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[Technorati tags: sunrise]

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I read an article at Salon about the New Age branding of airlines I thought RageBoy might enjoy, so I used the page’s handy “email this article to a pal” form.

The next day, I hear from RB that I’ve sent him a link to “The Hot Sex Handbook.”

Wow. That’s really not the sort of mistake you want a site to make with any of your friends, except maybe RB.

And while I’m being uncharitable about site mistakes made by my betters, what’s up with page 10 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?

The site, therefore, of Fudge stepping out of the fire once more, looking disheveled and fretful and sternly surprised that the Prime Minister did not know exactly why he was there, was about the worst thing that had happened in the course of this extremely gloomy week.

Site??? That’s the type of mistake I make all the time — I could sightsitecite lots of examples — but I’m not writing the most anticipated book of the year on which my publisher has bet the farm. They printed up almost 11 million copies in this country. One of the chains reported they were selling 200 copies a second (or so the rumor has it). You’d think they could put it through an extra round of proofreading…

Note: I can predict with 100% confidence that my next book will contain more and dumber errors than that. [Technorati tags: RageBoy Salon HarryPotter]

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The comments on this site seem to have vanished. I have no idea why. I’m on “vacation” using dial up so I haven’t been monkeying with my site. But this morning, previously posted comments have disappeared. There are none listed in the list of comments I can get to through my admin control panel. I’m using Movable Type 3.11. Any ideas? TIA.

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When Tina Packer, founder of Shakespeare & Co., asked the audience on Thursday night who had not seen King John before, I didn’t see a single unraised arm. Packer’s notes for the show—she directed it—say “I think King John is a rarely produced play because there is no clear answer” to the big issues it raises, which sounds like a director directing us away from her inability to make sense of the play. But Packer does make sense of it. I thought it was actually one of Shakespeare & Co’s most successful plays, and we’ve been coming to them for around 20 years.

Man, this is not a play that reads well, so I came in worried about following the action. Worse, you have to worry when the official synopsis parenthetically explains a character with the phrase “(also called Philip).” That’s a bad sign. But, it turns out that the twists and turns of allegiances are easy to follow, at least in this production. Credit Packer, the excellent acting, and the live music composed by Martin Best. The enunciation was bell-clear, as always, and the troupe uses Packer’s subtle gestural techniques to clarify who’s talking to whom about what. Plus Packer finds the humor in the piece, again as usual, starting with King John (Allyn Burrows) reading the line “Silence, mother” as a kingly shout of the first word and a second that, with a sly, conciliatory smile, acknowledges that the first went too far.

The play moves along until the intermission, but hits its emotional core in the second half. King John is undone more by fortune than by his own faults. Even his clearly evil act of ordering the death of young Arthur only drives him to ruin because the boy accidentally falls to his death, after Hubert has defied his king’s orders. Entire kingdoms hang on such events, in this play. It is a convincing and ultimately terrifying worldview.

In a disturbing final scene, we are left with King John dying in agony, poisoned by monks, as the crown passes to his young son who looks terrified at the prospect of being thrown into fortune’s maw.

The acting was overall terrific, but I particularly enjoyed Peter Macon as the bastard (the only character who has shown an inner constancy), Allyn Burrows as the king, Annette Miller as Eleanor, Robert Biggs as Austria, Kenajuan Bentley as Hubert, and Barbara Sims as Constance. The play runs July 21-September 3. If you’re in the Berkshires, see it. When else are you going to have a chance?

[Technorati tags: shakespeare]

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First: The video.

Second, the question:

1. He is cracking up as his policies fail and his supporters desert him.

2. It’s his inner frat boy escaping.

3. He’s led a life of assumed privilege, so when he doesn’t get his way, he acts like a spoiled teenager.

4. It’s his way of saying “America is Number One!”

5. We all know he’s thinking it, so why not just come out with it?

6. Because he’s the President, dammit!

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(Thanks to my brother Andy.)

