Kaye Trammell has put up a quiz about taking online quizzes because she's not sure what the right way to conduct one is. Fill it out.#

David Madore has an amazing page about the Calendar.#

Oliver Willis wants Clinton back and pushes for cloning to get around the constitution.#

Clinton had special criticism for fundamentalists of every religious stripe who feel only they have the answers.

"Once you believe you have the absolute truth, then it's not possible for everyone to count or for everyone to have a role," to play in the world, he said.

"There is a truth, life is a search for it, religion is a pathway to it, but we're all imperfect and nobody has it," Clinton said.

Gregor J. Rothfuss writes about how names define our identities and ponders about having unique names for every person?#

in the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. now it does. so i am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? some considerations:

only use meaningful combinations of characters. no ewrjp ewrerwh
make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
have mappings between languages
would numbers be impolite? somedude23 certainly is

I can't believe I'm admitting that I know this. But, in the Dragonlance series of the AD&D world, all the gnomes had completely unique names because their names where a dump of their ancestry. So rather than if I'm Jay A. McCarthy and have a son who I want to name Fredrick, he would be Fredrick Jay A. McCarthy. And you just keep adding them on. Since they did this since the beginning of time every name was unique, but if someone wanted to just start implementing this policy today you could still get collisions.

Alex Halavis comments on the recent Karl Marx interview.#

Karl is reanimated for this Prospect interview. Good stuff, though I would be much more interested in what he thinks of new technologies. He recognized that some forms of labor were inherently alienating, and (I suspect) this is why his early work never indicated what a communist utopia would look like. What happens when napster fabbing and ubiquitous robotics continue to shove human labor into tighter and tighter corners. In other words, what happens when it is cheaper to have a robot do the work than it is to run a Guatemalan or Malaysian sweatshop?

Carl Blesius writes about the transition from paper to online academic and professional journals.#

In an email the publisher of the journal mentioned that the paper-publishing world just doesn't "get" it yet (he was talking about the huge advantage accumulated content associated with unlimited access gives).

After spending some time observing the publishing process of the journal, it seems it is only being held back by two things: editorial review (a person can only read so much) and the publication workflow (the number of contributors is putting stress on the methods that have been working over the last 8 years).

At the Daily Kos is a story about John Dingell and an amazing letter he wrote the CBS.#

Introduction:

Dingell particularly relishes investigations, where his sharp mind and pugnacity strike fear in lazy bureaucrats and unscrupulous contractors. It was Dingell's committee that discovered that Stanford University charged the federal government for the wedding of the daughter of the University's president, and it was Dingell who found out the Pentagon had paid $640 for a toilet seat.

In every Congressional session for fifty years he's introduced for a single-payer national health care program similar to Canada's. He's personally known our last twelve presidents. If he remains in Congress until 2009--and he's expressed no intention to retire--he will become history's longest-serving member of Congress. Only Ted Kennedy can come close to matching the continued legislative influence that Dingell has exerted over the last half-century.

Part of the letter to CBS about the new mini-series "The Reagans":

I trust that CBS will not be a party to a distorted presentation of American history, and that the mini-series will present a fair and balanced portrayal of the Reagans, the 1980s and their legacy.

As someone who served with President Reagan, and in the interest of historical accuracy, please allow me to share with you some of my recollections of the Reagan years that I hope will make it into the final cut of the mini-series: $640 Pentagon toilets seats; ketchup as a vegetable; union busting; firing striking air traffic controllers; Iran-Contra; selling arms to terrorist nations; trading arms for hostages; retreating from terrorists in Beirut; lying to Congress; financing an illegal war in Nicaragua; visiting Bitburg cemetery; a cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein; shredding documents; Ed Meese; Fawn Hall; Oliver North; James Watt; apartheid apologia; the savings and loan scandal; voodoo economics; record budget deficits; double digit unemployment; farm bankruptcies; trade deficits; astrologers in the White House; Star Wars; and influence peddling.

Mentor Cana asks about whether the Semantic Web is just hype or is there some reality behind it?#

He may be interested in a Semantic Web Demo Site.

Kevin Drum writes about Wesley Clark and how he would, and other candidates, should talk about the "War on Terrorism."#

Since I'm not a presidential candidate I don't have a 20-point program for how to fight and win the war on terror. But at a broad level there is one thing that ought to be plainly obvious to anyone who thinks seriously about these things: we can only win as part of a large, committed, global alliance. It's not that I think the rest of the world has some claim to moral superiority or anything, it's just that if we take a unilateral approach we're going to lose, and I don't want to lose.

