I listened to some more of the Christopher Lydon interviews I had missed today.#

I'm beginning to think that what Chris is doing is one of greatest things going on in the blogosphere right now. I am confident that the history books of the blogs will include Chris with his interviews, giving the blogosophere a voice, along side Dave Winer with RSS and David Sifry with Technorati.

In the interview with the Real Live Preacher, Chris asks what he thinks of the "blogging revolution" and I think that RLP says something very interesting. He says that thinking about a "revolution" too much, is often the best way to doom it. I don't think he means that you can't think about it or how to improve or further it, but rather if you start patting yourself on the back to early you can lose the cause. I don't want that to happen with blogs.

In the James Gleick interview about Isaac Newton, James remarks that people often attribute great rationalism to Isaac Newton and hail it as a wonder of the modern era. Yet, he says, sometimes we trust our scientists a great deal - when we get in an elevator or plane - but other times we don't: when they predict that pollution while destroy our environment. He continues, Newton would be very disappointed at this lapse in rationalism that is often driven by political and religious reasons. I find that comment to be very poignant.

Lawrence Lessig is a member of NAN.#

Net Advisory Net (NAN), a group of advisors that will present Governor Dean and his team with "diverse and highly-informed opinions concerning the Internet and its potential impact upon society." NAN's first focus will be bridging the digital divide through universal broadband access. According to Governor Dean's site, the candidate is "seeking advice, not endorsements, and the advisors do not necessarily support the campaign."

Paul Bausch blogs on it.

Joi Ito is on it!

Jeremey Zawodny is not impressed with politicians who "blog."#

I really don't understand all the excitement. Another political candidate has decided to add "weblog" to the list of ways that he and his campaign staff can pollute our lives with more political bullshit. Yippie!!! As if that somehow validates or improves the image of weblog technology or the candidate.

Far from it.

Same shit, different medium.

Maybe the ratio of talk to action will someday improve in politics enough that I'd bother to pay attention, but I don't think an installation of MovableType and an RSS feed are going to do the trick.

Randall Parker writes about net surplus taxpayers...#

Imagine that. The Economist is coming out in favor of Europeans having more babies. The editors of The Economist still need to expand their analysis further to precisely pinpoint who should have babies. The problem is not just the lack of babies. What the Western countries really need is more people who are net surplus taxpayers. By "net surplus taxpayers" I mean people who pay more in taxes than they create in costs (if anyone has a more accurate phrasing for this term please post in the comments). People of different educational and occupational backgrounds are not equally likely to have net surplus taxpayer children. What we need is more children from people whose children are most likely to pay a lot of taxes and to generate fewer costs that governments end up paying for.

Someone who, for instance, commits a long string of destructive crimes at a fairly young age and then spends the rest of his life in jail generates enormous costs that the rest of us pay for. Someone who is lazy, never tries to develop any skills, lives in subsidized housing, makes very little money, and pays little in taxes is also effectively a net cost to society. It may sound harsh to describe people as net surplus or net deficit taxpayers. But we face real long term financial problems due to both an aging population and growing segments of populations that are not net surplus taxpayers even before they reach retirement. We need solutions for these problems.

Richard Tallent writes a wonderful essay about the politics of programming and how to create job THROUGH the IT industry.#

Andy Oram asks a question I've coincidentally been mulling over for a few days: the goal of IT (and business in general these days) seems to be to cut costs by replacing humans, which leads to higher unemployment:

I can no longer avert my eyes from the consequences of the field I have chosen, and no one else who programs, administers, or promotes the use of computers can morally avert their eyes either.

[...]

Most solutions I've seen for this problem are either completely protectionist (being in denial about technology replacing a job, such as the much-reduced need these days for blacksmiths) or depend on broken-window economics (i.e., relying on a systemic problem to create jobs, such as the argument that outlawing tobacco would devastate farmers and hospitals). I think I've discovered a few niches that can be easily targeted that do not fit into either category. These are by no means enhaustive, but I think they are illustrative of the concept Andy is trying to get across.

[...]

3. Replace materials, not people [...]
4. Make jobs easier, not redundant. [...]
5. Knowledge Augmentation. [...]

Read AT it.

