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Nick Gall's Weblog
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Wednesday, March 10, 2004 |
"Ages of Experience" prove once again that Bush is an ignoramous (this time on gay marriage).Saw this gem in the Boston Globe. Tried to find the full report at the AAA web site, but it only had a brief press release.
ON WEDNESDAY, the day after President Bush claimed that "ages of experience" support a ban on same-sex marriage, the world's largest organization of anthropologists -- "the people who study culture," as they put it -- responded by challenging the president's support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
According to a statement from the executive board of the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association, more than a century of cross-cultural anthropological research provides "no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution." Instead, anthropologists have concluded that "a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies."
Reached at her office at Albion College, in Michigan, AAA president Elizabeth M. Brumfiel cited the "widespread" Native American berdache tradition (in which males assumed female roles and married other males) and the existence of "sociological males" (women who assume male roles) among the Nuer of Sudan as examples of ways that societies have condoned same-sex marriage without collapsing. "People tend to rank their own culture as best, but anthropologists try to take a broader view," said Brumfiel.
4:46:14 PM 
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Monday, March 08, 2004 |
Software Architecture is "Union of All Manuals".This definition fits in nicely with the (re)emergence of an architecture as a set of views, each couched in a domain specific language:
In programming, the term architecture was first used to mean a description of a computer system that applied equally to more than one actual system. In 1969, Fred Brooks and Ken Iverson called architecture the "conceptual structure of a computer...as seen by the programmer". A few years later, Brooks (crediting Gerald Blaauw for the term) defined architecture as "the complete and detailed specification of the user interface. For a computer, this is the programming manual. For a compiler, it is the language manual... For the entire system it is the union of the manuals the user must consult to do his entire job." A careful distinction was drawn between architecture and implementation. Quoting Blaauw, Brooks writes, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen." This distinction survives today, and in the era of object-oriented programming it thrives. [emphasis added]
3:55:11 PM
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004 |
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