This is a review of the book, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World.. by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan.#

It looks like it's a very large corpus of work with a wide range and intense detail,#

``The five-volume, decade-long Fundamentalism Project was a major scholarly effort to see if there was such a sociological phenomenon as fundamentalism that might explain similarities, or at least "family resemblances," among so-called fundamentalist groups within several major world religions. A total of 75 different movements were examined by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists on several continents. The groups included had emerged from all of the world's major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam (both Sunni and Shi'ite), Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and neo-Confucianism. Strong Religion amounts to a concluding summation of the project's work.''

The reviewer has a bit of a problem with the assumption that fundamentalism and religion must bad and secularization must be good,#

``The larger issue raised by this effort to understand fundamentalism is the premise of the entire project: that such religious movements are "militant and highly focused antagonists of secularization." Many so-called fundamentalist movements are undoubtedly hostile to much of modernity. But the word "secularization" seems a bit loaded. It implies that increasing global secularism is somehow the natural order of things. In fact, the global upsurge of religion in recent years suggests otherwise.

As sociologist Peter Berger argues in The Desecularization of the World, "the notion that we live in a secularized world is false." Secularization theory, derived from Enlightenment views of religion and popular in American academia in the 1950s and 1960s, held that the world would gradually abandon religious faith and free itself from the shackles of religion and superstition. But as Berger notes, "The world today is massively religious, and it is anything but the secularized world that had been predicted (be it joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts of modernity." ''

David Aikman also notes some technical problems with the text,#

``The scholars also display something approaching intellectual dishonesty in their discussion of "martyrdom" in the Christian and Muslim contexts. "Christians, like Muslims," Strong Religion asserts, "have considered martyrdom a prime opportunity for holiness, and indeed, a direct ticket to heaven." This grossly distorts the difference between the Christian and the Islamic concepts of martyrdom. Within Islam, martyrdom is what happens when a person dies in jihad. Thus Palestinian suicide bombers, who try to kill as many civilians as possible while blowing themselves up in Israeli buses or discotheques, are praised by many fellow Muslims as martyrs. Christians are only martyrs when killed purely and simply for what they believe. Although Muslim "martyrs" may indeed enter paradise immediately, martyrdom within Christianity has nothing to do with entrance into heaven.''

The review ends on a strong note,#

``Efforts to analyze and seek commonalities among fundamentalist groups can certainly be helpful. The authors of Strong Religion have done a fine job in examining many often obscure groups. The sociological approach offers considerable insights. But in the end, it is hard to escape the feeling that the authors need to take more seriously the notion that it is what people believe, or do not believe, that determines their actions quite as much as their income level or their street address. If fundamentalism merely denotes strong belief in core doctrines of faith, what distinguishes an ardent churchgoer or mosque-attender from a "reactive" terrorist? The concluding paragraph of Strong Religion offers a revealing insight into the researchers' mindset as they affirm the need to understand fundamentalism "for politicians, diplomats, educators, and scientists, including those who continue to wonder ruefully how militant religion inherited a new lease on life in our supposedly postreligious age."

What sort of people have been supposing that our world was ever postreligious? Berger wryly proposes that the faculty dining hall at the average U.S. college might be a more interesting topic for the sociology of religion than the Islamic schools of Qum. Perhaps one should merely recall what an anonymous New York lawyer said on learning of the emergence of the Moral Majority in the 1980s: "Millions of people out there believe what nobody believes anymore." ''

This is a review of the book, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller.#

The book is about the origins of capitalism and what some major European thinkers have thought about it.#

It is interesting to note the "newness" of capitalism,#

``Because Americans take capitalism for granted, they often fail to appreciate what a historically recent and revolutionary phenomenon it is. Trade and commerce have been features of human society from the beginning, but it was really only in the eighteenth century that economies began to emerge in which markets were the primary force in the production and distribution of goods. And as soon as such economies did emerge, they began transforming not only economic relationships but social and political ones as well. These transformations were so radical and so destabilizing, in fact, that they prompted an almost immediate backlash.''

