Duel Booting

As my PC seems to be fairly stable - only one crash in 24 hours! - I'm beginning to think about trying out Linux. I've bought a copy of RedHat and I'm beginning to clear out one of the hard drives in my machine. But I'm frankly frightened about dual-booting XP and Linux given the fragility of my machine. So I'd like some advice.

Here's my situation. I have a fresh install of XP on my 120G boot drive. I will have lots of room for Linux on a 60G drive currently formatted as NFTS. I am ok with scraping everything off of that drive and repartitioning and reformatting.

I want to start slowly with Linux. I expect to spend most of my time in Windows for now. That may switch, depending on how things go with Linux. I will continue to have a hell of a lot of data in Windows formats. I also expect to need to boot into XP for some Windows-only apps, including games.

I am wary about monkeying with boot sectors. I will be really really pissed - at no one in particular - if in the course of installing Linux, I end up having to reinstall XP and all of its apps. But I also want a transition path; if (for example) I start off by booting Linux off a floppy, I'd like to be able to boot off a hard drive once I'm feeling more secure. But boot decisions seem to be forever.

So, does anyone have any links that explain it all to me? Or tales of woe and rejoicing?

As ever, thanks.

Semantic TV

The always read-worthy Scott Kirsner writes in the Boston Globe today (note: Globe links rot) about Gotuit Media, a company that "indexes" video. Indexing in this case means that it divides video content into chunks tagged by its content so that you can choose to watch "just the highlights, or the 'best hits' or the top plays by Tom Brady, or even a 20-minute Reader's Digest condensed version" of a football game or any other video. It takes software and humans to tag the video, an expensive proposition but perhaps worthwhile to cable providers and others who will sell the smarter content to the likes of us. (Gotuit also has a branch doing TiVo for radio.)

I wonder how much of this could be done right in a TiVo box. I don't know what metadata is embedded in the video stream, but Pinnacle Studio, among others, does a good job of figuring out when scenes have changed in a digitized video; I assume it looks for a significant change in the pattern of pixels from one frame to another. If TiVo increased its processing power, it too could offer scene selection. Speech recognition would let it find all the plays in a game where a particular player is mentioned. If it has access to closed captioning, then it could do some text indexing as well. And if it had some high-end visual pattern recognition software it could to the thing that traditionally has driven entertainment technologies: it could automatically find the nude scenes in any movie.

Scott also reports on a lawsuit brought by Pause Technology charging TiVo with infringing on a 1995 patent held by Jim Logan and a partner.

Pleeeease don't let them take my TiVo away!

Fear, Dread and Wifi

We all have watched the Arc of Fame:

1. Buzz among the cognoscenti
2. Adoration by the masses
3. Thrashing by the media
4. Blase disregard by everyone
5. Retro condescension by the idle smirky

Judging by a pair of articles in the Boston Globe today, wifi has reached stage 3 without ever making it to stage 2.

At the top of the Technology section today, Hiawatha Bray writes a fear-mongering piece about the vulnerability of home networks, with an emphasis on the dangers of wifi. Vandals are out to trash you! Thieves can't wait to get their hands on those photos of your kid's birthday party! The second half of the article is useful (but not detailed enough) advice on how to lock down your network.

Immediately below Bray's article is one by Peter J. Howe, subtitled "Some analysts wonder whether WiFi craze is a bubble waiting to burst." I know from sad experience that writers don't write their own headlines or subheads, but in this case it's a good summary of the article. Although (says Howe) the stats all indicate a sector taking off, Lars Godell of Forrester Research is quoted as saying that "much of the money ... is being wasted" because not enough people are going to be willing to pay for the service.

Howe's article ends by suggesting that wifi growth may be fueled by "companies supporting free access to draw publicity and foot traffic." He does not mention neighborhood networks. When I log onto my wifi network, I have three networks to choose from. One is my next door neighbor's and the other emanates from the house across the street.

Too bad there wasn't an accompanying article about how to build your own neighborhood network, including how lock down your computer as you open up your network.

PC Is working...

...knock wood, throw salt over my shoulder, kiss a leprechaun, pet a cobra, blow out the candles in one breath, pour out some wine, vote Republican.

It seems to have been a conflict between my Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard and Kingston HyperX memory. The PC store (ICG Computer in Brookline) put in a lot of hours tracking this down, and now that they've switched out the HyperX for whatever is the next best type, the system seems to be stable. At least it's been up for almost 24 hours. (And now, of course, I just jinxed myself.)

Let me add some keywords in case someone with the same problem is searching for information: Crash. No BSOD. Cold Boot. RAM. Hyperthread. Flashed the BIOS. Pulled out cards. Swapped graphics cards. Reinstalled XP. Reformatted. Repartitioned. Many times. Tried everything. Not heat related. Haunted. Cursed. Get a Mac. !@#$%!-ing computers!

Pundithood

I'm a pundit! Now all I have to do is spot a yellow crested grebe and my Life List will be done!

Unfortunately, it's a pretty biting and funny satire — the Internet Pundit Fantasy Camp — that accords me the accolade.

See you at Pop!Tech

It was a hard choice, but I've decided to go to Pop!Tech again this year. It was hard precisely because Pop!Tech is such a good conference, but it conflicts with DigitalID World, which was terrific last year and looks like it'll be at least as good this year. I really want to go to both, but physics is making that impossible. Damn physics.

I finally decided on Pop!Tech because its territories are more unfamiliar to me. But I will sorely miss the friends and ideas at DigID World. I wholeheartedly recommend both events.

[NKS] Starting point

If you're just visiting this blog for the first time in the past couple of days and are faced with the endless scroll of live-bloggage of the Wolfram conference, here's a place to start. The actual blog coverage begins in the entry prior to that one.

[NKS] Jason Cawley: Philosophical Implications

[Jason was a researcher on historical and philosophical topics for the NKS book.]

He starts by talking about what NKS says about Free Will. Wolfram isn't claiming that free will is impossible or natural. It's a much more limited claim than that, directed against the spontaneity position and the behaviorist position. Spontaneity: Will is uncaused. Behaviorism: There's a simple scheme for representing what wills do. Both too easily conflate being free and being unpredictable. Wolfram's found a wedge between determinism and predictability. Wills are more unpredictable than behaviorists think. But will's unpredictability doesn't mean that it's undetermined. Unpredictability is built into the system because of the system's complexity. One should read that section of NKS as arguing against those two positions more than as establishing a positive doctrine of free will.

As a person, Wolfram is committed to determinism. But he doesn't think that he's proven it or that it follows from NKS. He thinks NKS makes determinism more plausible but doesn't prove it.

Q: [Me] If we're computationally equivalent to Rule 110 and all other such systems, then what distinguishes intellligent systems?

A: Not their cleverness, but there are other factors.

Q: Then how can you talk about FW without talking about the factors specific to systems that have will?

A: Wolfram is making a more limited claim. He's talking about one piece of evidence — unpredictability — that's been used by various FW theories.

Q: Shouldn't he be talking about subjective vs. objective?

A: Complexity is independent of whether you're inside or outside the system.

Q: In a note, he mentions Augustine. Where's God in this?

A: [I suspect that Jason wrote the note] Religions are heterogeneous when it comes to the FW question. He talks about Augustine because Augustine tried to put together FW and predestination. Augustine distinguishes between what's knowable to us and to God. This lines up with what's subject to computation; you get the same sort of seems-free-to-us vs. seems-not-free-to-God viewpoint.

Just as Wolfram has presented open problems in NKS, Jason has open problems in philosophy for us, particularly for philosophy of science.

• What it means to stick your neck out, Popper-ianly, when dealing with computability. You're making falsifiable predictions about something that was logically derived. With NKS, you're experimenting on what used to be the model. E.g., The Principal of Computation Equivalence claims that Class III rules are universal but it could be wrong; its falsifiable.

• The definition of randomness. It'd be good to have a definition that captures the ordinary meaning but also works in the sciences.

• Distinguish prior determinism, epistemology and ...

• When you look at where a system is migrating to (an attractor or a constraint) it's different than looking at how it evolves. Discuss amongst yourselves.

• Distinguish rules, models and theories. A rule isn't a model because it's abstract. Models have to correspond to something in reality. When can you make predictions? When can you just see what happens? Can you have a theory that doesn't make predictions?

Q: [Me] What about the scope of NKS? Is it an ontology? Doesn't it seem tied to the happenstanace that we have computers and thus is simply a way of seeing the world, especially since Wolfram rightly says that a model always leaves something out and is something of a political decision?

A: He certainly likes to make heroic generalizations. Theoretical physicists like to stick their necks out and let others show them wrong. He has an ontology that says you can get everything as an emergent property of space. That's his intuition because he gets so much from what's simple. He has a philosophy of pure form. How can he know? He doesn't much care.

Q: [Me] But doesn't this prove that McLuhan was right and we see our world through our technology?

A: Sure, but when new tech comes along, we don't throw out the previous insights. We still incorporate what we see through telescopes. [Yeah, but revolutions do occur that re-do the fundaments.]

Q: Does he avoid using the term "emergence" because thinks simplicity and complexity are the same? Because he thinks emergence implies the properties aren't there at the beginning?

A: He thinks "emergence" is a buzz word. And it's present in the system from the beginning of its complexity.

Q: When you think about philosophers, which one strikes you as being Wolframian?

A: Hmm. Plato, because of his focus on forms. But Plato thought the forms had to be less detailed and specific than their instances, whereas Wolfram is all about seeing the complexity of forms. [I think he's more like Hegel in the Logic, deriving everything from the simplest of starting points.

I left the conference after this session because I have some family stuff and because the rest is almost all too technical for me.

[NKS] Wolfram: Computational Equivalence

[Continued live-blogging of the Wolfram conference in Waltham, MA.]

When looking at Rule 110, he wonde3red what happened if you consider everything that happens as a computation. He shows a Cellular Automaton [CA] that generates primes and another that does powers of 2. (The white stripes fall on the primes or the powers.)

He discovered the principle of Computational Equivalence (PCE) by looking at lots of CAs. The principle: If you look at a process, the process will correspond to a computation of equivalent sophistication. The computer revolution has taught us that it's possible build a single, universal machine that will do any computation. He's taken that idea seriously and applied it to the natural sciences.

The PCE says that except in cases where the system is doing something really simple, it's most likely the case that the system is doing a computation of equivalent sophistication. That principle has many implications and predictions. E.g., it predicts that a system with simple rules should be capable of computations equivalent in sophistication to any other computer of equal sophistication. I.e., Rule 110 should be a universal computer. Rule 110 is really really random looking, but it has some "local structures," i.e., there are identifiable structures (lines, triangles) in the swirling mist. These might rerpresent useful information. You might have thought that to do universal computation you need very complex systems with very complex rules (e.g., lots of logic gates), but instead you can do it with Rule 110 which arises from extremely simple rules.

This has implications. For natural science it means that among systems in nature one expects to see many systems capable of universal computation.

The PCE wraps together several things. First, it means there's an upper limmit on the computations that can be done by a system. You can't keep adding complex rules to get more complex computations; once you get past the threshold at which a system is a universal computer, you can't get any further. Adding registers, for example, won't increase the sophistication of the computation although it obviously might speed up the actual calculations. (This is like Church's thesis, he says.) But the PCE gets its teeth by saying that not only is there an upper limit, but this limit is achieved by many systems.

To do a computation, perhaps you have to feed Rule 110 complex inputs. But the PCE says that that's not necessary. Rule 110, even when the initial conditions are simple yields computations of enormous complexity. [I've always been fuzzy on this point. Still am. Where in Rule 110 is the computing of Pi or the lighting effects for Doom III?]

PCE is in one sense a law of nature [In the book he leaves out the "in one sense."] In another it's a law of computation. One must ask "How could this principle be wrong?" As a law of nature, it could disagree with reality. As an abstract fact, it might yield false deductions. He thinks that it will come to seem as obvious as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (He pauses to suggest that in fact the Second Law isn't obvious.)

So how might it be wrong? Systems might have too much or too little computational sophistication. Models in the past haven't noticed or cared about this. If constraint-based systems operated as well in nature as initial value problems, then the PCE couldn't be right. [I lost his point.] Or, in physics, if quantities are continuous, then you could do...[and I lost the point again...he's talking very fast and I am skating on very thin ice]. But Wolfram believes the universe is discrete, not continuous, so that objection doesn't hold.

Human thinking is supposedly more sophisticated than what computers can do. Wolfram disagrees.

But the PCE could fail at the low end, i.e., maybe Rule 30 isn't a universal computer. Maybe there's some regularity in Rule 110. We usually think of repetition and nesting as regularity but perhaps there's another form of regularity. And maybe selects for rules that are complex but have that unexpected form of regularity.

Wolfram thinks the principle is true but his point is that there are ways it could fail. [And thus the PCE is a scientific statement. He doesn't use the word "falsifiable" but he's clearly thinking it.]

Systems like 110 seem complex because they're doing computations as complex as we are when we're trying to make sense of it.

Computational Irreducibility (CI) argues against predictability. If a system is complex, we can't predict where it will be in a thousand steps except by running the thousand steps. That is, we can't figure out the outcome with less effort than the system itself expends. [This is one of the ideas that first attracted me to Wolfram's thought.] Computational reducibility has been at the heart of many of the sciences: we can tell exactly where the moons of Jupiter will be in the year 3005 without having to wait until 3005. But you can't predict will step 3005 of Rule 110 will be without going through all 3005 steps.

The PCI and PCE means that it simply won't be possible to find exact solutions (mathematical functions) for some systems.

(In response to a question): The Scott Aronson review was disappointing because Wolfram spent time with him trying to correct his misconstructions but it got published anyway.

Take a question like whether there's extraterrestial life. We recognize earth life because it shares ancestry. But is there an abstract definition of life? He can't find one. The same is probable even more true of definitions of intellligence. There's a threshold of computational sophistication, but beyond that there isn't an essence of intelligence. Lots of systems have crossed the threshold to universal computation. There's lots of fun things to talk about distinguishing intelligent systems from merely universally computational ones, involving concepts such as meaning and intention, but unfortunately we're out of time. [!]

[NKS] Biological systems

It's a panel on how NKS applies to medicine.

First: "Challenges to Conceptualizing Biological Systems: Wobble, redundancy and the unpredictable," by Elaine Bearer, Brown U. We have conceptual problems incorporating wobble, redundancy and the unpredictable.

