Beth Plocharczyk writes about the problems that arise from their not being a market in bodies.#

It seems that the whole cadaver donation and trade business is in need of a dose of glasnost and perestroika. Better dissemination of information from medical school to donor, and from distributor to medical school about what might the body be used for and where should be standard and people should be allowed to receive money for their gifts. Currently, medical schools, body brokers, and all others are not allowed to pay donors for their bodies, which is part of the reason this situation came about in the first place. Had the army been allowed to offer $25,000 - $30,000 directly to potential donors, people could make informed decisions about what happens to their remains and body dealers would be in a worse position to act in a morally questionable way. Also, if a medical school pays someone (or his estate) for use of his remains, it is less problematic for the university to sell or transfer that property to someone else. If the body market behaved freely, information would exchange in a more transparent manner and people could better choose the destiny of their remains and benefit from the sale of their property.

Via AKMA is Jason Schulz post Steve Martin's script notes from The Passion.#

* Is there someplace where Jesus could be using an iBook? You know, now that I say it, it sounds ridiculous. Strike that. But think about it. Maybe we start a shot in Heaven with Jesus thoughtfully closing the top?

* Merchandising issue: it seems the Cross image has been done to death and in public domain -- we can't own it. Could the Cruciifixion scene involve something else? A Toyota would be wrong, but maybe there's a shape we can copyright, like a wagon wheel?

Russell Beattie tells you to stop it.#

Look - we live in a country with hundreds of millions of people, yet we have communications tools that make any event in any part of that society seem like it's in our living room. It's *not*. Every day the media presents the absolute worst, shocking news possible on the television and in the papers and on the web. They pander to the worst parts of every one of us and breed a society of hatred and division and suspicions and fear. Stop it. Stop paying attention to all that crap. Look, there are 6 billion people on the earth so the odds are that someone, somewhere is doing something incredibly bad and now it can be instantly beamed into your dinner newshour. But that has nothing to do with you and the society you choose to live in. Society is like traffic: you can't bitch about it and point fingers because guess what? You're part of it.

Michael Feldman reports on a gay marriage demonstration in Boston.#

Razib explains why the analogy of Protestant vs. Catholic for the Sunni vs. Shiite split does not work with Islam.#

On the Shia-Sunni thing, you can find a lot on this topic. So I'll give a quick sketch in the context of the mapping to Protestant vs. Catholic split. My cards on the table: I think we should dump this analogy, the mapping simply is too far from 1:1.

Sunni and Shia and started as a dispute over the succession to the Caliphate during the early period. Everyone knows this. What people don't know is that there are other groups. The Khajirites for instance, who led to the Ibadi sect of Oman (it is dominant there), and are often classed with "Shia." The Shia-Sunni "split" was very close to the genesis of the Muslim faith-Protestantism was a series of revolts against an established Church, initially Roman Catholic (itself a subdivision of the Christian community), later against "established" Protestant Churches, 1,500 years after the genesis of Christianity. While the period of possibly Protestant-Catholic compromise was short (the idea that Luther & co. were reforming the Universal Catholic Church rather than founding their own tradition)-the Shia-Sunni split did not truly crystallize for a few centuries, and even today, there is a somewhat fuzzy line between the two, the conversion of Sunni nomads in Iraq to Shiism in the 19th century showing how the change need not be radical.

Kelso Jacks, be my wife, you are sooo funny.#

Rifkin vs. Wuornos...

By Kelso Jacks

With all due respect to the victims, their families, and their friends:

If they could do it with Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, two make-believepsychos, why not try it with two bona-fide psycho serial killers? Only in this film, we up the ante by making it male against of female. Thanks to the Academy Award-winning film Monster, America now knows that, though rare, female serial killers do exist. We exploit that knowledge by pitting Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron reprises her role!), a prostitute who murdered her johns, against one of the many male serial killers who chose to off prostitutes. Considered for the male lead character: Gary "Green River Killer" Ridgway, Maury Travis of St. Louis, and Robert Yates Jr. of Spokane. However, we decided to go with Joel Rifkin of Long Island, NY, simply because like Wuornos he's from the East Coast. David Schwimmer, in attempt to distance himself from his role on Friends, will play Rifkin.