A little bit about where people who weren't excited about capitalism found themselves,#

``Born in 1887, meanwhile, Freyer took a similar journey but ended up at a different destination. He too grew increasingly disillusioned with the spiritual emptiness and personal alienation that characterized modern society and searched for a radical alternative to the "moral dead-end of capitalism." But whereas Lukács found his salvation in communism, Freyer found his in National Socialism. Neither a racist nor an antisemite, Freyer, like many intellectuals, was attracted to the Nazis because they seemed to offer what capitalism lacked: an opportunity to sacrifice for the larger good and participate in a world historical project.''

The general feel was that capitalism was bad for the soul and community,#

``Möser also bemoaned the way the emerging capitalist system led to a stifling homogenization. By insisting on the universality and primacy of a set of "simple principles" and by allowing the direction and nature of social relationships to be determined by economic needs, the spread of markets threatened to rob communities of their distinctive cultures and institutions. Capitalism thus departed, he declared, "from the true plan of nature, which reveals its wealth through its multiplicity, and would clear the path to despotism, which seeks to coerce all according to a few rules and so loses the richness that comes with variety." ''

The problem isn't that capitalism isn't a good way to make money, it's that money is Not A Good Thing...#

``What they fail to understand is that such narrow economistic attitudes miss the point. Yes, capitalism is far and away the best method ever discovered for producing growth. But for serious thinkers that has not been, and is not today, the only issue. Even its most die-hard critics have never doubted capitalism's amazing capacity to generate wealth. In fact, Muller notes, for someone like Justus Möser it was "precisely the superior productivity of capitalism that was its most threatening aspect," because that was what enabled it to so rapidly and efficiently undermine traditional forms of production and the lifestyles, cultures, and communities that went with them.''

Introducing the author of the essay#

``Leonardo Maugeri is Group Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategies and Planning for the Italian energy company eni.''

The first paragraph is perfect for setting the mood of the essay,#

``Since oil became vital to industrial societies, it has been the subject of mythmaking. This is not surprising since the control and pricing of energy is an emotionally charged issue that lends itself to conspiracy theories and distorted interpretations of past events. Conspiracy theorists are once again active, spurred on by the conflict in oil-rich Iraq. They see multinational oil corporations working with the U.S. government to dominate the supply, distribution, and cost of oil. To them, the ultimate goal lurking behind major international crises, such as Iraq, is access to oil. But the relationship between oil and politics is not so simple. Neither oil scarcity nor energy security -- the twin concepts that underpin much thinking about this issue even in some official circles -- is a sound starting point for thinking about oil policy. Getting beyond such notions, however, requires an examination of the myths and the realities of oil.''

Leonardo writes in great detail of the sibling spectres of oil security and scarcity...#

``Dire predictions of scarcity go hand in hand with fears about oil security. The truth is that oil supplies are neither running out nor becoming insecure. Today, the average world recovery rate from existing oil reserves is 35 percent, as compared to about 22 percent in 1980. Given current oil consumption levels, every additional percentage of recovery means two more years of existing reserves. [ed--because it's reasonable to guess that oil consumption will remain constant.] This evolution also partly explains why the life index of existing reserves is still growing even though the world is replacing only 25 percent of what it consumes every year with new discoveries and major new oil discoveries have decreased since the 1960s. Today's ratio of proven oil reserves to current production indicates a remaining life of 43 years for existing reserves, compared to 35 years in 1972, and 20 years in 1948. Advances in technology explain the apparent contradiction between fewer discoveries and more oil. Whereas an oil field does not change, knowledge about it does, sometimes dramatically.''

