A sad, funny, beautiful response to Spalding Gray’s absence.

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As I continue to try to figure out why my office eats computer equipment for breakfast, I’m thinking that my Uninterruptible Power Supply may be inadequate. Everyone who reads this knows more about electrical stuff than I do, so perhaps you can help me…

I have an APC UPS Pro 650, 650 VA, 400 Watts. My computer has, I believe, a 450W power supply. I also have a 22″ CRT plugged into the UPS. So, I think that my UPS isn’t up to the task. It’s

So, do I need a heftier UPS? If so, what specs should I be looking for? And any recommendations for brand?

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Thanks to some hard work by a couple of folks, especially Boris, and a new version of MovableType released specially to fight comment spam, you can once again leave comments.

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The Dean campaign has created a page that aggregates blogs from supporters who have gone to Iowa to support the Governor — a real-time, partisan, participatory newspaper.

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The Cato Institute has just released its analysis of Howard Dean’s “Plan for the Internet.” This is one of the sloppiest pieces of thinking I’ve ever seen from an organization named after a Roman.

The author, Adam Thierer, begins by quoting from the Principles for an Internet Policy on the Dean site. He interprets “No one owns the Internet…. It is ours as citizens of this country and as inhabitants of this planet” as meaning ” [G]overnment must treat the Internet as one giant collective resource and regulate accordingly.” Wow. (For the record, here’s the sentence he leaves out: “The Internet does not exist for the unique benefit of any group or economic interest.” He omits it presumably because it implies that the Internet does have economic meaning, which works against the Birkenstocky impression he wants to convey.)

It gets much worse:

Dean’s Internet platform contains the key elements and catch phrases of a more sophisticated master plan for cyberspace concocted by a group of academics and public officials who advocate a “commons” vision of collective Internet governance. Their agenda consists of a three-pronged strategy: (1) Infrastructure: They want telecom, cable, and broadband high-speed networks subject to collective rule via a heavy dose of open access regulation, structural separation or even outright public ownership. And they want the Internet to be treated as a collective asset subject to “democratic rule” through a variety of “nondiscrimination” mandates and other regulatory controls. (2) Spectrum: They want most of the electromagnetic wireless spectrum to be treated as one big commons with very limited exclusive property rights. (3) Intellectual property: They want to water down IP rights and greatly expand fair use rights and the public domain.

And what is the evidence that this is Dean’s view? None is cited because none exists. The Dean campaign has not issued an Internet policy. So where does this “master plan” – with no master and no plan – come from? The next paragraph begins:

The triumvirate of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, prolific Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the New America Foundation (NAF) think tank deserve special mention since their advocacy of a cyber-commons has been particularly vociferous.

The rest of the article explains Dean’s Internet policy by assuming it’s the same as the “triumvirate’s”. The only problem is that neither Copps nor Lessig have declared themselves supporters of Howard Dean. True, Lessig is on Dean’s Net Advisory Net, but that explicitly does not imply that he backs Dean. And the New America Foundation does have two Deans on its Board of Directors, but one is dean of the London Business School and the other is a dean at Johns Hopkins.

So, leave aside the outrageous ascription of one person’s beliefs to another without the slightest evidentiary gesture. The content of the article is equally poorly thought.

Are markets and property rights really antithetical to openness, ideas, expression, knowledge, culture, diversity, and democracy? History shows that the exact opposite is the case. Markets and property rights have served as the foundation for those virtues…

Fine, except the triumvirate (as far as I know) doesn’t argue against markets and property rights. They argue for open markets and at least one of them — Larry the Good — has created a mechanism by which creators can maintain fine-grained control over their creations.

Thierer concludes, striking a faux reasonable note:

…Certainly there is a place for some commons within our society, but that society should be structured and governed by property rights. The commons crowd seems to reverse that equation by suggesting we need to carve out a little room for property rights in a world of collective rule. And that sort of thinking is downright dangerous, for if we allow ourselves to believe that collectivism is the central organizing principle of cyberspace, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Treating the Internet, broadband networks, spectrum, and IP like socialized property will not lead to a cyber-nirvana but to a scarcity of those very things if the Dean-Copps-Lessig vision of cyberspace collectivism prevails.

