Yesterday and today was Scheme Workshop 2003 and Lightweight Languages 2003. Both were really awesome.#

I met Kimberley Burchett. Ya, you wish you were there.

I took notes, in case you weren't there.

Scheme Workshop 2003 Notes: HTML Version and OPML Version.

Lightweight Languages 2003 Notes: HTML Version and OPML Version.

OPML information and tools are available at http://www.opml.org/.

Meeting notes for last Thursday's meeting at Berkman: HTML Version and OPML version.#

Ryan Overbey comments on the meeting and what he's going to try and do.

Today's Berkman Thursday meeting was nice. We welcomed Dave back after his absence, and got down to business- figuring out how to encourage widespread adoption of weblogs at Harvard. Dave has built a system here that gives everyone with a harvard.edu address the opportunity to use an easy content management system and to build a weblog with little or no knowledge of HTML- the next step is to go out and evangelize it.

I volunteered to talk to the Derek Bok Center about this. The Bok center works in tandem with Harvard's Instructional Computing Group to teach graduate students how to build productive course websites. My idea is to plug in the Berkman blogging machine into this equation- to encourage TFs and students to start blogs. If we can get 20-30 TFs to start weblogs centered on their particular courses, and we assume 15 unique students per TF, then suddenly we have 450 undergraduates who get practical experience posting and commenting on a weblog. And, given the qualities of this medium, chances are a good number of those will be inclined to start their own. And if we can demonstrate that weblogs are a useful tool (as measured by high scores in the CUE survey results), then we'll see much more than 20-30 TFs using weblogs.

Lisa Williams started thinking about communities and the insiders and outsiders after this meeting.

Building communties based on exclusivity starts very early in life. I see it among children when I look at preschools for Rowan. Knots of children center around a game or popular toy, and there are always one or two children on the outside, asking to play and being told, "No, you can't play." There's something old, fundamental, and atavistic about this phenomenon, perhaps going back to humans' roots as tribal beings who survived by creating small, exclusive, self-supporting bands, and acting with ruthlessness to those outside the tribe.

What this made me think of was the maxim of Vivian Paley, a kindergarten teacher who formulated a simple yet surprisingly radical rule for her students:You can't say you can't play (she wrote a book on what happened after). Dave immediately pointed out that You Can't Say You Can't Play is the "philosophy of the web," -- everyone can play, and everyone can link. But not without struggles, he noted, as the controversy over deep linking -- whether people outside your company or your group could link to a document inside your website -- attests to. People within a powerful group would attempt to say to other Web users, "no, you can't link to me, you can't play," and similar dramas are enacted all the time on the net.

Stirling Newberry on why Clark is the "one candidate in this race who has the magnamity of spirit and the commitment to the sinews of such a policy that can make it work" in Iraq.#

To cost for this is simple: we need to have our own economic house in order here to afford being the world leader that the present crisis requires. In the run up to World War II, Britain refused to set its financial and military affairs in order, and was forced, in a series of mounting confrontations with the rising forces of totalitarianism, to back down, retreat, or evade full responsibility. The right wing has tried to say that viciousness is the policy that should have been pursued, and claim the Churchillian mantle. Instead - and this will be the subject of a later blog post - the truly Churchillian approach is collective security, setting realistic boundaries, and being ever willing to look with a coldly realistic eye on the facts and figures.

Kaye Trammell blogs about blog names.#

I have blog names on the brain this week. It started when Dowbrigade's Michael Feldman revealed what the title of his blog meant. After reading his post, I started to look at other blog names.

What is in a name? A name is everything. When you see a link on a blog roll, you immediately decode the title & decide if it is "interesting." If it is, you click. If not, you glaze right over it.

People should post a story on their blog about the name.

Michael Lucas-Smith links to the spoiler rich Matrix Resolutions that goes through various theories that were not the case.#

DEBATE #7: WHO'S THE BAD GUY HERE?

Fan sleuthing hit its peak in August, following an offhand comment made by Laurence Fishburne that he played both "Luke and Darth Vader" in the Matrix films. To any other person, all this would mean was that Laurence Fishburne had gotten, once again, very very drunk. But to a Matrix fan, it opened entirely new horizons of understanding. Perhaps Morpheus was the villain of the series all along? Wow! Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that make no sense at all?

Many felt the "Morpheus is evil" theory wasn't a real Matrix theory because it actually had evidence, however slim, to support it. To retaliate, rival theories were created based on no evidence at all, which most fans agreed were far superior. In fact, so many of these theories sprung up overnight - "The Oracle is evil!" "Agent Smith is a good guy!" "Now I'm evil! I hate you!" -it would be impossible and, let's face it, a pointless waste of time to list them all. So to summarize: imagine one of the good or bad guys from the first two films. Got one? Okay, now make them switch sides. Congratulations, you now have your Associates' Degree from the Matrix Theorists' Community College.

