Posts

Anil Dash describes the Blog Cycle. It’s funny because it’s true.

Don’t miss this post on Terry Schiavo from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. Here’s the bottom line: First, in this country competent adults have the right to decline medical treatment. This is a very good thing, since many of the things doctors do to their patients would constitute assault if done against those patients' wills. It is this right that allows cancer patients to decide not to undergo that last excruciating round of chemo that would give them only a slight chance of survival, Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse the blood transfusions that they believe it would be sinful to receive, and people with painful terminal illnesses to refuse treatment for other diseases, like pneumonia, that offer them the chance of an easier death. This right is extremely important: without it, we could be subjected to serious assaults on our body without our consent, so long as some physician said that those assaults were medically necessary. Second, courts have held that for these purposes, nutrition and hydration count as life-prolonging treatments, and thus that competent adults have the right to refuse them as well. This is also important: having a feeding tube inserted is a serious violation of a person's bodily integrity, and people have the right to refuse it. It's also a point that is often neglected in the coverage of Terri Schiavo's case. What is happening is not that a court has ordered that she be killed. If courts could order that, there would be no reason to wait for her to die; the court could simply order a lethal injection of some sort. The court has found that she would not have wanted this sort of medical treatment, and thus that it cannot be forced on her. This is completely different. ... Under current law, when a person is incompetent to consent to or refuse treatment, evidence of that person's views and wishes is used to determine whether or not s/he would have consented to treatment. In Terri Schiavo's case, the courts have determined that she would not have consented. In accordance with what they have found to be her wishes, they are seeking to discontinue the treatment to which she would not have consented. That is: legally, this is a matter of letting her views about her life and her body govern the treatment she is subjected to, not a matter of anyone else's deciding whether she will live or die. What's at issue in this case is not "life"; it's patient autonomy. These are the larger rights that are at stake in this case. The thing that bothers me most about this case is that as a society we seem to be indulging our emotions to a greater and greater extent. This case is sad, and the video of Terri Schiavo is sad, and the idea of removing someone’s feeding tube and letting them pass away is scary and horrible. Nobody likes the idea of starvation. But the reason we have courts, and laws, and procedures for this sort of thing is so that we can try to get past the emotion and make decisions based on evidence. Yesterday, the federal government decided to throw out the results of the objective analysis of this case and instead indulge people’s emotions. That’s bad law. And indeed, to tie this back to last week’s tempest in a teapot, that’s exactly the problem with Professor Volokh’s assertion that executions should involve torture if a criminal did something bad enough – it may satiate people’s emotions (temporarily), but is it just and sensible? The wide ranging lurch in this country away from valuing reason and deliberation is quite literally terrifying. Update: this post from Digby is essential. ...

In the least surprising announcement ever, Yahoo has acquired Ludicorp, the company behind Flickr. How unsurprising was it? The headline of the announcement is Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr. I wonder if the Ludicorp crew is going to stay in Vancouver or move down to the Valley?

I have my own opinions on the Terri Schiavo case, which aren’t that interesting or unusual. Today, I found a pointer (via Respectful of Otters) to an excellent Web page that does an excellent job of running down the facts of the case. It’s these facts that seem to be largely absent from the debate, as far as I can tell.

Looks like Mark Kleiman persuaded Eugene Volokh to amend his position on the advisability of torturing criminals as part of their punishment. I’ll agree with both of them that vindication is a legitimate end in the justice system. I’ll also say that the willingness to publicly change one’s opinion after making such a provocative argument is rare and admirable.

Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame took a vacation in Lebanon and wound up visiting the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, where Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinian refugees in 1982. I had no idea that the camps still existed and are more densely populated than ever.

Today I take my first steps down a path that really scares me – object oriented PHP. I love object oriented design, and I feel like I understand it pretty darn well. The question is how to take a very procedural PHP application and graft some object oriented bits onto it. This application happens to run on PHP4, so I’ll be investigating from that perspective. The first stop is Chapter 18 in the PHP manual. What I’m working on is a set of improvements to a reporting application. Right now the report is a fairly standard PHP page. It takes some parameters on the URL, turns them into a SQL statement, and then displays the results of that SQL statement on the page. Naturally, feature requests have come in and now the report is becoming more and more complex. Some columns that can appear on the report should only be displayed for users with a certain access level. Users want to be able to customize the report to show only certain columns, and to show those columns in a particular order. There are also a number of filtering options for the report. The number one feature that requires a new approach in creating the report is the request to enable users to choose the order in which the columns will be displayed. When the column order is fixed, you can just list the columns on the page and wrap them in if statements that control whether or not the column is displayed. When the order is customized, you have to write some kind of control structure that presents the columns in the order that the user chooses. When I got to that point, I realized that it may make sense to create a class named Column. The members of the class are the label for the column, its name in the database, the level of access required to view it, whether or not the report can be sorted on this column, and the SQL to include in the select clause for this column. Each column that can potentially appear on the report can be stored as a static object, and a user’s preferences are simply an ordered collection of Column objects. To display the report, you just iterate over that collection once for each row in the report (plus once for the header). This is pretty rudimentary object oriented design. The results of the query are still handled in a completely procedural manner, as is just about everything else. All it does is encapsulate some characteristics of one component of the report. In fact, what it really seems like I’m doing is creating a fancy hashtable. Baby steps at first, I suppose. ...

Eric Lunt recommends Hibernate in Action highly. I’m still reading the pickaxe book (Programming Ruby), but I’m going to add this one to the queue.

Perhaps the most chilling of Billmon’s pantented juxtapositions of quotations.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has a good article in Slate today about how government secrecy has increased on many fronts during the Bush administration. This has long been one of my biggest complaints about the Bush administration, and it comes from a deep philosophical belief that secrecy and accountability don’t mix. I don’t think that secrecy works well in any relationship, whether it’s between spouses, or workers and management, or citizens and their government. Obviously some things must be kept secret, but it’s nearly impossible to be both secretive and accountable. ...