Nate Knows Nada

Can anyone help me with setting up my CSS so that all my paragraphs of text are indented, as proper style demands?

I got a response back from the Harvard Weblogs support people on my previous problem with using the latest generation Mozilla browsers with my HLS blog.

Hi Nathan,

Sorry for the delay, but we’re currently in a bit of flux about support
for the blogs.law site, since Dave Winer is due to end his fellowship at
the Berkman Center at the end of the year.  The Berkman tech staff
(basically me and one other person) has the resources to keep the back
end server running, but not to support front stuff like the site templates.
So, we’re not likely to have the resources to fix this issue soon.  If
you know html, you could of course fix the offending html yourself and
I’ll figure out how to get the fix plugged in.  Or you could wheedle
some techie you know to fix it for you.

-hal

I do indeed know some HTML, and I’ve looked into this a bit in the past, thinking it was a CSS
issue.  But the CSS’s appear to be the same.  Do any of the
techies out there have any ideas, or can you offer me a bit of help?

Can someone invite me to Gmail?  Please?

Last week’s NYT Magazine had this article about the teenage culture of dating and sex.

An interesting quote:

…And while gay high-school boys frequently advertise that they
”don’t do hookups” and are only looking for relationships, fewer
straight teenagers make that claim — and many make it clear that
they’re looking for anything but commitment.

”Straight teens have abandoned the rituals of dating, while
gay teens have taken them on,” says Peter Ian Cummings, the editor of
XY, a national magazine for young gay men. The Internet, Cummings says,
has made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way ”most
of straight society assumes gay men act.”

I think it’s quite interesting that the gay boys are acting in this
way.  It seems that their understanding of the world’s working is
much more realistic than that of the straight teenagers.

The straight teenagers in the article seem to have the attitude that
the culture of hooking up that they have created will last only
temporarily, that once they’re ready to “settle down” that there will
be a mate and a life for them.  But until then, they can have sex
with no consequences.  But I’d contend that they probably do
encounter some consequence, in that they don’t get the chance to do a
lot of learning about relationships while they are forming models of
relationality.  I fear the possibility that these straight kids
won’t be able to find the sorts of relationships they want “when
they’re ready” because they won’t have learned how to find and hold a
relationship.

In addition there seems to be an element of wanting what you can’t
or aren’t supposed to have.  People in our society aren’t
“supposed to” have lots of random sex, just for the sake of sex, with
no relationality attached to it.  The norm, at least on some
level, is that sex is supposed to somehow go with relationship. 
What these kids are doing is a form of rebellion, like many of forms of
teenage rebellion, but this one may perhaps have long-term relational
consequences, as opposed to dying one’s hair and so forth.

Interestingly, the gay teenagers are “rebelling” in some sense,
also.  The straight people in those teens’ lives tell them that
being gay has dreadful relational consequences (at least if their
upbringin has any similarity to mine).  They’ll live lonely lives,
they’ll never have children, the relationships that they do have will
be unfulfilling, and they will be cut off from “normal” society. 
The normal is abnormal for gay kids, and so they strive for it with all
that they’re worth.  They try to court one another, to go to the
prom, to hold hands in public.  They want to get married, perhaps
have kids, and die with a person they love.

The delicious irony in all this, is that it’s those who are
supposedly unable to create and sustain stable, productive, socially
useful, perhaps even ethical relationship who offer the better examples
for all.

I used to study gender stuff much more than I do now.  In college,
I thought about being an American Studies major, and I took a number of
courses on masculinity and gender roles from Prof. Jay Mechling, who’s been influential on my academic development in more than subject materials or approaches.

Tyler‘s post
yesterday about the male hero myth that we continue to retell ourselves
intrigued me to say the least.  Go check it out.  I’d comment
more, but I have thoughts about Colonial House and historicism for later today.

So I’m catching up on some links and such that I find interesting.  First, there’s Kartoo,
which is a visual interface search engine.  In people terms, that
means that it does a search of other search engines and then displays
the results in a map format, showing you the relationship between the
different results.  It takes some getting used to, and the
designers could provide some better documentation on how to read the
maps (you’ve gotta learn by trial and error), but it’s very interesting.

