Spanish Rice at 6AM
Something seems to be wrong with my RSS feeds, at least in my aggregator. Can anyone tell me what they see or what is wrong exactly?#
Joi Ito writes about why he quit drinking.#
I realize now that I was over-drinking at parties. I'm not generally an "angry drunk" but rather a "goofy drunk" so people who liked "goofy Joi" would push me to drink and those who didn't like "goofy Joi" would just avoid me. There wasn't a whole lot of negative feedback to quit the over-drinking at parties thing, but in hindsight my over-drinking at parties was a stupid thing.
As for drinking in the evenings... I just made a rule for myself. No blogging/work after dinner. Fine. Guess what, "after dinner" is a whole lot of time. I used to think that "unwinding" lowered my stress, but it basically just removes many hours of lucid time out of the week and you have less time and more stress. Also, falling asleep in a marinated state decreases your energy level in the mornings.
Sean Bonner writes about what it takes to quit drinking.#
What I noticed is the people who said they were going to quit, and didn't, never really believed it themselves. They were expecting thing to just happen magically. The people who did quit, believed. They belived in themselves. Maybe the only thing that has a 100% success rate is a personal commitment. If you commit not to drink, short of you changing your mind and deciding to drink, you aren't going to drink. What I mean is that as much as whatever program worked for you, YOU worked for you. And if a program didn't work for you, it's probably more of you not working for you. Because you are the common thread in all of this.
If something is important to you, you would do it and succeed. The fact that you still drink means that you don't care about quitting.
Stirling Newberry writes about Philidelphia Free School.#
Today's discovery is a new Philadelphia elementary school set up by Philly parents and open to all Philly children, based on principles of empowerment, freedom and responsibility.
"Imagine a school where students are empowered to govern the school and their own learning."
What do you think of this approach? How would a school based on "enabling" children be different?
Tibor Machan writes about Capitalism and Job Security; why they don't go together and why that is a good thing.#
Karl Marx argued that capitalism would eventually collapse and give rise to socialism, as a matter of historical necessity. Many now believe he was wrong but they rest this less on the problem with his theory than on the failure of the Soviet attempt to implement it.
Actually, Marx would probably have denied that the Soviets could be socialist — he in fact warned that if socialism is attempted in places where capitalism never had a chance to develop, all that would be accomplished is the "socialization of poverty" — exactly as it happened in the Soviet bloc!
Whether Marx had anything really important to say about the future of capitalism isn't something we can deal with here but there is one point that he clearly had right. He noted that in capitalism many workers would get fed up with the system because of its volatility. This is especially so when it comes to how capitalism affects job security.
The Marginal Revolution writes about the tragedy and absurdity that is Zimbabwe.#
Read Samantha Power's Atlantic article How to Kill a Country for the full tragedy. I will quote only one semi-amusing aspect that illustrates, once again, some of the absurd consequences of price controls.
[Mugabe] fixed the price of a loaf of bread at half the bakers' break-even price, and levied astronomical fines on any baker who charged more. Bakers stopped making bread until somebody noticed that sesame bread, a "luxury item," wasn't price-controlled; by sprinkling a few sesame seeds on their standard loaves, bakers were able to get back in business. A pair of mortuary workers were arrested recently for running a profitable "rent-a-cadaver" business: because Mugabe had decreed that drivers in funeral processions would get privileged access to the trickle of fuel coming into the country, these entrepreneurs had begun leasing bodies to Zimbabwean drivers.
Josh Marshall on campaign strategy.#
Dean's strategy here is the most straightforward: run down the clock. Get through both of these primaries with solid wins, prevent any of the other three candidates from significantly exceeding expectations, and end January with so much momentum than even the opposing candidate in the inevitable two-man race simply can't catch up.
One final thought: an interesting strategic question.
Would Clark gain more from a solid Iowa victory for Dean which effectively ended Gephardt's and Kerry's candidacies (thus forcing a two-man race by default) or by one of the other candidates breaking out, thus knocking Dean significantly off his stride?
Jon Husband links to Laughing Knees on Blogging.#
By taking time away from blogging I've come up with the theory that blogging is a kind of consumerism, a kind of accumulation of newness and ideas, much like gossip and bargain sale shopping and advertising. The difference from a book lies in its constant change and attempt to present all ideas as something as yet not told, when in actuality very little new is being said at all. Books require you to sit down and concentrate. They sit still and wait, whereas blogs flit by like the information before a blinking eye, a kind of verbal animation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that animation, video, digital music, cell phone communication, and blogs are all gathered together in the same place.