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[Technorati tags: hummingbird]

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Bob comments on George Gilder’s promotion of the “intelligent design” idea in an interesting interview with Gilder in the Boston Globe yesterday. (My take on the article was simply that Gilder has made an admirable career out of being wrong in public.) Bob says that bell curves look like they were intelligently designed, too, but as the famous exhibit at the 1964 Worlds Fair shows every time it’s run — I was there and I remember it — when you drop balls down a set of pegs, you get a bell curve every time.

Bob’s right, IMO, but his example isn’t going to cut the mustard with someone like Gilder who comes to the intelligent design conclusion not on the basis of faith. (Those who get there by faith can only be moved from it by another faith.) Gilder et al. point to far more complex examples than balls forming bell curves. In fact, the entire argument rests on finding examples so complex that they seem impossible without an intelligent designer. So, Bob’s tactic of finding something simple to understand that looks intentional but isn’t can’t work on ID believers, for they will always be able to find an example of something complex for which we don’t yet have an explanation.

Here’s my point of view on the intelligent design argument. I’m not claiming that it’s a sophisticated point of view. It’s just what I think.

I don’t know if there’s an intelligent designer. It seems unlikely to me for a few reasons: As SJ Gould pointed out, much of life is rather haphazardly and ad hoc-ly formed (e.g., the panda’s thumb), not as elegant as you’d expect from an ID and not like the elegant examples ID believers point to. Also, if there is an ID, I can’t imagine that the two words we use to describe it — “intelligent” and “design” — actually are anywhere near to describing it; it’s got to so far transcend our understanding that those terms don’t really make sense. Also, a belief that nature was intelligently designed raises the problem of evil — why do bad things happen to good people? — that argues against ID. I mean, if it turns out that it took an ID to design an eyeball, then why the hell didn’t it build in a tsunami warning system so the eyeballs of millions of children wouldn’t be dimmed? ID solves an engineering problem but raises an insoluble moral problem.

So, I don’t know if there’s an ID. As I say, if I had to guess, I’d say no, but if I don’t trust my judgment about whether my subscription to PC Gamer counts as a tax deduction, how can I trust my judgment about the origin of the universe? So, maybe there is an ID. But if there is, we sure can’t look to our ignorance as proof, because historically we know not only that we solve problems that once looked impossible, but our understanding of the domain within the which the problems exist changes radically. For most of recorded history we thought nature only had a few thousand years in which to operate. We were stuck with real-time apparatus for calculating. We were stuck running experiments about physical events by using physical events. We lacked the tools for understanding complexity. Human ignorance evolves, so it is unwise to base any argument on its nature.

Personally, I find absolutely nothing objectionable about people who believe G-d is the architect of nature. (Why pussyfoot around this? ID=G-d.) For the believers I know personally, this is a way of contacting the ineffable beauty, orderliness and complexity of our world. It is a way of acknowledging our dark-inked ignorance, our fallibility, our humanity, just as the best of our knowing always has. But taking ignorance as an excuse for remaining ignorant or, worse, for using it as an argument against science? The believers I know don’t do that. It would feel like a betrayal.

Bob also has a terrific essay on the damage DRM will do to the marketplace and innovation…and to the long tail. [Technorati tags: GeorgeGilder BobFrankston IntelligentDesign LongTail science]

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It’s no secret that Technorati’s response time has been spotty as the site has tried to keep up with the number of blogs and with its own traffic. Dave Sifry this morning has posted what seems to be a frank report on Technorati’s atempt to improve search and index times. Or course, it helps that the news is good. Dave reports that the median time between the moment you post and the moment it’s indexed at Technorati is now five minutes, which is impressive. It’s also crucial to Technorati since the site has two, related benefits: It indexes weblogs and it gives you a picture of what’s being talked about now. So, congrats to the Technorati crew — still providing all this value for free — and thanks to Dave for living the transparent business lifestyle. (And, yes, I am hugely biased because I’m on the advisory board and am proud to count myself as a FOD: Friend/Fan of Dave.)

