At dinner the other night, Paolo pointed out that while the US is budgeting $75+ billion for the war, Iraq’s GDP is $60 billion. We could buy the entire country for less than it’ll take to conquer it. (And does anyone believe the current budget figure?)

Apparently there’s some footage of Bush trying out his firm-and-patriotic scowl before broadcasting his recent speech. It’s been shown by the BBC and elsewhere, but not in the US. Does anyone have a link to it? (If this is currently the number one hit at blogdex, forgive my being so out of it. Damn vacation.)

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Finally found both time and a Net connection to update my blog! I’m in a Net cafe in Florence, two blocks from the Duomo, this big hunk of bricks with some art ‘n’ stuff inside it. It’s been a great trip, but I’ll spare you the details because I’m blogging it for the Boston Globe somewhere around here

I had dinner with Paolo and Monica Valdemarin in Venice, along with the other six members of my family traveling together. Paolo and I know each other through our weblogs and decided to meet in person. (We got a little encouragement from Marc Canter. Thanks, Marc!) We had a great time.

We talked about weblogs as building webs of trust. I met Paolo already knowing him through his weblog. I trusted him before I met him, and I had good reason to trust him. We were able to start talking as if we had been friends for months, which in a sense we had been. The Web is rewiring the real world. Just not fast enough. (Paolo blogged it and some pictures here.)

By the way, Paolo’s Google URL is “paolo”: that’s all you need to search on in order to get his blog as the first hit on Google.

On a semi-related note, Paolo told me that he posted on his blog a few months ago that he’d like a Radio script that would return the first hit on Google for any selected text so that he could more easily link while writing his blog. Within a few hours, two readers had sent him such scripts, one in England and one in Italy. Pretty cool, both as a widget and as an example of the power of this Web thing.

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I just posted Friday’s update on our trip to boston.com although it takes a couple of hours for the update to “take.”

There are peace signs everywhere in this city. No other political signage, as far as I can tell.

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We’re in Venice on vacation. I’m blogging it for the Boston Globe. We’re counting on the second day being better than the first. Just a loooong, wearying day of travel.

By the way, the second blog entry on the Globe site is by my son, Nathan, 12. The Globe’s going to update it to reflect that.

Bad, expensive AOL connection from the hotel room. 650 emails waiting. I think I’ll flee the Net for the day.

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Returning to Bucknell to give a talk was unsettling. I haven’t been back in 25 years and I’ve kept up only with a few friends. I was unhappy during college, and I have kept the lid of memories screwed on pretty durn tight.

I got a good education there. The teachers ranged from good to life-changing. But I didn’t realize how isolated and privileged the experience was until I stepped back on campus. Has it become even more of a country club than when I was there? No way of telling. Statistically, of course, it’s more diverse. Spiritually, I don’t know.

My breakfast with Professors Fell and Sturm meant too much for me to write about. But I can give you their reading list.

Professor Fell recommends John William Miller, his own teacher. He gave me a copy of The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects. I started reading it on the way back. Chapter One is gibberish to me. Chapter Two affords me at least a handhold. I will go to the site that Prof. Fell recommended, hoping that it will give me enough context to begin to understand what the book is about. (The site links to Prof. Fell’s exceptionally clear and helpful introductory essay on Miller.)

Professor Sturm recommends that I read Whitehead. I read Whitehead when I was an undergrad and maybe some more in grad school. Back then I read to conquer, to get Whitehead under my belt. (Talk about consumerism!) I read better now, but not well enough: I am still defensive, holding off ideas, maintaining my current beliefs. It’s one reason among several that I could never be a genuine scholar.

I talked with my old professors about my interest in the idea that the universe might be a computer. Within 90 seconds, the conversation clarified a point for me that should have been apparent: The universe-as-computer idea does not imply a maker the way the universe-as-clockmaker idea does because the complexity of the universal clockworks makes the Argument from Design seem plausible while the point of the universal computer is that enormous complexity results from great simplicity.

Ok, so this is a big D’oh! But isn’t so much of great teaching the revealing of the blindingly obvious?

I walked through Lewisburg two nights ago. I lived there for four years as a student and one year as a resentful day-laborer and bad writer.

Places change more slowly than we do. It doesn’t seem fair.

As I strolled, nostalgia intermittently struck, like being pelted with rocks. I say with no pride that I oddly found myself most wanting to visit places where I had been most notably stoned way back then: Tommy T’s apartment overlooking Market Street, the home goods store where I once spent too long watching skeins of yarn merging, the secluded point in the river behind the railroad tracks where we smoked freshman year when we thought we had to go a half mile into the woods to avoid detection.