Thierer acknowledges that the “commons crowd does not regard capitalism and markets as inherently evil or exploitative.” But he misses the real point: The question isn’t whether the Internet is socialized property or private property. The point is that the Internet isn’t property. It’s a protocol by which “content” is made accessible and communication is enabled. But, of course, Thierer sees property everywhere he looks: His complaint about the FCC’s policy of licensing spectrum isn’t that it needlessly concentrates power in a few hands but that spectrum ought to be property that can be owned, not just licensed. (Adam, here’s a hint: This makes as much sense as suggesting that the government sell colors to companies…because spectrum is color. And here’s another hint.)

Further, why is it that “society should be structured and governed by property rights”? Does the Cato Institute value property rights over individual freedom? Even if the Internet consisted of property — an arguable metaphoric reach — why on earth should we think that property comes first? Whatever happened to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

But Thierer is arguing against a strawperson in any case. None of the Triumvirate (AFAIK) advocates getting rid of copyright, for example. Larry certainly has consistently maintained that the control granted by copyright and Creative Commons licenses does indeed help to make for a responsive, vibrant market. Thierer knows this and acknowledges it at the beginning of the passage quoted above. But in the last sentence he ignores the sentence he just wrote, writing that the “commons crowd” advocates “socialized property.” Except for the “socialized” and “property” part, that’s exactly right.

What a load of crap. And it’s too bad, because an honest reading of the Dean Internet Principles should be music to the ears of those who believe in liberty and free markets, the way conservatives used to.

Clay Shirky, in a msg to a mailing list, writes about the Cato Institute:

They have simply gone off the rails on the idea that there is no difference between collective action and merely aggregated individual action.

It would be fun to ask them their view of, say, standards bodies.

An excellent clarifying question…

Note: My comments are still read-only as I recover from the damn comment spammers.

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John Fritz blogs about a paper by Steve Lansing about how attempts to “optimize” the traditional Balinese water supply actually disrupted the social and ecological systems, and not in the good, trendy sense of disruption. [Disclosure: I know John because I'm consulting to Icosystem, the company he works for.]

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You still can’t comment on entries on this site. I had to turn comments off after getting 1,000 comment spams in two hours. I hope to have a fix in a day or two.

Thanks for your patience, and special thanks to some folks who are helping me: Boris Anthony and Karl.

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Terry Heaton is a “New Media consultant” in Nashville who’s writing a book: TV News in a Postmodern World. His latest essay, “News Is A Conversation,” builds on and around Doc’s cluetrain meme. Terry also blogs about something like Applied Post Modernism with lots of good info and ideas.

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Advertising Age writes:

Anti-Bush Ad Contest Submits Super Bowl Commercial. A spokesman for CBS said the Viacom-owned network has received the request from MoveOn to run the ad in the Super Bowl, but added that the ad has to go through standards and practices before CBS will say if it can run an advocacy ad during the game. The spokesman said he didn’t think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices.

Have you seen the ad, the one that won MoveOn.org’s contest? What possible standard or practice does it violate? Is our country stronger because a TV network refuses to air an ad because it criticizes our president?

(Thanks to Dan Gillmor and Sheila Lennon.

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I have had more than my share of hardware problems. While I’m waiting for the electrician, or someone like him, to put a second circuit into my office, I’m having problems that defy the physics of electromagnetism.

Two days ago, my son’s computer crashed. The hard drive – about 1.5 years old, well within the MTBF for drives in our house – was making ugly, repetitive crunching sounds, as if it were doing sit ups, and Windows XP Home was refusing to boot because NTOSKRNL.EXE had gone all corrupt. The drive was so far gone that I couldn’t put a new copy of the file onto it. It wouldn’t even let me reformat it and reinstall Windows.

Three days ago, my father-in-law’s PC also bit the dust. The hard drive is fine, but Windows 2000 was refusing to boot because NTOSKRNL.EXE had gone all corrupt. I might have been able to copy that file onto it, but I didn’t have one with me, so I’m reinstalling Windows — it’s easy on his because he only runs one app: a browser.

Both machines are protected by Symantec AntiVirus. Both use RCN for broadband access. Other than that, they have different operating systems, different applications, different usage patterns. All they have in common is my aura.

