There’s a nice write up by Nate Anderson at Ars Technica about a chapter (download it here) in the forthcoming book The Making and Unmaking of Intellectual Property. The chapter is about how norms rather than copyright regulate the pilfering of jokes by comedians from other comedians, and the effects those norms have on the content of comedy. The authors (Dotan Oliar and Christopher Jon Sprigman — ironically, the Ars Technica article forgets to mention their names) maintain that once the norms against stealing jokes kicked in, comedy became less about everyone telling the same jokes but in unique performance styles, and more about differentiated material. Norms were sufficient to spur innovation: “Comedians today invest in new, original, and personal content. The medium is no longer focused on reworking of preexisting genres like marriage jokes, ethnic jokes, or knock-knock jokes.”

Encouraged to develop unique materials, comedians have turned to the micro-topics typical of observational humor (“Don’t you hate it when you split an Oreo and there’s just a little bit of filling left on one side?”), and to up-to-the-minute topical jokes. One of the 19 comedians the author interviewed says the rise of norms also led him to write longer jokes, because it’s easier to tell when they’re stolen. It’s also affected the style: since comedians are differentiated mainly (of course not always) by the content of their jokes, their performance style has become an undifferentiated standing in front of a mic.

The authors conclude, among other things, that “norms economize on enforcement costs and appear to maintain a healthy level of incentives to create alongside a greater diversity in the kinds of humor produced.”

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Jonathan Zittrain [twitter: zittrain] explains the Facebook directory “leak,” which turns out not to be a leak at all.

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In a press release that is barely comprehensible (or, quite possible, totally incomprehensible) to one such as I, GE has announced a new generation of components that can be used for, among other things, software-defined radios. It is unclear to me whether this technology is designed for anything except military use, but …

Software-defined radios (SDRs) are not the next generation of transistor radios or boomboxes (ask your parents, kids). They are radios in the more primordial sense of being devices that can receive radio-wave signals. The radios you and I are used to are hard-wired to do one thing: Tune into specific frequencies and translate the radio signals into toe-tapping tunes or the blather of infuriating talk show hosts. SDRs can be programmed to do anything they want with any type of signal they can receive. For example, they might treat messages as, say, maps, or signals to turn on the porch light … or as Internet packets.

SDRs matter a lot if only because they promise an alternative to the current broadcast medium. The way it works now, the FCC divvies up spectrum (i.e., frequencies) for particular uses and sells much of it to particular broadcasters. So, your hard-wired radio responds to particular frequencies as carriers of acoustic information sent by known, assigned providers: 106.7 on your radio dial, or whatever. This is a highly inefficient use of spectrum, like dedicating particular lanes of a multi-lane highway to a specific trucking companies. It’d be far more efficient if transmitters and receivers could intelligently negotiate, in real time, which frequencies they’re communicating on, switching to frequencies that are under-trafficked when a particular “lane” is jammed. If our radio receivers — not just our in-dash radios, but all devices that receive radio wave transmissions — were smart devices (SDRs), we could minimize the amount of spectrum we assign to a handful of highly-capitalized broadcasters. We would have more bandwidth than we could eat.

So, I think it’s good news that GE is pushing ahead with this and is commercializing it … unless I’m misunderstanding their announcement, the technology’s uses, and GE’s intentions to commercialize it.

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According to an article in Science Daily, the odd lumpiness of God’s jaw as painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel is due to the fact that Michelangelo gives us a see-through view to the brain stem. You can also see His spinal column through His chest.

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Paul Gillin blogs about CIThread (while disclosing that he is advising them):

The curator starts by presenting the engine with a basic set of keywords. CIThread scours the Web for relevant content, much like a search engine does. Then the curator combs through the results to make decisions about what to publish, what to promote and what to throw away.

As those decisions are made, the engine analyzes the content to identify patterns. It then applies that learning to delivering a better quality of source content. Connections to popular content management systems make it possible to automatically publish content to a website and even syndicate it to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the CIThread dashboard.

There’s intelligence on the front end, too. CIThread can also tie in to Web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. For example, it can analyze content that generates a lot of views or clicks and deliver more source material just like it to the curator. All of these factors can be weighted and varied via a dashboard.

