The much linked Lick me, I'm A Macintosh.#

a new Apple PowerBook, as I just did, and it comes in this really quite beautiful sleek black box with small elegant typeface and gorgeous subtle graphics and a strange and obvious attention to detail and you think, pshaw, who cares, just another big heartless tech corporation trying to smooth talk me, just another suckass hunk of plastic and wire and metal to break down in a month and be obsolete in a year and really, why should I give a damn.

And yet. You can't help but notice. Apple seemed to really put some serious work into this, into the details, the packaging, the shape and texture. The rich black box, the clean unobtrusive font, the silver sliver inch-wide side-shot photograph of the PowerBook itself on the box lid.

No screaming colors and no garish cartoon graphics and no massive corporate logo and no bullet-point exclamation points listing the outrageous features you'll never use and you're like, wait a minute, what they hell does Apple think they're hawking here, art?

Kasia likes it too.

Brian Leiter writes about Economics as a science.#

ext week, the Swedish Academy starts handing out Nobel Prizes, which guarantees for the recipients a wave of international publicity and attention. Since the late 1960s, economics has been included among the fields for which the Prize is given. And without a doubt, the field of economics has gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that it is the only social science field in which there is a Nobel Prize, which puts economics right alongside real sciences like physics and chemistry.

Economists tend to take the scientific status of their field for granted, while those outside the field are more skeptical.

Strange Women Lying in Ponds reports that Fat People Sue Ice Cream Company, Settle for More Ice Cream.#

Warren Ellis points out a report that Nazis Used Hospitals for Killings.#

Nazi Germany used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200,000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients who were deemed physically inferior, researchers said Tuesday.

In a report compiled by Germany's Federal Archive, researchers found new evidence on the program under which doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs or starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany and in present-day Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Even in internal documents, the Nazis cynically referred to the deaths as mercy killings...

Bill Dennis writes about poor journalism.#

Remember the 'kids have too much homework' complaint ... ... that was popular a few years back? Soccer moms were bitching that their kids backpacks were too damn heavy from all the books that had to haul home Well it turns out that like the whole baby-snatching epidemic, it was a bunch of hot air.

[...]

So where did all these articles about the massive homework problem come from? Well, I blame bad reporting, and the failure of newspapers to recognize the difference between anecdote and evidence. I can print a story that quotes a dozen complaints about excessive homework, but that doesn't mean that it's a real issue. After all, no one gets their name in the paper saying that they haven't noticed anything wrong.

Lilia Efimova writes about ramping up on weblog conversations.#

One problem in on-line communities is getting newcomers up to speed: it's not easy to catch up in a middle of a conversation of a group that has history of developing shared understanding and common language. A colleague asked if weblogs have the same problem.

I would say yes, but I believe that "getting into" a weblog is easier than joining a community conversation.

Compared to a forum posts weblog posts are more "self-standing" pieces. I would say that weblog post is more like one of many TV series and forum post is like a movie scene.

Jorrit Wiersma points out today's Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's pretty wild.#

Jorrit Wiersma also explains a bit of a theory that Gamma Ray Bursts can help influence the possibility of the existence of extra-terrestrial life/intelligence.#

The basic problem is that we humans, as a civilisation, have been emitting radio waves for quite some time now. The naive expectation is that the Milky Way must contain civilisations much older than us that should be doing the same thing and should thus be visible on our radio detectors (some even think they should have visited us already), but this is not the case. The proposed solution is that Gamma-ray Bursts were quite frequent in the past of our universe and that their radiation prevented civilisations from forming by killing them. Only recently has the rate been low enough to allow our own civilisation and possibly others to form.

I envy Moxie for getting off of using a cell-phone for 9 months.#

Don't get me wrong, the 9 months I spent without one were at times "inconvenient," it required me to be where I was supposed to be at the time previously agreed upon. Before I left for a new location I had to print out directions and be responsible. I was unreachable if I left the confines of Casa Mox. I was an Angeleno of mystery and intrigue -- who is this woman that doesn't have a cell phone in Los Angeles?

I didn't.
And it was divine.

Talk about a return to so-called responsibility. Cell phones allow people to change plans at the last minute, disturb the peace during a movie, ask inane questions at inappropriate times and yes I've even spent time with people who engaged in 20 minute cell phone conversations with clients during dinner on a Saturday night. For me, the peace and quiet and lack of an "OH, was that my cell phone ringing" moment was priceless. Cell phone etiquette in every day life is non-existent. I hate cell phones.

