A number of commenters are looking for ways they can lend a helping hand beyond opening their wallets. Some are willing to travel to the affected areas, live in tents, and pitch in. Does anyone know of any groups willing to take them up on their offer?

Here’s Peter Kaminski on that very question. And a tsunami aid blog. (Thanks for the links go to Staci Kramer, who has more on donation sites.)

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RealClimate.org defines its purpose this way:

RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.

Inevitably, because this is a blog with a voice and a point of view, the discussion is far from dry, with entries such as these:

George Will-misled and misleading
How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?
Fox News gets it wrong

This is engaged, passionate science. Cool. [Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.]

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…both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of the nation’s wealth, America’s emergency relief in Asia and development aid to poor countries actually ranks at the bottom of the list of developed nations…

…As of yesterday, the amount the United States has pledged is eclipsed by the $96 million promised by Britain, a country with one-fifth the population, and by the $75 million vowed by Sweden, which amounts to $8.40 for each of its 9 million people. Denmark’s pledge of $15.6 million amounts to roughly $2.90 per capita.

The US donation is 12 cents per capita.

So says an article in the Boston Globe. We have donated what we spend in five hours in Iraq.

Let’s call our representatives (Congress, Senate) and to see if we can aim high and beat Sweden by pledging $3 billion. And here’s a tip: If your Congressperson or Senator is a Republican, tell him/her that donating lots of money is a crucial tactic in the war against terror. It’s no joke.

[Congressional offices seem to be closed today. Sigh.]

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And the winner is: The Boston Globe for today headlining the plight of tsunami victims and, three inches away, running this teaser at the top of the page:

The article, on the front page of Living/Arts, relates the heart-breaking story of Blake Conney who drunk-dialed her old boyfriend and gave him a chicken recipe. Should she have deleted his name from her cellphone? The decision is, as the teaser promises, agonizing.

[Thanks to our daughter Leah for pointing this out.]

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I got an email from a stranger asking where he should donate money for tsunami victims. I sent him the urls to the donation pages up at Amazon and Google. I didn’t send him to Wikipedia. Apparently, for this type of information I trust a top-down source more than a bottom-up one.

Wikipedia does its best to discourage trust on this topic, and appropriately so:

Due to its open and collaborative nature, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the veracity of outside links or the absence of possible scams involving charities, thus the potential danger of fraud exists. In particular, please beware of organizations that have names similar to those of well-known aid agencies.

In a situation like this - especially since I’m responding to a stranger - I want a source whose intentions I trust 100% and whose research I can trust to be responsible. I trust Amazon because I trust Jeff Bezos. I trust Google because overall they’ve shown themselves to be interested in making the world a better place. (We can argue about the exceptions later.)

I find institutions to be much more trustworthy than individuals in this regard. If a friend told me I ought to contribute to Bob’s Missionary because they’re do such great tsunami relief work, the tie between my friend and Bob would have to be tight - almost first-hand - before I’d donate.

Reliance on branded authorities leads to more money going to the Big Brand philanthropies at the expense of smaller, more local efforts that may be more efficient and effective. But in a big world that has tricksters and con artists, trusted institutions can be a necessary intermediary.

FWIW, we gave to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent; I didn’t do “due diligence.” We routinely give to Oxfam, but I didn’t know how well set up they were for dealing with this particular disaster. We like Oxfam because of its programs for long-term, sustainable development of local resources - water projects, etc.

As Frank Paynter points out in a comment, CharityWatch provides info about charities.

I also trust MoveOn.org in this type of situation, and they’ve just sent an email suggesting that we give to Oxfam, which is already one of my very favorite organizations:

Our friends at Oxfam are already scrambling on the front lines to fight off starvation and disease — and beginning to rebuild. Because Oxfam has worked for years with grassroots groups in the hardest hit areas, they were able to mobilize local leadership to help survivors immediately after the tsunami hit. And Oxfam will be there for the long-term, helping communities recover and regain their ability to meet basic needs. Oxfam needs to raise $5 million immediately to provide safe water, sanitation, food, shelter, and clothing to 36,000 families in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. Your contribution can make this possible.