I don’t know why those were the memories most present. It felt more like the effect of brain chemistry than memory. Damn embarrassing.

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Here are some more honest and enjoyable splash pages for well-known sites. (Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.)

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At the AT&T Wireless kiosk in Sunbury, PA, when I tried to buy a new cell phone charger for $14.95, I was told that the cash register wouldn’t accept the transaction unless I gave them the phone number of my cell phone.

Fortunately, (617) 555 1212 was acceptable to the cash register when the cashier grudgingly entered it.

“It’s not an invasion of privacy,” she called after me as I left, genuinely wounded that I had insulted the integrity of AT&T Wireless.

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I’m finding the PC Forum Wiki a good way to catch up on what’s going on at that conference.

And I was glad to read Sergey Brin of Google taking on Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for the semantic web. It’s the battle between order and mess, and messiness not only will win, we’re better off for it. I mean, if the early browsers only read well-formed and valid HTML, the Web would be far neater, one-thousandth the size, and lifeless.

[Thanks to the people contributing to the Wiki. Here's an enhancement request that I know is counter to the wiki culture: I personally like it when the primary author of a page notes that fact. I don't even know who to thank for most of the work!]

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movabletype.org : TrackBack Explanation

Aha! Ben and Mena have posted a step-by-step guide to TrackBack.

Thanks!

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I am giving a talk at Bucknell University, from which I was graduuated in 1972. I haven’t been back in 25 years.

This morning I had breakfast with the two teachers who had the biggest influence on my intellectual development, JP Fell and Douglas Sturm.

It was for me a moving event. I may write about it more, or I may not.

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Donna Wentworth is blogging a conference on spectrum policy. She has complete notes of Larry Lessig interviewing Yochai Benckler. She points out that it’s also being webcast.

[I'm on the road again today. Light blogging ahead.]

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Operation Irate Fatwa
Operation Thin-skinned Privet Bush
Operation Very Hungry Beaver
Operation Choleric Hajj
Operation Cowboy Bird of Prey
Operation Trigger-happy Girlfriend
Operation Wrathful Button
Operation Sexually Ambiguous Griffin
Operation Platinum Centaur
Operation Spitting Uniform
Operation Infuriated Justice
Operation Brave Wombat
Operation Leather Tension
Operation Famous Sucker Punch
Operation Wild Republican Administration
Operation Wraithlike Typhoon
Operation Destructive Rottweiler
Operation Smite the Gecko
Operation Humane Crusade
Operation Screaming Cannon

These are from a random US Operation name generator. (Pointed out by Gary Stock.)

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Michael d’Cruftbox has posted an exceptionally clear “How To” for Trackback newbies.

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Robert Fisk of the UK’s The Independent reports on civilian casualties from a Baghdad hospital.

If a war is justified, then the inevitable and inadvertent killing of children is also justified. And pointing to a hurt child by itself isn’t an argument against a war. I know that. Nevertheless, these children are facts just like the other sorts of facts we’re being shown 24/7: the government buildings on fire, the incoming missiles shot down, the ring of fire lit around the city.

We don’t have to linger on these particular little facts. They don’t have to change our minds. But they should at least remind us not to cheer when we see the Baghdad night lit up.

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On Wednesday, 7 of us - my wife and two children, my in-laws and my sister-in-law - will be going to Venice and Florence for a week. That is, 3.5 days in each. I’ve been to Venice and Florence a few times, but if you have favorite places other than the Big Tourist Spots, want to let me know? (If you recommend restaurants, keep in mind that 4 of us are vegetarians and don’t eat fish.)

TIA, which used to mean Thanks In Advance before it meant Total Information Awareness.

By the way, I’ll be blogging it for the Boston Globe. Details soon.

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Anil Dash has written some notes on TrackBack for Dummies (i.e., me and Doc). He gives some idea of the power of TB beyond just noting who’s linked to a blog entry, capabilities AKMA reports Ben and Mena Trott also tout. Very helpful.

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This morning I woke up once again hoping to hear that Hussein is dead.

I am disturbed by my callousness. Up through my ‘twenties, I would have reminded myself that all life is precious and would have dredged up some sympathy for Hussein. I could probably still do it. I could get there by thinking about how his children would — will — react to his death. But it’d be a real effort. And it no longer seems helpful or important.