John Gruber is the best Apple opinionator and reporter.#

The Macintosh wasn't the first GUI, but it was the first useful one. In the same way, the iPod wasn't the first portable MP3 player, but it might as well have been. Earlier ones that were small enough used solid state memory, measured only in megabytes. (Somewhere in the back of a cabinet drawer in our home office lies my wife's 128 MB Rio, which held a whopping 11 songs; it hasn't been touched since a certain someone bought her an iPod.) Ones with hard drives were too big to carry easily, and also lacked a useful way to navigate hundreds or thousands of songs.

But the iPod is not merely an engineering and usability success. It's also a marketing success. Everyone knows what an iPod is, and what it does. And everyone knows that they're cool.

Andy Warhol said:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke and, just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

The iPod is the Coca-Cola of music players. It's not an expensive computer peripheral — it's a low-cost luxury item. For $500, anyone can buy the best MP3 player in the world, the same one used by the world's most famous, most talented music stars — like Moby, Beck, and Shaq.

Werner Vogels is going to describe how to get involved in a DARPA project.#

I realize that for the larger public DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has become a sort of synonym with the Information Awareness program that Pointdexter ran. We have seen lots of negative publicity around that particular program, which is now shut down, and not so long ago I felt I needed to come to DARPA's rescue when ignorance seemed to rise to the top. Maybe the more history-of-technology aware person knows about the agency and the origin of the Internet, but in general that is where it stops.

To educate those of you who do not know much about DARPA's day-to-day functioning I will try to give you a glimpse into its kitchen by taking you on an excursion through how one applies for research funding through a DARPA program. There is a new program starting that Ken, Robbert and I will jointly apply to, and in the coming weeks I will show you the steps we go through in getting the proposal ready.

The Yeti writes about breaking trust and helping people.#

What the hell? The worst part to me is the woman is afraid of breaking a bond of trust with the fourteen year old. As if one can exist.

There is a terrible wind blowing through this country where we shield our children from consequences and try to be their friends. You should not be friends with children. Friendly? Yes. Friends? Absolutely not.

[...]

Why is everyone so afraid of being judgmental when the welfare of others is at stake? Do you take the keys away from a drunk friend? Do you mention to a guy who's dropping a grand with his bookie that maybe that money would be better spent with his kids? Then why would you allow a fourteen year old start out on a path that is only going to bring her misery for twenty or more years?

The Yeti describes a first date he witnessed. Unquotable, you must read the whole thing.#

The Yeti links the amazing Bill Whittle essay on Power. So read it.#

Those that would have us disarm, withdraw, apologize and retreat make the assumption that by removing American Power from the world, the planet will become a harmonious village of diversity and mutual respect. Remove American capitalism, and the world's people will trade solar cars for indigenous beads, our European moral betters will hand over their cash to the third world until all are perfectly equal, and everyone will live in a sustainable ecological paradise. Remove American cultural power and Britney will be replaced with Beethoven, and an exquisite and reasonably priced Pate de Foi Gras Existentialist Meal can be had at a corner drive in where the former McDonald's once stood.

This is utter nonsense. It has never been true for a single page of the history of the Damned Human Race. There has never — never — been a day in human history when some form of power has not flooded the world, or competed to do so; and those times when the power was most one-sided reveal themselves to be the times of greatest relative peace, stability, and advancement of that quaint notion known as civilization.

I'm a big fan of this part as well...

My friend Steve Stipp mentioned in passing a fascinating thought experiment. If you had to design some foreign power to dominate the planet, what would you want it to look like? If there is to be a hyperpower, how would you design one that was least likely to run haywire and plunge humanity into a new dark age?

Would you want its people to have untrammeled respect for authority, like Nazi Germany, with a lock-step willingness to follow its leaders blindly, or would you prefer that it had a deep and passionate anti-authoritarian bend, where the soul of the rebel and the outsider and the little guy fighting big powers was manifest in all of its art and music?

Would you want it to be racially homogenous, like Imperial Japan, advancing out into the mongrel world as the sons of heaven, or the most racially diverse blend of people ever to form a single nation?

Would you prefer that it be driven by a rigid and ironclad ideology, such as the Soviet Union, or rather a hodge-podge of wildly differing and competing ideals doing constant battle in the marketplace of ideas?