This has been true for all the big wars of the 20th century, but a combination of dim historical understanding and a desire to canonize Ronald Reagan seems to have left much of the populace under the impression that we won World War II and the Cold War almost singlehandedly. But we didn't. We won them with lots of allies, and without those allies we would have lost. And on the lone occasion when we did try to win a big war alone, in Vietnam, we did lose.

Ken Masugi links to George Will, of the Washington Post, writing about a new candidate for the Senate: Jack Ryan.#

Three years ago, when Ryan was 41, he walked away from moneymaking to start his real life. Or resume it. Earlier he had been doing what his family has always done, which involves making the rest of us seem like moral slackers.

Ryan, who keeps in moral and physical trim by going to Mass and the gym each morning, left Goldman Sachs to become a teacher at Hales Franciscan High School in the heart of the huge African American community on the South Side. In an area where some schools send more young men to prison than to college, Hales Franciscan has for six consecutive years sent all its graduates -- all African American youths, most from homes poor enough to qualify for the school lunch program -- to colleges, including Notre Dame, Northwestern, Georgetown and the Naval Academy.

Jeff Jarvis on what he dislikes about Larry Lessig.#

Larry Lessig's cadre of media haters has a new book out. Mark Cooper is the author of Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age from Lessig's Stanford unthinktank. Please, please don't buy it. That would be so un-creative-commons, so big-media of you. No, go get it for free and then read along with me.

I have two problems with Lessig et al. The first is that they hate media and media companies so thoroughly and indiscriminately. The second is that their cure for this is government involvement in media -- which is to say, government interference in news and journalism. They disdain the free market of ideas and commerce. They want the government to impose ownership structures and even content on a free press to fit some paternalistic view they have of proper information in a democracy. That is the last thing government should ever decide. I find that constitutionally and democratically abhorrent.

I remain surprised that Lessig et al are the darlings of the libertarians. You'd they'd disdain anybody in favor of greater government meddling in our press and media. But they apparently hold their media disdain more dearly than their ideology... or their logic. Lessig wants less government involvment in copyright but wants more government involvement in media ownership. The thread that ties that together is only media hatred. It's an intellectually and ideologically illogical stance.

Richard links Jesse Browner writing about invitation anxiety.#

I have friends who want to be invited to things, but can't figure out how to get invited. It's an art, of course, an art that involves reducing the amount of choices on the part of the person holding the party to one choice: invitation. Creating a situation in which it is uncomfortable for someone not to do something is difficult. Like how my ex (before she was my girlfriend) once made it nearly impossible for me to not put my arm around her. I tried a similar technique last night, in which I tried to make it uncomfortable for a girl not to let me put my arm around her. Not knowing how (coupled with a cuddle-block on the part of a well-meaning but evidently clueless friend) proved insurmountable obstacles. Point is, for a lot of things, you can't just invite yourself, but you can create the circumstances in which that is the only option. It would be a mistake to say that I know how to do this, however.

Richard links to Douglas Gantenbein "calling bullshit on firefighters as heroes."#

Firefighting isn't that dangerous. Of course there are hazards, and about 100 firefighters die each year. But firefighting doesn't make the Department of Labor's 2002 list of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers top that one, followed by commercial fishermen in the No. 2 spot, and general-aviation commercial pilots (crop dusters and the like) at No. 3. Firefighting trails truck-driving (No. 10) in its risks. Pizza delivery drivers (No. 5) have more dangerous jobs than firefighters, statistically speaking. And fatalities, when they occur in firefighting, often are due to heart attacks and other lack-of-fitness problems, not fire. In those cases where firefighters die in a blaze, it's almost always because of some unbelievable screw-up in the command chain. It's been well-documented, for instance, that lousy communication was a huge reason why so many firefighters still were in the burning World Trade Center when it imploded, and well after city police and port authority police had been warned by their own commanders of an imminent collapse and cleared out.

Yes!

Richard "On A Roll Today" Gwai Lo links to Laura Kipnis about pornography and the decay of Playboy.#

Laura Kipnis: "Where would pornography be without repression? Out of business, that's where. If we all ran around naked, humping each other left and right whenever we felt like it, would porn exist? Doubtful! Who'd be interested in leering at this month's Playmate; who'd be snorting over the latest round of smirky "Party Jokes"? Pornography needs sexual repression to have something to overcome (or claim to overcome); it requires taboos to be able to ruffle them: Pornographers and censors are the world's most interdependent couple."

