Good lord I’m tired of David Mamet.

Last night, we rented Edmond because I’d read that it was a taut, twisty, noir-ish thriller that didn’t suffer from the flaws of later Mamet. Or at least that’s what dripped into my brain pan from some reviews I read.

Wrong.

As usual, his characters speak in an unnatural rhythm, repeating endlessly. They are all little people struggling with the author’s big ideas, but the author thinks his characters are too little to be having ideas as big as his, so invents a form of speech uttered by no actual people ever. As the anti-hero, William H. Macy, moves through his existential (= inexplicable) crisis, we learn that nothing motivates him except the scriptwriter’s desire to be deep. As for the acting, it was hard to tell if it sucked because of the direction or because the script is impossible to speak convincingly. It was painful to watch good actors (and Denise Richards) stuck with those words to say.

Glengarry Glen Ross was the one good movie for which Mamet was the sole script writer, and, while there’s more to like in it than in the rest of his catalog—the plot has a surprise, sort of—it too has a condescending view of Ordinary Folks that thinks they need to be elevated into capital letters by speaking in an unnatural patois. Glengarry Glen Ross has one great role in it (the boss, played by Alec Baldwin in the movie) and a whole bunch of great actors struggling to escape the didactic machine.

Not that Mamet does mechanisms well. House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner are both complex, box-within-a-box, hoax-and-fraud movies that get your head spinning until you think there is no possible way Mamet is going to be able to resolve all the pieces, and then everyone gets run over by a truck. Feh.

The movie scripts that he’s done that are not Mamety are surprisingly conventional and not very interesting: The Postman Always Rings Twice, We’re No Angels, The Untouchables, The Verdict, Hoffa, Ronin, Hannibal. Vanya on 42nd Street I actually liked, but was cowritten with Andre Gregory. But now it’s time for me to learn my lesson: If David Mamet is the only writer and it is reviewed as a David Mamet film, I’m not going. Unless I hear it’s really good. Because I am a fool.

By the way, as William H. Macy entered the screen in Edmond, I said out loud that I’ve seen Macy’s butt in more movies than I’ve seen the butt of any other actor or actress. “Please,” I said, “let this movie be free of Macy-butt.” But even that prayer went unanswered.

(Note: It is possible that your opinion is different than mine.) [Tags: david_mamet movies reviews edmond]

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…it’s also Christmastime for the Jews. [Tags: christmas robert_smigel video humor]

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I’m listening to Love, the Beatles mashup by George Martin and his son.

Yes, it’s part stunt. The Beatles left such a rich selection of song styles and pieces that you can create a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” without a dominant guitar. But the CD is also an act of love that makes that song—which I always found slightly embarrassingly George-ish—more lovely than the original. The Martins often reveal an essence of melody, harmony, voice, meaning or mood. (Keep in mind that I am a sentimental Beatles fool. They were our music in a way that my children have yet to find for themselves.)

The first track is a version of “Because” rendered less sentimental by highlighting the beautiful vocal work. The second track, “Get Back,” is fun. But the third track, “Glass Onion” overwhelmed me. It pulls together many pieces, most recognizable if not actually familiar. Each of the parts is so resonant that it sank me into the feelings those songs had engendered. No, not feelings. Meanings. What the songs meant to me.

This is the part of what I’ve been calling the “miscellaneous” that that word doesn’t capture. Categorization puts like next to like. The miscellaneous category consists of that which does not share likenesses beyond their shared domain—the kitchen’s miscellaneous drawer contains implements that have nothing in common beyond the fact that they all belong in a kitchen. But the digital miscellany we’re building for ourselves is an over-abundance of likenesses, across every domain. The likenesses are drawn by every link we create, each made of intention and meaning. In some ways, it is the opposite of the miscellany. It is the surfeit of connection, a potential unlike anything we’ve had before short of language itself. [Tags: beatles taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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That’s the headline of an enthusiastic report by Shivan Vij on the Global Voices confab in Delhi. Worth reading… [Tags: gv global_voices shivan_vij media blogging blogosphere total_world_domination ]