Would you want it to be a religious dictatorship with a state church, acting on what it perceived to be the revealed word of God, as is the case with Islamic fundamentalists, or a secular nation with strict and inviolate rules keeping religious fervor out of the decision-making process?

Should it be administered by a small group of hereditary elites, as with Great Britain, or rather have political power dispersed among its fractious citizenry?

And finally, should it be a product of a culture long isolated from the rest of the planet with a low tolerance of outside ideas and philosophy, such as China, or rather one composed of all the nations and histories the world has to offer?

I have my own opinion. Your mileage may vary.

There is great as well!

The fundamental decency of the American Character reverberates throughout our history. Immediately after the French and Russian Revolutions, huge numbers of people on the losing side were murdered indiscriminately. In Paris, the gutters ran red with blood and the guillotine saw so much action it must have tottered on the verge of catching fire. And the revenge taken on the kulaks in Russia was horrible almost beyond imagining. During the American Revolution, on the other hand, the winners fought a terrible and bitter war, and the losers…went back to their homes.

During our own Civil War, with a quarter of the population in open, armed rebellion, the Union captured the entire political and military leadership of the Confederacy intact. One man — the superintendent of the appalling Andersonville prison camp — was hanged for his command's monstrously inhumane treatment, but that was not punishment for rebellion. The rest of them: Generals Lee, Johnson, Bragg and Beauregard, not to mention President Davis, Vice President Stephens, and all the others — were released unharmed. Stephens immediately ran for, and won, his old seat in Congress!

Show me anywhere else in all the pages of history such national decency, forgiveness, and generosity. You can't do it. It is, like so much of our history, unique.

This fundamental moral decency was evident all throughout the Iraqi war. Countless times, US (and British) troops were under direct attack, and did not return fire due to the presence of civilians, or even due to the fact that the attackers were firing from mosques and we did not wish to offend, let alone kill or injure, the people who we were mocked for trying to save from themselves. There was, and is, no better look at the vast American military juggernaut, than that image of a young American soldier atop a Humvee, in a still-unsecured village, giving hip-hop dance lessons to a group of obviously delighted Iraqi children. I'll never forget it as long as I live.

Richard quotes a funny Seinfeld joke about Telemarketers.#

Telemarketer: Hi. Would you be interested in switching over to TMI Long Distance service?
Seinfeld: Oh, gee, I can't talk right now. Why don't you give me your home number and I'll call you later.
Telemarketer: Uh, sorry, we're not allowed to do that.
Seinfeld: Oh, I guess you don't want people calling you at home.
Telemarketer: No.
Seinfeld: Well, now you know how I feel.

Metafilter links to an essay by Wesley Clark about what went wrong in Iraq.#

The second major criticism of the war plan—a profound flaw—concerned the endgame: it shortchanged postwar planning. Those who plan military operations for a war must take into account the aftermath. Four steps have to be considered: deployment; buildup; decisive combat; and postconflict operations. The destruction of enemy forces on the battlefield creates a necessary but not sufficient condition for victory. It is not just the defeat of the opposing army but success in the operations that follow that accomplishes the aims and intentions of the overall plan. In this case, the purposes, as enunciated by Secretary Rumsfeld, included ending the regime of Saddam Hussein, driving out and disrupting terrorist networks, finding and eliminating weapons of mass destruction, eliminating further terrorist activities, and establishing conditions for Iraq's rapid transition to a representative government "that is not a threat to its neighbors."

Victory requires backward planning, beginning with a definition of postwar success and then determining both the nature of the operations required and the necessary forces. Here the administration's focus and determination on winning the war in military terms undermined the prospects for success once the country was occupied.

Thoughts on the new Revolutions trailer at Matrix Essays.#

The matrix system is conscious outside of the Matrix proper, i.e., the sentinels, as we already know, but the large speaking spiky thing is interesting.

Cypher/Neo is back, indicating possibly that there is no real world, only more Matrix, i.e. Zion=Matrix

I think that the spiky guy grants Neo the power to do what he needs to do to stop Smith. i.e., "power" in what we had formerly believed to be the real world. (He kills sentinels by thinking.)

Also to note: a ship crashes, under a blue dusky sky, with the moon visible. Perhaps the real world isn't dead and crappy like they've made us think it is. Maybe, while Zion is fake, the survivors of Revolutions make it to the real real world?

