Alex Tabarrok links to the first book without verbs.#

"My book is a revolution in the history of literature. It is the first book of its kind. It's daring, modern and is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art," said Mr Thaler, an eccentric who refuses to reveal his real name or age, beyond admitting to being in his sixties.

"The verb is like a weed in a field of flowers," he said. "You have to get rid of it to allow the flowers to grow and flourish.

"I am like a car driver who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see into the future, smashed the rear-view mirror so he cannot see the past, and is travelling in the present."

How to write your doctoral thesis on Kuro5hin.#

Step Zero: Pain. The design, construction, and implementation of such a worthless document requires time. Less time than you think, but more time than you have. Unfortunately, this means you will have to give up some of the finer things in life. Food, sleep, bathing, websurfing, and civility towards other humans are nice, but simply are not within the scope of a thesis writer. You must give them up. It will hurt, but you must. Loved ones will forgive you, since they will be deluded into believing that after the process is complete, you will have a sense of achievement, and more earning potential. They are wrong, but their misguided justifications for still loving you will last just long enough to get it done.

Lawrence Lessig in Wired on protectionism.#

This prosperity is vital to all of us. It will spur growth here. It will weaken fundamentalism elsewhere. It is the product of the laws that Adam Smith taught us. It is the consequence of the lessons that America has been teaching the world for generations - that free markets free people.

Yet we call this great good bad. We amplify anxiety through code words like outsourcing, and our rhetoric invites policies that would return this nation to the darkest days of the Depression. [Ignore boos from laid-off, pissed-off programmers.]

Google responses to criticism about their blog:#

Well, we managed to break rules with our very first couple of posts here. We started our blog with a post about recruiting and didn't sign it. Then we changed it once it was up. You just don't do that with a blog, according to half the Google staff and all the Blogger folk. They've made that opinion abundantly clear to us with emails, hallway lectures and posts on their own blogs laying out all the ways this launch could have gone better.

So yes, we do get that blogs are all about communication with readers, not processed info dump-and-run. And we get that people want to know who's giving them that information. We also get that this is a new medium and that despite the conventions of the blogosphere, not everything is set in stone when it comes to blog style and tone.

Chip Gibbons notices something interesting about the Nick Berg video and its popularity.#

I do want to say, however, that the Nick Berg murder video is a new variant on an old theme. If you strip away all the terrorism rhetoric and the media-fueled hysteria, what you have left is a group of individuals ganging up against a single man. They have rules, they are good, Berg is evil, they read proclamation, make it official, take Berg's life. The group is right, the individual is wrong. The group is moral, the individual is immoral. The group lives, the individual dies.

The video is a mircocosm, the worst of politics and mysticism distilled into one horrendous event--the sacrifice of the individual to the whim of a mindless mob.

Mel Gibson recently made a film, The Passion of the Christ, about the same subject. The film has grossed in excess of $300 million.

Matt May explains why the W3C wants Atom--unofficially though.#

Why do we want Atom work to happen here? A number of us on the W3C Team know that Atom is an important missing portion of the Web's architecture. We see something that is relevant to more than blogging apps. Since Atom also contains a protocol for extracting and manipulating content, I can see loads of potential for content management systems in general. I can also see new applications of Atom such as a system for maintaining threaded discussions across sites, while keeping the overall referential integrity of the Web intact. RSS can't do that. Atom can do it without breaking a sweat, or worse, suffering from scope creep.

Julie Leung writes about Ted, their kids, and work.#

Ted started working at home when our oldest was 2, and its the only life all our kids know. When I asked 6-year-old Abigail to tell me what Daddy does all day, she replied "work on his computer" and "type on his Apple laptop" (notice the alliteration of the "p"s). Explaining careers and jobs, what other people do to earn a living, becomes a bit more difficult when all they see of the sole provider is that he sits in his room two yards from our dining table and plunks letters on a keyboard. "You know how Daddy works on computers all day for his job?....Well, some people do other things, like drive bulldozers...and fly airplanes..."

Julie also reminds me of my desire to learn sign language and Braille.#