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I know it makes me a small person to say this, but I’m surprised to find myself not only enjoying but agreeing with a book that comes out of the Cato Institute. Jim Harper’s Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood makes a confusing topic—identity on and off the Net—understandable, and argues persuasively that our rush to enforce strict identity rules not only eats at our freedom, it doesn’t make us appreciably safer. Of course, I was inclined in that direction anyway, since I continue to think I believe that anonymity is and ought to remain the default. (Yes, the “think I believe” indicates some doubt.)

Jim’s book is nicely written, clear in its explanation and clear in its point of view. [Tags: identity jim_harper cato anonymity ]

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With yesterday’s arrest of director Gus Van Sant for driving while under the influence, Olympia Dukakis becomes the last Hollywood personage not to be charged with the crime. The Academy Award winner’s spokesperson last night said that Dukakis has no intention of getting arrested for drunk driving because she has “always been a non-conformist.” Dukakis is also rumored to have a peptic ulcer that prevents her from drinking heavily. “She just doesn’t want to support the neighborhood,” sniped Mel Gibson, whose DUI arrests have had him contribute more than 35,000 hours of community service. “Ever since the Academy Award—for Moonfrickingstruck, for Christ’s sake—she’s suddenly too big to pick up trash alongside the highway.”

Dukakis last appeared in a supporting role in The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines, a made-for-tv movie, directed by Star Trek’s Jonathan Frakes, who was arrested for DUI in 1997, 1999, 2000, twice in 2002, and—in a bid to salvage his career—continuously since 2004. [Tags: satire dui hollywood]

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I’m sure I’ll get past the level I’m on in Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter (PC). If I put in enough time, I will not only rescue the VIP, but I’ll hold off those bad, bad terrorists or whatever they are until the chopper comes to pick up me and my brave boys. But, you know what? I’m tired of replaying this same segment of the level. Run across the square. Position my squad. Shoot the two baddies who approach from the side. Then pick off the ones on the right. Wait for the armored vehicle. Wait for the tank and the radio instruction that I can call in an air strike. Carry the VIP to the chopper. Wait for the next wave. Shoot the guys behind the monument. Wait to be suddenly felled by a bullet or shell from somewhere. Reload from the previous save point. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Let me try explaining this to the game designers. You see, fellas (and I’m guessing you’re mainly guys), I know you think this particular segment is fun. You probably used phrases like “It kicks ass” and “This is so fricking cool!” But some of us are 56 years old and happen not to enjoy getting 90% through the segment only to have to start again. Oh, sure, if I play it another ten times, I’ll figure out where the fatal shot is coming from. But now I dread playing your game because I know I’ll have to go through the same fricking cool segment again. Your game has become a chore.

But you’re convinced I’m having a good time, because not only are we all as good at the game as you are, we all enjoy it for exactly the same reasons.

Stop being dicks. Let us save the game wherever we want, and let us know the codes so we can get past the parts of your game we’re not enjoying.
Thank you. [Tags: games cheats ghost_recon]

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Rebecca MacKinnon has posted the fascinating results of her survey of foreign correspondents who cover China, asking how blogs affect their coverage of China. 90% follow blogs. Most find blogs more useful than CNN and BBC when it comes to writing their stories. And generally they refuse to generalize about whether blogs are more or less reliable than official PRC media. [Tags: china blogs rebecca_mackinnon berkman]

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Public Library of Science has gone beta with PLos ONE, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes everything that passes the review, not just what it considers to be important. So, if it’s good science about a nit, it’ll find a home at PLoS ONE.

And at that home, readers can discuss and annotate the articles. They can also read them and reuse for free since they’re all published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. It does, however, cost a scientist (or her institution) $1,250 to be published by PLoS ONE. This is, alas, an improvement over what traditional journals charge scientists. PLoS ONE will waive the fee for authors who don’t have the funds.

