I just read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. And I whole heartily agree with the quotation on the front cover:#

From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories - the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.

It is very insightful and makes you feel like it's plan could really do wonders for the world. There's an Online Community for the book too.#

Here are some favourite quotes.#

This about finding in the newspaper an ad for a student, when the reader has been in search of an earnest teacher for so long...#

But this still doesn't explain my outrage, does it?

Try this: You've been in love with someone for a decade-someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open up the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has place an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by... [pg. 6]

Ishmael, a gorilla, is talking about the difference between life at the zoo, and life in Africa.#

By contrast, this life was agonizingly boring and never pleasant. Thus in asking why, I was trying to puzzle out why life should be divided in this way, half of it interesting and pleasant and half of it boring and unpleasant. I had no concept of myself as a captive; it didn't occur to me that anyone was preventing me from having an interesting and pleasant life. When no answer to my question was forthcoming, I began to consider the differences between the two life-styles. The most fundamental difference was that in Africa I was a member of a family-of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas-but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

I considered the matter of feeding. Human children dream of a land where the mountains are ice cream and the trees are gingerbread and the stones are bonbons. For a gorilla, Africa is such a land. Wherever one turns, there is something wonderful to eat. One never thinks, "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absentmindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. [pg. 12]

In a discussion about the destiny of man there was this quote,#

In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers [aka, The Civilized] see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takes chose a brief life of glory. [pg. 75]

An interesting misconception in the old account of history,#

When the people of your culture encountered the hunter-gatherers of Africa and America, it was thought that these were people who had degenerated from the natural, agricultural state, people who had lost the arts they'd been born with. The Takes had no idea that they were looking at what they themselves had been before they became agriculturalists. As far as the Takers knew, there was no 'before.' Creation had occurred just a few thousand years ago, and Man the Agriculturalist had immediately set about the task of building civilization. [pg. 201]

And how history relates to the present in the two different cultures of the Takers and the Leavers (the primitives)...#

"Yes, I see. It's coming together for me now. I was saying that among the Leavers you always have the sense of a people with a past extending back to the dawn of time. Among the Takers you have the sense of a people with a past extending back to 1963."

Ishmael nodded, but then went on: "At the same time, it should be noted that ancientness is a great validator among the people of your culture-so long as it's restricted to that function. For example, the English want all their institutions-and all the pageantry surrounding those institutions-to be as ancient as possible (even if they're not). Nevertheless, they themselves don't live as the ancient Britons lived, and haven't the slightest inclination to do so. Much the same can be said of the Japanese. They esteem the values and traditions of wiser, nobler ancestors and deplore their disappearance, but they have no interest in living the way those wiser, nobler ancestors lived. In short, ancient customs are nice for institutions, ceremonies, and holidays, but Takers don't want to adopt them for everyday living." [pg. 202]

Ishmael educates the reader of the not-so-grimness of the lives of the Leavers.#

Hunter-gatherers no more live on the knife-edge of survival than wolves or lions or sparrows or rabbits. Man was as well adapted to life on this planet as any other species, and the idea that he lived on the knife-edge of survival is simply biological nonsense. As an omnivore, his dietary range is immense. Thousands of species will go hungry before he does. His intelligence and dexterity enable him to live comfortably in conditions that would utterly defeat any other primate.

Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work-which makes the among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as 'the original affluent society.' And incidentally, predation of man is practically nonexistent. He's simply not the first choice on any predator's menu. [pg. 220]

Ishmael advises the reader with a plan on how to make the future a wonderful place,#

As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they've been acting for the past ten thousand years. They're going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they're going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ides and leave a void behind: you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost-something that makes better sense then the old horror of Man supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't server his needs directly or indirectly. [pg. 249]

That thing that is to replace the destructive man is the man that is the role model to all future species that have a choice. A choice between living with or against the world. To show that you can survive if you are allowed a chance, because you will learn what the right choice is and the world with be a better place for your decision.

