Ogged at Unfogged writs about Paris Hilton.#

This is all true, of course, but there is something special about Paris Hilton: she's the cool kid. It's not easy to say what makes her (or anyone) a cool kid (that's why they're fascinating), so it's tempting to attribute her fame to her name and skankiness, but really, does anyone think she's unique in those ways? Of course not. And we shouldn't confuse the fact that she's cashing in on her fame now for some master plan: she was an object of fascination before she capitalized on the fact that being that object could be a career.

Paris Hilton is the kind of woman that people want to talk about, figure out, fuck, hate, be with, or be. But that's not her fault. And it's fine to say that she's spoiled and vapid--certainly there's evidence for that--but it's absurd to write an article about someone who's famous and alluring arguing that she's not really alluring and shouldn't be famous.

Adina Levin writes about Matt & Ben.#

On Saturday night, I saw "Matt & Ben", the off-broadway play, about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in their pizza, beer, and rehearsal days. The screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls from the ceiling, testing testing the friendship of the aspiring actors, who'd been buddies since Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The play is written and performed by two women, Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, who carry off the drag pretty well, showing the loyalty and rivalry between the buddies, til a fight scene at the end which overstretches their abilities.

Jeremy Bowers on the Big Number Fallacy.#

I couldn't find this on the Internet, so I present to you the Big Number Fallacy:

Big Number Fallacy: All big numbers are infinite. In particular, they are all larger then each other, smaller then each other, and the same as each other, randomly.

In mathematics, depending on your choice of axioms, infinity is a "number" that can be greater then itself, less then itself, and equal to itself at the same time. Its ability to perform this feat is fundamentally why it's not a number (hence the scarequotes); it does not act like a number, therefore it isn't one.

Kevin Drum links to Chris Mooney on college essay questions.#

Best Essay Question: The award goes to the school that asked, "You have just completed your 300 page autobiography. Please submit page 217." Talk about giving students a chance to be imaginative and distinguish themselves from other applicants. My own conceit for answering this question--which would, admittedly, be tough to execute--is to borrow a gag from the novel Tristram Shandy: At page 217, I would still be in the womb. After all, a lot of things happen in life. If, as an autobiographer, you're really committed to telling all--or "tout dire," as Rousseau put it--then it could take an awful lot of time to get yourself born.

A friend of my mother has a different approach. This person would begin the essay in mid sentence, with this phrase: "...after that frightful business with the duchess..." I think that's also a pretty amusing idea.

Fullness links the Dragon Go Server.#

Rory has it going for him.#

Kori took it pretty well. I thought I was going to have to spend the night at a hotel, but her reaction was very sensitive and mature. She pretended like she didn't even care, obviously trying to make me feel more comfortable about having just dropped this bomb right in the middle of our relationship.

It's times like this that I know I really understand women.

Hey - if any of you out there ever need any relationship advice, then just give me a holler, 'cause the Doctor of Love is in.

SilverStr on security procedures...#

Recently I have found myself with the opportunity to continue my ambassadorial role as it comes to information security, and provide some teaching on the basics of security as it relates to business. As I sit here and reflect on just what should be covered in a span of 15 minutes to give the most in depth understanding, I realize that its not such a simple task. Traditionally, people look at the infosec field as something to do about firewalls and antivirus. They treat technology as THE solution, instead of simply the enabler. And it's this fallacy that weakens any security implementation. Security is a process, not a product… and should be treated as such. Through the security lifecycle, policy and procedure needs to take precedence over implementation. It's a bigger part of the circle for a reason.

Felix Rayman on "Free" discussions sites that are not free.#

A comment posted to another Free Republic story, "Howard Dean: The Mayor of Milwaukee", in an attempt to belittle Howard Dean's fiscal record claimed that the budget of one county in Illinois was larger than the budget of the state of Vermont. It claimed the budget of the County of DuPage, near Chicago, to be $1.6 billion, and that the budget for the entire state of Vermont was $73 million. After a quick google search, I found this assertion to be incorrect. The reply I posted 'The "$73 million" figure you quote is for the Vermont Municipal Employees' Retirement System, not the entire Vermont budget. Vermont's budget calls for 1.8 billion in state spending with another billion in federal spending', wasremoved within a few minutes.

The Free Republic claims in its help section that, "While Free Republic is not edited or censored, it does reserve the right to remove any postings that are considered inappropriate. Examples of inappropriate posts are those that are off-subject or contain advertising, pornography, obscene material, racist material, Nazi (or other hate group) material, materials promoting violence, threats or illegal acts, etc". It would be interesting to know under which category my replies were considered to fall.

David Brooks writes about the religious style of Americans.#

Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville was bewildered by the mixture of devout religiosity he found in the U.S. combined with the relative absence of denominational strife, at least among Protestants. Americans, he observed, don't seem to care that their neighbors hold to false versions of the faith.