Could be a virus, of course, although I haven’t found reports of one that eats that particular file. Apparently, this problem is sometimes caused by boot.ini crapping out. But why on both machines at the same time?

I should never have shot that guy in that graveyard that night.

The Head Lemur replies, via email since my comments are still down:

ck the harddrives. IBM 40GB made in Thailand have problems. The spindle bearings go bad resulting in the clicking of the armature hitting the surface, causing the disk to wobble, causing the armature to hit the surface, and so on. NTOSKRNL.EXE is one of the first files needed, sitting on the first track the computer accesses during boot. having the armature hitting the spot where it sits, makes this unrepairable. you can’t record data on a surface no longer there to recieve it. Maxtor drives suffer simular problems.

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My web host (friends of mine) unplugged the comments module after the first 1,000 spams came in within two hours. I think you can still read comments but you can’t write them. I’m going to try installing David Raynes’ script that lets you turn off comments on scripts older than n days until I can install James Seng’s script that will require commenters to type in a verification code displayed on the page. Thanks to BurningBird, who also offers a MySQL command that will strip out all comments between two named times.

In the meantime, if you need to reach me, I’m at my usual emai1 address, which you can construct by connecting self to evident with an at thingy in the moddle and a dot and a com at the end.

Damn spammers.

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I just got 500+ comment spams (mainly for zoo sex, apparently) from someone who changes IP addresses every 3 msgs and changes the offensive link in every message. This defeats the MT Blacklist program I’ve been relying on.

Help! I don’t have time to manually strip out 500 spams. I will have to close comments (if I can figure out how to do so for all previous entries).

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So, the Club for Growth runs this ridiculously nasty commercial that slips into self-parody as a couple says: “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving…[etc.] freak-show back to Vermont.”

The Dean blog responds by posting the ad and a new version with dubbed voices so that the couple is now explaining why they’re supporting Dean. It’s a totally amateur job, and is intentionally funny because of that.

Now the blog is hosting a make-your-own-postcard page where you can make your own list of the sort of Dean supporter you are.

The blog notes that “frequent blog commenter ‘jc’ has been collecting more responses than we can publish here,” so it links to her page where you can read postcards that are funny, touching and completely human:

Niece-spoiling
chai-drinking
Jeep-driving
Springsteen-listening
Dean Supporter

Trail hiking
Nature loving
Honda driving
Sushi eating
Blog reading
Hard working
Healthcare lacking
Dean supporter

Take all this together and you have a real Webby way to respond to the mass media!

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Jeff Jarvis has some excellent transcriptual commentary on the unintentionally hilarious Tim Russert segment on blogging.

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David Isenberg is thinking about holding a real world get-together — he’s calling it WTF — for his readers and people like his readers. I’ve been to get-togethers David’s put on and they’ve all been great experiences — I met wonderful people and learned lots.

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[NOTES: 1. At no point in the following do I compare George W. Bush to Hitler. 2. All those who take quotes out of context will be prosecuted, or at least whined about.]

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, suggests a New Year’s resolution in her Boston Globe column today (which will be de-linked by the Globe tomorrow):

No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.

Likewise, Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby thinks any comparison to Hitler is hate speech. Not to mention the field day the conservative groups are having with the fact that two of the 1,500 entries into the MoveOn.org ad contest compared some aspects of this administration’s policies to Nazi Germany’s. (Oddly, none of these commentators have complained about the Bush administration’s repeated characterization of opponents of the Iraq war as “appeasers,” a direct reference to the British policy of appeasement that failed to stop Hitler, or about its use of the phrase “Axis of evil” with its implicit comparison to WWII’s Axis.)

So, let me come out firmly against stupid, thoughtless comparisons of anyone to Hitler. Often such comparisons commit an informal fallacy: Because person A is like Hitler in property P, A is like Hitler in property Q, where Q is Hitler’s evilness. That’s not only fallacious, it trivializes what is important.

But ruling out all comparisons with Hitler and Nazism can also be a way of forgetting what should be remembered.

Here’s one thing I think should be remembered: Nazi Germany’s unfathomable evils were perpetrated by one of the most civilized of cultures. Yes, “civilized” is a loaded term. Deconstruct it as you will, Germany — a country that gave us many of the West’s most revered artists and philosophers — seemed to be operating well within the norms of Western politics and culture. Yet it democratically voted in Hitler and watched (or worse) as it murdered its children and rolled tanks into its neighbors’ cities.

