Month: November 2010

birthornot.com: Domain name suggests hoax

At birthornot.com, Peter and Alisha Arnold, a Apple Valley, MN couple, asks the public whether they should kill their unborn child.

I think it’s a hoax.

Minneapolis/St. Paul’s Star Tribune reports the baby is at 17 weeks.

Today (Nov. 19) is week 46 of the year 2010. 46 minus 17 means the child was conceived no earlier than week 29 of 2010, which starts with July 18.

Here’s the problem: The birthornot.com domain name was purchased on May 17, 2010. That’s week 20 of 2010. They purchased the domain name more than two months before conception!

That doesn’t make sense. I really hope it’s a hoax; the alternative is sick, that they planned a media circus around conception.

I guess there’s a shot of this being just good timing, or someone else just happened to purchase the domain name and donated it, but either fails Occam’s razor.

What do you think?

“Soliciting Sodomy” offenses in Dallas

For my doctoral research, I asked several cities for their traffic citation data. Some cities gave me all their violations, traffic or otherwise.

Dallas gave me all data. One offense is “6460 -SOLICIT SODOMY”. Um, what? After the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court case that shot down Texas’s sodomy law, why is this enforced?

Was I wrong! Here’s Dallas’s enforcement of that offense:

These are all the sodomy citations in the dataset I have from Dallas. (2009 is an incomplete year–data was requested in mid-2009.)

There’s a chance that “the system” says offense 6460 is “SOLICIT SODOMY”, but in fact it’s a different crime. That wouldn’t surprise me because Dallas courts still use an archaic mainframe system. But who knows?