New JOHO

Doc reminds me that I published a new issue of my newsletter this morning. Yeah, I remember now! In it you'll find some previously blogged stuff PLUS reader mail and link contributions. And a Bogus Contest. In fact, here are the contents:

Kevlar's Good but Dupont Sucks(tm)

From http://dpsftp.sourceforge.net/about.html:

DPS-FTP is a multi-threaded FTP client for GNOME. It was originally called Kevlar FTP, since its interface was inspired by Bulletproof FTP, and Kevlar is bullet-proof. But DuPont actually sent me a notice telling me that I can't use their trademarked product names in my product name. They were generous enough to allow me to say that my product contains Kevlar, however. After explaining to them that, being software, my "product" does not contain Kevlar, and that I'm not making any money from the "product", they still would not let me use it. So, I renamed the program to DuPont Sucks FTP, or DPS-FTP.

50 Fond Farewells

Gary Stock writes:

Half of these I just don't get.

Half of the remainder are not funny.

Half of the remainder are sort of funny.

Half of the remainder are really funny.

The remaining half-dozen are very, very funny.

"50 things we'll be glad to see the back of in 2002"

Rowling Weds!

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, today married anesthesiologist Neil Murray. The private Rowling issued no photos, but the happy couple were caught on film several months ago:

Immediately after this picture was taken, however, a gust of wind blew back the good doctor's hair:

For purposes of creepy comparison:

Kuhn's Paradigm

Chris RageBoy Locke has sent an email to a few of us pointing out an excellent article in the NY Times by Edward Rothstein about recent books about Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and the guy who - damn his eyes! - introduced the phrase "paradigm shift." The article talks about Steve Fuller, a sociologist who has written a philosophical biography (which I have not read).

The Times article summarizes Fuller's position:

Mr. Fuller, in fact, suggests that Kuhn, despite his reputation, had too much allegiance to the old concepts of science. Kuhn, says Mr. Fuller, retained the "elitist myth" about "visionary geniuses" who changed the world by shifting paradigms. The notion of a coterie of specialists coming to agreement, Mr. Fuller says, supports the idea of an authoritarian, antidemocratic establishment.

...Unlike the object of his criticism, Mr. Fuller doesn't offer many scientific examples but he does follow some of Kuhn's precepts in mounting his attack. Like Kuhn, he treats scientific inquiry as a matter of sociological confrontation rather than a progress toward truth; he just thinks the confrontations should be taken out of the hands of specialists. Science, he says, should become a democratic clamor of competing ideas.

Fuller's attack (or the Times' representation of that attack) seems off base. Kuhn was an historian of science. He found a paradigmatic movement in that history. The fact is that Newton, for example, smashed the old paradigm through an intellectual breakthrough so radical that it can only be called an act of visionary genius. (I just finished Newton's Gift by David Berlinski, an oddly ornate but quite effective effort to explain the magnitude of Newton's genius to those like me whose math is 400 years behind the times.) Within the bounds of the new paradigm, science becomes a more-or-less democratic clamor of competing ideas. The fact that science operates within - conforms to - a paradigm discovered by a (usually) dead white man may make us uncomfortable politically, but I think Kuhn's description (notice, not "prescription") is brilliant and can only be refuted by an hypothesis that accounts for the facts of the history of science as well as his does. (The Times points out that Fuller's critique is not redolent of historical facts.)

Now, having said that, Fuller is certainly right that science is becoming democratized and messy, no little thanks to the Web. What started as a way for scientists to exchange information is sapping the power from the scientific authorities, for the old guard worked by limiting access to information - could your article make it into Science or JAMA? - and now, of course, we not only have unlimited access to information, but that access is causing new scientific communities to form the way rocks cause eddies in streams.

But does this mean Kuhn is wrong? Not in the essence of his insight. Paradigms are second-order information. They frame the eddies. They determine which questions are sensible to ask and which issues are urgent. They enable science to proceed with its daily tasks. They require, by definition, an act of genius to be born. But perhaps we have entered a time when multiple paradigms can exist.

The Web is ready for this but the real world isn't ... and the funding comes from the real world.

[Note 1: This doesn't touch on the truly sensitive topic: can one paradigm be said to be closer to the truth than another or are all paradigms equal? Don't even get me started!]

Killing the Too-Clever Clipboard

If you want to get rid of the annoying clipboard in MS Office that pops up when you all you want to do is a two-finger copy and paste, you "just" need to edit a line in your registry. Microsoft has directions here. (If you're using Office XP, it seems likely that you can replace the 9 with a 10 when you're browsing the registry.) Obviously, editing your registry is a dangerous undertaking, you should make a backup, don't come whining to me, etc. etc. etc. [I found this tip in the Lockergnome discussion forum. Thanks!]