Carly is a great girl.#

I'm going to see Noam Chomsky, too! Jay! Noam Chomsky! So excited, I can't even tell you. He's coming to a college not far from here, and my department is taking a couple of vanloads of people. Thrilled. I might have to bump the purchase of the Chomsky reader up about fifty places on my list of Things to Buy so that I can delve into it a bit before I go. (It's next Tuesday.) Not that I have time to do that at all, especially since two of my friends are turning 21 this week. Which means, yah, my sober streak? Definitely over.

When I saw him I wanted to ask, "What are some valid, reasonable criticisms of your views?" To see if he was humble enough to admit that the people he criticizes are not completely wrong and that he is not completely right. Also, he talks a lot about political propaganda in the media, I wanted to ask his thoughts on corporate propaganda. Maybe Carly will? (Jay bats his eyes.)

I have a comment to make about something I read in Jay's daily review where someone said that freedom of the press is the only safeguard against the tyranny of the government. And it's de Tocqueville related, as all of my political rants are lately, but I have neither time nor energy to put into it at the moment, so wait it must.

I hope she remembers to write it out :)

Strange little stories at The Daily Report.#

Oh man. Endings for Super Nintendo Games.#

Bacchus writes about the ErosBlog philosophy.#

Naomi Darvell at Clean Sheets wrote this roundup of sex blogs while I was away, and had some kind words for ErosBlog:

Bacchus is very much into pictures, ranging from the cute to the edgy. Although he focuses on the female body, he does it without the grating lasciviousness of, say, The Man Show. His is clearly a male point of view, but most of the time it feels friendly to this bi woman.

Naomi has picked up on a very deliberate philosophy of mine. I've always felt it should be possible to express my unabashed appreciation for the female form without that stinking aura of leering misogyny that's found in, say, your average Maxim magazine. I want ErosBlog to always feel friendly to everyone. As Robert Heinlein said: "Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary."

David Weinberger writes about the side effects of blogging.#

I went to the gym today for the first time in over 18 months. I used to go before my kids got up, but now I blog instead. As a direct result, I've put on decades of blogfat, giving a new meaning to "blogroll." Since I have all of the stick-to-it-ness of a thrice-used postage stamp, I expect that my new regimen will fail. And since I am a vegetarian, I can't lose weight the low-carb way. (Alternative title for this entry: Blogging turns you into a carnivore.)

Ryan is hilarity.#

he second point was that genetic similarity among species is used for moral significance - this is most apparant through family memebers as opposed to strangers. When a building is going to burn to the ground, there are two people inside, there is only enough time to save one, and one of the persons inside happens to be your sister, you will more than likely save your sister letting the other person die. Again, common sense and common practice. This was a fact simply meant to be pointed out for real-world application of the genetic similarity theory. And it was a very good one.

I then see the hand go up down front of one of the terrible three: the stupidest women I have ever had the torture of being in a logic class with.

"Yeah, but what if one of the two people inside was your sister, but you were separated at bith, and therefore didn't know she was your sister.."

Excuse me God girl, shut the fuck up. You also wanted to argue that humans are more significant than animals because humans have souls and animals clearly do not. That alone already holds you to be a Human Chauvanist so you don't have to sit there trying to weasel your way out of the category by placing yourself deeper in. I do not hold your shallowness against you, I just ask that you keep your thoughts where they should be: inside your head.

A New York Times talks about the latest from California. Ho-hum.#

Via Boing Boing is the Paper iPod.#

Jason Kottke links to an article on O'Reilly about Mac OS X docks. Fun.#

Curt, at Hunting the Muse, reports that the Free State Project has chosen a state: New Hampshire.#

Joey Gibson links to an article about a pro-life demonstration.#

[A] supporter of the demonstration, had this to say

"I think if this is the reality, there's no sense in softening the blows[.]"

Precisely. The pro-death camp has altered the debate by altering the language. They speak of "choice" and "unviable tissue masses" and "dilation and extraction" to soften the edges; to convince people that they are not really killing a human being. Changing the language doesn't change the reality, even though lots of people like to pretend that it does. People need to see these horrible images so that they know and understand just what they are supporting. And so that they won't forget. Just like photos of the Nazi death camps needs to be seen so that people never forget what happened, photos showing what has happened to 42,000,000 children since Roe v. Wade need to be seen. People need to feel sick and uneasy and angry and disgusted when confronted with photos of aborted children. When the people of a nation are no longer sickened by what is happening to their young, they cease to be a civilized nation.