Ishmael says that he learned that culture was like a giant prison from an ex-convict who he once talked to.#

Primarily what I learned from him is that, contrary to the impression one receives from prison movies, the prison population is not at all an undifferentiated mass. As in the outside world, there are the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. And relatively speaking, the rich and the powerful live very well inside the prison-not as well as they do on the outside, of course, but much, much better than the poor and the weak. In fact they can have very nearly anything they want, in terms of drugs, food, sex, and service.

[...]

You want to know what this has to do with anything, [...] It has this to do with anything: The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leave people in North America was given a chance: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjust to prison life. [pg. 251]

It's a very mind opening book.#

Richard Tallent writes about the devil and the divine being in the details.#

Good software is like a good car: aesthetic design, things found where you expect them, a good "fit" to the body, controls that make sense, good negative space, and plenty of "no-brainer" automatic features.

[...]

My coworkers probably wonder why I actually bother over finding the right icons and color palette for an application, why I implement keyboard accelerators on web forms, and why I'm constantly tweaking formatting. I get positively giddy when I get some new little feature going that makes the UI a little simpler. It's because every little change I make will be repaid in an untold amount of time that my software's users won't be spending trying to find an option or understand a report.

Tony Pierce is the original romantic.#

people ask why i dont write about anna any more. i told her that when she got married to that no talent boy bander that i wasnt going to write about her. people ask me if i miss her and i say yeah.

[...]

people ask me why i dont like her husband and i say easy, just look at him, or better yet, or worse yet, listen to him.

[...]

i say how come he doesnt wear tshirts that said anna on it.

i say how come he doesnt wear a turtleneck that says luckiest man alive.

Bill Dennis said it best.#

Judges agree: Blacks and Latinos too stupid to vote

You know, I would think that after spending half of my 40 years working as a reporter, I would be more cynical than I am. When a bunch of liberal organizations asked a federal appellate court to halt the upcoming recall election in California recall vote because minorities and old people couldn't possibly be expected to understand punch card ballots, I thought there was no way this obviously racist argument would be successful. I guess I was wrong.

Brad DeLong wrote something so insightful that you must read it.#

A tidbit between a conversation between the young and old...

Adult: "President" doesn't have to mean elected. After all, "President" is just a Latin word meaning, "the guy who sits in the front of the room."

The Ten-Year-Old: But that was two-thousand years ago. Meanings drift. Since then, the word "President" has picked up more meanings--it's not just a title.

Adult: So are you saying that any government can call its ruler "President," but that only someone elected in a free and fair election in which a majority of the voters casting ballots voted for him or her is a real President?

The Ten-Year-Old: Yep. A majority of the voters. Or a majority of the votes in some weirdo electoral college setup that makes no sense but that is nevertheless part of some duly-ratified constitution. Yep.

Via Boing Boing is Stealth Disco.#

Stealth Disco is the act of sneaking up behind your cow-orkers and silently rocking out while a co-conspirator films you and the hapless "victim."

Via Tim Bray is Rick Jelliffe on how Spaghetti would prefer to not be free...#

Any sufficiently monolithic technology is indistinguishable from spaghetti. Once a large technology is made from sufficiently intertwined parts, there is no way to order an exposition of it such that strongly-connected ideas are always close together. Spaghetti doesn't want to be free. (At least, "no way" to order the exposition with HTML-style pages: maybe WXS needs something more like Nelson's transclusion, where you can pull in fragments (without losing their context) and embed them into running text, without the maintenance penalty of duplicated sections.) Indeed, I think that is a forgotten rationale for XML over SGML: dumbing down an intertwined technology so that it could have a spec straightforward-enough that people could conveniently read it.

Richard Tallent weighs in...

I think we need to tatoo the acronym "K.I.S.S." to the foreheads of every person working on new XML-based standards (web services included). A byte is a pretty simple, platform-independent unit of storage, but what drove us all to XML in the first place was the way programmers combined those "simple" bytes with "simple" ideas like floating points, endians, structures, blocks, UNICODE, UTF, headers, footers, CRCs, compression, encryption, pointers, and b-trees. The collective end result: just to peek into our "simple" binary files, we needed reams of code and documentation.

There's a very interesting article in the Harvard Crimson from Shoshana Zuboff about the problems with the Economy and current capitalism.#

The problem...