The evolutionary hypothesis says that biological systems raise through the process of selection which ignores details. It operates on the results, so there may be multiple ways to get to the same outcome. There's a ton of evidence that supports the idea that it's the outcome that counts, including wobble in DNA-protein interactions. Also, many functions are redundant. Wobble means that more than one triplet can spcify the same amino acide; the third nucleotide can vary. E.g., methionine is coded for by ATG but also by ATT and ATC. There's no 1:1 relationship between the nucleotide code and the protein. Also, transcription factor-DNA interactions have no code. [No idea what that last sentence means.] There are many combinations that will work.

There's also redundancy: more than one protein or copy of a gene can have the same outome. E.g., the ability to change cell positions is crucial and there are over 50 proteins that take its cytoskeleton structure apart. She shows an amazing video of a platelet taking apart its cytoskeleton and puting it together again like an earthworks mound around the center of the cell in order to form a clot. She's discsovered which proteins enable this. She used Mathematica to simulate how the protein spreads. [This isn't a CA thing but more of an example of the power of Mathematica.]

She points to differences in conceptualization that get in the way of a fruitful conversation among biologists and mathematicians. For example, for her randomness is easy: it's death. Life is randomness harnessed into regularity and repeatability. [I think she's getting at the difference between randomness and complexity that occasionally confused me in NKS.]

Ilan "Lanny" Kirsch, chief of the genetics branch of the Center for Cancer Researcfh at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda. He's going to talk more generally.

Cancer is a genetic disease caused by genetic instability. The genome of a cancer is the not the same as the genome of the normal cell from which it arose; the DNA in a tumor is different that of the cell that gave rise to it. The change in DNA that is cancer is caused by interitance, encironment and randomness. So how does NKS modeling work? We'll look at three general examples.

1. Pathways and systems. Define the initial conditions annd the rules that descrfibe the pathway. [He doesn't explain what pathways he's talking about.]

2. Sequential steps in carcinogenesis. Usually it's not a single gene that goes but the alteration of sequential genes that causes cancer. NKS can define the sequential rule/condition changes lead to the coutme of malignant transformation.

3. Undersanding and modeling instability. This one is more problematic. It moeans modeling instability itself, studying the basis of change. Wolfram's example of mutation (p. 321? 391?) is a very good starting point. In the example, there is a mutation of a rule (i.e., if the left and right block is black, the middle block turns white instead of black, or whatever). The sort of randomness he sees in genes look very much like the randomness Wolfram shows and seem to be capable of being modeled by CA. Perhaps we're seeing the collision of CA. Are mutations the result of the intersection of programs each with its own rule and initial conditions?

Wolfram: What sort of questions should pure NKS investigators concentrae on that would help biologists? In morphological studies, what are the appropriate rules? What are the primitives? Network based systems? Mobile automata? And what's the appropriate level for trying to do modeling? What sort of questions would you like to be able to answer about these questions?

Kirsch: [Didn't undestand a word. Too much medical jargon for me.]

Bearer: Computational biological models have been held up by the belief that you need to have everything in place. But NKS may help us figure out what the missing factors are. When we were modelling, the Mathematica guy said that there has to be an inhibitor at a particular position because otherwise the model says that the branching would be other than it is. [Impressive.]

[NKS] Wolfram: Applying to the physical world

When you try to model a natural phenomenon, you inevitably drop out some of the phenomenon as irrelevant; that's the nature of modeling. You can't then complain that the model doesn't capture something that it wasn't intended to capture.

Lt's take snow flakes as an example. When snowflakes form, they start from a seed. When a crystal bond is formed, some heat is released, inhibiting neighboring molecules from attaching. So, make a rule that says a cell will only be filled in if ___, and you get a snowflake form. You can make predictions from this such as: Big snowflakes will have holes in them from where arms collide; that turns out to be true. The model works. But it won't answer a question like how far an arm will grow at a particular temperature. [I don't know why.]

So, how does one assess models? The best models are ones where you put a little in and get a lot out. A bad model gets more complex because you have to keep adding new considerations until you're putting in more than you get out.

Models used to be mechanistic: you push A and B moves; there's a small chain of inference. In another form of modeling, about 300 years old, we use equations to model systems. That's a much more abstract form of modeling. But some of the equations can be very hard. E.g., you can explain snowflake generation via partial differential equations, but they're very hard to solve. But NKS adds a new type of model: a simple set of rules producing complex phenomena.

It's not proper to object that snowflakes aren't made of CA cells because CA is a model of snowflakes. We don't think that the earth is solving a differential equation when it moves through space. Differential equations are an abstraction. Similarly, a CA model of a snowflake is an abstract representation of how snowflakes work.

Randomness in models

We see examples of randomness in the natural world, e.g., fluid motion. Where does the randomness come from? There are three possible origins:

1. Classically, randomness comes from external perturbation, e.g., a boat being kicked around by the randomness of the ocean's surface. Randomness of this sort: Brownian motion and some electronic noise. The randomness you get out isn't part of the system you're studying.

2. Chaos theory points to systems in which the initial conditions are random, e.g., a toin coss or the spin of a wheel. The three-body problem in gravity was one of the first cases of this studied: a change in a billionth of a degree results in hugely different results. There's some effect from the outside that causes the initial conditions to be random. The randomness doesn't come from the system we're modeling.

3. You can get randomness without going outside the system. E.g., Rule 110 is intrinsically random.

Constraints

In traditional mathematical models, one can have an equation that is a constraint on the system that solves the equation. Typical example is a boundary problem. [Suddenly over my head. Prepare for vagueness. ] Constraint-based models don't tell you how to fill in the constraints to solve the problem. His example of a constraint-based model is the question of what the closest packing of circles is. This is very hard to solve if the circles are different sizes. [I've lost the point. Damn not-knkowing-math-iness!]

Biology wants to know where the complexity of organisms come from. Initially, Wolfram assumed it was a different class of phenomenon because the biological systems adapt and change over time. But he's concluded that adaption and evolution isn't the issue. What forms of explanation should we give for biological systems? Will simple rules do or do we need much more complicate rules? Maybe biology is in fact sampling really simple programs. So, does the complexity come as a response to the visual system of predators [he seems to be thinking about patterns of fur] or does it come from simple programs? We think it has to have a complex explanation (evolution) because it's complex. Nah, says Wolfram. [Evolutionists don't necessarily think that pigmentation patterns have been "carefully tuned" by natural selection. The question is whether we can get past pigmentation and get to flight or sight or kidneys.] Natural selection is good at progressively shortening or lengthening bones, but it's not good at creating complicated things. Natural selection actually simplifies things, not makes them more complicated. We see this in technology where a form of natural selection makes stuff simpler, e.g., Fedex bills have gotten simpler. Natural selection operates well where you can make small changes and not have them be disastrous, just as engineering does.

His model explains how sea shells are formed. If you exclude ridiculous shapes — e.g., ones that leave no room for the animal — all of the ones his model draws are found in nature. So, you don't need natural selection to explain them. Likewise for the shapes of leaves.

How do you find a model? If you think it's a CA sort of thing, you can just match 'em up. But it can be really hard to go from a natural phenomenon to its model. It is an unsolvable computational problem in the general case. So what do you do in practice? First, you can use Wolfram's Atlas of Simple Programs and see if you recognize one. [The mug shot approach.]

The other thing you can do is search through all possible models of some particular kind. This seems crazy because if you were to search all possible equations, you'd never find it. But because you're looking for simple rules, it can work.

[NKS] Analyzing Simple Programs

I'm in the beginners section on how to do cellular automata. The instructor (I came in 10 seconds late and missed his name) is explaining how to use a particular piece of software.

Q: You suggest we look for "interesting stuff" when playing around with CA. But what do you mean by "interesting"?

A: Everyone has a different viewpoint. But there are basic things like classifying them [according to Wolfram's 4 classes of CA, the 4th being complex/random]. Or you might notice that in Rule 30 big white triangles come at particular intervals. You can ask about the distribution of these triangles and plot according to the size of the triangle and where it shows up. You might understand more about how Rule 30 works. These localized structures are incredibly interesting.

A: Isn't there a problem with relying on perception to notice randomness?

Q: Yes, perception isn't reliable. That's why this is non-trivial.

[NKS] Wolfram: How it works

Wolfram is explaining the argument of his book. My blogging this is not going to be more helpful than reading more considered expositions, including Wolfram's own. So, I plan on only jotting down some stray notes and thoughts.

Trivia: A cellular automaton (CA) gets its number by converting the pattern of bits that express the rule of the CA into a decimal number.

Wolfram shows how simple rules can lead to great complexity in simple CA. He asks how typical this is in the computational world. Is it only CA that generate complexity from simple rules? CA seem special (everything updates at the same time, there are local rules, etc.) so is this generalizable? So Wolfram systematically removes each of the CA's special features. E.g., what happens if you don't update all the cells at the same time? So he looks at some variations (substitution systems, replacement systems) and finds that they too can generate complexity from simple rules.

Tag systems: Look at the first element of a string, chop it off, and add different strings at the end based on the color of the first element. If you chop off one element, you get nested patterns. If you chop off two or more, you get much more complex behavior. In cyclic tag systems at alternating steps you add cells or not depending on the step number. [Aha! In the book tag systems turn out to be crucial in explaining the universality of CA 110, and I didn't understand them until now.]

[It's 11:05 and he's lost me. Too much math.]

He's finding complex patterns in multidimensional systems and networked systems evolving through time, all part of his argument that simple-makes-complex isn't an artifact of CA.

Nor is it dependent on the complexity of initial conditions. [This I believe is part of Wolfram's radicalization of formalism: initial conditions are a type of contingency and having to rely on initial conditions would mean that the system isn't entirely formal and mathematical.]

[He's talking about constraints. I'm lost again. But he bounces up a level and says the point is that you can force constraints to yield complexity. This apparently has application to the nature of crystals.]

He's finding the same simplicity-yields-complexity in arithematic and math. Part of his point is that it's a property not merely of an artifical construct like a CA. But I'm not sure if he's re-pounding the same nail or whether he's finding important insights within each area he's discussing.

Now he's talking about CA in which cells aren't only black or white but could be any shade of gray. Guess what? Simple rules yield complexity. And it's true of differential equations also.

He's summarizing: Each of these types of systems comes up over and over again so it's worth understanding something about how they work [A plea for a science of computation]. We've seen over and over again that simple rules can bring about great complexity. As soon you pass a very low threshhold of complexity of the initial rules you get all sorts of wild results.

Next topic: Analyzing what simple programs do. What can you do to analyze a hugely complex CA-generated pattern. The end of the story is that there isn't a way to crack something like that. But what does "crack" mean? Can we go from the sequence back to the rule and initial condition that generated it? Nope. When we say something has regularities, we mean we can summarize it more briefly than by just repeating the sequence. [E.g., "It's a checkerboard" is a lot shorter than listing all 64 squares.] Can we compress some of the complex CA? Nah. Run-length encoding doesn' work. Block-based compresssion doesn't work. Dictionary-based? Nope.

We say something is random if we can't summarize it. When we call something complex, not only can't we find a unique summary but we can't find a summary of the properties we actually care about.

Wolfram is endorsing simply looking at patterns. With our eyes. Our visual systems are quite good at discerning patterns. How does our visual system do that? What kind of things will our visual system be able to disentangle? It's very good at noticing repetition. It's ok at noticing nesting where there are big blocks of repeating color.

Application to cryptography.

Summary of this part of the talk: One's assumption when confronted with something like Rule 30 is to say that there's got to be some pattern of regularity hidden there. But he's tried lots of ways of "cracking" it and none work.

Summary of the talk overall: These are the sorts of issues that pure NKS talks about.

After lunch he's going to talk about more technical approaches. Bad news for the likes of me.

Block that metaphor

From RottenTomatoes' aggregation of movie reviews:

"Watching Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is like being trapped inside a pinball machine operated by a 6-year-old having a sugar rush."
— Kirk Honeycutt, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"Watching Full Throttle is like being pummeled for two hours with a feather duster. It leaves no scars, but you do feel the pain."
— Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE

"Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is like eating a bowl of Honeycomb drenched in Red Bull — a dizzying mouthful of unabashed silliness that leads to an equally precipitous crash once the buzz wears off after the film's first hour."
— Elvis Mitchell, NEW YORK TIMES

["Block that metaphor" either is a blatant violation of the New Yorker's copyright or is a loving homage. We'll leave it to the courts to decide.]

[NKS] Why I Care about Wolfram

I am not qualified to have an opinion about Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. I've read it 1.75 times just to confirm this fact. I can't evaluate the claims about how much of what he says is new, but I also sort of don't care, except in a gossip-y sort of way. So why am I interested?

First, since I was in high school I've been bothered by the notion of laws. It's a metaphor that scientists immediately reject: there's no governing body, there's no jail time for miscreants. So, then it's just regularities and correlations. But that's not much of an explanation. Wolfram tries to explain phenomena by asking what's the simplest computer program that could have generated it. I don't know that that is any more of an explanation, but it's at least a radically different type of explanation. One indication of its radicalness: some phenomena cannot be predicted by solving an equation but only by running the program.

I like the fact that his approach holds hope (but I can't evaluate how much) for understanding complex phenomena. Traditional science often punks out there. I asked a physicist friend of mine about this, a guy who was in grad school with Wolfram btw, and he said that the structure of heavy atoms is too complex to be managed — so far — by our equations. So, here's exactly the sort of problem that Kuhn pointed to, a limit against which the current paradigm bumps. And it's not in some marginal area. Complexity is clearly hugely important, from snowflakes to brains to galaxies. Wolfram may have (I can't tell) made progress in understanding how complexity can be generated from very simple rules.

I'm also interested in watching the scientific community's reaction to it. Will it embrace or reject (or take a third path) this? Likewise, will there be sufficient application of Wolfram's ideas to recalcitrant existing problems to establish it as a workable paradigm? Fascinating.

And I'm very interested in his metaphysics because it seems to be the apotheosis of a modern trend: the triumph of formalism. The discussion in the comments section of my blog recently about Kurzweil and Searle typifies the deep division in our thought. Many of us find it obvious that the brain is hardware running software, and thus we will be able to move the software into another medium and run it losslessly, just like we can move our copy Sim City and our saved games from one computer to another. But this seems to me to be so fundamentally wrong, for reasons I won't discuss again here. Wolfram takes the brain-as-software idea to its ultimate extension: the universe is software. His books attempts to derive space, time and the fundamental particles of physics from purely formal considerations. Wow.