And this is completely classic:

If you're wondering whether or not there will be a Matrix 4, picture 2.5 billion dollars (that's what the first trilogy will make when all is said and done). If you're having trouble picturing this, it's three stacks of 100-dollar bills, each stack as tall as the Empire State Building. Now picture someone offering that money to a Multinational corporation like Time-Warner, and then imagine that corporation not taking it.

Via Jonathon Delacour is Everything Burns' question...#

For whatever reason (say an opressive regime has taken over your country), you find that you have to cut and run, leaving most everything behind to live on the lam for a while. After packing all the essentials (You packed a flashlight, right? Double check), you find that you have room for 7 or 8 books. You have 5 minutes to select the books to take.

Via Joey DeVilla is The Meatrix.#

Dave Winer on the shape and future of blog software.#

Weblog software is going to be like mail servers. Lots of ways to deploy, every niche filled. For the masses, services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Blogging servers for corporations, inside and outside of the firewall. For schools, for the military, specialized systems for lawyers, librarians, professors, reporters, magazines, daily newspapers. The next President will have a blog. Writing for the Web, the prevailing form of publishing in the early 21st Century, will come in many sizes and shapes, flavors and styles. It won't be one-size-fits-all. Open formats and protocols will make this possible. I'd bet on the formats and protocols we're using now, RSS 2.0, OPML and the Blogger API.

Charles Miller reviews the Matrix: Revolutions, with a few spoilers, and the trilogy in general.#

What was new and cool in The Matrix is now worn and clichéed. When Reloaded came out, people wanted to be blown away like they were the first time, and they weren't. Partly because the script was poorly balanced: too much badly timed non-action and a gratuitous sex scene, but mostly because the stuff that was cool, was really just more Matrixy-like stuff. When it tried to outdo its predecessor, it just came off looking like a try-hard.

The fans consoled themselves by diving into all the exposition that happened in Reloaded, and building grand theories of what It Could All Mean. For a time, the fact that the drawn-out speeches from the Architect and Merovingian were part of what bogged the second movie down in the first place was forgotten, as they were examined for Deeper Meaning.

Halley Suitt informs us that she's in the latest Penthouse and writes about herself,#

So can I integrate the person who writes erotic fiction with the person who makes lunch for her 8-year-old son, who writes about technology, who writes about the death of her father, who serves wine and wafers at communion in a mid-calf grey pleated wool skirt, white "good girl" blouse and school marmish grey cardigan with the woman who plays Scrabble with her 95-year-old shut-in lady and the same woman who gives speeches at Harvard and sometimes appears in photographs half-clothed and publishes case studies in The Harvard Business Review?

[...]

As for Penthouse, I'm thrilled to have my story published there. Buy one. They went bankrupt last month and are just getting back on their feet. They need your money. There's an awesome pictorial of a menage-a-trois right before my story -- two guys and a girl. Much hotter than my fiction. I have to remember to make my characters do it naked with sunglasses and hats on next time. Classic but always cool.

Tony Pierce on food in Hollywood.#

one of the nice things about living in hollywood is that theres people from all over the world here. which means theres food from all over the world.

the food that im most fascinated by currently is philippine food. specifically hollywood philippine food.

usually i get tricked into one of these magical places because from the outside they look like $1 per item Chinese places in that they have the buffet style pans of crap with the heat lamps drying everything out, a crazy woman sitting on a stool waiting to serve you, and a mexican chap in the back with an apron listening to the clipper game on the radio.

i like philippine places like this because its almost like an adult lemonade stand: people just [can't] believe that youre buying something from them, and when you do they always smile and smile and sometimes they'll even shake your hand.

Via Green Hat Journal is Tom Paine on Manufacturing.#

Sometimes you read something that is so simple and obviously right that you can't believe you didn't think of it before. This short post at TomPaine explains that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing around the world, not just the advanced countries, because higher productivity allows fewer workers to produce more goods. They point out (duh!) that manufacturing is experiencing the same growing pains agriculture experienced 50 years ago. Now fewer than 3% of Americans work in agriculture (and that number is bloated because of subsidies), yet it produces mountains of food. So America is not losing jobs to Mexica and China, we are losing jobs to machines.

John Gruber writes about external editor support in Xcode.#

Project Builder, on the other hand, did not support external editors when Mac OS X debuted. Most programmers were satisfied using Project Builder's built-in editor, but others — the aforementioned ones who are attached to their own very favorite editor — were not. You could use an external editor alongside Project Builder, using drag-and-drop to drag source files onto another editor's Dock icon, for example. But that's a far cry from explicit built-in external editor support.