Fees aside, if you were designing a society, wouldn’t you want scientific research to be handled this way? If it’s good science, make it available! (And if it’s not clear if it’s good science, make it available anyway, but that’s not PLoS ONE’s niche in the knowledge economy.)

(Note on the beta: The site could use tagging. And more feeds.) [Tags: plos plos_one open_science science everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

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Every day in December, Dabble announces a theme and asks users to create playlists of videos that best exemplify it. Dabble users vote on them. At the end, there will be a winner of all winners who will get $500. Today’s theme is “Useless Blonde Celebrities,” although I assume videos about useless blond celebrities are also acceptable.

Some themes I’d like to see added to the contest:

Other uses of Mentos

Ways to squander a college education

The fun is in the background
Proof that there is or is not a God

Great unintentional air guitar performances

Worst. New dance steps. Ever.
No, it’s not pornography, you sick bastard [Tags: dabble video contest]

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Quinn Norton has a good overview of Global Voices, including its recent Delhi confab, at Wired.com. [Tags: global_voices ]

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After several years of trouble-free use, my Vonage modem stopped working a couple of days ago. The green light wouldn’t stop blinking. After searching the Net for answers, I finally screwed up my courage and called Vonage phone support, about which I had heard horror stories. Well, this isn’t one of them. They answered quickly and put me in touch with the right person within a minute. The support person walked me through the steps—a little too slowly—and now I know how to reset my Vonage Motorola VT1005V modem. Let me save you the phone call:

Connect your PC to the Vonage modem by plugging a cable into your PC’s ethernet port and plugging the other end into the PC port on the modem.

Browse to http://192.168.102.1/admin.html. This will bring up the Motorola admin screen. Click the “restore factory defaults” button. Just to be sure, then click the “reboot” button.

Now unplug the power to the modem and wait ten seconds. Plug it back in. The modem’s green power light will blink for a minute or two. Once it’s on steady, you should be back in business. (If not, check to make sure you have a telephone plugged into the modem. In fact, that’s the first thing you should have done.) [Tags: vonage reboot reset factory_defaults]

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MsDewey entertains as it searches. The fetching young woman who talks to you—commenting on your search query or trying to entice you into searching—has a fetching, simpering quality just short of flirtatious. She reacts appropriately to a surprisingly wide set of terms – it’s like an application that’s all Easter eggs. Because the actress is, well, hot it should be a big hit with the adolescent boys. But how many times do I want to hear her patter before I’ll go elsewhere for faster results presented more conveniently, … a site that doesn’t actually rap on my screen if I haven’t searched for thirty seconds?

The Digg comment stream has a list of terms that Ms. Dewey reacts to in entertaining ways. (Yeah, it was posted at Digg two months ago. So, I’m not keeping up. Thanks to Bill K for the link.) [Tags: search marketing msdewey google microsoft]

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Polar Rose is doing what it can to identify people in photos on the Web. Unlike the previous generation of face recognition software, it turns a photo’s 2D array of dots into what it hopes is an accurate 3D rendering of the face depicted. This gets past the problem of not recognizing yor Aunt Sally’s profile because it only knows what she looks from the front, and maybe of confusing your Aunt Sally with Adolph Hitler because the sun is above her, casting a shadow across her upper lip.

Polar Rose —currently in beta—is going to be available as a browser plug in and it’s opening up its API’s, trying to to increase the Web’s IQ when it comes to the stuff that doesn’t form into letters. And because Nikolaj Nyholm is involved, I’m confident that they’ll get the privacy and ethical issues right. [Tags: polar_rose face_recognition photos nikolaj_nyholm everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

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Shouldn’t someone tell them that this logo reads “Herpes of Annihilated Empires”? [Tags: games]

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Washington DC — FCC Chair Kevin Martin has announced that in addition to auctioning off rights to spectrum—ranges of radio wave frequencies, also known as “colors”—the FCC will in January begin auctioning off the eleven dimensions discovered by string theorists. Winners will have exclusive rights to all property and activity in those dimensions.