He's also an excellent writer and a truly interesting character. I've had the opportunity to spend a little time with him, and I like him.

Although I'm frustrated by my inability to follow his argument past page 500 or so, I also think there's a certain benefit to being forced into agnosticism about his content, for the questions that circle "Is he right?" are fascinating on their own.

[NKS] Wolfram: The NKS Enterprise

He's going to talk about three components of the New Kind of Science (NKS) enterprise: Pure NKS, applied NKS and the NKS way of thinking. [I'm live-blogging and don't have time for quote marks.]

The intellectual core of pure NKS means asking the abstract question: What sort of simple programs are there and what do they do? It's an independent area of intellectual inquiry that one day will be viewed as a discipline like physics and mathematics. It's topic: the computational world.

The pure science might not have any applications but what's been driving it is the hope that it does. Applied NKS takes what we learn from pure NKS and use it to model elements of nature, and even to human organizations.

The NKS way of thinking extends this to philosophy and art. NKS may not provide a model for human organization but it may provide a way of thinking about human organization. Also education.

"In order for NKS to realized its potential, it's absolutely crucial that the pure NKS be properly developed." A danger is that pure cores get left behind because of the excitement about applications.

The core has a simple story: One day it should be like physics and math with its own questions and methods and thhat is recognized as its own thing that gets to define its own boundaries.

It's also important that NKS be embedded in other sciences. That's the only way applications will happen. So, while Pure NKS should be its own field, the applications should not spring from a separate and distinct NKS.

You'd think that sciences are defined by their subject matter, e.g., biology is defined as the study of all living things. In fact, they're defined by their methodologies. The questions they ask are the ones answerable by their methodologies. [Very Kuhn-ian. But it also fits with Wolfram's attempt to explain the universe purely through formal terms; subject matter doesn't count any more than a mathematician cares whether you're adding apples or oranges.] NKS needs to be implanted through real practitioners, although the questions NKS asks are different. NKS enables some tough questions in these fields to be answered. [Pure Kuhn: new paradigms grow in part in response to anomalies in existing paradigms. Wolfram knows his Kuhn.] In this way NKS is similar to mathematics.

Is there a general applications layer between the pure NKS and applied NKS? Yes, sort of. But it'd be a mistake to focus on that layer instead of focusing on particular application areas. Unlike philosophy, when NKS goes into an application area, it has lots of clear things to say, whereas philosophy has trouble moving from the pure to the applied with any clarity.

How do you confirm the rightness of NKS? Pure NKS simply wants to explore the computational world and see what's out there. Whether that's worth doing can't be judged by the applications. The principle of computational equivalence, however, is an exception within pure NKS because there are predictions that can be made and it is falsifiable, but Wolfram's not going to talk about this tomorrow. [Damn! I'm only here for the one day!] But in general, pure NKS is like math in terms of its justification. With applied NKS, it works like physics and other sciences: you see if you're explaining stuff. By the way, when NKS is applied it generally works on more complex problems than the traditional sciences can handle. [He means "complex" in the complexity theory way, e.g., turbulence.]

Are there technologies that arise from applied NKS? Sure, particularly and obviously around computer technology.

History of NKS So Far

It was satisfying that the initial print run of 50,000 of A New Kind of Science sold out in one day. He's planted the ideas by writing the book, lecturing, etc. But beyond that, how do ideas get introduced into the world? Let's look at previous paradigm shifts.

There are typical responses: It's wrong, it's been done before, and it doesn't make any sense.

But it's hard to quickly say that NKS is wrong because there's a lot in it. And it's been done before is a denial based on the need to connect what one is doing with what one's done before. And it seems like it doesn't make sense because it's different from what's gone before. [Wolfram's reply to the "It's been done before" objection was weak, I thought. Better to say that it builds on what's been done but is new in important ways.]

The reaction against NKS shows that it's being taken seriously. I had viewed science as a less emotionally-involved enterprise ... [audience laughs knowingly]

He's been flooded with emails, etc. His site's guestbook shows that the visitors come first from the physical sciences and then from mathematics. The most frequent request is for software that will let people do their own experiments. NKS Explorer enables this. [Does it require Mathematica?]

About 50 papers have come out that refer to NKS. They almost uniformly cover the chapters of the book.

He's handed out a booklet of "Open Problems and Projects." Most have to do with pure NKS issues, but he's continuing to work on this and will post on his site open questions in the applications area as well.

He's been building an "atlas" of what's out there in the computational world. It's available on his website. The "Wolfram Atlas" is repository of information. It enables people interested in pure NKS to meet, sort of an experiment in Open Source science. There will probably soon be an online forum for discussing NKS. They haven't done that yet because they wanted to wait for the furor to die down so that a reasonable discussion can be held.

Application areas he's particularly interested in:

He wants there to be survey articles in various fields to show the activity around NKS. He's very interested in how the idea NKS can be used in schools. He'd like somehow to incubate 50 pure NKS professors in order to seed academia; he's running a summer school as a start. He's found the best reaction among those at the beginning of their careers and those who are near the end; those in the middle have too much invested in what they're currently doing. He believes that there will be some dramatic applications that will help people understand what NKS is about.

Why I'm epigrammatic today

I'm running out to an all-day conference about and by Wolfram. I don't expect there to be wifi so I'm off-line all day...

LATER: Ok, I was wrong. I'm here with about 250 others and there's wifi. Wolfram is just welcoming us...

Why matters matters: Short version

Brains aren't hardware running software any more than pool tables are.

3 Justices

So three justices of the United States Supreme Court think that it's ok for the government to tell us what type of consensual sex we can have with whom.

Scary.

Paynter on Saltire

Frank Paynter subjects Steve MacLaughlin - so funny he has a laugh in the middle of his name - to his long form interview. I haven't had time to read it yet because I'm running out to a lunch thing, but Frank's got a way with the Q&A.

Were you pitched today?

I received an email today from a "boutique" PR firm asking me if I'd be interested in writing about one of their clients, a company that provides enterprise IM. The email msg was personalized to the extent that it had my name and my weblog's name at the top of it.

The product seems not particularly interesting and the pitch is rather naive - I'm not really going to get excited because people can IM with other team members when they're on a conference call with a client - but I am curious about whether we're being spammed. Did you get this pitch today, too?

If so, maybe we can do something to help educate the PR firm; I don't want to be at the receiving end of their pitches and press releases.

I heard back from the PR guy who sent it to me. They went through MediaMap and sent the pitch to about 25 bloggers and 100 media outlets. "To my delight, I have received several positive responses which should result in some great coverage for our client. Yes, the idea of IM is nothing new, but in the context of a real live application story and how a real business uses it, I thought it would be of interest." I wonder why.

Breakage

We had one of those lunches last week where right after the first glass fell and broke, a bowl cracked. And for breakfast, I had dropped one of the mugs we'd gotten from a penniless friend for our wedding 24 years ago.

The glass that broke at lunch had been one of our "good" ones, a cheap blue tumbler that we use pretty much only on the sabbath. My wife picked up a couple of replacements today. They're blue and tumbler-shaped, but no one is going to confuse them with the originals.

I found this depressing. I am not sentimental about glasses. I didn't even care hardly at all about the wedding gift breaking. It's just stuff. (Yeah, well, try saying that about my computer.) What bothers me about the replacements is that they're plastic. And it bothers me not for environmental reasons.

I'm 52. We're still re-using cheap plastic cups our children got at kiddie events over 15 years ago, the sort of cup movie theaters use for their $4.00 small size soda. Occasionally one of them cracks. But we have a shelf of far more substantial Disney character cups brought back from Disney on Ice® and Disney on Parade® and Disney on Crack® and Disney Owns Your Freakin' Ideas® that show fewer signs of age than I do. When my time comes, I will be handing them down to my children, along with my coffee can of miscellaneous screws and the Cuban cigar hidden in my closet that is now twelve years too old to smoke. (The Cuban cigar is legal because I only intended to burn it as an anti-Castro protest.)

So, if we get good quality plastic glasses, I am going to be drinking from them for the rest of my days. I don't like them enough for that. I like the idea of them even less. I don't want to be outfitted for life. Because I'm a middle class American, I like shopping, I like novelty, I like assuming that in five years — if I have another five years, if we have another five years — my stuff will be different and better. I don't want to buy a new suit that's so durable that as it's being fitted I'm thinking, "Yup, this is definitely the suit I'm going to be buried in."

I'm not saying any of this is rational or justifiable. I'm just saying it is.

Guess whose PC is broken?

Yup, it's back in the shop. I never did get the !@#$-er to work and I don't think they will either. My attempts include: Taking out the ATA card. Replacing the graphics card. Turning off hyperthreading. Turning off the onboard ethernet and putting in my old ethernet card. Running the virus checker every night. Running chkdsk several times. Spending about $20 on the Radeon support line finding out that they don't know nuthin'. Contacting ASUS and being told that it could be lots of things. Nevertheless, all day long it's gotten worse and worse, crashing to a re-start at closer and closer intervals. You'd almost think it was a heat thing except the motherboard monitor says it's a cool 90F in there.

So, I'm thinking about my alternatives. I spent a chunk of money on the new mobo, RAM and case. I don't know that the store will take it back since it seems to work when they take my drives out so it seems to have something to do with my software. (After a clean install of XP and with only Office XP added, it was still crashing.) So, I may have a major piece of metal on my hands. Suppose I were to try linux on it? (I forgot to try booting up knoppix before I dropped it off at the PC shop. Damn!)

I do need Windows for a few reasons. First, I want to know what the rest of the world is experiencing (=suffering). Second, there are some business docs that I work with that use Office features that Star Office doesn't offer. Third, I play games. So, maybe I take my high-end graphics card out of my current machine and replace it with something simpler. I build a new new machine, not as high-end, to run games and Office and Quicken. I use the current new machine as my daily linux box, even though the new machine is way over-spec'ed for linux.

Hmm.

QuickTopic goes Pro

Note: I have a financial relationship with Steve Yost, the creator of QuickTopic. But I have that relationship in large part because I'm such a big fan of Steve and his digital progeny. I believe I'd be saying what I'm about to say even if I didn't know Steve.

QuickTopic, my favorite fast-and-easy discussion board, is now offering a Pro (= for pay) version. For $49/year, you get to make it look visually like a part of your site, get administrative tools, and get to use QuickThread which lets you create a QuickTopic thread out of any existing email thread. QuickTopic's normal version is still completely free to users.

Steve created QT because he saw a need and, as a Good Citizen of the Web, he's invested thousand of hours in making QuickTopic work like a charm. I'm happy to see him try to make a few bucks out of it. In fact, I hope he makes buckets of bucks.

Simulated Life

I'm woefully behind in this area, so I'm sure others have proposed this and then disposed of it. But here's a question for the Moravek/Kurzweilians who think it's obvious that if we model a brain's 100B neurons in software, the computer is conscious: If we were to model an entire body's molecules or atoms in software, would the computer now be alive?

By sheer coincidence, Steve Talbott's fabulous newsletter today takes on Rodney Brooks' new book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. In particular, Talbott argues against the idea that humans are "just machines." Talbott's aim in this relatively brief essay is to remind us of how non-machine like we are as we look ever more closely at what's "really" going on. And it's not just quanta that are non-machine-like; cells themselves cannot be understood solely at the level of molecules:

Moss is one of many researchers looking at the complex chemical dynamics of the cell as a whole, and noting that there is no one-way chain of cause and effect determining the cell's order. This order (which is passed from one generation to the next) is irreducibly manifested in the cell as a whole, with each part (including the DNA) being effect as well as cause.

I like that Talbott then broadens the question to: Why are we so willing to hear this? He proposes an answer:

In a society where the cry echoes from all sides, "You are nothing but a machine", we can rightly ask whether what we are really hearing is "I sense that I am becoming nothing but a machine and, dammit all, I won't tolerate anyone else being more than I am".

I am a big fan of Talbott's.

Rodney Brooks was staying at the same B&B as I was at a Pop!Tech conference a couple of years ago, and we had a drink together one night. I liked him a lot, and I think his approach to robotics is brilliant. He told me that night that he was thinking about investigating the nature of life. Looks like he's headed in that direction.

Open KM

Jerry Ash has opened up his Knowledge Management site to anyone who wants to see what's there; previously it had been open only to members.

Isn't it nice to see the world trending in the right direction every now and then?

Blogging without the Chrono-Reversing

My friend Paul English doesn't write a blog. But he does write blog-ish essays on topics which he then aggregates on his site. It's like a blog turned sideways and sorted alphabetically by topic. See, for example, this on judging people by how they treat waiters.

Legalese for Humans

Dave points to a Terms of Use statement written by Diane Cabell and some law student interns for weblog hosting at Harvard Law. It's actually understandable! Cool! (They also have a privacy policy drafted.)

Latest crash clue

Continuing to crash the ol' PC. The latest was more polite than usual. As I was working, my screen snapped to 640x480 with 4-bit color. A message box said that there was no driver for my graphics card (Radeon 9700). It rebooted to the minimal resolution, but I was able to get it back to a reasonable display by using Display Properties as usual.

So, is there a problem with my graphics card, or did something else wipe out its drivers? (XP's error reporting system says that it's a problem with the ATI driver, but I had already installed the latest and greatest.)

Why matter matters

Gerry Gleason responds in the comment area to my blogging on Kurzweil's fallacious (well, I think so anyway) reasoning about the self. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is a pattern of neural states caused by the "software" that runs the brain. If we instantiate that pattern and its rules on a computer, that computer should be considered conscious, according to Kurzweil. Gerry wonders:

But following [Buckminister] Fuller, the essence of this particular "pattern integrity" is something related to emergence through evolutionary linking of system and environment; by what argument do you exclude this evolution based pattern of development and emergence from all possible complex synthetic systems?

Great question. Too hard. But I don't think the argument against Kurzweil, as put forward brilliantly by Searle, rules out all synthetic systems. The argument is against considering symbolic processors — today's computers — as conscious. And the reason is that they are only instantiations of the patterns of consciousness because we take them as such.