I like the idea of providing automated assistance to human curators…

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Slashdot has an interesting discussion of a question I’ve often wondered about: What does non-commercial mean in a Creative Commons license? If your blog runs some ads, does that mean you can’t use a photo CC-ed for non-commercial use? CC-friendly BoingBoing is the possible offender in this case.

BoingBoing has removed the image to respect the author’s wishes, and has posted a brief notice acknowledging ambiguity about “non-commercial.” I think that’s the right way to handle it. But I’d love more clarity about this. I’d be fine with commercial entities using a photo I CC’ed, so long as they weren’t directly making money from it, because I think the culture of sharing is improved with that policy. But, it is a knottier problem than it would be if CC were more explicit about what the intended norms were for commercial use.

[Later that day:] Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing responded to my tweeting of the Slashdot discussion with three tweets:

Slashdot post is fake. Did you know the photographer is a flickr friend of @doctorow’s and namechecks him in the photo?

the post by the slashdot anonymous troll is NOT by the proprietor of the image. But by a troll.

They’re trolling because the very post was written by Cory, a longtime CC activist, & post said “I’m going offline for a month”

Thanks, Xeni

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Harvard has announced the creation of the Harvard Library Lab:

The Lab promotes the development of projects in all areas of library activity and leverages the entrepreneurial aspirations of people throughout the library system and beyond. Proposals from faculty and students from anywhere in the university will also be welcomed and the Lab will encourage collaboration with projects being developed at MIT.

This is great news, both in its practical import and as yet another sign of Harvard’s desire to innovate to help make libraries more useful,  valuable, and relevant than ever. Thanks to the Arcadia Fund for supporting this.

Disclosure: I’ve been consulting to Harvard Law Library’s own Library Lab (which is likely to change its name to avoid confusion with the newly announced university-wide library lab). The HLS Lab is under John Palfrey, who is also a member of the university Lib Lab.

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James Franco rules the meta-universe the way Chuck Norris rules the meager regular old universe. (This summary of a New York article should convince you, as if you needed convincing.) So, here are some James Franco Chuck Norris jokes (each of which builds on an existing CN joke):

Chuck Norris cracks walnuts in his six pack … and obediently feeds them to James Franco.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity – twice. James Franco whistled infinity three times, while mastering Russian literature.

Chuck Norris can speak braille. Braille speaks back to James Franco, and by the end of the movie realizes it was in love with him all along.

Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle. So can James Franco, but he doesn’t, because he’s too modest to show off like that insecure asshole Chuck Norris.

Once a cobra bit Chuck Norris’ leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died, after being nursed through its ordeal by a compassionate James Franco.

Chuck Norris can slam revolving doors. But then James Franco opens them again because he finds them to be a fascinating Western manifestation of the East’s eternal mandala.

Death once had a near-Chuck-Norris experience. Death then went to James Franco to talk through the experience.

Chuck Norris can play the violin with the piano. James Franco can’t do that, but, unlike Chuck Norris, he can convincingly play any part he is given.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. James Franco does not sleep. There’s too much to learn, too many ideas to ponder, too many feelings to feel, too many people to help…

Chuck Norris once visited the Virgin Islands. They are now The Islands. James Franco had long conversations with the Virgin Islands, really got to know them, and established a life-long friendship that has mutually enriched their lives.

Some kids piss their name in the snow. Chuck Norris can piss his name into concrete. James Franco can piss Chuck Norris’ name into piss.

Chuck Norris sued the kid who posted the original Chuck Norris jokes site. James Franco will undoubtedly take time out from the 64 credits he’s taking at Columbia to invite the inventor of James Franco Chuck Norris Jokes over for a beer.

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Eszter Hargittai and her team have done research that shows that digital youngsters are not as savvy as we would like them to be, over-relying on Google’s rank ordering of results, etc.

It’s important to have actual data to look at — thanks, Eszter! — even though it confirms what we should all probably know by now: When it comes to information, we’re a lazy, sloppy species that vastly over-estimates its own wisdom.

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Jessamyn West took a creative writing course with David Foster Wallace in 1987 and posts her course evaluation. Nope, no footnotes.

For fans of DFW.

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Tim Hwang points us to a video demonstrating an amazing physics engine.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

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I find that I’ve taken to tweeting links of sites I think are worth looking at but about which I don’t have much to say.

I think I may try posting them here as well. Why not?