In fact, in hoping that Hussein is dead, I’m also acknowledging that I’d be willing to kill him. That’s not to say that I can imagine sneaking through Baghdad and pulling a trigger. But, I’d take my failure to kill him if given the opportunity to be moral weakness.

So, here’s my question: When I was in my ‘twenties, I’d have to work myself into feeling sympathy for someone like Hussein. Now I have to work myself into feeling bad about not feeling sympathy for someone like him. Is my callousness a sign that I’m making moral progress or that I’m slipping into the comfortable certitude of middle age?

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<eob>

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MoveOn.org is recommending that we give to Oxfam to help rebuild what we are at this instant destroying - although, of course, what most needs to be rebuilt never can be.

Oxfam is at the top of my family’s giving list. We give every month automatically, and when I once upon a time made some money at a dot-com, we tithed to Oxfam. It’s a good group doing good works.

MoveOn writes:

The Bush administration has shown that it has a very short attention span on post-conflict humanitarian efforts. The White House didn’t request a single dollar for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan in this year’s budget — Congress had to take the unusual step of adding in $300 million.

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It’s beginning. I feel I am going to puke. I am keeping a trash bin next to me as I type this.

Why should we Americans even have to contemplate the possibility that a massive crime is being carried out in our name?

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At the O’Reilly conference on emerging technology I agreed to talk about “the future of groups.” How the hell would I know? So, I’m turning to you. I just want enough to stimulate a discussion, so all I need from you is 20 minutes worth of brilliant insights that are staggeringly fresh, indisputable, and vastly amusing.

Here are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about:

The Eskimos may have 35 words for snow (they don’t, and they’re not called Eskmos any more), but we have 100 words for groups. (Note, we also have 100 words for dirt.) But we don’t have good words for what we do online together. This is part of a general trend: as computing enters new phases, it takes over old words and stretches them beyond recognition: information, documents, and now communities. It’s actually the concepts that are being stretched, of course.

Groups vs. groupings. A grouping is a set of people who are unknowingly lumped together for some third party’s purpose: a demographic is a grouping. A group consist of people who have clustered themselves. The Internet gives dominance to groups over groupings.

Why the word “community” is wrong for most of what’s on the Net. A community is a group of people who care about one another more than they have to. That certainly occurs on the Net, but not always. In fact, the ease of virtual group-forming means that there are many more ecological niches that are being filled in the social ecology. E.g., membership in RW groups used to be required because of problems scaling meetings; now membership often plays a different role, if it’s required at all. Maybe do a 3-D matrix and suggest unfilled niches. (If that doesn’t work, maybe show “The Matrix” in 3D.)

Groups are at the heart of the Internet’s value. (See Reed’s Law vs. Mecalfe’s Law.) Yet the Internet doesn’t look like groups, with a few exceptions (mailing lists, buddy lists). Myopia rules. I can’t see the web of people who whom I’ve sent out email. We can’t even do anything with the rich social web created by second degree buddy lists. What would the Internet look like if we looked at it from the group point of view? Answer: I dunno.

Why hasn’t word of mouth done even better on the Net? We have generalized sites (epinions, Amazon) but not among friends and not for geographic localities. (Note: I’ve started failed businesses to address these so-called opportunities.)

I don’t want to look like a moron in front of an audience of my betters! Hellllllp!

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Arnold Kling disagrees with me about anonymity.

Norman Mailer is back in form as a psycho-mytho-political commentator.

You tell me: Is this Web design firm’s home page the worst professionally designed Web site you’ve seen? Or do I just not appreciate de Modern Stijl?

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Grant Henninger is suggesting that the peace movement refocus its message since obviously we’re not going to prevent the war. Instead, Grant suggests, we should focus on limiting civilian casualties and ensuring that we step up to our responsibility to rebuild Iraq afterwards.

I’m in favor of both of Grant’s points, but I think there is a point to continuing to protest the war itself: It tells the government that we don’t all fall into a line when a war is declared, and it tells the world that not all Americans believe this war is worth the death and instability it will bring.

Nevertheless, I think Grant raises a point worth discussing.

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When I was 12, I remember listening in my bedroom for sirens to tell me that soon I’d be inhaling the radiated dust that once was New York City 15 miles away. The US Navy was going to intercept Russian ships suspected of transporting nuclear missiles to Cuba. The Russians would either allow us to board or they would fight back, likely escalating quickly into a “nuclear exchange.”