Chip Gibbons discusses al-Qaida and numerology.#

David Weinberger poses some questions about same-sex marriage and stirs controversy.#

If I could quiz one of the tens of millions of reasonable, good-hearted Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, here are the questions I'd ask.

Set #1

Do you believe that same-sex couples can fall in love?

[...]

Set #2

Do you believe that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, it will affect contra-sex marriages? If so, how? Is there evidence to support this prediction?

Dave Winer comments:

After reading the comments here, I wondered what, just for the sake of argument, the people opposed to gay marriage would think if, in 2016:

1. We elected a gay president.

2. He or she took the position that only gay people could marry.

3. And that all hetero marriages were immediately anulled.

He or she explained that your hetero marriage is rogue and an offense to all good people.

What do you think?

The question I ask is not "Why don't gay couples have the same rights as straight couples?" But instead, "Why don't single people have the same rights as couples?" and "Why can't I define my own contracts about this sort of thing for my own use?"

English#

Original:

I sit in my house when all is quiet, typing with my hands and wandering with my head. The whole world is opened up by my mind, but I never seem to have enough time.

Corrected: (Lee is studied English in college before becoming a language addict.)

When all is quiet, I sit in my house typing with my hands and wandering with my head. The whole world is opened up by my mind, but I never seem to have enough time.

French#

Original:

Je s'asseois en mon maison quand tout est silencieux, typais avec mes mains et parcourissais avec ma tête. Le monde entier ouvrisse de mon espirit, mais je ne semble jamais avoir assez temps.

Corrected:

Quand tout est silencieux, je m'asseois dans ma maison en typant avec les mains et en parcourissant don la tête. Le monde entier s'ouvre par mon esprit, mais il ne me semble jamais d'avoir assez de temps.

Spanish#

Original:

Esto sentado en mi casa cuando todos están quieto, tipía con nuestros manos y vagaba con mi cabeza. El todo mundo abrí por mis mente, excepto nunca pareco estar bastante tiempo.

Corrected:

Cuando todo está silencioso, Etoy sentado en mi casa tipando con las manos y vagabundeando en la cabeza. El mundo entero se abre por mi mente, pero nunca me parece tener tiempo suficiente.

Lessons Learned#

In English, always try to use the active voice over the passive voice, not only does it sound better and stronger, but in this instance it eliminates confusion.

In French and Spanish, when you're talking about your body parts (and presumably other very obvious things) you don't say "my hands", you just say "the hands." They know what you mean.

In French, you use "of" a whole lot. You don't have "enough of time," not "enough time."

In general, the "-ing" verbs that I used in this letter are not the "Imperfect" (Strawberry) tense but are a modified tense whose name I have forgotten write down. Note to self: Look in the dictionary when you get home.

In general, to help out in translation try to translate the English in a more basic form with less inferences. Example: "I never seem to have" becomes "It seems to me that I never have." Basically, when you have a string of verbs, turn them into objects verbing on other objects.

In Spanish, "vagabundeando" is an awesome word, take the opportunity to use it if you can.

In general, try to translate the same in the different languages. (In French I had "the entire world", but in Spanish I had "all the world.")

In Spanish, "bastante" means "enough," but of the variety like "make sure I have enough" when asking for more tea. On the other hand, "suficiente" has the connotation of "enough/sufficient" and it is what you want.

Dave Winer posed a question on the BloggerCon site for discussion, perhaps at BloggerCon II.#

Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading (aggregators).

Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. What bug is most in your way. Ramble, please. Is there one thing you'd kill for? Or perhaps you're satisfied with the tools as they are. I hope your comments are on the record so I can assemble a quote sheet as the beginning of a conversation that I hope will yield better tools for all of us.

