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.

(1)

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

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.

In a story which is, at least, not completely apocryphal, tennis player Arthur Ashe was dying from acute AIDS when, in response to a fan's letter asking "Why did God select for you this fate?", he wrote:

The world over, 50 million children start playing tennis, 5 million learn to play tennis, 500,000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach Wimbledon, 4 to semi final, 2 to the finals -- when I was holding a cup I never asked God 'Why me?'

And today in pain I should not be asking God 'Why me?'

Well, one's modus tollens is another's modus ponens^[?] -- maybe we should be more in the habit of asking "Why me?"

But

Ore Babarinsa, one of my classmates, had the following to say on recent events in Ferguson, MO via Facebook. With permission, I've copied his words without modification below.

So, I've purposefully stayed off facebook for the last 12+ hours because I wanted to spend some time thinking about this whole mess because I specifically since I find so often that immediate outrage requires reflection before it can be distilled into meaningful wisdom.

Firstly, to address the immediate situation. There's a critical failure of justice, and the rule of law that has occurred. Once again, the forces of moral cowardice and systemic racism have won out over wisdom, fairness, and any sort of allegiance to due process. There's no working around that simple fact. The necessity of an open, public, and fair trial for Officer Wilson was paramount, and that the grand jury failed to acknowledge this is galling.

Secondly, the riots on the ground are understandable, and I'm not going to sit in my Harvard Ivory Tower and finger-wag at those involved. I'd likely an active participant if I were anywhere near Ferguson. This said, the long view of history, and wisdom show that riots won't get us anywhere our goals of racial equity, economic redistribution of wealth, or any sort of meaningful political or social gains. Neither will insipid, simple slogans, hashtags, or boisterous threats of violence towards the state or law enforcement. Change is hard, and fraught with disappointments and setbacks.

Thirdly, as many of us forget, there is no easy way to fix this. There is no fixed set of enemies of progress. There is no plan for revolution, or system dismantlement that will lead you to

I'm still running an updated-almost-daily feed of readworthy links at My Faults My Own | Reading Feed. Check it out if you're a fan of these BoL's!

For reasons which may later become clear, I've written two subtly different versions of this post, for different audiences. Poets, dreamers, and readers who don't particularly care to erect walls between fantasy and reality, click here. Readers who don't have time for my mind games and just want to read a normal Bucket o' Links, click here.