Spam words

The Bayesian spam filter Popfile lets you query any word to see the probability that it's a spam indicator. Some semi-random scores based on the 500+ spams I receive a day:

           SPAM        INBOX

Sex:       0.53       0.71
Viagra:    0.91       0.0
Behind:   -0.10       0.91
Remove:    0.90       0.03 
Home:      0.53       0.73
Becoming:  0.0        0.962 
Bush:     -0.61       0.75
AOL:       0.58       0.68
Nigeria:   0.98       0.0 

Blogging Collective Nouns

Stephen Downes in a comment on my Bloggercon plug, refers to a "bevy of bloggers" at the MERLOT conference (aggregated here).

Surely we can do better than "bevy"! How about:

A roll of bloggers
A we of bloggers
A permalink of bloggers
An href of bloggers
An entry of bloggers
A self-reference of bloggers
A pronouncement of bloggers
An unread of bloggers
A glob of bloggers
A winer of bloggers

Surely you can do better!

Bridging the Wifi Gap

Glenn Fleishman has a clear explanation of a way to bridge wireless networks, Wireless Distribution System.

What will they think of next!

And who are "they" anyway?

Republican for Dean

Michael Cudahy has written a terrific explanation of why he, who has supported many a Republican all the way back to Goldwater, is supporting Gov. Dean. Among other things, he writes:

Governor Dean projects a complete unwillingness to be afraid ... From what I am hearing from friends inside the Republican Party, they are deeply concerned by the Dean campaign because they do not know how to deal with it.

Wifing the Playing Fields

Jonathon Peterson thinks it'd be cool to provide wifi at local sports events:

How much would you pay to be able to attend junior's little league game but still be able to get a little work done from the stands?

Not to mention the silencing of the crowds as the cheering gets sublimated into cross-team IRC.

Well, count me out. I consider it a solemn obligation of parenting to fake, um, take an interest in our child's baseball games.

Linux Travails

The Globe and Mail has a follow up column about the travails of installing Linux and making it useful in an officey way. This is very much in line with my own continuing attempt to get Linux to work for me.

Fighting the RIAA

The EFF has posted the legal filing of a Jane Doe who is fighting an RIAA subpoena that claims she has unlawfully shared copyrighted materials. Jane maintains that she told Kazaa not to share any of her files. The legal brief (or whatever it's called) is quite interesting, but only starting on page 9 once you get past the legal language. (And, yes, I am aware that I've likely misused every legal term in this paragraph.)

Self-Referential Blogging

My friend Jimmy Guterman writes in Business 2.0 — subscription required — that this whole bloggin' thang is overblown. Among his complaints is that

top-tier bloggers like Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger are endlessly self-referential.

Self-referential? Moi?

I think it'd be more accurate to say that blogs are conversational.

Order of Magnitude Quiz: WW II

I've been reading Anthony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945, a book that makes world war sound like something to be avoided. The carnage and outrages it relates are all the more horrifying since everyone but the Nazi leadership knew that Germany had lost. (Beevor is also good, however, at laying out how the struggle for post-war power drove military operations.)

So, I mean no disrespect when I pose the following question: How many artillery shells did Russia fire into Berlin in the last ten days of the war, according to page 262 of the book? Coming within a factor of ten in either direction counts as correctly answering the question.

Reveal the answer by drag-selecting the seemingly blank space between the X's:

X ————1,800,000———— X

Selling Your Data Blood

The AP reports:

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights say personal information is so vulnerable now that it was able to go on the Internet and purchase the Social Security numbers and home addresses of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser.

The info cost $26 each.

Inspired by the Net's trend toward disintermediation, I've decided to cut out the middleman. What am I bid for my Social Security number? Act now and I'll throw in a Mastercard with $1,700 of credit still available...

Blatant Plug for BloggerCon

Bloggercon is shaping up to be something good. You'll be sorry if you miss it.

Will it be the most extensively blogged conference in history? Anyone want to give me odds?

Dean on TV

Some excellent and quite positive coverage of the Dean 4-day "Sleepless Summer" tour in the New York Times and elsewhere. All the reports I've read point to the enthusiastic crowds and the success of the Governor's new crowd-pleasin' delivery. Not to mention the new Zogby poll that puts Dean at 38% in NH compared to Kerry's 17%; for the past seven months, Dean and Kerry have been statistically flat at 19% and 25% respectively. Not to mention the $1,000,000 Dean raised over the Internet in 4 days, from 17,000 contributors, of whom 10,000 are first-time contributors.