That's because many Americans have tended to assume that all these differences are temporary. In the final days, the distinctions will fade away, and we will all be united in God's embrace. This happy assumption has meant that millions feel free to try on different denominations at different points in their lives, and many Americans have had trouble taking religious doctrines altogether seriously. As the historian Henry Steele Commager once wrote, "During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt."

Don Park writes about hive-minds, social networks, and millions of dollars.#

Social network is a network where nodes are people and connections are positive relationships -- I guess negative relationships can also be used to build social networks but they are not very useful. Current upswelling in the interest about social software can be divided into two:

1. Forming new connections and nurturing old connections
2. Sending and receiving data through social connections

Companies like Friendster and LinkedIn are focused on the first. Bloggosphere is all about the second. I tend to favor the second because the first reminds me of the sneaker net and because relationships are easy to stress and difficult to create.

Seeing social networks as a data networks like the Internet or intranet helps me see new opportunities. One I recently thought about involves distribution of favors, Favor Network if you will.

Weblog Hype on Dave Pollard and his Time-Savers.#

Perhaps there are some who take tips like these to heart, but I imagine the majority of webloggers just write what they want, when they want. Stopping to think about the process could detract from what the blogger had in mind in the first place.

The Binary Circumstance has a great piece on the intersection of religion, politics, and evolution.#

Begin with the binary circumstance: things either exist or they do not. Knowledge and evidence can only be acquired about things that exist. Knowledge is nothing more than a state of mind that is in sync with existence. That knowledge state of mind is constucted of concepts and ideas that are rational because they can be reduced to existents, things that exist. A mind that is full of concepts and ideas that have no connection to existence, is an irrational, mystical mind.

[...]

A mandatory government is based on what I call theplantation premises: some superficial collectivist identity, like skin color, ethnicity or sex, makes certain groups inherently superior to others and those individuals or groups have a "right" to control the lives of others. This control requires that those who are being controlled cannot act in their own rational self-interest (by law), and must surrender the fruits of their labor to the superior class (taxes).

[...]

Any rational individual who dares to point out that the government is based on irrational premises will be ostracized if not put in jail. If he uses force in self-defense to protect his natural state as a free, rational man, he will be killed. This puts selective pressure on rationals in the gene pool, making it more difficult for them to pass along their genes, while making it easier for mystics, irrationals and the delusional to rise to positions of power.

ScrappleFace reports some great news for Atheists.#

(2003-12-29) -- The Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington, today announced that the "angel Gabriel" told him that Christians worship the same God as atheists do.

"Gabriel said we're all God's children," said Mr. Chane, "and any distinctions in belief are not meaningful. Faith in God is the same thing as non-belief and we should unite with our atheist brothers in this revelation from Gabriel -- who either exists or does not."

Brad Edmunds on why Government WILL be abolished.#

That having forcible government is not in our best interest is demonstrated every day. A basic illustration shows the implausibility of any hope that government, even at its most benign, can improve our lives: Say you have three people, one of whom is poor. Under a free market, the poor one builds a fence for a non-poor one, and is paid. Now, three people are working, each producing and earning wealth. Under forcible government, the poor one appeals to the government one. The government one points a gun at the non-poor fellow, takes some of his money, and gives it to the poor one. The government one keeps some of this money for himself. He does this all day long. It's his job. Under the government scenario, we have one of the three people working to create wealth while the other two commit an injustice and forever operate under distorted incentives. All three now regard each other with distrust and resentment, with two of the three (the non-government folks) wishing there were a better way. This scenario applies equally to law enforcement, justice, roads, and geographic defense.

The 279 million of us who believe forcible government is necessary haven't yet seen enough history or enough entrepreneurs (government schools ensure this), even though the occasional government official utters something vaguely supportive of free enterprise. As historians have documented from the dawn of civilization, government works only for its own purposes. Any good work a government chances to accomplish for any person or people can come only at someone else's expense. Government never creates wealth, and it never improves, but can only degrade, the standard of living of those under its rule. Forcible government has no moral standing, no right, to exist.

Michael Hansom on advertising.#

One of the great benefits of living a TV-free lifestyle (and one of the reasons I went to a TV-free lifestyle) is that I don't need to sit through the neverending stream of stupid, pandering, insipid ads that eat up a quarter of every show on television. However, every so often, some ads are rather entertaining to see, and it's nice to be able to take a peek at them from time to time.