And so these programmers would ask Project Builder's developers, "Please add external editor support to Project Builder, so that I can use my favorite editor instead of Project Builder's."

The response from Project Builder's developers was — and admittedly this is paraphrasing — "What features in your favorite editor would you like to see us add to Project Builder?"

"I'm not asking you to add features from my favorite editor to Project Builder; I just want to write code using my favorite editor."

"What features in your favorite editor would you like to see us add to Project Builder?"

And so forth.

Allah hates the US. I love it.#

You know what Allah likes most about your Jew president, kufr? His subtlety. Those sure are a lot of flags you have there, Jew. Allah has not seen that many American flags in oh, about two years, since the day after he laid the smackdown. Speaking of which, how is your hunt for Osama going? Allah knows how much you would like to parade him in shackles through your streets; it is just too bad he is out back right now sitting in a tire in Allah's pool with one of those umbrella drinks in his hand. Oho! How about Saddam, kufr? How is the progress on that one? Allah must say, it is quite an accomplishment not to have found a guy whose photo until recently was on the country's fucking money. This, more than any other reason, is why the Sassycrats must take power, for if there is one thing a Jew Communist knows how to do, it is find people. You would do well to consult with this godless yet entertaining proletarian; Allah bets he will have a few good ideas on the subject. Even now Allah can hear Saddam sing, "Don't turn around, uh oh . . . ."

Jessica asks a very interesting question...#

Je' has an interesting post somewhere about reading blogs. It started with Halley's Comment. Halley writes about a study that says no one reads blogs, so she writes about reading blogs and all the blogs she reads. Je' reads many, many, many blogs. The guy Je' linked to must also read blogs because he's responding to Halley's post, even though he goes off on a tangent about Halley's point.

[...]

(If I read Je's blog and he blogs about the [700]+ blogs he reads, am I only reading one blog or am I reading [700]+ through him?)

I think she reads however many I "human aggregated" that day. She is read THEIR thoughts.

Ryan Overbey reviews Revolutions. The click through has spoilers.#

Wow. What a let down. I tried as hard as I could to treat the third Matrix installment like I would treat George Bush in a presidential debate- to judge it with the soft bigotry of low expectations. But even so prepared, I found the film revolting.

Where to begin? Train station, Indian family, a discussion of karma. OK, not bad so far. Karma is only a word, like love. This was actually the best part of the movie philosophically. Not that I was expecting anything deep. But the notion that one could be grateful for one's karma, to dismiss any essence of karma and love and point out that they are designations for links and connections- all this deserves emphasis. How did the screenwriters hit this nail on the head while managing to royally fuck up the rest of it?

Kevin Drum on why he likes Wesley Clark.#

Foreign policy. This is probably the #1 issue in the 2004 election, and it's one where Clark's experience gives him credibility that the other candidates lack. It's true that most of the Democratic candidates say that they're committed to restoring our international relationships, but Clark is a guy who's actually fought a war with an international coalition and knows what a huge pain in the ass it is. When the other guys talk about alliances, I sometimes wonder if they really believe what they're saying, but when Clark talks about it I know that he believes what he's saying. What's more, I think he can convince the electorate that he's right about this and George Bush isn't.

Clark also does a pretty good balancing job. One of the fundamental problems with opposition is that you spend most of your time attacking the guy currently in office. That's fine, it's the way the game is played. But you also need to make it clear that you have a positive plan to make things better, and Clark does that pretty well. I think it could still use some work, but overall his ideas for fighting terrorism seem realistic, toughminded, and sensible.

Tyler Cowen at Volokh links to Clay Shirky on "Silent Dating."#

Silent dating, the new trend? Read the ever-insightful Clay Shirky on silent dating. That's right, you all show up in the same room and start passing notes to each other. It turns out you can meet many more people this way, many more than with speed dating. Plus it offers, according to Shirky, physical proximity, albeit without noise.

I wonder if this can last, if only because so many people at dating services don't really want to meet somebody, they just want to feel they are doing something about the problem. I suspect silent dating does not address their needs. Still, an intriguing idea.

Clay's interest in silent dating springs from his analysis of how you get groups to interact fruitfully, a critical topic in social science, especially in an age of blogging.

Erin Judge classifies new subspecies of human. So funny.#

*The Paranoid Egocentric. Ever meet somebody who isn't totally self-involved, per se, but instantly becomes convinced of personal culpability for any negative interaction? I'm talking about the people who, when you stub your toe and yelp, snap back with, "What? What did I say?!" You know, the people who, when you tell them you had a dream about a giant panda bear eating your dog, turn ghostly white and ask, "Do you think the panda bear symbolizes...<gulp>...me?"