This essay has now reminded me of the explanation that the world will never run out of oil, because by the time there is one drop left it will be so expensive that no one can buy it, and it will have become useless so no one will want to.#

Leonardo acknowledges this idea,#

``Oil is considered a semi-mature commodity, the fate of which is closely connected with that of most raw minerals, all affected by a rise-and-fall consumption pattern in modern economic history. According to this pattern, just as the Stone Age did not end for the lack of stones, the oil age will not end because of the scarcity of oil. Rather, oil will inevitably be surpassed in convenience by a new source of energy.''

A summary of the scarcity issue is succinct. Basically this is the boy crying wolf every time he gets a little scared.#

``In short, the world is not running out of oil, and there is no oil security problem in today's world market. The problem instead is that many Western observers speak about oil security when what they have in mind is stable and cheap oil supplies. this confusion of two very different things usually stems from public hysteria when oil prices soar. When prices drop, oil matters are forgotten. Few remember the general refrain in 1998-99, when oil prices plummeted to about $10: "Bad for oil companies and producing countries, good for everyone else." No spoke then about oil security and energy alternatives.''

The author give some short advice to the builders of a New Iraq about oil stability,#

``for Arab countries it is difficult to translate creeping political rivalries into competitive oil policies. If a major producer, such as Iraq, were to open its oil fields to foreign investment again, its neighbors would be obliged to react so as not to lose future market share and revenues. In short, they would be compelled to overproduce and accept plummeting oil prices. That is the challenge that Iraq could pose if unregulated foreign investments flowed in to rebuild its oil industry. While Iraq is being reconstructed, care must be taken not to deconstruct the oil market again by sparking fierce competition among major producers.''

I take some of this with some salt because the author is a member of Oil interests, but at the same time I wonder if I should put more stock in what he says. Seeing as he is an "insider" and presumably knows a bit better than the academics.#

Razib at Gene Expression doesn't think ethnocentric myths like this are too cool,#

``I am sick and tried of people telling me that the Bering Strait is true. I know where we came from and it was not Siberia.

The oldest Native remains are located in South America.
The oldest cities existed before Jesus are located in Latin America.

Our people are so old that we were human when the European were running aroung being monkeys. Geoglocal records show us that there was no land bridge and the glacier were inpassable. If you came from the north why do we not have older sites up here? Because it was under ice. DUHHHHHHH

I find more truth in our own stories them those made up white stories.''

Interconnected brings us some strange metaphysical story of the origin of the universe.#

I don't often disagree with Razib but, Keira is much prettier.#

Joey deVilla is a funny character of this short play in five acts called my life,#

``While walking to the side door of the house, I said "Hello" to the neighbour's cat, Pusskin, who was sunning himself. He turned his head towards me for just a moment, barely acknoledging my presence as indepedent cats are wont to do, and then resumed staring off into space.

"You wouldn't be so standoffish if I were the one feeding you," I said to the cat, as if a creature with no language centre, a brain the size of a walnut and the loyalty of a Third World mercenary soldier would understand or care. ''

Charles Miller points out a not-bug in Java.#

``Cedric thinks he's found 64,000 bugs in the Java Character class. He ran the following test against all the available chars, and found there were about 64,000 characters that were not lower-case after you've called toLowerCase() on them.''

Just a Gwai Lo continues a discussion about annoying traits of women,#

``_8. Dress slutty. There is a difference between slutty & tastefully risque -- Learn it._

What is that difference? It's a thin line. Take, for example, my first year classes (please, take them!). About half the women there are dressed to impress, which, evidently, means that they show off their bra straps. (Myself, I'm wearing t-shirts and jeans, because I don't give a mad fuck how I look.) As a man, if I see a woman with purple bra straps showing, I think to myself "whoa, look at her bra straps, they're purple!". Some women also show a lot of skin. It's a guaranteed way to get attention. At least mine, whether it's wanted or not. There are limits though. Showing what I can only describe as vagina lines (you've no doubt seen the low rider pants/shorts/whathaveyou). Yeah, that crosses the line. A little mystery please. Mystery can be sexy.''

Camel toe is NO fun.