The dimensions include:

Bidding begins January 2. [Tags: fcc spectrum telecommunications humor ]

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I got a call from a robot today, asking me to call an 800 number about something to do with my Citi credit card. The robot didn’t identify me by name, but it did say that it wasn’t a sales call. So, I called the 800 number (800 200 8054 in case you care). The person who answered asked me for my name and credit card number, which I refused to give them. Why should I hand that out to a stranger, even if the stranger claims to be with Citi and has a lovely speaking voice? So I spoke with a manager who assured me that it was ok to give him the information. “It’s a common business practice,” he told me.

He also said me that the call was legit because there’s a telephone number on the back of my card.

“Is it this number?” I asked.

“No, but you can call it, if you want.”

So I did. They had no notices on any of my accounts, except for a tickler to sell me identity theft insurance.

So, was it all a crafty attempt to either sell me ID insurance or to motivate me to buy ID insurance??? [Tags: citi scams identity_theft]

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Jerome Armstrong was a senior staffer at Mark Warner’s almost-campaign for president. (And a shout-out to Nancy Scola, Nate Wilcox, and the rest of the group.) Warner was doing interesting things with the Net and was on the verge of possibly taking some strong positions extending broadband and protecting the Net architecture. But, alas, Warner decided not to run.

There’s an excellent interview with Jerome over at Personal Democracy Forum… [Tags: politics netroots jerome_armstrong mark_warner democracy ]

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Oy. Glenn Fleishman has tagged me in a game of blog tag. The rules say that I now have to post five things most people don’t know about me. I then get to tag five other bloggers.

Five things:

1. I hate fish so much that even before I was a vegetarian, I’d sometimes lie that I have an allergy to them. (I like feeding fish, however.) I will leave the table (without making a fuss) if seated across from someone reverse engineering a lobster or crab.

2. I am afflicted with a malady that requires me to tap along to any beat, including directional signals.

3. I’ve played almost every first person shooter there is. My player name is “Target,” which gives you an idea how good I am.

4. I am a closet hobbyist programmer. But because I have difficulty with indirect relationships such as pointers, I couldn’t get from C to C++. To my great embarrassment, I currently program mainly in Visual Basic.

5. I was on the student-faculty committee at Bucknell U. that came up with the idea of letting students design their own major, and I was in the first graduating class that could take advantage of this opportunity. And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains why I graduated Bucknell as a Meaning major.

I tag Euan Semple, Denise Howell, Chris “RageBoy” Locke, Jeneane Sessum and Susan Crawford… [Tags: blogtag]

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Gosh! I’m so excited. I know everyone says this, but I really wasn’t expecting to win. There are so many great, great other nominees. It’s really just a privilege to be nominated with them.

But, gosh, I won. I won!!!! I wish I’d listened to mom and prepared something better. Hi, Mom. I love you!

An award like this really shouldn’t go to one person. Everyone involved in the project deserves the credit. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. Really. Every one of you. I’m so worried I’ll leave someone out, but, well, I’d like to thank Baija Aa, Banta Aa, Baroni Aa, Basilia Aa… [Tags: time person_of_the_year humor]

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Slayage.tv, the Buffy scholarship site, is closed. Ack! There were tons of articles there. Perhaps the owners of it would like to move it to Wikia’s OpenServing program where, if accepted, it’ll be hosted for free? If you happen to know the Slayage folks, could you let them know about OpenServing? [Tags: buffy slayage openserving wikia ]

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Paul Graham, the massively talented essayist, has published a piece that further explains the ideas in his “Taste for Makers” article. The new piece is called “How Art Can Be Good” and it is, of course, excellent.