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I just came across (via Megan McArdle) this piece by Gregor Hohpe from 2004 that analyzes Starbuck’s way of queuing orders — the cashier writes your order on a cup that gets filled asynchronously by the coffee-machine oeprator — in computer processing terms. Fascinating.

Clearly, a computer program could do a better job of optimizing for the most rapid throughput, while minimizing customer delay and keeping customer orders batched together successfully. So, you can imagine the cashier inputting the order electronically, and the barista working from a properly queued list put together by the computer.

Unfortunately, this is one of those places where the real world seems to prevent proper algorithmic optimization. What do you do about the cup of coffee that has to be remade because the customer wanted a double half skim double latte, not a half double double skim latte? What do you do about the cup that spills on its way to the customer’s hands? What do you do about the customer with the spilled coffee on her hands demanding that you top it up while she calls her lawyer?

If only life were more like a computer!

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Slashdot discusses a NY Times Magazine article on the problems with remembering everything, and refers to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete. (I interviewed Viktor for a RadioBerkman episode here.) I think this is one of those topics that’s so large that we’ll only understand it fully by living through it. (Not that we shouldn’t keep trying.)

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We saw Inception last night. Here are my predictions for its Oscars:

That’s twelve nominations. Titanic was nominated for 14, Avatar for 9. Inception is certainly better than either of those two movies, not that that has anything to do with it.

I’m not saying I agree with the Academy’s decisions here. I don’t think Marion Cotillard deserves a nomination, and I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was very good in this, will win to reward him for playing humans with decent haircuts in indie movies after “3rd Rock from the Sun.” But then you have to ask why Ellen Page didn’t get a nomination. Sometimes I just don’t understand the Academy!

But Inception is an excellent movie. Much better — in my opinion! — than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I thought was a mess rescued by Heath Ledger’s performance. I also liked it better than Nolan’s The Prestige, a movie I liked a lot even though in the end the plot cheated. As for Memento, well, that movie is just special. Inception is special, too: a Hollywood movie of its sort (no spoilers here!) that actually works. It is conventional enough that you’ll predict some large-stroke stuff, it’s arbitrary enough in its rules that you’ll feel it’s all a bit weightless, and it’s confusing enough that you’ll leave not sure if it followed its own rules (I think it does). But it’s well-imagined and extremely well-told. It’s The Matrix with a brain.

M. Night Shyamalan must be kicking himself that he didn’t come up with the idea of Inception so that he could direct it and really f*ck it up.

Screenrant’s page on Inception is nothing but spoilers, but it usefully goes through the film’s rules and narrative. Read it after you see the movie…

[Later that day] Here’s a Donald Clark’s thoughtful appreciation of the movie, also full of spoilers (via Seb Schmoller).

[Later that day] I put in “screenplay” twice. D’oh. I meant to include cinematography. So, I fixed it.

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The following isn’t actually interesting. It’s just for the “record.”

TechNewsDaily has an article that maintains that teachers are worried about students using laptops in classes. The quotation of mine that the reporter uses to end the article I’m pretty sure I didn’t say. It’s ungrammatical (“mediums,” ” they just have to exercise precaution of the downsides,” and there’s a comma splice) and, more important, I don’t believe what it has me saying (“students don’t want to be told how to learn”). Of course, it is possible that I mis-expressed my meaning and that I spoke in solecisms. If that’s the case, let me here be clear: I don’t believe students don’t want to be told how to learn. And if they don’t want to be told, they still need to be told. After all, teaching students how to learn is the most important lesson to be taught.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young:

• Radio Berkman 159: “Spare a Cycle?”
  link

• Doc Searls gets literal with consumption link

• Ethan Zuckerman reports in from Nigeria link

• danah boyd challenges us to think about race and class online link

• Herdict has the word on Pirate Bay (non)blocking in the Netherlands link

• OpenNet Initiative on Chinese Internet deanonymization link

• CMLP on Net anonymity and the Ninth Circuit link

• ProjectVRM on progress “toward free and open markets” link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Kazakhstan: Bloggers see China’s ‘weaponless invasion’” link

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The National Enquirer, which thinks it’s about time it was given a Pulitzer, this week (July 26) blares from its front page “Whitney’s $6,300 a Week Drug Habit.” The story inside tells us that Whitney’s addicted not only to drugs but to eating. And they’ve got the photo to prove it:

As my brother Andy pointed out when he saw me reading it, the least of Whitney Houston’s problems is that she’s over-eating. She really ought to see someone about that extra hand of hers.

