As the gay marriage debate broils, I’ve been hearing about transgender rights a bit lately. As someone who hasn’t sat down and read a newspaper lately, I was a bit out of the loop. I’d seen it mentioned in passing in a few times, and then one morning there was nothing good on FM radio on my drive into work, so I switched over to AM.

It turns out, by the way, that the AM band is the (almost) exclusive province of conservative talk radio. So I found one radio station that talked about the absurdity of the transgender rights bill, known by some in New Hampshire as the “bathroom bill.” It seems that the bill is to allow transgendered people to use whatever bathroom they like, regardless of whether it’s labeled as Male or Female. That seemed like a pretty ridiculous law to me. The talk radio hosts went on to describe a situation in which your young daughter would be in a public restroom, and then a giant gay man/pedophile would go in after her and you’d be powerless to object, since he’d claim he was transgendered.

But it turns out that you shouldn’t get your news from random far-right talk radio shows on AM radio. I saw another reference to “The Bathroom Bill” in New Hampshire, so I actually looked into it.

First of all, here’s the Transgender Wikipedia page. I think many people (including myself) thought it referred to people who had operations to change their gender. In actuality, it refers to people who were born one gender but but are mentally a different gender, or those “whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female roles, but combines or moves between these.”

More significantly, “The Bathroom Bill” is a giant misnomer. The law does little more than plunk “transgendered person” into the middle of the equal rights bill. It makes no mention of bathrooms at all.

But in viewing a discussion of other things right now, someone pointed out a few good points:

• No one seems to be able to find any law governing bathroom usage now. I don’t believe it’s illegal for a male to go into the lady’s room, or vice versa. Sure, in most cases it wouldn’t go over well, but now imagine a mother going to check on her young son in the men’s room. It’s already legal.
• You don’t have to prove your gender to use a bathroom or locker room.
• With status quo (the law not proscribing which bathroom should be used), no one seems to be aware of a single case of a transgendered person causing problems by using the “wrong” bathroom. More directly, no one seems to be aware of a transgendered person ever using the “wrong” bathroom, because it’s a total non-issue.
• Transgendered people aren’t looking for bathroom equality. The bill has nothing to do with that. They’re looking for protection against people who fire them or otherwise egregiously discriminate against them.

So I didn’t care before. But now I do. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone transgendered, I’m supporting transgendered rights. I thank the uberconservative talk radio show I happened across for distorting the issues enough to get me interested in the issue.

After experiencing XKCD’s problem with Wikipedia first-hand, I went from the page on canned air to the page on liquid nitrogen to the page on promession. “What is promession,” you might wonder?

It’s a new alternative to cremation, in which a corpse is frozen with liquid nitrogen until it is so brittle that it can be shattered sufficiently to render it nothing more than a pile of extremely cold dust. It’s then returned to room temperature, allowing all the water in the body to evaporate. (Metals are apparently removed from the body at this point, too.) This dried-out smashed-up body powder is then buried, much like in cremation, only there’s more dust than with cremation. The good news is that it’s eco-friendly.

Prediction: promession is not going to catch on very quickly.

Even when I have maple syrup on a plate after breakfast, it’s a pain to get off. But that’s nothing compared to what happens if you spill a few drops of maple syrup in your car’s cupholder and don’t realize until the next day. I ended up leaving it for a few more days because I couldn’t think of a way to get it out. Cleaning it up with a napkin wouldn’t work since it’s far too sticky; scraping it wouldn’t work because it would leave a thin layer behind; cleaning solution wouldn’t help a lot, either. Time for a new car?

Driving home tonight, the perfect solution hit me. Freeze it and then chip it out!

Most of us (myself included) don’t have access to liquid nitrogen, but we have something almost as good: cans of compressed air, meant for cleaning out computers and such. Held perfectly upside down, it sprays a liquid that can cause nasty frostbite.

It wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped, but it was the same general plan: spray a bunch of the stuff on to freeze the crap out of it, then go in with a knife and chip the deep-frozen maple syrup chunks off. (Warning: the stuff is dangerously cold. The can carries a frostbite warning. Don’t touch it!) The problem I ran into is that it would thaw out in a matter of seconds, meaning that I had to spray a ton and then very quickly chip it out. (Because there’s nothing like rushing while you’re weilding a knife and some unknown chemical that’s ridiculously cool.)

Nerd node: The Wikipedia page Gas duster covers the contents of this canned air stuff in great detail, and also mentions something I’m noticing after the fact: they put a bitterant in to keep people from huffing the stuff (I’m not sure why, since it’s toxic?), but it’s much stronger if you hold the can upside down (since you’re basically releasing the liquid before it expands, hence using a much greater quantity). So consider doing this in an open area. At the very least, don’t eat nearby, and whatever you do, don’t end up putting your fingers in your mouth. Trust me.

I saw someone following a user named “snoopdogg” on Twitter. I thought it was hilarious because the posts are exactly what you might expect Snoop Dogg to tweet: things like “bacc on the blocc what up ma hungry twizzles” and “mad love to everyone out here itz gonna be a dope dizzay.”

But with over 100,000 followers, it seems that snoopdogg really is Snoop Dogg. And in this case, it’s a neat use of Twitter for marketing. He just posted, “4 all ma djs get this track out there download link http://tinyurl.com/cgl2ka” — the link goes to a stream of Snoop Dogg Millionaire, what seems to be a hot-of-the-press new song with someone from Slum Dog Millionaire. I have to say that the song is awful (IMHO), but that’s not the point.

So I think almost everyone would agree that child porn is awful, and those involved in it should be sent to jail for a really long time.