And yet I watched the NY rally on CSPAN last night and with the crowd noise turned way down Dean looked awkward. We could say that that was just bad miking by CSPAN, but the TV interviews I've seen and the televised debates so far aren't capturing what you see of Dean in person, on stage or in smaller groups: someone relaxed, "comfortable in his own skin" (as Chris Lydon put it), serious, but also enjoying himself. It's a mysterious medium.

DevoSwiffer

You can see the Swiffer mop-thingy ad with Devo singing a modified version of Whip It here.

Mark Mothersbaugh of the RugRats, um, Devo says that the band agreed to do it because it was just so absurd. And he's right.

Take Back the Books!

From a friend at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In our local paper today: Some students got sick of being fleeced by bookstores, and started their own book buyback website. So far, the site has brokered $66,000 worth of books. They're going to try to help other students in other places set up similar sites.

One of a million acts of consumer-based capitalism...

Seeing Halley

Halley's cataract surgery has gone well and the scales have fallen from her eyes.

See for yourself ... :)

(Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Halley.)

FotoKey

My friend Paul English is writing photo gallery software because he hasn't found any that suits all his needs, including: "three sizes of each photo, keyboard navigation, netflix-style starbar ratings, email, shutterfly upload, EXIF camera settings info, and CSS templates." He says:

Fotokey is for people who already have their own website, and want their photos on their own site vs. hosted elsewhere. It currently works on linux servers, although could be made to work elsewhere. All source code is on the site, and the application is free for any use.

I'm looking for some digital photographers who can help beta test the software.

Grant for Consciousness

According to an article by Alok Jha in The Guardian, "Scientists have been given the biggest ever grant to build a 'conscious robot'. " The grant is for 500,000 pounds and it repeats the most persistent — because it's metaphysical — error (IMHO) in AI: thinking that consciousness consists of an internal representation of the world. In this case: "Mr Holland's idea is that a conscious robot would have to build up internal models - one for the 'self' of the robot and another for the world around it. "

Thanks to Gred Linuxman Cavanagh for the link

State-by-State Battle for VoIP

Jeff Pulver of The Pulver Report keeps a page with updates on the looming state-level battle over Voice over IP, i.e., the use of the Internet to place calls instead of using the aging, expensive, proprietary, debt-ridden, closed (but quite magnificent) incumbent telephone network.

I Hate Wifi

Adelphia cable modem, meet Linksys 802.11b wireless access point router. Router, meet cable modem. Now that you're old friends, allow me to introduce Linksys 802.11b card. Oh, you don't get along with him? Then you'll definitely hate his more powerful sibling, the 802.11g card.

Put aside the G card; even when it works, it's much slower than B. Before I can get online with B, I have to go through a ritualistic dance for at least 40 minutes. Some combination of rebooting the three devices, doing "ipconfig /renew"s until the cows come home, and clicking on the 105 Windows dialog boxes that use redundant terminology for non-redundant operations and non-redundant terminology for redundant operations, and maybe it works. For a while.

It's simpler than it used to be, but it's still not right.

I know my anger is misplaced. Wifi is good. Wifi is kind. Wifi is understanding. It's Windows and Linksys and maybe Adelphia who are devouring my time and good will and replacing my usual beneficent smile with a fanged snarl. Or maybe it's my antivirus software, my mouse, or possibly just my karma. (I knew I shouldn't have kicked that dog in Babylonia.)

O, where is the page that gives step-by-step instructions based on the specific symptoms? I know you're out there somewhere...

Targeting the wireless

From a friend who wants to remain anonymous:

A friend in Belmont (MA) was among a group of neighbors whose laptops were stolen from their homes. It seems the thieves used RF detection equipment to scan the neighborhood, finding homes with wireless hubs. They targeted those homes & stole the laptops.

Oy, something new to worry about!

AKMA on Ordaining the Gay and Educating the Young

AKMA's back and reflecting on topics roiling his church. Fascinating.

In the comments, Jonathon Delacour asks if students are arriving in seminaries knowing less and less about Scriptural issues, then what is it that they know more and more about?

Sleepless Notes

I've posted some pretty mediocre snapshots from the Dan campaign's Sleepless Summer Tour.

The Sleepless Tour is being well-blogged by guest blogger Natasha C.