The Russians “blinked.” Kruschev didn’t have JFK’s balls. (The fact that we actually did a deal with him — we agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey on his border — didn’t emerge until years later.)

We won and we learned the wrong lessons. We are going to win in Iraq and we will also learn the wrong lessons.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was only a crisis because we made it one. Having nuclear missiles in Cuba did not affect our national security one iota. Soviet subs armed with nuclear missiles patrolled our shores, so why did it matter that there were a handful more nukes 90 miles away? The presence of Cuban missiles only meant that Miami might be vaporized 8 minutes sooner than New York. The deterrent to any attack remained the 28,000 nuclear weapons we had dispersed around the world.

The Cuban missile crisis was our fault. It was reckless. It was machismo that put the world at risk. Thank God Kruschev didn’t have JFK’s balls. In fact, the Cuban missile crisis is the best argument in history against balls.

But, we learned from it that playing chicken “works.” We learned that threatening to end life on the planet is an effective way of getting what you want. We escalated the arms race — it was JFK, after all, who campaigned by making up a “missile gap” — to heights that almost bankrupted us before it bankrupted the Soviet Union. The real lesson should have been, IMO, that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to use except for deterrence. And if deterrence was our goal, we only needed a few subs swimming deep under water.

Now we are going to win another fight; we would turn the desert to glass before we would lose. And the lesson we’ll draw from this is that it’s honorable to be willing to wage war alone, that war works, that the UN doesn’t, that we are not secure unless every risk is removed, that peace means no strife or disagreement, that strength means power and that restraining from the use of violence is weakness.

Each of these lessons is wrong. The world will be more dangerous because of it.

And there’s not a thing we can do about it. It’d be like suggesting that the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really an American triumph at all.

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Here’s a little experiment in social software.

I’ve been talking with Jack Bury, a 20-year-old American poet living in Amsterdam, who is part of a tiny start-up trying to get some traction for “Eyebees,” a Microsoft IE add-in. (It’ll be open sourced eventually.) The add-in puts a frame on the left of your browser that shows you up to 200 little dots (Eyebees), each representing another person in the “swarm” you’ve joined. Their relative position shows which pages they’re currently viewing. If a few people are each looking at, say, Doc’s blog, then you’ll see the five Eyebees clustered together; clicking on any of them loads the page they’re looking at. You can also send a message to any of the Eyebees visible in the panel. Cool idea.

So, Jack is proposing that at noon EST tomorrow (Friday), we do a “peace swarm,” i.e., a bunch of people who are sorry about the war we’ve started will all click on the appropriately-named swarm at www.eyebees.com and we’ll browse around together. So, if you wanna hang out for a bit tomorrow, download the software and join the swarm.

And now for the main question this raises to me: Why can’t I be a 20-year-old poet living in Amsterdam? Please?

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Breaking News
Save Over 40% on Intel CPUs!

Look, TigerDirect, you’re a fine discounter, but please don’t send me any more email with “Breaking News” in the subject unless there’s some actual goddamn news in it like a cure for ebola, Ireland rotating 15 degrees clockwise, or President Bush’s succubus emerging and announcing that it’s worn out and is taking a few days off.

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This blog from Baghdad is must-read for two reasons. First, it will tell you more about what the coming war feels like than 24 hours of network babble. Second, it is a vivid example of why blogging matters.

(Thanks to Kathy Quirk for the link.)

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The Dixie Chicks’ album is plummeting because they are being kept off the air for saying what many of us feel. I myself am about to buy muh very first Dixie Chicks CD.

You can get their new one, Home, for $14.00 plus shipping at their web site.

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From William Du Bois, from a mailing list I’m on:

Bush’s Utopian Plan for Peace and mine differ at the core.

Hal Pepinsky, one of the founders of peacemaking criminology, talks about the dynamics of democracy and violence.

He defines democracy as responsiveness — we take each other into account. We may not change our agenda but we take what the Other has to say into account. Violence is the opposite of democracy. It is asserting your own will and refusing to take the other into account…

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You know how the NY Times wrote a few hundred words about each and every person who died in the attack on the World Trade Center? Suppose the Times were to accord each Iraqi civilian we kill the same dignity. Of course the Iraqi victims will be unintended casualties, unlike those who died on 9/11. But, they are predictable unintended casualities, so why not remind us of the price of victory? Why not remind us that an Iraqi father searching for his child in the rubble is no different from my friend who waited for a phone call from his son who worked in the Towers? Are Iraqi lives really not worth the ink? Or our attention?