I don’t know, and I don’t believe it can be known with certainty, whether there were particular aspects of the German situation that made it susceptible to turning evil. Certainly Germany’s particular way of being evil was rooted in the particularities of German history and culture. But one big lesson I take from this is that cultures that are convinced they are good can nevertheless become evil. And they can be evil when they think they are at their greatest.

That’s why I think Cathy Young is profoundly wrong. We should learn from the horrors of Nazi Germany that it can happen anywhere, even here. But, we should not expect it to happen in the same way, with concentration camps, jackbooted soldiers and a hypnotic demagogue. In fact, we are so aware of those particular forms of evil that we’re less likely ever to fall for them. We need to remember Nazism especially when we’re looking at the forms of evil that do not mirror the particulars of the Nazi expression of evil.

Before the death camps and the invasions, there were the steps that somehow led a country to embrace great evil. The Nazis came to power not by military takeover but through an election. Each subsequent step seemed justified or was at least so palatable that there was no civil uprising. We honor those who fought Nazism and we remember those whom Nazism murdered by being vigilant about the steps we take, for we understand that some steps can lead a country from good to evil.

So, yes, comparing Bush to Hitler is worse than stupid. But we forget the lesson that we should have learned if we don’t publicly notice that some steps our country has taken could lead our great nation into evil:

Demonizing enemies

Questioning the patriotism of dissenters

Monitoring the political expressions of citizens

Establishing a special class of offenders who are removed from the protections of the judicial system

Lowering the intensity of the threat required to justify preemptive action

Disregarding world opinion

Playing on fear in order to sway public opinion

Lying in order to get us to invade another country

Do these acts make us into Nazi Germany? Of course not! Is any of these acts on a scale with death camps or the invasion of Poland? Not in the least! Each may be entirely justifiable: It may be the responsibility of a courageous country to ignore world opinion in some instances. Some dissenters may actually be unpatriotic. It’s possible that our enemies are demonic; I have nothing good to say about Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Even so, we should take such steps with open debate and genuine trepidation. Shutting off the conversation does not help us preserve our genuine American values. We should remember that it can happen here because it did happen there…and also that if were to happen, the it would certainly be different. Is it happening here? That’s exactly what we should be talking about, even if our answer is a resounding No.

If all comparisons to Nazi Germany are out of bounds, then we’re saying Nazism was sui generis, unique, something from which we can learn nothing about how we humans can go so astoundingly wrong. And that truly dishonors all those who suffered its horrors.

Mitch makes a good point about why MoveOn’s open posting of ad entries is as American as multimedia pie.

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Type “old fart” (no quotes) into the search box at Amazon. Act now! (Thanks to Dan O’Neill for the info.) (If that doesn’t work, try here.)

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Dean opted out of the campaign finance reform law because its cap on fund raising would have meant that this spring, even though he’d raised the maximum allowed, he’d be out of money. He might have the nomination sewn up, but he’d have to sit on his hands as Karl Rove spends $150M against him, right up through the Democratic Convention in August. What candidate could survive that type of blitz?

So, let’s say Gen. Clark wins enough primaries to become the nominee. Clark has opted into the campaign finance reform law, so he’ll be out of money in March. Or maybe in May. Either way, how is he going to win the general election? What is the Clark strategy for winning? Does anyone know?

(If you tell me that blogs will enable a candidate to withstand a $150M negative TV campaign, I will ask you to send me a sample of what you’re smoking.)

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George Dafermos has posted a paper titled “Blogging the Market: How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations.” Given that nothing is truly comprehensive, this paper edges in that direction. It begins, in the Abstract, with these words and in this tone:

Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases

and it ends like this:

YOU CORPORATE BUREAUCRAT, STANDARDISED VOICE IN THE MARKET WILL BE ASSIMILATED OR ANNIHILATED. THE CHOICE IS YOURS: SPEAK WITH A REAL VOICE, TELL US A STORY AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION OR BECOME DEFUNCT.

