Articles By Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia is the scourge of slacker philosophy students at UNC where he is a PhD candidate in philosophy. An avid technical kibbitzer, keen conversationalist, and metaprogramming Smalltalker of first order, Bijan lives with Zoe, hedgehogs, cats and many overdue library books in Durham.

Voting Matters?
Some reflections on futility and usability.
5 November 2002

A simple, prima facie argument in favor of the Semantic Web
The W3C is promoting the "Semantic Web" as a successor to the good old fashioned web. This article presents a simple argument that we have good reasons to be, at least in the absence of counterevidence, optimistic about it.
26 April 2002

Masters and Tools: Thoughts Inspired by Audre Lourde
Notes and reflections in response to Audre Lourde's essay, "The Master's tools will never tear down the Master's house".
6 February 2002

First Takes on Appiah's In My Father's House
Notes from a first reading of the book.
4 February 2002

Bush's Racist Slur
Bush's use of a racist slur -- and subsequent failure to apologize for such a use -- is an intolerable coarsening of the present situation.
10 January 2002

Those who do not obey shall be destroyed
Bush declares the Newest World Order.
23 September 2001

Congress Must Not Abdicate to Bush
During a national tragedy, Congress seems too willing to capitulate its role to the President's ambition.
14 September 2001

Bush Speaks Out (a little) Against Anti-Arab Racism
In a phone converstation with Pataki and Guiliani, Bush finally says something against Arab anti-racism.
13 September 2001

The Illogic of Genocide
Given the response of some people, the "mindset of terrorism" that lead to the disaster may not be as alien as we might think.
13 September 2001

Feeling strongly about this
A response to coffeecup.com's call for retalitory annihilation.
11 September 2001

Massive Attacks inside the US
World Trade Center towers collapsed after being hit by passager planes. And that's only the start.
11 September 2001

Strong Words and Strange Reasons
Some tangled thoughts about the Jenna Bush flap reaction.
7 June 2001

Freedom to Spew: Appropriate Responses?
What can we do to oppose speech we hate?
19 March 2001

May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and guard your left.
A discussion about the nature of work from Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova.
2 February 2001

Starting Black History Month With a Bang: Confirming John Ashcroft
In so many ways, the nomination and confirmation of John Ashcroft to the post of Attorney General is an affront to the overwhelming majority of African-Americans; that confirmation came at the start Black History month is the icing on the cake.
1 February 2001

Nader's Big Chance
Fighting the various forms of Black voter disenfranchisment in Florida (and elsewhere) is just Ralph Nader's kind of gig.
15 December 2000

Fuzzy counts: Did Bush invent ballot counting procedures?
Bush's self-coronation speech tries to build legitimacy out of distortion.
27 November 2000

Technically Writing
In which our Author, while Technically Writing, avoids his Technical Writing.
19 November 2000

Who is the spoiler?
Predictably, the (possibly) Losing Loyal Liberals want to blame Nader and the Greens for the (possible) Gore defeat. But is it right, correct, or prudent to do so?
9 November 2000

A Modest Proposal
A simple proposal that would simultaneously increase general citizen participation in and control over government and reduce that of the corps and professional lobbyists.
2 November 2000

Voter Disobedience: Solidarity and Disloyalty
A study of the Nader/Gore dispute in light of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.
31 October 2000

Gored Liberals, Wasted Votes, and Selling Out
Some thoughts on the malestrom of "tactical voting" arguments.
30 October 2000

Nice Guys Don't Mock the People They Execute
Continually cropping up is the claim that Bush is a nice person. He's not.
25 October 2000

Finishing School
Upon turning something in, Our Long Suffering Graduate Student contemplates acquiring polish.
25 October 2000

Monkeyfist supports Iraqi Humanitarian Aid
Our new Paypal setup makes it easy to donate.
29 September 2000

"After all, there's a war on."
A bit of antiwar stuff inspired by Samuel Delany's Triton and The Fall of the Towers.
23 September 2000

A Non-declaration of Peace
President Clinton addresses Columbia in his native tongue: Newspeak.
31 August 2000

But I'm a Cheerleader
Not a good film, but I persist in liking it.
19 August 2000

What Gore won't give
Gore could gain some progressive credit by doing what he just will never do: treat the protesters well.
15 August 2000

To Philly: Remember MLK
It would not be inappropriate to have a Letter from Philadelphia City Jail.
8 August 2000

Give a little criticism; get a little hate mail
Your Author receives anonymous, puerile hate mail, presumably in response to PhillyCriticism.
3 August 2000

Act now to support jailed activists
If you're a local Philly bigwig, or know one, or know someone who knows one, please try to "fix" the Philly courts!
3 August 2000

