8 Ways to Sunday

I’ve re-opened comments on Low Pass Filter after trying in vain to recover the 20 I deleted accidentally two weeks ago. Just an FYI.

The Supreme Court of the United States today declined to hear a case disputing the year-old decision of Massachusetts’s highest state court, which ruled that the right to marry could not be denied to gay couples.

By refusing — without further comment — to hear the case, I feel that the Supreme Court is acting prudently and within the bounds of the law. They are, however, running somewhat afoul of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which states that under federal law marriage is defined only as the union of two persons of opposite sexes. The Supremes have been reluctant to hear cases dealing directly with the DOMA in the past, but their decision not to hear this case could be seen as an indirect weakening of a law that some feel is already ripe for being struck down as unconstitutional. My personal opinion — as stated in my post on SEB about federalism and gay marriage — is that the DOMA is fundamentally flawed, and should be replaced with a similar constitutional amendment that doesn’t contain a nation-wide definition of marriage by gender.

What’s interesting (and amusing) about this is the lame arguments being used by social conservatives to combat the Massachusetts decision. To quote the Associated Press article:

Critics of the November 2003 ruling by the highest court in Massachusetts argue that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government in each state. They lost at the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Their attorney, Mathew Staver, said in a Supreme Court filing that the Constitution should “protect the citizens of Massachusetts from their own state Supreme Court’s usurpation of power.”

Federal courts, he said, should defend people’s right “to live in a republican form of government free from tyranny, whether that comes at the barrel of a gun or by the decree of a court.”

Merita Hopkins, a city attorney in Boston, had told justices in court papers that the people who filed the suit have not shown they suffered an injury and could not bring a challenge to the Supreme Court. “Deeply felt interest in the outcome of a case does not constitute an actual injury,” she said.

Did you catch that? Living in a nation where people of the same sex who love one another are permitted to express that love through marriage and to enjoy the rights and privileges which come with that institution is, apparently, equivalent to living under a tyrannical government with a gun pointed at your head.

I think these nimrods need to spend a few weeks in North Korea. Living under Dear Leader for a month or so might give them a bit of perspective, and help them better appreciate the freedom they enjoy as citizens of the United States of America. Maybe then they wouldn’t be so eager to deny those freedoms to others.

If you’re getting this via e-mail, you subscribed to my Bloglet-generated update notifications. I’ve ditched Bloglet in favor of Brian Groce’s Email Notification Plugin for WordPress. The main differences are (1) this actually works, unlike Bloglet, and (2) you’ll get notifications for every post instead of daily digests. Since I rarely post more than a few times a day, that shouldn’t cause any problems.

In other subscription news, the RSS feeds should now work with all news aggregators. A WordPress bug had been causing problems with some .Net-based programs like Sauce Reader and Sharp Reader. Thanks to this pointer at Dennis Grinberg’s technospin.org, I was able to correct the problem.

I’ve been doing some much-needed work on the guts of this site since the election, and will probably continue to do so for the next week or so off and on. You can expect a more regular posting schedule to resume after that.

Google Scholar — a new Google service currently in beta — uses the power of Google to search scholarly literature. From the about page:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Man, where was this when I was in college?

(Props: SEB, via ***Dave)

I was loving the new version of Photoshop Elements, except for one little problem — I couldn’t save.

Turns out that Photoshop Elements 3.0 is incompatible with QuickGamma, a program I recommended earlier this year. Uninstalling QuickGamma fixed the problem, and now my gamma-correction needs are being fulfilled by the excellent Adobe Gamma (included with PSE3).

For those who don’t use PSE3, I still recommend QuickGamma. It’s pretty good at what it does and, unlike Adobe Gamma, it’s free. The makers of QuickGamma also have a new monitor profiling program called QuickMonitorProfile available. Between the two, you can get a decent color-managed workflow going on a budget.

If you’re serious about color management, however, I recommend springing for a professional-grade monitor profiling kit like ColorVision’s excellent Spyder. It comes in several flavors for casual, advanced, and professional users. Prices as of this writing range from $119 to $299.