E-Friends Redux

Gary Turner has a new suggestion for what we call people that we are friends with through email. Rather than "e-pals," as suggested by Bethann, Gary would have us use:

equaintances

A Christmas for Everyone

Christmas is too cool a holiday to confine it to Christians. We ought to reformulate it as a secular two-day holiday, Dec. 24-25. On the 24th, we'd all decorate our homes with lights, reflect on peace, get together with the family, exchange presents, drink eggnog, kiss strangers under mistletoe, etc., just because those are fun things to do near the Solstice. It'd have nothing to do with Jesus, mangers or myrhhhhh. Then, on the 25th, the Christians could celebrate Christ's birth by going to church, praying, and engaging in activities more spiritual than whining about misfired gifts before heading out to an afternoon movie. The rest of us would have a second day off.

So, I guess my new party platform is: "Let's get the Christ out of Christmas." In fact, let's call the new two day federal holiday "Mas." Got the Spanish connection and everything.

George Lyon responds:

.. I urge you to take heart as I did from a recent (yesterday or the day before I think) feature on Marketplace (the NPR business show). It casually stated that many more Japanese celebrate Christmas than are Christian and moved on to the main point which is that many more Japanese than should (my spin) eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas because they believe that is what Americans do...

Helpful Forums

A World without Gray: Why Customer Support Sucks

I called RCN a year ago shortly after they installed my brand new cable modem account. "Look," I said to the customer service rep, "I know your support stops where your wire stops, but I just spent 5 hours trying to get my Linksys-based home network running again and I'm wondering if you can tell me if it can be done."

"Sure," said the rep, cheerily. "I have one at home."

"Great! Is there some trick to getting it to work?"

"Um, yes, but I can't talk with you about it."

"But there's some one thing I have to do?"

"Yup."

"Can't you just blurt it out?"

"These calls may be monitored."

"Ok, I understand that, and, for the record, you've been great and have followed the guidelines. Is there a Web page that talks about how to do it?"

"Not that I know of."

"Can you email me the trick?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to help you with this."

Obviously, this rep was going out on a limb just by saying that RCN cable can be home-networked via Linksys. It was RCN, Inc.'s fault that the call went wrong. Their message that "This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes" should say "We may listen in to make sure our reps aren't using their own judgment. Remember, here at RCN Customer Support, customer support comes second and protecting ourselves comes first."

The problem isn't just that companies are afraid of the legal implications of going beyond the smallest range of responses. It's that the legal system has scared the gray out of the system. Had the rep said, "Look, we don't officially support home networking and there's nothing in the RCN playbook about this, but I have one at home, and here's something you might try..." I would have understood � from the words and their context � that this wasn't an officially sanctioned RCN procedure for which I could hold them responsible. Our language accommodates conditionals and qualifiers. Our legal system doesn't.

Even better, I wish RCN had set up a customer-to-customer support board. I'd be happy to share the PPPoE tip. And I bet the support guy would have already logged on from home with step-by-step instructions on how to get a home network going.

Two followups:

1. After another day of trying, I randomly discovered that you have to unclick the PPPoE box on the Linksys prefs page.

Cho Cho Cho, Merry Christmas!

Binyamin Jolkovsky, editor of the Jewish World Review, is passing around an article by Michelle Malkin that says that Ron Sims, county executive in Seattle, deserved the pummeling he took for suggesting that public employees avoid the phrase "Merry Christmas" or any other greeting specific to a particular faith. Malkin says that Sims was wrong to try to exclude religion from the public sphere.

Humbug! It's not a big deal - not big enough to get all snippy and self-righteous when someone wishes you a cheery "Merry Christmas!" - but it is rude and thoughtless to assume that everyone is of your faith. It's more troublesome if the person is representing our government. Sims was, in my opinion, 100% correct.

No, it's really not a big deal. It's worth a memo or an email reminder, but not worth a reprimand. Personally, if I'm feeling feisty, I respond with a festive "And a happy Chanukah to you!"

The Red Pill

Gary Stock points us to an academic article by Nick Bostrom of Yale's Dept. of Philosophy, the title of which poses a question with relative succinctness: "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" Dr. Nick summarizes:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a �posthuman� stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

If I understand this - and there's no reason to think that I do given that my eyes glazed over rather early on - the professor is saying that if our descendents managed to evolve into something post-human and care enough about the past to build a simulation of it, then, yes, we probably are living in a simulation.

Developers x 3

Vergil Iliescu points us to an MP3 (found by his 13-year-old son) that sets to music the footage of Steve Ballmer chanting "Developers developers developers." You can download the footage at tdcrc.com There's also a music video that failed to play on my machine.

Blogful Statistics

A few people have written in with suggestions for where I might find the statistics I've been looking for.

