I got to have dinner with Loic Le Meur tonight. As you know, Loic is a serial entrepreneur and the head of Europe for Six Apart (=TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal). We went to a brasserie where I had a delicious salad — why does French lettuce taste so much better than American? — an omelet, liberte frite, and a fantastic tarte. But, most of all I got to talk with Loic for three hours. We talked about why there are an incredible three million bloggers in France, what people on the Net have in common, whether American waiters mean it when they ask how you like the food, and lots more.

I would never have met Loic if we weren’t bloggers. And we were friends before we met because we are bloggers. [Technorati tag: LoicLeMeur]

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This morning I was part of a two-hour panel discussion sponsored by Edelman PR on the effect of blogging on business. Also on the panel: Fiona McDonnell of Forrester Research, Peter Olsthoorn, a journalist, and Richard Edelman, CEO of guess what company. About 50 business people and journalists showed up.

I went first and talked for about 15 mins on what blogs aren’t: Bloggers are not journalists (by and large). Blogs aren’t a medium any more than conversations are a medium. The long tail isn’t straight; it’s knotted with links and conversations. We don’t just talk about our cats, but if our cats are interesting to us, then why wouldn’t we write about them? There is no one definition of blogs, but I find it useful to pay attention to: 1. The way blogs are our selves in the new public of the Web; 2. The way the fallibility of blogs creates intimacy; 3. The fact that blogs are conversational in ways that the mass media simply can’t be. Finally, blogging is not a fad.

Fiona presented the result of Forrester’s studies showing that the influence of the Net is continuing to increase and that we trust other people like ourselves more than we trust authorities. (This finding is consonant with Edelman’s “trust index.”) Then Peter gave a journalist’s view, worrying about the unreliability of blogs as they gain influence. We hadn’t seen each other’s slides beforehand, and his final one flat out disagreed with my final one; his said “Journalism is for real. Blogging is hype.” (That’s a paraphrase.) What can I say? Peter is a very smart guy with a lot of experience as a journalist, and we disagree. Then Richard talked about how the rise of blogging in particular and the Web in general is changing the practice of PR. He is encouraging clients to blog, and writes his own here. (Disclosure: I am a consultant to Edelman PR.)

Afterwards Richard and I flew to Paris where tomorrow we have a similar session, moderated by no less than Loic Le Meur. Immediately after that, I fly home. I love Paris and wish I had more than an hour of free time here, but I am very ready to be home for a looong time…

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Gary presents the first known instance of this nascent art form.

Thank goodness Gary hasn’t turned his genius to evil. [Technorati tags: GaryTurner humor]

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From Rebecca MacKinnon:

On Global Voices, Ethan Zuckerman has a roundup of African blogger reaction to Live8: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=263

Ethan adds his own two cents on his own blog here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=98

[Technorati tags: GlobalVoices EthanZuckerman Live8]

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I’m in Amsterdam today and half of tomorrow, talking at meetings set up by Edelman PR, to whom I consult. I had the afternoon off, so after falling into a state of unconsciousness deeper than that of the mattress on which I lay, I set out with nothing but a map and zero sense of direction.

I walked into the center of the city and then came back out and went to the Rijksmuseum for an hour. Most of it is closed for renovation, so they’ve concentrated the masterpieces into about ten rooms. Astounding. Too much. I had the sense that I could see the paint run backwards into the puddles of color on a palette, and then I simply could not imagine how the process ran forwards. I could almost hear the suck and pop as my attention pulled from one painting and attached to the next.

And I had an experience I never had before. There was a landscape — I amazingly didn’t bring a pen with me so I don’t remember who painted it — that wasn’t particularly attractive to me. It was somewhat washed out, perhaps by time but perhaps on purpose. An oak tree twisted itself up from a hill against a low Netherlands landscape and miles of gray clouds. The craft of the painting didn’t particularly strike me — I’m a sucker for craft — yet I felt a yearning to be on that hill on that bleak day. I actually felt sad that I couldn’t be there. The painting made me homesick for a landscape I’ve never been centuries before I was born. [Technorati tag: amsterdam]

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Alert reader Peter Dawson figured out that it’s “Landscape with Two Oaks” (1641) by Jan van Goyen.