Sadly, Oliver Willis does not like Mandy Moore.#
Soon after this, Mandy debuted in a saccharine laced teen drama (A Walk To Remember) whose down home Christian values caused at least one brain-addled conservative (is that redundant?) columnist to hail Ms. Moore's wholesomeness, never mind that the movie was craptacular. Mandy's subsequent musical forays have not exactly set the charts on fire, though I bet they've received decent airplay on Radio Disney (which is not such a horrible thing to tap your toes to when on a long car trip, not that I know anything about that), so she's decided to be: an actor. Inhabiting the same mindspace as Freddy Prinze, Jr. her latest foray is a film entitled Chasing Liberty, ostensibly the misadventures of a teenage First Daughter (has the "Girls Intelligence Agency" been subpeoaned by John Ashcroft yet?). To which I must cry: WHY?
I'm sorry Willis, but I have to unsubscribe from you. Those are fighting words and I have to retaliate.
Betsy Devine writes about book blogging, novels as blogs, and the blogging of great journeys.#
Jay McCarthy has been blogging his reading of Dante's Divine Comedy, * using the quotes-plus-notes that make him such a good guide to blogworld.
Then I started thinking--what if Dante rather than Jay were the blogger? The Pepys' Diary blog shows how a blog format can add value--even when you just reproduce a text and add hyperlinked notes.
But why stop there? Why can't you "study" a favorite novel by writing a blog for each character? Why can't you write a blog-novel where characters in a Live-Journal-like community interact? Or a role-playing game, where different players create fictional blogs that take turns talking about who did what to whom?
There is also the on-hiatus Bloggus Caesari.
I think that blogging under a fictional identity, whether as a creation of your own or someone else, would be a great way to learn about those characters and know yourself better. I imagine a novel with attached blogs of the characters who wrote first person thoughts about what was going in the novel... strange concept.
Michele at A Small Victory on the Hitler/Bush MoveOn.org commerical.#
I don't know why this instance of the nuts on the far left engaging in this comparison bothers me so much this time when I just laughed it off the 3,000 times before, but it does.
I made a vow not to engage in anymore nut-baiting or political bashing here. I'm trying my best to hold my tongue. So maybe I'll try it this way: I want one person - just one - to list for me all the ways in which Bush can be said to be just like Hitler. I want a side-by-side comparison of the two detailing all the ways in which they are alike, all the ways in which Bush is running this country like Hitler ran his, all the ways in which Bush is treating people the way Hitler did.
Stephen Cohen on Share Your OPML.#
I don't understand why Share Your OPML, the new "service" created by Dave Winer, is such an interesting idea. We have been able to share our OPML for a long time now. Why is this so different? Here are two ideas to make this service useful:
[...]
2) Break the OPML feeds down into categories. For example, let me see all of the librarians that have uploaded their OPML and, of course, let me subscribe to them.
Let this project not just be a nice ego boost for the "A-List".
This year Faré will improve on his persistency.#
Said Calvin Coolidge: Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Faré writes about Islam and Tolerance.#
Bref, s'il faut reconnaître que la plupart du temps, les musulmans ne font de mal qu'à eux-mêmes et leurs enfants (et cherchent à améliorer leur sort au sein de ce carcan imposé), la religion a indéniablement un fond impérialiste: elle veut s'imposer à tous, et réserve explicitement un sort fatal à tous ceux qui résisteront ouvertement, infidèles ou pire apostats. C'est donc un mensonge de prétendre l'Islam à la cheville du Christianisme ou même du judaïsme question tolérance -- ces religions antérieures se sont historiquement développées dans un contexte où elles ont été victimes de l'oppression, alors que l'islam s'est toujours développé par l'oppression. Mais le plus inquiétant est que cet impérialisme très activement entretenu par des groupes radicaux très influents dans le monde arabe, où toute opposition ouverte à l'Islam est censurée par une mise à mort immédiate.
In short, it should recognized that most of the time, Muslims only make trouble for themselves and their children (and seek to improve themselves within these chains); and, that the religion is unquestionably imperialist: It wants to be essential for everyone, and explicitly holds those who will resist openly to a fatal fate. It is thus a lie to claim that Islam can work with Christianity or even Judaism in tolerance -- these religions were historically developed in a context where they were victims of oppression, whereas Islam was always developed by oppression. But what is most worrying is that this imperialism is very accurately maintained by some very influential radical groups in the Arab world, where is any opposition to Islam is censured by immediate death.
