You Just Don't Turn It Off
I took notes at the last meeting at Berkman on Thursday. They available in two versions: HTML and OPML. I love OPML.#
Gawker reports that Boy George's Gaydar was exposed.#
Mr. Boy says, "I'd like to thank them because I haven't had so much attention since signing up. There have been one or two unkind responses, like, 'Why don't you kill yourself on TV and become immortalised?' but most mesages have been sweet and suggestive. The thing about Gaydar is that if you don't like a message you can just click once and it's gone. If only you could do that to suitors in real life." Or to German magazine publishers and theatre reviewers.
Cory Doctorow links to Bombardier's concept "vehicle", and it looks pretty rad.#
Embrio, Bombardier's new concept monowheel -- balanced by gyros -- is pretty cool looking, and like all good vaporware vehicles, it is powered by magic hydrogen fuel-cells. Also: night-vision and ATV-style active suspension. I love the fact that the lines are visibly CAD-generated. You can almost see the nurb and spline handles depending from the curves.
Ryan Overbey links to Kevin at BigHominid and his review of the Matrix: Revolutions.#
Cinematically, I think the Wachowskis are the George Lucases of this generation. Like Lucas, they concocted a filmic mythology that borrowed from all sorts of sources, and which therefore contains elements recognizable to a wide swath of worldviews, offering endless oppportunities for interpretation and discussion. This will give the Matrix franchise legs, and we geeks will have plenty to chew on long after "Revolutions" will have sold its 10 millionth DVD.
I hope the Wachowskis don't make a "Matrix 4." To me, that would be the cop-out, not to mention a very Lucasian, money-grubbing move. The series should be left as it is, untweaked, with all its faults and virtues. While I'm disappointed in many ways by "Revolutions," I appreciate the Wachowskis' attempt at aiming for something bigger than what the typical sci-fi movie aims for (consider, for example, the theological vomit splatter that is M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs," or the bubble gum goofiness of "Independence Day"). At the same time, I felt that the Matrix series became rapidly ponderous and lost much of its sense of fun, especially toward the end. If the series fascinates me, it's mainly because the Wachowskis tried to give us something metaphysically complex, and they dealt with Big Issues not normally tackled competently in this genre.
Michael Feldman is surprised to learn that youthful coding gods simply don't exist.#
Be that as it may, we asked Dave, who was waxing rather pessimistic about the state of the industry, what was happening to the young genius programmers just coming into the game with their brilliant paridigm-busting epiphanies and limitless post-adolescent energy. Immediately several of the greybeards at the table chimed in, almost in unison, "Myth!"
They all agreed, the popular picture of pimply cyber-punks rewriting the universe was totally a Hollywood invention. "There's just so much you have to know," explained Dave, "All of the best software is written by experienced developers."
The Dowbrigade was crushed. How could the Iconic Image of Keneau Reeves as the (now not-so) young genius programmer saving the universe, not to mention high schoolers reprogramming Defense Department doomsday programs, young Einstein realizing relativity, and the brute brilliance of 20-something programmers churning out millions of lines of code in twisted 96-hour bursts of caffeine and testosterone-fueled creativity, not be true? Once again, reality was rearing its ugly head.
I think that software is like a mathematics - a young man's game. But when I say young I mean young at heart.
Draft Clark on Wesley Clark's criticism of Bush's handling of the "War on Terror."#
General Clark calls for the US to "Finish what we started" and hunt down Al Qaeda. Going further and saying that we are risking American lives every day that he is loose. It is part of the strong defense strategy that only Wesley Clark can mount: no other candidate has the credentials and credibility to attack the handling of "The War on Terrorism". The reason this is important is very simple: Iraquamire is the obvious sign that Bush drops the dog: he doesn't have what it takes to handle the Executive Branch.
Richard links to what we think when they say, "I think we should just be friends."#
Joel Spolsky on measuring productivity and development success.#
If you have even the slightest bit of common sense, you should ask: "Where's the data? If I'm going to switch to Intense Programming I want to see proof that the extra money spent on dog kennels and bird cages is going to pay for itself in increased programmer self-esteem. Show me hard data!"
And, of course, we have none.