Meg Hourihan writes:

I don't know if there is any one place that has the kind of blogging stats you're looking for, but I'd like to see them too. When we were raising funding at Pyra (spring '00) we crunched some numbers and came up with one interesting stat: Blogger users averaged 2.5 updates *a day* their pages. That was total users, we didn't do any filter to remove inactive users when we got that number, so I imagine a more realistic number might be higher.

Michel Benevento suggests we take a look at some Yaysoft stats:

you'll see that you can view a couple of thousand different blogs by latest entry, total entries, average entry per day of, and so on. It uses data from weblogs.com.

The Silence of the Wolves

Gary Stock points us to Poynter.org where we can read this memo:

Panama City (FL) News Herald chief copy editor Ray Glenn's memo re war coverage

Oct. 31, 2001

"...Per Hal's order, DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. [Note: "Hal" is News Herald executive editor Hal Foster.] Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like.

Also per Hal's order, DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the U.S. hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children. See me if there are any special situations..."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how it happens.

Windows, Sharp and TinkyWinky

Bill Seitz looks at the similarity of the default backgrounds of the Sharp Actius laptop and Windows XP and asks:

I think the scarier question is why both of them look so much like the "set" of the Teletubbies

Request for Scenes

A web acquaintance (we really need a word for this relationship!) has asked me to send around a notice for a project he's working on. Sounds like an appropriate bloggino. So, here goes:

...Professor Arthur B. Shostak at Drexel University, is completing a book that would really benefit from your input. It will discuss the impact of memorable scenes from movies on our lives. Thus far nearly 500 people in over 12 countries have participated.

What scene from a movie (or several such scenes from different movies) do you regard as really consequential in your life? A scene(s) that you cite when you want to make an important point. A scene(s) that altered your view of things. Or taught you something you value deeply. Or scared you forever. Or that you treasure for its humane quality. Its deep-reaching humor. Or its unique perspective. Please share your scene(s) - in your own words, at ANY length (the longer the better).

1) Title of the film:
2) What year did you see the film?
3) How old were you?

4) What was/were the impact(s) of the scene? Why?

5) And, what are your thoughts/feelings now about it?

Finally, Professor Shostak would appreciate some bio data:
1) Age
2) Gender
3) Race/Ethnicity
4) Religion
5) Last year of schooling completed (or highest degree earned)
6)Occupation
7) How would you characterize your movie-going?: VERY causal ? Casual? Serious (read and are guided by movie reviews)?
8) About how many movies do you see in a month? (on TV, home rentals, and movie theater combined)

Please e-mail this form to [email protected]

Spam, SPAM, Windows, and the Uses of English

Let's see. I post a glowing bloggino (a small blog entry) about some software brewing over at SpamSubtract. Doc clicks on the link and his Linux-loving heart goes cold when he he reads the first sentence of their survey: "What kind of connection does your Windows PC have to the Internet?" So, the lead guy there (hey, lead guy, am I allowed to use your name?) writes to Doc, makes the Windows-only-ness of it more explicit and less assumed, and posts a brief, frank and unsurprising explanation. I like the explanation if only because it's written by a real person in real language without bullshit. So, I check back at the SpamSubtract homepage to see how it's been modified and notice some unrelated language in tiny print at the bottom of the page:

"We are not associated with "SPAM" �; we've never eaten their fine luncheon meats and we certainly don't want to suggest that you need to subtract them. We think they are cool guys, or, at least their lawyers seem reasonably cool, well, at least as far as lawyers go."

So, I follow the link to the SPAM company's statement about the use of the word "spam" in the email sense. And it's more than "reasonably cool." It's very cool. Not only are they not assholes about asserting their sole right to those four letters, they actually talk to us like human beings. It's clear, reasonable, friendly, helpful. And, in case you've forgotten the difference between how normal people talk and what lawyers sound like, they provide a link to their legal and copyright information.

Places I'm Enjoying

I poked around Living Code this morning and enjoyed it. A reader of my newsletter recommended a Cat Stevens conspiracy theory expounded there. The lead story today is a call for an XML standard for GUIs, which the author calls "AmbiGUI." Gotta love it. Plus the site quotes Ambrose Bierce: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I like the mix of tech, humor, social conscience, and word-awareness.

Prof. Tom Wilson at the Dept. of Info Sciences at Sheffield Univ. wrote to me today to point to a little grenade he tossed into a listserv recently in which he mentions that there may not be any such thing as knowledge management. Here's his original message and here's the listserv's archive; look for entries in December and November. The thread is interesting if only because of the effect academic conventions have on the expression of passion.

The Silence of the Blog

No real blogging for me today since I spent the day (and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before) putting together an issue of my newsletter. JOHO is so long that no one has ever read an entire issue. Ack.