You can give through MoveOn or directly through Oxfam.

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Sidney Blumenthal in Salon marshalls the recent hirings and firings as evidence that Bush is thoroughly purging the administration of those who counseled caution in Iraq. Here are the opening lines:

The transition to President Bush’s second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of “I, Claudius.” To begin with, I have learned from numerous sources, including several people close to Brent Scowcroft, that Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgment dumped Scowcroft, his father’s closest associate and friend, as chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The elder Bush’s national security advisor was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration…

We are witnessing the construction of the protypical echo chamber. Too bad the fate of the earth is in its hands.

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I have agreed to write the February issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0, and I sure could use your help.

The topic is something like: What’s up with taxonomic trees? We used to think that they represented the actual shape of knowledge. Now we generally recognize that they’re “just” tools. So, how are they doing as tools? Are they as important as ever? What new ways are they being used? What’s being used in their place? How are they being modified to make them more useful? Is it true that they’re being used less frequently for browsing? Are ontologies subsuming/replacing them? Etc.

I’m particularly interested in vendors who build trees for customers (software and services), vendors with new approaches, and businesses that have either recently created a large taxonomic tree or who have recently decided to go in another direction.

If you can help, please either post in the comments or send an email to me (self@evident.com) with “trees” in the subject line.

Thanks!

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As Rayne points out in comments to my blog post on the administration’s support of torture, to many Americans the events look very different. America harbors duelling narratives.

The Blue Book’s narrative is a story of creeping fascism in which the torturing of captives and suspects is just Chapter One. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are Kristallnacht and the invasion of Iraq is the invasion of the Rhineland — not in their moral equivalences, which are impossible to calibrate perfectly, but as harbingers: We should be awoken by them as the Germans were not.

The Red Book’s narrative looks at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as signs of the seriousness of the threat facing us, and as indications that we are at last taking up the task of leadership we’ve avoided for too long. Our foes treat people far worse than we do, and to stop them we have to shed the crippling moral relativism that has been 20th Century liberalism’s legacy.

The Blue Book sees recent events as steps towards a totalitarian state in which all rights are sacrificed in the name of homeland security. The Red Book sees a world of bright new democracies that drastically narrow the terrorists’ freedom to operate.

The Blue Book fears a policy of appeasement being applied internally, so it wants to draw an early line. (”First they came for the Jews and I said nothing…”) The Red Book thinks we are now emerging from an international policy of appeasement, so it’s happy to see the old lines erased.

The Blue Book worries about America becoming Germany. The Red Book worries about America becoming France.

I am, of course, over-simplifying. But narratives are more stubborn than facts because narratives give facts their relevancy and meaning. I wonder if there is a narrative we can agree on that will get us past our differences.

I am not hopeful. But if a politician were to write such a narrative, I’d vote for her…

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Apparently no one told the Santa Clara Democratic Party that it’s supposed to lick Bush’s ankles and roll over to have its belly scratched. The blog is feisty the way an opposition party should be. Elisa Camahort, who writes it, is keeping a day-by-day count-up of Bush’s outrages. Good, partisan stuff - livelier and more frequent than the DNC’s Kicking Ass blog.

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JHopper writes in the comments to a post about where to donate:

We would like to suggest that the people of the United States innundate the White House, Republican Party, etc. to demand that they donate the $40 million they are planning to spend on the Bush 2nd term inaugural. It is only RIGHT the our rich nation and the rich contributors do this.

What a powerful symbol that would be. The original $15M we pledged was shamefully low, even when we thought “only” 25,000 people had died. Now apparently we have added another $20M. I want my government to do more.(And, yes, I have made a donation to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.)

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Here is the package of nubbins for my Thinkpad — the little red eraser-thingies — IBM sent me, shown about actual size:

Here is the package it came in: The plastic bag, in a foamy bag, packed in a basket of shock-protective cardboard in a box about a foot square.