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I’ve completed a first run-through of a chapter on the fate of long-form argument on the Internet. I say “run-through” and not even “draft” because I started off not knowing what I thought, where it was going, or how to get there. So, I’m quite confident that when I re-read it, I will discover that even if the chapter moves along ok sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph it will make no sense.

I’ve been writing boxed intros to each chapter, which I’m likely to take out afterwards. They’re more for me than for the reader, because readers shouldn’t need to be given a boxed intro to know why they’re reading what they’re reading; relying on them is lazy writing. Nevertheless, here’s what I have so far for this chapter.

The Nets continues where arguments end.
We’ve liked to think that we think through issues by digging deeper and deeper into our assumptions, until we come to some bedrock. Then we write up what we’ve learned, going in the other direction: establishing a foundation, and then building upon it, board by board, nail by nail. We are thus archeologists when thinking and carpenters when arguing.

The pinnacle of knowledge has been a structured presentation of a long-form argument — a book — that leads us step by step to a conclusion of import. And now we worry that the Net is destroying our attention span so that we can’t follow arguments long enough to reach responsible conclusions.

What is the Net doing to the long form of argument and to the knowledge that it derives?

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I’ve been reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignity of Good. The first two essays are written a little too much (for me) within the particular philosophical debates of the 1960s, but the third remains pretty wonderful. Here’s a short paragraph that is not central, but that I really like:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student — not to pretend to know what one does not know — is the preparation for the honesty and humility of the scholar …[A]part from special contexts, studying is normally an exercise of virtue as well as of talent, and shows us a fundamental way in which virtue is related to the real world.

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Brough Turner has done some investigative work. Here’s the photo that summarizes it:

The following is an edited, paraphrased version of Brough’s comments on the mailing list I got this from (with Brough’s permission):

In the picture, the building on the right is 111 Huntington Avenue in Boston. It’s served by 7+ separate carriers each of which owns their own fiber into the building. The price quoted on the slide is Cogent’s list price for a 3 year contract (lower prices and/or shorter terms are available to those who can wait for an end-of-quarter special).

The building on the left is 170 Huntington Avenue in Boston. There is Verizon fiber into this building, but apparently no other carrier has their own fiber into this building. The price quoted is what a friend’s IT department signed up for less than 45 days ago.

In both cases we are comparing “dedicated” services, i.e. a supposedly committed information rate service. Yes, Verizon’s price per Mbps would be better if the customer had ordered 155 Mbps, but the disparity would still be outrageous.

Gotta love competition. Brough’s case study is one more data point confirming Yochai Benkler’s massive study of broadband around the world [pdf] that found the countries that surpass the US in price and penetration are generally ones with competitive markets for broadband.

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Have semantic technologies reached the tipping point? Rene Reinsberg at the MIT Entrepreneurship Review says yes.

Im not sure what exactly a “tipping point” would be here, but it seems incontestable that semantic technologies are an important part of the Web and of business, and, taken broadly enough, always have been. I wonder, though, if the term “the semantic web” has reached a negative tipping point. Rene seems to use it pretty much interchangeably with “semantic technologies,” although the Semantic Web seems to promise something more world-wide-ish and systemic than the increasing use of semantic technologies.

Anyway, its an interesting post, with lots of links.

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I just re-read Jay Rosen’s piece on objectivity as persuasion more slowly than I did the first time. It’s like watching a master carpenter bang nails. Beautiful.

Jay’s post is #6 in a series. Jay tells me he has at least one more. So far, he’s written 15,000 words … and his commenters have written 96,000. (That second number seems way too high, but it’s based on my copying and pasting the comments (plus Jay’s integrated roundups) into a text editor. My clerical skills are poor, however.)

For Too Big to Know, I’ve written a section (which means I’ll probably be unwriting it tomorrow) taking these six pieces as an example of one type of long-form writing on the Web … or, more exactly, web-form writing. At the end of the discussion, I list advantages and disadvantages of Jay’s webby version of long-form argument versus standard, book-length, printed long-form arguments. In abbreviated form:

Advantages

1. The argument assumes a natural length.

2. The ground the argument covers is more responsive to the ground itself. Readers will point out neglected areas that the argument requires the author to talk about.