Erik Meijer writes about how "Inside Every API is a Programming Language Struggling to Get Out" - This why Lisp is so great, build your own domain specific language on top of it because there's nothing really "special" about the language and you have macros. Yes.#

Carly on drama,#

``Does the high school-ness of life never end?

Seriously, now.

Everyone says that at some point you escape the drama, but I'm really starting to not believe it.

Maybe it's more a matter of cutting off the people who are the instigators of all the drama. The drama mongers then congregate together and have their own drama-filled lives so that the rest of us can live normal lives.

Not that drama doesn't make things interesting, because it does, but I think it's an interesting I could do without. There's plenty of stuff to talk about and deal with without things getting out of control because of catty girls who seem to thrive on D-R-A-M-A. Does no one live their life according to the precepts of pop music anymore? Mary J. Blige can be your messiah. No More Drama in your life. ''

Jack Bogdanski writes about Bill and Hillary's tax fraud...#

``I read every week about Bill and Hillary Clinton's legal defense funds. These are funds, to which all sorts of people have contributed millions of dollars, that have paid the Clintons' legal bills over Whitewater, Headgate, and those other scandals.

The junior senator from New York and her saxophone-blowin' Bubba apparently have never reported any of the money paid to the funds as income on their income tax returns.

Should they have?

The consensus among the several tax professionals who have written on the subject is that, yes, indeed, payments to or by the funds are income to the Clintons, and should have been reported. [...]

So these millions should have been reported as income. To my knowledge not a single tax expert has written a word in defense of the Clintons' omission of this income from their tax returns.''

Raymond Chen writes about Longhorn rumours,#

``It's a lot easier to write a column if you don't care about accuracy. Now that Longhorn Rumor Season seems to have kicked up, I'm reminded of Windows 95 Rumor Season. The great thing about writing a rumors column is that you don't have to be right! Even if you're wrong, you can just say, "Well, Microsoft changed it before they shipped," and nobody can say you were wrong. It's a victimless crime! The only victim is Microsoft! ''

Raymond Chen writes about how the "Windows 95 Startup Sound" was made. Well, he quotes the artist.#

``The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time. ''

Matrix Essays asks some hard questions,#

``Maybe when programs do things they're not supposed to do, humans in the Matrix explain it away with stories of werewolves or ghosts. But what are Joe and Jane Q. Public in the Matrix thinking when Neo keeps buzzing past overhead, and moments later there are huge explosions nearby? Why isn't there a panic? Some black-clad sunglasses-wearing goth priest punk looking guy flies around over the city and nobody notices? No media frenzy? There wasn't even one reaction shot of pedestrians looking up and saying, "what the hell was that?" ''

Brad Hurley isn't stimulating the economy...#

``When you buy something well-made that lasts, you save money because you only have to buy it once. Here are a few examples: In 1987 I bought a Braun coffee grinder. I've used it almost every day since then, grinding coffee, spices, and dried hot peppers. It still works as well as it did the day I bought it 16 years ago. In the mid-80s, a rock-climber friend of mine turned me onto Patagonia clothing. I still wear some Patagonia shirts and a coat that I bought around 1986. Their stuff is expensive, but probably cheaper in the long run. I bought a Honda Civic wagon in 1990 and sold it 10 years later after putting 250,000 miles on it. Last I heard, it was still running fine. And in 1991 I won seven compact fluorescent light bulbs in a contest sponsored by my local electric utility. I've used them daily since then. Two of them burned out recently, but the other five are still going strong after 12 years.''

Via Slashdot is a story about the Woz, OK-ing an Apple I replica,#

``A year in development, Briel's replica uses different components than Woz's original, but is functionally identical, he said.

In fact, Briel said he spent a lot of time "un-implementing" features offered by the modern chips he used -- features unavailable on the chips Woz used in the late 1970s.

For example, when typing onscreen, the replica can perform a backspace, which the original cannot. Briel said it took him weeks to figure out how to disable it.