As you shop for new classes this week, consider this: the pandemic of corporate narcissism, greed, rigidity and sheer cluelessness that you have been reading about all summer is a sign of the ripening conditions for economic revolution. We are facing a once-in-a-century opportunity for wholesale innovation and extreme creativity comparable to the rise of mass markets and mass production nearly 100 years ago. It is a time for a new generation—yours—to reinvent capitalism for our times. Your fresh insight and heart can ignite the next wave of wealth creation capable of carrying the global economy to new heights of prosperity and community. Here is why.

We are living in a period of "disruptive capitalism," because we have changed more than the companies we depend on as consumers and employees. Today, we have all become history's shock absorbers, struggling to reconcile our new needs with the demands of an exhausted business model. A chasm has developed between organizations and us. It is filled with our stress, outrage and frustration. Anxiety is widespread and most people feel that they are being forced to fight over an ever-shrinking pie. How did we get here?

The solution...

As employees, we are tired of stuffing our complex new lives into the simplistic old career structures that still dominate most jobs—a phenomenon I call "career taxidermy." We want a life. We want families. We want the flexibility to control our own time. In other words, as individual economic citizens, we want more than just goods and services, paychecks and promotions. We want a "support economy," an economy in which we can live our ever-more complex lives as we choose. And in return, we are willing to give a great deal—cash, intelligence, creativity and commitment.

When we take our complex new lives to the door of business, we are typically met with adversarialism and indifference. Efficiency dictates that we get seven minutes with our doctors, even though we spend hours navigating automated phone trees and negotiating with call centers. Legitimate insurance claims are routinely rejected to keep costs down. Do you know anyone who looks forward to calling his or her telecom provider or bank to question a bill? Have you tried calling an airline lately? Managerial capitalism was great for making cars, but it has been a disaster when applied to services and is hopeless in the face of our new yearning for support.

Some chilling statistics about the economy's inability to support us and gain our trust:

According to one recent U.S. survey, a whopping 96 percent of consumers say they do not trust their HMO, 93 percent do not trust their health insurer and 88 percent do not trust their telecom provider. Which industry has the lowest mistrust rating? Only 60 percent say they mistrust their supermarket.

When it comes to the employee side of our lives, the news is just as bad. Another recent U.S. survey shows that 96 percent of employees want more flexibility and control over their time through options such as telecommuting, job-sharing and flextime—although few encounter such possibilities. Seventy-three percent say they are willing to curtail their careers to make more time for their families, and 75 percent would like to change jobs within the coming year.

The Yeti speaks to the seeker in us all.#

You've always considered yourself a seeker of Truth. A worshipper even. Nothing was as holy or important as discovering every nuance of belief in a system or a cause.

That was fine in your 20's. You were able to taste life proffered from many cups. You learned, not the truth, but the essence of learning.

There is something noble about the pursuit of knowledge. Yet there is also something selfish in it. Aware that life's deepest secrets are beyond all but the most disciplined, and cognizant that learning all Truth is beyond mortal ability, there is perhaps a time to set aside your selfishness and work on disseminating that which you know.

That time is now. You need to stop arguing and philosophizing, and start teaching. This will require more effort than proselytization. You're going to have to work on the message, and the audience.

Richard links the Advice Goddess, giving, well, advice.#

you should never leave a recorded message for a woman you don't know very well. But, but...you don't want to get rejected, not to your face. Yes, you do. Because what's worse than being rejected to your face is being rejected not to your face. When that happens, you're never sure whether you really were rejected, or as you'd prefer to believe, you called the wrong number or she dropped her answering machine into the Ganges.

Richard quotes on the "Why Buy the Coy" dilemma.#

heather: "i'm suffering the whole "why buy the cow" dilemma. it's a horrible contradiction. we're told that good girls don't sleep around, but that also seems to mean that good girls also don't sleep with a boy they think is hot without some sort of committment. why can't we? if the boy is cute and interested, why is it so wrong to get naked with him?"

Funny. She explains why in the next paragraph: "i suppose i'm just afeared that the boy will think it's just the sex when there's a hope for more. i don't want it to always be just the sex. i want there to be the love and the romance and the committment, complete with the trust, the respect and the quiet affection, too." Some guys (many guys, it turns out), will happily trade commitment for sex.

