The truth finally gets its boots on...

"A lie may run 'round the Earth twice before the truth gets its boots on."

As many of your may recall, there was a story the day before Thanksgiving about a principal in a California school district banning a teacher from distributing copies of The Declaration of Independence to his students. The reason given was that the Declaration contains the phrase "endowed by our Creator," and the principal thought that might be a violation of the separation of church and state.

The timing of the release was perfect. Families would argue about it around the Thanksgiving table. News services, awash in family-togetherness chatter and with most of its investigative journalists sent home, would have neither the time nor the resources to investigate or refute the charges. I guarantee you that at the next election cycle right-wing pundits will bring this story out as an example of the eeeevil secularist culture warriors.

Except it's not true. The teacher, Steve Williams, was already on probation. Consider this class assignment he had handed out. "Read the Easter story it the Bible, interview a family that celebrates Easter, write a paper about what your church will do to celebrate Christ's death and resurrection." I don't know about you, but those don't sound to me like appropriate subjects for a class that may well include children of many different religions.

Other handouts that he has given to his students include the now infamous forgery that Washington once claimed the country could not rightly be governed without the Bible; Washington never said that. Nor did Jefferson ever say "The Bible makes the best people in the world," but Williams told his students that Jefferson had said that.

The headline read, "School bans teaching of Declaration of Independence because it mentions God." And that's the story that we'll be refuting two and four years from now. And it simply didn't happen that way.

[TT] St. Cynic

Some minor lifehacking...

Still sick, but somehow oddly productive. I feel tired, I've done less caffeine than usual today, and yet I'm getting an awful lot done. I've done a couple of lifehacking things that make my life a bit easier, here and there.

The first is a program I wrote called animemonitor. It reads a configuration file (command-line configurable, but has a default file for each user) with lines that read "FEED <path>", "DONE <path>", and "WANT <regexp>". Feed and Done are directories into which you drop torrent files; Want entries are regular expressions. The program monitors downloadanime.org for new torrents and, for those that match any of the expressions in Want, checks to see if they're already in Feed or Done. If not, it downloads it and drops the torrent into Feed. Connected to a cron job that runs it every three hours or so, it automagically grabs all of the anime I want to watch.

Right now, animemonitor is broken. One of the python libraries it depends on is dying, and I'm trying to figure out how.

The second program is deeplycurious. DeeplyCurious is a proxy for liferea, my RSS reader of choice. DeeplyCurious keeps track of everything I deliberately click on in liferea via the "open in browser" button. Right now, it just logs the URLs I click; the idea is that in the future, it will keep "per day" archives of what I've read. That way, if I ever have a "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that..." moment, DeeplyCurious will help me find it. I'm hoping that DeeplyCurious will have an archive mode so that it will be able to add to a sub-folder of bookmarks under Mozilla with a list of days (or weeks) that it has recorded.

And finally, I've got my moleskine. I'm not sure why, but this is one of those notebooks that I really love. Combined with a decent gel ink pen, it's perfect for lots of the things that I need to be able to touch to accomplish, like my "todo" lists. One trick I've learned recently is to write in the upper-right-hand corner, diagonally, what the page is "about"; this makes finding things easier. Since I regularly update my todo lists by copying what I want to do to later pages, one trick I have is to cut that corner out with scissors when I'm done with it. It gets skipped in my riffles through the notebook. The other thing I do is use bookdarts for those things that must get pushed into other documentation, like story ideas or project notes.

I'm not quite up to the full Life Hacks (Getting Things Done, Geek-Style), but I've been implementing a couple of the things from 43 Folders and enjoying it.

One of the "life hacks" is that every power user syncs between two (or more) computers rather than back up his data, and every one has scripts that let him do that. I'm embarassed to admit that I haven't had scripts to do that for me; instead, I rely on my 10,000-entry deep shell history to remember "the usual backup commands" by grepping for them. I got over that today; I wrote "common_rsync" and "download_rsync," little four-line scripts that will do my daily synchronization for me.