Joi Ito on it:

My personal opinion is that short term quarter-by-quarter capitalism can't possibly think long term enough to deal with many of the larger social issues. I don't think it's just about creating jobs. I think issues such as the environment, poverty, privacy, even computer architectures defy short term profits/gains thinking sometimes. I think it's a good idea for computer professionals to be socially responsible and think long term whenever possible.

Jim Moore writes about the Clark campaign and why the Clinton's are supporting it...#

The Clintons are heavily supporting Wesley Clark in exchange for Clark choosing Hillary Clinton as the vice presidential candidate on Clark's ticket. Why is this good for Hillary? Assuming Clark/Clinton win the nomination, and assuming Clark/Clinton also win the election, Hillary as vice president is in good position to run for president in 2008 or 2012. In the meantime, both Clintons enjoy influencing policy, from her perch as VP, in the administration of a political neophite who is expected to be receptive to their advice. Assuming Clark/Clinton win the nomination and lose the election, Hillary Clinton becomes the presumptive presidential candidate for 2008.

[...]

Chris Lydon has written a favorable blog about Clark today, but I treasure something Chris said to me last week, "Presidential nomination politics is gang warfare. A bunch of guys get together and say, 'hey, do you want to take the hill? Let's do it! How about you be the candidate and I be the money man?"

Professor Weatherson posts a letter that reveals some interesting things about how an academic journal gets published.#

Oh, That Weapons Grade Uranium#

Bill Dennis writes about drug legalization.#

When I converted to libertarianism, I argued for total legalization. People own their own bodies, after all, so how can they be denied the right to medicate themselves? No one's more devout than a recent convert, I suppose. These days, I just hope the guy taking my order at McDonald's isn't too stoned to get my order right.

These days, I can see where doing away with all drug laws might not help create the self-medicated Utopia some libertarians envision. I'd settle for allowing terminally ill people to light up if they want, for not sicking the narco squad on doctors who prescribe pain-killing medication to people with chronic paid and not locking up the wives and girlfriends of drug dealers because they lived in the same house where a bunch of drugs were found.

Friedrich writes about a interesting school.#

I have often wondered how educators (and the politicians they report to) think learning is going to take place in schools where such items as peace, quiet, discipline and even personal safety are in short supply. It would seem as if the first requirement of a school would be to ensure an environment where these items—at last report mostly free—are plentiful.

[Talk Trey Whitfield's private school that has lots of rules and order. Some people think techniques are "robotic."]

These so-called "robotic" techniques seem to consist of dress codes for teachers, uniforms for students, and prohibitions (apparently enforced) on gold teeth, coarse talk in the hallways and hip-hop fashions. And, given the school's Christian religious affiliation, daily prayer. Corporal punishment, while permitted by the school's by-laws, has apparently never been necessary, possibly because of Principal Whitfield's previous line of work as a professional football player. This former New York public school teacher also takes the time to greet every student from pre-school to 8th grade with either a hug or a formal handshake.

It kind of makes you wonder if America's schools aren't failing for lack of well-socialized children, but for lack of leaders who are willing to be—well, you know, adults.

xian about Michael Feldman's opinion that blogs are essentially in reverse chronological order.#

The web is about now. The web is about "What have you done for me lately?"

I'm glad Michael hearkened back to Greek and Roman concepts of storytelling, because someone once told me that modern people look at time as if we are on the prow of a ship cutting through the sea. The past is behind us, the future lies ahead. This is the heroic American posture familiar from film and legend.

The Greeks, my friend told me, viewed time as if we were in the stern of a ship moving across the ocean looking back at our wake. As I thought about it, this metaphor is in many ways more apt. We back into the future. We can't see it. We can only see the past, but even then we can only see the ripples and memories of the past, gowing fuzzier and fainter as they recede into the distance.

She has no brain left, apparently.#

If you wondering what type of candidate Richard looks for, wonder no more.#

've said the following elsewhere, and I quote myself verbatim: "I prefer well-informed informed democrats who make decisions which benefit the most people most of the time and a decision-making process that is fairly flexible and transparent." Educated leaders are more than welcome, but being "educated" is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition in order to get my vote.

