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August 25, 2008
Our Pathetic News Media
The USA/Today reports
While Obama leads McCain 48%-42% among women in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll released Sunday, Biden’s family life and his legislative record on women’s issues could help win disappointed fans of Hillary Rodham Clinton and enlarge that gender gap.
First of all, 48%-42% was McCain’s lead over Obama among men. In that poll, Obama lead McCain among women by a whopping 49% – 39%. To achieve that large a lead among women overall, his lead among women Democrats must be overwhelming.
And yet, our benighted news media are so insistent in their narrative about “disappointed fans of Hillary Rodham Clinton” that they need to resort to misreading their own polls to propagate the story.
August 20, 2008
Instiki + IE7
Somehow (doubtless, because I try to stay as far away from Windows as possible), it eluded my attention that there was a serious bug when viewing Instiki pages in IE7+MathPlayer. The problem doesn’t occur with IE8β+Mathplayer or, as best I can recall, with IE6+MathPlayer. But, with IE7, instead of displaying the page, it showed you the XML source tree instead.
The problem turns out to be involve the HTTP Content-Type header. If you send IE7+MathPlayer the header
Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8
you trigger the bug. If, instead, you omit the charset parameter,
Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml
all is well.
Getting Rails to omit the charset parameter turns out to be surprisingly difficult. If you want to see how to do it, search for “MathPlayer” in this file.
Technical details aside, the latest version of Instiki finally works with IE7+MathPlayer.
Thanks to Timm Wrase for reporting the problem (best of luck in Munich, Timm!), Neil Soiffer for confirming its origin, and Sam Ruby for working to ensure that Rails 2.2 will solve the problem in a less convoluted way.
August 2, 2008
Noncommutative
From time to time, I’ve been asked what I think of the Connes-Chamseddine-et al “Noncommutative Standard Model”. I haven’t had anything terribly profound to say, but recently I got involved in a conversation with Urs Schreiber about it. So, perhaps it might be useful to summarize what was said.