While I hate, hate, hate the appearance of what's so euphemistically called "pre-show entertainment" in the movie theaters lately (the ten minutes of advertising that runs after the advertising slides, but before the fifteen minutes of trailers before you finally get to see the movie you paid for), I saw a great ad for HP photo printers that used a 'flipbook' form of animation. The spot opened with a 20-something guy standing in front of a staircase, and you watch him jump up and down a couple times. The scene then cuts to a pair of hands holding a flipbook titled "I defy gravity" made of photos taken of the guy at the peak of multiple jumps, creating an illusion of him flying over the ground, up and down staircases, and over parked cars. Once the flipbook finishes, you get a couple more shots of him jumping up and down, and then it's over. Quick, simple, amusing, and sticks with you — nicely done.

Matt May on why Permalinks and Cool URIs shouldn't Change.#

This is more or less why I started writing my own blogging software. I wanted to make sure that I could have absolute control over my content, including my URIs, and mix it up any way I want. I have about three lines of server-side code that gives me a little flexibility with my physical directory structure, but that's all. Permalinks are neato. They should be respected even when you change blogging apps.

Hossein Derakhshan writes about when a government is disconnected from its people.#

However, the reason is pretty clear: When a government can run the whole country only by the oil and gas income, it doesn't have to answer its people's needs; it only thinks about its own needs. (In 2004, Iran will have $16 billion revenue from oil export, while it only depends on approximately 18% of citizen's taxes.)

So it's not important for the government that tens of thousands of lives are lost in road accidents every year, or millions are living in homes poorly resistible against any earthquake bigger than 5 Richter, or millions are open to different kinds of cancer because of the poisonously polluted air of Tehran, etc.

But they are pretty concerned about their own power and the threat from their own enemies; so they are always ready to spend a whole year of oil income, $16 billion, to achieve nuclear technology to use it as defensive weapons.

Even if a government needed the people's taxes to operate it would still not need to meet their needs. It would simply need to have a strong enough arm to continuing forcing the money out of them.

Governments are, by their nature, coercive entities. If they were good then you wouldn't need to be forced to pay taxes.

Ed Cone writes of mistakes in the Lord of the Rings series that he can live with.#

But Frodo -- please. He's supposed to be older than Merry, Pippin, and Sam, but he looks like their kid brother. Even when he embarks on that last ship, after going literally to hell and back, his face is unlined and boyish.

Jackson skipped the critical 'Scouring of the Shire' chapter, wherein the story of the books is recapitulated in microcosm in the hobbits' homeland. OK, he had to skip it, for reasons of time and pacing. But that means he skipped an important explication of Frodo's character -- the moment when he keeps the mob from killing Saruman, thus revealing his hard-won maturity, even nobility. The movie could have used that moment, because we damn sure don't get it from visual cues.

Michael Williams on the essay, Polyamory - What it is and What it isn't.#

Aside from being awkwardly written (avoiding some common contractions, but using one in the title, for instance), the essay is dull and boring. Plus, it's not based the slightest bit in reality. Anyway, what is "polyamory"?

Polyamory has been defined as the philosophy and practice of loving more than one person at a time with honesty and integrity. Synonyms for polyamory are responsible, ethical, and intentional, non-monogamy. Because those descriptions are somewhat clumsy, the term Polyamory was coined in the late 80's by a pagan Priestess, Morning Glory Zell, and defines a range of different lifestyle alternatives. In most cases, but not all, this involves some sexual or at least intensely intimate sensual behavior.

Let me summarize: you have sex with lots of people, but there won't be any complications if you all love each other

Jonathon Delacour writes about politics and the development of his philosophy.#

As I see it, universal health care and pharmaceutical benefits, anti-monopoly and consumer protection laws, environmental safeguards, public transportation, communications and cross-media regulation, and publicly-funded broadcasting are all viable and beneficial tradeoffsthat balance the interests of individual, corporation, and government.

Experience shows me that, while free and open markets offer the most effective way of improving living standards, corporations can rarely be trusted to place (for example) the well-being of the environment ahead of the interests of their shareholders. Equally, individuals can not always be trusted to act in the best interests of themselves and their families. The Happy Tutor put it well:

What 95% of the people may tell the pollster is that they love God and want to be happy with him in Heaven, rather than burning in hell with Satan for all eternity. But with their earthly wallet and mortal attention what they buy is violence, perversity, fleshly pleasure, vanity, pride, pain, and death—all that Satan sponsors.

And until we inhabit a Utopia in which nations consistently place the interests of others above their own, I'll continue to believe that the high moral ground is a poor vantage point from which to conduct foreign policy.

Oh man, do I disagree with this. So individuals can't be trusted, well then we shouldn't make those wonderful governments out of them because they are corrupt. If we don't trust people then we can't trust anything that is made up of people.

Most of those "solutions" (universal health care, anti-monopoly and consumer protection laws, etc) are all fixing problems that are created by the government and the lack of protection of property laws. The government is the only one who can create monopolies that monopolize by law (patents, copyrights, government contracts, etc.) If people's property was truly protected then a company would have to negotiate with me to pollute my piece of sky or river. etc.