3. The work becomes embedded in a loose-edged discussion that more naturally reflects the messy, intertwingled nature of topics.

4. Readers are given fewer reasons to get off the bus midway. When Darwin writes in Chapter Four of On the Origin of Species that “He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory,” he’s opening the door and inviting passengers to get off. If Darwin had published in a webby way, he would have discovered unanticipated objections, and he would have been able to meet at least some of them.

5. Ideas get out to their public far faster than the old write-in-private, publish-in-public model.

6. The ideas more successfully escape the grasp of the author so that they can change the world.

7. Readers are more involved in the long argument the author used to be having with himself.

8. The author’s authority gets right-sized. Simply seeing the author engage with readers through comments tells the great percentage of readers who do not leave comments that the author recognizes that her/his words need defense, that her/his authority goes no further than the worth of the ideas.

9. We can see some of the effects of the writer’s words rippling through the culture.

Disadvantages

1. Some people don’t like to work this way.

2. Some arguments work better rhetorically if they are presented all at once.

3. Some ideas won’t do well commercially if developed in public for free. Note, though, that it’s not clear that our assumptions here are correct. Cory Doctorow, among others, has succeeded commercially, as well as in the impact of his ideas, by giving away online access to his books even as he sells hardcopies.

4. The published book is a traditional token of expertise and achievement. They look mighty impressive arrayed on one’s bookshelf.

5. It is harder for us to know what to believe, because more voices are present and in contention.

(By the way, these forms of argument are not mutually exclusive. Both and many more as well are present simultaneously on the Net. On the other hand, traditional long-form arguments posted on the Web inevitably become embroiled in web-form arguments, and thus are not unchanged.)

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Here’s the weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young.

• Doc Searls wonders whether biz is all it is link

• Ethan Zuckerman’s “a wider world, a wider web” TED talk link

• Donnie Dong spots the difference anew on Google.cn link

• Herdict updates us on Australia’s Internet filtering plans link

• Wendy Seltzer comments on “Bilski and the Value of Experimentation” link

• Radio Berkman 158: “Thinking About Thinking About the Net” (Tim Hwang and me) link

• danah boyd shares her concerns and questions about Facebook’s UK “panic button” link

• OpenNet Initiative on Pakistan and Facebook, encore link

• Harry Lewis reads the speech control news link

• CMLP thinks of the children, and constitutionally protected speech link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Uganda: Bloggers react to bomb blasts” link

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I didn’t need the viral campaign to convince me I loved the Old Spice Guy ads. I rewound it the first time I saw it on TV so my wife could see it.

Two points:

1. While I of course admire how cleverly they’ve viralized it, credit where credit due: it would have laid there as inert as a hand-caught silverfish if the content weren’t compelling. And what’s essential about the content, besides the charm of the Guy himself, is that it mocks advertisements, men, the product, and the viewers. Pretty much a clean sweep of ironic commentary.

2. In a viral campaign — as in the general movement of ideas and memes around the Net — the audience is also the medium. We are that through which memes move.

BTW, here’s a look at how they churned out the personalized videos.

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I am a Tim Hwang fanboy. Tim is one of the founders of ROFLcon and The Awesome Foundation. So, I was very happy to get to interview him for Radio Berkman. We talk about classifying Internet enthusiasts, and about whether there are schools of thought emerging among people who think about and research the Net.

Tim’s pretty damn insightful and delightful. In fact, Tim Hwang is awesome.

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According to a post by Carl Brooks at SearchCloudComputing, Verizon is making a major push to be the provider of health information exchange services:

The Verizon Health Information Exchange can be used by doctors and healthcare providers to store, manage and transfer patient information, including medical records, test results, medical images and more, all hosted on Verizon’s infrastructure.

The project is nothing if not ambitious. Verizon says it is ready to roll nationwide and can absorb as many electronic medical records (EMR) as are currently out there; there may eventually be one for every person in the United States. It may even offer personal health records (PHR) to its telco customers.