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You know how early on in cheesy sci fi movies they would casually show a small article in the newspaper like “Explosion on Mars Surprises Scientists” that foreshadows the disaster that is about to impend? A couple of days ago, I saw a headline like that: Reuters wants to become a front line news source, rather than simply having its content used by other newspapers. (I tried to find the article today but try searching on “Reuters” at Google News.)

So, imagine that we — you and me, sister — have access to this miscellanized news content. Who needs the NY Times editorial judgment to tell us what’s important when we can filter it for one another? Or let me get a mix filtered by the NY Times’ judgment with a heavy dose of the interests of Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon, AKMA, The Kenyan Pundit, Zephyr Teachout and Susan Crawford. Then throw in the stories that have caught the eye of The Daily Show staff writers, Michael Moore, Andrew Sullivan, Ken Mehlman, Powerline, Isaac Mao and Esther Dyson’s mailing list…just for starters.

It’s not just, as Dan Gillmor famously says, “My readers know more than I do.” We readers, clumped into knots of interest, also are better judges of what matters to us. Put that together with an explosion on Mars, and you’ve got the fleet of flying saucers just about to enter our atmosphere. (Early saucer sightings: Rojo and NewsILike.com [Technorati tags: reuters media]

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A teacher who heard my talk at the NECC last night has sent me an email wondering how teachers (pre-college) can “evaluate and assess the level of student contributions to conversations.” No fair disputing his premise that he has to assign grades, because we’re talking about a public school system under increasing back-asswards demands for more and more “accountability” and testing. So, given that he has to give grades, if he moves more to a conversational model, how can assess students’ participation? Do you know of any interesting approaches to this?

Thanks. [Technorati tag: education]

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Alberto Mucignat has translated the kids version of Small Pieces Loosely Joined into Italian, and has posted it into a wiki. Thanks! [Technorati tag: smallpieces]

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One.org is giving away 50 backstage press passes to bloggers. Dave Sifry explains how you enter the drawing, as do Joe Trippi and Powerline. [Technorati tag: live8]

(Get your own Live 8 graphic like the one above here.)

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My brother and I are known to our family as “The Lumberjerks” not so much because we can’t drive a nail straight but because of the throroughness of our lack of familiarity with the basic properties of three dimensional space.

As I was constructing a simple set of bookshelves today, I discovered the following Lumberjerk principle: When fastening an object, every additional screw you put in increases the probability that you have positioned the object in the wrong place. [Technorati tag: diy]

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Quick before it goes behind the Boston Globe pay wall, you can read Scott Kirsner’s Supernova primer:

…the conversation was thick with concepts and terms that may be familiar to those who marinate daily in the blogosphere, but are novel to those of us who are still retrograde enough to read (or write for) an ink-on-dead-trees publication. Let me try to explain a few

[Technorati tags: ScottKirsner supernova2005]

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…read Susan Crawford on the BrandX decision that gives the FCC regulatory control over all bits. [Technorati tags: fcc grokster]

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I’m keynoting the National Educational Computing Conference today in Philadelphia. Here’s a sketch of what I plan on saying. (The first two paragraphs are a variation on my “stump” speech, and you may recognize bits from elsewhere.)

Knowledge is being shaken to its roots. Knowledge began in ancience Greece as a way of sorting through conversations to discover what’s the right advice for guiding the state. Over time, it got associated with certainty and became more and more restricted and less in touch with the messy human context. In fact, it took on four properties, two of which mirror the nature of reality and two of which mirror the nature of autocratic political reality: 1. There’s one knowledge to serve all humans. 2. When sorting ideas, we have to put them in separate bins. 3. We need experts to do the sorting. 4. These gatekeepers have power.

But in the digital age, we snip the connection between how we organize physical stuff and how we organize knowledge. Four principles of organization change: A leaf can be on many branches, messiness is a virtue, the owners of the information no longer own the organization of that information, and users are contributors.

