Happy (belated) seventy-seventh birthday to Dr. Lynn Conway, now emerita at UMich, who was dealt a really shitty hand in life and overcame it to revolutionize the field of electrical engineering, literally write the book on VLSI design (along with Dr. Carver Mead, of CIT), and, in the past fifteen years, become a outspoken trans-rights activist. She also rides motocross.

![Photograph of Dr. Lynn Conway](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnPhotos/Lynn2006.jpg" caption=""Playing is Adventuring is Exploring is Innovating is Designing is Engineering is Architecting is Art."
~Lynn Conway")

When I'm calling out heroes in STEM, I usually say something about the sort of challenges they had to overcome to achieve what they did, but Dr. Conway's story takes the cake. She was born physically male, which, as it turns out, is a really, really shitty thing to happen to you if you're a girl born in 1938. She's written a memoir on her life, which traverses the painfully personal, the fascinatingly technical, and everything in between, in the arc from her early struggles with gender identity; to her career at IBM (cut short when they fired her for transitioning male-to-female); to her subsequent second career-from-scratch at, well, everywhere; to her coming-out and subsequent trans activism. I don't have the words to recommend it highly enough. It's honest, raw, and inspiring -- oh, just read it.

Conway's accomplishments include:

• the Mead-Conway revolution in VLSI design (this is why you're able to read this on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop right now)
• "generalised dynamic instruction handling", used in out-of-order execution (this one's happening in your computer/smartphone/tablet/laptop right

In good-things news, Martin O'Malley, term-limit lame-duck governor of Maryland, announced that he will use gubernatorial authority to commute the sentences of Maryland's last four death-row inmates to "life without possibility for parole".

Good.

He had previously spearheaded the successful legislative effort to repeal the death penalty in 2013 (which was not challenged by referendum, due to lack of signatures), which left the status of the five men then on death row in question, and by this action has ensured that my home state has (I sincerely hope) executed a human for the last time. (There were five men on death row when the legislature struck down capital punishment; one has since died of natural causes.)

But his rhetoric surrounding the action is the most interesting (to me):

The question at hand is whether any public good is served by allowing these essentially un-executable sentences to stand...

Gubernatorial inaction -- at this point in the legal process -- would, in my judgment, needlessly and callously subject survivors, and the people of Maryland, to the ordeal of an endless appeals process, with unpredictable twists and turns, and without any hope of finality or closure.

In the final analysis, there is one truth that stands between and before all of us. That truth is this -- few of us would ever wish for our children or grandchildren to kill another human being or to take part in the killing of another human being. The legislature has expressed this truth by abolishing the death penalty in Maryland.

For these reasons, I intend to commute Maryland’s four remaining death sentences to life without the possibility of parole.

It is my hope

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