Let's say we did the Kurzweilian experiment successfully: through advanced science, we model his 100 billion neurons and their states and we figure out the rules by which they work. The computer chugs along and answers questions as if it were Kurzweil. We can grant all that and still say that the computer isn't conscious. Let's say it takes a byte of information to represent one neuron. The fact that memory address 100-107 represents neuron #212 in Ray's brain is completely arbitrary. The pattern of high and low voltages in those transitors only represent a neuron because we say so. The relationship between the computer and Ray's brain is symbolic.

Consider a different scenario. You're getting a tour of the M&M factory. There are 20 huge bins that together hold 2 trillion M&M's. Giant paddle arms are stirring them to randomize the mix. By freakish luck, if you count an M&M with the M showing on top to be "on" (or 1) and one with the M on bottom to be "off" (or 0), the paddles stirring the first 10 bins — which hold 100 billion M&M's — happen to be producing a series of brain states identical to what's going on in the computer. (We'll have to slow the computer down or speed the paddles up to get them in sync.) Are those bins conscious? No, because the pattern is only there because we chose to see up-facing M&M's as on and because we happen to be looking at the first ten bins: we could just as sensibly look at every second bin or count down-facing M&M's as on. Or maybe if we count raindrops larger than n to be on and ones smaller than n to be off, yesterday's rainstorm was also conscious.

You want the formal proof? If the candy bin is conscious because we take up-facing as meaning on, then it is simultaneously unconscious if someone else takes up-facing as meaning off or as meaning nothing. Thus, the candy bins are both conscious and non-conscious in the same way at the same time, which is a contradiction. QED.

Now, because the computer is running a program rather than acting randomly, we can probably learn stuff about Kurzweil that we can't from the candy bins. But so long as the pattern exists only because we see it as a pattern, it can't be conscious.

This doesn't mean that only carbon-based flesh like ours can be conscious. But it does mean that patterns aren't enough and that there's something special — not necessarily unique — about flesh.

If this is right, what does it mean for theories that stipulate that the universe is itself a computer? What does it mean for Wolfram's attempt to explain It All through a few simple programs?

Why is this happening?

The PC shop installed XP onto my 120GB hard drive. I took it home. It's working beautifully. I install the basics: Office and Outlook. I'm rebuilding my directories from my backups. I'm on the phone for a minute so I know my hands are off the keyboard, and Boom, it goes to black and reboots.

I have the minimal peripherals plugged in: USB mouse and USB keyboard, ethernet cable, monitor. I am running a minimal set of stuff. No virus protection, no ad blockers, no fancy dancy drivers. And yet I still got a big, scary crash. It's a new motherboard and RAM.

Suggestions other than to get a Mac? I'm at my wit's end. (Fortunately, that's a short walk for me.)

Guess who's reinstalling Windows?

The local PC store has performed every conceivable test on my broken computer. With a new new motherboard and new new RAM, it works fine...except if they put in my 120MB hard drive where Windows XP lives. They cloned that drive to another and still get blue screens of death. Hence, my installation of XP is corrupt, possibly caused by the faulty memory they'd installed originally.

So, this afternoon I get my PC back with a new mobo and RAM, and with a reformatted drive with XP installed. And so, for at least the 4th time in the past ten days or so I will be spending 30+ hours setting up my work environment again.

Why do I have the suspicion that when I'm done it's still going to work for 2 days (i.e., just enough time for me to be finishing up the re-insall) and then start crashing?

Landmines kill indiscriminately

Matt Prescott says that the Mines Advisory Group reports dozens of children are being killed every day by landmines and unexploded bombs in Iraq. Landmine Action has a petition here.

Searle and Symbolic Bits

Ed Nixon, referring to a blog posting of mine about a fallacy in Ray Kurzweil's thinking about selves, points to John Searle's reply to Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines. Ed comments further here. Searle, of the famous Chinese Room thought experiment (Kurzweil's response is here), hammers away (successfully, from my point of view) on the fact that computer programs are symbolic; the ones and zeros that are Deep Blue calculating a chess move are only about chess because we have so invested them with meaning. This is the real difference between atoms and bits.

A President for Bloggers

From Miles at TinyApps.org:

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.

The power of randomness

I just heard this story, probably well-known to many of you.

For many years, the leading automatic translation software worked on a Chomsky-ian theory that to translate between two languages, you parse the grammar/syntax of the portion in language A, look up the words in a dictionary, then apply B's rules to them. The results have been mixed at best.

Then IBM began the Candide Project. It took hundreds of thousands of pages of Hansard, the bilingual record of the Canadian Parliament. The project did nothing but associate words and phrases by position in the French and English versions. It had no dictionary and no rules of syntax. And it did better than the rule-based technique. (In this case "better" means that human readers gave the IBM project's translations a higher score.)

This appeals to me because I've always resisted the idea that humans understand things by interiorizing rules and maps. On the other hand, this makes the argument against AI harder, for if computers and human brains are now both working associatively, we're forced to argue about what probably can't be argued: whether thought is necessarily an organic function, something that living flesh does, whether you have to be alive to think/experience.

(See here for a history of computational linguistics.)

The Terrorist Arms Distribution Plan

President Bush, trying again to explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said on Saturday that suspected arms sites had been looted in the waning days of Saddam Hussein's rule. — Reuters

So, our invasion of Iraq resulted in the uncontrolled distribution of the weapons of mass destruction that we invaded to make ourselves safer from? Oh joy. I continue to feel just safer and safer because of this war.

Emerson lives

Both Halley and Chris Lydon are reminding us that no generation invents the world anew. "Harold Bloom and others say that we are all Emersonians by now, willy nilly, for both good and ill," writes Chris towards the end of a perfectly lovely essay. And Doc would remind us that we're all Whitmanians. And damn if I haven't been finding a whole lot of America worth loving in Sandburg and Frost.

Chris' voice is a unique addition to the blogosphere. You might want to try dwelling at his place for a while.

6 Degrees of Anonymous Blogs

Horst Prillinger explains why he doesn't like anonymous blogs. It's a good explanation, and I too tend to prefer blogs where I feel like the person has some "skin in the game." But there's plenty of room for every gradation of anonymity including:

Hiding all biographical facts but using your real name (= shy blogger or professional journalist blogger)

Making up biographical facts using your real name (= liar blogger)

Making up biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= fictional blogger)

Telling the truth about biographical facts while using an obviously false name (= informant blogger)

Telling the truth about biographical facts while using a false name (= witness-protection blogger)

Hiring someone to boast about your life and sign it using your name (= CEO blogger)

Surely this just scratches the surface...

Divestigative Journalism

After having done absolutely no research beyond reading the papers that I read and then forgetting what they said, it seems to me that the US media in general is neglecting to do investigative reporting of what has to be the biggest story about the current administration: Did Bush lie to us in order to get a war that he wanted?

I get the sense that if the Congress drops the issue, so will the journalists. The media are covering not the issue but the Democratic pursuit of the issue. Investigative journalism, in contrast, would be out trying to track down information on its own.

Is my fact-deprived perception correct? If so, why aren't there journalists out there digging into this story the way a dog digs into a bowl of fresh Pulitzer Prizes?

A Quiz

How many hits are there in Google on "weblog"? How many on "blog"? What's the total number of mentions for weblog and blog? (Hint it's about 8x the number of mentions of "web log" in quotes.)

Answers within an order of magnitude count as correct and will be placed in a sweepstakes the grand prize of which is the chance to imagine having won a real sweepstakes.

The solution is in the first comment to this blog entry.

Still PC-less after All These Days

The brand, spankin' new mega-monster PC is still in the shop. They've confirmed that the onboard ethernet port is busted. But they put in a new, identical mobo, and the system still isn't working. New RAM also. So, now they're checking whether one of my boards is causing the problem. Another day or two is required, which means I won't get it back until Tuesday at the earliest.

Living via my laptop is certainly ok, although I feel like I'm eating every meal out of a picnic basket. But there are some problems. First, my Quicken data is on the broken desktop machine which means that my bills are going unpaid. Second, there's the forking of my email. Yes, sure, we all want to say "Forking email!" from time to time, but all I mean is that I have to remember to search two separate Outlook files when I look for old messages.

Also, all the good games are on the desktop machine. Not that that matters. I can control my finger twitches. Really I can. Must. Must. Control. Twitching.

Clueless-by Four

There Is No Cat is getting nasty mail from someone who claims to own the trademark on the phrase "Clue-by-four." Since the phrase is used in sentences like "He wouldn't understand the Internet if you hit him with a clue-by-four," There Is No Cat points out the irony of it all.

You know what? So long as we're not trying to confuse your customers for our own commercial gain, we're going to use the words we want. Even though Silence Is Golden®

I enjoyed GroovyMother's response to the same not-yet-a-lawyer letter from the owner of the trademark on Clue-by-Four. (Thanks to One Pot Meal for the link.)

Hue-y Decimal System

Trevor has posted a photo of his bookshelves on which he's sorted his books by color.

Digital Autographs

I somehow missed the landmark moment in Akma's blogging of a talk that Larry Lessig gave at Northwestern in April. Included in Akma's coverage is Larry's 100% genuine digital autograph.

Have we at last found an incontestable use for strict digital rights management software?

European Blogging Rules

All hail Declan McCullagh. E.g., a couple of days ago he covered the Council of Europe's all-but-final proposal that would require " Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs" to offer a "right of reply." The proposal is absurdly detailed. In fact, it's just plain absurd.

In honor of this proposal, I am turning off the comments capability for this blog entry.

Hatch the Pirate

According to Declan:

On Wednesday, Hatch came under attack for allegedly being a copyright pirate himself. His hatch.senate.gov Web site's menus use JavaScript code created by the U.K. company Milonic Solutions. Milonic Solutions charges between $35 and $900 for the right to obtain a license number for its JavaScript menu, but Hatch's site does not include a license number. Instead, this comment appears in the site's HTML code: "i am the license for the menu (duh)."

Hatch is, of course, the senator who suggested two days ago that enabling copyright holders to destroy the machines of violators would be a darn fine way to enforce copyrights.

The online world is so messy that we're all pirates one way or another. Find a machine that doesn't have material on it that even unintentionally violates someone's copyright. Likewise, find a cubicle or a refrigerator door that's pure. Find a copying machine that has never been used to violate someone's copyright. Shall we blow 'em all up? Or should decide that computers are too inflexible to enforce copyright, whether it's by not letting us copy a frame of a DVD or by melting our hard drives. We need more elbow room than a Terminator can ever understand.

Thanks to Greg for the link.

How Verisign Is Changing What's Ours

Eric Norlin flags an important development from Verisign and explains its importance.

Kurzweil on Self

Here's Ray Kurzweil on the nature of the self, in his generous and excellent article on Wolfram's A New Kind of Science:

If I ask the question, 'Who am I?' I could conclude that, perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain.

However, the specific set of particles that comprise my body and brain are completely different from the atoms and molecules than comprised me only a short while (on the order of weeks) ago. We know that most of our cells are turned over in a matter of weeks. Even those that persist longer (e.g., neurons) nonetheless change their component molecules in a matter of weeks.

So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum from my past self. From this perspective I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules (of water) change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.

From this Kurzweil seems to conclude — fallaciously — that the self is merely formal. That is, the substance is irrelevant. Therefore, other stuff with the same form is just as much the self. Thus, strong AI is possible.

The fallacy is in thinking that if the stuff of X changes, all that counts is what remains constant, i.e. the pattern, and the pattern could be moved onto new types of material which would be an X just as real and fully as the original. Here's a counterexample: A restaurant is constantly bringing in, cooking, and serving new food-stuff. All that remains constant are the patterns: the menus and the recipes. Therefore, if we instantiated the same menus and recipes in non-food stuff, it'd still be the same great restaurant. (Remember, Kurzweil isn't talking about re-creating the pattern of person X in flesh but in an entirely different medium, a program running on silicon, where the pattern is actually even more abstract than a 1:1 relationship.)

I'm perfectly happy to say that life is an emergent property of our carbon-based molecules. Consciousness, too. I am not an essentialist who thinks that somewhere there's a soul, ghost or life force that exists independent of the body. (Actually, I'm agnostic on the topic, mainly because a universe in which my wife's soul doesn't continue is not only unjust, it's just plain stupid.) But emergent properties often (always?) inhere in that from which they emerge: if, say, democracy emerges from the interaction of free individuals, you can't say that the same pattern when expressed on paper is a democracy; you need the free individuals for that.

I can put this more simply: We are bodies. Flesh rulz.

By the way, I'm going to go to the first day of Wolfram's 3-day conference on his new kind of science.

Around the world in three steps

Michele Costantini's Italian blog (with many entries in English) points to a blog entry by Hossein Drakhshan that points to a BBC report on Iranians' feelings about the US.

Michele also has a link to a suggestion by Eve Tushnet that the US encourage yet more blogging in Iran.

PC Hell continues

Guess what's back in the shop? Yes, my new computer has gone back to its birthplace yet again.

Yesterday I discovered that the machine was crashing to a cold boot - no blue screen of death, no hanging in hyperspace - because one of the two HyperX 512MB RAM chips is defective. At least that seemed to be the problem: when I left chip A in and ran a diagnostic, the system crashed, but B completed the diagnostics fine.

So, I was feeling pretty good until a few minutes later I realized that I was off line because the built-in ethernet card was no longer functioning. So, back it all goes to my local computer shop where they're watching whatever profit they made get eaten by the labor they're putting. They're nice guys, but I do sort of want to have a working PC at the end of this...

A woman's truth

Halley retells the history of business, blogging, voice and truth with a woman as the heroine. It's a compelling story.

Voice

Voice is truth's body.

Maybe.

Nexcerpt the Clipping Service

My efriend and very funny guy Gary Stock writes about the Nexcerpt service he provides:

Nexcerpt now scans over 35,000 brand new articles every day — and more folks should be taking advantage of all that data! If anyone would like to clip or publish with Nexcerpt — up to ten queries of any complexity, excerpts are automatic — they could take a quick guided tour: ...and sign up for a free trial account.

It works real good for me.

True Geek

In the new version of Dreamweaver, if you want to change the default extension from .htm to .html, the configuration panel explains: You can change the default extension in the document type XML file."

Yes, you have to learn XML to change the default extension. In the next version, I hear that changing the font size will be a simple 3 step process:

1. Download the source code.

2. Type in the octal representing the new value.

3. Recompile.

Voila!