Wouldn’t such coverage help tell the world what sort of people we Americans are?

The bumpersticker “Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity” pisses me off because it glosses over the hard question: Is this particular war worth fighting? Will it create a more peaceful world once the bombs stop turning people into red mist? That’s the difficult discussion we need to be having. My answer is: No! But not because bombing is always illogical the way fucking for virginity is always self-contradictory. I’m not a pacifist, so I think sometimes bombing makes sense. Our challenge is to figure out when. This bumpersticker doesn’t help.

Here is my new bumpersticker. I’m not satisfied with the wording, though. Any suggestions?

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Hank Blakely of Dystopical has decided to continue his weekly comments on the Bush administration. Hank’s writing is funny the way Delft is blue.

He reports this week that he was going to suspend operations during the upcoming carnage, but his wife convinced him that this is precisely the wrong time for critics to go silent.

Good.

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I’ve published a new issue of JOHO, my free newsletter:

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I wish that Bush were strong enough to admit ambivalence. But he’s not. He has the courage granted by a big rare-wood desk.

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Niek Hockx giving one Dutch citizen’s despairing reaction to Bush’s cowboy ultimatum last night: “Evil is out of its cage.”

Steve Kirsch on The Five Lessons of 911.

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Eric passes along this article about ending spam by altering the terms of the Internet, something World of Ends recommends against unless the new agreement is genuinely in the interests of the users. In this case, the group discussing changes to SMTP has been convened by the group that created SMTP 20 years ago.

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I blogged that the Google translation of a French article on World of Ends said that the piece is “corrosive and didactic.” Kenneth Powers writes from Spain:

As a professional (i.e. I generally get paid for it) translator, I am happy to see that I will not be out of a job for some time yet. I would recommend the translation “scathing and educational”, and yes, I would say they liked it, as did I. Of course, given the roots of the term “Mordant”, they could be saying “it bites”, translation is such an uncertain science, :)

Too bad. I sort of liked being corrosive and dictactic at the same time.

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Ben Hammersley, noting that a change in one site’s query parameters broke another’s plug-in, writes:

The trouble with small pieces loosely joined is that if one goes, the others look really silly

True enough. And since the initial site’s change actually broke Ben’s page, we can all Feel His Pain. But remember the old tightly coupled days when we thought that CORBA was going to provide the Nirvana of inter-application integration? Tight coupling works if everyone agrees to it ahead of time, but no one does, so it doesn’t.

As Jonathan says:

While the distributed, loosely-coupled nature of the web is good for innovation, the dependency on others for correct function is bad…

Jonathan concludes: “…on a personal level the interconnectedness is a mess that frankly I can’t see the end of.”

Obviously, there are ways we can make the loose coupling less fragile: registries, for example. But the Web is always going to be a little bit broken, as Tim Berners-Lee supposedly said. That leaves a whole lot of ways in which the Web works surprisingly well.

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It’s good to be joined in befuddlement by none other than the Docster. He, too, can’t figure out Trackback.

I’ve got the general idea. I just can’t figure out how to get it working in Movable Type. Maybe someone should write a “Trackback for Dummies” and post it. And, please, only use small words.

Thank you.

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Tim Bray, one of the fathers of XML, blogs about the NY Times reporting that Comcast is going to add services to its delivery of broadband. Tim knocks ‘em upside the head:

Let’s lay it out in maximally-simple bullet-point form so anyone can understand it:

Fast pipe.

Always on.

Get out of the way.

You can’t get much clearer than that.

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Jack Bury, a 20-year old poet, is co-creator of a Microsoft IE add-in called Eyebees. If you join a “swarm” - people interested in the same topic - the add-in shows you the movement of all other swarm members as they go from site to site. Click on one of the dots representing a swarm member and you are taken to whatever site they’re visiting. It’s a visceral visual experience.

To join the peace swarm, download the Eyebees software from www.eyebees.com and join the “Eyebees March on Washington” swarm (under the category of “The Rally”) at Eyebees.com. Jack is suggesting that Friday at noon EST might be a good time to flock together for peace.

This software is way new. There have been a handful of downloads so far. So if you don’t see anyone in the Peace Swarm, check back later.

Writes Jack: “The enveloping presence of thousands of minds, tracing across the Internet Sky in strange union - hissing and livid and one in censure of war - would be a conspicuous, awe-inspiring sight of this next social revolution taking firm hold.”

John has told Doc that he plans to open source Eyebees. Good move. That’s the only way to get an idea like this off the ground.

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