No. No, it's not about you. No. Get over yourself.

Stirling Newberry on Wesley Clark, you gotta read it.#

If there is one comment that I heard over and over again from reporters in the early days of the Clark campaign - strike that, one word - it was "handled". Professionals, reporters and amateurs alike said it. It was a concern - people tried everything to get the message through that the handling was slowing down a candidate who could soar with wings.

Well the handling is ending, and the surest sign is the return of Clark's signature sense of humor. Handlers hate humor, they live in fear of the off the cuff joke that becomes a gaffe. [...]

Need an example? In New Hampshire recently, Clark was asked about the 87 Billion appropriation, or perhaps misappropriation, for reconstruction of Iraq. After stating his position "Iraq reconstruction yes, blank check for Bush, no." he launched into a small monologue about how costs pile up in the bill - having two imaginary government contractors scurrying around to get 5000 tract houses set up in Iraq, with the cost of shipping and handling of the cement from the US - one of the eager beaver contractors saying "we can't find the cement factory in Iraq, I think we bombed it." - and then finishing with a serious point: it is better to create the infrastructure in Iraq than to treat them as a nation of refugees, needing everything from outside.

Werner Vogels writes about online scholarly publication.#

In his article "Citation and influence: science versus the blogosphere" Jon Udell makes a case that Jeremy Hylton also made yesterday after my article about the Elsevier Journals: that online visibility of articles and papers is remarkably limited outside of the CS, Physics and related areas. This in contrast to the findings in the Online or Invisible report by Steve Lawrence that suggests that online articles are more widely referenced.

Outside of the few fields that seem to have accepted online publication as a viable approach to disseminating scholarly information, there are major obstacles. And one of the biggest obstacles is the academic tenure process. Academic success is measured partially by how good an educator you are, but for an important part also about how good and prominent your research results are, and for the majority of the fields this is measured in Journal publications. These journals frequently require you to hand over the copyright of the paper to the publisher, and you are barred from putting copies online for a number of years. Putting the papers online, before you submit them is not possible for many of these fields as the reviewing often takes many, many months, maybe even up to a year, and you do not want your competitors to get away with your ideas...

The key to make this happen: Don't read articles and papers that aren't online and don't subscribe to paper editions that strangle the contributors. Until their audience dries up they won't care.

Tony Pierce advises the smooth operator in us all.#

best laid plans, my friends. let me give you a little tip about life, boys. dont tell a girl who likes having sex with you -- a lot -- that youre going to sleep over at her house and not have sex with her.

dont believe her when she says shes on the rag.

dont bring over your laundry, dont drink her wine, dont let her turn up the heat, dont dare her to wear something sexy, dont tell her that her lips look good shining in the candlelight, dont think that her roommate not being around doenst mean anything

Tony Pierce posts a preview of the Bill Gates blog.#

11:45am, im sitting in the east campus and im in a meeting with bill and mohammed and opal and jerry, shits really going over my head but bill just cracked this super funny joke that i think he stole off futurama.

5:09 pm, i challenge bill to three shots of 151, he talks me down to two cuz he claims he has to drive home. i remind him that one of the interns can drive us both home. so he says yes to two shots of 151 and a half a beer. we end up talking about the portland trailblazers and laugh and laugh and laugh. hes got a funny laugh.

7:20pm, still drinking. we've sent out for cough medicine. bill says hes never had a flaming moe. i called him a liar and he took off his glasses and said right here! and dared me to a brawl. i think he meant it. i made a fist and three robots shot me with paralyzing darts and i froze for three seconds. he stepped aside and three totally different robots shot me with unparalyzing darts and i was able to complete my punch, missing, and fell on my face to a chorus of hoots and hollers. gotta admit, it was pretty awesome.

bill gets me a screwdriver and reminds me that hes the fucking man, tosses a peanut into the air and it nearly chips a tooth.

Tony Pierce is the fucking man.

Godless reviews the Matrix: Revolutions.#

This movie ranks down there with "The Phantom Menace" and "Hannibal". Hannibal jettissoned the psychological intrigue of "The Silence of the Lambs" in favor of a straight-up slasher movie. As for Episode IV...well...most people who aren't Lucas fanboys agree that it moved Star Wars from space opera to farce.

Like both of those flicks, Revolutions discards everything interesting about the Matrix franchise and comes up with a plain, poorly acted, pompous action movie. Reloaded was a significant dropoff in quality, but Revolutions is just...well...words fail me. I honestly thought about leaving early - it was really that interminable, predictable, and uninteresting. The only time I've ever done before that has been during the Batman movie with Schwarzenegger as the bad guy (I forget which episode it was).

Matthew Dennis comments amongst spoilers.