15,000 people turned out for the Seattle rally. That is incredible. And 5,000 in Portland, OR; Portland is not a big city. (We lived there for a year and I can promise you that it is a beautiful city, though.)

Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect says that what's happening is better understood as a movement than as a campaign. The size and fervor and grass-rootedness of the crowds supports that reading...

Sleepless at 10 (Central Time)

There are about 800 people packed into a hangar at the Milwaukee Airport. It's been festooned with Dean posters and a huge flag - a bit like dressing up the gymnasium for the prom. The crowd has turned out solely on the basis of notices in email and on the web site. It's Saturday night. It's 10pm. And the crowd is on fire. They're applauding, laughing, booing the bad guys, chanting.

The Governor speaks without notes and with no Teleprompter. At the end, you can barely hear him over the crowd's sustained roar.

Sleepless at 9

I met the Governor. Joe called me over. We talked about - guess what? - blogging! He said he hadn't realized how deeply issues-oriented were the readers of his blogging on Larry Lessig's site. I said that I thought it worked out well ultimately. No presidential candidate had done that before. We're all making this up as we go along. And then we talked about the value of the campaign blog.

What can you tell about a person in a few minutes of casual conversation? Lots. The Governor looked me in the eye, engaged immediately, did no meaningless "Hey, howya doin'?", turned to a topic that was interesting and real, was perfectly at home - not a flicker of hesitation - in talking about a episode in which he didn't do as well as he'd liked, was alert, friendly, curious.

Compare and contrast with, oh, let's say, President Bush...

Sleepless at 7:15

[Joe Trippi has just declared me the first blogger to travel as a blogger on a presidential press bus. Woohoo! I think I'll print myself up a certificate!]

There are four buses for the press and staff. I looked in each and picked the studious one where most people have their laptops out. I'm just that sort of guy,

Joe Trippi's son just came through with an assortment of potato chips. I chose BBQ because it just looks so professional to have your fingertips and lips ringed with orange flecks.

I'm sitting next to Patsy Wilson from Reuters; she's got a White House press pass hanging from her bag. In front of me, Mario from the Getty Archive is editing some photos he's taken of the event: bring a face out of the shadows, turn up the contrast on a woman holding a Dean sign, upload it via a cellphone modem. Isn't technology amazing?

It's quite a collection of journalists. Maybe 30 of them. CNN. The NY Times. Reuters. C-SPAN, Newsweek. Fourteen months before the election. This must be what momentum feels like.

On the plane now. It's a chartered 737 sitting on a back leg of the airport. No metal detectors here, but they do a thorough job going through everyone's luggage. The press sits in the back of the plane, the staff in the front. Plastic clumps of grass are taped to the seats because this is a "grassroots" campaign, which is somewhere between charming and hokey.

The Governor enters the plane last of all. (Yes, they wand him before he enters ... you never know, given his stand on gun control, he could be packing heat :) The press crowds the aisle, pointing cameras at him. Now it's like a rugby scrum except with cameras and inside a plane. The Governor talks with reporters until we're all told to sit down so we can take off...

We're half an hour into the trip and it's a bit of a party. People are standing in the aisles. There are dozens of conversations going on. It's festive.

Some of the staffers are sleeping, having worked their butts off for an event that pumped up a crowd of 4,000+. I've talked with some of them and they feel they've turned a corner. The campaign is on its way. (One of the journalists on the bus said that you can tell a lot about a campaign by how well organized the press facilities are and this campaign was running exceptionally smoothly.)

It's festive but it's also weird. Behind me, one media person is interviewing another about her reaction to the campaign so far. The Governor is sitting with a staffer, and the cameras are on. Always. You could desalinate a small pond with all that a wattage.

The plane is touching down...

All these entries are cross-posted at the Dean campaign blog

Sleepless Summer 6:00

All entries from the campaign trail are cross-posted at the Dean campaign blog.

Gov. Dean enters as U2's "Beautiful Day" plays. The crowd chants. Dean starts strong. After saying that the Sheriff estimates the crowd at 4,000, he says: "The president is sleeping comfortably in Crawford tonight. And while he's sleeping, we're going to take our country back."

I'm not going to blog his entire speech. But it's good. It's focused on issues, with passing funny jabs at Bush. But, more important, he's doing a good job of flipping the cliched expectations. For example, he warns us that the Republicans just don't know how to handle money: "Borrow and spend, borrow and spend." And he goes after the idea that the Republicans are tough on defense and Democrats aren't; "North Korea is about to become a nuclear power because President Bush won't sit down and talk with someone he doesn't like." He says that he won't hesitate to send American soldiers into battle but not without telling us the truth about why.