I write about this a bit. Particularly check out stuff from Faré.

I feel I should note that it seems many people who support such policies are saying, "We cannot fix that part of the system, but we can alleviate that damage." I respect this and slightly support it as an interim step, but I feel that the goal of the current age is to restore Liberty in America (for Americans) and elsewhere (for everyone else.)

 

This quote is great...

I'll finish as I started, with a quote from Tony Kushner:

I have said this before, and I'll say it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs—if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate—don't give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

I find it very intriguing when people are encourage to not consider their ethics, morals, or vision of the future when voting for politicians. What are they about then? Try to find a candidate who will leave you alone while oppressing everyone else?

Richard links to Dave Pollard on how to save time blogging and make a better blog.#

I agree with Richard that tip #14 is the hardest and most important.

Give yourself time to think, to experience offline, and to think creatively. This is the most important time-saver of all. Don't just react to what you read and see in the news. Get away from reading and your computer and other media, take a walk, do things that stimulate your creativity and give you unique material to write about, talk to people to get different viewpoints and ideas, clear your mind, think about what's really important to you, what you really believe, what you think needs to be done and said, and then write about that. The time you spend in unencumbered thought will be saved many times over in the process of reading and writing: You'll know exactly what you want to say, your enthusiasm and creative energy will make your writing easier, faster and more entertaining and valuable to readers, and you'll find it much easier to say 'no' to wasting time reading and writing about things that are suddenly much less important.

Unfortunately for me, as Richard points out, he advises against reading lots of blogs. I read lots of blogs. Although I read them much less frequently than I once did. Generally I only go through my entire blogroll on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And the other days I'll do small pickings or write about books or something. Hmm... if I start going downhill, let me know?

Later Richard writes about the lack of time while blogging and the thought that goes into creates problems with the discourse.

should write more academically, and should resist ad hominem attacks. But, because the expectation of blogging is that you must respond quickly or risk being seen to be behind the times, they do not. Academics have processes like peer review to help stamp out ad hominem attacks and lack of substence, but bloggers very often do not. There is no one to "edit" your thoughts before they get published (unedited voice of an individual, right?), and yes, that is a weakness of blogging as well as a strength. A double-edged sword, if you wanted me to use a cliché to make the point.

Perhaps the discourse that we're talking about exists in the academic world but it is behind closed doors and you only see the finished product. In the blogging world, what the finished product is is simply unclear. Is it the individual blog post? Is it the entire blog? Is it the blogger's philosophy?

Thinking about it at this level seems to suggest to me that we should not worry about the lack of academic style on initial posts so much.

Richard writes on quotes and points out something that I noticed but neglected to mention.#

I've always had problem with quotes by famous historical figures in isolation because the source is very rarely ever cited. Just recently, several quotes puportedly said by Abraham Lincoln were shown to never have been uttered by the man. The Internet only made it easier for unattributed quotes from historical figures to gain currency. Some—and it's funny that this comes from the same site (lewrockwell.com), although different author, as the above quote—have gained actual currency from spreading a falsely attributed quote.

You'd think I'd have a bigger problem with quoting out of context. But nope, attribution, or more accurately, the lack thereof.

Also of interest is when famous figures have their worst purposefully hidden. In the recent Christopher Lydon interview with Gore Vidal, Vidal talks about a great quote from Benjamin Franklin about the Constitution. I'm not quoting it exactly, but he essentially said that he supports the Constitution only because it will lead to tyranny and then the people will revolt and make a better one. Hah.

Mark Schmitt writes about how Bush and most of the other "conservatives" are not really conserving anything. (Via Richard.)#

The term radical was never even associated with conservatism until the late '60s, and referred to groups like the John Birch Society, which were as dedicated to the destruction of the existing order as the radical left-wing groups of the time like the Weather Underground. But in the sense that "radical" means a change down to the very roots of society, it may be more suited to Bush than conservative. It is exactly right to call the underlying vision of his tax policy, which is a system that taxes exclusively income from labor, and exempts income from investment, "the most radical idea since socialism," to quote John Edwards.

But in most other cases, and particularly when it comes to government spending, the administration and Congress are not operating from any deep principles of government, just seeing what they can get away with to benefit their friends and contributors, and figuring out how to win an election so they can keep doing it.

Many people (Matthew Stoller and Jonathon Delacour, above) are talking about how language and narratives are incredibly powerful forces in politics. They frame debates (George Lakoff) and issues while leading the voters and other politicians down strange roads.

My maxim: Politics are complex to confuse the populous and avoid the truth, not because they have to be.

