Marion Barry Accidentally Recognizes Gay Marriage

Amanda Hess — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:20:59 +0000

Over on City Desk, Mike DeBonis is reporting that the D.C. Council voted unanimously to pass a package of bills that includes recognition for out of state same-sex marriages.

Why did Marion Barry, who led a chant of "No to same-sex marriage" at an anti-gay-marriage rally last week, decline to oppose the gay marriage bill? Oh: He didn't realize what he was voting on. According to DeBonis, Barry realized his mistake minutes later and moved for reconsideration, firing up the Council debate on marriage.

No take-backs, Marion Barry. No-take backs.

I Write Like A Dude, Just Like Danielle Steel

Amanda Hess — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:55:27 +0000

Boing Boing points us to a Gender Analyzer which asks the question, "Man or Woman: Who Is Writing That Blog?" The program is developed to use "Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman" using a "text classifier" that's "been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women."

So, where does The Sexist's writing fall on the gender spectrum?

Well, according to the program, The Sexist is a man. Housing Complex, written by my colleague Ruth Samuelson, also registers as man-powered. City Paper's mixed-gender blogs—Black Plastic Bag and City Desk—are classified as dudely, too. After the City Paper homepage—the Web site of a decidedly unmanly local newspaper—also came up as male, I began to suspect that the machine was broken.

So I ran a sure-fire female blog—one penned by noted romance author Danielle Steel—through the site. The program thinks it's written by a man.

The Sexist » City Desk

Marion Barry Accidentally Recognizes Gay Marriage

I Write Like A Dude, Just Like Danielle Steel