This sort of service seems valuable. In fact, it’s so valuable that it makes me nervous that it would be in the hands of a telecommunications provider. For example, MedVirginia says that “its entire base of patient records will be stored with Verizon and delivered via the cloud.” Are we sure that this vital service should be a company that also sells access to the cloud? Will there be temptations for Verizon to use its ownership of the medical records infrastructure (“store, manage and transfer patient information”) to leverage its position as an access provider, or vice versa? Will medical images in Verizon’s vault arrive faster for Verizon’s ISP customers? Is that what we really want? Wouldn’t it be better for us all to have this service in the hands of someone who has zero interest in how we access that information? And I’m putting all of these as questions because I have vague suspicions but nothing more.

Maybe I’m just especially nervous because today is the last day to leave a comment for the FCC about Net neutrality.
The

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Google Docs for quite a while now lets you write your own scripts. So, I wrote one a year ago that turns the entries in a row in a spreadsheet into some plain old text. This is useful to me because I’m keeping the bibliography for Too Big to Know in a Google spreadsheet. When I need to insert a footnote, it’s much easier to run this script and copy the text than it is to click into every cell in a row.

Keep in mind that this script is highly likely to be completely sub-optimal and more than a little embarrassing. (At some point, I’d like to have it process the content of the cells, turning them into a properly formatted bibliographic entry.)

Anyway, use as is.

function onOpen() {
 // create a menu entry for this script
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  var menuEntries = [ {name: "Create Biblio Entry for Row", functionName: "createBiblio"} ];
  ss.addMenu("Scripts", menuEntries);
}

function createBiblio() {

// get the selected row
var r = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveRange();
// get array of of cell values in that row
var vs = r.getValues();

// get the number of columns in the row
var numcols = r.getNumColumns();

if (numcols == 0) {
   exit()
}

var i;
var s = "";
var content;

// cycle through the cells
for (i=0; i < numcols; i++){
  content = vs[0][i];
   if ((content != "") && (content !="undefined")) {
      s= s + content + ". "; // concat the content
   }
}
// put it into a msgbox so you can copy it
Browser.msgBox(s);
}

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Ethan Zuckerman, the world’s best live blogger — full awesomeness for his intellect, his writing talent, and his typing skills – is blogging TEDglobal. He is a prodigy of live blogging. I can’t even list all of the talks he’s blogged.

And Ethan’s own TED talk there is brilliant, funny, surprising, and compassionate.

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Larry Lessig has responded to ASCAP’s near-total misrepresentation(1 2) of Creative Commons with a clear explanation, and a challenge to debate the president of ASCAP at NY Public Library. (You can support CC here.)

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I’ve been staring at a chapter I need to write about transparency, books, long-form thinking, and maybe attention. I had hoped not to have to write about this stuff. As a result, I haven’t thought about what to say or how to say it. So, I’ve been thrashing for the past few days, writing an opening, realizing it’s irrelevant, making notes, deleting, starting again. I don’t like writing without knowing roughly what the chunks are that I need to cover.

I think I’m making progress, though. As of now, I’m opening it with a look at what long-form writing is like, using Darwin as my example. Now I think I’m going to write as concretely as I can about how the form of books (bound paper ) dictates the form of what you write. It may turn out to be too obvious, but I won’t know until I try writing it.

Yes, there’s a small irony that I’m having trouble writing a short-form chapter about long-form books, critiquing long-form books in a long-form book.

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In the comments to my post about understanding Heidegger in translation, Seth Young reminds us of this video, which I had in fact seen before but forgotten.

And, oh, what the heck….

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I’m on a mailing list that discusses the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Many years ago I was a fledgling Heidegger scholar, but now I am on the list strictly as a tourist.

Today someone posted: “If you don’t know German you don’t have a ghost of a chance of understanding Heidegger.” A few people posted immediately in reaction to the “dismissive” tone of the comment. I felt the same way, but then thought, hmm, this is an empirical question, isn’t it? List the people you think understand Heidegger best — or pick some other writer in some other language — and see how many of them don’t read him in his original language. There is something true about the dismissive remark.

But, there is something false as well. It draws too strong a line between understanding and not understanding. I obviously don’t understand Heidegger as well as the full-time scholars on the mailing list do. But, having studied Heidegger for several years of my life (I wrote my doctoral dissertation on him), I’m pretty sure I understand him better than most who haven’t studied him do. If we acknowledge that our understanding improves as we read and study more, we acknowledge that understanding doesn’t fall into only two buckets: understands or doesn’t have a ghost of a chance of understanding.