Richard writes about when humans are better than machines.#

I'm trying to avoid what seems to be an likely trend towards computers aggregating and filtering out weblogs based on relationships and other criteria, where having a human do it at least gives one a window into that human's personality. Eventually artificial intelligence will be indisguishable from human intelligence, but I'll always want nothin' but the real thing, baby.

I could not agree with this more. What is powerful, to me, about the Blogosphere is that ideas and stories will rise to the top because real people care about them. When enough people care about them and write about them personally you see them more often. Rather than a message automatically getting out and being seen as important because someone related to Mr. Popular said it, a message gets out when it's worth it to enough people. This, to me, is the difference between automatic and personal aggregation.

Not that I think such tools are completely worthless, but I think they should be thought of more like search engines or databases. You go to them occasionally when you don't know what you're looking for, but you don't open them up for every reading adventure.

Wendy comments on the Harvard Magazine article.#

Mostly it's great. My quotes are intelligent yet cute, reflecting what I hope is the tone of my blog. However.

I never said that my personal blog takes up any of my work time. This is implied in the article, somewhat indirectly. I spoke a lot about my work blogs, and I obviously work on them during the day, particularly the home page blog. But The Redhead is on my time. If I break during the day for ten minutes of personal blogging, that's ten minutes I add onto the end of my day. My blogging is encouraged by my department in many ways, but I am not given work time for The Redhead.

Ryan Overbey comments on how analogies are used in Buddhist philosophy.#

When your opponent then rips your dumb analogy to shreds, congratulate them for attaining a deeper understanding of Buddhism. In the Lakavatara, the interlocutor challenges the ocean-waves analogy by saying, "Hey, we can all see the ocean, but we can't see this ubiquitous Mind in the same sense." To which the Buddha responds, "I just used that analogy to help stupid people along the path." Implication: Congratulations, you've progressed farther than the stupid people. Now shut up and believe my initial assertion regardless of my inability to prove it.

Michael Feldman links to Joan Anderman in the Boston Globe, who writes about music taste. Michael uses to opportunity to talk about his children's musical tastes.#

Joan Anderman, writing in today's Boston Globe,has some very interesting observations on inter-generational taste in music. She is a music critic, and up on Foo Fighters or Ben Harper or Korn or Sheryl Crow, while her kids go nuts for the Doors, Cream, Led Zepplin and Yes.

It reminds the Dowbrigade of our #1 son, now residing in the mountains of Peru trying to simulataneously build and manage a small hostel on a piece of land we bought 25 years ago because it was the most intensely beautiful spot we had ever seen. When he was 3, we lived in a tourist hotel in Huanchaco, a beach town known chiefly for its excellent surfing and reed boat fishing industry. The Dowbrigade taught English Literature and Linguistics at the National University by day, and ran the Bar/Discoteque, named "Joey's Pub" after self-same #1 son, by night. Which might at least partially explain what he is currently doing up in the Andes.

Michael Feldman writes about The One, who will save the system.#

Howard Dean is not The One who is going to wipe away the subterfuge and meaningless rhetoric which have blocked the arteries of our political process and get the blood flowing once again. He is not The One who is going to challenge, and break, the Major Media Monopoly on our collective consciousness. He is not The One capable of igniting an unstoppable brush fire of grassroots actions which are going to truly revolutionize how the political process works in this country.

Make no mistake, we are not whistling wistfully in the wind. The Dowbrigade firmly believes The One is out there somewhere, and his or her moment is swiftly approaching. Our existing political process, honed and evolved in a period of governmental and media encroachment into all areas of public and private life, simply doesn't work any more, and is incapable of producing leaders of the stature and integrity needed to get us out of this quagmire of disfigured development. The dynamic and the technology to effectuate an authentic revolution in how political decisions are made and implemented don't need to be invented or brought about. They exist today. The One will be the first public figure to figure out how to catalyze these conditions and start them revolving around his or her vision.

It will not be the One, but the Many who are together the One.

Matt Stoller writes about David Brooks and aesthetic politics.#

Brooks's aesthetic sense is very much wedded to a political mentality, that aesthetics and grand pronouncements create reality. In his world, Bush's speeches towards democracy are terribly important, much more so than the cozy dealings with an undemocratic China and abandonment of a democratic Taiwan. Dean's pragmatic rhetoric on internationalism is disnoble when compared to Bush's high flying description of the greatness of America. Also, Al Gore is awkward, Bush is heartfelt and decisive, Dean is an angry atheist from Park Avenue, Kerry is nobly arrogant, and the vitriole against Clinton was all just a big misunderstanding. Brooks reports just the factoids, glossing over details and empirical data with smooth phrases. Brooks's columns and his emphasis on image are the closest you can get to bottling television into a newspaper column. And he broadcasts his aesthetic sense, on, say, Dean as a third-party candidate, from the New York Times, twice a week.