Light blogging day

I'm probably not going to have a lot of time for blogging today. I'm reinstalling software for the 3rd or 97th time; I've lost track.

Except for one gigantic crash-to-black yesterday that dimmed the neighborhood's lights, the new PC is doing well.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Order

Here's something blindingly obvious, really just a spin on what has been said elsewhere:

Most (?) ordering schemes apply an externally-devised order to the stuff to be ordered: alphabetic order is not something built into the books on your shelf. Or, in the case of Trevor Bechtel, while the color of a book's binding is clearly part of the book, the idea of ordering them on a shelf by color comes purely from Trevor.

Hyperlinks aren't like that. They build into the page itself its place in the webby universe.

Is there something interesting about this other than it's how web spaces construct themselves?

The Globe on Blogs

The Boston Globe today runs an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Business Section on the Weblogs Business Strategy conference last week:

Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what they know. Now give these workers an internal corporate blog, and encourage them to use it. Let them natter away on every topic that intrigues them. Harvest and index the results. You've mapped your workers' brains. With a few keystrokes, a manager can find out who's been blogging about skiing or bowling or restoring classic cars — just the thing when you're trying to sell something to an avid collector of '64 Mustangs. The company's hidden experts will cheerfully reveal themselves, and the firm's institutional memory gets an upgrade.

By the way, the link above will decay in a day or two. And, in any case, you won't get to see the big photo in the paper version of me and Doc.

Marc's Vision

Marc Canter explains the vision behind Broadband Mechanics. This is from the end of his essay:

The idea is that all of us together can equal what Microsoft is working on – which they call Longhorn.

It’s possible that an inter-connecting world of micro-content servers and RSS aware tools can create a distributed, open source, web services based People’s Mesh.

Longhorn and Apple’s iLife will be the litmus we will compare our ‘People’s Mesh to. The goal would be to equal their functionality, but have it free and open for us all to use.

You can see part of that vision instantiated in a WebOutliner demo. (The WebOutliner will be one of the first apps to support threadsML, by the way.)

Betsy Fresh on Devine

Here the autobiographical paragraph from a book proposal Betsy Devine is circulating:

Betsy Devine has parlayed a master's degree in engineering from Princeton into a high-powered 30-year sabbatical. She is the C++ programming genius behind "Funny Bits From Your Talking Chips," whose free shareware version delighted Mac users worldwide and whose $25 version has sold exactly one copy. Her enormous collection of jokes, barely tapped by this book, is founded on years of nerd symbiosis in Princeton, Cambridge, and on the World Wide Web. Other distinctions include making microwave popcorn in Einstein's kitchen and two years as captain of the Princeton Eulers—the world's most mathematical softball team, and probably one of the few teams in history to have a Fields Medalist playing second base and a MacArthur Prize winner at shortstop (Betsy was worse than either.) Her weblog "Funny Ha-Ha Or Funny Peculiar?" is universally granted to be both.

Man, I admire that paragraph as a piece of writing.

It comes from Frank Paynter's interview with the devine Ms. Betsy. Frank's interview is, as always, funny haha and funny peculiar...and peculiarly revelatory.

Gary's Fathers Day

There's something lovely about Gary's Fathers Day blog.

Technology Breakthrough

At long last a technology that answers the perpetual question: "Now where did I put that darn sheep?"

And it's brought to you by Destron-Fearing, Inc., whose tagline is — or at least ought to be — "Fear your Destron, Earthlings!"

PC Hell: A Glimmer of Hope

Not that you should give a rat's tuchus about my personal PC Meltdown Hell, but the local PC store that put the system together thinks it's isolated the problem. They've managed to get XP loaded onto the new 120Gb hard drive, but only by taking out one of the system's two memory 512Mb chips. The memory chips test as good, but if both are in at the same time, they get the same random hard drive writing errors that kept me up until 3 last night. They're going to try updating the board's BIOS to see if it fixes what looks like an incompatibility between the dual channel mobo and the RAM. (Or is it the RAM that's dual channel?)

FWIW, it's an ASUS P4P800 Delux motherboard with two Kingston HyperX 512Mb memory chips.

Update: The BIOS update seems to have done the trick, but the store's going to keep the machine until Monday morning to see if it makes it through the weekend.

Thanks for all the great discussion on the comment board.

Everything I Know about String Theory

Last night I found myself standing next to Ashok Das at a high school graduation party for the daughter of a mutual friend. Prof. Das, a leading thinker in the field of string theory and a member of the Royal Society, let me pump him with dumbass questions, even though it was obvious that I couldn't possibly understand any answer that wouldn't require a cab ride to get within hailing distance of an approximation. It's tough grasping string theory if you took your last math class in 11th grade, even if you did read half of Elegant Universe two summers ago before it was stolen along with the rest of your luggage on the first day of your vacation. Nevertheless, he was totally gracious.

I said something like: "String theory is a model. Some models are useful because of their explanatory power without any claim being made that they are essentially like that which they're modeling. Is string theory like that? Do string theorists believe that there are actually strings extended in space, or is that merely a convenient way to talk about the math?" Prof. Das said yes, it's not as if there are strings, there actually are strings that actually vibrate.

"Actual strings extended in space?" I asked, since I hadn't expected that answer. Yes, he replied, although of course it's 9-dimensional space. (Well, obviously!)

"Is string theory believed because of its explanatory power, or is there - or could there be - experimental evidence?" Dr. Das said that there are ongoing experiments in gravitational effects at extremely short distances that could help confirm that matter/energy becomes 9-dimensional, which would help confirm the theory.

"So, strings actually vibrate, back and forth. Which means they're in time," I said, not meaning that they vibrate synchronously. "It seems that as we reduce space and matter in scale," I said, "we get discontinuities: quanta are really really unlike Newtonian bodies. But do we get the same sort of discontinuity in time? At some small interval, does time become as weird as space does at a similar scale?" Dr. Das said that the time in which strings vibrate is so small that it does become unlike macro time. But then dessert was being served. Besides, I'd left my 60 extra IQ points add-on (I got it at eBay) in the pocket of my other pants.

There's a really good chance that I got part or all of the above wrong.

What the hell???

Want a puzzle?

I'm sitting here with a new PC. Well, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and power supply are new. Everything else is from my old computer, including 3 hard drives. The 80MB drive is fine. The 60MB seems confused. The 120 is one day old.

My local computer store cloned the 60 onto the 120. I watched them do it. It all checked out.

They assembled the computer for me; I've done it too many times to want to do it ever again. The 120 is the master, the 60 is a slave, and the 80 is attached to an ATA card. I boot up from the Windows XP Pro CD. It seems to go fine until it actually begins installing on the 120. As it's transferring setup files from the CD to the 120, I start getting error messages about not being able to transfer this or that file. And I have not been able to get past that point even though I have:

• Repartitioned and reformatted the 120 , via the Windows setup disk

• Installed from a copy of my original Windows CD (a copy that makes me liable to the severe penalties of the DMCA, by the way)

• Tried installing from the second of the two CD players in my machine

This makes no sense to me. It sounds like it's a problem with the 120, but I've partitioned and formatted it without any problem.

It's 2:15am. I'm going to sleep and will take the machine back tomorrow at 9. Anyone have any bright ideas? ("Get a Mac" just isn't funny.)

What's up with Daypop

File this under Ego Surfing, but I just saw that my blog is at the top of the list of Daypop "Posts." Daypop explains: "This Top Posts page is for following the most popular weblogging posts that are making the rounds in the blogging world." But I don't get it. The link isn't to a post but to the top level of my blog, as is true for many of the items on the list. And the DayPop Top 40 now looks like a list of top blogs, not the current set of most linked-to blog entries, which it used to be. Does anyone understand this? My ego wants to know!

Update: As several of you noted, the DayPop home page notes that several of its services are down. That's what I get for linking to its inner pages.

Plugging the local PC store

I normally don't write about my daily activities, but I'm so wrapped up in my little world of PC pain that it's driven everything else out of my mind (except for the occasional negative book review). My computer crashed so hard yesterday morning that the crater on my desktop is still smoking.

The storefront where I've bought my last n computers really came through. No, they couldn't salvage my PC, but they did manage to clone the drive with my backups on it. Tomorrow they'll put together a new computer for me - a screamer, by the way - which I'll then bring home and spend 30+ hours installing the software on. But this time, it'll be with some confidence that it may last longer than 31 hours.

The store is ICG Computer at 358 Boylston Street (on Route 9 at Cyprus St.) in Brookline, MA. Ray helps you figure out what you need, gives you a great price, and remembers you the next time. His staff - two young hardware geeks - are ultra-technical and friendly. If you live around Boston, give Ray a visit the next time you need a computer. Phone: 617-738-5289.

And, no, I'm not bartering a blog mention for computer parts, you cynical bastards. It's just such a relief to be dealing with a small store crammed with technical smarts after wandering down the double-wide aisles of the local computer megamart. Plus, Ray's a good, honest hard-working guy...probably just like the people in your own local storefront computer store.

Dr. Dobbs and the Problem with Small Pieces

Michael Swaine, editor-at-large of the estimable Dr. Dobb's Journal, doesn't like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. But he doesn't like it for the right reasons: He disagrees with the ideas in it. The way he disagrees points to a deeper problem with the book. And with my life.

Apparently, I set his teeth on edge in Cluetrain by insisting, in Michael's words, "that the fundamental unit of life is the group and that individual human beings only have meaning or worth as members." In fact, Michael is so convinced that that's wrong that he assumes that I must be doing some well-intentioned lying, in the good ol' fashioned "The poets tell many a lie" sense:

Now, I suspect that he realizes that this is not the case: He regards it as a useful fiction, and offers it up as one of several Lies to Live By. Personally, I think that valuing bloodless abstractions above flesh-and-blood humans is both antihuman and dangerous...

Actually, I have to agree with myself on this one. I don't think groups are fictions. They aren't the same sort of thing as individuals, of course, but a view that says that only individuals are real — and that groups like families and communities are therefore fictions and lies — strikes me as overly strict in its understanding of what the meaning of "is" is. (Who would have thought that Bill Clinton would be remembered as a metaphysician?) Nor do I think groups are abstractions any more than the concept of a self is an abstraction. (Humans aren't just "flesh and blood.") But it doesn't follow from the acknowledgement that groups are real and are formative of individuals that groups should have totalitarian power over individuals. It's just not that binary. We've been working for millennia on getting the complex mix of rights and obligations right.

The same issue arises for Michael in Small Pieces. He says the book recommends abandoning ideas like individualism and that the world is independent of our awareness:

He is only suggesting that we jettison these truths and live by lies on the Web, as I understand him. He's not talking about "real" life. The Web is a new world that we are creating, Weinberger says. Why not make up better rules than those we live by in the "real" one?

Michael then reasonably objects that we're unlikely to be able to agree on the new values we're creating in cyberspace. No arguing with that. As he says, "we can't settle on rules for running a mailing list..."

But, the book doesn't suggest that we jettison truths about reality and individuality, etc. Rather, it says that our traditional ideas about such things are alienating. For example: (1) The focus on reality as that which exists independent of us drives a wedge between reality and meaning. (2) This split is untrue to our everyday, real-world lived experience, which is of a world of meaning. (3) The dismissing as fictitious of all that is dependent on our awareness — i.e., the claim that groups are unreal because they aren't flesh-and-blood — is itself a value judgment. So, in Small Pieces I'm not arguing that we adopt some "Lies to Live By." I'm suggesting that a description of our life on the Web unveils some truths we already live by in the real world. Further, the Web appeals so deeply to so many of us because it offers a haven free of our real-world alienation from those truths.

Michael thinks I'm up to something different because my description of Web life — and of the real world — seems just so thoroughly wrong to him. He and I are left without a lot of recourse. At one point when discussing my claim that our rugged individualism makes us unhappy and lonely, Michael writes "I'd like to see the data on that, David." Even if there are some statistics (e.g., Putnam's Bowling Alone), the correlation of psychology and metaphysics is always going to be, um, a little shaky.

Small Pieces proceeds, to put it grandly, phenomenologically. Phenomenology tries to uncover experience. Of course, "uncover" is a loaded term since it implies there's something there to be uncovered. So, perhaps I should say that phenomenology points at stuff and says "See?" If you don't see, phenomenology doesn't have a way of proving it to you. That's a huge stinking problem. And, of course, it introduces the observer into the equation: could it be that you don't see what I see because I'm who I am and you're not? To which the phenomenologist replies: "Oh yeah? You wanna make something out of it??" After which the phenomenologist puts an ice pack on his broken nose and replies that the whole point is that the observer is always already in the equation and that experience is indeed and obviously conditioned by culture and language and that the idea that certainty is the only acceptable criterion for truth is itself a highly cultural/historical idea. But what it comes down to is: "See?"

I wish I had another way to proceed. I like the cool slap of a clean proof. But for the sort of issues I care about, I'm stuck with a way of thinking that is indeed more like writing fiction than like writing science, not because it's less true than science but because it's clarifying only if it clarifies. But that's inevitable if you want to talk not about the world so much as about our world. And both are conversations worth having, IMO.

If you're not a subscriber to Dr. Dobbs but want to read Michael's review, it'll cost you $5 for 72 hours of access, which strikes me as pretty pricey for a narrow time-slot.

Michael's blog is lively, informative and opinionated. No surprise there.

Kaboom rel. 3.0

Guess whose hard drive crapped out again? Third time in a week, second time for this particular hard drive.

Guess who's facing spending another 30+ hours reloading the same goddamn software and rebuilding his work environment?

Guess who's wishing he'd named his new 180G drive "WESTERN DIGITAL SUCKS"?

Guess who's ready to take a job pounding used bricks so long as it doesn't involve any data entry?

Silence Is Untrademarked

Our local AMC movie theater runs a clip before each movie reminding us that Silence is Golden. Of course, they also slap a "registered trademark" sign on the phrase thusly:

Silence Is Golden®

Oh sure. And I wrote the lyrics to the taunt "Nah nah nah nah nah nah"®. (Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary wrote the music).

Gimme a freakin' break!

AlwaysOn Debate

Kris in a comment on my blogging of the last session of the Weblog Business Strategies makes a damn fine point:

I find it ironic that the "real webloggers" (whoever that is) reclaim the term "weblog". If I remember correctly it was the makers of weblog software and other A-list webloggers who diluted the term "weblog" from the beginning. They called every site that was made with weblog software a weblog to prove that weblogs are the next big thing.

