Unless I am mistaken, which is not outside the realms of possibility, I seem to have completed an application for approval from the university’s human ethics committee. It describes my intended first experiment, and promises that I will not cause my participants to experience physical discomfort, despair, fatigue, mistrust for authority, wanderlust, itchiness, or a crippling sense of the numinous wonder of all creation that makes them drop out of their normal lives to join an ashram, commune, or other intentional counter-cultural community.

The human ethics committee does not take documents signed in triplicate. It would be too easy to lose all three, so they take ten.

Technorati Tags: research

Recently I have been looking at a few social networking sites, for myself and for Funtime Comics. I have ascertained the following facts:

• FaceBook is quite pleasant to use, and fun to visit.
• deviantArt is OK. Some people wanted to see Funtime there, and I have no particular objection.
• Using MySpace is like having weevils eating your face. There does not appear to be a single thing about MySpace that isn’t fundamentally wrong-headed, and I trust that those people who suggested that Funtime should have a MySpace page appreciate the deep personal anguish I have experienced in creating one. The default appearance of MySpace is too hideous to be safely viewed by human eyes, but it seems that you can kludge in CSS styles if you stick them in one of your content boxes. And the redoubtable Mike Davidson has already risked his own sanity to figure out the mess of tables and non-semantic tags and provide instructions for beating MySpace pages into something remotely tolerable.

Technorati Tags: web design, wrong-headedness

By some unaccountable oversight, it is apparently still legal in New Zealand to import products made overseas by slave labour. Trade Aid are running a petition to have this gap in our law corrected, which you might like to sign.

(via No Right Turn)

Technorati Tags: puppy