Zeno's Paradox
March 31, 2004 - Today

I'm taking off early today in order to fly from Midway to Newark so that I can give a talk tomorrow at Brian Kernighan's advanced programming course. The tentative title of my talk is "I have a $150K CS degree. Now what?". I'll be covering some of the stuff that I've done in the last two years and hopefully I'll be able to share some of the things I've learned over the past two years to those just starting out.

In other news, a news story and photos about Iraqi insurgents killing eight and the local residents mutilating the corpses has been circulating among the right wing blogs this morning. I saw the pictures on Yahoo News and they were simply sickening and appalling. I'm not posting the link to these as they're very graphic. However, they have gotten me started thinking again whether there can be any sort of compatibility between the west and the "Arab Street". While I can't post anything reasonably intelligent here at the moment (still shocked), instinctively I'd like to level that particular town. Not that it would solve anything in the long run or be constructive in the least.

Posted by br284 at 08:58 AM

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Not that it's at all the same thing, but how do you feel about Western media picking up the images and showing them? Supreme Court yesterday kept sealed the records of a Clinton staffer's suicide citing the family privacy rights that are protected in spite of FOIA. I feel like the media showing these images (and often just sticking them on newspaper homepages instead of forcing you to link to them with a warning of the graphic depictions you're about to see) is disgusting, dangerous, disrespectful, sensationalist, etc. Yes, photography is in incredibly valuable tool/art form, but are there limits? If we condemn the actions of the photographed, how do we feel about the actions of those who spread the photo of the deed?

There's something to be said for recording for posterity - the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, war in general. It's something else entirely to make us watch without a warning as to what we're about to see... There's two separate points mushed in here together, and I'm ambivalent about one of them, but you get the idea...

Posted by ... on March 31, 2004 10:58 AM
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