He talks about balancing the budget, about providing educational and child services. He talks about Martin Luther King's dream and says "This president played the race card" with regard to affirmative action, "and for that alone he deserves to be sent back to Crawford, Texas." He talks about the make-up of the Supreme Court. He talks about being a world leader not just through military strength but also by being respected around the world.

He urges people to sign up on the Internet. "We won't spam you ... except for the last three weeks of every quarter when we're trying to raise money."

"The reason we're going to beat this president is that we're going to give the 50% of Americans who've given up on the political process a reason to vote again."

The Governor has connected with this crowd, and it seems to me that he's connected beyond issues and politics. And that's exactly what he has to do.

Sleepless Summer 5:30pm

Ok, I was off by a little bit. I'm not good at crowd estimates, but it's got to be in thousands, not hundreds. The cab driver found the venue by following the stream of people. All types. Stand still and every type of American will pass by.

After the predictable Bruce Springsteen recording on the PA - it's a sign of age that he's become a safe choice - and some Loving Spoonful, the local mayor (Dan Gardner) talks briefly. Then Jasper Hendricks who remembers segregation. And Isis Castro who spoke from her experience as an immigrant to this country.

Elaine Castro says that in the Dean campgian she's reecovered her enthusiasm for the political that she lost in her youth. She says that Gov. Dean, among other qualities, is "articulate." The crowd goes wild.

Bill Euille, the first African American mayor of Alexandria, speaks.

Sleepless Summer 2pm

I'm on my way to a Howard Dean "event" at a place called Cherry Hill Farms in Falls Church. My participation was arranged so quickly that I have few expectations about the nature and scale of the event. Twenty-five people in a living room? Two hundred people screaming like bobby soxers? Because it's the kickoff of the Dean campaign's "Sleepless Summer Tour," I'm pretty confident that it's not going to be a dozen oil industrialists balancing caviar-topped crackers on their checkbooks as they wink and say how they know they can count on the Governor...

It's a lovely summer day no matter how we humans choose to populate it.

Off to the Sleepless Tour...

I leave in a little while for the trip to Falls Church, VA, to meet up with the Dean campaign. I'll be blogging the event here and at the Dean campaign weblog.

I'm all a-twitter. (Well, at least I'm all a twit.)

Right, wrong and none of the above

I had a brief-but-hearty discussion with someone I love and respect last night over file sharing of the napster sort. He thinks it's obviously wrong and those who think it will be permitted forever are living in dreamland.

I remain conflicted about this. My friend seemed to be approaching it from a rules-based moral position — stealing is wrong — with pointers to consequences: CD sales are down (well, there's argument about this), and who knows what the broader effects of wholesale file sharing might be. My friend lives a principled life and I admire him vastly for it.

I, on the other hand, am unsure exactly which rules to apply since we don't have a pay-per-play policy in the real world — I am allowed to make a copy off the air and I am allowed to give a friend a taped copy of a CD, and you are allowed to re-read my book without paying me again — and I see wonderful consequences mixed with the undesirable ones as a result of allowing some degree of file sharing.

So, I come down to the following assumptions, none of which I believe without qualification:

Having a vibrant, rich public domain is good, important, necessary, etc.

Artists need to be compensated fairly. The marketplace needs to encourage artistry.

We positively do not want to have to pay every time we get value from someone's creative work even if that would be the fairest way to treat artists. Art needs to suffuse a culture and that can't happen if the economics demand strict fairness.

The recording industry as it is currently constituted is so unfair to artists that it needs to fail before the right relationship among artists and audiences can emerge.

Except in the extreme cases, I just don't know what's right and wrong. But I do agree with AKMA's overall educational precept: the truth lies in complexity.

(Apologies to AKMA if I got that wrong. And apologies to my interlocutor for, ironically, over-simplifying your arguments.)

Celebrity Encounter: Tony Shalhoub

Our 18-yr-old daughter spotted Tony Shalhoub at the Agricultural Fair on Martha's Vineyard last night. Our daughter is a good critic of acting and is talented in that direction herself, and Shalhoub is towards the top of her list. She's admired his range, from Galaxy Quest to Big Night. She, her aunt and my wife approached him as he waited for his daughter to get off a ride.