Also, Dave blogs that Technorati now filters by language, which should be a useful feature both for those using Technorati as a search tool and those using it as an analytic tool. [Technorati tag: technorati]

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Reading the New York Times while on vacation is fundamentally different from reading it while not on vacation.

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I’m about halfway through Harriet Ritvo’s The Platypus and the Mermaid, a book recommended to me by Chris Locke’s sister Liz. It’s about the 19th Century’s obsession with taxonomies, and it’s staggeringly good. Ritvo is one of those authors whose breadth of knowledge and grasp of details seems impossible. She shows how naturalists and culture struggled with the concept of species, with the naturalness or artificiality of order, with whether order is simple or complx, with the discovery of a continent’s worth of new animals (kangaroos looked a lot like greyhounds) by not only following the scientific debate but by attending to how children’s guides to animals explained themselves. And she’s a good writer to boot. Thanks, Liz! [Technorati tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Britt has hit upon the “campfire talk” as the aesthetic corporate bloggers will “get.” Sounds right, although I wouldn’t know having never been to a campfire. So, my only cultural references for campfires are: Roasting marshmallows, telling stories about homocidal maniacs with hooks, and peeing on the fire to put it out (men only!). But if it works in corporate America, then more power to the aesthetic! Anything that will get corporate bloggers past the idea that they’re writing memos or brochures in public…

(Is it a coincidence that a guy named “Blaser” would come up with a fire metaphor?) [Technorati tag: BrittBlaser]

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When doing pushups under water, most of your energy gets expended going down.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (known in my family as I Can’t Believe We’re Eating This) is eschewing TV commercials in favor of a 4-part animated mock soap opera at TasteYouLove.com.

It’s certainly interesting when a retail product jumps off of TV. For one thing, the Web ad doesn’t interrupt me while I’m trying to do something else. And the first two episodes ICBINB has posted are a tiny bit amusing. But just a a tiny bit.

The problem is that products like ICBINB aren’t interesting. The script tries to make up for the product’s tedium by hitting the predictable soap opera parody points (handsome doctor, evil twin, amnesia), but it’s hard to believe that people are actually going to send this around to their friends. Maybe if the product made fun of itself instead of a tired TV genre…

I would love to see more advertising move off of TV and onto dedicated websites, as ICBINB has done. But the Web sites can’t be as boring as TV ads are. If you want our attention, now you’re going to have to earn it. Turning your bottle into an animated character that looks like Nicole Kidman just isn’t going to cut it. [Technorati tags: marketing]

Totally by coincidence - I swear! - our daughter was watching a Simpsons rerun just now that mentions www.SexySlumberParty.com, so I checked it out…

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Pito aggregates what he’s learned about the use of RSS and blogs among academics, researchers and scientists. Short answer: A lot’s going on.

The final point on Pito’s list is one he appropriately calls “awesome”: the University of Saskatchewan Library’s list of feeds from hundreds of journals, from Abacus to World journal of surgical oncology [Technorati tags: rss PitoSalas]

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The Bush administration continues to refuse to release photos and videos of Abu Ghraib that, by all accounts, show far worse scenes of torture.

We need to know what happened. We’re Americans. We’re supposed to believe in the power of truth. [Technorati tags: iraq bush AbuGhraib]

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According to a survey conducted by eBay, how many Americans say that eBay is their primary or secondary source of income?

The answer is in the first comment… [Thanks to Center for Media Research for the info.] [Technorati tags: OrderOfMagnitudeQuiz ebay]

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PRSpeak thinks maybe it’s time to get the various people mouthing off about PR (I am one of those mouthers) into a room and produce something like a manifesto.

This isn’t a manifesto, but here’s a self-description I’d like to hear from a PR agency sometime:

1. Our PR agency’s aim is to help knowledge emerge in public.

2. We recognize that knowledge is a property of conversations.

3. Scientists, industry experts, businesses, enthusiasts, and users each have important and unique contributions to make to these conversations. No one group holds all the knowledge necessary.