But there’s a constant barrage of news stories where prosecutors fail to use any common sense at all. A 16-year-old boy might send an explicit photo of himself to a 16-year-old girl, and a school administrator might confiscate the phone and alert police. And then the boy is arrested for creating child porn, the girl is arrested for possessing child porn, and the school administrator who confiscated the phone is also arrested. How does that make any sense at all? In another recent case, two minors (both around 16) videotaped themselves having (consensual) sex and were charged with statutory rape, since both were underage.

I think it’s a case of no one wanting to appear too lax on prosecuting child predators, so no one stops to consider that it makes no sense to arrest children as child predators. Let’s stop arresting children for child porn. And then, let’s get the media to forget the absurd phrase “sexting.” And then maybe law enforcement can start focusing their attention again on creepy old perverts who should be arrested for child porn.

Any time these news stories come up, the response is pretty much universal: “That’s absurd,” or, “They’re making way too big of a deal out of this.” I wish some legislators would have the courage to say the same thing.

A few cool things I’ve found myself looking at today:

• Leatherman Skeletool. I have one of their old-school multi-tools, but it’s huge. This is a trimmed-down version that looks much slicker.
• TuneUp, a program to clean up your iTunes libraries. (Found via Uncrate.) It’s supposed to find names for your music to keep things accurately labeled, and also download missing cover art. I haven’t tested it yet, though.

I don’t know why I keep doing this, but here’s a roundup of current tech deals that seem enticing to me:

• HP tx2z laptop, $650. 12.1″ LED-backlit screen (multi-touch), a Turion X2 processor (AMD dual-core), a 320GB disk and Radeon HD3200 video card, webcam, fingerprint reader, and a DeskJet printer. Here’s the link at HP, which doesn’t mention how you can save several hundred dollars.
• Hitachi SATA 2.5″ notebook drive, 100GB 7200RPM with a 16MB cache. $39.99 at NewEgg.
• Acer X203Wbd, 20″ LCD at 1680×1050, $139.99 at NewEgg. Fairly good reviews, too.
• Linksys WRT54GL router, the one that runs Linux so well, $60 at NewEgg.
• Toshiba laptop, dual-core Intel, 15.4″ (with a crappy 1280×800 resolution), 3GB RAM, 250GB (crappy 5400rpm) disk, Vista Home Premium, and a “SuperMulti” DVD drive, $499.99 at NewEgg.
• USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter, $25 at NewEgg. Very handy. I guess it doesn’t support SATAII, but it’ll do SATAI and 2.5/3.5″ IDE, great for reading data off of old hard drives. (Or for people who want a backup hard drive but are too lazy to buy one in a case with a USB cord.) It includes a power supply so you can power the drives. Some people seem to be confused or have trouble, though I have not.

Some of us at work were talking over lunch about Google’s servers. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of them, and it’s well-known that they’re based on commodity x86 hardware. Otherwise, they’ve been pretty secretive.

The article came out on April 1st, so many are a little doubtful about its veracity, but its seems fairly believable. Apparently, the Google machines have integrated 12V batteries in lieu of UPSs, and the servers are hosted in shipping crates.

The Digg conversation also makes mentions of GoogleFS, their proprietary in-house filesystem that apparently makes it easy to stripe data across many servers. (Hadoop is loosely an open-source version of the same, though it’s not entirely the same.)

Edit: I included the link this time. After a while I started to doubt the veracity of this article. I’ll expand on some of my thoughts about why it seems odd in teh comments, but wanted to link to this Twitter post that seems to confirm the veracity of this article. Note that it’s dated April 2, which makes me think there’s better than a 50/50 shot that this is real. And this guy is either in on the prank, or corroborates that this was actually presented at a workshop.

This blog post isn’t about Firefox, the leading* web browser. I really do mean Foxfire.

I was going to open with a really nerdy explanation of bioluminescence, the scientific term for biological organisms (i.e., things that aren’t chemically-altered glowsticks) that glow in the dark. But that doesn’t sound interesting. (But do click through the Wikipedia link to see glow-in-the-dark waves.)

So I’ll cut to the chase. Foxfire is a mushroom that glows in the dark, and is apparently fairly common. What’s weird is that it appears as if it was widely known by people like Benjamin Franklin, but is now entirely unknown to people who don’t read my blog.

• Among my tech-savvy peers, at least.

Does anyone else remember the days when Nessus was a GPL’ed application? It was a top-notch security scanning tool. While nmap is a really powerful port scanner, Nessus was more targeted at helping administrators and auditors spot vulnerabilities in their network. As I recall it, people kept taking GPL’ed Nessus and trying to pass it off as their own commercial product, making a pretty penny on GPL’ed software. The Nessus developers were understandably annoyed, but they did something I wish they hadn’t: they became a commercial service.

It’s still a free download, but it’s kind of like anti-virus software (actually, a lot like anti-virus software) in that they steer you into paying for updates. The version I downloaded appears to be several months behind.

The reason I downloaded it was that I had heard it had been updated to detect Conficker machines. The media had hyped Conficker as an incredibly destructive virus, so I thought I’d set myself up with some tools to detect infestations. It’s always important to be prepared against infestations.

I certainly don’t wish malice on anyone, but I have to say that I was disappointed to see what a failure Conficker was. I don’t know a single person affected by it. It’s kind of like SARS, which after months and months of being hyped as the end of the world, turned out to cause something like 20 fatalities across the world. It was practically a joke. (Except to the 20 people who died.)

If you download the latest nmap, it’s capable of picking up Conficker-infested machines, too. If you check out the changelog, don’t miss “The compile-time Nmap ASCII dragon is now more ferocious thanks to better teeth alignment.”