One set of people will tell you you gotta have private offices with walls and a door that closes. Another set of extremos will tell you everyone has to be in a room together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Neither of them have any hard data whatsoever, where by "hard data" I mean "data that wouldn't be laughed out of a sixth-grade science classroom." The truth is, you can't honestly compare the productivity of two software teams unless they are trying to build exactly the same thing under exactly the same circumstances with the exact same human individuals, who have been somehow cloned so they don't learn anything the first time through the experiment.
The Green Hat Journal has an appalling anecdote on incompetency.#
This reminds me of a story relayed to me several years ago by a friend. Her office had hired a temp to do some secretarial work. She asked the temp to type up a letter and send it to a few people. A few hours later she checked on the temp to see what was taking so long. Apparently, the temp typed the letter in MS Word, printed it, then opened a new window to type the same letter again for the next recipient. The temp did not understand what it meant to save a document, nor did the temp realize she could have simply replaced the address and names on the letter and printed it out w/o retyping the whole letter from scratch. She was using Word as - literally - a typewriter.
John Wiseman links Hansa. Jay thinks, "Global Thermonuclear War?"#
Kim should check out http://www.googlefight.com/#
Doug Miller wonders about Hierarchy, Relationships, and Optimal Organization.#
I'm also interested that Dave is so fascinated with hierarchy. If he's really shooting to create a directory of the web, I suppose hierarchal classification is an obvious, and for most people preferred means of doing that.
However, based on much of what I've read of his writings, and his work on outliners, it's pretty clear to me that he has a bias toward categorizing things in hierarchies. That's not a bad thing, but I'm interested in how that (speculated) bias impacts his thinking and makes it different than mine. More and more, I find myself ambivalent or down right opposed to categorizing things into hierarchies; the nodes and links approach of true hypertext seems to match my style of thinking more comfortably.
[...]
Classification is difficult, and often subjective. Moreover, I'm finding it's also relative. Today, when I first seek to classify something, I may feel it belongs in category X, because I'm thinking about it in relationship to other items in category X. However, next Tuesday, it occurs to me that it also has a relationship with things in category Y, which I happen to be thinking about then. That relationship may be more or less subtle to the relationship with category X items, and, in fact, my perception of the strength of that relationship may vary depending on my interest level in and understanding of category X or Y. Of course, two hours or two days or two months later I'm thinking about category Z, and I discover a relationship between the original item and that category as well...and now category Z may seem to me to be the most relevant category to classify the item under.
On my computer I want to organize everything in a multi-connected network, adding categories and associations as I go. Then, be able to look at my network as a hierarchy by choosing one particular angle or vantage point. In my opinion, in the real world you can't look at all relationships at the same time AND you can't look only at one rigid hierarchy - so this makes the most sense to me.
David Hyatt writes about the reality of bugs in the real world.#
As some comments in my previous blog entry illustrate, I think people simply don't grasp the magnitude of the Web. There are (conservatively) 10 million Web sites on the Web. Let's say (conservatively) that each Web site has 50 unique Web pages. That's 500 million Web pages that the Web browser has to work perfectly on.
Let's imagine that the browser has done a fantastic job of emulating all the quirks of WinIE and Netscape 4, and that it is really good at laying out malformed HTML. An awesome browser would be (conservatively) 95% compliant, which means that it would have some sort of bug or problem on 5% of those 500 million Web pages.
5% of 500 million Web pages is 25 million malfunctioning Web pages. Let's now assume that only 10% of those Web pages are even seen by someone using Safari itself. Now we're down to 2.5 million pages seen by Safari users.
Sometimes if you're Tony Pierce, you'd just like to vent about things, like the bad bits of being broadly read.#
bad news is, if you find yourself in a moment of sadness and you want to write about that feeling, people will start emailing and commenting with words of advice. which is super nice. dont get me wrong. but sometimes a guy just wants to write about how depressed he is, just to vent.
other bad news comes when the guy's mom reads about how he wants to fling his black helicopter into the side of a mountain. it can be hard to explain to her that what he's writing isnt literal, that its symbolic, dramatic. its not a cry for help. its just representative of wanting the madness to end. it's far from suicidal.
Jay Rosen writes about shooting the messenger and the ethics of journalism.#
Let's agree also on the wisdom in Baquet's "the newspaper should kick you around sometimes." In fact there is some moral sense there, and it's not confined to journalism. A good accountant should kick you around at times by way of raising hard questions. An honest attorney, the same. A doctor, at times. Even a football coach. If it never happens, you might worry.