4. So, the aim of this agency is to help enable the conversations from which knowledge emerges. [Here's where a list of services would go.]

5. Our clients pay us to represent the public’s interest in having the honest and useful conversations that generate knowledge, because our clients believe that an increase in public knowledge is good for their business.

Could such an agency actually make money? I don’t know. That’s why it’s called “mouthing off.” [Technorati tags: PublicRelations PR]

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Andy Ratto is reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and blogging about it. Quite unpretentiously and charmingly.

He’s including references he doesn’t understand. E.g., on page 29 of the first volume there’s a reference to the “pangolin.” Andy consults Wikipedia to discover that they are scaly anteaters. Presumably he didn’t look up “pangolin” in the Britannica because he’s checking the volumes out of the library one at a time.

He also promises to note particularly profound moments, ridiculously obtuse parts and the bios that end in murder or suicide. He is also blogging interesting facts, such as:

“The smallest arthropods include some parastic wasps, beetles of the family Ptiliidae, and mites that are less than 0.25 millimeter in length, despite their complex structure, and may weigh less than the nucleus of a large cell.”

Andy is a college student majoring in poli sci, and is in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. G-d speed, Andy!

(Thanks to the EBlogger — a blog about the Britannica — for the link.) [Technorati tags: britannica wikipedia AndyRatto]

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Take a look at the Big Broadband Bill of Rights and consider signing it. I did.

Fat lot of good it will do. And least it reads better than most petitions/manifestos.

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Clicking above or below the slider thingie advances or retreats your window by approximately one window’s worth of display. That’s useful, but I’d also like to be able to right-click in a scroll bar and get taken to that proportional spot in the document: Right click three-quarters of the way down and it shows you the document three-quarters of the way in. Sure, I could slide the slider thingie, but that requires more eye-hand coordination than my eyes and hands have put together.

Maybe LonghornVista - Could it be a more boring name? Why not something with some guts, like Winux or HAL? - will institute this, if it has time after implementing tag-based scroll bars.

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The Berkman Center is arranging a showing of Chuck Olsen’s Blogumentary, a documentary about — surprise! — blogging. Chuck’s going to be there so there will be a discussion afterwards.

It’s at 7pm, Tuesday, August 2, in Pound #102 a site to be disclosed soon. It’s free. [Technorati tags: blogumentary berkman]

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Here’s an idea that’s circulating: Create an entry in your cell phone directory for “ICE” (”In Case of Emergency”) where you list the number you want a paramedic to call if she finds your inert body on a sidewalk. For mltiple numbers, create either “ICE1″ and “ICE2″ entires, or “ICE-Spouse,” “ICE-Mom” and “Ice-Jack Bauer” entries.

Yes, if you lose your cell phone you’ve told evil doers who you care about most. No, the idea that paramedics are starting to look for ICE numbers is not a mere urban myth.

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GlobalVoices has aggregated links to Egyptians bloggers protesting the mass murder at Sharm el-Sheik. Karim Eslahy reports it was “small turnout and the cops made them leave,” but one of the commenters says there was a protest with over 1,000 attending at Sharm el-Sheik itself:

“There is no God but God and terrorism is the enemy of God,” chanted the Egyptian protesters, including hotel chefs, technicians and road sweepers, as they marched along the main road of Sharm el-Sheikh…

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I switched hosts today (thanks, Bill!). As we try to get POP3 working — I know MAPI is better, but the last time I tried it, my client got confused about what was local and what was on the server, and then I got confused, and my client and I ended up eating a whole tub of cookie dough ice cream — it seems like an obvious time to consider switching from Thunderbird to gmail. (I would retain my current email address.)

My reasons for preferring Thunderbird are not necessarily invincible:

I’m familiar with it

I have rules set up for foldering incoming email

Nice people write cool extensions for Thunderbird

I have a greater illusion of privacy having my email archive on my hard drive and not on that of some large corporation, even if the corporation is Google

Any thoughts?