Alan Green writes about "It Should Just Work"...#

"It Should Just Work" is a wonderful computing cliche that I can no longer say with a straight face.

However, after making a check-in this morning, I couldn't think of a more appropriate phrase to reassure a co-worker that I had fixed the problem. "It will be alright now," would have been too strong a statement. "I hope it works," would have been accurate, but did not express my level of confidence correctly.

New Tales of Symphonia screenshots at RPGamer.#

Square Enix announces a new game.#

Lance Arthur is funny times twenty.#

Me: I just don't get why your site is so popular. I mean, really, why is it so popular?
Jason: (shrug)
Me: No, really. I'm interested. I mean, who gives a flying bloody fuck about your opinion about, like, black holes or some shit?
Jason: I don't know.
Me: You must have some idea, Jason. Honestly, I'm quite perplexed. I mean, okay, so, anyone could just go off on black holes or whatnot on their page and, you know, bitch about The Matrix sequel and whatever, and yet when you do it, it's like... historical or something! What is that?
Jason: I don't know, Lance.
Me: Jason, don't be coy. Are you paying people? Is that it? Do you pay people for links? Because I'd totally accept money from you.
Jason: No.
Me: Because when you look at the site... what is it? Where's the "there" there? Sure, you update it frequently and shit, but a lot of times it's like, hello? So what? Really, jason, so what?
Jason: I'm going out.
Me: I'll come with!

Richard Tallent writes about indicators of tricks being pulled by software engineers on non-technical people.#

Robert L. Clark published in the Chronicle for Higher Education a 7-point list of indicators that some scientific claim is probably horse poo. Good read.

The software world needs a list like this for non-technical people, a simple set of guidelines to help them make reasoned judgments about the claims of consultants and shiny printed boxes. I've started such a list below, anyone care to add to it? [...]

Werner Vogels writes about a meeting of some database researchers. The topics discussed and the report are both interesting.#

Tony Pierce will be your best friend.#

you ever want to be friends with people because its so obvious that they have all the wrong friends?

i felt that way and still feel that way about mike tyson and michael jackson and even oj. i think if they all just had one friend who woulda said, yo, king of pop, get those fucking kids OUT of here, dog.

if i was iron mike's friend i would just say, today i will hold the bag, just hit it. dont think about anything else. think about tetris. heres ac/dc's for those about to rock, we're going to put on side one and just hit until its time to flip the record over. yes, when i train pro boxers i use record players. cd players are for champs. mike is an ex-champ.

Tony Pierce quotes, at length, an AP article about the Patriot Act.#

In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes.

[...]

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

chromatic on the good things about documentation.#

Aside from some minor hacking on directory views, I spent an hour or two writing documentation for Jellybean. I've said before that I hate writing documentation (which is weird, as I enjoy writing and make a very enjoyable living as a technical editor and writer) and that documentation helps me figure out nasty bits in my code. If it's embarrassing to document, it needs to be cleaned up and perhaps rethought.

Martin Pool quotes an interview (second hand) with Bill Joy about writing vi.#

This quote about the speed of it is great,

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.

The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

Philip Greenspun writes about why gun laws are important to getting elected. And how this foretells the future of the Democrats.#

Why are gun laws so important? Consider Johnny Paycheck. He has no freedom of speech, at least if he wants to keep his job. He has no freedom of action; a hierarchy of managers tells him what to do all day every day. Johnny Paycheck has no wealth; all of his income goes for rent and payments on his SUV. He has no pension; his retirement mutual fund is being eviscerated by managerial looting at American public companies. Johnny spends about 40% of his income on various taxes so that rich people don't have to pay taxes.

Why does Johnny support the Republicans then, the party of corporate looters and tax cuts for rich people? He expects rich people and the government to take away all of his money and freedom, regardless of which party is in power. The difference to him is that the Republicans will allow him to keep his gun, the one shred of personal dignity that he has left. The Democrats want to take away Johnny's gun, his last vestige of personal freedom and manhood.

