To quote one of my favorite blog titles ever, "almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken" -- especially in the digital world. Unfortunately, I don't have a post from Jai for you; it's just me today. But it is the case that almost no one evil and almost everything is broken -- most recently-notably, Facebook.

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Background reading:

• Facebook, in a continuing trend of "We're actually paying attention to the date -- maybe people won't get angry about it this time", offers users auto-generated slideshows of "Your Year in Review".
• Noted web designer Eric Meyer writes: Meyerweb | Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty.
• Basically every news site on the web posts some variant of the following: "Facebook Apologizes for Pain Caused by 'Year in Review' Posts", uniformly consisting of the following: (1) quote a paragraph from Meyer (2) publish a few paragraphs of screed about how this is the year that Facebook became heartless (3) conclude with a line from Meyer's post saying something about "empathetic systems" (4) publish an update about how Facebook Itself has publicly apologized to Meyer and (5) quote a sentence from Meyer's follow-on post about how he hadn't meant to make quite such a big deal about it, but (6) ultimately miss the point.
• These are basically all useless, unless your intention is to drive yourself to pointless outrage, in which case -- welcome to the Internet; you're in the right place. Instead, just read the follow-on itself, Meyerweb | Well, That Escalated Quickly.

I believe that Meyer has this

One of the problems with being an avowed altruist is that it's hard to talk about it with other people without coming across like you're trying to claim you're better than them.

One of the problems with being an aspiring effective altruist is that it's hard to talk about it with other people without coming across like you're trying to claim you're better than everyone else, including other avowed altruists, and definitely including non-altruistic plebes.

(This, I think, is something of a barrier to effective altruism becoming a more popular thing, and I'd like to see it change.)

But if I can't write about this in the locus of the interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I can't write about it at all, and that would be really quite sad for me, so here goes. I really, really don't mean to brag or guilt-shame anyone else -- I am trying to normalize talking casually about altruism, because I think a world where we can talk about it without awkwardness is a better world than this.

My brother asked me the other day: "What do you want for Christmas? Give me two things, one which someone could reasonably buy you, and another which you'd ask for from a wish-granting genie who popped out of a lamp."

My answer for the first was an Oculus Rift; my answer for the second was that malaria be eradicated tomorrow.

Now, of course I would actually ask a genie that all communicable diseases be eradicated tomorrow, or that all

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the World War I Christmas Truce, where a hundred thousand German and Allied soldiers left trenches, ventured into no-man's-land, played football, and sang carols.

This year, one of the speakers at the university Carols Services mentioned this fact, and attendees were provided with both English and German lyrics, to sing their choice. The resulting mess didn't have much in the way of distinct words, but the tune was unmistakeable and powerful, and there was something profoundly humbling about singing it in the Memorial Church, erected in honor of the men who gave their lives in that war and the next.

(Crimson photo gallery of the service -- you can spot the back of my head in the first photo if you look hard.)

There's something otherworldly about the idea, isn't there? -- that there was a day of the year where (literally) mortal enemies could treat each other as humans. Do you think that the warriors of the right and the left could keep such a peace in the battlegrounds of Facebook and Twitter today?

I can hope, but I can't hope confidently...

And, strangely enough, we're also currently in the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War (We're 100 years from WWI and only 150 from the Civil War? What?), which drove Longfellow to write: "It was as if an earthquake rent the hearth-stones of a continent... There is no peace on earth... for hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men."

But of course, that's not the end of the poem, which reads in full:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their

As you may have noticed, the front page of the blog has changed. Ever since the transition to Ghost in May of last year, I've been using Sheet by Brian O'Keefe as a theme, but I decided recently that there were a few little tweaks I'd like to make.

So, here we are, about three days of hacking later. Two columns, a few special boxes in the upper-right, and a whole mess of responsive layout design (thanks, Pure.css!) -- let me know what you think! Sound off in the comments below, drop me an email, or whatever. I'm pretty happy with the individual post/page layout in Sheet, though, so I think I'll leave it be for the time being.

Happy holidays, all, and may you always have projects to keep your fingers busy.

According MIT's Title IX Office, no-longer-Professor-Emeritus Walter Lewin acted in violation of the Institute's sexual harassment and misconduct policy while teaching an online MIT course open to the public. The Institute announced on Tuesday that it has stripped Lewin of Professor-Emeritus status, and will be removing videos of his physics lectures -- which have been called "legendary" -- from MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx.

I accept without question the reports that the charges were extremely serious and that "this wasn't a borderline case", and I agree with my current CS(@MIT) professor Scott Aaronson, as he writes in a recent blog post:

• [S]exual harassment must never be tolerated, neither here nor anywhere else. But I also feel that, if a public figure is going to be publicly brought down like this (yes, even by a private university), then the detailed findings of the investigation should likewise be made public, regardless of how embarrassing they are.

• More importantly, I wish to register that I disagree in the strongest possible terms with MIT’s decision to remove Prof. Lewin’s lectures from OpenCourseWare—thereby forcing the tens of thousands of students around the world who were watching these legendary lectures to hunt for ripped copies on BitTorrent.

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Again, I believe that MIT President Rafael Reif speaks correctly when he says, in the Institute's initial press release:

Students place tremendous trust in their teachers. Deserving that trust is among our most fundamental obligations. We must take the greatest care that everyone who comes to us for knowledge and instruction, whether in classrooms or online, can count on MIT as a safe and respectful place to learn.

To this

On the St. Louis Rams "Hands Up"

...joining in a common signal of solidarity, like that Hunger Games Katniss three-finger salute. Of course, obviously, the District Eleven residents who held up their hands like that were immediately attacked by the police, which is where our metaphor...uh...um...alright.

(related: Salon | Mockingjay's eerie echoes of Ferguson: Our real dystopian nightmare)

Larry Wilmore: "We're race-aholics. We'll always be in recovery, and the best we can hope for is to manage it."

Stewart: Larry, if I may, there's been some talk that none of the events of these past few weeks have actually been about race. (clips roll) What do you say to those people?

Wilmore: Oh, I don't know, Jon...I would say that they should probably go fuck themselves?

and:

Stewart: You don't think a conversation about black-on-black crime should be happening now?

Wilmore: It is, Jon, but it's a black-on-black conversation. Just becaue you're

Blah blah blah blah Reading Feed blah.

Sometimes, when we're interacting with people on the internet, we forget that, on the other end of a digital pipeline, there's an actual human being.

...and so, sometimes the right way to deal with internet trolls is by letting their mothers know what they're up to:

Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I've started telling their mothers. pic.twitter.com/0Cbs81eXiE

— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) November 28, 2014

Alanah Pearce, student and sometime-game-reviewer, is quoted in The Guardian:

"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males... It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable."

When Pearce sat down to figure out the best way to resolve the situation, she concluded she was best off contacting the boys’ mothers directly, "especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It's shockingly easy to find out who their families are."

Also, we're not going to talk about #gamergate, because Pearce is on the record saying she doesn't want to make it about #gamergate, and that's enough for me.

At the other end of the