So, why is anyone upset that Tony Perkins claims that his AlwaysOn site is a weblog or even a "super-weblog"? Does the phrase "reaping what you sow" have any relevance here?

It sure does. But that's why at the conference I said that I don't think this is a semantic issue. Or as Alex Golub writes also in the comments section: "Tell me what /problem/ you are trying to solve by asking that question." Exactly.

If you really don't know what weblog is, it's not hard to explain. You point to some uncontested examples of blogs — say, Dave's and Doc's — and you say something like, "See? It's a web site where an individual can talk about what matters to her/him, generally in relatively short bursts, generally every day, and with lots of links." We can natter over that "definition," but I'd say that now you know pretty much what people mean by "blog." And, of course, you acknowledge that individual blogs may not have all of those characteristics, that there are borderline cases, etc. That it's ambiguous isn't a criticism of a definition. It's just how language works; language is necessarily ambiguous, but that's another story.

At yesterday's blogging conference, everyone knew what a blog is. We might disagree about whether Slashdot or Drudge should count as a blog, but no one would disagree that Dave and Doc are writing blogs. And fundamentally that's what "knowing what a blog is" means.

No, the question wasn't about semantics. It was about politics, about the effect on our connected existence of Tony proclaiming loudly that AO is a weblog. Mixed in was certainly some people's antipathy towards Tony and AO. (I entered this with no feelings about Tony whatsoever and a with a genuine hope that AO succeeds if only because every business failure hurts the Net.) Those extraneous feelings aside, there's still a genuine complaint against how AO is using the term.

The part of AO that might be considered bloggy is pretty clearly a commenting or letters-to-the-editor capability. That's good to see, and people are writing trenchant commentary. But it's missing some core stuff that's central to understanding why bloggery is important: Members don't get a home page where I can go to read what they've written today. The "members profile" page doesn't count even though it has a linked list of previous posts. This matters (to me, anyway) since I think the most important effect of weblogging is that it creates a persistent place on the Web that comes to stand for the person; a blog site is as close as we've come to having a Web self.

Tony is obviously a great marketer. Every time he proclaims AlwaysOn as a "super-blog," he's having an actual effect on the world. People who go to AlwaysOn thinking that it's a prime example of a weblog are going to hear interesting voices — good — but are going to miss what to me is the most important aspect of blogging: the creation of a web of Web selves. That objection is political, not semantics.

Now, it wouldn't take much for AlwaysOn to become truly a "super blog," i.e., a place that offers and aggregates blogs:

Give every member a blog page where her/his posts are shown. And, what the hell, show them in reverse chronological order. Why not!

Preferably, but not essentially, allow members to customize the look of their AlwaysOn blog page. Keep 'em branded with the AlwaysOn title bar, but allow people to decorate their space.

Fix up the Terms of Use so users not only own their words and are liable for their words, but their words aren't perpetually licensed for free to AlwaysOn. We just need some qualifying words assuring us that AlwaysOn won't sell our words without first asking us.

That's all it would take, I believe, for AlwaysOn to turn itself into what is unarguably a blog provider. Think how having your own blog page at AlwaysOn would increase customer loyalty to the site. Win-win! And all it would take is a smidge of software.

[WBS] Expert panel

David Winer is hugging Tony Perkins. Also on the panel: Rebecca Lieb of internet.com and Jason Shellen of Blogger, who are not hugging. This is a panel where the Experts answer our questions.

"Do people blog just to say they're blogging?" Surprisingly, Rebecca says yes. Jason replies that it takes staying power to blog for a long time.

"What is a blog?" Dave: It's the style, not the technical features. It's in the unedited voice of the individual. But even that rule can be broken, e.g., group blogs like BoingBoing. But there's a long list of best practices.

Jason Shellen: It consists of posts. Harrumph.com.

Rebecca: "A business blog is an unofficial means of addressing a defined agenda." An individual and honest voice. An open loop.

Tony: He quotes Dave Winer. Dave urges him to give all of AlwaysOn's members their own blog. Tony says they do, but they're disagreeing (again) over what a blog is.

Now we're fighting again over Tony's use/coopting of the word. The crowd is generally tired of the topic. I'm not, although this is no longer the right place to pursue it. For me, the issue is that we — the Blogosphere — have built something special, post by post, day by day. Tony is misappropriating our work for his own purposes. I have nothing against his purposes — I hope AlwaysOnline succeeds — but having him misuse and abuse the term "blog" makes it harder for us to explain what is special about the world we've built together. It harms the growth of blogging. IMO.

Tony wraps up by acknowledging that AlwaysOn isn't a blog. "You can sense it." But he wants to help us expand beyond our "cult." Sure, but Tony should listen about what makes blogs blogs, IMO.

Dave is enlisting Tony in Dave's project of giving a blog to everyone in New Hampshire in order to affect the 2004 presidential election.

[WSB] Christopher Lydon

Lydon was the host and creator of The Connection, a genuinely intelligent talk show on NPR. He's interested in how blogging fits into the attempt to create a national conversation.

He tells about the best caller into the show. She took various names but settled on "Amber" and took on the most powerful articulate guests. "When she nailed Gore Vidal to the wall, I knew I wanted to meet her." She turned out to be an illegal immigrant with insight and intelligence and passion. He told Dave Winer about this and Dave said "That's the blogger."

Christopher worked for the NY Times for ten years. For him, the fall of Raines is an epochal event. But Jayson Blair is just a tiny bit of the picture. The crisis is really due to the fact that "we're not talking straight with one another." And "the encroachment of electronic media." And, fundamentally, a dissatisfaction with the conversation around Iraq: we were lied to.

"We could put together a 2 hour radio show tomorrow that's just as interesting and knowledgeable as the NY Times." "We are being induced to shake off the phony authority of the NY Times."

But he also wants to complain about BlogWorld: Too techie. Too much quoting and not enough writing. Too rude. Too much hip shooting and ideological response. But it is genuinely open and free and democratic.

To Tony: "We're talking about free individuals, not about mass commodities that can be packaged and sold."

How do we aggregate that talent without sitting on it? "We're in the process of designing a radio broadcast that draws significantly on blog smarts." How to do it? How often? What time of day? How do you get people to listen? How to make it global?

[WSB] Blogging in Large IT Organizations

Rock Regan, CIO of IT for the State of Connecticut says the Architectural Review Board is composed of 9 different groups. About 40 people are using blogs to capture information, discuss stuff, and make decisions. He wants to use blogs for project management. He wants to capture information by function, not by person. "It's a critical element of organization." The government's motto is "I'm all for progress so long as there's no change." Moderator Phil Windley, former CIO of Utah, smiles.

Phil asks how the culture of blogging is affecting organizations. Bill Seitz says managers need to be aware of how their implicit power can "drive honesty underground" by being heavy-handed in how they deal with blogging. Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads says that blogs can make public what otherwise would be lost in email, improving corporate memory.

Paul Perry of Verizon created private spaces for people to post to as their own private journal. This helped ease them into blogging. "People need to be able to post and make mistakes." And gain their own voice.

Bill finds that encourages structuring ideas into smaller chunks. It makes it easier for people to ask for further explanation.

Phil asks about blogging and KM. Paul Perry chose Tractions as his software because it tracks the links among the blogs. For Paul, KM is the ability to quickly find the best summary or set of ideas. In response to a question from Martin Roell, Paul explains that he allows people to modify the taxonomy of ideas he initiated.

Rather than expecting someone to write up a big report on, say, competitive analysis, Paul encourages people to blog their ideas. That way the report doesn't go stale in two weeks.

(I had to take a phone call and missed the last ten minutes.)

[WSB] Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn is giving a keynote. He's drawn a whole lot of fire over the past 1.5 days, in his absence, because some people think he's been claiming to be a champion blogger (through an actual PR person) even though AlwaysOn isn't actually a blog. I don't know him and have no opinion. He's going to talk about why he's an inappropriate choice as a keynoter and why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur. Then, why "participatory journalism" can be "leveraged" to do great things. Then, he's going to talk about the AlwaysOn network's business model.

"I'm not really a blogger," he says. But he is a "media entrepreneur." He started Upside and Red Herring. While he's a "poseur" in this market (blogging, presumably), "I have never been so excited or had so much fun in my entire professional career" as he's having with AlwaysOn.

It's a great time to be an entrepreneur because the initial work of the Internet (the Bubble) did the loss-leader work of creating a market and infrastructure. He built AlwaysOn for $50K in developer time and $150 sw project ("P Machine"). In 1996, it would have cost millions.

He's done research that confirms that this Internet thing is going to be big with the kids. By 2005, there will be 2B users (half non-PC users), 2B cellphone users. "Wireless is going to be a huge driver." By the end of 2003, every Sony TV will come with a Net address.

Tony has a set of principles for media start-ups. It's stuff like "It's better to bootstrap than go to a board of director meetings" and "Build a community that advertisers care about." Not a lot new here.

Tony's "entrepreneurial lightbulbs": "Voyeurism is good for stickiness." Open Source means that the guys who are usually interviewed now post their ideas directly. And the "eBayization of Media."

"Open Source Media" means that members can post comments and do so under their own names. You can get context info about members.

AO makes money by sponsorships and advertisements, and by producing events. Also, paid members receive premier services. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

"So, why am I here? Most importantly, to get feedback because I'm not from the community." He wants to find partners, to engage with developers over "identity" issues, etc.

Q: Could you quantify the size of the opportunity for bloggers?

A: You could build a network around every community gathered around a subscription.

Q: (Dave Winer) If you're successful at what you do, how will what you do be like a weblog?

A: I'm giving people a chance to participate.

Dave and Tony go at it, to no avail.

Q: (Halley) What happens when members post stuff that criticizes the site's sponsors?

A: The sponsors are prepared for that.

A kerfuffle breaks out about whether AlwaysOn is a blog. IMO, the only issue is whether Tony is attempting to coopt the term "blog."

[WSB] Law and Blogs

This is an illustrious set of panelists.

Denise Howell says there are risks to blogging just as there are to maintaining any web site. People do it anyway "because the price of not being on the Web is just too high." Blogs are even riskier than static Web pages because there's greater employee involvement, speedier updates, more interaction and more visiblity. Liabilities include defamation (knowingly publishing something false and harmful) or Corporate Disparagement. It's not clear, says Denise, how the First Amendment applies. [I thought we repealed that pesky Amendment a couple of years ago.] There's also the misappropriation of information or the name and likeness of individuals. In general, you ask people permission and set rules and policies. She cites Groove Network's statement on blogs as a model. "The laws don't go away," she says.

John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Centere says he's learned three things from launching the Harvard blogging initiative :1. Be wary of becoming an ISP. He's found dozens and dozens of definitions in the law about who is an ISP. At least 40 different ways. "The US law is a complete mess in the Internet space." So, get a lawyer to work it through. 2. Be prepared for take-off. 3. And blogs are good for the Web. John is hugely enthusiastic about blogging but recommends that we be aware of the risks. He also urges people to use Creative Commons licenses.

Catherine Reuben talks about blogging and employee relations. Employers can read the blog of a prospective employee. And they can read — and act on — what an employee writes in her personal blog; the First Amendment restricts the government, but not business. Employees can also be disallowed from blogging that gives away something of value, e.g., the CNN reporter who was also blogging. Employee don'ts: Don't do it on company time. Don't reveal your employer. Don't "fire off stuff you wouldn't want a potential employee to see." Don't automatically sign your confidentiality or "intellectual property" agreements; you have more bargaining power than you think. If you are an analyst, your employer may own what you write. Employers should have a reasonable, clear confidentiality agreement. They should have a clear policy about employee Web sites and blogs. It's a huge area of legal uncertainty...

Maurice Ringel is a lawyer who did 20 years as a marketing and ad guy. He says a blog may be considered a form of advertising, even if it's totally unintentional. It's not yet clear which bodies may enforce regulations against bloggers somehow conceived as advertising.

Arik Hesseldahl is senior editor of Forbes.com. He passes everything he writes through the site's lawyer. (I got interrupted and missed his comments. Sorry.)

[WSB] Dan Bricklin's Conference Photos

Dan has posted his conference photos...

[WSB] Blogging's Effect on Traditional Media

(First of all, the 6th grade jazz band is pretty damn amazing. My son included.)

Moderator David Schnaider is fed up sloppy writing, big egos and people speaking without knowing about the topic. "And that's why I'm not going to watch the Fox 10 O'Clock News any more."

Now each of the panelists gets ten minutes to talk.

Jeff Jarvis: "Weblogs are the highest form of audience content" because: 1. We put our names on it; 2. Linking means the cream rises to the top; 3. The interactivity improves quality. Weblogs have advantages over traditional media: more tmely, more variety, highly voiced, great tools, and hugely interactive. Blogs are "the fastest, cheapest publishing tools with the widest distribution ever." Marketers will figure this out and, if they're smart, will treat bloggers as "influencers" without asking anyone to hide the relationship.

Elizabeth Spiers of Gawker says her blog gets covered by the media a lot in part because she writes about media and it's a narcissistic industry. Some of the print gossip columns apparently routinely take stuff from her blog. So, not only is her site better than the print media, she is the source of the news.

Rafat Ali runs PaidContent.org. He is a journalist interest in new ways for e-content to make money. His premise is that weblogs will replace trade web sites: they're timelier, leaner, and can provide saturation coverage. And, he stresses that the Open Source ethic gives trade weblogs a big advantage. Put together a blog + database + research rep[orts, and you do business, but a blog + nothing is a hobby. And, says Rafat, blogs have killed the newsletter business. [Hell, judging from how often I now bring out my newsletter, JOHO, it's killed the free newsletter "business." JOHO lives. But barely.]

Vin Crosbie says the traditional media are still dismissive of blogging. But keeping a journal isn't a fad; it's part of human nature, he says. Further, blogging is journalism so long as it's honest and accurate. His advice to the media is: Let the people with expertise and enthusiasm blog. Do it because it's a service to your readers and also so you won't lose traffic to bloggers. It'll take journalists a few years to figure it out, but they'll come around.

Question: What will the media landscape be like in 5 years? And which money streams will have shifted?