But again it does not follow that a given kick received by citizens of Los Angeles is the kind of kick they deserve just for being citizens confronted with a tough newspaper in a tough town, edited by tough editors who make the tough calls and hang tough when accusations come down. "Our job is to ask tough questions of government," Baquet said. "We should be tough, we should be believed, we should be vital. And that's a whole lot better than being loved." That the public's love must be foregone by tough journalists is mostly an irrelevant sacrifice, however, since what mature person expects press and public to love each other in a huge, divided metropolis like L.A.?
Let's agree that the cult of toughness pays many dividends to journalism. Being unafraid to ask hard, even grating questions is a clear virtue in those who have to raise issues and deliver bad news. It takes some imagination to see how toughness is also a vice. It is a vice because it seduces journalists into thinking that the only alternative to being extra tough is being extra soft, caving in, losing nerve, listening too much to critics-- tanking. So if toughness--an attitude supreme in newsrooms--requires you to ignore critics, and its alternative, going soft, means you have caved into your critics, when in that scheme do you actually listen to your critics and puzzle through what they are saying? The cult has no answer to this question.
Brad DeLong on the good natured WTO who keeps the Sinful Shrub at bay.#
As George W. Bush's economic advisers told him two years ago, have told him many times since, and are telling him today, tariffs on steel imports provide every steel-using American industry's foreign competitors with a powerful cost advantage. The steel tariff has surely cost America more manufacturing jobs than it has saved. It's not only bad economics, it's bad mercantilism as well.
Now the World Trade Organization has said the obvious--that this tariff was a violation of our treaty obligations. Thus the Bush administration has a chance to back down, and it has a chance to save face by blaming the World Trade Organization, and Bill Clinton who got us into this WTO business, for its failure to fulfill campaign promises made to America's steelworkers.
But consider. Nobody is happy with this Bush administration's trade policy, especially not those who hoped to see moves toward freer trade that would strengthen the American economy. But isn't it very likely that Bush administration trade policy would have been even worse for America in the absence of the system of rules and obligations that is the World Trade Organization?
Joi Ito writes about the need for a global democracy and on the effect the US has on the rest of the world.#
One thing that I am struck by, having been at several conferences lately where we have had discussions about US foreign policy is the inability for foreigners to affect US foreign policy. The US seems ready to ignore the UN and the rest of the world when they disagree with it.
So let me get this right. The US is going to become the world's policeman and will bomb the bad guys into democracy. The US will become so rich and powerful that there will no longer be hatred and wars? The US will become the one nation to rule them all and American culture bind them?
In this scenario the US is kind of like a super state, but only American citizens can vote, right? Only American citizens have rights. What does this mean exactly?
Kaye Trammell: Blogger, Smarty Pants, Warrior - Always full of surprises and insight.#
Hamish on code as a repository of knowledge.#
In the case of models of environmental processes, for example, a huge amount of knowledge is embedded in software implementations of those models, and reading the code is more or less the only way of getting hold of that knowledge. Descriptions of models tend to be ambiguous or incomplete, and they rarely describe in detail the implementation of the model as actual, running, code. The process of translating a mathematical model into a numerical one, and on to functioning code, generally results in code which completely masks the structure of the model.
Code is a dreadful knowledge representation format, not just because a language dying out leaves you with no way to make use of the thus represented knowledge, but because there is no good way to recover the knowledge from its representation back into a human brain where it can do some good.
AKMA writes about various disagreements in churches and how they are handled.#
[Why], if an alleged breach of church discipline is so very bad, are those to whom it gives offense unwilling to say, "We can no longer remain in communion with those transgressors; we renounce communion with them"? In the present dust-up, it seems as though people want very much to be able to say, "We aren't renouncing them — they're renouncing us."
Alex Halavais writes about Nick Olejnicazk's blogging class and its Wiki site.#
Nick is teaching a class on weblogs at the "other" UW (Wisconsin, not Washington or any of the many other Ws out there), and has put the syllabus up on a wiki for public perusal and enhancement. I had originally hoped to teach a complementary course here at UB that could share in the fun, but since I'm not doing an undergraduate course in the spring, we'll have to see if autumn semester is a possibility.