I’m proud to say that he was stimulated to do this in small part by my interview of him (video) at the Berkman Center. I’d like to think I annoyed him just enough to push him over the edge to write the new essay :)

A couple of days after our conversation, I wrote up a response to “Taste for Makers.” But it slipped between my cracks–I have become all cracks, no flooring–so I never posted it. I’m posting it here, even though it’s now obviated by Paul’s new essay, “How Art Can Be Good.” But I did the work, and I want to get it “on the record” so to speak. I’ll come back to “How Art Can Be Good” soon…

Paul Graham was motivated to write his essay, Taste for Makers by his father saying that something was just a matter of taste, as if there were nothing more to be said on the topic. Taste is not subjective, Paul argues. In his essay, he gives a dozen principles for designing beautiful things, principles that he urges are eternal and even—in my interview with him last week (video here)—trans-planetary: The proverbial space alien would respond to at least some of these principles. (Question I should have asked him: A space alien might, but do dogs? Dolphins?)

I agree that taste is not merely subjective, and Paul’s principles taken together and apart seem like helpful advice. (I am not a “maker” in Paul’s sense so I don’t have standing on such questions.) The case for taste needs to be made now more than ever, and Paul makes it with his usual casual elegance (which, we learned in the session I had with him last week, was the effort of non-casual labor). But I disagree with how he makes the case and the picture of art that flows from it.

The case for taste needs to be made because the alternative is ignorance, arrogance, and despair. “I don’t like Bach,” uttered by someone who has only heard one piece, forced on her by her seventh grade music teacher, betrays a type of aesthetic fundamentalism that thinks works can be experienced directly. You just sit down and listen. If you don’t like it, that’s the end of the story. In fact, the seventh grader doesn’t know how to listen to Bach. Further, as Paul points out, if left unchallenged, she’s implicitly told that she is a competent judge and that therefore beauty goes no further than the surfaces she experiences. Ignorance, arrogance, despair.

But, the way past this does not require affirming principles that, because they are eternal (or at least long-lasting) and trans-species, have the properties we expect of the objective.

Paul defines taste as the ability to recognize beauty. It is not “merely a matter of personal preference.” To be clear, I think we ought to differentiate taste from mere taste. Of those two, mere taste is far less problematic: Something is merely a matter of taste if it is simply a personal preference. I like chocolate ice cream and hate mint. You hate chocolate and like mint. If there’s nothing else to be said, it’s merely a matter of taste.

Taste is harder to understand, in part because in recent years it’s taken on an elitist cast, so there are cultural politics involved in its use. Think about when and on what occasions you might say, “She’s a woman of taste,” or “She’s got good taste.” Frequently, that’s a way of saying that a person likes expensive things. If talking about curators of major museums, the term “taste” may actually mean “mere taste”: If I say I like the taste of the curator of the MOMA, I’m probably not acusing the curator of the Met of being unable to recognize beauty; I’m probably saying that I happen, subjectively, to prefer the choices hanging at the MOMA.

So, “taste” is a tough word. Paul’s definition—the ability to recognize beauty—has the advantage of acknowledging that beauty is not a matter of mere subjective preference. But Paul’s definition may imply too simple a relationship between beauty and experience. Beauty and our recognition of it is conditioned by elements that Paul ascribes to mere fashion. (Fashion is, in Paul’s understanding, a trend in what I’m calling mere taste. Mullets are a matter of fashion.)

The problem with tying the non-subjectivity of taste to beauty is that beauty does not consist of a set of properties that can be specified, agreed upon and applied. Paul’s design principles say that beauty is simple, eternal, symmetrical, resembles nature, is hard but looks easy, is often slightly funny, is often strange, is often daring, etc. Of course Paul isn’t saying that these are either necessary or sufficient. But, any design principles cannot do more than capture the current taste in beauty. For example, I think Paul’s “Good design is simple” resolves into the tautology that “Bits that are extraneous are extraneous.” But which ones are extraneous? Even as an exhortation to prefer fewer bits to more bits (or, as Paul brilliantly explained it in our discussion, to prefer designs that compress better), it fails to capture periods in which, say, paintings tried to express the excessiveness of G-d’s gift or plays that revelled in language that no real character would ever have uttered.

