The New Hampshire Primary Blog reports on Ralph Nader.#

The consumer activist plans to send the parties, in the next few weeks, his blueprint on the need for universal health insurance, a more progressive wage policy and an aggressive crackdown on corporate fraud and abuse.

"The highest priority is to defeat President George W. Bush and his administration, which is running this country into the ground," Nader said at a news conference.

Michael Feldman ponders on the Rule of Links...#

I question whether linking is an obligatory feature of anything that can be called a weblog. What about the short, sweet and intensely insightful postings of a wizened widowed grandmother tending an herb patch in Nova Socia and reflecting on her storied past as a Be-Bop xylophonist in the 40's, the specific shade of blue in the early morning sky over Prince Edward Island, and a childrens' story she is writing for her grandchildren? She posts everyday, early in the morning, as she waits for her herbal tea to steep, and includes nary a link outside her own self-contained world. Is she not a blogger? In some ways is she not the quintissential blogger?

Are links really essential in EVERY blog?

Are Cats Evil?, Most Democrats Think So. PETA Forms Republican Voting Bloc.#

Dave Winer is a busy bee today.#

In the essay about The Rule of Win-Win, Dave writes:

The Rule of Win-Win says that by choosing to participate in the Web, I can promote my own interests, but I must acknowledge the existence of others and their interests. I don't sacrifice the truth in furthering my cause. In fact, if you accept the Rule of Win-Win, the truth is your first cause, it comes before all others.

[...]

A corollary to the Rule, there is no such thing as a Win-Lose. I don't know exactly why, but I've never seen it happen. Microsoft dominates Web browsers, but can't make the browser go anywhere after they own it. Lotus dominates spreadsheets, but fails to make the transition to GUIs. There must be a thousand examples. When you try to be the only winner, you plant the seeds for your own loss at the same instant.

He points out what he means by bad editing...

I believe in the power of editing. I practice it myself. I have an essay I'm working on today that I wrote two days ago but held up so I could edit it with a fresh perspective. What I don't believe in, emphatically, is what comes after editing, and often is called editing -- dumbing it down -- the notion that some thoughts are too complicated for the audience.

Dave mentions me. Thanks for the kind words Dave, but it's actually mousse. Another note on talk radio: Most young people are know who don't care about anything, particularly don't care about talk radio. Those that do care about things seem to feel that all talk radio is either right-wing pundit wackos (influenced by Rush) or a medium for meaningless pseudo-intellectual pedantry. (The young people I use to base this on are those at schools I've gone to and communities of friends I've been a part of.)

Dave said something great a particular part of the Thursday night meeting last night. He said that you shouldn't think of each blog as a publication and ask whether it is "fair and balanced" or what not, but think about the entire blogosphere as one huge newspaper. Whether or not you think that blogosphere SHOULD be like a newspaper is a different question,

I wonder if we're in agreement at all about what we're doing in the weblog world. Of course there's no law that we have to be in agreement. And if we're not, it's good because you can read both our blogs and get two views of the same data. This is called triangulation, and it's one of the great things about having lots of people writing.

Via Doc Searls (and Dave Winer also links) is Mitch wondering, "What is good about unedited?"#

Editing is not the same as filtering, which is what publishers do. Publishers decide what they are going to put in print, distribute and market. They may accept all manner of writing as long as it finds an audience, and that is what we describe as the "voice" of the publication. In that sense, a blog can have a voice. The voice can be coherent or uneven or incoherent. But a great deal of editing goes into the establishment and preservation of that voice; when we talk about a "New Yorker story" or a "Lad magazine story" or a "Cosmo story" we have a good idea of what that means because the editors of the publications are working to select stories that fit into the voice of the publication. They may sometimes stretch the voice with a piece that is more or less daring (think of the way Esquire has morphed ceaselessly for the last 15 years, since it first went downhill), but basically the content of the magazine is carefully filtered to deliver what readers have come to expect from the publication--marketing told them to expect it or tradition has led them to expect.