For the original comment to be empirically true, we’d either have to show that (a) there is a clear line between those who understand and those who do not (and that reading the original language is a requirement for getting into that first bucket). Or, (b) we could say that the commenter is actually talking about having professional standing as a scholar: You cannot claim to be a Heidegger scholar if you can only read him in translation. The first alternative seems to me to be ridiculous. The second seems far more plausible. The problems arise when someone applies the bright perimeter of professionalism to the messy web of understanding.

I certainly do believe that had my German been better — it was barely adequate at the time, and now has devolved into very basic travel glossary stuff — I could have understood Heidegger better. Likewise, better understanding the history of philosophy, knowing early 20th century German politics, reading Greek and Latin, and being conversant in German poetry all would have helped me understand Heidegger better. There is no end to what we need to know in order to understand the thought of another, because there is no such state as Understanding that excludes all doubt, excludes all errors, and excludes all others.

Finally, it’s not at all clear to me that if we list those whose understanding of a thinker we most respect, they will be in rank order based upon how many of the Professional Requirements they’ve mastered. Some of the best Heidegger scholars — and you can pick your own criteria of bestness — may be weak in Greek, weaker in German politics, but very strong in poetry. Others might have other sets of strengths and weaknesses. Not only doesn’t understanding necessarily correspond to the fields mastered, the community of scholars ameliorates the weaknesses of individuals by writing works that others read: A scholar weak on politics reads the work of scholars strong on politics. Understanding in this sense is a networked property, and a very messy one indeed.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young:

• Doc Searls remembers Persephone Miel link

• Ethan Zuckerman asks, “What if search drove newspapers?” link

• Donnie Dong gets lawyerly with Google.cn’s ICP license link

• Herdict on Australia’s progress toward Internet filtering link

• Andrew McAfee elaborates his Internet optimism: link

• CMLP assesses debate on the reporter’s privilege link

• PRX develops a free iPhone app for Boston’s WBU link

• Radio Berkman 157 “Gaming Grief” link

• OpenNet Initiative on ’slandering’ the Lebanese president, on Facebook link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Nigeria: The Facebook Page of Nigeria’s President” link

The Radio Berkman listed above is my interview with Lisa Nakamura about why some people in online games feel free to use the vilest racist, sexist, and homophobic language while denying that they are racist, sexist, or homophobic. In fact, if you chastise them for it, they will maintain that the fact that you’re complaining shows that you’re the bigot. (Note that the interview explicitly discusses highly objectionable language.)

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Dave Winer just linked to a bookmarklet — ijotEdit by Marc Barrot — that lets you write outlines in your browser. It’s OPML-based, of course. Very nice.

I have to admit, though, that I played with it with mixed emotions. I have nothing negative to say about it at all. On the contrary. And that’s the problem. For the past two months, my hobby has been writing an OPML-based, browser-based outliner because I couldn’t find free one that worked across Mac, Linux and Windows. I just two days ago got mine to the point of minimum usability, although it’s still full of bugs. But you can save and load the outlines you create with it, and it exports in RTF, HTML and text pretty reliably. The functionality is truly minimal: You can use the arrow keys to move lines or lines + children, but you can’t cut and paste structures; there are no tools for including links or graphics; it doesn’t do rich text; if you want to change the styles, you have to hand-edit the css file. But, hey, the little right and down arrows work! I could never get it to the point that I would share it with anyone else, and if I ever showed the code to an actual developer, the milk would come out her nose. But I got the arrow keys working in IE as well as Firefox and Chrome! (Well, the place I copied the key capture code from said that it would work in IE.)

So, why mixed feelings about Marc’s actual, real, working outliner? Simple: I lost the excuse for writing my own. I’m a hobbyist, so it shouldn’t matter. Oddly, it does.

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House Bill 4810, An Act Relative to Certified Professional Midwives and Enhanced Practice of Certified Nurse Midwives, would provide licensure and oversight for direct entry midwives, i.e., for home-birth midwives (as opposed to nurse midwives, who are already covered). Midwives provide superb care for women and their babies.