[...]

On Iraq, Brooks uses his aesthetic reverence for Americana to devastating effect. While nodding at critics of the post-war planning, he glides over their concerns by writing that "our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality." As Mark Kleiman points out, this isn't strictly true. There was a plan - that the exile community would take over seemlessly and Americans would collect the rose petals strewn as their feet - it just didn't work very well. But in typical Brooks fashion, his point seems true. There wasn't a Plan B and military men like Anthony Zinni are agog at the incredibly bad post-war management, so now, Brooks has established the factoid that in fact there was no plan because the situation was so unpredictable in the first place. Iraq is a grand adventure, says Brooks, and sure it's tough, but no one could possibly have done better at this. Besides, American spontaneity is a testament to its splendor.

Richard links to Tom Mangan on writing a blog.#

Seems obvious but people make me wonder sometimes: Everybody who gets paid to change other people's writing should be doing some writing of their own, preferably for an audience. (File under: another reason why all you lurkers out there oughta be blogging. The more you write, the more you identify with other people who write, and the better chance you have to make constructive changes to their copy vs. reflexive responses to your pet peeves.)

Kaye Trammell writes about lots of bloggers and the USID.#

Even if the USID typology were to be worked out, the premise of the system as Mike states it undo's the essence of blogging. Mike talks about the blogosphere as an echo chamber of 1,000 posts talking about 1 story.

I don't think he means this, but it almost sounds like he thinks this is a bad thing.

I welcome the 1,001st post about a dead horse news story because if it was written by a blog I subscribe to then it is likely to hold some unique point of view. It is likely to point out something that hasn't been yet brought to light. And if it is rehashing something, chances are that this is happening because the rest of the world is ignoring it.

Compare this to one of Dave Pollard recommendations that you shouldn't rehash a major story that EVERYONE is rehashing.

But what if everyone stops? Then no one will rehash it and how will we find out about it. :P

Jay Rosen writes about Paul Krugman's New Years resolutions for the rest of his and him in general.#

For the sad likelihood is that the partisan will wind up saying: journalists, see as I see. Denounce as false what I denounce as false. Treat as urgent what I treat as urgent. "That's how you would report the campaign-- if you were serious," where serious turns out to be the worldview the writer had going in. Sadly, that is what Krugman did. He conformed to the very low expectations that journalists have for press criticism in this genre.

From his Times perch and in his recent book, Krugman has written against an "ideology that denigrates almost everything, other than national defense, that the government does." To him, Bush, Cheyney, Rumsfeld, Rove and crew are radicals, secret revolutionaries, not conservatives. They took what was beyond the pale in politics and economic policy, and made it happen overnight-- without any real debate, without coming clean about the real agenda, without the press noticing or raising basic questions.

Richard, one of my favourite bloggers OBVIOUSLY, writes about armed police officers and carrying out policy.#

I've heard it said (from the mouth of a prospective RCMP candidate) that Canadian police officers must report each instance that they draw their gun in public. It's not clear to me what the policy is for police officers Stateside, but if TV is any guide—and it's not—American officers draw their gun hourly on the hour. Anyway, Johnston interestingly notes that only 22% of those polled in the police officer's association in Britain favour armed officers on the beat. (A message for politicians and the public: if you have a certain policy idea, it might be wise to first see what the people who will carry out that policy think.) Johnston argues for more unarmed police offers on the street who are approachable and part of the community they serve, rather than separate from it.

Oh my god. Richard links to the best thing ever. Gay Boyfriend, a music video for girls with terrible boyfriends.#

I like cigarettes, and that's no gag
But you'll always be my favourite fag!

Tony Pierce puts the sucker in the front for the ones that front.#

my problem is, i like smart people. not sucker mcs. not people who dare me. ooooo a dare. what is this, fifth grade. and anyway, i make the fucking dares around here.

they come to me saying theyve never read my shit but i suck. they say who's tony pierce like they dont know. they know. my hairs soft and its coming back so call it a comeback. my problem is that i get distracted easilly. especially by nothingness.

I've reached 1000 (actually 1001) subscribed feeds. Fear.#

Richard links to Amy Wohl who writes about social networks and the real value.#

It's not the idea of on-line socializing that I find odd. I do it all the time. It's the artificiality of doing it with people just to get a connection for some unshared reason. If we're getting together around a shared interest and we need another point of view -- and one of us can make the connection and bring that person it -- that would be fine. The fact that we're talking about something we're all interested in makes it seem, well, less crass.

Later Richard links to Roland Tanglao who suggests that the only social network tools we need are blogs because they join people with similar interests together.

I find these networking sites kind of dubious. If you are already a good networker, it will help but if you are not I think you are better off blogging stuff that shows your expertise (or how lovely you are if you looking for dates!) and networking that way. Blogging might take longer, but I bet in the long run the outcome will be better.