So, does Dave Winer mean "unedited," which would mean to publish without first correcting, revising and adapting the material or an "uncut" first draft? I think he means "unfiltered," not "unedited," since the Bloggercon statement goes on to ask if bloggers are "modern-day Emersons and Thoreaus or Charlie Chaplin, PT Barnum or Erma Bombeck," each of whom relied on their own editing and the editing of friends or professionals to prepare their work for publication.

This presumably why Dave cleared up his position on and meaning of editing.

Jason Kottke on Google. "The first rule of Google AdSense is, don't talk about Google AdSense"#

Have you noticed that Google is acting more and more like a stupid marketing/advertising company lately? It's one of the side effects of not really being a search engine company and seems to fly in the face of Sergey Brin's Google rule #1: "Don't be evil".

[...]

Since when is Google providing a service by paying people for advertising placed on their sites? This seems backwards; people are providing a service by placing the Google's ads on their sites. Google has every right to place whatever limits they wish on people who use their "service", but terminating said service without recourse when money is potentially owed by Google *and then* not allowing any site using Google AdSense (which may eventually include media sites like Salon, NY Times, MetaFilter, Slashdot, and even kottke.org) to comment on the Terms and Conditions that brought about the termination is just plain bad (evil?) and should give serious pause to anyone considering using any Google service.

Dave Shea ponders Internet research and accountability.#

So the question is who determines the nature of a weblog? If the author intends on publishing nothing more than exploratory musings, is the readership responsible for treating the subject matter as temporal and non-factual? If the readers notice reliably consistent factual information from the author despite what he or she claims, can they reasonably expect future publishing by the author to maintain the trend?

Of course the answer is obvious. It depends on the source. [...]

The final onus must be exclusively on the reader. Do you believe everything you read? Do you believe everything you see on TV? Neither should you believe everything on the web. The only truth is your own experience, and everything else is just second hand.

It's the way it always has been, and a new medium doesn't change that.

Don Park thinks all the talk of abandoning the Email ship is silly. Well, he doesn't say that but I'm an unaccountable pundit blogger so I will just pretend he did and exercise some editorial sovereignty.#

Ray and Ross are pointing to other communication technologies such as Groove and Wiki as possible solutions to the e-mail problem. I disagree. Vast millions are already familiar with e-mail and nothing but the e-mail will meet their needs.

Their suggestions amount to telling everyone in Asia to switch to bread because rice crops are infected with some harmful virus. I do not believe fixing e-mail is beyond technological reach. I also do not think the alternate technologies are problem free, particularly when they are deployed as widely as e-mail.

Ted Leung on improving programming languages.#

I'm an admirer of Erik Meijer's work on unifying tables, objects, and documents so his recommendation of Dave Thomas' article got my attention. Unfortunately, Thomas is just restating the problem, not offering a solution.

One thing that is important is that he is talking about "a computationally complete end user programming language". I think they key in that phrase is complete. Quite frequently language designers focus on minimality (my own bias towards Lisp and towers of macros is in this vein). Two of the three paradigms in Thomas' (and Meijer's) article are relational database and XML, which aren't really treated as basic types in most language designs. This usually means that they get pushed out to libraries.

I didn't provide internal links to entice readers to click through. Is this a good idea in general?

Ole Eichorn votes to win!#

Julius Caesar is back from holiday.#

Where were we? Oh yes. We had destroyed the Bellovacian rebellion and reduced the country of Ambiorix. I decided to give some of my officers a chance to prove their worth. Labienus was sent with one legion against the Treveri, who live close to the Germans and are in many ways quite similar: warlike, brutish, opposed to civilization. Caninius was to deal with reported unrest among the Pictones, as his camp was closest. Fabius went out on a political mission to sign treaties with various tribes.