Jeff says: We don't know. The audience is spreading out, e.g., we've gone from three networks to hundreds. That makes it harder for people to make money. The ad industry will figure out that this is a great opportunity for "targeting." [All hail Gonzo Marketing.]

Question: What about aggregation?

Jeff: People don't have time to read everything. "The media need to learn that short isn't dumb. Short is smart."

BusinessWeek on Weblogs

BusinessWeek Online has posted an article on blogging. I haven't read it yet.

[WSB] Gone Fishin'

I'm going to have to miss the opening session or two of the conference because it's our 12-year-old's end-of-school concert and awards ceremony. Looking forward to it.

Meta-blogging: Denise and Heath Row are doing their usual astounding jobs of detailed, comprehensive live blogging. Joi Ito has the best list I've seen of conference bloggers. And here's an aggregation site that some of the conference bloggers are using, set up by Martin Röll who's visiting from the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. (Martin is the first person I've ever met from a fictitious country.)

[WSB] Where Tools Are Going

Doc is moderating. Great set of panelists. Doc asks where tools are going.

Jason Shellen of Blogger: Blogger is playing catchup. They were building a tool for web designers originally. They now have 1.5M registered users. So, they're doing a major code revision. He agrees with Tim Appnel on the previous panel that the tools will fade away; you won't notice them or recognize them as blogging tools.

Bob Frankston: We need to try out many more ideas. We need more people to do experimental development

Dan Bricklin: 1. You have to integrate your blog with the rest of your web site. 2. The current generation of blog tools take care of the housekeeping. This is like VisiCalc and 1-2-3. We're not yet at the level of Excel. One of the important new capacities will be multimedia. But we don't know what will be invented.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type. The immediate future for them is a service for beginning bloggers. More generally, MT thinks that "the anatomy of the weblog has been decided," e.g., blogroll, permalink, TrackBack, etc. The goal should be to work backwards from what people are doing with blogs to provide them with the tools they need.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter: You shoudn't have to blog only from your PC. Their research shows that we want at least two bloggable devices.

John Robb of Userland: They're getting ready to release Frontier 9 with spiffy new features. On the Radio side, they're looking forward to synching up with multiple desktops. There will be continuing need for desktop clients as more multimedia gets included.

Jason tells us to check QLogger.com, whose creator is in the audience.

Anil: We can broaden publishing so that you can present a much fuller picture of yourself, including potentially all the audio you hear all day. But then we'll probably want to control who sees/hears what, he says.

Bob says we'll get very good at creating "synthetic personalities."

Doc is now dinging the panelists for features. Dave has just promised to add the ability to add a link within Radio without having to go to a menu.

Kerfuffle about what to call MovableType's code: Open Source? Nah. Editable source? Yeah. The panel did not go off the rails on this the way it wanted to.

Doc wants to be able to serve up photos from his desktop. Dan says that that is unlikely to come through blogging since blogging is too complex; people will want to dump their photos onto the machine and have magic happen. (Major paraphrasing.) Anil wants to be able to store it in The Cloud rather than having to connect up at home.

Bob says the real innovation is going to come out of Japan.

[WSB] Conference Boggers

Here's a list of conference bloggers, lifted directly from Joi Ito.

[WSB] Blogs and/as Content Management

Speakers: Timothy Appnel, Mike Amundsen of EraServer.net, Bill French of MyST, John Robb of Userland, Willilam Stow of Tsunamin, and Adam Weinroth of Easyjournal.

The panel is trying to disambiguate blogs and content management systems. Blogs are a type of content but they're tough to pigeon-hole. Willilam Snow warns about thinking about blogs are content to be managed. CMS is about control, he says, which will kill what's valuable about blogs. Mike says, "No one talks about content management for email" and the same will happen for blogs and other content.

The panel generallly agrees that blogging will get so easy that it will practically disappear from notice: you'll just do it. Tim says that we're going to see more and more widgets for doing webby stuff, apps will be integrated, and blogging will be lumped in with other ways of putting stuff onto the Web.

(Meanwhile, I'm sitting next to Doc who squirms every time someone calls blogging "content." In fact he just took the mike and said: "I write a blog. I don't produce content. I do that on the john.")

Similarity

At the back of the conference are some round tables at which people are sitting, laptops sprawling. They're doing what the rest of us are doing: listening but also IM'ing, checking email from time to time, looking up links. Somehow it reminds me being at a drive-in: there's a movie playing at the front, but attending to it is a social event.

Strategies and Tips

"Strategies and Tips for Business Blogging Success."

I missed the first couple of speakers because I was decompressing from my keynote. Ok, so actually I was talking with Bob Frankston.

Halley describes how she came to blogging. She started writing about her father's dying. Now, of course, her blog is lustily intellectual and intellectually lusty.

How closely should the content of a business blog be managed? Major Chris Chambers of the Army says that you should find "trusted agents" who will express themselves in appropriate ways. Halley was impressed with Chris' blogging from Afghanistan; it had a lot of voice and established a "customer intimacy." The Army uses a broad array of networked technology but not blogs, in part because of security issues. (Adina raises issues in her blog coverage.)

Greg Lloyd of Traction Software says that on the West Coast, police organizations are using weblogs as a way to pull together information from all over.

Don White says that the conference is more focused on personal expression than on blogs that are about expertise; the latter will drive blogging into the corporation.

Well moderated by John Lawlor of Blogs4Business.

[WBS] Managing a Business Blog

Panelists: Jason Butler of the online employment capability of BostonWorks.com. Adina Levin (my old friend) of Socialtext [Disclosure: me and everyone else is on their board of advisors.] Biz Stone, author of Blogging. Jimmy Guterman is moderating.

The panel discusses practical tips for corporate blogging. What tools? What policies? How to make the case to management? Unfortunately, I have been working on my keynote for this afternoon and haven't been paying enough attention to the panel.

Here's the ending point: Adina discusses how software for corporate-wide blogging has to be different from that of personal blogging. She adds that internal Technorati's will arise to capture and measure the interlinking of weblogs. Good point. And anything that makes money for David Sifry I'm totally in favor of.

[WSB] List of live bloggers

Joi Ito has a list of people live blogging from the Weblog Business Strategies conference.

[WBS] Threat or Opportunity

"Are Weblogs a Threat or Opportunity for Enterprises?" Panelists include Rick Bruner, Beth Goza, Michael O'Connor Clarke, Carin Warner, Jeff Mooney. They are PR folks, a journalist, and a Microsoft employee who took down her blog for corporate reasons.

"The only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy," says Beth Goza (of Microsoft) to applause: just let 'em blog. "Blogs personalize this big, monolithic corporations and expose the face that they're really a bunch of passionate people..." It's "marketing by default," i.e., unintentional marketing.

Rick Bruner asks the eternal question: What is a blog? We shouldn't assume, he says, that a blog has to be all rant-y. Michael O'Connor Clarke disagrees: you can't take the personality out of blogs. Dan Bricklin from the audience says that a blog should have either personality or expertise and possibly both. The panel seems more focused on personality perhaps because the panelists are mainly PR and media people.

Beth, who began by saying she's nervous, keeps banging out the quotable insights: "I think of blogs as the anti-popup" because blogs pull rather than push.

Michael advises CEOs: "If you believe that what your company is good and right, get the hell out of the way" and let people blog.

The panelists are excellent. And funny. (I'm a big fan of my old friend, Michael O'Connor Clarke.) Excellent. It might have been even better if it hadn't been so pro-blog, to give some of the issues a heavier workover. (The only truth is bruised truth?)

[WBS] Dave Winer

Dave is keynoting. He takes his usual expansive view of what is a blog. And, he gently chides Michael Gartenberg for saying that you should keep your business blog free of personal opinion. Dave says that by including personal stuff you give your customers, clients and partners a sense of who you are.

He sees blogging as part of a much broader social change: speaking in your own voice, admitting that you're not perfect. (At one point Dave used "We make shitty software" as a disclaimer for his company.) He ties blogs to The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Dave has an equally expansive view of journalism: if you disclose your conflicts of interest and you don't lie, you're a journalist. That allows for a lot of overlap. Dave takes a question: Doesn't journalism have to be edited? Dave says that editing doesn't always improve the article. Doc says that all of his stuff is edited: some gets edited by an editor and some gets edited by his readers. Now there's an audience free-for-all about the differences between blogging and journalism. Few hold out for a strong distinction. (Jeff Jarvis argues for a difference between having a trained journalist reporting from a site and a blogger commenting on it.)

Very interactive for a keynote. And his last line: "Idealism: Don't knock it until you've tried it."

[WBS] Conference Aggregator

A TopicExchanage has been set up to aggregate conference blogs.

If you're blogging the conference, you ping http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_business_strategies_conference/

Thanks, Martin Roell, for setting this up and Adina for IM'ing me about it.

BioComputing

As I sit at the conference, I feel neurologically distracted by the need to rebuild my broken hard disk again. I feel like errant bits are jumping my synapses. My connection to my computer apparently has become organic.

[WBS] Need a conference aggregation site

I just took a look at Denise's blog and so far she's doing her usual superb job of live blogging.

We really need a list of who's blogging. Not to mention an aggregation site. h

[WBS] Conference, Day 1

Oy, I'm at another conference. At the moment, as it kicks off, I'm sitting next to The Doc. Michael Gartenberg, VP & Research Director at Jupiter Research, one of the conference sponsors. He says he's nervous about talking to a group of live bloggers because we can catch him out, so he jokingly begins by saying "It seems to me that ..." As Homer would say, it's funny because it's true.

Michael does a good job presenting what's important about weblogging. And unlike what one might expect from an opening address to a business audience about blogging, he stresses the importance of voice, lack of spin, directness...

I'm going to try to avoid over-blogging this conference since the place is lousy with topnotch bloggers. I'm just not sure if I listen better by taking public notes or by listening. We'll see.

Clear signs of doom

And if the simultaneous failure of my blog site and my desktop computer isn't enough proof for you that the Apocalypose is nigh, Us Magazine of June 9 features the following headline on its cover:

Hollywood Wedgies

Run, run!

Totally Hosed

I just spent 30 hours, broken by 4 hours of sleep, rebuilding my desktop computer after my boot disk melted. And now I have to do it all over again. I am sooooo depressed. (I'm writing this from my laptop.)

I replaced the bad boot disk with a 180GB monster from Western Digital for $130 after rebate. Big mistake. It requires an ATA board because it's too big for Windows. But I already had an ATA board in because I have 3 drives and 2 CDs. After the usual couple of hours of trial and error, I got the thing up and running, partitioned into two pieces, one of which (a mere 50GB ) I couldn't format.

After loading all my software (well, not quite all), rebuilding all the pieces, restoring from my 3 daily backups (yes, I'm totally paranoid), I was in pretty good shape and even managed to work on my keynote at the Jupiter Business Blogging conference tomorrow.

In fact, I was feeling so confident that I ran Partition Magic 8 to see if I could get those 50 pesky GBs formatted. As PM started, it told me that some cluster count was being misreported and did I want to fix it. Sure, I said.

Kaboom. The 180MB drive is completely hosed. I can't even figure out how to repartition it at this point. PM's boot disk won't fix it. It's a boat anchor. I'm totally at a loss. It's even too late to go out and get another frigging drive.

I'm depressed. I can't face another 30 hours of installing and tweaking software. And don't tell me that this wouldn't happen with a Mac you bastards.

Back Blogging!

Thanks to Karl, my blog is working again. Woohoo! Thank you, Karl.

Body Thread

Trevor responds to my response to AKMA's posting that was in part a response to my worrying about what the Web tells us about the importance of being embodied.

A quick recap (in order to get everything wrong or at least overstated). I said that since Web selves are so important and yet so disembodied, doesn't this reinforce our alienated belief that bodies don't matter? Trevor said that bodies aren't primarily material: look at communal bodies. I replied that communal bodies, lovely though they are, lack something essential to embodiment. It's not they're immaterial (for Trevor and I agree that bodies aren't just atoms...and Trevor has been helpful in clarifying my thinking on this, for which I thank him). It's that they can't have sex, feel pain, or die. Then I presented a four-step line of thought that allows me to hold the two beliefs I'm trying to coordinate: Our Web selves mirror (or shadow) the consequences of having a body in the real world, e.g., our perception is formed by the fact that we care about ourselves and our world, we have a point of view, etc.

In his latest entry, Trevor takes the four-part "argument" and applies it to communal bodies. It seems to me to fit well in some places and not so well in others. In particular, my way of caring about what happens to my body — the whole pleasure and pain thing — seems to me to work only in a metaphorical or extended sense for communal bodies. Sure, a communal body cares about what happens to it, but its pleasure and pain is way different from what I feel if I break a finger or come to orgasm. But, so what? Once we say that the essence of a body isn't the atoms but what being embodied means to us, we can apply that to immaterial bodies like Web selves and communal selves. We just have to go back afterwards and remember the difference between enjoying a blog thread, finding satisfaction in improving the neighborhood, and having an orgasm. Forgetting that difference would be a real sign of alienated thinking.

Laura and Tripp, students of AKMA's and Trevor's, comment on my four-part argument from their faithful Christian perspectives, raising a whole bunch of deep questions that I am in no position to address but that sound spot on. For example, what's the connection between voice and the Word? And what does incarnation mean, both for us mortals and for a particular carpenter born at the cusp of BCE and AD? Tough for a Jewish atheist-leaning guy to talk about.

Trevor has finished his first year teaching. I can tell from how he talks to students outside of the classroom, including how he blogs, that he is an inspiring teacher.

One man's turmoil is another...

The executive and managing editors of The New York Times resigned today "following more than a month of turmoil in the Times newsroom," according to The Boston Globe.

Funny that turmoil in a real-world newsroom is a cause for resignation whereas turmoil in the distributed newsroom of bloggery is cause for celebration.

Why Blogs Aren't Tivo

And why would you think they are?

Answer: Because you read Simon Dumenco's column in which he somehow fails to notice the difference. Or, more likely (and more to the point), you read Doc's comments on Dumenco's column. There's a germ of truth in what Dumenco says. And since he actually asks bloggers to tell him what he means, I'm happy to oblige.

He's feeling overwhelmed by everything he's supposed to know and think about. By TiVo-ing programs that he then doesn't have time to watch, feels that he's not entirely out of the cultural loop because the show is at least residing on his TiVo disk. Instead, he finds himself reading bloggery about what he didn't have time to actually watch and so he's able to engage in the water-cooler conversations.