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JonL forwards this tsunami relief site: http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

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Scott Kirsner has a good piece in the Boston Globe appreciating “pure entrepreneurs” who go ahead and build stuff without asking for funding or permission. One of those he cites is my friend Pito Salas who is creating BlogBridge, an aggregator with lots of potential, currently in alpha. He also points to Paul Cosway who is working on what sounds like a very cool, portable Internet radio, called “Radeo.” And he interviews Dan Bricklin and Bill Warner (Avid).

Three cheers for pure entrepreneurs!

BTW, I don’t know Paul Cosway, but I can attest that Pito Salas is not “loopy” (which Scott meant in an affectionate way).

[Note: I am on BlogBridge's board of advisors.]

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Terry Heaton interviews Ed Cone about the newspaper-sponsored local blogging community.

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While poking around for blogs reporting on the tsunami, I came across Mr. Brown’s in Singapore. He reports that the police called a friend to say that they’d caught the guy who stole his anonymous cashcard. Except the friend hadn’t reported the card lost. Mr. Brown figures that the police triangulated against the transponder in the friend’s car. He writes:

I don’t know whether to be happy we have an efficient police force that can return your stolen goods to you even if you did not make a police report, or be terrified at the thought that nothing escapes the Eye of Sauron.

I’ve been poking around Mr. Brown’s site. There’s a whole bunch of good writing there - technological but also personal and even intimate, without being overwhelming. Here’s a piece about his autistic daughter. And here’s a translation of a short story that’s being circulated in Chinese.

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Does the Web have seasons? Discuss amongst yourselves…

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My fellow Americans, in our name our government is torturing people scooped up indiscriminately — some were turned in for a bounty, not much of a guarantee of guilt. You and I are chaining them into a fetal position for 24 hours or more without food or water, letting them shit themselves. You and I are threatening people with vicious dogs. You and I are letting them roast in unventilated cells. And then there’s this: “I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing.” Is this some Clockwork Orange technique to make triple sure they hate Israel?

Now the Boston Globe reports that an FBI email says that Paul Wolfowitz approved Defense Department personnel impersonating the FBI so the DoD could avoid blame. And, freed of accountability, the torture began. Wolfowitz should be ashamed, fired and tried, not necessarily in that order.

But there’s little reason to think that this un-American buck stops with Wolfowitz. Another email refers to an executive order signed by President Bush directly authorizing torture.

Impeach Bush.

(The documents were released thanks to requests by the ACLU. Don’t forget to renew your membership for the new year.)

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Worthwhile Magazine, for whom Halley, Tom Peters and I (among others) blog, has posted a PDF of my column for their premiere issue.

Added Bonus: You get to see my “I Hate Being Photographed” face!

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Gavi Narra notes in a comment to my entry on Google Suggest that s/he has implemented it for a public-domain dictionary and has posted how it works. It works darn well! Gavi notes: “[A] connection is being opened for every keystroke and is not a good idea…Google Suggest is probably running by having all the suggestion words in main memory and a custom webserver that does nothing else.”

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JP Barlow recounts his day in court, on trial for threatening to blow up an airliner with a few grams of pot smuggled in an Ibuprofen bottle. danah weighs in with her own account of the drama.

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You want to know what “geek” means? This is from a discussion board about MythTV:

I found MythTV, Freevo, and WebVCR+ all far too complicated to setup, so I created my own PVR. It is written in C and does not require a separate database process (such as MySQL) to be running. Despite this, it is very fast (faster than any interpreted language can be) and it has a full-featured GNOME front end.

It can be found at http://furioustv.sourceforge.net/

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In anticipation of Tivo’s presenting ads while we fast forward, I’m looking into building (or buying?) a MythTV, an open source project that turns a linux box into a Tivo++. We love Tivo, but MythTV looks much better. (We’re also going to try to buy our next TV before the Broadcast Flag goes into effect in July 1, 2005.)