"I spent a lot of time trying to get every detail so the replica functions completely identically to the Apple I," he said. ''

Because we can!

At Game Girl Advance is a thought about why some games are popular and others not,#

``Years ago I read a survey that indicated that women weren't opposed to computer games, it was just that the games all seemed so meaningless. So you kill all the monsters on a level in Doom or Quake - so what? And until the movies came out (and really, even with them) how many gamers really care whether Lara Croft has a degree in archaeology? Games like Myst, while intensely lonely, at least introduced a feeling of meaningfulness, that the player's actions mattered in some larger context. Same with The Sims. And while these games have been studiously ignored by most game developers, they have far, far outsold any other PC games ever. It's not that people won't buy computer games; they just won't buy flashy crap that seems to satisfy the typical gamer (and perhaps, the typical game developer?).

A lot of people who fall into the presumed "core gamer" demographic - that portion of the 18- to 30-year-old mostly male audience that buys games - don't seem to care about meaningfulness. They don't really seem to catch on, at least consciously, to the power of giving someone something important to do. Shooting bad guys is "important" enough, at least if they die with realistic rag-doll physics.''

Godless at Gene Expression, writes a New York Times translation of rap lyrics,#

``EMINEM: "The most meanest emcee on this - on this earth / Cause since birth I've been cursed with this curse to just cursed / And just blurt this bezerk and bizarre shit that works / And it sells and it helps in its self / To relieve all this tension dispensing me"

TRANSLATION: I am a rap "artiste" / Sometimes my mouth gets me into trouble / Ironically, it has also made me a lot of money / Go figure ''

Jakob Nielsen writes about Misconceptions About Usability...#

``*Usability Is Expensive*

Yes, big computer companies have been known to invest in million-dollar usability labs. Yes, experienced usability professionals are very highly paid. And yes, large-scale user testing to compare multiple design alternatives across several countries can cost $200,000 or more. Ouch.

But most everyday usability projects are cheap. Small companies don't need labs; you can run user tests in a spare conference room. Rather than hiring expensive usability professionals with ten years' experience, you can teach existing staff how to conduct studies. And, even though international studies are great, you don't start there: just spend a few days testing five domestic customers. ''

More commentary on The Futile Pursuit of Happiness by me,#

I think of this, that people cannot guess how things will make them feel and will always adapt to things that "make them happy", as evidence that there is always something new to want and desire. Always something new to make yourself miserable because you don't have it. And this is a nice data point showing the science between the Buddhist Axiom that desire is the root of all unhappiness.

``If ego decides it likes the situation, it begins to churn up all sorts of ways to possess it. A craving to consume the situation arises and we long to satisfy that craving. Once we do, a ghost of that craving carries over and we look around for something else to consume. We get into the habitual pattern of becoming consumer oriented. Perhaps we order a piece of software for our computer. We play with it for awhile, until the novelty wears out, and then we look around for the next piece of software that has the magic glow of not being possessed yet. Soon we haven't even got the shrink wrap off the current package when we start looking for the next one. Owning the software and using it doesn't seem to be as important as wanting it, looking forward to its arrival. This is known as the hungry ghost realm where we have made an occupation out of craving. We can never find satisfaction, it is like drinking salt water to quench our thirst. ''

Science helps us prove things we already know.

Via Brad DeLong is The Simulation Argument that we are probably living in a computer simulation. From The Summary ...#

``The simulation hypothesis, however, may have some subtle effects on rational everyday behaviour. To the extent that you think that you understand the motives of the simulators, you can use that understanding to predict what will happen in the simulated world they created. If you think that there is a chance that the simulator of this world happens to be, say, a true-to-faith descendant of some contemporary Christian fundamentalist, you might conjecture that he or she has set up the simulation in such a way that the simulated beings will be rewarded or punished according to Christian moral criteria. An afterlife would, of course, be a real possibility for a simulated creature (who could either be continued in a different simulation after her death or even be "uploaded" into the simulator's universe and perhaps be provided with an artificial body there). Your fate in that afterlife could be made to depend on how you behaved in your present simulated incarnation. Other possible reasons for running simulations include the artistic, scientific or recreational. In the absence of grounds for expecting one kind of simulation rather than another, however, we have to fall back on the ordinary empirical methods for getting about in the world.''

