Barak Pearlmutter Rants and Random Writings

Academic

I wrote a page for reviewers people have told me they found useful.

Some resources:

Nerd Politics

Software is expressive speech and should be subject to the same first amendment protection as other speech; support the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

If you oppose trivial software patents and the barriers they raise to entry into the software market, you should join the League for Programming Freedom, as I did.

I'm a card-carrying member of The ACLU. I also think these organizations are pretty cool: the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Verified Voting advocates the use of physical voter-verified ballots.

Essays, and Art I Felt Strongly Enough About to Write Something

A modest proposal for tweaking the dysfunctional USA health care system.

The way I wish politicians would frame environmental issues.

The movie Chatterbox.

The book The Iron Dream.

The book A Fire Upon the Deep.

Programming Language Features

The Common Lisp loop construct.

Pet Peeves and Praise

Librarians who hate books and want to turn libraries into computer pods.

Voicemail systems rank right up there. (My UNM voicemailbox, through overly aggressive compression, garbled into unintelligibility about half of the phone numbers left for me.)

I'm happy to critique unsolicited advertising copy for $100 per flier. If you send me unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam), I will go ahead and send you my critique and bill. Sending me unsolicited commercial e-mail will be construed as implicit agreement to these terms. Since I use Emacs RMAIL, I've found this snippet of code to be quite useful.

It is great sport to poke fun at bad ecowriting.

Sometimes I eat out in Dublin.

Artistic

Automotive

[PICTURE OF A VIVIDLY PAINTED CAR] This ocularly dominant automobile, shown here behind Harvard's William James Hall in the final stages of painting, is part of Jim Muller's art car caravan. The central portion of the hood is copied from Nobel laureates Hubel and Weisel's influential work on occular dominance columns in cat striate cortex. (This lovely art car is no longer for sale.)

Wagers

[Viewable with any browser]

Barak Pearlmutter <barak@pearlmutter.net>