Brian Kerr

Canada legalized same-sex marriage tonight. The legislation passed by a decently large margin, but didn’t come cheap. It’s really encouraging to see the country develop its strong human rights record in such a progressive way.

The Toronto Star ran a great article on marriage and the Charter of Rights this February, which I quote in part below. It’s well-informed and well-said, and does the topic justice in a way I cannot.

This belief in the individual worth of every person regardless of background is now part of the wider Canadian value system. It was eloquently stated by Clifford Lincoln in a speech that deserves to be included in every legal textbook in the land.

After resigning from the Bourassa government in December 1988 because the notwithstanding clause was used to take away anglophone language rights, Lincoln told a hushed legislature,

“Rights are rights are rights. There is no such thing as inside rights and outside rights. No such thing as rights for the tall and rights for the short. No such thing as rights for the front and rights for the back, rights for the east and rights for the west. Rights are rights and will always be rights. There are no partial rights.”

The Martin government has decided there should be no partial rights in marriage. In doing so, it is in the forefront of applying equality rights to marriage. The Netherlands and Belgium are currently the only countries in the world that recognize same-sex marriages. By innovating in the realm of human rights, the Liberals are firmly within a great Canadian tradition.

I am curious to discover what sort of play this gets in the U.S. corporate media. I am also idling about moving as close as possible to this beautiful place after Liana and I earn a few degrees.

(tags: politics)

A shopping district in Vienna was ‘deleted’ for two weeks this month — yellow coverings were draped over all store signs, logos, billboards, and other forms of advertising visible from the street. It didn’t take long for the neighborhood, in its temporarily horizontal / personal configuration, to continue the conversation with itself.

(Discovered at The Morning News.)

(tags: design)

Round one — How do you kill a T-Rex?

Round two — Who would win in a fight:

Could a typical young man, armed only with a knife, (say, six or eight inches long) be trained to consistently “win” fights with a grizzly bear? Assume no element of surprise.

(tags: weblogs)

One weekend chore: regressing from OmniWeb to Safari, because the former is just too slow and leaky under Tiger.

If OmniWeb moves to the new Webkit, I may return, but the browser has many lingering stability and performance problems that, over time, offset its otherwise insanely great experience.

The web browser scene on OS X is still crappy. Think about it:

• Safari has grown into adept handling of the basics, but doesn’t really do much;
• Firefox’s Mac port is terrible, totally phoned in;
• Camino manages to somehow combine the limitations of Safari with the shitty user experience of Firefox;
• a plague of marginal or experimental browsers (iCab, Shiira, Trailblazer) offer interesting features and half-baked implementation;
• Opera boasts useless 20th-century junk such as integrated e-mail at the cool price of $40 — twice as much as OmniWeb, the other commercial, non-bundled browser; and
• OmniWeb is close to perfect, if you have the mega amounts of horsepower to run it.

This is, of course, much better than it was a few years ago, when OS X stunk and Internet Explorer was the browser of “choice.”

(tags: design mac web)

A good nuclear free community is hard to find, but Brandon managed.

(tags: photos)

The New Yorker DVD set is available for pre-order (but won’t ship until fall). A hundred bucks gets you 4,109 issues of The New Yorker spanning precisely eighty years on eight DVDs.

A recent article in the Times described it as follows:

The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.

The magazine’s card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine’s office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication’s insurance company found the catalog to be “irreplaceable and beyond value,” Mr. Remnick said.

I’m excited about this for several reasons.

(1) After I started reading The New Yorker (by way of Liana and co.), I chilled in the grad library reading old issues, and it’d be fun to do so at home.

(2) I’m glad to hear that there is a separate cartoon index (no word on movie reviews yet, although there’s always the Film File).

(3) There’s an interesting book/thesis/etc. waiting to be written about the weird history of advertisements in this snooty loss-leader of a magazine; I can hardly wait to read it.

Probably the more responsible reason to be excited is that magazine archives are fucking great, and anything that opens them up for deep search and/or random access is awesome. Even if that anything costs money, or is marketed as more of a toy than a tool.

Magazines are like weblogs. 90% of the time, you only care about the contents of the new issue, the front page. But it’s the other 10% of the time — when you need to (1) find, (2) retrieve, and (3) reuse something old — that really proves their value. The library solves the second problem, but for the first, you really need one of these, cheap and functional and not behind a wall of money or academic library access:

It’s time to move beyond sequential access, and this is something like a start.

(For a different approach, see that taken by Harper’s Magazine, which hired Paul Ford and his mythical sitekit to develop a much richer form of archival access with the dual attractions of being web-based and free, but it is alas very shallow, as in: only goes back a few years and doesn’t include full contents. Consider also Economist.com. Both of these magazine sites are biased towards sliced-and-diced reuse of recently-published writing, which is a blast to read but scales poorly, if at all, back into the archives. Someday, a good magazine will be a brand beginning with this week’s paper issue, and ending with a Montfort-style encyclopedic, explorable space — however small — infused with that organ’s style, bias, and charm.)

(tags: design narratives)

The Onion has seen the future, and it is murder.