Perhaps if gun laws made a difference alienating half of America's voters might be worthwhile. It would be nice to strip America's underclass of their ability to perpetrate violence. But the gun laws proposed by the election-losing Democrats are feeble pathetic measures that serve only to annoy gun nuts.

You can have a powerful semi-automatic rifle... but it can't look exactly like a military "assault rifle". You can get a machine gun but you need to fill out some forms. You can buy a pistol but unless you fill out the right forms you can only kill 5 people with it before popping in another magazine. These then are the achievements for which the Democrats have sacrificed their relevance to American government.

Philip Greenspun notes that real estate sales are killing CD purchases and that the RIAA needs a new target.#

Went to a party last week in Boston's North End. Most of the folks there were young people who work for airlines. This is a prime demographic for the music industry. Yet they were not playing CDs. A tiny apartment in Boston costs $2000/month. This has dual effects: (1) young people have no money to buy CDs because it all goes to their landlords, and (2) young people have no space to store CDs because every square inch of their apartments is already devoted to something more essential.

Ask Bjørn Hansen links to Grand Theft America, a flash move about how Katherine Harris stole the vote in Florida.#

Sarah Dessen writes about Book Launches.#

There are book launches. And then there are Book Launches. Madonna's new children's book, The English Roses is now on sale. If you click on that link, you can hear a little audio clip of Madonna talking about her book. This is apparently the widest simultaneous release of any book ever, with over a hundred million copies going on sale today. Madonna, bless her heart, will not have to endure all those little quirky milestones of the firstime author, like appearing at a bookstore with four people in the audience, three of which came with you. Or doing the rounds of school book fairs, where you sit at a card table with six copies of your book in some gym that smells like Ben Gay. I can't tell you how many varied humiliations I have endured while trying to promote my books...a couple of years ago I did an event at a big historic house, where I was told I'd be speaking in the garage. I thought this was just a nice term for it, you know, that it was set up as something else, but no, it was a GARAGE. I had to stand there---no chairs---with gardening implements behind me, while two very nice people who had no idea who I was---but felt sorry for me standing in front of the weedwacker all alone---listened politely as I did my little program. Oh, the shame. And it just goes on and on. It's part of how it is: every author I know has a story like that. Many stories, in fact.

Peter Lindberg writes about annotating a book as a weblog. I try to do something similar by taking notes as I read a book, but I think he means something more: being able to look at what text he's commenting on. Coool idear.#

Then I thought about publishing an RSS feed along with the annotated book, where each item would point to an annotation. This is an interesting variation of the weblog concept. The front page would perhaps aggregate the latest n annotations, which can be clicked to visit the annotated passage.

Michael Watkins replies to some criticism of his blog.#

This excerpt about if acknowledging the message of terrorism justifies the means of terrorism is interesting.

You also don't see me engaged in any handwringing about "why do they hate us." They do, that's it. For those that do, and that seek to destroy us, there is no middle ground.

But we cannot ignore the forces that allow Osama bin Laden and his ilk to gain funding, recruit etc. Above all, we shouldn't be doing things that unnecessarily increase the level of hatred (note the word unnecessarily) and/or that catalyze a clash of civilizations.

The Israeli Palestinian conflict, and our role in it, plays a large role in this (The Economist agrees with me on this, see article the article cited in the original post.)

Addressing these issues by-no-means legitimizes terrorism. It is a pragmatic response to the realities of the situation, which we cannot wish away. How does promoting economic development in the Muslim world legitimize terrorism? How does seeking a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict legitimize terrorism?

Michael Feldman reports on some counterfeiting in the US.#

North Carolina cops are searching for a guy who successfully passed a $200 bill bearing George W. Bush's portrait and a drawing of the White House complete with lawn signs reading"no Justice Scandals" "We like broccoli" and "USA deserves a tax cut." The phony Bush bill was presented to a cashier at a Food Lion in Roanoke Rapids on September 6 by an unidentified male who was seeking to pay for $150 in groceries. Remarkably, the cashier accepted the counterfeit note and gave the man $50 change. "

Don Park fearlessly moves up the Don ladder.#