So, what is the new shape of knowledge?

First, Andy Clark in Being There reminds us that we have always externalized thought, which is a good thing: We got smarter when we learned how to write on walls to express more complex ideas. We used to worry about the effect of calculators on children’s cognitive abilities. Now we worry about Google. Books made us smarter. Now bits are going to make us even smarter.

So, what happens when we shake knowledge off of paper? Quick example: Freed of the limitations of paper and publishing, topics get smaller and better aligned with human interests.

But, you can see with Linnaeus how the use of paper shaped knowledge. The fact that he recorded species on index cards led to him organizing them one way and not another.

And we’ve treated documents as if they were containers. That’s because we’ve thought of our minds as containers. But the Web is made of links — pages pointing outside of themselves to other pages — each a little act of generosity.

But why believe what anything on the Web says? Yes, why believe even Doc Searls? Because are now capable of multi-subjectivity: many voices in conversation. Knowledge is becoming conversation.

Two further effects: 1. On the Web, we don’t have to settle every dispute. Thus, knowledge can stay local and ambiguous. 2. We don’t insist on a perfect beer before we drink one, and we shouldn’t insist on perfect knowledge; since knowledge is social, it’s as flawed as we are. (Of course, the criteria of belief vary by domain. I want more certainty from my doctor than I do from Jon Stewart or Michael Moore.)

So, how do we teach our kids? Do we cram their heads full of content and then test them on it? As individuals? Do we imply ambiguity is a failure? Do we insist on being right? Or do we say that knowledge is an unending conversation? Do we teach children to seek ambiguity and love difference?

Conversation is a paradox because it iterates difference on a common ground. That a paradox happens every day is a miracle. [Technorati tags: epistemology taxonomy NECC]

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Everything Bad Is Good for You got an oblique reference in the Sunday Doonesbury. That, along with appearing on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, has to be on Steve Johnson’s life list… [Technorati tag: SteveJohnson]

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I just made the mistake of turning on the TV and seeing the George Stephanopoulos show just at the moment where George Will, minimizing Karl Rove’s dangerous disconnect from reality, lumped MoveOn.org and Michael Moore as “extremists.”

Say wha’????

Michael Moore is an irresponsible provocateur and humorist who sometimes raises topics — and says truths — the mass media is too craven to discuss, so I can see why Will might confuse him with an extremist. But MoveOn.org, which came into existence with the radical extremist notion of censuring Clinton and then moving on? Is this a conscious effort by Will to shift the table to the right, or is he really so lacking in vision and historical perspective?

You would think that a vibrant democracy would take as a matter of pride the range of opinions it embraces… [Technorati tags: politics GeorgeWill MoveOn MichaelMoore Karl Rove]

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While I’m talking about companies I am an official advisor to, Technorati is serving as “blog central” for the Live8 Concert. Live8 wants your voice, not your money: The idea is that lots of our voices maybe can influence the G8 to put an end to poverty. The goal is to get a million posts supporting this idea. I don’t actually believe that even ten million would make any difference to the leaders of the G8, but what can it hurt?

Dave Sifry, Mr. Technorati, talks about this in my video interview of him at Supernova, which you can see here at C-Net. (The aggregation of v-blog interviews is here.) [Technorati tags: live8 technorati]

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BlogBridge, a free open source aggregator client for Windows [added:], Mac and Linux, put together by my pal Pito Salas, has announced two cool features. [Disclosure: I'm an unpaid advisor to the company, but I had nothing to do with these features.]

First, BlogBridge is recruiting subject matter experts who want to put together sets of feeds on a topic. For example, Amanda Watlington is aggregating feeds on search engine optimization.

Second, BlogBridge now lets you create “smartfeeds,” feeds made of other feeds based on rules you specify. E.g., you could ask to see all the feeds you currently subscribe to that use a particular keyword. Or, you can have it fetch tagged feeds from the likes of del.icio.us, findory, flickr and technorati.