And so there is no confusion, I mean democrats in the sense that a person listens to the electors as well as leads them, and not in the capitalized Democratic sense which refers to the American political party.

Richard blogs about "being outed as a blogger" to your friends. I used to think I wouldn't like the idea of people I know personally knowing about it, but I don't think I would mind so much now...#

Adam helpfully pointed out to me that searching for my full name, with a little bit of patience, one could eventually find this weblog. That's fine. It's inevitable. Potential girlfriends (ha!) will probably search for me on a search engine and come to the conclusion that I'm some neurotic nerd. That's also fine. This weblog is a fairly accurate representation of the things I think about, but not necessarily of the actions that I take.

Michael Heraghty writes about the "blogosphere's so-called glass ceilling."#

I argued that the notion of there being any impediment to the popularity of women's blogs was clearly nonsense. That such a complaint was even postulated reveals the whining, blaming, conspiracy-theory mentality that underlies much of feminist "ideology".

From my everyday experience as a blog reader, I suggested there were roughly equal amounts of male and female bloggers. I noted that men's blogs tended to express opinions about external events, while women were more likely to opt for introspective biographies, and offered this as an explanation for the greater audience share enjoyed by male bloggers (people, I can only presume, are more likely to read weblogs that present or discuss newsworthy subjects).

Brad Hurley on Jakob the Conquerer.#

More people would probably take Jakob Nielsen seriously if he didn't have such a high opinion of himself. In today's Alertbox, he takes stock of what he views as his major victories in the battle to "stand up for what's right and defend humans from overly complex technology." A noble cause to be sure, but is he taking too much credit?

Joey deVilla, I hope I see you when you come down.#

Joi Ito links to a grass-ad for Clark.#

A friend of mine said this, "Desire makes passion more powerful, like distance bringing hearts together."#

Kim, maybe the relational model isn't right for facetted classification and navigation?#

Much Love.#

The Daily Kos advises against "pissing" on the First Amendment.#

It really scares me to see so many of you calling for criminal prosecution of Robert Novak. Are you guys insane?

Do I really need to explain the First Amendment, and the freedoms it confers on the press?

Jeez, a free and open press is the best safeguard we have against the tyranny of government. That's why the administration's past cowing of the press was so dangerous, and why the press' willingness to be muzzled so frustrating. Any governmental action that seeks to chill the free excercise of press freedoms is a clear and present danger to every one of our rights.

[...]

And remember, "good" and "evil" are subjective. You go after Novak today, they'll come for me tomorrow.

Michael describes his programming methodology.#

I don't know what "Extreme Programming®" is. Or any of the other four or five "Buzzword Programming" methodologies that have appeared in the world in the last ten years or so. This doesn't mean that I think they are stupid or useless, it probably just means I am either to arrogant or lazy to read a book about programming methodologies when there are so many more interesting things available to read.

In a world where it is important to sell books, the pressure to codify and trademark programming methodologies is totally understandable, but I have different theory about programming methodology. Here, for all the world to see, criticize, or even steal and write a book about, is the theory of programming that I carry around in my head. It isn't mine, because it is borrowed from all the great programmers I've ever worked with. I guess I should name it, so I can make money off the TV miniseries. I guess I can call this methodology "Whole Programming®"

A Forward that's Worth It.#

Richard Tallent on techie wannabies.#

The problem in the IT industry is as much one of supply as it is of demand. The market is chocked full of what Karl refers to as "Bob." I've seen them and worked with them, so have you. It is the 2-year tech school grad who "wants to do computers" but can't figure out which way PCI cards go in on a motherboard. It is the unschooled geek who thinks the world owes him a career where he can read Star Wars novels, customize his KDE skin, play the Sims, and maybe once a week (with many sighs and cursings) tweak a shell script or two. It is the middle-aged hack looking for a career change who figures they are qualified for a lead development position by virtue of having their own web site, complete with animated GIFs and a few grainy vacation photos, and some "really hard Java scripting." The market is already stuffed to the brim with Bobs, complete with their outdated certifications, worthless MIS degrees, and bogus job experience.