I find myself amazingly confused, however. For example, the EFF says that PC TV tuners will record HDTV off of over-the-air broadcasts but not off of cable boxes. That sounds crazy…crazy like the FCC. (Tivo also doesn’t record HDTV, except through some deal with DirecTV.) Will going the MythTV route lock me out of recording HDTV if and when commercial recorders enable it? Will the free source of programming information, zap2it.com, continue as free or is there a reasonable likelihood that we’ll be locked out of access? Does someone sell ready-to-run MythTV boxes? Alternatively, since it seems that there’s a CD with linux and MythTV sw ready-to-install, is there a list of exactly the right hw I can just go out and buy without having to make choices beyond how large a hard drive and whether I want a white or black case? (MySetTopBox is pretty good at this.) Just a few of a zillion questions. And I won’t be starting this immediately since I have been unable to extirpate entirely my sense of priorities.

Some initial links:
MythTV home
Screenshots - mmmm!
Documentation
PVR Blog (personal vido recorder)
PVRBlog’s MythTV how-to
MySetTopBox
Knoppmyth- MythTV on a CD
Support the EFF!

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According to the NY Times, Bush has cut our contribution to global food aid by $100M. As Mathew Gross comments: “While he flushes billions into his war in Iraq and trillions into his senior-fleecing scheme. Nice man. Great moral values, there.”

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Culture Cat has a list of blog entries that talk about gender issues in the blogosphere.

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Chris Nolan publishes the second half of her critique of MoveOn.org at Personal Democracy. Lots of great information and an animosity I don’t share. MoveOn isn’t perfect, and if it were it still wouldn’t revolutionize politics or create a new movement, but I count it as an important ally in our joint struggle. Anyway, the two-part series is well worth reading. (Part 1 is here.)

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With some trepidation, I’ve posted “Now Go To Damn Sleep,” doggerel for the worn-out parent. Here’s the beginning:

My angels, now, it’s to your room
To dip into sleep’s stream
And let your parents’ life resume.
Fast forward to your dream.
What’s that you say, my angels dear?
The day has not run out?
Tonight you just must-see ER?
And then the title bout?
Oh my dears, my little mites,
Walt Disney’s themed your beds.
And if you’re good and very quiet
I’ll tell my day instead.
Oh, Mikey, Sal and Ted please hear
The story I have to tell
I love each one of you so dear
But you’ve made my life a … well ….

After all, what could be better for the holidays than a little anti-child hostility?

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Paul English explains carefully how to set up two wifi access points if you need to cover a broader area…

He also has a nice appreciation of David Brudnoy, the long-time Boston-area radio talk show host who was opinionated without being stupid or obnoxious. I only heard him a few times, but his movie reviews were the best thing in the Boston Tab newsweekly.

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Doc said that, and he’s right.

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Q: Which host of Saturday Night Live exhibited the biggest gap between his/her talent and his/her performance on SNL?

A: Robert De Niro. Twice.

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Fascinating back and forth over at Kos. Kos calls Zack Exley, who was in charge of Kerry’s Net campaign, “an idiot.” Zack is anything but an idiot. He’s a good guy personally who has spent most of his life working fulltime for his political beliefs. I respect him, and am grateful for what he did using the Net to do traditional things, like raise money. I am certainly more of a believer than he is in the power of p2p politics, but of course campaigns also have to get the offline basics rights; just ask Howard Dean the day after Iowa.

Zack posts a spirited defense in which he vows allegiance to the Internet vision, so long as it’s not seen as a replacement for the traditional tasks. Who could argue? And does anyone disagree that the Kerry campaign would have done better if it had also let loose the dogs of the Web?

Here’s a response by kmthurman with a long discussion thread.

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TrackCap.com trackpoint.com sells nothing but the nibs, nubbins, caps or whatever you call them for the IBM ThinkPad Trackpoint - you know, the little sticky-uppy thing between the G and H on Thinkpads. $10 for 2, so maybe they’re doing ok, especially since you can get 6 for $10 from IBM. (Shipping is free at both places.)