I’ve been using BlogBridge as my main aggregator for a few months now, and I’m happy with it. Yes, there are a couple of edges that I consider rough, but BB is free, it’s open source, and I’ve known Pito long enough to know he’s a really good guy. [Technorati tags: blogbridge rss]

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Andrew Rasiej, running for the obscure post of NYC Public Advocate, has put forward a plan that would connect wireless routers on city lamp posts using the city’s dark fiber. The total cost would be less than $10/person (= $80M) and would provide free wifi access in public places; businesses and residents would pay about $20/month for basic high-speed service.

Of course, the incumbents, always zealous in their protection of the free market (hah!) are lobbying hard to prevent municipalities from providing this service. [Technorati tags: rasiej wifi]

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Inside Knowledge devotes 2,300 well-written words (by Sandra Higgison) to the work of Euan “The Obvious” Semple at the BBC. Euan has been leading the BBC down the social software path before software was called social.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to wrestle my 75+ pages of notes on the Beeb’s digital make-over into 2,500 words for Wired. More words! I need more words!

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As a liberal, I’m not insulted by Karl Rove’s remark that “liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” He’s just demagoging based on a seed of truth: I do want to understand our attackers (because it’s stupid in n dimensions not to understand the people you’re fighting) and I do want a nuanced, well-thought-out response that will actually make my children safer, rather than the kneejerk Bomb Someone strategery we got from Bush and Rove. So, fine, politicians exaggerate the positions they don’t like and even end up stating utter falsehoods like Rove’s.

No, what gets my goat is his unthought assumption that every issue and event is fodder for political advantage. So he goes into the very city where firefighters ran up the stairs instead of down, and he mouths off to score some points at a fund-raiser? Tell me now who doesn’t take 9/11 seriously, the liberals or callow, unfeeling, assroves like him? This split from reality — he was in New York City! — is where evil takes root.

Karl Rove should apologize or resign…apologize not because our poor widdle feelings are hurt but to acknowledge that reality still matters. [Thanks to the Daou Report for links and fire.] [Technorati tags: KarlRove 911]

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Irina leaves the serious content blogging to others and instead presents the lighter side of the Berkman ILAW conference now underway… [Technorati tags: ilaw berkman]

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I’m actually getting to sit in on a session at Supernova. John Seely-Brown is talking about the themes of his book with John Hagel, The Only Sustainable Edge. For an excellent overview and probing of these themes, see Kevin Werbach’s interview of the co-authors at Knowledge@Wharton.

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From USA Today:

With boy safe, searchers celebrate
Prayers answerd in Utah mountains as lost 11-year-old is found after 4 days

Maybe I’m feeling snippy this morning, but in the interest of fairness, I expect to see a headline like the following soon:

Body of missing pretty white woman found
God turns deaf ear to distraught parents

Yeah, I guess I’m feeling snippy.

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A whole load of v-blogs from Supernova are up. I interviewed a bunch of interesting people, including Jonathan Schwartz (Sun), Hossein Eslambolchi (AT&T), Mena Trott (6 Apart), Chris Anderson (Wired), Lili Cheng (Microsoft), Da Scoble (Microsoft), Peter Quintas (SolidSpace), Scott Kirsner (Boston Globe) , John Patrick (IBM, ret), and more. (C-NET has started posting them as well.) [Technorati tag: supernova2005]

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I’m at the Supernova conference from which I’ll be doing video blogging for C-NET and Knowledge@Wharton. C-NET’s coverage is here. The video bloggery is here. [Technorati tag: supernova05]

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Says Jeff:

This is like hearing Kathy Lee Gifford try to rap and then, upon hearing the results, declaring hip hop dead.

I’m not convinced that wikitorials make sense, but if they do, they should heed Jeff’s three pieces of advice…

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Betsy Devine has a lovely reminiscence of her father and her mother. Affecting. [Technorati tags: BetsyDevine FathersDay Fathers]

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I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you.

But we’re now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator.

I just can’t do it any more.

I’ve been faking it for a while. Months. Maybe a year. If we’ve met and I look confused about something you told me, and if you said, “I blogged it,” as if that should be explanation enough, I’ve made some excuse as if I read every one of your posts except that one.