So consider this a call for participation of sorts. Help out by (a) contributing to Nick's syllabus, (b) letting him know if you have other ways of helping out, and (c) letting me or him or someone know if you might be interested in a joint class on the social aspects of weblogging in the autumn. I think it would be neat if we could do something autonomous enough that it wouldn't require a lot of administrative overhead, but would provide oportunities for our students to read and comment on each others' blogs across campuses.
Michael Feldman, in particular, will be interested in this, I hope.
Jeremy Hylton writes about the 2003 Scheme Workshop.#
Strange Women Lying in Ponds excerpts from Shelby Steele's column about Howard Dean, Confederate Flags, and racialism.#
He absolutely nails the reason why Howard Dean's appeal to guys with Confederate flags on their cars fell so flat: Dean's appeal reflected the limitations of the sort of identity politics that the Left has so long espoused. [...Quoting the column...]
White guilt--the need to win enough moral authority around race to prove that one is not a racist--is the price whites today pay for this history. Political correctness is a language that enables whites to show by wildly exaggerated courtesy that they are not racist; diversity does this for institutions. But white guilt's greatest taboo is the one that Howard Dean violated--assigning whites a racial identity out of which they can pursue power as whites.
Yet Mr. Dean did not cross this taboo as a racist; he crossed it as a hard-core liberal, a supporter of race-based affirmative action, who in the name of racial progress has learned to mentally compartmentalize Americans by atavisms. So used was he to acknowledging the atavistic identity of every minority in the country, it was no doubt a small leap to "include" Confederate-flag whites.
The underlying irony here is that white guilt has given America a liberalism that revives as virtue the precise moral formula at the core of fascism: power justified by race alone. Today a wealthy black will be preferred over the son of a white mailman at all of America's best universities. This of course is illiberalism of the same sort that segregation was.
Glenn Reynolds links to an article about ancient Native American Genetically Modified Corn.#
Apart from saying that domesticating any plant or animal can be construed as genetic modification. I want to make two notes: ancient peoples did not do so on purpose, they choose what lasted and what was good for them. Unlike today's scientists you study and test the genetics of different strains, trying to guess which one is "best."
Secondly, while corn is generally thought to be "one of humanity's most important foods," it is in fact, a public health disaster, From The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond:
Corn, first domesticated in Central America thousands of years ago, became the basis of intensive farming in those valleys around A.D. 1000. Until then, Indian hunter-gatherers had skeletons "so healthy it is somewhat discouraging to work with them," as on paleopathologist complained. With the arrival of corn, Indian skeletons suddenly became interesting to study. The number of cavities in an average adult's mouth jumped from fewer than one to nearly seven, and tooth loss and abscesses became rampant. Enamel defects in children's milk teeth imply that pregnant and nursing mothers were severely undernourished. Anemia quadrupled in frequency; tuberculosis became established as an epidemic disease; half the population suffered from yaws or syphilis; and two-thirds suffered from osteoarthritis and other degenerative diseases. Mortality rates at every age increased, with the result that only 1 percent of the population survived past age fifty, as compared to 5 percent in the golden days before corn. Almost one-fifth of the whole population died between the ages of one and four, probably because weaned toddlers succumbed to malnutrition and infectious diseases. Thus corn, usually considered among the New World's blessings, actually proved to be a public-health disaster. Similar conclusions about the transition from hunting to farming emerge from studies of skeletons elsewhere in the world. [pg. 186-187]
Right now I'd really like to be able to double-classify this item and associate it with my other notes on that book.
Tom at Matrix Essays links to Steven Spencer writing about Buddhism in the Matrix Reloaded.#
You could of course go the whole way and say that Neo can be likened to a Buddha (enlightened being) or a bodhisattva, (an enlightened being who forsakes nirvana to be reborn as to help humanity). Evidence in the film supports this (the latter more so), Morpheus (acting as a master) wakes Neo to the fact that the world he has taken to be real is anything but. Now, in Reloaded the conversation Neo has with the architect turns what we understand of the prophecy on it's head, transforming our view of the 'system'. This represents (in my opinion) the deepening levels of enlightenment when wisdom and compassion continue to grow in the Buddhist view and the deepening level of understanding that Neo is only now achieving.