This was from IRC earlier...#

Some Dude: oh dude you suck.
Some Dude: i clicked on makeoutcity and I just got a fucking blog.
Some Dude: what's up with that? I was expecting a cityfull of makeoutednes.s
Some Dude: it's like those rooms that say 'women' and inside there's just a toilet.

Peter Lindberg quotes to the third degree, and I intend to raise it to the next level,#

``There are three golden rules:

1. Put down conceitedly every requirement, argument, inspiration and mind's eye picture that occurs during the design process, and put it down as concisely, enthusiastically, and pictorially as possible.

2. Phrase your conclusions, set out and color your pictures, in such a way that they will mean the most to you (or a colleague) at a second reading.

3. File everything where you will still find it fresh and clean tomorrow or in a year's time. Architecture needs paper in order to take form: enjoy and respect your material.''

Peter comments,

``To me, these rules seem intended to stimulating the generation of ideas in projects, rather than a form of documentation. I see it as a habit that reinforces itself: a habit of discussion, thinking, brainstorming, refining ideas, combining ideas, and so on. It also builds culture.''

You can't force discussion, brain storming, or right thinking - you can only encourage them and help make them habits. "Agile development" (I hate this term.) and democracy are two good enablers of these goals.

Peter Lindberg also writes about software projects as scientific explorations...#

``Some ideas about scientific exploration as a metaphor for software projects: Scientific exploration doesn't take place in a void; there's always a starting point, something to relate to. But there's also something unknown that is explored, that we want to learn about.

With this metaphor, we conduct experiments to prove our hypotheses (as per the scientific method). One way to do this is to express the hypotheses in code, either as prototypes or by evolving the real piece of software under development, and let the future users test them, such that their feedback either proves or disproves our hypothesis.''

He later adds the following,

``For a software project viewed as a scientific exploration, it becomes apparent that what matters at a given time is the set of proven hypotheses, not whether the exploration has proceeded according to some original plan. The purpose of a project becomes not meeting some set goal, but exploring a field (the problem context), trying to answer questions, solving problems, and so on.'

Charles Miller points to Critiques of Libertarianism#

Michael Watkins, a Natural Born Blogger, writes about how history should judge Bush,#

``The concept of opportunity cost kept running through my mind as I was digesting the President's speech on Iraq. The idea is a simple, but powerful one: when thinking about a choice about how to allocate some scarce resource, say for the sake of argument $87 billion, you should focus on the opportunities you will give by going down a certain path.

[...]

I believe that history will and should judge President Bush not so much on what he did, but on what his choices made it impossible to do.''

He also writes about how we are committed to Iraq,
``To say we are committed does not mean that we have to be happy about it. [...] To say we are committed does not mean that we buy the administration's rationale for why we are there. [...] To say we are committed does not mean that anyone else is going to help us. The President's continued use of the declarative tense, in which he essentially tells the international community to help us out or face an even bigger mass, suggests that he still doesn't get it. This is a President who doesn't know how to admit mistakes and ask for help. It's simply a continuation of the rhetoric of threat and unilateralism that has alienated us from our allies. Who is accountable for that?

We must hold someone accountable for those errors of judgment, or else we will do nothing to prevent them from reoccurring in the future.''