Summary of Outliner Features, the start of a series.#

John Wiseman covers the world's opinion on Lispers, particularly Smug Lisp Weenies.#

Lisp: everyone who promoted it always seemed to be a whining snob.

if lisp users were as smart as they think they are they'd have learnt from their mistakes, but no, they write bitchy articles and think that renaming "let" (or whatever other trivial changes graham's much-hyped-and-long-waited-but-still-not-present-language will make to lisp) will somehow change all this.

Not only an argument from a willful position of ignorance, but elitist drivel, as well. reply: these are lisp users. i guess you haven't met them before?

the Lisp guru is writing bitter diatribes on the web

there are an awful lot of lisp bores (more than lisp users, it seems like, at times).

I often hear about the wonders of Lisp and about how there are a number of large projects (like Sabre), although I have no real urge to try it out. Especially because most of the Lisp evangelists I've known have been real assholes about it.

Sometimes you may actually getting an interesting forward. I was sent one with haiku error messages. Wonderful.#

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Speaking of haiku, someone at the Berkman meeting last night mentioned Spamhaiku, and it's funny.

I listened to some more Christopher Lydon interviews today. I'm also done, phew.#

The Paul Krugman interview was very appealing...

Krugman was a riot on Big Media's docility. "If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say 'yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic.' And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth: Views Differ.'...and would at most report that some Democrats say that it's round."

During the interview, Paul mentioned that one of the strategies of the right was to explode the spending of revenue for defense while lowering taxes so that social services policies get hurt and underfunded, but you CAN'T raise taxes. This is what Noam Chomsky referred to as "starving the beast." It's nice to know that Chomsky isn't all crazy.

Krugman also said that with regards to the Patriot Act, no one was as right about Bush as The Onion.

WASHINGTON, DC—Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."

There's an interesting thread on the TUNES mailing list about programming languages and what can be done to make them "better" or "easier."#

I agree - my point was more that despite the efforts to use friendly sounding long names in COBOL and SQL rather than terse symbols, neither of them ended up being accessible to laymen in the long run, because software is complex for reasons other than the syntax of the language.

Chase from the Conservative Crust writes about accountability in the media.#

I wonder what should be done about media accountability. With their jumping on allegations as if they are facts (Schwarzenegger and Rush) and their perception of this "witnessing" as not only their right but also their duty, we must ask, "On what authority, and what is the punishment for being wrong?" The answer to both is, unfortunately, none.

But there was a time when bearing false witness was one of the ten worst things a person could do; it meant he was no longer obeying the rule of law. But can you imagine if we tried to reinstate this standard today. "McCarthyism" would be about the nicest thing we'd hear from the Left. They would cry out that they are being censored (nay, persecuted!) and that they can't be afraid to report what they think is true; there might even be a "chill wind" blowing through the editorial offices of the New York or Los Angeles Times -- instead of the hot air that is currently the emission of choice.

Kevin at Wizbang is very negative about BloggerCon.#

Just in case you forgot (and I'm pretty sure you did) the giant blog circle jerk to the Dean campaign Democrats the founders ego starts tomorrow.

Observant readers may remember that I was trolling for a speaker invite. That is true, but I only did so when I found out that the unshaven masses were footing the bill for the glitterati in attendance.

Steven Johnson has interesting ideas about email clients, which he writes about as a result of reading about proposed email conventions.#

Reading this piece reminded me of an idea I've had for years now, that perhaps someone has implemented in an email client somewhere. It would be a huge help to me if my email software would automatically organize incoming messages based on 1) whether I've responded to the sender before, and 2) on average how quickly I've responded to the sender in the past. So what I imagine is a kind of fuzzy inbox: a message from a complete stranger would stay in my inbox for a week, before getting bounced to the archives. A message from someone I once responded to would stay for two weeks, while a message from a regular correspondent wouldn't leave the inbox until I removed it myself. Effectively, what I want are filters based on the history of my email interaction with specific people: prioritize mail from people I always respond to immediately; demote mail from people I ignore. Has anybody seen software that will do this?

