From today's school newspaper, an article that made me laugh quite a lot:
A recent study conducted by Janet Elise Rosenbaum yet again compares the sexual behavior between teens who take abstinence pledges and teens who don't. She found that after five years of taking the pledge, 82 percent of the virginity pledgers deny having ever pledged and ultimately, there was no difference between the two groups in terms of sexual activity or sexually transmitted diseases. However, pledgers were less likely to use contraceptives, such as condoms, and Rosenbaum writes this may be because many abstinence-only programs disparage the effectiveness of contraceptives.
(Article by Helen Zou, available here )
I laughed a lot because I really hate faith-based initiatives, and to see them failing so miserably (indeed, being arguably counterproductive and potentially harmful) brings great joy to my twisted, cold, black heart. I hate them because they are pure nonsense initiated by people with likely good intentions, but absolutely absurd, borderline megalomaniacal obsessions with controlling thought. Of course the easiest targets for such thought control are young people, with the enormous potential for peer pressure in youth-oriented groups. To strive for prevention of disease and unwanted pregnancies is a noble goal, but to try to do so by fighting human nature is folly. I am delighted to see nature prove it as such.
If you haven't already seen this, you really should watch it. It's a 1985 documentary on Harvey Milk, the subject of the recent Sean Penn movie.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/49577/the-times-of-harvey-milk
It's worth watching because Harvey Milk exemplified the kind of person that we desperately need - right now and always. He was gentle and compassionate, yet fiery and determined in his push for human rights. I have been forced throughout my life to learn about Christianity at various religious schools and from growing up Catholic. This man, more than anyone in the political history of the United States that I know of, truly exemplifies what it means to be a Christian politician (even though he was Jewish): accepting of others, peaceful, selfless, and relentless in his pursuit of human equality. I only mention Christianity because of the current political skew in that direction. It is irrelevant in understanding Milk's life, but does provide a widely acknowledged standard of excellence, a standard through which Milk can be evaluated to be a truly praiseworthy man.
The Sean Penn movie is also worth watching, but this documentary is better, in my opinion. It covers the events after the assassination in much greater detail. If you do go to see the Sean Penn movie, please avoid Cinemark theaters, as the owner of that chain donated the maximum personal contribution to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign, and should not be profiting from the memory of such a great leader of the gay community.
I wanted to make a nice, pretty text file from some log info, but python didn't want to cooperate with string formatting.
I was trying something like this:
f=open('file','w')
f.write('%-10s' %string)
At the interactive prompt, the equivalent print command would give the desired result.
I got it to work by replacing f.write() with
print >> f, mystring.ljust(10)
This code has the same net result of printing to the file, but it actually does the spacing properly.
This thread gave me the hint I needed, though it looks like the poor guy never resolved his issue - he should have tried the print suggestion.
http://bytes.com/groups/python/25205-using-string-ljust-try-hold-fixed-width#links
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