From Mark Pasc: How to make a quick links weblog in Movable Type. Hmm. More trouble than it’s worth or the greatest thing since sliced bread?

I’m hoping to figure out a way to put a sidebar blog within this blog so that I can post links to (and brief summaries of) news stories every once in a while. Until that happens, however, I’ll put them here. I’m not sure I agree with what Deeb and Marefat, two Middle Eastern specialists at the Library of Congress quoted in the article, say but it’s an interesting note from history, if nothing else:

Ken Ringle, “The Genie in an Architect’s Lamp: Frank Lloyd Wright’s ’57 Plan for Baghdad May Be Key to Its Future” (Washington Post).

Updated June 28: Here in America, the land of the free, teenagers are put in prison for having sex. Doesn’t that make you feel safer? From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court announced yesterday the first ripple effect of its landmark decision on gay rights, ordering a Kansas court to reconsider its approval of a 17-year sentence meted out to an 18-year-old man for having consensual sex with a 14-year-old boy. Without comment or published dissent, the court vacated the Kansas Court of Appeals’ ruling last year that Matthew Limon’s sentence was constitutional even though the same conduct between two persons of different sexes would have received a far lighter penalty under Kansas law. (emphasis added)

As the Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court struck down Texas’s ban on private consensual sex between adults of the same sex today, in a landmark ruling that enshrined for the first time a broad constitutional right to sexual privacy.

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Texas Fourteenth District is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

Read the opinion for yourself.

I am very happy with this decision, but while Kennedy’s belief that “persons in every generation [will engage in] their own search for greater freedom” is admirable, it fails to recognize that often one person’s oppression is another person’s freedom. The Christian right, for example, argues that they (and their always-invoked children) should have the right to be free from the “homosexual agenda.” And it’s not inconceivable that they’ll eventually end up with a Supreme Court that agrees with them. It was only 17 years ago, in Bowers v. Hardwick that the Supreme Court decided that the Constitution contains no “fundamental right” for people of the same sex to engage in intercourse. Lawrence et al. v. Texas overturns Bowers v. Hardwick, but surely the more recent decision will not remain unchallenged by subsequent cases. The U.S. Constitution will inevitably be open to continual re-interpretation (including interpretations that claim they are not interpretations, which is the rhetorical position often favored by conservative jurists), but we can’t really expect that this process will only go in one direction, politically speaking.

Oh, let’s not be so serious for the whole entry, G. Here’s a quote from the WashPost story that’s too good to resist:

“Today’s decision has awakened a sleeping giant and will galvanize and reinvigorate the majority of Americans who believe in traditional marriage but have ignored the radical agenda of the same-sex marriage movement,” said Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of Florida-based Liberty Counsel.

What marriage traditions are you alluding to, Mr. Staver? Do you mean those American matrimonial practices such as boredom, lying, infidelity, 50% divorce rates, spousal abuse, freakshow marriage-themed reality tv shows, and other sacred practices? Oh no, can’t let those gay men and lesbians get married, because that would really undermine this great thing the breeders have going.

How many people will think, based on the title, that this entry is about some kind of illegal lab? Nope, it’s about programming with php.

After a long day of tedious html form building for data that will be entered into a database using some php scripts, I thought, while trying to fall asleep, “There’s got to be a better way. I’m creating the same kinds of forms over and over, surely there’s a way to automate this. I bet I could build a set of pages that would be based on php, but would actually create forms after asking you for some basic info. Yeah, that would be cool. It’s not php, it’s meta-php! I should blog about this…zzzzz.”

The next day, Jeff wisely said, “Why don’t you just look on Sourceforge and see if anyone has already created something like that?”

And voila! phpCodeGenie

I haven’t actually gotten it to work, yet, but I’m close. Does anyone know of similar tools that

1. are free
2. actually work out of the box without too much tweaking?

Reading a couple of posts from Liz Lawley on gender and communication — the second of which points to an essay by Dan Spalding aimed at “other men in the movement” and designed to help men “act better in meetings” by learning the value of silence — has me thinking about whether or not my as yet embryonic typology of the kinds of “moves” people make in conversations might be useful in thinking about gender. Conversely, perhaps thinking about gender will be useful in reworking my typology.

For example, Liz writes:

I spend a lot of time watching the conversations that are taking place these days in weblogging, social software, and other technology contexts. Yes, there are a few women involved in the conferences and meetings. But their voices arenít the ones we usually hear about from the men. To be heardóto really be heardóa woman has to break the rules. She has to be outrageous.

I had written that the move of affirmation (e.g. I agree.) wasn’t a significant contribution to a conversation, but clearly this is too simplistic. The value of that move will depend on context. If you are participating in a conversation and feel that no one is really listening to you, when someone says Yes, I agree. Good point. then something significant has taken place, and your participation is validated to some extent, depending on who has done the affirming.

I think that participants in a conversation that contains several “moves” of acknowledgment, affirmation, bridging, and synthesis will feel more comfortable than they would in one that is characterized more by disagreement, challenge, diversion, or digression. Would we want to say that men (or at least unselfconsciously masculine men) are more likely to engage in the latter than the former? As if every conversation was a contest to be won? This would certainly be true if those kinds of moves are considered more “valuable” in a conversation than others, and if we assume that men are socialized (I’m anti-essentialist) to acquire more of what’s valuable than the other “players” in the conversation. I might want to rethink my model of conversation as game where individuals earn points for their contributions. What kind of model would reward more collaborative or generous behavior?

Obviously, one way to affirm or acknowledge what someone has said is to cite them in your blog, conference paper, or journal article. This is what Liz means when she says that women’s “voices arenít the ones we usually hear about from the men.” Hmm. Even disagreeing with someone in such a context is a means of affirming or acknowledging them, though, isn’t it? These moves are more complicated than they appear at first blush.

More thinking to be done…