In between it covers a huge amount of ground. I’m sure I’ll be returning to it frequently as I try to remember who said this or that insightful thing about weblogs.

Besides, how could I not like a paper that refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto as “infuriating”? :)

(Thanks to John Robb for the link. Also, here’s a PDF version that doesn’t have some of the formatting problems of the HTML rendition.)

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On my first trip with my Garmin navigation system (Model 2610), I got lost within a quarter mile of home.

Well, I didn’t get lost because that doesn’t happen when you have an omniscient navigator. I did manage to make a wrong — unindicated — turn, I think because I was not used to how far away an intersection is when the navigator says that I should turn left in 400 feet. A few seconds after you make the wrong turn, the navigator calmly says that you are “off course” and recalculates the route. As a result, it took me through back streets all the way to my destination (Halley’s apartment), a route substantially different than the one it plotted for me when I came back and didn’t make wrong turns.

That aside, it’s pretty damn impressive. The pre-turn instructions are timed well. The map zooms appropriately so you can see where you are and where you’re supposed to be going. It would help, though, as Halley pointed out, if it gave you a verbal “Right on!” when you’ve managed to make a turn correctly; some of us (me) are so pathetic that we need the encouragement.

It did route me home in a sub-optimal way. I’m sure the route looked like the fastest on paper, but you really don’t want to go through Harvard Square at 6pm on a Saturday night unless you have to. Also, while it’s legally possible to make a left onto Comm Ave the way it told me to, you’d have to violate the laws of physics to do so, particular the clause that says two bodies can’t occupy the same space at the same time.

I’m still finding it confusing to create routes. It’s a highly compressed UI. But I’m getting better at it.

The weirdest thing is, though, that while it certainly is getting me from A to B better, I now have even less of a sense of where I am. I don’t know how what cities I passed through or what roads I’m on. All I know is that I have to make a right turn in 400 feet.

[Episode 1. Episode 2.]

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So, I’m at this big Dean organizing event in a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I plug in my wifi card just for kicks. And — surprise! — it tells me I’m getting signal, which is surprising since the event and the hall don’t have any wifi transmitters. So, I look at the properties of the connection:

This would be great except Joi Ito is some thousands of miles away, telling Sony executives what they need to know about the future of media, a fact I confirm with Boris Anthony, Joi’s blogmaster who happens to be at the Dean thing.

And, no, there wasn’t really any wifi working, ad hoc or otherwise.

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Off on a 1.5 hour trip tomorrow with the new Garmin GPS navigator. Part one takes me 20 miles away to Halley’s place; I’ve never been in that neighborhood and it sounds like it’s a bit tricky to find. Then it’s on to Portsmouth, with Halley and Jackson, to a Dean meeting. So, this should be a good test.

I’m having trouble with the UI for requesting routes. When I do a text search for an address, three times out of three it’s told me that it doesn’t exist, although if I use the map zoomed in all the way, I can find them, and the system accepts them as valid waypoints. Odd.

BTW, Gary Turner writes amusingly (as always) about his own experiences with GPS navigation.

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Here’s an unanticipated effect of spam.

Spam showing up in blog comments increasingly tries to pass itself off as a genuine comment. So, I’ve been getting spams that say how interesting my blog is and how much they care about what I have to say. How touching!

Other comment spam disguises itself in the form of some bromide so generic that it can apply to any blog article and so bland that no one will object to it. For example, “Pamela Woodlake” recently spammed an entry on Andrew Odlyzko’s comparison of broadband and cell phone adoption rates with the heartwarming comment that “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” The URL she gave as hers, however, is for some weight-loss hokum.

Frankly, I’d rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.

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According to an article in yesterday’s Miami Herald:

In Tuesday’s special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate…

The percentage of nonvotes — 1.3 percent — is modest compared to the days of ”hanging” and ”pregnant chads.” But in Tuesday’s race, every vote was crucial. In a seven-candidate field, Ellyn Bogdanoff beat Oliver Parker by just 12 votes.

The non-votes may be due to Democrats entering the voting booth only to discover that there were no Democrats on the ballot. But the mere suspicion that the machines are at fault is intolerable in a democracy.