Design principles can only capture current taste because beauty is not (despite Paul’s second principle) eternal. Sure, we can go back and point to paintings from hundreds of years ago that are still beautiful, and find the design principles that differentiate them from the ones that “fail the test of time.” But taste is built into this proof: Paul points to a Bronzino as a painting that still works and a van Eyck as one that does not (among examples I chose), explaining that the van Eyck is needlessly complex while the Bronzino has a simplicity beneath its surface. But, this can’t be evidence that simplicity is an eternal property of beauty because the selection of which old paintings are still beautiful is itself at issue. It’d be like me proving that sourness is an eternal property of beauty in the culinary arts by including pickles and lemon meringue pie and excluding leek soup and quiche from the list of beautiful cooked works.

It’d be different if there were agreement across ages and cultures about what goes on the list of The Beautiful. But taste—genuine taste—has fashions. The length of the fashion wave seems to lengthen at about the hundred year mark, lending credence to Paul’s view, but there are waves of taste nevertheless. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies have come into and out of fashion, and not just among the play-going public. Vermeer seems more prominent than fifty years ago. We find more beauty in Bronzino than van Eyck because that’s how our tastes run these days. We like the simple over the florid.

But I most definitely am not saying that it’s a matter of mere taste. Paul can tell us why he prefers Bronzino. He can bring us to see what’s there. Some of it is a fundamentalist reading of the painting: Notice that the background is extremely simple. Notice that the pattern on the dress would compress well. But some of what he says explains what isn’t on the surface of the painting: It was a court portrait, for which there were certain rules. By understanding the historic context, we see the beauty that’s there.

This is exactly what the best critics do. Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes, for example, tells us about the historical and political climate in which Rembrandt painted The Night Watch. Someone who sees that painting free of that context and who pronounces it “boring,” is not seeing what’s there—or, more exactly, isn’t seeing what isn’t there.

But, that such criticism works is empirical evidence that eternality is not a design principle. Beauty is situated in one’s time and place because it is a way of seeing, and seeing is never fundamentalist. This has a few consequences.

First, it means that we can’t engage in the project of gathering up the beautiful and seeing what it has in common to find its eternal properties because recognizing beauty is itself a situated act. We don’t see The Night Watch the way the Dutch at the time did, just as we can’t see western Medieval art the way the people of the time did. Through education and imagination we can get closer or further from that experience, but if you’re a 21st century atheist brought up in a surfeit of images, you are miles away from the experience of a 15th century person seeing a picture of Heaven opening up or of St. Sebastian being pierced with arrows. Include those works in the canon, and simplicity will not show up as a virtue, but sanctity will.

Second, Paul thinks that fashion is the residue after the eternal, trans-species properties of beauty are subtracted. But in dropping out what’s context-dependent, much of the experience of beauty is lost. In fact, we can’t even understand what we’re looking at. The more we understand about the particulars of the time, place and person, the closer we get to seeing what’s there. Now, I think that Paul would say that a 15th century person viewing Piero del Pollaiulo’s painting of St. Sebastian might be distracted by the context-specific elements of the painting, whereas its beauty (if this is a beautiful painting, and I’m really not sure about that, but I do know that a photo of it is available on the Web, which is why I chose it) is what survived its context and is visible to moderns and to space aliens. I don’t know how to respond to that except by saying no. For me, a painting is not only an arrangement of color and form. Often, a picture depicts something. Its content is part of its beauty. But its content is dependent on time, culture, belief, language, history…It helps to know that that particular Bronzino painting was a court portrait, that the garden behind Mary in the van Eyck is planted with “lilies and roses symbolizing Mary’s virtues,” and that the guy pierced with arrows was a saint thought to be capable of interceding during plagues.