Richard links to Teresa Nielsen Hayden who writes about creationists and Biblical interpretation.#

They're not making a defense of religion. They're defending their own pet proposition, that the Bible should be approached via unnaturally simplified reading conventions that are less subtle than they'd use to read a paperback romance, and less sophisticated than their own face-to-face speech. I have real trouble with that.

And where's their faith in the unmediated reading experience? If the basic deal is that you should read the Bible for yourself, as literal truth, how come so many of these guys publish books explaining what it says, and what you should understand from reading it? How come they keep telling other people they've read it wrong? There is no such thing as a single literal reading of a complex text. Pretending there is just puts you in the middle of a covert game of "my reading can beat your reading."

There are SO many great links off of that page if you're interested in some argument between creationists and non-creationists.

Richard links an amazing article in the Economist on the development of human hair and the social practices surrounding its use.#

The article goes through talking about how human initially lost most of their hair, the different theories, why people are continuing to remove more hair, and why the hair we have stayed around:

Whatever the explanation for the loss of hair, another explanation is needed for why men and women kept dense hair in three places: their heads, armpits and pubes. In particular, those who believe in the parasite theory must explain why humans merely shed some of their hair and not all of it, since the head, armpits and pubic areas are the very regions where human parasitic infections tend to occur.

The answer is sex, of course. David Stoddart, an olfactory biologist with Australia's Antarctic programme, points out that armpit and pubic hair grows just where the major scent glands are to be found. Hair is a means of wafting this scent about. Thus a tuft of hair allows humans, like other animals, to advertise to mates that something of interest is happening on the skin below.

John Gruber on Rob Enderle.#

Speaking of jackasses, how about technology industry "analyst" Rob Enderle? Enderle is both:

• Frequently quoted in major mainstream media
• Nearly always completely wrong (at least regarding Apple)

One would hope these two facts would be mutually exclusive — that a self-professed industry expert whose pronouncements about Apple were nearly always wrong would eventually stop being asked for his opinion about the company and its products. But alas, no.

Kaye Trammell on when it is okay to modify old blog posts.#

Never delete a post. Never. If you no longer agree with the post then use the strikethrough HTML option: < strike >. If you post something controversial one day & then pull it down the next you are telling your readers that you don't have the backbone to say what you say on your blog. Say it & stand by it.

I agree with Kaye on all her suggestions, especially on the "window" of free changes right after a post has been posted.

Tony Pierce has an impromptu pie eating contest.#

somehow it was discovered that i had two perfectly good apple pies in my kitchen.

she was all, wtf you doing with two apple pies in your kitchen?

i was all, nothin.

so she went, how old are these?

which unfortunately is a good question in my house.

i was all, new.

Brad DeLong quotes The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Fall of ENRON.#

ENRON seems to have consisted of a guy (Kenneth Lay) who believed that deregulation would produce huge profit opportunities (but weren't sure what they were), a guy (Jeff Skilling) who understood that deregulation would produce huge profit opportunities to a firm that could become the best at trading natural-gas contracts in newly-deregulated energy markets (but had no clue what to do next--other than to piss away billions upon billions of $$$$$ trying to enter markets that nobody inside ENRON understood), a guy (Andrew Fastow) whom Lay and Skilling let steal $100 million because he was very good at both legal and illegal large-scale financial fraud, a host of investors and analysts who paid no attention to the large wedges between ENRON's unimpressive cash-flow and its impressive reported earnings, and a host of other enablers.

Moxie compares the Democratic Presidential contenders to pre-schoolers.#

4 year old boy: Moxie gave me diarrhea. And she's got cooties. Ask anyone!

Moxie: I did not! I do not!

4 year old boy: AND she spit on the cookies and milk for snacktime. And my Daddy could beat up her Daddy. And, and and, Santa didn't come to my house because of her.

Moxie: Of course not, you are Jewish!

4 year old boy: You made me fall down and hurt myself in the playground. You made everyone be mean to me.

Steven den Beste on intelligence and emergence.#

We should not be asking whether a hive-mind is intelligent. The question is whether we should define 'intelligence' in a way which includes hive-minds, and I think that we should. That kind of collective behavior among groups of animals is very old, and it also includes fish schools, bird flocks, herbivorous animal herds, predatory animal packs, and human tribes. But the degree to which any given example of collective behavior is "intelligent" varies enormously; fish schools demonstrate very little intelligence, whereas lions and wolves and African wild dogs have extremely sophisticated hunting behaviors in groups. (And when it comes to African wild dogs, it appears to be "culture". Cooperative hunting behavior and other ways in which members of the pack interact is learned, not instinctive, and when African wild dogs have been raised in captivity and released in the wild without the opportunity to learn those things by observing them as puppies, they do not prosper.)

