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It seems the NEA would prefer a certain fictional President to our real one. They’re running excerpts from a fictional speech given at an imaginary NEA convention on The West Wing the other night on their Web site. Better, though, is the text from an email sent out by an NEA PR flack about the speech: If you saw "The West Wing" last night, you saw the National Education Association's logo and slogan ("Making Public Schools Great for Every Child") prominently featured as a backdrop for a speech by President Josiah Bartlet. The National Education Association strongly agrees with President Bartlet's call for more teachers and better funded public schools. We know that quality teachers who teach in well equipped classrooms is a formula for student success. We agree with President Barlet that we must come together as a country and "do better" on behalf of America's children and America's public schools. The President can be sure that the members of the NEA will do our share to make public schools great for every child.

If you haven’t yet made up your mind about whether somebody ought to storm into Iraq and send Saddam Hussein to Boot Hill, you should check out the ongoing dialogue among Slate writers arguing for and against the war. Unfortunately, the navigation for the series sucks, because it spans two weeks. Here’s a cheat sheet: 9/26: Jacob Weisberg (pro) 9/27: Steve Chapman (anti) 9/30: William Saletan (mostly pro) 10/1: Anne Applebaum (pro) 10/2: Kate Taylor (anti) and Robert Wright (seemingly anti) 10/3: David Plotz (pro) and Jeffrey Goldberg (pro) 10/4: Dahlia Lithwick (doesn't trust Bush) and Robert Wright (counters Jeffrey Goldberg) 10/7: Jeffrey Goldberg and Steve Chapman The arguments defy easy categorization, and are nuanced and qualified, so don't just accept my one word summaries. As more installments are added, I'll try to keep this item updated.

I’ve started logging the referrers for individual items on this site. Perhaps I’ll start displaying the referrers as well, but the first step is, of course, capturing them. Doing this sort of thing is awfully easy, I kind of wonder why I haven’t been doing it all along.

An Iraqi vice president has suggested that Saddam Hussein and George W Bush settle their differences mano a mano. One wonders about the connection between this and the body double story from yesterday.

Research shows that the funniest non-offensive joke is: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice, says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?" I was hoping for one I hadn’t heard. ...

Google has changed its link ranking algorithm and word is going around that search results are hosed. I remain the top ranked Rafe in Google, but that’s hardly surprising. Mark Pilgrim has a detailed post on the changes. Google has earned enough good will from me as a customer that I’m perfectly OK with waiting for them to get things back on track. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. ...

A German scientist claims to be able to prove that Saddam Hussein has been using body doubles at public appearances in his stead for the past few years. That’s paranoia.

Today, I’m hurricane obsessed. I have lots of friends and family that live near the coast in the green section of the hurricane path probability map.

One of the things that depresses me about the software industry is the transformation of version numbers from being a useful indicator of a software package’s maturity to marketing tool. In the commercial software world, all bets are off with regard to version numbers. Windows NT debuted at version 3.1. Netscape has been skipping version numbers like crazy in recent years. Plenty of other companies muck around with their version numbers as well, basing them as much on the version numbers of their competitors and how they want their software to be percieved as on the actual number of releases of the software itself. In the open source world, though, there’s still some integrity with regard to version umbers (even if there’s not consistency in conventions between projects). For example, when the 2.5.x series of development Linux kernels is released, will the release version be 2.6 or 3.0. Based on this KernelTrap report, much wrangling is going into this decision. If anything, the Linux kernel version numbering scheme is a bit too conservative. Given the degree to which Linux has changed since it was introduced, it could probably easy be a few rev numbers higher than it is right now. Other open source projects mirror this humility, Mozilla debuted properly at version 1.0 (even though its lesser sibling is called Netscape 7), and for a long time Perl was issuing fairly major revisions and only incrementing the second sub-version when they did so (that was actually confusing). This entry is really nothing more than a lament, the world of commercial software certainly isn’t going to change back to responsible version number usage anytime soon. If anything, the move is toward dropping numbers altogether and using things like XP, MX, etc. ...

The Well-Formed Web is an essay by Joe Gregorio arguing that rather than focusing on the pie in the sky vision of the Semantic Web. Considering how far we are from the well-formed web, and given that we already have a clear path toward it (converting our pages to XHTML), it makes sense to go there first. Joe’s vision goes beyond simply structuring our pages to be XHTML compliant, but even so it’s still a humbler step than changing the way we do everything. ...