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The Annals of Improbable Research’s newsletter version — and check out its new blog — is running a limerick contest:

Investigator Steven Slap recommends that we recommend the book “Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods,” by Alan R. Olsen, Thomas H. Sidebottom and Sherry A. Knight.

We commend Investigator Slap for his recommendation, and recommend that, for conversational purposes, everyone refer to the book as “Sidebottom’s classic ‘Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods.’”

Readers who have read the book (which we have not) are invited to submit limericks in tribute to it or to specific portions of it. We will publish the best of these either here in mini-AIR or on the WHAT’S NEW blog (see below).

Here’s my entry:

The book by Sidebottom is lunch-
Time reading for a scary bunch
    Who look into their meal
    With a bug-eyéd zeal
And savor its every crunch.

You can send your entry to:

FILTH-IN-FOODS PAEANS
c/o marca@chem2.harvard.edu

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My Garmin 2610 GPS navigator arrived this afternoon, on time, from CompuPlus, a cheapie online merchant. But I had to help my son with his homework when all I wanted to do was play with my new toy. Damn homework!

The unit seems smaller than I remember it from my friend’s car. But such is the illusion of consumerism.

The installation instructions are mediocre. The software installed pretty easily despite that, although I’m not sure that my registration went through. I got a mysterious error code. But the mapping software seems to be unlocked, so I’m proceeding.

When you turn the unit on indoors, it defaults to showing you China and displays a “Locating Satellites” message, which may or may not be the case.

You load up the two disks of North American maps that come with the system and you click on the regions you want to install onto your device. An inconspicuous note in the window frame tells you how many megabytes of mappage you’ve selected. Since my unit comes with 128MB of memory on a flash card already installed in the system, I picked 127.9MB of maps, which covered all of the Northeast, up to about 50 miles west of the Hudson in NY and upper NJ. Then you tell the software to save the maps into the GPS unit, which you’ve connected by USB.

It transfers slowly. The meter says it’ll take about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the first time through it got to the 15 minute mark and only then told me that I’d selected too many maps. So I knocked it down to 126.9MB and we’ll see if it craps out again. It’d be real handy if it’d warn you about this before you spend the time uploading. Sigh.

The upload screen grays out the choices for waypoints and routes, so I’m a little nervous that after I’ve uploaded all the mapping data, I still won’t be able to tell it that I want to go from my house to my in-laws’ house. (They live over a mile away so I need electronic help getting there. Really.) But we’ll see.

Anticipation…

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Halley is making light of the Club for Growth today, and manages to work us around to a Joe Conason piece on the hypocrisy of rich addicts who are hardliners about drug users except when they’re them (so to speak).

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A team of celebrities is determining the winner of MoveOn.org’s contest for amateur commercials countering the Bush administration’s policies and propaganda. But we wee folks get to vote on winners in three categories: Funniest, Best Youth Pitch, and Best Animation. Some of the 12 entries are very well done and quite amusing.

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My GPS navigation system should arrive today. I forewent all birthday and Chanukah gifts from my family in order to build up a fund for the device, a Garmin 2610. It’s a perky little number that sits on your dash and tells you, in a silky voice that forgives all your directional transgressions, how to get from A to B.

I’m not a particularly good driver to begin with, but I spend most of almost every trip trying to envision how the road I’m on links up with the road I’m trying to get to. The rest of the time I’m having mini anxiety attacks, worrying that I’m on the wrong road or in the wrong city. See, I’ve only lived in the same neighborhood for 17 years, so you can understand why going to pick up milk is an adventure that requires road maps, emergency flares and a sextant.

I am just missing some synapses. To me, right and left are like red and black on the roulette table. But two recent incidents really scared me.

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled into a gas station and asked my wife which side of the car the tank is on. (The cars only three years old, so I’m still getting used to it.) My wife, knowing my directional stupidity, said “It’s on your side.” I still pulled in on the wrong side.

Then, yesterday, I said that my son was “up in the basement.” I really thought I had mastered up and down. Fortunately, that smell of burning plastic came from a misguided science experiment.

But my problem isn’t just with basic spatial orientation. I can’t visualize how the parts of my world connect. When driving, I’m constantly surprised that this road leads to that one. To plot how to get somewhere, I have to laboriously piece together scenes of intersections, and often I just can’t do it. I also have no sense of which areas are near other areas.

