Category: Journal

“Strict Rules of Evidence Do Not Apply”

Andrew Coyne is again liveblogging at the BC “human rights” tribunal.

There’s lots of commentary on yesterday’s farcical proceedings: Ezra Levant as always, Jay Currie, the man himself has lots of links to media articles, including the National Post:

Mr. Elmasry, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and a highly controversial figure himself — especially among Jewish groups — claims the Steyn excerpt denigrated and vilified Canadian Muslims and promoted hatred of an identifiable group.

He is not obliged to demonstrate what harm occurred to whom, or to what degree. Maclean’s magazine and Mr. Steyn could still be found to have violated B. C.’s Human Rights Code. No proof of damage is required.

…

“Strict rules of evidence do not apply” in cases before the Tribunal, noted its chairwoman, Heather MacNaughton.

Fire. Them. All.

In the Wild

It’s a little wierd now that I’ve been working on actual published software for a few years, as opposed to research, to see actual products I’ve worked on in the wild, and to read reviewers’ comments where I know exactly what the software in question does, because I wrote it.

Andrea & I have just put our place on the market, and are looking for a new place, and we’ve been getting lots of real estate listings from our agent.

What makes this relevant is that a couple of years ago, during a lacuna in employment between computational linguistics research and game development, I worked for a company whose software is used by half the realtors in North America. And indeed it turns out that the printouts we’ve been getting were made by that software.

Now I’d like to say that I know exactly what the software that made those printouts does, but the software in question is a vast and terrible jungle of recursive and self-modifying spaghetti code without end. I must confess I quit that job partly out of fear of ever being asked to work with it.

I much prefer physics and artificial intelligence.