Here’s the best interview with Bill Gates I’ve ever read, by Sarah, a 15 year old girl from the UK.

I admit that my morbid curiosity was piqued by Johnny Jihadi’s Usenet posts (link via Instapundit). Unfortunately, there’s not much interesting to see there other than his question of whether certain musical instruments are prohibited by Islam. Last night I decided that we ought to leave lil’ Johnny in Afghanistan with the other POWs to be dealt with by the new government, but I can’t remember what my reasoning was. I’m sure it was very sound, despite the fact that it was late.

Javalanche is a new mailing list I created for people who develop web applications in Java. The Internet is, it seems to me, a place where you ought to create the resources you need if you can’t find them, and I created this mailing list in that spirit. I stole the rules pretty much directly from the policies of Webdesign-l. Anyway, if you’re a web developer working with Java (on the server side), please join us (err … me).

British researchers have developed a strain of tobacco plant which removes TNT from the soil in which it grows. For all the complaints about genetic engineering, projects like this show massive potential for cleaning up toxic waste in a very non-invasive way. Whether the leaves of the plant can be used to make exploding cigars is unknown.

Physics for Game Developers is an interesting looking new book from O’Reilly.

Robert Fisk tells of being assaulted by Afghan refugees in his own words. The story is incredibly harrowing. One thing I found interesting in the story is that he holds himself responsible for fighting back against the attackers, but does not hold his attackers responsible for attacking him in the first place. I also find it odd that despite the fact that Fisk obviously deplores violence, he says that if he were an Afghan, he’s attack Westerners, too. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Honoring Those Who Look Out for Human Rights
Today is International Human Rights Day. This brings me to something I’ve been meaning to say. I’ve read a lot of complaints here and there about NGOs like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and the UNHCR for their criticism of US bombing of Afghanistan, the bombing of the prison revolt at Qala Jangi, and the way we handled airdrops of aid into Afghanistan (among other things).

I feel like most of their criticism was wrongheaded in this case, but I also think it’s insane to write these groups off for that criticism. Unlike me, these guys are on the front lines around the world dealing with the fallout of people expressing the worst aspects of human nature. Are these guys touchy about disruptions of their ability to deliver aid to the starving, or of bombing civilian areas, or of possible mistreatment of prisoners of war? Yeah, they are. But it’s because they’re nearly always the ones left to pick up the pieces when hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees find themselves without food and adequate shelter, when cities get reduced to rubble for no sensible reason, or when we find mass graves in the middle of nowhere that are the only remnant of some atrocity.

So, I’d ask you to cut these groups some slack. Do they lack the distanced perspective that allows us to see that, ugly as it is, bombing might actually save lives in the long run, or that risking the disruption of aid delivery in the short term might insure that the ability to deliver aid properly is established? Perhaps. Most of the time, though, bombing doesn’t save lives or serve any higher purpose, and aid deliveries are disrupted simply out of capriciousness, or greed, or pure malice.

Aid agencies and human rights groups are the world’s janitors. They respond to the horror of war simply by trying to ameliorate its effects to the degree that they can, and the only weapon they have to try to guarantee their own obsolescence in the future is the ability to condemn those who perpetuate those horrors. So cut them some slack. They’ll be in the backwaters of the world treating the sick, feeding the starving, and trying to free political prisoners while you and I are running over to Wal-Mart to buy gardening supplies.

The Economist has a pretty evenhanded rundown on the administration’s various attacks on our civil liberties/efforts to improve national security in the wake of the September 11 attacks. A lot of people believe that Bush and Ashcroft are attempting to turn the US into some sort of dictatorship, I’m not one of them. However, I believe that all of the steps that have been taken need to be evaluated as a whole, and that we need to consider how they might be misused by someone with good intentions and poor judgement, or someone who flat out has bad intentions. If we don’t give the government the tools to legally monitor and dominate our lives, it’s less likely that it will do so.

Columnist Richard Reeves expresses his outrage at John Ashcroft clearly enough in his latest column:

So, the attorney general of the United States tells me: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists.”

Well, screw you, buddy! What are you trying to say? Are you saying that anyone who talks about civil rights, civil liberties and the freedom that makes us Americans is a traitor in this undeclared but loudly proclaimed war?

I think that one marginally interesting story that will come out in the future is the context surrounding the editorial decision at the New York Times to hammer the civil rights issue unrepentingly in months since the attacks. Every day it seems like they have multiple news stories and op-ed pieces about all aspects of civil liberties. There have been plenty of columns that they’ve printed that I haven’t agreed with, but I really appreciate their vigilance on this issue. There’s no question that the fundamental balance of liberty versus security has rightfully changed since September 11, but the work of publications like the New York Times (and perhaps weblogs like this one, too) helps to insure that the balance doesn’t skew too far in the wrong direction.