[...]

With the development of the internet it becomes possible for arbitrarily large groups of people who are geographically distributed to spontaneously form hive-minds and to communicate with one another at speeds and latencies approaching those which previously only had been possible in direct teamwork. The internet largely solves the scaling problem involved in direct teamwork, and totally eliminates the effects of geographic distribution of participants. In the "global village" of the internet, everything is right next door.

Jeremy Bowers comments on weblogs and Journalism as different "hive-minds" of journalism.

This provides an even better hook then I was planning on to answer the perennial "Are Weblogs Journalism?" question. The answer is: Journalism is itself a "hive mind" that has a certain structure and purpose. It consists of several distinct and highly stereotyped levels, roughly hierarchial, and stories flow from the local to the national levels. (Each level also distributes the stories at its own local level, which may also include "regional" or "statewide" depending on the story.)

In order for a story to "make the jump" from local to national, it must pass certain requirements. The fundamental requirement is that "many people nationally will consider it interesting". Unfortunately, this is not possible for the journalistic hive mind to correctly estimate in advance, because it has a structural flaw: Individual humans are forced to decide what will be interesting to large masses of people. "Interesting" is a very, very complicated criterion, so instead of being able to judge "interesting", the journalism hive mind has instead developed very quick and very stereotypical heuristics for whether a story should be taken national. One of the well known ones is "If it bleeds, it leads." Bad news is a "good bet" for being "interesting", so even when it really isn't, it's broadcast on the national news. There are others. To borrow one of the few good terminology contributions of post-modern analysis, these are also often expressable in terms of "narratives"; "Sports Team Wins/Loses", "Bush is Stupid", "War in Iraq Failing", "Your Children Are Going To Die Painfully Unless You...", you can think of others. Stories that fit these narratives/heuristics are more likely to be selected, those that actively contradict them may be actively surpressed by the editors.

Sebastian Holsclaw points out that because the decisions of a hive-mind are so complicated and cultures are hive-minds, then a conservative approach to change may be best so you don't undo decisions you don't understand.

It is believed that this collective intelligence is a form of emergent behaviour of complex and self-reinforcing systems. Steven mentions that the market exhibits this kind of emergent behaviour, but he only touches on the fact that societies as a whole also exhibit emergent behaviour. These emergent behaviours are a large part of what we talk about when we mention 'civilizational knowledge' or 'historical wisdom'.

The problem of understanding a behaviour which is emergent from a system as complex as a society is very difficult. If you are in the society from which such a behaviour emerges, you are certainly influenced by the society in ways which do not rise to your conscious understanding. If you are outside the society, you may miss very important factors which are not obvious to outside observers. In either case the emergent behaviour may be geared toward things or ends which are not readily apparent by merely examining the origin and immediate growth of the behaviour.

Michael Lucas-Smith on how people are afraid of hive-minds and becoming a node of the Borg.

Thoughtless minds are like those army ants.. they don't think about where they're going, they just get there. Humans are -terrified- of this concept. The very thought that -we- could be that thoughtless fills us with dread, so much so that we pretend it hasn't and can't and won't and doesn't happen.

The social mind is perhaps the most interesting one. It tends to value individuals over the whole even though our politicians stand up there telling us the whole is more important than the individuals. A conflict between hive minds can cause great tension, so it is often the governments job to try to manipulate the social mind or find a syngery with it. In steps the media, who's job seems to be to cause as much conflict as possible? :) (they are no 'peoples champions', they are a catalyst, the fist clenching because the mind wants to strike, but thoughtlessly, without a target, blind rage, what the buddhists shun).

Harvard Magazine on the Berkman Center's Blogging community.#

Welcome to Weblogs at Harvard Law, an experimental community where more than 350 students, faculty and staff members, and alumni have signed up to publicly express their thoughts about everything from social issues to software, from literature to love. Based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the initiative is free and available to anyone with a Harvard.edu e-mail address. And except for a few private blogs limited to specific classes, all Harvard-hosted blogs can be read by anybody on the Web.

[...]

Blogging is also a cheap—or, in the Berkman Center's case, free—form of publishing using existing space on University computers. And from a user's perspective, it's wonderfully liberated from editorial interference. "You know that old saying that freedom of the press belongs to whoever has the press?" Winer asks. "Noweverybody has the press."

[...]

Despite the growing pains, most bloggers remain true believers in their medium's value and promise. Downey, for instance, feels guilty if she gets so busy she goes several days without blogging. When that happens, she says, she posts a message letting readers know "I'm still here; this Weblog hasn't been abandoned." Once she decided to take a break from blogging, perhaps permanently—but she missed it so much she found herself back on-line within a week.