The truth is, I probably haven’t read your blog in weeks. Months maybe.

And I don’t expect you to have read mine.

I don’t want to lie any more. I don’t want to feel guilty any more. So let me tell you flat out: There are too many blogs I like and too many people I like to making “keeping up” a reasonable expectation, any more than you should expect me to keep up with Pokemon characters or I should expect you to keep up with Bollywood movies. I’m not going to feel guilty any longer about my failure.

I will read your blog on occasion, either because I’ve been thinking of you or because something reminded me of you. Maybe it’ll be because you sent me an email pointing to a post you think I’ll enjoy. Go ahead! I’d love to hear from you.

But I hereby release you from thinking I expect you to keep up with my blog, and I preemptively release myself from your expectations.

Otherwise reading each other’s blogs will become a joyless duty. And we’re too good friends to do that to each other.

[This is from the latest issue of my free newsletter, available here.]

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C-Net has put up its page where the Supernova videoblogcasts (and more) will occur. I fly out there tonight and start vblogging tomorrow morning… [Technorati tag: supernova2005]

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Boston Globe columnist Hiawatha Bray writes about Microsoft’s enabling of Chinese censorship, wisely using Rebecca as his primary source. Good column, although I think he’s overly-optimistic at the end about the ability of the Chinese government to cut off access to sites it doesn’t like. The Berkman report on Chinese filtering paints a more depressing picture… [Technorati tags: RebeccaMacKinnon HiawathaBray China]

(I blogged a response to Scoble’s defense of Microsoft.)

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Spring

A maple leaf

as flat as an open palm

and cold with rain

leaned over and slapped me

as I walked on the sidewalk.

The advantage is mine:

I have evolved thumbs and vengeance.

[Technorati tags: poetry humor]

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RageBoy writes what may be the least corporate blog post to ever appear as an official corporate blog post. Called “Lashing them together” — the “them” refers explicitly to a writer’s sentences but sentences are not the only ones who receive the edge of RB’s cat o’ nine tales — this is a cauldron of ideas and gestures that is about child rearing the way Mt. St. Helen’s was about the even distribution of ash. [Technorati tag: RageBoy]

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Terry Heaton blogs about a “think tank” confab at Ball State University where he became more convinced than ever that the mainstream press is on the precipice. I have that sense more and more, too, although I couldn’t quantify it or even argue for it. You know how you feel when the wind blows a little colder than usual and there’s a drop in the air pressure? That’s how I feel. Something is on the way. [Technorati tag: media]

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Comic Life (Mac only) turns a series of photos into comic book format, complete with captions. The Flickr feed of the results is pretty cool.

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I got an Citizen Eco-Drive watch off eBay a few of months ago. As I blogged, the instructions for setting it are incomprehensible. So I posted my own instructions into the entry for Eco-Drive at Wikipedia . But I’m afraid an editor will take it down since I think Wikipedia doesn’t like “how-to” articles. So, I’m going to post it here, just in case.

The English-language instructions for setting Eco-Drive watches are close to incomprehensible. Here are instructions for one particular model – BL5XXX – that probably hold for similar Eco-Drive watches. This particular model has three small dials in addition to the main face, two buttons and a stem. Its functionality includes an alarm clock, a chronograph (i.e., stop watch) and a perpetual calendar.

Here is how these instructions will refer to the various elements of the watch:

Main Face: The place where the main minute, hour and second hands are.
Dial A: The upper left small dial numbered up to 24. Underneath it says “Chronograph” and “Alarm”
Dial B: The upper right small dial numbered 0-8. Underneath it says “Perpetual calendar”
Dial C: The bottom middle small dial. It has four labels that repeat around the circle: TME (time), CHR (stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (alarm)
Button A: The top button
Button B: The bottom button
Stem In: The stem in its normal position, full pressed into the watch
Stem Mid: The stem in its middle position
Stem Out: The stem pulled out all the way into this third position.

Turning the stem to the right means giving it a half turn or so in a clockwise direction. This generally turns the affected hand counter-clockwise. Likewise, turning to the left means turning the stem counter-clockwise, generally causing the affected hand to turn clockwise.