[The next day:] Ok, Bill just explained it to me. We’re going to route my mail from Bill’s server gmail and I’ll point Thunderbird at gmail’s pop server. Got it.

And, yes, when I said IMAP, I meant MAPI, or possible PAMI, IMPA, AMPI, AMIP, MAIP, PAIM or IAMP.

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No kidding. Before you click on this link to Doc’s site, you should be prepared. It is back-from-the-dead, scare-the-blind, directed-by-Tim-Burton, beyond-Photoshop ugly. [Technorati tags: ugliest DocSearls]

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I switched hosts this morning, resulting in some expected down time. If you’re reading this, it’s up and working. If you’re not reading it, you’re missing some mighty fine content-free blogging…

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Susan writes:

Jeff Jarvis has a good post today about all the feeds, conversations, aggregations, and other kinds of thingies that make up what he calls Web 2.0. He says, “This is a new architecture. It’s a dynamic architecture.”

It’s even more than that — it’s political. These meta-informational thingies are letting us see our online environment in ways we can’t possibly see the offline world. What’s important isn’t just that these thingies are dynamic (although that’s clearly important) but also that they can be (1) visualized and (2) affected by the attention of individuals. When humans can see something and act on it, they are suddenly in charge of their own environment…

I haven’t been a booster of the “Web 2.0″ phrase because it sounded like something a conference organizer desperate for novely came up with. AFter all, the Web has always been more than a set of billboards. Ever since JavaScript — every since the “Submit” button? — the Web’s continuously been bringing itself alive. But Susan has convinced me that that’s like saying “Weblogs are nothing new. I was FTP-ing posts every day in 1994.” Yes, I’m sure you were, and Notepad is the greatest.html_editor.ever, dude. But the fact that weblogs are so much easier now means that tens of millions of people are able to write them, and that’s a real difference. Likewise, put all of the Web integrative pieces together and make them available to more and more people, and you’re talking about something different because you’ve changed the politics of the technology. [Technorati tags: web2 SusanCrawford]

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The Iraqi blogger, Khalid Jarrar, who had been taken in by the Iraqi government has been freed. Look for an update on his blog… (Thanks to GlobalVoices for the link.) [Technorati tags: iraq GlobalVoices]

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Google maps now reach to the moon.

Time for earthlings to get moving on Vint Cerf’s work to devise network protocols suitable for inter-planetary message transport. Snippet from a msg Cerf posted to a discussion board in 1999:

actually we think each moon will have its own addresss space. Not clear yet the role of DNS in all of this.

(Thanks to Lockergnome for the link.)

[Technorati tags: gis VintCerf google]

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Scott had a chance to talk with George Gilder about the future of the movies: “The cineplex becomes the home domestiplex.” The whole interview is available for download… [Technorati tags: ScottKirsner GeorgeGilder]

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Heather Green has risen to defend my honor because a story on podcasting in the NY Times yesterday attributes the quote “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people” as a “podcasting maxim” rather than to me. Thank you, Heather.

But, my honor doesn’t need or deserve defending in this case. Here’s the comment I left in response to Heather’s post, which was title “Quote foul!”:

I’d jump in and grab the glory except for two points:

First, although I came up with the line independently, if you google it you’ll find a bunch of other people who came up with it independently before I did. Life’s like that.

Second, even if I knew that I was the first person ever to say those words, so what? Sure, it’s good to attribute quotations when possible, but it’s even better to let ideas be assimilated into the cultural body, and that doesn’t happen if people have to keep saying “As so-and-so said.” I’m proud to have something that I (and others) wrote enter the culture as a “maxim.” Cool!

Just to be clear: Had I known that someone else had said that line, I would have attributed it to him/her in the book. That would have been appropriate in that context. It’s different if a reporter thinks that it’s a phrase that’s been floating around for a while and attributes to a general purpose person.

So, thank you for the defense, and I’m sorry to have inadvertently led you to defend my honor when there is no honor to defend. At least in this case.