Henry Miller on Public Opinion and Public Policy.#
"How can you tell whether a whale is a mammal or a fish?" a teacher asks her third-grade class. "Take a vote?" pipes up one of the pupils.
This idea might be amusing coming from a child, but it's a lot less funny when applied by governments to the formulation of complex policies that involve science and technology. And it's an approach that is becoming increasingly common around the world.
During the past two decades, the convening of citizens consensus conferences on a variety of issues has gained popularity in Denmark, where it is believed that non-experts "bring to the conferences a basic 'common sense' derived from worries, visions, general view and actual everyday experience as their basis for asking a number of essential questions concerned with the given subject."
Ryan Overbey posts new pictures.#
Je', would you still read 1001(+) blogs if their content wasn't coming to you via RSS feeds and an aggregator?
I probably wouldn't read most of the blogs (15+ maybe) in my aggregator if I had to go to their sites every day. (I just added a few more tonight.)
No, I definitely would not. In fact, I no longer read weblogs or sites that do NOT have RSS feeds. (Actually not entirely true there are a few sites (~5) that I still check because they are so good.) And before I had an aggregator I think I topped out at about 50 news sources which I organized by a site-updated checker.
RSS has changed my life.
Michael Feldman writes about the dangerous consequences of blogging.#
In this day and age, the first thing any competent personnel manager will do with a potential employees resume is to Google the individual involved. Thanks to the qualified success of the Dowbrigade News and Google's blog-friendly logarithm, four of the top ten search results for our name lead directly to our Blog. Thanks to the unparalleled efficiency of the Blog format as an on-line information storage and access system, this means virtually everything we have written since founding our Blog (can it only have been six months ago?) is there for a prospective employers leisurely perusal.
Dave Winer asks about ethics on the Internet and if it should be okay for Google to advertise itself without a disclaimer.#
Does Google need to tell readers that it owns Blogger? It appears as if Blogger paid for this ad. Did they? I think they are required to disclaim if they want to maintain their integrity. Apply The Microsoft Test -- i.e. if Microsoft did this would we object? If so, it's not cool to have different standards for different 800-pound gorillas. Google dominates search the way Microsoft dominates operating systems. In 2004, it's hard to say which dominance has more potential to do damage to competition. Or apply The New York Times test. If the Times were promoting a service, or appearing to promote a service, that it owned, but it wasn't clear from its name that it was owned by the Times, would they include a note saying they owned it? Imho, without a doubt. Should we look for Times-like clarity from Google?
Richard links to Makiko Itoh on how to meet people online.#
Incidentally, I don't believe that blogging is any special, better-than-other, method of communication towards meeting "the" person. The advantage it has is that blogged thoughts tend to be better thought out than something you'd blurt out in a chat room or on ICQ, or Usenet messages, or even in an email. So in that sense perhaps it is closer to the handwritten letter (which brought plenty of people together without the corporeal face-to-face had taken place before the personal computer) than email or something else is. To draw more analogies, online dating services and chat rooms that are specifically geared to meeting people (cybersex involved or not) are sort of the online equivalents of the pickup bar.
Anyway, forget about the sceptics, who probably don't know the feeling of a magical attraction you feel over just the words appearing on a computer screen, typed by some faceless person way on the other side of the world. You know the magic in your heart is real, so why not take a chance that you can capture it permanently?
I just want to meet someone, online or not. Either that or convince someone to like me again, ugh. So pathetic.
Doug Miller links to Sunspot.net on the distrust of Americans in needy areas.#
In January last year, Nigerian health workers knocked on Umar's door, offering her newborn daughter a free dose of polio vaccine.
Two drops of the oral polio vaccine taken at least three times as a child, the health workers told her, would protect her daughter, Zaliha, from the crippling virus for life.
But Umar turned the vaccinators away. Most of her neighbors did the same, some hiding children under their beds.
They had heard a rumor circulating through the hot, dusty villages of northern Nigeria that the vaccine had been contaminated with an anti-fertility agent that would sterilize their children or perhaps infect them with the AIDS virus, all part of an American plot to depopulate the developing world. The villagers believed it.
Dave Winer writes about some of the features of Channel Z and a new way of blogging.#
The codename for this software is Channel Z. It's a new kind of software, it's a weblog authoring tool with an outliner and a server-side content management system with lots of smarts about categories, RSS and OPML. It can be made to work with Movable Type, Manila or Radio, any weblog tool that supports the MetaWeblog API.
But are you required to use Channel Z to participate? Of course not. You should use it because it's the best software not because it hides the way it works from other developers. It's all out in the open.