Changing modes

With the stem in, give the stem a little twist in either direction. This will cause the hand on Dial C to move, changing the mode of the clock from TME (normal time), CHR (using the stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (setting the alarm). Depending on the function, changing modes may automatically change the big hands on the main face.

Setting the Perpetual Calendar

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Set the stem to mid. Turning it to the left will set the date. If you give it a full turn instead, the date will change continuously until you give it another little spin. (It can be difficult to get the stem spun just right to start the continuous date changing.)

The second hand points to the month. E.g., if it is pointing to 1, your watch thinks it is January. If it points at 12, your watch thinks it is December. Press B once to advance the second hand by one month.

Now you have to tell it when the next leap year is coming. Dial B indicates that. If the hand on Dial B is pointing at 0, then your watch thinks it is currently a leap year. If it points at 1, it thinks it was a leap year last year. If it points at 2, it thinks it was a leap year two years ago. And if it points at 3, it thinks it was a leap year three years ago (and that therefore next year is a leap year). Adjust this by pushing Button A once for every year you want to advance Dial B.

Push the stem all the way in. Your watch is now set to keep track of dates for the next few decades.

Setting the time

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem to its out position. The second hand should advance to 12.

Turn the stem to the right or left to cause the big hands to turn. (To the right moves the hands clockwise.) The hand in Dial A will turn. Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement. (NOTE: Dial A tells you whether the big hands are showing AM or PM; if you are setting the watch to 7:00pm (or 19:00, if you prefer), for example, the hand on Dial A should be pointing at 19. To make the hands move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns. (NOTE: This doesn’t always work.)

Push the stem in all the way.

Setting the date

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem to its mid position.

Turn the stem to the left to cause the date number to change. (Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement.) The big hands will move as the date is set. (NOTE: This doesn’t always work.) To make the dial move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns.

Push the stem in all the way.

Using the stopwatch

The stopwatch, or “chronograph,” can measure up to an hour.

Set Dial C to CHR. (See “Changing modes” above.) The second hand will advance to 12. Button A starts and stops the stopwatch. Pressing Button A continuously resets the stopwatch to 0. Dial B records minutes.

Using local time

Set Dial C to L-TM. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem all the way out. Turn the stem left or right once for each hour you want to advance or setback the time. When you’re done, press the stem back in. So long as you are in L-TM mode, the watch will show local time. If you set the mode to TIM, it will show the time where you started.

For example, if you are visiting some place three hours ahead of your home, you would go into L-TM mode, pull the stem all the way out, and turn it stem three times to the right.

NOTE: If in setting local time you go past midnight, the calendar date will change

The alarm

(I think these instructions are correct.) To set the alarm, set Dial C to ALM. (See “Changing modes” above.) The hands move to whatever time the alarm had been set to previously.

Pull the stem out fully. Set the time you want the alarm to go off by turning the stem. Check Dial A to make sure you have it set for AM or PM. (For example, to set the alarm to go off at 11:30 PM, Dial A should point to one tick before 24. Push the stem in. The alarm is now set.

To turn off the alarm when it is beeping, press Button A.

To un-set the alarm so it won’t go off at its appointed time, set Dial C to ALM and pull out the stem. Pressing Button A toggles the alarm on and off. You can tell whether it’s on by looking at the second hand. If it is pointing to 41 minutes after the hour, the alarm is on. If it is pointing to 37 minutes after the hour, it is off. Why Citizen decided to make the difference a matter of four minutes beats the heck out of me.