So, I’m hoping that my new GPS system will let me focus on the important part of driving: Talking on the cell phone.

NOTE: Now would not be a good time to tell me that instead of paying $750 for a Garmin, I could have done the same thing by wrapping copper wire around a $0.59 Boy Scout compass and sticking it into my Palm Pilot. Thank you.

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BoingBoing pointed to a site that PhotoShopped celebrities into old age and zithood.

Since I have on occasion been cruel about celebrity faces, I thought it only fair that I PhotoShop my own visage to see what I might look like at the decrepit age of, oh, I don’t know, 53:

1972 college yearbook

30 years later (artist’s rendition)

(The depressing thing is that despite using every deformation I know of in PaintShop 8, this picture still has aged better than I have.)

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The O’Reilly Digital Democrary Teach-In’s lineup is now online. It’s sorta kinda part of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which was a must-attend event last year and promises to be as good this year. The Teach-In — bring a flower and anything written by Howard Zinn — looks like it’ll be a great day with some fabulous folks who are actually making a difference. (Disclosure: I’m on the conference committee, but that doesn’t mean I’d lie to you about being excited about the event.)

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I will admit it’s a little thing, but it irks me. The Boston Globe today has an article by Joanna Weiss about the Clark campaign “blasting” a leaflet from the Dean campaign. In order to build the narrative, the fourth paragraph says that “Clark aids said that the Dean attack was a sign that…the presidential race might be evolving into a two-way battle…”

The fifth paragraph then validates this point of view:

A New Hampshire tracking poll released this week by American Research Group indicated Clark in second place behind Dean, pulling ahead of … Kerry…

The sixth paragraph continues the story:

A USA Today poll indicated Clark and Dean in a statistical tie nationwide.

Hmm. The first poll mentioned has Clark at 16% and Kerry at 13%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. The second one has Dean with 24% and Clark with 20%, with a margin of error of 5. The Globe article ignores the margin of error in the NH poll but includes it in the national poll. Why? I can only presume because the story tells better that way.

Clark is coming up quickly in the polls. That’s an important story. We could do without shading the statistics to make it “tell” better.

The Globe’s lead story today is Bush’s immigration reform proposal. I read all three articles in the set and I still don’t what Bush is proposing or how it’s different than what currently exists. This is some bad reporting.

Here’s a Q&A from the Miami Herald that I found much more helpful.

It turns out that the proposal, which does not give illegal immigrants the right to apply for permanent residency, sets up a “guest” status where “guest” means “Willing to pay a fee to take a job so crappy that, even during the worst economy for jobs since the Depression, no American is willing to take it.” Be our guest to do our back-stooping, subsistence-paying labor! You’re welcome!

(Are FAQs becoming more useful than inverted pyramids in telling non-narrative journalistic stories?)

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The Club for Growth, a Republicanish group, has spent $75,000 to air an ad in Iowa that features a couple saying, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding…[etc.] … freak-show back to Vermont.”

One has to wonder why. If Dean is the weakest candidate against Bush, why is a Republican group working so hard to keep him from getting the nomination? In fact, why would Karl Rove be telling the world that Dean is the candidate he would most like to run his boy against? Surely Karl is too devious to be giving the Democrats such good advice!

Anyway, thanks to the Club, we now have an easy way to gauge whether Dean is the candidate for you:

	Me	You
Tax-hiking
Government-expanding
Latte-drinking
Sushi-eating
Volvo-driving
New York Times-reading
Body-piercing
Hollywood-loving
Left-wing
Freak show
PERCENT DEAN SUPPORT	70%	??

By the way, in response to this ad, Dean supporters donated an additional $280,000 to the Governor’s campaign.

Charles Taylor at Salon has a good review (i.e., I generally agree with his assessment) of the ads created by amateurs as part of MoveOn.org’s contest. He particularly likes Charlie Fisher’s “Child Play.” Me, too. As Taylor says:

If I were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark, the impact and economy of these ads would make me think twice before I shelled out big bucks to some media professionals.

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Edward Mac Gillavry has a paper on collaborative mapping that comes at the idea from a different angle than does Matt Haughey’s suggestion that someone combine a mapping system with a Slashdot-like system to do collaborative routing:

Collaborative mapping is an initiative to collectively produce models of real-world locations online that people can then access and use to virtually annotate locations in space.