Second, there’s MP3.com’s Musicvine. 
This is similar.  Type in the name of a musical artist, and it
will show you a map of “related” artists, sorted by affinity, musical
sound, and popularity.  It’s really kind of fun to find out that
you’re not as special and unique in your musical tastes as you think
you are, as Ryan found out the other day.  (Thanks to him for this link.)

Got more to talk about, especially this week’s episode of the West Wing a bit later.

I found two very interesting sites today, on subways.  The first
is a map showing the London Underground and how the map relates to the
reality of the street.  Check it out.  The next compares the size and density of various major transport systems worldwide.  It’s here.

Another site I found previously tries to fit the NYC MTA into the Tube’s design.  You’ll see what I mean when you check it out.

This is probably below the radar for lots of you, but there’s a good
little discussion going on in the open source software world about user
interface and usability.  In regular people’s words, how easy does
the software make it for the user to do what s/he wants?  Can the
user figure out with ease how to get from A to C?

Eric Raymond, one of the high priests of open source, an expert of experts, couldn’t figure out how to use his own printer.  John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, notes

Raymond is ignoring the actual depth of the
problem. It’s easy to say, The open source community needs to do
better, we need to create software Aunt Tillie can use.[emph. in original] But they’re so far
away from this right now that even an expert like Eric Raymond can’t
figure out how to use their software.

The “I thought I was the only one” letters that Raymond found so
interesting aren’t coming from the A.T.-set; they’re coming from Linux
geeks who read essays written by Eric Raymond. And they’re frustrated by
open source software’s terrible usability. The problem isn’t just that
dear old A.T. can’t use desktop Linux — the problem is that even Linux
geeks have trouble figuring it out.

Another perspective comes from mpt, on “why free software usability tends to suck.”

So why do I care?  Well, because the statistical software that I
use is open source (as per the trend at Harvard to push the open-source
software over commercially available alternatives with user interface
that make is easier for the novice to get up and running with his or
her data analysis), and its user interface sucks.  Yes, it’s very
powerful; yes, it’s customizable; yes, it has more flexibility than a
number of the commercial products, especially when you get to the
advanced level and need to program your own models.  But that’s
not very likely in the sort of research that most of us in political
science do.  The existing models are quite adequate, especially in
light of the fact that when one deals with social phenomena, you can
get very precise, but probably not very accurate.

But everyone here wants to see us use R (a variant of the S language),
rather than Stata or SPSS, or even SAS. 
So we’re all being turned
into open sourcers, whether we want to or not.  But the problem
comes when you decide, “Oh, I want to run X type of analysis.” 
You know the statistics that you want to do, but the damn interface
gets in the way of doing that without some significant programming, on
a steep learning curved.  It
takes quite a while to figure out how to get that analysis loaded, how
to run it, and how to get some results to come back to you.  Much
more
time than I remember it taking with the commercial software projects.

AKMA posts an excellent summary of the MAJOR problem with the theology of substitutionary atonement, especially as portrayed by Mel Gibson.

The
New York Times noted the following, in an article about President
Bush’s address to the National Association of Evangelicals meeting:

One of the few discordant notes at the convention came
from Robert Schuller, a televangelist and senior pastor of the Crystal
Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., who delivered an address gently
criticizing some conservative evangelical Christians for acting as if
they know the only possible route to salvation.

“What
upsets me about religious leaders of all faiths is that they talk like
they know it all, and anybody who doesn’t agree with them is a
heretic,” he said later in an interview.

Mr. Schuller said he
did not know enough about the proposed amendment banning same-sex
marriage to express a view. But he suggested that politics could be a
distraction from more important matters.

“Politics is a force that pulls answers towards mediocrity,” he said, “That is why when issues are politicized, I am gone.”

I had to say that this surprised me, coming from such a publicly prominent and vocal evangelical preacher.