I am attempting to summarize some of the discussion that was generated by this, as archived in the comments and the TrackBacks.#

Lisa Williams posted the first summary of this discussion.

Behind every wishlist lurks a manifesto.

Be it as humble as the grocery list, as innocent (and voluminous) as a kid's missives to the north pole, as big as a National Five Year plan, our wish lists tell us what we really want, and perhaps a bit of who we really are -- or at least who we want to be. The harried person in the supermarket chooses chicken soup because they want comfort; a kid wants a bike because they want freedom; the politicians want increases in production of everything from ball bearings to grain because they want prosperity, abundance (and not incidentally, re-election).

But what do bloggers want?

Shimon Rura did an amazing job categorizing the posts so far.

Michael Fagan wanted a summary. He got 3 of them!

Ryan Tate on the idea:

This page is probably the single best roadmap to the future of the consumer software industry I have ever seen.

Microsoft, Google, Apple et. al. should tap in. This is the ultimate focus group.

Benoit Bisson on Lisa's summary:

Keywords that came up: simplicity, ability to blog anything, anywhere, anytime, connectivity, community, conservation.

People - ordinary people, not tech heads - want to blog, and they want it as simple as writing in a diary, with the same ease to mix content. Add to that the ability to make that content - audio, video, photos, text - available on the Web, easily archived, easily searched.

The tools for blogging, ideally, should be invisible as far as tech goes, yet powerful enough to handle content in the form the user chooses - not the software maker.

I will organize primarily by type of feature or comment, and on occasion I will point to a place that talks about this problem in depth if I know of it.#

Archive#

Erik Neu would like to be to avoid link rot in what he links to. He has the outline of how to implement this as well, basically he'd like his tool to copy the text and change the link when the text changes.

Pedro Daniel would like to have a portable back format for switching between systems, possible just an RSS feed of all your posts.

Rauno Saarinen would like to be able to have "Slashdot Insurance" and have his blog mirrored automatically when traffic picks up. (Note: The Freenet Project has a feature like this.)

Create#

Brian Sullivan would like a stronger editor, preferably one that is stable, with special checking and previewing, and makes integrating multimedia easier. (Also Mark Seifert.) (Also Sarah Looney, who adds that a thesaurus would be great too.)

Jack Foster Mancilla would like not only to have the ability to integrate multimedia into his posts easier, but would also like his system to manage the data about those pictures in a Who/Where/When/What/etc style.

Tom Degrémont would like for blogs to find "nice resting places, once they've expired their last post." This is something we've talked about at Berkman Thursdays in relation to the Dean/Clark blogs.

Mike Lougee takes Tom's idea and runs with it, think it would nice to make a "blogs-to-paper" system for permanently archiving blogs.

Dale Pike would like tighter integration with blogging and the system he already he has. He'd like to interact with bloggers with whatever tool he wants, giving email as an example. Why can't he email a blog post? Or, reply to a comment email and have it show up as a comment?

Steven joins in asking for spell checking, valid code generators, and a good drafts system, to save posts for latter. This is n-th'd by Ron Jeffries.

Pete Prodoehl wants quality and valid code over features.

Rauno Saarinen would like to be able to share calendar information on his blog more effectively.

Phil Wolff wants to be able to give geographic data about everything on his blog for filtering purposes later.

Phil Wolff, who accounts for about half of all the comments, thinks that "Print to Blog" or "Save to Blog" option would be convenient.

Tilman Haerdle would like "perfect" support for offline blogging.

Rob Robinson would like a way to license his feeds and issue keys that unlock them.

Cesare Lamanna would like more simplicity and thinks that large number of diverse systems will be the best way to do this.

Benoit Bisson would like more integration with his browser, Firefox, for editing and better support for W3C standards.