I'd like something like this in reverse for RSS feeds. I'd like NetNewsWire to be able to sort my RSS feeds based on what percentage of the feed's past posts I've clicked on. That way I can have at the top all the people I read religiously OR all the people that I don't read enough of. Thoughts Brent? I promise it would be reason enough to buy a pro license (if I could pay via PayPal.)

Brian Leiter writes about immortality in legal philosophy and the post contains a great Nietzsche quote.#

Luhmann seems to be a case study in Nietzsche's dictum: "Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity." Luhmann is, shall we say, a bit obscure at times. There is a reason.

Seth Godin writes about usability and user research.#

When people interact with your site, your product, or your company, you don't have the luxury of telling them a story first. You don't get to give a speech about WHY it is the way it is. It just is. So the experience must stand on its own.

He links an article at Good Experience (who does NOT have an RSS feed. Shame on you Mark Hurst.)

Four Words to Improve User Research:

Don't

define

tasks

beforehand.

Don't click at sexually hostile work enviornments.#

Jen Cheung finds things that are too funny for words.#

"After messing up a major drug bust in New York City, two African American FBI agents (who are also brothers), Marcus and Kevin Copeland (Shawn and Marlon Wayans), try to impress their boss by volunteering to protect the Wilton Sisters, Tiffany (Dudek) and Brittany, the heiresses of a hotel empire, from a kidnapping scheme during a short trip from JFK to the Hamptons. Deciding to change the strategy drastically, the brothers use themselves as bait, wearing lots of pale makeup and dresses to pass as the Wilton sisters, while the real sisters are hidden away, safe from harm. Now, the agents just have to convince the world (including their coworkers who are now protecting *them* and the Wiltons' friends and family) that they're actually young, rich, white heiresses. Shenanigans and misunderstandings surely ensue." - Greg's Upcoming Movie Previews

It is is a joke right?

The Yeti ponders when his body stages a coup d'etat to usurp the governance of his mind in the Era of NotDating.#

I know this sounds crazy. Sometimes I really hate being a guy. Here I go chatting about morality and women and maturity, and a few hours with a couple of 21 year olds just tears it all away.

Last night I went out, and ended up with a girl dancing on the bar for attention. I couldn't help it - she's been in my thoughts, because she was young and perky and fresh - though I could never go out with her.

Tonight I saw her and her friend. We sat down and chatted and flirted and I just couldn't keep my eyes off her friend's breasts. I was subtle, and charming, and sat there taking compliments - but I was thinking the worst thoughts. Well, worst isn't the right word, because I know several of you would love to have me write what I was thinking. Those stories of desire don't get made up.

Metafilter links to Michael Williams who applies the Dungeons and Dragons "alignment" system to world politics.#

Forgive me if this is just plain too geeky, but I started playing Temple of Elemental Evil last night and it gave me the urge to apply the D&D alignment system to world politics.

In D&D, moral alignment is described along two axes: the first includes "lawful", "neutral", and "chaotic"; the second is "good", "neutral", "evil". So a person or organization has an alignment with two components, one from each set, and there are 9 possible combinations. For example, "lawful good" or "chaotic neutral". If someone is neutral along both axes, they are "true neutral". [...]

With regard to "international law" and the interests of the United States, America can be seen as a neutral good actor. We tend to give lip-service to organizations such as the UN, but we really don't seem to care that much whether they go along with us or not. And from my perspective, our country is generally trying to do good.

Bacchus vents his annoyance at the term "Not Work Safe."#

I hate that name, just like I hate the way people refer to ErosBlog as not work safe. It's a pet peeve. See, the deal is, ErosBlog is safe for work, although perhaps not conducive to getting any done. If it's not safe for you to view ErosBlog where you work, it's your work that's not safe for ErosBlog. Just because some of my readers live in the United States and choose to work in environments where they are treated like horny fifth-graders and assumed to be unable to make responsible choices about viewing and displaying sexual material, there's no reason to call the blog unsafe, especially when other readers and potential readers live or work in less repressive societies (or environments, such as their own office or home) where the blog is perfectly safe. Folks, if your work isn't safe for ErosBlog, consider getting some different work! And if you can't do that (and I know a lot of folks feel stuck in their lives) at least don't assume that everyone else in the world is in the same boat. Modest proposal: Try saying "not safe for sex-hostile environments" or some such.

