David Acevedo's Blog

A black man was shot in Florida. A kid really. Wearing a hoodie, buying skittles not to far from his home. Unarmed. The man who shot him was Hispanic. Everybody is crying racism.  I doubt it.  Race had something to do with it I'm sure, but I don't think it's as simple as racism. I think it's from a different way of looking at the other man, a way where the man is suddenly a threat before anything else, a kind of Anton's blindness that prevents people from seeing what's in front of them . A teenager with skittles becomes a threat. A danger. A terror that has to be stopped, lethal. I, of course, don't know for sure if this is what happened in Florida a few weeks ago, since few details have come out. But I doubt the calls for racism and wonder if it is this other thing. I'll call it the Scary Man syndrome, w hich is distinct from racism. I've seen it before. My roommate in college told me an experience so bizarre at first I thought he was pulling...

I've been rather bemused by the calls to increase STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education in this country. Mostly because I think the stress is in the wrong area. The US in my opinion doesn't need any more STEM mayors. What it needs is to have the base level of understanding in those subject areas raised across all disciplines . The fact that a simple process like global warming is misunderstood and one as complex as evolution dismissed and in danger of being taught along side creationism in many states (see teach the controversy bills) are real problems. But a shortage of engineers sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on why exactly that is but I have a good intuition about this things and I'll trust it. One clue however is the H1-B1 program . In my former company we had software-engineers that were part of that program and I found something strange about it right away. The visa is owned by the company you work for not the individual: it is a hi...

Opera Opera was for the longest time my favorite browser. It had tabbed browsing when that was just an idea in the back of a Firefox developer and it had a great hiding ability in the PC which made it great for work, Ctrl+H (they changed it afterwards) and it minimized to a task-bar icon, perfect for that unexpected visit to your workstation and even better, as my job was visually intensive but I could listen to whatever, it has a voice reader built-in on Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera has more or less dropped from my the list of browsers I use with one exception: It's my default feed reader and IRC chat client . I also use it on my Mac laptop because it allows private tabs (as opposed to the whole browser) saving screen-real-estate. Sadly on the PC it has gone from main browser to occasional special use, which is a bit sad considering Opera pioneered a huge amount of the technologies used in other browsers like: tabbed browsing, keyword searches, persistent tabs, bu...

I'll post a picture with the shirt once I get it.