And this is why taste is not merely subjective. It’s not because beauty is objective, to be seen or missed. Nor does beauty devolve into a set of properties, since the properties themselves require us to make aesthetic judgments: Which bits are extraneous? When does symmetry become formula? Rather, taste is a defensible recognition of beauty. If all you can say is “I don’t like Bach because he sucks,” your taste is mere taste. As you learn more about what to listen for—what’s in the work and what isn’t in the work—the better your taste is and the more beauty you’ll find.

This leaves some huge questions. Suppose tasteful people disagree? I like Mozart’s string quartets more than I like his symphonies, and I like his symphonies more than I like Schumann’s Lieder. I may understand all three equally. (I don’t, but I get to make up my examples.) I may even be able to point out to others what’s beautiful about the Lieder while changing the station when they come on the radio. The difference is a subjective element in taste. To say that taste is subjective in this way, however, doesn’t mean that it’s nothing but subjective. Taste is a response to an object. Paul is right, imo, to point to that object and to remind us that taste is not merely subjective.

The object, however, is complex because it is a human creation, and thus has meaning within a particular context and situation. The same painting isn’t the same throughout time. It’s not just that during the 1960s, we rediscovered Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of Hell because they looked so “trippy.” Rather, the 15th century painting of St. Sebastian simply cannot look the same in an age of devotion as it does in an age when religion seems at best quaint. It may be beautiful now and then. It may even be beautiful continuously throughout history. But it is not the same painting and it isn’t the same beauty. Things don’t have beauty the way some nuggets have gold flecks in them and others don’t.

But, that doesn’t mean that taste merely subjectively picks out what’s beautiful, and that motel wall art is as beautiful as a Rembrandt. Rather, taste enables us to see the beauty that’s there, ideally in ways we can articulate and discuss. It may not be convincing the way a test for gold flecks is, but it is defensible. What we need to learn to see frequently is precisely the particulars that time has obscured. Taste, as the discussion of the beauty that’s there, thus is always unearthing more beauty.

Taste doesn’t just respond to beauty. It makes beauty.

[Tags: art aesthetics beauty paul_graham philosophy]

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Discover magazine runs two letters this month that bring up two more problems with the International Astronomical Union’s criteria for planets. Jerry Svoboda points out that because Neptune’s orbit is crossed by Pluto, Neptune fails to “clear its zone,” thus failing one criterion for planethood. Brett Bochner argues (in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way) that Jupiter is 300 times larger than the Earth and is made almost entirely of gas, and thus shouldn’t be lumped with the Earth.

Fortunately, I have the solution.

Everyone knows the IAU’s tortured criteria were designed to give us back as many of the nine planets as possible. Even so, the IAU failed. At best we got eight planets and one dwarf. So, let’s skip all the weird distinctions and just declare the Solar System a constellation. After all, no one says that some other star really “deserves” to be part of Ursa Major even if it means the bear now becomes a unicorn. Nope, a constellation is what we say it is, and the same is now true for the nine planets of the Solar System.

Welcome back, Pluto!

[Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous IAU planets pluto solar_system astronomy taxonomy]

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Zack Exley has posted Part 2 of his call for revolution. It’s a transition piece, leading us to a post in which he may suggest some of the changes he’s asking us to start thinking about. But it tells a terrific story that involves a white teenager in dreadlocks, an Ethiopian cab driver, and Larry Summers being a swaggering dickhead.

Zack is right. We’re not thinking big enough. We should be thinking as big as the possibilities we’ve created for ourselves. Reality is for wimps. Possibilities come first. And we’re not living up to the possibilities we’ve created for ourselves. [Tags: zack_exley politics]

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The Global Voices folks are meeting in Delhi, and there’s a whole lot of blogging going on. There’s live blogging at the conference blog. Rebecca’s put a slideshow up at GV. Theres IRFC at irc.freenode.net #globalvoices. There’s a live audio stream. You can search for the tag gvdelhi2006 to find all the other blogs, photos, streams, and biometric monitoring… [Tags: gvdelhi2006 globalVoices berkman]

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