Just out: post-Dykes To Watch Out For
Yet another in a string of wonderful collections of the ongoing series. No deliberation needed: just get it.
31 July 2000

Black American Freedom Songs
How to sing freedom even if you aren't politically unabashed.
14 July 2000

Harry Potter---The good, the bad, the bizarre, the silly.
A quick reaction to "Harry Potter IV" and some attendant phenomena.
11 July 2000

Against sedentary habits and silent harms
Bob and Jean Anderson's book Stretching at your computer or desk describe practices which should be part of schools' curricula.
30 June 2000

Patently Mythological
Why the public prefers patents which patently punishes them---that is patents period.
28 June 2000

Another year, another Erlang conference
Erlang, the Smalltalk of functional programming (in pleasure production), the Java thereof (for marketing).
21 June 2000

Feel the churn, Monkey!
Through the power of a little irc bot written in Squeak by yours truly, MonkeyFist enters the age of microcontent.
19 June 2000

Sense and Offense
Nitpicking at a difficulty of language, thought, and action.
13 June 2000

Done badly, it will be hell
Somewhat interesting article by Conrad Taylor on WYSIWYG graphic design from 1996.
9 June 2000

File Format Info Galore
A web site, with search engine, collecting details about "all the file formats you've ever heard of...and then some".
1 June 2000

Information Prostitution
Infomarkets: a way to sell out being helpful.
30 May 2000

The ambiguities of honor, memory, and love
Poetry in memory of WWII veteran.
29 May 2000

Land of the incarcerated, home of the tortured.
U.S. police and prison brutality condemned in the latest U.N. Committee on Torture report.
28 May 2000

Is this a computer speaking?
AT&T advances the state of the art of text-to-speech.
20 May 2000

Turning off: Light pollution and net noise
Reflections on distractions and other obscuring phenomena.
19 May 2000

Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking
An over 12 year relationship is still going strong.
17 May 2000

A little mail database history
As a followup to Niel's explorations of archiving mail in databases, a few pointers to Xerox PARC publiciations.
12 May 2000

The public talents of duotones
An commercial photoshop plugin for generating duotone full color reproductions.
5 May 2000

Austenian interlude
Read Jane Austen, NOW!
2 May 2000

The grotesque and the sublime
A short musing on the essence of the domestic cat as a reflection of domestic tranquility.
30 April 2000

Brenden Larvor's Lakatos: An Introduction
With a few caveats, Lakatos: And Introduction is a readable, stimulating introduction to Lakatos' work, and, indeed, to mid-century philosophy of science.
24 April 2000

Minor amusing juxtaposition
Our Author finds an Amusing Relevant Quote after writing his Last Article.
24 April 2000

"A major, perhaps foolhardy, undertaking. "---JEmacs Paper
Per Bothner's Usenix paper detailing JEmacs.
24 April 2000

A Prime Time PyUnit
Finally, someone finishes a port of S/JUnit--Kent Beck's unit testing framework, to Python.
19 April 2000

Frisbee interlude
Our Arthritic Author has a good Frisbee day.
11 April 2000

Small Economies
Elizabeth Gaskell's examination of a quirk of human psychology.
11 April 2000

Some depressing things
Ok, not all that much like Sei Shonagon.
4 April 2000

A "PG-13" version of Logo
Updated, crossplatform, Java implemention of StarLogo, a "a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems".
10 March 2000

Gabrielle Palmer's The Politics of Breastfeeding
A political, social, economic, and historical look at breastfeeding and strong critique of the formula/medical complex by Gabrielle Palmer.
9 March 2000

'X' marks the Smalltalk
Update to Smalltalk/X, a cool, unusual Smalltalk system with C compilation and Java integration.
9 March 2000

The Amazon Patent Paradox Plan
Buy more, so they lose more!
3 March 2000

Common Lisp in the White House
The White House Electronic Publications runs on CL-HTTP, a Common LIsp based web server.
3 March 2000

The real reason Nader hates Microsoft
Microsoft basher and presidential candidate Ralph Nader's online donation system uses M$ software.
3 March 2000

The Politics of Breastfeeding
A political, social, economic, and historical look at breastfeeding.
2 March 2000

The Craft of Text Editing
An online book about the nuts and bolts of writing a text editor.
1 March 2000

Kawa updated; JEmacs advances
Per Bothner releases version 1.6.64 of his Kawa system (mainly a Scheme compiler for the JVM) with lots of JEmacs improvements.
1 March 2000

The dirt on everybody
All the presidential candidate scandals that're fit to HTTP.
26 February 2000

The secret talents of duotones
Using duotones to achieve full color reproduction.
26 February 2000