The Plight of The Orange Juice Container:#

When I was kid and something was lost, my mother was fond of saying that the lost thing didn't just get up walk and away. I imagined that the container of orange juice did in fact just get up and walk away. It had grown little arms and legs, forced open the refrigerator from inside, climbed down the shelves, and scrambled off into the bathroom, where it was now cowering in the bathtub, the poor thing, having realized that there is no way out of my apartment except through the front door, which I am not in the habit of leaving open (below is an artist's rendering of the plight of the orange juice container).

The Yeti is a on a roll...#

I also heard Michael Moore say America's culture is like apartheid because we don't have a black woman as president. Or, as Bill Maher put it - "a sista girl."

I don't want a sistah girl in the White House. Or a surfer dude. Or an ignorant hick. Or a Latin dancing machine. Or anyone else who defines themself by popular culture or race.

I want clear headed, classically educated, and morally strong people in the White House, regardless of their gender or the color of their skin.

But to be fair to Michael and Bill, I'm not held back by racist views as they seem to be.

A word of advice to wealthy entertainers. You're not smarter than the rest of the country. If you were, you wouldn't be talking about banding together with the other powerless idiots in the country. We may be stupid enough to buy a bill of goods about hope - we're not dumb enough to trust wealthy entertainers who can't seem to speak without being condescending.

Richard posts on the State of his Blog.#

This blog, as it is now, has been going well for me lately: instead of just blogging about my personal life straight out—as was the case from December 2000 to May of this year—I've been doing it in reference to other's personal posts and other stuff on the web, primarily newspaper articles. That's partly because I ran out of material to talk about (you can only talk about Missed Opportunities with girls for so long before people get fed up, send you "shit or get off the pot" emails and give up on you entirely), and partly because it was really boring. For me. But now I think my blog is more interesting because a) I'm linking to other people, which helps makes others aware of my blog as well as others aware of their blogs and b) because I don't have to think of stuff to blog about. Other People's Blogs (you down with OPB? yeah you know me!) remind me of stuff that in the past, present or future. Plus, this way I can be a lot more arrogant and self-loathing while engaging in the lives of others. It's nice to know that the stuff going on inside of my head isn't all that unique.

(That's still an enduring myth with a lot of people though: that the personal bullshit people go through is a totally unique experience. Yeah, whatever it is, it happened to you and thousands of others, and they handled it just fine.)

Morendil writes about "Project Schizophrenia," inspired by yesterday's Dilbert...#

Paradoxes arise because it's hard to keep logical types straight. Many actions or verbal utterances contain more than one logical type of message. The gist of the double bind is that you are receiving, on distinct logical levels, contradictory but threatening messages from a figure of authority, and there is a prohibition on even discussing the contradiction. You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game.

The "project" or "initiative" form of organization perhaps leads to more double bind situations that other forms, and among projects I would suppose that software projects are more vulnerable than others because software is all about communication; there more than anywhere else we find opportunities for mixing up (or keeping straight) communication and meta-communication.

A common issue is management keeping important information, e.g. about schedule, from project teams. (The converse happens as well, of course; many project teams keep information from their management.) I was asked recently about a project where management had negotiated one date with the customer, but had asked the project team to deliver on a date two months earlier, telling all sorts of scare stories about the customer pulling out if the date couldn't be met, while in private reasoning that "if they try to hit February there's some chance we might have something for April". Middle managers privy to this decision and its rationale were asked to keep it secret from the team.

Brad Hurley reflects on Japanese rooms and quotes a book...#

Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose.

Razib mocks the idea that all kids are above average.#

The guidelines, for marking key national curriculum exams, recommend that the current F grade, for 'fail', should be replaced with an N grade, for 'nearly'.

...

They include instructions that maths exam answers should be marked as either 'creditworthy' or 'not creditworthy', rather than correct or incorrect.