But why is this a bad thing? The truth comes out a couple of paragraphs down: People read bloggery about Dumenco's writing rather than reading the writing itself. He does not say (admit?) that this is insulting. Instead, he goes POMO on us and says that this is "interpassivity," like a laugh track that decides for you what is funny. Worse, Dumenco says that TiVo and blogs:

up the ante so dramatically and seamlessly, that they create an entirely different sort of interpassive lifestyle, one that's, well, hyperpassive.

There are only three things wrong with that idea. First, (as Doc points out) blogging is interactive, not passive. Second, even if you only read blogs and never interact with them, that makes blogs as "hyperpassive" as, well, the writings of a columnist. Third, his reasoning about the seamlessness of TiVo and blogs is hooey. He thinks that, unlike TiVo, unwatched video tapes "constantly taunt you, reminding you of their presence." Yeah, but not nearly as much as the list of unwatched shows presented to you every time you turn on TiVo. (His real problem is ontological - he prefers "a physical collection of information" because it "exists" (his emphasis) - but we needn't go there, girlfriend.)

TiVo is a response to the problem that there's too much to watch. Rather than being hyperpassive, TiVo makes every person a monarch in the Kingdom of Couch Potatoes. Think of TiVo as being your own personal channel.

Blogging is a response to the problem that there's too much for any one of us to think about. Conversation is the ur-response to the same problem. Aggregators respond to the next level of too-much-ness. Conversations, blogs and aggregators all "up the ante" not on passivity but on thinking together.

Dumenco's last sentence asks: "Did you read this essay or did you read about it?" Maybe we didn't have time to read the column. Or maybe I get more out of it by reading it via a thoughtful commentary like Doc's that not only clarifies Dumenco's thought but adds to it.

Meanwhile, I suspect the emphasis in Dumenco's last sentence was supposed to be on about. Probably a typo. No problem; I make 'em all the time. Anyway, some blogger no doubt will read Dumenco's writing closer than the editor did, and will notice the error and help make the column just a little bit clearer.

Hunting Down the Evil Doers to Their Tastefully Decorated Caves

Sure, Enron's Ken Lay has escaped indictment for allowing his company to steal billions from its investors and turn its employees into paupers, but after a year of investigations we did manage to nab the pretty lady for selling 4,000 shares on a tip.

Totally irrelevant fact #1: Enron and its executives were the largest single contributors to W's gubernatorial campaign, chipping in $312,500.

Totally irrelevant fact #2: "Enron was Mr. Bush's biggest political patron as he headed into the 2000 presidential election." And after the election, "Enron officials contributed $10,500 to his Florida recount committee, and when the recount was ended, they donated $300,000 for the inaugural celebrations"

Totally irrelevant fact #3: Bush has admitted lying about his relationship to Enron and Ken Lay: "White House officials had more extensive contacts with Enron executives in 2001 than previously disclosed, according to a document released by the Bush administration today in response to a request for information from a Senate committee."

The Bush Policy initiated so successfully in the "War on Terrorism" has been extended to domestic policy: Villify and Distract.

Sigh.

Here's a page that does nothing but list articles about corporate scandals from January 2002 on.

Chip points us to a Democratic Flash on how Bush's tax cuts work out for the rest of us.

Microsoft/AOL Lock-in

Tristan Louis lays out how the Microsoft-AOL/TW detente could eventually lead to a Microsoft lock-in: you wanna see the movies, you gotta buy the platform. It plays nicely into what I've been trying to say about why Applied DRM is scary: No matter how good DRM sounds in theory ("Artists can negotiate deals with their audience...") if Microsoft offers the only/dominant platform for securing content, then the content owners make their stuff work only with the Microsoft platform. It's win-win...so long as you're Microsoft or Jack Valenti.

Dean MeetUp, Boston Style

I went to the local monthly get-together for supporters of Howard Dean last night. These real-world meetings are arranged virtually through MeetUp.com. The meetings all take place on the same day in cities across the country, so you feel some sense of solidarity with the other 31,000 Deanies who have signed up with MeetUp.

The event packed the downtown bar where it was held. Of course, any event is packed so long as the room is small enough. In this case, however, it looked like there were 100-200 people there, continuing the event's growth. Plus, there are now Dean MeetUps taking place in 5-6 cities in Massachusetts.

The brief presentations by the local organizers stressed (boiled down and rephrased): 1. Bush sucks. 2. Diversity rocks. 3. The Internet makes a difference. At least, that's what I heard.

If Dean gets some traction - things are looking up in New Hampshire and Iowa - then being packed into a room of supporters in June '03 will be an "I was there when it started" sort of memory (although, of course, it started way before then in much smaller rooms). If his campaign founders, well, it still felt good to be in a real world room with people willing to work for change.

The strength of a group is determined by the entanglement of its links. There's nothing like the real world for tangling them links quickly and ambiguously.

It also reminded me why I don't hang out in bars.

Up Eclipsing Down: End of an Era

Take a look at a presentation given by David P. Reed (CableLabs' CTO and not that other David P. Reed) to the FCC's Technological Advisory Committee in April. Slide 6 shows the ratio of download traffic to upload traffic trending down from 2.0 to 1.4 in just the months of May to September 2001. There's no data for later than that. Here's a screen capture of the relevant chart:

Is it reasonable to assume that the trend has continued? If so, by now, we're uploading more stuff than we're downloading.

Wow! So much for thinking of the Internet as a broadcast medium.

(Thanks to Dewayne Hendricks for pointing me to this document.)

My Fill of Anthropy

The Happy Tutor is our proxy in a discussion about how the love of humans might actually result in building a better world for humans.

I have a stubborn idea that I know won't work. I once tried writing about it in the rhetoric of a politician because it only sounds plausible if it's in a voice you don't take seriously. So, here it is in PowerPoint format:

The Problem

Those who have the money to give got it by being the one's least like to give it

Business' Secret Prime Mover

It's not greed

It's winning!!!!

(Hence business's love of exclamation points)

Solution: Competitive Philanthropy

Every corporation competes to be the most successful at giving

But what is the metric of success? It used to be money, but...

The New Business Landscape

Despite corporations' best efforts, the Internet is affecting our culture

Internet teaches us to connect directly

Competitive Philanthropy in a Connected Market

Each corporation picks "do-able" projects that require direct connection

International aid groups and charities will arise to manage the projects

E.g., Oxfam builds water purification plants in central Africa for Exxon

The company shamelessly touts its own goodness in the voice of humility, tacitly trying to out-do its competitors

Action Items

Towns, congregations and online communities can do this, too: Let's start.

Get Marketing to work on naming and branding the idea

Elect a president with the Vision Thing

Look, I know this is impractical, implausible and naive. It would require a change in expectations: of course a big corporation will add "lifting up the world" to its mission statement. But, expectations are powerful.

Not powerful enough to give me any hope, of course.

Dean Meetup Tonight

See you at the Howard Dean Meetup tonight.

What's MeetUp? It's an online service that lets people organize real world meetings. Once a month, on the same day, supporters of Howard Dean meet in lots of cities around the country. If you want to go tonight - it's just a meet-and-talk sort of thing - sign up at MeetUp and then show up at 7:00PM at Coogan's, 171 Milk St., Boston, MA (map). (MeetUp seems to be quite a clue-y sort of outfit. Check the "about" page.)

Who's Howard Dean? Oy veh!

End of the World

Excellent piece by David Spector on why the FCC's decision on allowing the congealing of all media into one large scab is very bad news for the Internet.

By the way, David thinks he's arguing against the World of Ends piece that Doc and I wrote, as if we were saying that the Internet will survive all such onslaughts. On the contrary, we wrote the piece precisely because we're worried about clueless government agencies like the FCC making decisions based on ignorance of how the Net's value is anchored in its open architecture. We wrote it because we agree with David that the Net is vulnerable.

Public Domain Petition

Larry Lessig urges us all to sign a petition:

We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don?t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain.

This proposal has received a great deal of support. It is now facing some important lobbyists? opposition. We need a public way to begin to demonstrate who the lobbyists don?t speak for. This is the first step.

And, yes, if Larry Lessig jumped off a bridge, I'd jump off a bridge, too. But we really don't want Larry even thinking of jumping off a bridge, so sign the freaking petition. The Public Domain Enhancement Act would have the effect of making reverting to the public domain the default after 50 years by putting up the lowest conceivable barrier against it. Great idea.

The public domain gives ideas breathing room, and we need some fresh air in this country!

How Webby Are the Candidates?

I've written an article reviewing the candidate's web sites?

Extra Special: Act now and read a table showing exactly how many flags they use on their home pages!

MeetUp for Dean

If you want to get together with other supporters of Howard Dean in your area, the next national set of local meetings (if you know what I mean) is the evening of June 4. Go here to get details.

The Dean campaign is making cool use of this MeetUp facility. And read the staff's blog. Damn good.

BTW, did I ever mention that I wrote an article reviewing the candidate's web sites? Heck, I'll give it it's own blog entry...

Happy Tutor at the Crossroads

Happy T explains where he writes his X on the Post-Modern map.

Webbodies

AKMA reflects on the importance of bodies and how we can have important, deeply personal relationships in a bodiless world like the Web.

He calls "replacement panic" the anxiety that Web sociality will displace real world sociality. It's a keeper of a phrase.

I do not pooh-pooh virtual friendships. Not at all. That they're "real" (you know you've been in the company of intellectuals too long when you have to put "real" in scare quotes) is not in question. That they're valuable is not in question. At least not to me.

But...I continue to worry about what lesson we learn from the fact that these immaterial relationships are so real, so valuable. Many other lessons of the Web bring us back from our alienated real-world beliefs. This particular one seems to me to reinforce our real-world alienation from our bodies. "See, we can have perfectly good friendships without bodies ever being there," we learn from the Web.

So, I'm stuck between two ideas, both of which I believe firmly: 1. Virtual sociality is real and important. 2. Bodies are real and important. I'm having trouble bringing the two ideas together, but I am unwilling to give up either.

Trevor Bechtel, AKMA's colleague, in his paper at the Digital Genres confabulation, broadened "body" to include social bodies such as congregations. This would enable us to say that virtual communities are still bodily. But to me that over-extends the idea of a body; there is something special about my body that's fundamentally different than that of a community: my body can have sex, feel pain, and die. Preferably in that order. So, Trevor's strategem doesn't work for me. (Ultimately, this turns on a difference in faith, I believe.)

In my paper at Digital Genres, I tried the following four-part escape route.

First, we agree that what's important about our bodies isn't the matter/atoms of our body. Rather, it's our peculiar relation to those atoms. That it's my body counts for everything, but if we look at bodies just as matter, we don't get to the my-ness.

Second, we look at that relationship. What does it mean to have a body? It means, among other things, that we care about what happens to these atoms, that we have a point of view from the space and time in which we're rooted, and that we are able to turn towards the world with other similarly situated and caring bodies.

Third, we note that voice - in the "I am what I speak" sense - has those three characteristics: we speak from a point of view about what we care about, turning towards the world together with others.

Fourth, the Web is all about voice. Thus, on the Web we use and value the very characteristics that being embodied grants us. We learn not that the body is unimportant but that the body purely as matter is unimportant. We go back to the Real World better understanding that having a body is about having passion and a point of view, not about having atoms.

I'm just not sure I'm convinced.

(For those who are keeping track, i.e., a Mrs. Emma Frink in North Hotcake VA, this is very close to my position in Small Pieces. The main difference is that Trevor's comments pointed to embracing the non-material characteristics of the body as a way of returning from the alienation of thinking of the body only as matter.)

Go, Dan!

Dan's blurting out the truth again, this time about how dangerous the FCC's ruling today is for the future of the Internet.

Nigerian Email Conference

From Jeffrey Tarter comes this link to the one conference you cannot afford to miss this year, assuming, of course, that you are a Nigerian scammer.

Betsy on Digital Genres

Betsy boils the conference down to a handful of spiffy quotes. Very entertaining and the insight-per-word ratio is waaaay higher than my live-blogging verbosity.

Floating Class Theory

These may not be aircraft carriers, but they are some big-ass yachts.

The WMD Descent

Billmon has knit a noose out of quotes.

Economist on Open Spectrum

The Economist has a good piece on Open Spectrum, except it punks out in the end. I prefer David Reed on the topic.

[DG] Laura Trippi: The Fog of War

(One last blog from Digital Genres. My laptop was requisitioned for projectile servitude during Laura's presentation so I actually had to take notes on paper. Oh, the humiliation! BTW, my piece yesterday about Shock and Awe was an improved version of something I said at the conference during the discussion of Laura's paper.)

Laura notes a structural similarity between the way the Defense Department is reforming the military and the bottom-up, emergent networks the Internet is enabling. While we're all familiar with the Net's way of enabling groups to form, Laura says that the Defense Department isn't just using complex network theory when deploying troops, it's also engaged in a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that transforms the nature of peace and governance. In fact, Laura sees RMA not as limited to the military but as an overall strategy employed by the Bush administration.

The difference between the Defense Department and the emergent groups on the Internet is that the DoD harnesses smart mobs to a top-down strategy whereas groups on the 'Net are organized purely bottom-up. So, in the political struggle between the DoD and the d00ds, the DoD have a distinct advantage.

(Laura recommends the work of "Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek." I haven't heard of him.)

[Abstract]

Digital Genres Photos

Good photos of the Digital Genres conference are over at kiplog.

Denise at D

As everyone probably already knows, Denise did a spectacular job of blogging the D conference. And here's Dan Gillmor on the fact that only the journalists were asked not to cover it.

Shock and Awe's Real Target

Shock and Awe worked. It turned out not to work exactly as advertised in Iraq: the Iraq military didn't fold once they saw our might on display. But that's not what I think the aim of Shock and Awe was.

Take Shock and Awe as applying not to the three nights of massive bombing but to the entire Iraqi campaign. Its target wasn't the Iraqi enemy but the rest of the world. And it worked. Our political system is in shock and awe: The Democrats have scattered like ants in shock and awe of the Bush Administration's willingness to lie, threaten and stuff socks down its crotch to get a war that it wanted for reasons it couldn't explain. The world is shocked and awed to learn that the US can and will slam anyone into the sand we want to, no questions asked, no recourse allowed.

Shock and awe worked.