Mac Gillavry points to two aspects of collaborative mapping: 1. Generating maps by mapping with your feet, so to speak. For example, at Waag.org, you can see maps of Amsterdam generated by aggregating data from people carrying GPS devices. 2. Collaboratively annotating locations with content that is displayed on location-aware devices.

A wiki for every street corner!

(In case you’re wondering why mapping stuff has started showing up in this blog, it’s because I’m working on an article on it for Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0.)

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Mike O’Dell points us to a hard-to-fathom game at the Things You Never Knew Existed site.

Why this counts as a game is a bit of a mystery…

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I sent an email to a friend this morning asking for help thinking of technology people who meet a particular parameter, you know, along the lines of “Do you know any techies who ____?” Unfortunately, my friend forwarded my hastily written mail to about 20 people who might also be able to fill in the blank.

One of those twenty mentioned Metcalfe’s Law in her reply. Someone else talked about the need to supplement that law in order to understand a different aspect of social dynamics. Someone else commented, contradicted, expanded…

Now those 20 people — strangers — are engaged in a conversation about social network dynamics.

This leads me to a conclusion: The Web is more social than I am.

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I just posted this at Corante Many2Many:

I like Skype. It lets me make phone calls for free to the other 4M people who have signed up for the service. The calls go through my computer and they work real good.

But I’ve just gotten my second random phone call from some well-intentioned stranger who wants to know if I want to chat. Actually, I don’t. If you call my Skype number randomly, the odds are just about perfect that you’re going to be interrupting something that I’d rather be doing than speaking with a stranger. And here’s how you know that: If I wanted to be speaking with a stranger now, I’d be on the Skype phone calling one. If you can get through to me on my Skype line it’s because I don’t want to be speaking with a stranger now.

Thank you for your attention.

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Anyone care to review the following snippet, about open source GIS projects, for accuracy, completeness, fairness, etc.? It’s part of a much larger piece on the GIS industry. I’m on short deadline here…

<Draft>

One of the leaders at this point is the University of Minnesota’s MapServer. It was initially developed as part of the ForNet forestry management project, funded by the state of Minnesota and NASA. While the MapServer lets an application display a browsable map, the site notes it, “is not a full-featured GIS system, nor does it aspire to be.” The US Geological Survey announced last month that it will use the MapServer technology to help build The National Map, an open source map server with access to 20 terabytes of data from TopoZone.com (a site created by Maps a la carte, Inc.). TopoZone’s map data comes, in turn, from the USGS as well as other sources.

There are other open source GIS web servers and applications. For example, GeoServer [led by whom?] implements the OpenGIS Consortium’s Web Feature Server with the noble aim of making the citizenry better informed about matters geographic. PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the open source Postgres SQL database. GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), an international effort hosted in Italy, Germany and at Baylor University in the US, is strong in producing map graphics.

Of course, the open source projects generally don’t provide all the functionality that the commercial services do. For example, if you give MapPoint or ESRI’s map server a list of points you want to visit, you will get back an optimized routing map. MapServer and its like don’t offer that functionality. But, because the open source map servers are non-proprietary, the community can add the features it needs as it needs them. For example, the Rosa Java Applet is one among several tools developed by the DM Solutions Group that add functionality to the MapServer, enabling users to interact with an image of a map by clicking, pressing buttons and dragging and dropping. Open source lags commercial development in this space, but it is good enough for many applications…not to mention it has the advantage of being open source.

</Draft>

Thanks!

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MoveOn.org has posted the selected nominees in its create-an-ad contest. If I weren’t on deadline, I’d be watching them right now…

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Hanan Cohen explains why Israelis refer to New Years Eve as “Sylvester“:

It’s just because Israel is a Jewish state. The [Jewish] new year holiday is celebrated on the eve of Tishrei 1st. People who immigrated to Israel from western countries still wanted to celebrate the “old” new year, like at home, but could not say that they were celebrating the new year so they used instead the Catholic name of the day, Sylvester. That’s why the Jews in Israel celebrate the event using a name of a Catholic saint.

Hanan also points to an article about the 25% increase in poverty in Michigan.

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