Peter Lindberg notes of Semiotics,#

So far, it seems to me that semiotics tries to see and treat things (literature, architecture, films, etc.) as being languages—although I haven't seen it defined this way; only as the science of signs, which doesn't say that much to me.

Joey deVilla is funny times so much!#

"Dogs have masters," my ex-girlfriend Erica, a cat owner, used to say. "Cats have staff."

If dogs could write poetry, they'd write stuff like this:

You're my best friend
You're my best friend
You're my best friend
Is it dinner yet?

Or this gem:

Are you gonna eat that?
Are you gonna eat that?
Are you gonna eat that?
I think I'll eat that.

Cats, on the other hand, would this poesy of this variety:

I hate you.
Now feed me.

Susan Mernit thinks about privacy and a blogger's voice.#

The topic of privacy and what you do and don't write on your blog--both your personal blog and a workplace blog--interests me as a question of privacy, but also of voice, of how bloggers present themselves. After all, blogs are personas. We emphasize particular aspects of ourselves, allow things we want to share to be revealed, and try to obscure those we consider private, want to hide, or are not aware of.

Joi Ito links to an article by David Kirkpatrick about social networks and Joi Ito!#

Joichi Ito, a venture capitalist in Tokyo, knows just about everybody in tech. That's good for business, but it also means others are constantly approaching him to broker connections around the world. Though the superkinetic Ito likes to help, he has trouble finding the time. "I need to throttle back my interactions with people," he says. "I need to get fewer requests from higher-quality sources." So this summer Ito joined a website called Linkedin, one of about 15 so-called social-networking companies or sites formed in the past year. These businesses, all part of the hottest online trend, act as intricate friendship flow charts, showing who is friends or partners with whom. The best-known site, called Friendster, launched in May and is already hosting almost two million users, most of whom--unlike the businesspeople using Linkedin--are looking for dates, love, or sex.

I know about Ito's network because a few weeks ago he invited me to join--adding my name to his 444 direct connections. (Not everyone is as dedicated; Ito is Linkedin's most wired guy). Now I have indirect personal access to 10,100 people on the site. What makes this different than just being able to rifle through his Outlook contacts is that any mail I send to a Linkedin connection of Ito's has to be approved by Ito. If someone I sign up wants to reach that same person, his e-mail has to go through both me and Ito. Today's social networks typically give you access to friends of friends out to four degrees of separation. Everybody you meet on such a site is thus connected to you by a traceable network of acquaintance. Not surprisingly, Ito hopes to use Linkedin to use his time more efficiently: "I can imagine eventually telling people, 'If you want to reach me, do it through Linkedin.' That way everyone would come with references."

Jason Kottke writes about the social forces that are active in elevators.#

I stand alone in the elevator, right in the middle, equidistant from the four walls. Before the doors close, a woman enters. Unconsciously, I move over to make room for her. We stand side by side with equal amounts of space between the two of us and between each of us and the walls of the elevator. On the 12th floor, a man gets on and the woman and I slide slightly to the side and to the back, maximizing the space that each of us occupies in the elevator. At the 14th floor, another man gets on. The man in front steps to the back center and the woman and I move slightly toward the front, forming a diamond shape that again maximizes each person's distance from the elevator walls and the people next to them.

Ryan McGee writes about art and just "doing it."#

Been thinking a lot over the past 48 hours about something Jenny said to me in a museum about 18 months ago. I've quoted it here before, but I'll quote it again, cuz hey, this is my site. I was looking at a painting by Mondrian, and it looked so…simple. Bugged me. I liked most work in the museum because I appreciated the fact that I couldn't actually create that myself. But this…this looked just…well, doable. I grew annoyed. "I don't get it…why is this in a museum? I could have done this!"

"Ah," she said. "But you didn't. And that's the point."

And the time, I scoffed at her, cuz that's what we did a lot: scoff at each other. But it's why I write, I find. The best writing to me seems like it always should have been written, and usually by me, and why didn't I think of it first, darn it all? The ease is of course deceptive, I have a failed novel to attest to that, in addition to hundreds of articles I contemplated and never wrote or finished. I make it a point to read Sarah Dessen's site everyday, not just because she's got a great blog, but because she's a constant inspiration to me. She writes for a living. She helps others to achieve that goal as well. I'm not one of her students, but she's teaching me all the same. She's got novels in the works, maintains a blog, and just had a movie adapted from her work. To quote King Missile, "That's so cool."