RPGamer has news on Kingdom Hearts II.#

First, it was said that the next Playstation 2 installment, entitled Kingdom Hearts II, will boast more characters than the original. These new faces will consist of both original creations and a higher number of Final Fantasy characters. A darker-dressing Sora will once again take the lead role, and Square Enix is currently trying to reassemble the first game's voice cast.

The New York Times reports that "Schwarzenegger Acknowledge 'Offensive' Behavior."#

Schwarzenegger said: "Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I offended people."

Moxie has an thought on this.

Moving on to the "recent" womanizing revelations -- to be frank -- they make me chuckle more than anything else. These Democrats "who were not involved in the LA Times piece" are the very same Democrats who argued that Clinton's historical womanizing and playing rousing games of "hide the cigar" with an intern had nothing to do with a) lying under oath and b) his ability to complete his term as President. Why is Ah-nold's naughtily expressed love of women supposed to be an issue now?

Because he's a Republican, of course.

A. Beaujean at Gene Expressions reports on a recent announcement.#

Aarhus University professor Helmuth Nyborg made a statement that rang around the world today as he called for the government to practice selective breeding among humans to prevent the cognitive decline of the human race.

While many will be quick to equivocate his statements to Hitler's policy of eugenics, Nyborg preemptively says that Hitler practiced extermination along racial lines, removing the intelligent with the not-so-intelligent from the gene pool.

"Intelligence is hereditary," said Professor Helmuth Nyborg, the dean of the Psychology Institute at Aarhus University. "The 15 to 20 percent of those at the lower levels of society -- those who are not able to manage even the simplest tasks and often not their children -- should be dissuaded from having children. The fact is that they are having more children and the intelligent ones are having fewer."

Tim Shey links to the Toddler Blog...#

Today my mommy and I went to the store to get my halloween costume. I picked a classic, snoopy. Anyway, I wore the costume out of the store and kept it on all day (I had to try it on at the store since my mommy wasn't sure it was going to fit, good move on my part, right). If anyone tried to take my snoopy costume off, well, let's just say I had an "episode."

This is another area where you older people have got to drop the act and lighten up. Who says you can only get dressed up once a year? Getting dressed up is fun. My daddy has a full-fledged replica of a stormtrooper uniform he once wore to 7-11 while going to get me diapers. People gave him a lot of grief for it, but, I digress (and let me tell you, digressing when you're not-yet three is hard).

Joey deVilla's political opinion.#

I like to joke that NDP [New Democratic Party, the mainstream left-wing party] voters tend to be the sort of people who have great disdain for working professionals like myself, as they are often neither working nor professionals. Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to major in underwater basket-weaving, kids.

Jason Kottke is about to be quoted out of context.#

This goes on for a minute or two. Then a woman, dressed to the nines and obviously a lifelong New York resident, annoyed that these silly girls are between her and whatever purchases she wants to make, pushes by them while loudly announcing to the rest of the store, "my God, I don't understand what the big deal is, seeing some guy and then crying like a baby, yelling, and blocking the aisle. I hate this fucking store."

Ranchero Software has a feature comparison chart of different versions of NetNewsWire.#

Razib at Gene Expression writes words of wisdom, let it be.#

Either a society must be changed, or it must be allowed to develop on its own. Ultimately I think in the modern context that such top-down thinking is unecessary. If you judge people as individuals, you can allow them to make their own transition out of whatever "heathenry" you perceive. The orientalists and conservatives of the day have been vindicated by the chaos and social disruption caused by the insertion of Western forms of governance and culture in the non-Western world. But the liberals and Evangelicals have also been proven right, with the spread of the liberal ideal and modern science as the ancien regime recedes the world over. An ultimate balance must be achieved-though I believe that to change a culture precipitously can be disastrous, individuals must be given free reign to make their own choice, to not be constricted by artificial restrictions of race, ethnos or religious community. Let us return to a Golden Mean, think locally, change globally!

