digamma.net - notes

This guide to adding Google AdSense to Mediawiki is well-regarded, but it only works with one skin, and I think I’ve found a simpler way.

I just pasted the AdSense code in includes/Skin.php at line 452, right underneath the line containing div id=’article’.

The only gotcha is that you have to add slashes before all the quotation marks in the code, or else they’ll break the PHP and bring your Wiki down.

See my results at Wiki Gonzalez.

I think I’m the only person in America who both thought Bill Clinton deserved to be charged with perjury in 1998 AND now wants to see the senior administration official(s) who outed Valerie Plame go to jail.

For the first time, the government’s idiotic adventure in Iraq has threatened someone I know.

The Guardian today confirmed that its Baghdad correspondent Rory Carroll, an Irish citizen, is missing, believed kidnapped, in Iraq.

Rory Carroll, 33, was on assignment in Baghdad earlier today when he went missing. It is believed Mr Carroll may have been taken by a group of armed men.

The Guardian is urgently seeking information about Mr Carroll’s whereabouts and condition.

I try to keep my personal life out of this blog, so suffice it to say that Carroll has close ties to my family.

I fucking hate war.

UPDATE: I still hate war, but this is very good news.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s his account:

Angling my head it was possible to see sagging powerlines, crumbling houses, sheep grazing on rubbish, traffic. I waved a foot to try to catch the attention of a trucker. It was rammed back on to the floor. The driver, stocky and stubbly, turned with a toothy grin and said “Tawhid al-Jihad". Otherwise known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, the beheaders of Ken Bigley. I stopped breathing.

I hate to defend Big Pharma, whose entire business model is based on government-created monopolies, but this is silly:

In testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Dr. Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, detailed how drug ads – on television, in print and on the Web – encourage doctors to prescribe pricey drugs to many patients who do not need the medication.

“Direct-to-consumer advertising is nothing less than an end-run around the doctor-patient relationship,” Lurie said.

What Dr. Lurie seems to be implying is that if your doctor doesn’t tell you about a drug, you shouldn’t know it exists.

By this standard, high school biology classes are an even worse “end-run". After all, if your doctor tells you that leeches will cure your HIV, how dare some faceless textbook corporation or teacher’s union suggest otherwise?

But I guess the right-wingers are doing such a good job destroying biology education with Intelligent Design that the left-wingers can leave it alone.

Atrios writes:

Whatever the merits of any particular proposal falling under the general “school choice” umbrella otherwise, unless the transportation issue is addressed there isn’t any actual school choice for most people, aside from their choice of which school district to reside in (and, of course, depending on home prices not all choices are available to all people).

Huh?

I don’t know what rural areas Atrios is thinking of because, in the rural area where I live, that scenario describes the status quo WITHOUT vouchers pretty well. You have to go to school in the town where you live, and the only way to choose a different school is to move.

When I hear parents discussing the towns they live in, the foremost question is “How are the schools?” Why is it that, when comparing two towns that lie side-by-side or two houses separated by 5 miles or less, I never hear “How are the jobs?” or “How is the shopping?” Because the government lets you work and shop in a different town than the one you live in, but your home locks you into one school. Needless to say, this seriously distorts the housing market.

(Why it is evil for Microsoft to give you a web browser with its operating system but okay for a school to be “bundled” with buying or renting a house?)

Not every town out here has a high school. In towns without them, the town pays for its students to go to any of the surrounding towns’ high schools, public or private. This is, of course, the dreaded voucher system. And it seems to drive very few of the local children into sweatshop labor.

UPDATE (5:52 PM): That Eschaton entry has since disappeared. It included some complaints about how Blogger was deleting his stuff, so I’m not surprised. But I swear he wrote what I quoted.