A few days ago I returned to Ann Arbor from a couple weeks of backpacking at Mt. Rainier and working in Seattle.  For most of that time, I was, by choice, disconnected from the daily news cycle.  But when I did reconnect, I was blasted from every side—TV, radio, Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere—with the "Ground Zero Mosque" story.  It was (and still is) everywhere.  I figured this must be something big, so I started looking into it.

Boy, was I disappointed.  Not for the reasons that Newt, Sarah, Rush, and Glen are upset (or at least pretending to be upset), but because we're turning into a nation of idiots.  Of course, not everyone has stopped thinking yet, but the trend is disconcerting.  Even normally rational Sam Harris came down on the wrong side of this one.

I certainly appreciate both Christopher Hitchens' and Hendrik Hertzberg's responses more than Harris's.  The fact of the matter is, the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not a ground zero mosque.  It is not a "Victory Mosque" or any of that other Gingrich/Palin/Limbaugh/Beck/paranoid-kook rubbish.  It is a legal, private project by U.S. citizens.

There should be no place in our society for special treatment that is quite literally based on "intolerant and bigoted" views, even if it would make some people feel a little better.  As Thomas Jefferson rightly pointed out, "A society that trades a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither."

And that does not make me an Islam apologist—I'm actually (very, very) far from that.  I just hate seeing Idiot America rising.  I have genuine concern for the toll that ignorance, if not outright idiocy, is taking on this country.  Jefferson was also spot on when he said, "If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and what never will be." (Incidentally, the Texas state school board, just this year, removed that rabble rouser Jefferson, who coined the term "separation between church and state" from the standard high school curriculum.)

We, as a nation, continue our steady march into ignorance.  This whole mosque "nontroversy" is the latest in an ever increasing list of examples of Idiot America rising.  It's worrisome.

The other day, Alan Kucheck pointed me to an interesting blog post about names and how programmers deal (or don't deal) with them.  This post resonated with me in many ways: as a software guy in general, as someone deeply interested in information and identity mapping, as someone who uses computers almost constantly, and as someone whose name rarely fits into existing web forms.

My full name on my birth certificate is "Frank Andrew Seidl II".  My Dad was also "Frank", so everyone called me "Andy" to avoid confusion—it stuck.  My signature reads "F. Andy Seidl" (if you can read it at all.) 

I can attest to how many systems make bad assumptions about names.  The most frequent, and obvious offender is the large class of forms that look like:

First:   [_______________]
Initial: [_]
Last:    [_______________]

Or simply those that have:

First: [________]
Last:  [________]

Often, I’ll try to put “F. Andy” in the “First” field, but frequently the system defines that as “illegal”.  Apparently, many systems feel a period, space, or other punctuation just does not belong in a first (or last) name.

Then there are the countless "personalized" messages I get like "Dear F.," or "Thank you, F.!"  (BTW, if you want to almost guarantee your message will fall unread off the bottom of my bloated inbox, address me as "F.")

As a matter of expediency, I sign off most e-mails with "—fas".  There's usually a full standard e-mail signature block below that, so even people that don't know me personally can see my full name.  But then I still get plenty of replies that begin "Hi fas, ..."

But its not only programmers that get all in a twist about names.  What about all those legal documents that have a signature line and require your legal signature to be your full legal name? What if your signature (like mine) isn't your full legal name?  I sold a business once where I had to sign 93 documents at the closing.  But I had to sign each twice—once to match my birth certificate, once to match the signature on my driver’s license.

(Oh, and BTW, few people ever spell my last name correctly.  But that's another matter.)

I've just gotten used to it. But at least the software systems I design can accommodate my name.

   —fas

A few days ago, AnnArbor.com staff reporter James Dickson (who lives nearby) dropped by to say he was doing a story on my house and how it came to be named “Blunderstone Rookery”.  We ended up chatting later via phone and talking about the house and our history with it.

Then, first thing this morning, I noticed a Facebook update indicating the current top story on AnnArbor.com:

The story of Ann Arbor's Blunderstone Rookery

Later in the afternoon, a staff photographer came by and snapped a bunch of pictures of Carol, the kids, and me on the front porch for an upcoming print edition.  Who knows, maybe this fame will stretch to a full 30-minutes.  :-)