I spent 27 years in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I helped build a state of the art automated manufacturing system for bent sheet metal parts. (Sort of origami in metal.)
For many years I was an elected member of CMU's Staff Council and was appointed to serve on the University's Human Relations Commission. I played a significant role in winning domestic partner healthcare benefits for staff and faculty. I was unsuccessful in trying to get the university to care about light pollution. They lit a large, silly outdoor sculpture from the ground. In October 2007 I moved back to Texas.
I grew up in Port Arthur, Tx, and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1965. Until the end of 1968 I attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, majoring in Mathematics and Physics. I was at the University of Houston 1968-71. I got my B.A. in Philosophy in '69 and stayed to do graduate study for a couple of years. I was in the Ph.D. program in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1971 until I left to become a research computer programmer in CMU's Robotics Institute in 1980.
What we need is a single-payer system with everyone being covered. We already have an American model for such a system: Medicare. We could extend it to cover everyone and we could fix whatever flaws it may have. All doctors should be required to participate too.
Why is it that the “disorderly conduct” charges were dropped if the arrest was justified? Is that offense merely an excuse the police use for harassing people who annoy them? And once they have harassed someone for a few hours do they drop the charges because beyond that it’s too much trouble for the police, or else they know they can’t get a conviction?
The U.S. has been holding a guy for six years at Guantánamo with no evidence he has done anything wrong, except for a confession extracted via torture and threats his family would be killed if he did not confess. He may have been as young as 12 when first detained. Why is the Obama administration still holding this guy?
“The complaints [about iPods catching fire], made to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, amount to over 800 pages of documentation covering 15 incidents that Apple’s lawyers repeatedly tried to prevent [investigative reporter Amy] Clancy from accessing under a Freedom of Information Act request.”
An amateur astronomer in Australia using a $10,000 14.5” reflecting telescope discovered that an Earth-sized object recently struck Jupiter.
Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, explains why we do, and why we must, ration health care. He also suggests a rational way to do it.
Cellphones are the most dangerous distraction on American roads. Driving while using a cellphone is as dangerous as driving legally drunk; it ought to be just as illegal. Hands-free phones do not eliminate the risk, because the problem is the distraction, not the fact that you’re holding something in your hand.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes, “a national civil rights organization that takes a ‘neutral position’ on an issue of basic civil rights [same-sex marriage] does not deserve to exist.” She points out that it was an openly gay black man, Bayard Rustin, who architected the 1963 March on Washington and “whose fierce pacifism and commitment to non-violence is the very basis of King’s strategy.”
The story of the violent police raid on a gay bar in Fort Worth on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall from the pages of the Fort Worth Weekly.
