Geeks and politics don’t mix
May 24th, 2004I was reading last night about the appointment of a new German President and was struck by how he is selected by an élite, rather than the general population (though as President is a largely ceremonial role in Germany this isn’t too undemocratic). But it got me thinking “how come I didn’t know about this before?”, which led me onto ideas about some sort of database of countries’ constitutions, so you could look up different parliamentary systems in different countries, and contrast and compare them. Then I thought of implementing it in XML to make searching & sorting easier (maybe have algorithms to measure political freedoms like in Nationstates?), and started thinking in hideous detail about what the schema should be, and then I realised “Chris, it’s nearly 2 in the morning, you sad bastard, get some sleep”, and that this is why geeks never get into power - we’re too busy thinking up idle fancies like this all the time.
May 24th, 2004 at 18:56:07
Yeah, I think you’re right after all. You are a geek.
That was pretty damn funny, though.