So to conclude, there are immeasurable amounts of Buddhist philosophy occurring in Matrix Reloaded, I have only begun to touch on the surface with this article, really all the characters can be associated with Buddhist, erm, organisations I think is the best word. Neo can be likened to an 'awakened one', 'Buddha' or 'enlightened being', Morpheus to a wise Monk and Trinity to a devout follower of the Buddha, in this case out of love for the Buddha, Neo. I'd also like to say finally that super powers that Neo demonstrates in the Matrix are also said to be acquired by those who are extremely disciplined and nearing enlightenment, such as flying, the Buddha however discouraged the use of these 'powers' as it could cause people to follow Buddhism for the wrong reasons, and as the only people wanting to demonstrate the abilities had not yet reached full enlightenment they would not be able to use them as to be an effective teaching aid.
Brittney Gilbert reviews the Paris Hilton Sex Tape.#
Cease your search. It's so not worth it. I saw the 6 meg, night-vision video that features a glowy-eyed, stick figure Paris giving some guy whose hair highlights glowed neon green the worst sex ever featured on film and it is awful. For real. This girl couldn't fuck if dicks were fire and she was the world's only water source. Which is total nonsense, I know, but wholely symbolizes the pointlessness of your search.
Abandon ship. Look no longer. There is no coke-ridden hotel heiress writhing in ecstasy or even drooling in drunkeness--just some slightly buzzed blonde with a boy's body stopping mid-way through the most pitiful fuck seen on screen to answer her fucking cell phone.
The Elegant Universe Series on NOVA is available online.#
Leon W. Zelby says something profound in the New York Times Letters to the Editor in response to "The Price of Forgiveness."#
As a Holocaust survivor (Auschwitz-Birkenau, 72099), I cannot understand the persistence of faulting descendants for the transgressions of their ancestors. When will most of us finally understand that as descendants we had no control whatsoever over the actions of our ancestors? The best we can hope for is that the descendants will learn from the actions of their ancestors and will not emulate them if those actions are not acceptable in a civilized society!
LEON W. ZELBY
Norman, Okla., Nov. 11, 2003
Michael Feldman extends blog love and curiosity to Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work?#
Like, we assume, all of our readers, the Dowbrigade mailbox continues to fill with ingenious advertisements for penis enlargement products. Along with Russian sex slaves, Valium, Xanax and Vicoden Free prescriptions and my personal favorite, Stop Span and Adult Email, there have recently been a seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of penis patches, penis pills and penis pullers, all claiming to enhance my endowment by leaps and bounds.
While it is easy to imagine what kind of pathetic insecure idiots fall for these pitches once, one would think that their supply of suckers would have dried up by now if there wasn't SOMETHING to their services. Or would it?
Kelly Grotke, when writing to The Clark Tribune, writes about the distaste Americans feel for false conversations and unimportant drivel being force fed by conventional media.#
I don't see the point of bringing up flag burning, again, given all the more serious things these days that deserve a candidate's attention. Sometimes a flag is just a flag - which is to say, this is a symbolic issue, and as such plays right into the so-called culture wars and the exceedingly problematic issue of legislating morality (take it from me, I'm a legal historian). I'm very, very, very tired of that kind of politicking. Why go there? If Clark can't draw a line between patriotism as a matter of ensuring appropriate display & veneration, and patriotism as a matter of actively working to create a better and more just society, then he'll lose me. Look, if someone doesn't step up and start convincing me of their plan to revive the economy so that those of us competent, diligent but unvalued people on the nether regions of the economy can get decent jobs, I might just burn a flag myse! lf. And I'd feel justified - especially if the person who's telling me not to makes several million a year, and I and all my friends are without health insurance, have to make a living in an economy based increasingly on part-time work, don't know how we're going to pay the rent or utilities from month to month, worry about buying food, and see a politics almost irretrievably corrupted by money and privilege. I'm not kidding - these are serious problems. I won't even try to elaborate on the many and varied psychological effects of living under this kind of pressure - but I see them often enough, in my little circle, and it's ugly and I'm angry.
I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from Diderot: "There are narrow minds, ill-formed souls, who are indifferent to the fate of the human race, and who are so completely absorbed in their own little group that they can see nothing beyond the boundaries of its special interests. These men insist that they deserve the title of good citizens, and I will allow it to them provided they will permit me to call them bad men." I always thought this worked well applied to lobbyists and political operatives, but they are really cautionary words for all of us, even presidential hopefuls. I think Clark is a decent, intelligent man, but.....flag burning?