In short, if I were the referee, I’d say: “No foul. Fair play!”

One of the commenters tracks the phrase to a 1997 usenet post. There are a couple of other references as well.

Which just proves one of my other maxims: Nothing has ever been said just once. (By the way, there are no google hits on that phrase.)

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Newsweek’s Web site runs an interview with Rebecca MacKinnon about the complicity of US tech companies in China’s amazingly detailed suppression of the openness of the Net.

Rebecca also blogs about Newsweek’s sloppy characterization of her. As she notes, it’s not a big deal, except that the MSM keep telling us that they’re better than bloggers because they have fact checkers, they’re professionals, they get their facts right, etc. [Technorati tags: RebeccaMackinnon Newsweek China]

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Nat Torkington posted a short movie last week that combines bad language and adorable kids.

Yeah, it’s scandalous. A little. But I take it as teaching your kids that the power of these words is in the intention and use. In my family, if we’re talking about a curse word, I try to use the word without hesitation or embarrassment to make the same point: Kids can tell the difference between the “fuck” that’s the sound the possessor of a stubbed a toe makes and the “fuck” in a dinner-time conversation about words that haven’t evolved since they were invented. [Technorati tags: NatTorkington]

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Michael Geist writes about a couple of cases that demonstrate “the potential damage that can result from overbroad application of copyright laws.”

One of those cases affected the 14 people to whom a grocery store in British Columbia inadvertently sold copies of the new Harry Potter a few days before the book’s release date. The book owners obtained a court order preventing the owners from reading the book or talking about it.

It’s hard for my not-a-lawyer mind to understand how copyright can be used to justify a ban on talking about something, but I’m sure it all will be explained to me when I’m dead. And in hell. [Technorati tags: copyright MichaelGeist]

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The World Bank’s Information for Development program has a call for bids:

The consulting firm (hereby referred to as ‘consultants’) is expected to have expertise in development of management strategies, deployment of technology, and process services (including management consulting, design and project management) of municipal broadband networks, in developed and/or developing countries. Additionally, consultants with a proven record in the following areas will be considered: in-depth knowledge on public policy issues related to state/local/municipal governance; reputation and expertise in the above field amounting to 5 to 10 years of experience; high research capacity and ability to develop the Study and Toolkit.

You’d have 19 weeks to complete the task, at the end of which you’ll receive US$90,000 and one of Bono’s black t-shirts. (If you win, I of course get a 10% finders fee.) For more information, visit this pdf. [Technorati tags: wifi muniwif]

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As far as I can tell, our daughter Leah is right: There are no laws against jaywalking where we live.

I tried searching Massachusetts LawLib and couldn’t find any references to laws regulating pedestrians crossing streets, so I used the site’s “Ask a librarian” service, and within 12 hours got a terrific response that said,

Mass. General Laws chapter 90 section 18A, http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/90-18a.htm, gives cities and towns the right to regulation pedestrians. Some have chosen to do so.

She then cites Pittsfield and Fitchburg city ordinances. How about Boston and Brookline?

Brookline has bylaws prohibiting the riding of horses on sidewalks, and pages of laws specifying where newsracks can be placed, but I couldn’t find any that prevent pedestrians from pogo-sticking across the street in the middle of a block. Likewise, I couldn’t find any laws that use the word “pedestrian” in Boston’s city code except for a couple that regulate cars, not pedestrians. (Here’s a list of bylaws for Massachusetts cities.)

Now, IANAL (it stands for “I am not a lawyer,” not “I anal”). In fact, I don’t even know where you’d look for jaywalking laws. Maybe they’re legal guidelines, regulations, Papal bulls or ukases. Nevertheless, it looks to me that where we live there’s nothing to stop you from stepping out into the middle of Comm Ave during rush hour as a 70 ton trailer is headed towards you.

In fact, that’s pretty much how we nominate presidential candidates in this state. [Technorati tags: law jaywalking massachusetts boston brookline]

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