Right now, House Bill 4810 is in the House Steering and Policy committee. It would help if you called your Mass. House representative and ask him or her to speak with Steering and Policy committee chair Rep. Kafka and House Chairman DeLeo to encourage them to move the bill through the committee and onto the floor.

You can find out who your house rep is and their contact info here.

Here is the Massachusetts Midwives Alliance. Here is an excellent midwife, who is also our daughter.

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[NOTE: A couple of weeks after posting this, Bruno Amaral wrote an Apple Script that does a far better job of it. Check the comments for his script and instructions. Thanks, Bruno!]

Here’s a very simple Automator script that extracts the speakers notes from a Keynote file and writes them into a text file on your desktop. The text file it makes is very ugly, and I’m sure someone better at this than I am (= everyone) could have Automator do some cleanup of it.

To install it, download it (duh), unzip it, and then put it into MacHD/your_account/Library/Services (where MacHD and your_account reflect the actual names of your setup).

To run it, in Finder select the name of the Keynote file, and right click for the context menu. Go to Services > extract_keynote_notes.

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Details…

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The founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, has been knighted, has been plausibly suggested for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is revered by his peers. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, inspires a worldwide nervousness: “What will the kid do next?” Yet, Facebook does something as important as the World Wide Web: While the Web knows how pages are connected, FB knows how people are connected. So, how can MZ get some of the love the world shows to TBL?

There is a way.

First, let’s make sure MZ is comfortable. Let him take, say, $100 million out of FB as winnings. His co-founders and managers deserve to do very, very well too. In fact, all 1,000 or so employees should make out like freaking bandits. They took a risk, they built a business, they have succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. They should make more money than they’ll ever need. If $100 million isn’t enough, make it $250 million. Whatever.

No, I’m not going to suggest that FB go away or become a non-profit. But it would have to make a big change. It would have to separate itself as a company from the social data it’s gathered so far.

To do that, FB could create the FB Foundation, or the Social Data Provisioners Consortium, or the World Wide Graph, or whatever. It would be in charge of the social information FB has gathered — who knows whom, who likes what, who isn’t speaking to whom ever again. From now on, that’s where the data FB users generate would go. MZ, in his role as the chair of the Facebook Foundation (FBF) would put together a stellar board, composed of the smartest and most trusted people from around the world to guide its decisions about privacy and other policies.

The FBF would be structurally and legally separated from Facebook. Facebook would continue as the world’s leading supplier of client software and services for people who want to do online social networking. It would continue to sell people to advertisers and make as much money as it can. But it would draw from and contribute to the FBF’s data servers just as would any other group that wanted to create a social networking client, or make other (permitted) use of the FBF data. All those using FBF’s data for commercial purposes would be required to chip in a little cash to keep its server farms well fertilized. (If these servers could be distributed and federated, the cost might be born by the hosts.)

Why would MZ do this? Because it’s the right thing to do. Or, some version of it is. And maybe if FB doesn’t, there will eventually be enough anxiety worldwide to create and populate an open, federated social networking data system that starts from scratch. But it’d be better for us all if it started from the staggering investment in time and information FB’s users have already made in it.

Besides, is there any contributor to the Web more admirable and more admired than Tim Berners Lee? MZ, that could be you! Do what TBL would have done! The MZ legacy FTW!

[And then I woke up...]

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Ian Frazier has a well-done-as-usual piece in the New Yorker, reporting on a visit to the Berg Collection in the NY Public Library, where the librarian Ann Garner showed him some literary marginalia — Mark Twain, Nabokov, Ted Hughes, Kerouac on Thoreau, and more.

It begins with a paean to the physicality of books, leading to:

In the soft lamplight, the open pages of the books she had chosen glowed like a physical and visible representation of the sublime.

All part of our culture’s long goodbye to the Era of the Book. Books will be with us forever, but functionally and iconically they’re being replaced by networks that don’t glow nearly as sublimely in soft lamplight.

The irony is that the digitizing of books should bring us into the Golden Age of Marginalia, in which not only is it easier than ever to highlight and annotate passages, but we can benefit from the marginalia of others, especially as reading becomes social. We will lose the thrill of knowing that Kerouac’s hand scratched that line of ink into this book, but we will gain the ability to learn from the digital traces left by all of today’s Kerouacs, Kerouac scholars, and Kerouac readers.

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