Via Joey deVilla is Tom McDonald retelling a classic story about the meaning of life. I think it's interesting how at each step the jar is "full."#

Joey deVilla is on the television.#

Dr. Frank writes about the Norfolk natives and nature,#

``And have I mentioned the dear little hobbits? Biffins, Bofurs, Bracegirdles, Proudfoots, etc.? They'll bring you back to earth, so to speak. They live in sweet little houses built from stones gathered from the seashore; I'm quite confident that when we are safely out of earshot they turn to one another and say things like "there's queer folk about, and no mistake," rolling every "R." But they don't quite seem to blend in all that well either. The landscape sets itself apart from hobbits and Big Folk alike. Believe me, I realize how fortunate I am to have been able to "live" the north Norfolk coast (or at least to spin it) as a quaint, Nazgul-free Lord of the Rings fantasy rather than as some kind of Straw Dogs scenario... And yeah, I may be exaggerating just a teensy, tiny bit about all this, but what the hell... it's really nice out there.''

Ryan McGee talks psyche...#

``So this friend of mine keeps insisting that people enter into our lives at certain points for a reason. Not a divine reason per say, but definitely a kharmic element is involved. That there's a reason people appear when they do. That they have medicinal properties, as it were. A balm on the soul. A kick in the ass. Whatever function they might inevitably serve, they are introduced or re-introduced to you for cosmic reason.

Course, all that's a load of crap. And I can write this since I told her as much to her face. The sentiment is nice and comforting and it takes away all personal autonomy, and there's my issue with it. I believe our lives are one big messy pinball game; I just don't believe any one person is manning the flippers.

[Talk about how music never loses it's influence on you, and how people can let you down.]

Now, I'm not advocating a hermit-like retreat away from society and into one's headphones, though such trips periodically and finitely are always good, I feel. Substitute "film" or "book" or "theatre" or whatever you want here for "music". Just don't substitute "crystal meth" and then blame it on my site, OK? The arts (and the humanities in general) exist as an oasis for the crushing mediocrity and imperfection of everyday life. The best art (and the best pop art especially) makes the magical attainable, even though perfection only exists for the length of a song or the area of a canvas.''

Chris Rhodes writes about some weird bugs,#

``Bugs bugs bugs... some of which were nastily difficult to track down. Particular embarrassments:

(ash (1- (ash 1 32)) -40) no longer returns 1;

(round 1.3) no longer trashes the stack;

(truncate 291351647815394962053040658028983955 10000000000000000000000000) now returns 29135164781, not 29135164782. ''

Curt on the War on _Terrorism_#

``It's not a war on Terror. It's a war on Terrorism. Terrorism is bad and should be wiped out. Terror is different, it's a human emotion that sometimes needs to be embraced to find out what is behind it. It's important, because the demonizing of Terror is yet another step towards invalidating human emotions.

What's so stupid about the reaction is that it is exactly an illustration of what happens when you do invalidate real terror. You've got a whole set of people that are petrified of terrorism and what it means, so much so that as soon as the concept is introduced to them as anything other than a vague hazy term, they immediately and reflexively react with an instinct: "Aaagh! Smash smash! get it offa me! kill! kill!" They don't even try to come to any wisdom about it. It's worse than animal, because it's not actually expressing fear, it's acting from a hatred of fear. And in the long run, it just makes the situation worse. This administration is not strong, it is lethal and stupid. ''

Moxie and her cats watched Legally Blonde, then they reviewed it,#

``Phoebe's review:
I sat with my Mom while she watched this nihilistic chick flick. I was busy reading Nietzsche. Legally Blonde? Whatever. I'm an intellectual hippy, paw is down.''

Moxie is profiling some silly Califlower candidates. Fun!#

Tony Pierce is such a role model...#

``First piercing/tattoo: if it wasnt against the bible i would be covered in tattoos and have nipple piercings''

Ted Leung writes about what he thought about Be,#

``During the time that I was in Apple's Newton Group, one of my colleagues in the OS group was fooling around with alternate operating systems on Mac hardware. I remember the first time I ever saw BeOS live. Herman had just installed it on his machine, which was a PowerMac 9500 (I can't remember if it was a dual, all I remember was that I was jealous because he had a PowerMac, I was still creaking along on a 68K (yes, unbelievably, there was a shortage of PowerMac hardware inside Apple). Anyway, I still remember standing there as he booted the machine into BeOS. He and I just looked at each other, kind of stunned, because all of a sudden we realized how fast the PowerMac hardware actually was. We never actually saw all the performance becase MacOS was still doing mixed mode switches due to emulation, and Rhapsody was carrying a lot of UNIX bloat. After the surprise wore off, sadness/depression set in, as we realized that we were probably never going to see the PowerMac hardware utilized to the fullest.