[Technorati tags: ecodrive eco-drive howto]

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Bev Trayner gets appropriately complex about the intersections of communities, languages, norms and metaphors. Here’s a snippet:

Recently at two different conferences which represent two different international communities I belong to I was aware of the genre boundaries we are crossing in our work on communities, technologies and learning. The combination of different modes and technologies and a focus on emerging processes and diversity changes the whole nature of communication. It also changes our ways of of working together, what gets done, whose voices get heard, and where power lies…

Meanwhile, in my local community I have to develop another Zen-like robustness to help me through the quagmire of rules, norms and fixed expectations. The complexity of my universe here is to be found in the discovering or revealing of nests of relations and realities…

(Thanks to Nancy White for the link.) [Technorati tags: NancyWhite BevTrayner]

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The Man Who Loved Only Numbers was worth reading, but I felt used. Paul Erdos was a completely fascinating eccentric who proved that not all mathematical geniuses do their important work by the time they’re 30. I won’t go through his bundle of oddities because the author, Paul Hoffman, does a good job enumerating them through anecdotes. But don’t expect a biography: Hoffman doesn’t get much past anecdotes.

That’s not, however, why I felt used. First, the title is a lie. Hoffman makes it clear that Erdos loved his mother, loved little kids, and loved — in his own weird way — his friends, many of whom he kept for his lifetime. Second, this started out as a magazine article and it reads that way. It jumps around in the history of mathematics in order to pad out the book. Some of those jumps are interesting, but as a reader, I felt disrespected, as if Hoffman thought I wouldn’t notice that he’d changed the topic without even the courtesy of a transition sentence.

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When in London I picked up a paperback of Blowfly, the not-quite-the-latest in the Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. I’d pretty much given up on the series, but the book was on sale so I figured I’d give it one more shot. I’m about half way through it and that’s probably as far as I’m going to get.

The series started out well — a smart, feisty, female forensic pathologist who solved crimes the CSI way except without the techno beat. (The series undoubtedly was an inspiration, if that’s the word, for the CSI sausage factory.) But as it’s progressed, Scarpetta has gone from interesting to perfect. The people around her tell us that she is gorgeous, flawless, a genius, perfectly moral, the most caring person they’ve ever met. This would just be bad writing except I get the creepy feeling that Cornwall identifies completely with Scarpetta.

That’s in addition to a standard problem writers of crime stories now face: The Temptation of the Lambs. In the first half of Blowfly, Cornwall spends more time with her pair of serial killers than with Scarpetta. She apparently believes she is a fine observer of character. But, her serial killers are impossibly monstrous and monstrously over-written. It’s embarrassingly melodramatic and creepy in all the wrong ways.

O, Thomas Harris, what hast thou wrought?

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If you’re a PC owner and have looked under the hood at the BIOS, you may be a teensy bit confused about whether you should “Allocate IRQ to PCD VGA” or enable “Palette Snooping.” The Rojak BIOS Optimization Guide will explain it all to you. Then it’s up to you to decide if you want to risk varying from the defaults. Most of the entries come from 2003, and the information is not specific to particular motherboards, but I’ve found it to be a good place to start. [Technorati tag: bios]

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That’s the title of a piece by Joan Didion in The NY Review of Books in which she insists on finding the complexities, ambiguities and unaddressed questions in the Schiavo case. Whatever your position, you’ll come out of the article less sure that you were right. [Technorati tags: Schiavo JoanDidion]

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An email from Brendan Greeley (lightly edited):

Last night on Open Source (Chris Lydon’s radio show), in honor of Bloomsday, we decided — quite arbitrarily — that this Tuesday, June 14, 2005 was “blogsday.” We spent two days poking through the Internet to find the sound of ordinary people writing about their own lives.

For an hour on the radio, we had Chris Lydon and two actors read out these blog entries, all from a single day. I think the results are kind of stunning, which is why I’m sharing them. The writing is gorgeous; it hits on barbecue, adopting a child in China, an infantry patrol in Iraq, marriage, the purchase of a hula hoop and about fifty other things.

My favorite entry is a post from a 365-pound man who had made it his goal to get a yellow belt in karate; his tone is earnest, driven and honest in a way I’ve never read, from any writer.

I think we captured a bit of this hum of people recording their lives and came up with a day in the life of America. We’re proud of it. Take a listen.

I haven’t listened to it yet, but I figure especially with podcasts, if I wait until I’ve actually heard it, it will be too late to recommend it. But between Brendan and Chris, its provenance can’t be beat…

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