Here's the table of contents:

Gonzo Marketing: Chris Locke's book is so good that you can disagree with it and still like it a whole lot. Slumping the Shark: The difference between sitcoms and corporations when it comes to declining interest. A Hippie Learns to Love West Point: What I learned about collaboration from 4 hours with the military. Hunt for Strongest Possible Terms Ends: Groups that have denounced something in the strongest possible terms come clean. Conference Report: High Tech Lives: Moribund economy? Not entirely. Misc.: The anals of marketing and why searching sucks(tm) (excepting Google of course). Walking the Walk: PTC enables collaborative product design. Cool Tool : Little tiny utilities. Internetcetera: Who we netizens are. Politicklish: Death to terrorists, Bush is a moron, etc.: Your comments and denunciations about 9-11 and more. Links to Love: Places you think worth a visit. Email, Stray Insults, and Worrisome Flu-like Symptoms: The rest of your comments and denunciations. Bogus contest: MRUs of the Rich and Famous

XP, The Background Pirate

Has anyone noticed that the Windows XP default desktop background is almost identical to the Sharp Actius' desktop background?

Sharp Actius	Microsoft XP

The End of Spam

At the risk of sounding Ginger-ish, you should keep your eye on SpamSubtract. They are getting ready to launch a product that promises to take a big bite out of spam.

Wicked fun

Textism's snarky commentary on Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is wicked. I'd never heard of Mau. He seems to be a self-important designer. I laughed anyway.

A Powerpoint presentation is making the rounds that's pretty funny. It's a customer complaint (from Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison) that uses many of the standard business presentation conventions. (You can see it as an HTML page here.) [Thanks to Bruce Milne for passing this along to me...and thus to us. PS: Bruce adds; "I've now seen this from 3 other sources within a span of 3 hours- ya gotta love this Web thing (unless you run a DoubleTree in Houston....)"]

Juicy Bit from Tom Matrullo

Tom gives the NYTimes a well-deserved pasting for writing about "Eric Corley's efforts to demonstrate that the DeCSS code that breaks the 'protection' code on DVDs is free speech." For example, Corley printed the code on the front of a t-shirt. Especially in contrast, the Times' piece is a toothless gumming of the topic. Tom writes:

When a T-shirt has more critical first amendment power than the nation's most prestigious newspaper, it's fair to say that news is now the promise and the burden of the Net.

Walking the Walk

Scott Kirsner's always-worth-reading column in The Boston Globe today describes how Parametric (now known as PTC) is attempting to become interesting again. In the late '80s, it was an important player in the CAD market. And, with a market value of $2.2B and annual revenues of nearly $1B - that's a lot of CAD! - it's the largest standalone sw company in the Commonwealth of MA. Even so, it's such a dull company that Mike Dukakis was kicked off of its board of directors because his crazy antics were too distracting. (Insert rim shot here.*) Now it's trying to reinvigorate itself with a new line of software called Windchill that opens up the product design process to all concerned parties, from internal departments to external suppliers to customers. The software is already being adopted by such thrill-a-minute corporations as Airbus, EMC and Lockheed "Lewis and" Martin. Owners of PTC's CAD software are averaging 14 licenses of Windchill for each CAD license. Product design is a conversation. Who'd a thought it! (Well, Doc Searls for one.)

CIO magazine has given a Web Business 50 award to the American Cancer Society for its bulletin boards and chat rooms. The boards are so important to users that the organization prominently displays the link to them on its home page. This looks like a great site.

Then there are those who take steps backwards. CIO also gave an award to K2, in part because of their cool user-to-user technical forum. Unfortunately, as the article notes, the forum is no longer up. Instead, the company has a set of technical manuals available. In PDF, to add insult to injury. (Oh, PDF is well-architected and a boon in some situations, but it is usually a dodge for companies that insist on putting their handsome looks ahead of their customers' convenience and time.)

A reader whose name I've already lost, thus setting a new land speed record for forgetfulness, points us at Jones Soda where they do everything they can think of to get visitors involved. They'll display your photos, they'll publish your stories, they'll even put your picture on a bottle of soda. On a quick look I didn't see much that I actually cared about, but at least the gimmicks are customer-focused gimmicks. I guess that counts as progress.

Thanks

I got an encouraging note from Dominique. Her blog today tells a sorry tale of a show-me-your-tits job interview, a genre I thought we'd left behind us. Foolish me.

USAToday has an article that treats Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing book seriously. Wow! What a score! They even do a good job summarizing RageBoy's surprisingly coherent thoughts. You go, USAToday!
12/10/2001 01:20:36 PM | PermaLink

Sunday, December 09, 2001

I look forward to more such critiques. Thank you, Post. Or should I just call you "Coward"?
12/9/2001 03:43:06 PM | PermaLink

Sunday Funnies