Fabrice would like for his blogging to much more transparent to the way he uses the computer, he resounds the call to make it easy to "upgrade" any document, email, page, etc to a blog post.

Connect#

"Dan" would like a way to notice if a page he is looking at has been blogging, but without the overhead of going to Technorati. He'd like it to be an automatic "emblem" on a page.

Jim Biancolo would like a more decoupled comment system as well as threaded comments for his posts.

Phil Wolff would like his comments on other people's blogs to be cross-posted to a side-blog on his blog to control the spread of his internet identity. (Note: Phil also posts some links to proposed solutions to many of the above problems.)

Bruce Landon wants to be able to connect to more, to do this he thinks it would be nice to have a translation tool to accurately transform his text into different "levels" of English and other languages.

Mars F. would like an authentication system like a PKI for posters and commenters so he could have a distributed identity with different privileges in different places.

Pea would like to be able to link to anywhere on the web, not just to a page, but to a particular word on the page. (There is a W3C standard for this, see XPointer.) (2nd: Bob Stepno.)

Peter Eschenbrenner wants better support for loosely coupled conversations. He wants to know if some replies to a blogger who replied to him. (There is a W3C standard for this, see Annotea.)

Darren Rowse would like a way of showing his readers what entries have been "most viewed in the last 24 hours," so they can know what are "hot topics."

Jeff Jarvis wants more intuitive tools, in more languages, and without techno-speak. This will enable more people to interact and expand the blogging world.

Scott Johnson, of Feedster, wants all tools to support RSS feeds for their comments. This will make searching RSS feeds more effective.

Stephane would like to be ale to easily setup a relationship between his blog and another, particularly to associate his blog with his students and (perhaps?) approve their posts. He thinks this would be a small thing that would great aide blogs in education. (Note: This is a very rough understanding/translation of the original French.)

Jon Husband thinks that the next step of blogging is more general and powerful social networking software:

Blogging and its dynamics is about online presence, the experience of self and others online, and the exchange of value, whether psychic, emotional or knowledge-based economic value

There's a new application being developed here in Vancouver that will be useful for blogging, bloggers and the spread of blogging-like microcontent assemby and publishing into social networking domains - workplaces or virtual private social networks where work gets done and deals start.. It's derived from and designed based upon some fundamental cognitive research as to how the human-computer interface supports (or not) the way humans think and put together thoughts to create knowledge.

Consume#

Blair Fannin would like an easy way to put all the audio and possibly the text "audio-ized" onto his iPod to take with him. He'd like to listen to the daily news, but from a blogger.

Franz Scherz wants to be able to filter out blog entries that point to stories he's already read. Like the Universal Story Id proposal.

Phil Wolff would like many ways of filtering his aggregator content (viruses, family, etc) and getting recommendations for feeds/items he might like by his history of linking or "voting" on certains items/feeds. In his words: "Prioritization Filtering Trusted referral Summarization Threading Geo sensititivity Clustering Behavior analysis and related techniques to manage the flow in a reasonable time."

Mars F. would like easier syndication... preferably one-click.

Anna would like a way to annotate that she is providing new content, commentary, or just propagating links. Then someone could filter their intake based on this.

Tilman Hardle would like to be able to subscribe to non-RSS/Atom content and just be notified when it changes.

Philosophy#

Jason Fried thinks that the discussion is too focused on features. He says that the problem with blogging is not that there are key features missing, but that people don't "get it" and it needs to be simpler.

A note from me on Fried: Perhaps the discussion should be split in two: How to make blogging more accessible to more people, and how to make blogging more featured for the "experts." Basically some people need to work at getting what we already have to the masses, while others look at what's next--which one to we want to talk about?

Adam Curry makes an important point related to the above, and (sorry Phil Wolff) lends his support to the simplicity crowd:

Dave poses an important question. If I could have answered this question after the release of Word 1.0, would I have asked for all the features Word has now? There's probably a lot of overlap there and we might only wind up creating more bloatware.