Chris Clark writes about his favourite thing about Mac OS X...#

I will say this, though: one of the greatest visual effects of Mac OS X (to my mind) is the window shadowing; the foreground window has a 'higher' drop shadow, indicating that it is 'closer' to the viewer than the background windows. In keeping with this stack order/distance analogy, background windows should be darker… as if dimly lit. Jaguar does a fair job with this by making its background—window—titlebars mildly transparent. More often than not, they inherit a degree of darkness from the desktop background they inhabit. Panther, however, has no such transparency and the background—window—titlebars are lighter than their foreground cousins, to boot. It is my humble opinion (and experience, given this last week of Jaguar—imitating—Panther fun and foreplay) that the practice of presenting foreground windows with titlebars darker than their background compatriots is completely counterintuitive; and though I doubt that Apple, in its magnanimity, will deign to alter their design decision any time soon, I sorely hope this changes before Panther's gold master. That is all.

Eugene Volokh posts his opinion of today's Doonesbury.#

Today's Doonesbury is a slam against Schwarzenegger, urging people to send in petitions to recall him once he gets elected. Not terribly funny or insightful, I think, but that's fine; Trudeau is entitled to express his opinion (and he is trying to make a deeper point, about the absurdity of the California recall procedure, as well as just slamming Schwarzenegger, though I don't think he's doing it very effectively).

But it struck me: This strip will probably be read by tens of millions of people nationwide, and millions in California. If someone who doesn't have Trudeau's media access wanted to buy the same amount of advertising space, and if "campaign finance reformers" had their way, he'd be committing a crime. After all, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 barred the spending of more than $1000 to elect or defeat a candidate for federal office, and many FECA supporters naturally want to do the same at the state level. The Supreme Court struck down that provision in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), but many scholars and activisits bitterly criticize that decision, and hope that the Court will one day reverse it. (It seems likely that there are already three votes on the Court -- Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer -- to do just that.)

Tom Coates as a very intriguing thought about space travel.#

So it occurred to me (while watching some dumb sci-fi TV series set in space) that maybe spaceships that make noise in a vacuum isn't such a dumb idea after all. I mean, obviously they wouldn't (couldn't) make any noise, but there would be all kinds of reasons why it would be in the best interest of neighbouring ships to simulate the sensation. After all, noise can convey all kinds of useful information - different guns make different noises, different engines make different noises, you can tell the location - perhaps even the speed - of an object by pure noise alone. If we were to assume that - in space - the computers and sensors on ships would most likely be taking in much more information than a human could easily assimilate through a visual interface, then it makes total sense that you'd try to deliver some of it through sound. In fact it seems astonishing that you wouldn't!

AKMA writes about blogs as an indicator of individuality.#

So far as I can tell, these hypotheses apply not only to marketing, but to other social scientific studies as well; the interests of aggregation trump the interests of particularity or adaptation. As a result, serious and intelligent people develop scientific generalizations about human behavior that human behavior itself tends to falsify when people behave in ways that reveal their difference from the aggregate, their responsiveness to contextual signals too fine to incorporate into a data set. One reason I appreciate blogs derives from their marked proclivity to favor the particular over the aggregate, their tendency to open onto adaptive behavior rather than to enforce expected conformity.

This is not to say that no bloggers are conformists or stick-in-the-muds; far from it! But although bloggers reflect the aggregate, homeostatic behavior that justifies quantitative research, the practice of blogging provides opportunities for particular differences to get a hearing, to make productive connections, to move in unanticipated directions.

Jeremy Doolittle is proud of Ashcroft for getting all those terrorists behind bars...#

Which is of course not to say that America's own ayatollah hasn't found his new toy handy for its intended purpose as well. Consider this victory in the war on terror:

The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to press charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County, Calif., who planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise ship she was traveling on with her family in May. The woman, who said she made the threats to try to return home to her boyfriend, was sentenced this week to two years in federal prison because of a provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism against mass transportation systems.

Little things like this keep showing up in the news, mentioned in passing. Oddities, vaguely amusing. A disturbed young woman is going to federal prison for two years. Looks like the Red Sox might have a shot at the pennant this year. I'm sorry, dear, what were you saying?

