Brains, Down in Recovery

Brad Delong with the zinger of the day!

The Bush administration, having entered office as social conservatives, leaves office as conservative socialists, proprietors of the most sudden large expansion of the state's role in the US economy since mobilisation for the second world war.

How to pair books and alcohol

( Just in case you need to. )

Cheery thought for the day:

We owe something to people who don't exist yet. People who don't exist yet are waiting in line to take our places. They can't do that unless we die. Don't nonexistent people have rights? Damn right they do. The right to demand our deaths. Luckily, nonexistent people have Bill McKibben and Frances Fukayama speaking up for their right to kill you. Which they can't do, since they don't exist. So Kass and Fukayama will kill you for them, by legislating against doctors interfering with your long slow death.

(via H+ Magazine, a new magazine for Transhumanists, and transhumanist critic Bryan Appleyard)

Children of the... broccoli?

( Weird photoshop silliness )

Sarah's $150,000 shopping spree

( Republican socialism )

Jim Horne argues that, really, we're getting enough sleep.

( I don't feel like it... )

Homeschooling Hints recommends "blowing up gay schools."

( 'I'm not conding vigilantism...' )

Django: The Book Is Wrong, the Tutorial is Right

A couple of weeks ago I bought the book “The Definitive Guide to Django,” and I’ve come to realize, to my frustration, that the book is already outdated.  My big headache this week was dealing with the administration interface, which the Django people swear is one of the coolest features of the entire application server.  The problem is simple: between Django 0.96, which is when the book was written, and Django 1.0, which is what I’m running, the interface was completely changed.

In 0.96, the way you defined a database table as being “administratable” was to add to the Python definition of the table a subclass entry class Admin: pass.  The Administration app would automagically pick out those tables that were administratable and they would appear in the admin interface.

In 1.0, it’s completely different.  Instead, you must create in your application, next to your models, a file admin.py which contains registry lines for each model and, optionally, an administration interface class that describes how the model should be administered.  It’s all covered in the Django tutorial which doesn’t really help you if all you have is the book.

This makes obvious sense. Administrative details are independent of model details, and although the argument could be made (and was made) that they’re implementation details of the model, making it a separate decorating class also makes just as much sense. Yes, it means that the details of a class (the administrative class of a model) are in two different places, but it also means that administrative features of your application can be restricted in deployment just by deleting the admin.py file.

You did keep a copy of admin.py in your source control, right?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Drinking Liberally, or Some Days It Just Doesn't Pay To Chew Through The Straps

Omaha and I went to the Burien Drinking Liberally tonight. I don't have all that much in common with most of those people, and tonight, I had even less.

Omaha and I sat the girls down at a separate table so we could have a night together. The girls are behaved enough that they can be trusted to sit by themselves through a meal, and they did well enough tonight that one woman came up and complimented us on teaching children how to behave in a restaurant. Unfortunately for Omaha and I, the evening was not to be as quiet we had hoped.

The woman sitting next to us started out, with me at least, on the wrong foot. "I hope Barack Obama becomes president," she said. "He'll be ready to deal with the terrible things that mother nature is about to hit us with. That what it says in the Mayan Prophecies. Four years from now we're going to be in deep, deep trouble. And the prophecies were right, too, they predicted the economic crash we're having right now."

Oh, grief.

"But I have two causes now that I'm a grandmother and retired," she went on. "The first is world peace, and the second is clean water."

"Well," I said, making a mistake, "Clean water isn't really a problem in the US and Canada."

"Oh, that's where you're wrong," she insisted. "Too much water in our country has flouride in it."

It went downhill from there.

She and her male companion were anti-flouridation nuts. They were anti-vaccination nuts. He went on and on about thimerosol in vaccines, and when I told him there hadn't been any thimerosol in vaccines in ten years but that there'd be no noticeable affect on public health, he said, "Autism rates are up." No, autism diagnoses are up because the diagnostic criteria have been broadened, but there's no appreciable increase in rates of autism. (Or if there is, there's a commensurate drop in diagnoses of other forms of "mental retardation" which have been deprecated by the medical community.)

And then he dropped the final straw. He was a 9/11 truther. He did not believe, thankfully, that the entire thing was a conspiracy, "But," he intoned seriously, "Something happened to building 7 that they're not telling us about." Uh, it caught fire and collapsed after too much damage?

But she was certainly the leader of the two, going on and on about flouridation, and how it was a seventy-year-old conspiracy by the coal companies to give them a way to dispose of ash waste buildup in smokestacks, and how it was a carcinogen and a toxin and the AMA had said that pregnant women shouldn't drink flouridated water. Sigh.

I was very grateful that we had the kids. They gave us both an excuse to get out of there before too many more braincells were sacrificed under the stress of being "polite."