Michael Feldman notes the anxiety around BloggerCon at Berkman.#

We even had the first hint of controversy at the final Thursday night planning session tonight. The discussion grew quite heated and two people actually walked out. In 25 years of going to English teachers conferences I've NEVER seen anybody walk out. And this was just a planning session! If this is a taste of what blogger or gearhead conferences are like (neither of which I have ever experienced before) it should be quite a show!

Susan Mernit links The Kicker from Elizabeth Spiers.#

Lancer Arthur makes me laugh and cry.#

If my body and I are not friends, my penis and I are positively strangers. I have no idea what it's going to do from one moment to the next, and it betrays me at the most inopportune moments. I know I should be over this by now and look on my ability to spring the occasional accidental erection with charm and grace and, dare I say it, pride. But I still find that I would rather ignore the fact that I'm packing entirely than have to deal with it.

And also, as long as we're down there, let's just say that as far as tools go, my screwdriver would be the one you use for detailed work. I'm not the one you can also use as a hammer. I'm the one that fits the tiny little screws holding the bottom of your keyboard to the top. Oh, I can hold my own when it's called for, I can certainly do the job, but I didn't earn the nickname 'Shy Turtle' for nothing.

Aaron Swartz ponders how to solve the gun control problem...#

Background: Some people like guns. They argue that guns can be used to deter or prevent crime. Some people don't like guns. They argue that making guns widely-available makes it easier for people to be killed.

Assumption: Using a fast-acting tranquilizer, we can build a device that can be shot at a person to make them quickly go unconscious.

PhotoDude links to an article related to the fine line between insanity and genius.#

Science Daily reports on a study that found creative people are "more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called 'latent inhibition' - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition."

I need to remember that phrase, so the next time someone asks me, "what exactly is your problem," I can reply, "I lack latent inhibition."

It appears creative people are more in touch with the random stimuli in their environment, and willing to interact with it, while others are ignoring it. I can't tell you the number of times someone has been looking at my photography, and made a comment along the lines of "you take pictures of things I walk right by and don't even see."

Steve links the Britney Spears Esquire photos.#

Strange Women Lying in Ponds writes about "The Passion" and the Jews as the "killers of Christ."#

It seems that a number of Jewish writers and community leaders are concerned that the film will unleash a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria in the Christian world that will only be rivalled by the unmitigated anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. Because I am not a Catholic, and probably indeed because I was raised in an area of the country where even the Catholics and Jews in my neighborhood were rather WASPy, I never had a firm grasp of the old "blood libel" against the Jews as the "killers of Christ." Whatever vague awareness I had of this notion came from studying the history of the Inquisition and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when the Nazis used the blood libel to suit their own purposes.

[...]

The notion of the Jews as "killers of Christ" misses the point of the Christian religion. If Jesus hadn't been killed, then Christianity would have never existed.

Richard quotes Conrad of The Gweilo Diaries.#

A disaffected Gweipo demeaningly referring to Asian girls as "compliant little creatures." Who didn't see that one coming from a mile away? By compliant I presume the condescending cow means the kind of 'creature' who doesn't turn up on someone else's blog and start dictating how and what to write.

Listen up, Gweipo, regarding the tired "compliant Asian woman" cliché *yawn* you really don't have the first friggin' clue, do you? You've obviously never encountered the pouty, foot stomping tantrums for which Hong Kong's princesses are famed, or the sheer bloody bullheadedness of a determined Indonesian woman or, God forbid, the astounding hissy fits of a pissed off Thai girl.