Think about it. FBI agents investigated the case. Their superiors passed the file on to the U.S. Attorney's office. An Assistant U.S. Attorney looked into the matter and agreed that prosecution was warranted. His recommendation was approved by the U.S. Attorney. The young woman either pleaded guilty or was found guilty by a judge and jury. Two years were then abstracted from her life, and society can rest assured that never again will she leave threatening notes on a cruise ship.

Simon Phipps writes about problems with RFID tags.#

If the RFID-Tag is not destroyed or - better - removed at the checkout the consumer can easily be recognised by the EPC of her T-Shirt. With this unique identifier the retail shops are easily able to i.e. track the buying habits of their customers.

For 'T-shirt' read "any purchase" - the European Central Bank is even thinking of putting RFID tags in banknotes. The innocuous term 'bar code' seems wrongly applied to RFID/EPC/PML. To read a bar code I have to get access to the item. To read an EPC from an RFID tag I need just to get within radio range of the chip. Maybe a term like 'e-tag' for this technology grouping is more appropriate.

To be clear, the privacy problem with e-tags is the same as the one with national identity cards and other pervasive, public, unique IDs - triangulation. The problem of triangulation lays not in the nature of nor the intent behind the ID tags being used - e-tags, date of birth, social security number, vehicle registration - but in the ability to gather and cross-relate them with information gathered by other means.

Don Park captures the feeling many of us have with regards to Dave Winer and BloggerCon.#

Reading Dave Winer's blog these days is like watching a house being built from the inside. Right before our eyes, a major conference is taking shape! Day to day, it can be a little tedious, but spanning over time, one can't help but appreciate the unique experience Dave is providing us. I wish more blogs would do what Dave is doing, showing rest of the world how things come to be from the insider's perspective, one day at a time.

Michael Lucas-Smith links to Rock-Paper-Scissors programming competition report. Very neat.#

Dr. Frank is just about finished with the album.#

Has anyone ever been totally happy with his own album? Can anyone ever be totally happy with anything? I think the answer to both questions is probably no, though a good friend of mine, arguing to the contrary, recently alluded to "all those people walking around in an ecstatic self-worshipping delusion in love with the sound of their own juvenilia." I guess there are such people, but most of them are probably in fact just as torn apart by inner doubts as anyone else and just haven't realized that the pretense of auto-enthusiasm doesn't always serve them as well they think it does. I'm not discounting the value of pure bravado, which works way more often and more thoroughly than it ought to. But I find I'm not often very impressed with super- self-confident people: there's rarely much of a basis for such high self-regard, so in the end they tend to seem kind of stupid. (Maybe "happiness" isn't exactly the right word, though happy people tend to seem kind of stupid, too; I suppose what we're really talking about is Satisfaction. But mis-using the word "happiness" in this way arguably creates more arresting aphorisms, so I'm sticking with it.) To adapt a platitude, happiness is just another way to say you've run out of ideas. Or so it seems to me.

The world is made great by unsatisfied people, because if we were all comfortable there would be no reason for anything better. That's why there will always be starving, poor, and unhappy people so that the human rat race has some place to go.

This comment is very interesting...

By the time it is officially released, I'll already be working on the head version of the next album. In fact the next album begins the second the the master arrives, and I'm already well into it. Three months from now, people will mention the "new album," and I'll have to pause for a moment to remind myself that they're talking about the stuff I was doing last year.

Alexander Payne has ToorCon reports.#

Ryan McGee writes the Alias girl.#

Watching tonite's show with the uninitiated roommate was a bit tough. I even confused myself at points. Luckily, you were there, on screen, for maximum droolage factor, and the language barrier was lowered. Sorta like the Berlin Wall falling, only this didn't involve communism. Then again, if you had been born a few decades earlier, maybe you could have ended the Cold War yourself. You could have pulled a Bill+Ted and brought the universe into harmony, and…man, there I go again on a flight of fancy.

Love.#

Green Hat Journal writes...#

David Blaine is in a glass box suspended by a crane near the River Thames, London. A friend walked by last night and found a crowd hurling rocks, firing paint guns, and shouting through a megaphone to keep Blaine awake. A sad spectacle: a B-list magician assailed by a Clockwork Orange mob. This strengthens my staunch misanthropy.