But as we all know by now, the best technology doesn't always win.''

Tom Coates thinks about Recommendation Engines...#

``I'm doing a bit of work around recommendations and recommendations engines at the moment, and I'm finding it really illuminating. The thing I think I'm most surprised by is how unclear the boundaries that surround the whole concept actually are - how everything seems to bleed into surrounding areas - where structure and categorisation bleeds into navigation bleeds into contextualisation bleeds into associations between things which bleeds into tracked user-behaviour in aggregate which bleeds into individual user behaviour patterns.

[Amazon has lots of different recommendation engines all going at the same time.] All of which only makes it worse that seem to think they think I'm obsessed with low-grade sk8ter rawk.''

Philip Greenspun disses Manilla a little bit,#

``Hmm... one of the nice things about software like what our students at MIT build and like what's behind photo.net and philip.greenspun.com is that all postings are stored in a standard relational database management system such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. It is virtually impossible to lose transactions in a commercial RDBMS. This server, though, runs its own object database and it seems to have eaten all of the comments on the Music CD item (from Friday). Fortunately I have many of them in email alerts and I'm posting them here...''

John Wiseman links and comments on a NYT Feature about "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness"...#

John quotes, ``Apparently people do a very bad job of predicting what will make them happy and just how happy it will make them. It's also interesting that research suggests that "wealth above middle-class comfort makes little difference to our happiness, for example, or that having children does nothing to improve well-being -- even as it drives marital satisfaction dramatically down." and "the data make it all too clear that boosting the living standards of those already comfortable, such as through lower taxes, does little to improve their levels of well-being, whereas raising the living standards of the impoverished makes an enormous difference." ''

And I quote, ``The problem, as Gilbert and company have come to discover, is that we falter when it comes to imagining how we will feel about something in the future. It isn't that we get the big things wrong. We know we will experience visits to Le Cirque and to the periodontist differently; we can accurately predict that we'd rather be stuck in Montauk than in a Midtown elevator. What Gilbert has found, however, is that we overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions -- our ''affect'' -- to future events. In other words, we might believe that a new BMW will make life perfect. But it will almost certainly be less exciting than we anticipated; nor will it excite us for as long as predicted. The vast majority of Gilbert's test participants through the years have consistently made just these sorts of errors both in the laboratory and in real-life situations. And whether Gilbert's subjects were trying to predict how they would feel in the future about a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, the defeat of a preferred political candidate or romantic rejection seemed not to matter. On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.

[...]

This is exciting to Gilbert. But at the same time, it's not a technique he wants to shape into a self-help book, or one that he even imagines could be practically implemented. ''Hope and fear are enduring features of the human experience,'' he says, ''and it is unlikely that people are going to abandon them anytime soon just because some psychologist told them they should.'' In fact, in his recent writings, he has wondered whether forecasting errors might somehow serve a larger functional purpose he doesn't yet understand. If he could wave a wand tomorrow and eliminate all affective-forecasting errors, I ask, would he? ''The benefits of not making this error would seem to be that you get a little more happiness,'' he says. ''When choosing between two jobs, you wouldn't sweat as much because you'd say: 'You know, I'll be happy in both. I'll adapt to either circumstance pretty well, so there's no use in killing myself for the next week.''

The pursuit of knowledge is a quest for happiness but you can never adapt adapt to the result because as long as you do not succumb to arrogance, you can never know (or think you know) everything. Thus knowledge, is the one goal that will not let you down, because you'll forever be walking towards it.