Trackpoint.com also sell screws for the IBM Ultrabay at a buck each, so apparently they’re branching out. Radical.

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Google’s logo today features playful polar bears. I assume that if you come to Google from the southern hemisphere, it doesn’t have a winter theme, but I don’t know how to check…

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Chris Anderson has signed with Hyperion (Random House in the UK) to do a book about The Long Tail, and has started a blog devoted to it. (The long tail is the social effect of the Web apart from the hit-heavy, glamorous side of it.)

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This makes my head hurt - indirection makes me sweat - but I think that Michael Lenczner is proposing a way to use del.icio.us not only to track the comments we leave on people’s blogs, but to bundle together different people’s comments into one RSS feed so that you can see, for example, where all of the contributors to Many2Many are commenting.

But, I got this wrong in several rounds of correspondence, so I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten it wrong again; I am user but not a power user of del.icio.us. Read Michael’s blog entry to get the straight scoop (and to get the scoop straight).

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Copyscape finds pages that repeat phrases you used on your page. It bills itself first as a way of tracking down the nogoodniks who are plagiarising your valuable content, but the page also mentions its non-violent egosurfing capabilities. [Thanks to Dave Rogers for pointing this out. He found it in Ian Poynter's newsletter.]

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Here’s an odd idea. The Urban Eyes proposal by by Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Angesleva (Ireland) would feed pigeons tiny RFID transmitters embedded in bird seed. When a transmitting pigeon passed close enough to one of the CCTV cameras watching the streets, the camera would transmit a video image to the Urban Eyes server. You would then see how the city looked to a particular pigeon in the 12 hours between ingestion and excretion.

This won third prize in the Fused Space contest. The winning project proposed setting up light sticks on a small Swedish island; lights would be lit when people visited an online memorial for the dead. (I think.)

[Thanks to We Make Money Not Art for the info.]

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The award for the most narcissistic performance by a recognized actor in a real movie, where the aforementioned narcissism is completely undeserved is ….

…Mickey Rourke, after plastic surgery that pulled his face back so tight that it stretched his nose holes, in The Last Outlaw.

(FWIW, I discovered this while lying awake with jetlag at 2:30 am. I may never sleep again.)

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BlogExplosion is designed to boost traffic to your site by funneling members there according to how many members’ sites you visit. I’ve been playing with it for the opposite reason: It randomly shows me blogs I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise.

In their latest newsletter to members, they list the following feature enhancement:

List blogs by country

The directory got an update so that you can now list blogs by country too. This makes it much easier to locate those blogs from the same region as you.

Ack! Isn’t this feature more valuable as a way of finding blogs that aren’t from the same region? That’s really what I’m looking for.

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The front page of the Boston Globe has a good article on podcasting by Peter J. Howe, a staff writer — they didn’t farm this out to one of their (excellent) tech writers. Peter writes:

If Internet-based weblogs turned everyone into a potential newspaper columnist, and digital cameras let them become photojournalists, podcasting is promising to let everyone with a microphone and a computer become a radio commentator.

After the fold, he gets to what the effect podcasting will have on broadcasting: With the ability to mix home-grown creations with an increasing choice of mainstream offerings, we’ll get program allegiance, not channel allegiance.

[Note: The Globe link will break in a day or two.]

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Interesting article by Di Luo in Computer Gaming world about the government using games not to recruit and train for war (e.g., America’s Army) but to teach more peaceful tactics. Tactical Language Learning System and Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness teach cultural sensitivity. The former is built on the Unreal engine and the latter uses the LithTech engine that brought us so much gamey fun in No One Lives Forever and Tron. For example, VECTOR players learn to understand other cultures’ body language, and also get extra points for head shots.

The article also reports that the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has created A Force More Powerful that’s designed “to train activists in the planning and tactics needed to bring about political change.” There’s some great stuff on the ICNC page reminding us how successful organized non-violence has been. It makes you wonder what we could have done in Iraq if we had been more imaginative.

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