Glen Justice from the New York Times doesn't get it.#

Dr. Dean used the Internet to build a base of small donors and fund-raisers, a strategy that transformed a former governor from the 49th-largest state with no national fund-raising network into the best-financed Democrat in the presidential campaign. It has also recast the way many in Washington think about how money is raised. In a world in which the highest-spending candidate wins at least three quarters of the time, the curiosity among politicians and big contributors is understandable.

Many wonder whether Dr. Dean's success has cut a permanent path into politics for outsiders and whether many candidates will be willing to relinquish a degree of control over message and method, the approach that Dr. Dean used to build a decentralized Internet-based campaign.

Dr. Dean's Internet fund-raising presents the first new addition in years to time-tested strategies like direct mail, phone solicitation and events in restaurants and hotels that mix donors with candidates in exchange for a check.

The article mentions getting more people interested and involved marginally once and a thimbleful once. It'll be sad to see you go, Grey Lady.

This Week in Pictures at MSN.com is very cool. Thanks Krystal.#

Peter Van Roy writes about 'nonalgorithmic programming.'#

For my final post, I'd like to be a little more provocative. There are several known programming paradigms that can be characterized as "nonalgorithmic": to solve a problem, it's enough to specify the problem. (In some sense, this is the real vision behind declarative programming: ask, and the system answers. The traditional declarative paradigms, functional and logic, are far away from being declarative in this sense since in practice you still have to think very closely about how to solve your problem.)

One example is constraint programming. Specify your problem as a set of constraints and let the constraint solver do the rest. The constraint solver will do some reasoning (using heuristics) but it falls back on brute-force search when reasoning fails. Constraint programming research has made lots of progress in making the whole thing smart (see chapter 12 in CTM for an introduction, or any of several good books such as Marriott & Stuckey or Van Hentenryck). It actually works in many cases: it has even been observed to run in polynomial time if there is an underlying polynomial solution (in natural language processing). It is also causing something of a revolution in the area of numerical analysis.

Danah Boyd at Misbehaving on porn.#

First, i have yet to find a group of women fighting for gender equality who have the same opinion on porn. The group at misbehaving is no different. We don't purport to represent any one view, or even the breadth of diverse views on this topic. Porn is a long-standing feminist debate, full of nuanced discussions about consumption and production, objectification of women, power/empowerment and control, consent, violence, economics, and desire, etc. There are academic volumes on the topic and it's a highly contested and heated debate. Thus, i can't imagine any of us agreeing on the topic, let alone thinking that we can represent anyone else!

That said, we are quite curious to know how porn is affecting women in tech. With a hefty percentage of the web economy depending on porn, how does this affect women's participation in the tech industry? Does the exorbitant presence of porn discourage women from entering tech? What have you heard?

Michael Feldman links to a great old story about the Universe as the Library of Babel.#

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.

The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest....

This blew my mind when I was younger.

Joi Ito quotes George Bush Senior on why he did not occupy Iraq.#

Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

Joi Ito writes about a panel he was on:#

I moderated a panel on democracy and Japan. My panel was Mr. Morimoto, a former Defense official, Mr. Hato, a management consultant and Mr. Takano, an independent journalist. I think it was the consensus of the group that Japan was not a democracy in the typical sense but really much more like a socialist country. Mr. Hato said he was always appalled when people blamed schools, the government and other organs of the state for their problems. Mr. Takano talked about a front page article in the left-wing newspaper of 1000 students marching in Tokyo protesting the fact that they can't get jobs. ;-)

Mr. Morimoto pointed out the the Japanese people were not individuals but identified more with something similar to the proletariat. The Japanese people have never had to fight for their "rights" and the democracy was put in place by the US occupation and they therefore do not really feel like they are active participants in it. In fact, Takano-san pointed out that the pre-war Meiji constitution is a good place to go to understand what the Japanese think about government. That constitution apparently stated that the Emperor would treat cause people to be "free" and treated fairly and that the bureaucracy was empowered by the Emperor to make sure this happened. (I have not read it myself so my paraphrasing may be a bit off...) What happened after the war was that the US occupation kept the bureaucracy, the former right hand of the Emperor, in place because it was so handy in execution. After the Americans left, the bureaucracy has stayed in place, now with power, but no leadership and a faux democracy that sort of dances around it.

Doug Miller picks up on Allah as the Pussy.#

Oh my - I laughed until I cried! This makes me think that maybe our problem is that Jehovah isn't tough enough, either - after all, any number of religious types will tell you that Jehovah and Allah are more or less the same deity. Maybe what we need to do is go back to venerating some of the real tough old bad-asses. Odin, Thor, or Lugh were all rough and tumble types. Even better, let's throw together an alter to one of the really scary ones like the Morrigan or Kali. That ought to get them to wet their caftans!