Ryan McGee writes on work...#

I mean, really, how does anything get done? Ever think about it? How many people in your everyday work shift somehow prevent you from getting something done? Enough to make you think, at the end of the week, at the bar, nursing your Scotch and Mountain Dew, wishing that girl over there would just look at you, you know, while you're trying to impress her with your peanut throwing skills, "Man, a lot of people just seemed hell-bent on making sure I couldn't get anything done."

And that's why they call it "work". Because it takes work to get any of it done. The name indicates the meaning. For some of us, those hours spent in a cubicle consist of work. And we work to get the enemy to give up what we want. The enemy can be in the next cubicle, the next country, or in another country. But make no mistake about it, they are the enemy. And they have work to do, as well. But their work consists of shirking responsibility while laying the deadline smackdown on your ass. They are the one who invented the asinine phrase, "The customer is always right." They invented bureaucracy in order to make sure they had company approval to not actually do anything. They expend an incredible amount of energy in order to walk around and be able to complain how they have no time to do anything…and then leave at 5 while you're still working to make their deadline that's important, really, it is, and thanks so much for putting in all the good work!

Don Park writes about Semiotics, Semantics, and Jars.#

Semiotics is all about problems of jar selection. While size and shape of a jar limit what can be stored inside it, there are enough leeways for people to use the jars for wide variety of purposes.

In Korea, there is a specially shaped jar for urine so one doesn't have to go outside in the middle of the night to take a leak. It's a beautifully shaped jar. Now imagine what would happen if an American came upon the jar. Chances are pretty good that he would see a cookie jar, a jarring example of semiotics.

So Joi was musing about Microsoft monopolizing the emerging jar market to gain an upper hand on Google which cornered the market on baskets. Tim disagrees because people can put anything in jars regardless of the picture or label on the jar which will cause confusion like the Ecstasy test result mixup.

Tony Pierce does a great thing by protecting our Homeland at the XBI.#

today i wish i was back being an fbi test pilot. most testers dont actually fly all the planes, sometimes we have to test other things. gross things, like torture devices, like poisons, like quote unquote drugs, like esp techniques, like powers of manipulation.

you are getting sleepy, for example, very sleepy.

Tony Pierce knows what women want.#

she obviously wants a guy who knows the difference from html 2.0 and 3.0, as most of the fly bitches desire these days.

gabrielle union wants to talk about cascading style sheets, but you know what, if i had a dime for every hollywood starlet who wanted to talk about design and structure as just a sly way to get into my wranglers then id have, shit, four five bucks by now. easy.

Via Ted Leung is an essay by Dave Stutz about the failure of shrink wrapped software. It contains this gem:#

Doc's metaphor of the software industry as the construction industry is nearly perfect: those who build and maintain software are like the millions of architects, builders, and contractors who help us maintain and preserve our homes, businesses, and public places in the face of dryrot, hurricanes, vandals, changing family sizes, and all of the other forces that conspire to ruin them. The guild of craftsmen who join software to service, software to device, and software to other software are not factory workers cranking out uniform widgets. They are journeyman integrators who create vernacular items matched to quotidian requirements. Of course there is a mass market, but mass market software, like any other prefab item, is destined to be far less than perfect.

In my experience, people understand the approximate nature of real-world construction projects. The delays and unforeseen contingencies are frustrating, but also explicable. If the software industry were to present a similar face, people would be much more likely to understand the presence of spam, viruses, bugs, intermittent connectivity, incompatible systems, or any of the other plagues that assail the innocent victims of software/hardware/service amalgams. They would also be much more likely to participate in the solution of these problems through the application of social mechanisms.

Ted Leung points to an interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto about Ruby.#

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is perfect. It can do everything." But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language—how we feel while programming.

[...] You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ—but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.

Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

Chrystal doesn't like stuff. Such as...#

7. Family Circus. Everytime I read it I get angry. You're not funny - get out of my newspaper!!

Kim sees weirdness.#

The weird part is that the site sells toys for kids. You have to wonder who would go to a children's toy site and search for "sex" to the sixteenth power. The consensus in the group is that it was probably some kind of crawler or aggregator site that was merely passing along queries that it got from some other source.

John Wiseman is going to ILC 2003, hopefully I'll see him there!#