They expected to gush for a moment and then to back away apologetically. But not only was he polite, he engaged them, and especially our daughter, in conversation. Where is she from? Where does she stay on the Island? When she told him that every drama class she's taken has shown the last scene from Big Night, he was impressed and asked about her interest in acting. They chatted about Monk, a program with silly mystery plots and some fetching acting by my daughter's dear friend, Tony Shalhoub.

And then he excused himself politely as his daughter approached.

BTW, I wasn't there because I was in Boston for a few days, doing my annual spell as a footloose bachelor. And you know what that means: eating out of the pot, smoking a cheap cigar just because I can, and watching something with Bruce Willis in it whether I want to or not.

Hear Dean

I listened to Chris Lydon's recording of a talk Gov. Dean gave a few days ago at a gathering of 250 people in New Hampshire. Listen to this mp3 and you'll have a good idea if you want to support Dean or not.

I do.

Traveling with Dean

The Dean campaign has invited me to travel with the Governor — ok, actually, in the large crowd of people around the Governor — during the first leg of the "Sleepless Summer Tour" in order to blog about it on the Dean campaign weblog. I'm going to meet up with them in Falls Church, VA on Saturday night and go to Milwaukee for a late-night rally. I've never traveled with a presidential campaign, although in 1960 I was attendee #15,672 at a rally for JFK at the Roosevelt Field Mall. I'm excited.

My inclination at the moment is to do a more complete write-up on my site (= here) and a briefer version on the Dean weblog. As you may know from my conference blogging, I tend to go on a bit recording details, and I don't think that's exactly what the Dean weblog folks are looking for. But, we'll have to see as the events unfold.

[Disclosure: I work for the Dean campaign as Senior Internet Advisor. No money changes hands, but the campaign is paying my airfare. I am partisan.]

Chris Lydon has posted sounds from his recent trip to New Hampshire where, by chance, the first "hot house-party...was Howard Dean's." He includes Dean's 24-minute speech, 20 minutes of Q & A with Dean, and Q & A with the crowd. I am on the road and haven't had a chance to download the mp3's, but I have no problem blindly recommending anything Chris does.

Welcome BAKMA, AKMA

Akma's back from his trip, and the US of A is better off for it.

CIA Bank Heist?

I have no idea if there's any truth to this, but this article claims that the CIA engaged in an "ultra-secret operation to electronically remove an estimated $10 billion out of the Iraqi Central Bank hours before the start of Persian Gulf War II. The whereabouts of the money is not known." The article (on the American Free Press site) cites International Currency Review, a real journal with no Web site that I can find. That this story hasn't been picked up anywhere either indicates that the media are sheep or, more likely, that the story is bogus.

Black Friends

Find out why Black People Love Sally and Johnny. It's bad taste, it's satire, and it's a little bit funny...sort of like Saturday Night Live.

Remembering Eleanor Searls

Doc and his siblings have put together some pages remembering his mother. She died today.

Doc, I'm sorry for you and your family. Thank you for sharing your memories and letting us learn something about this remarkable woman.

Love,

David

Kevin's Job

Kevin Marks' felicitous titled "How I emailed myself into a job and blogged my way out" explains that he's now looking for work. If you know Kevin at all, you know he's wicked smart and a natural-born helper, the type of person who adds value to whatever conversation he's in. Got a lead for him?

Scott Kirsner Radio

The dapper Scott Kirsner — columnist for the Boston Globe and contributor to Wired and FastCompany — is hosting a one-hour radio show all this week on the Bloomberg Radio affiliate in Boston, WBIX 1060 AM, from 1-2 PM. You can listen here. The show is about Boston business, but Scott's interest in technology will certainly seep in.

How Ideas Happen

Renee Hopkins has ideas about how ideas happen. (She cites my piece on the unspoken of groups.)

Isenberg on Stuff

The new issue of David Isenberg's newsletter is out, and it's as rich as usual. Top topics in this issue are:

1. Notes from the Intel Capital CEO Summit: How Intel has earned David's respect

2. David Dorman's Multiple Personality Disorder: A brillilant analysis of the Nethead vs. Bellhead personalities of AT&T's CEO.

3. Four Scenarios for "The Internet Five Years Out": Four ways the "last mile" problem will be solved (or, ulp, not). (Open Spectrum isn't one of them.)

Eventually, David will post the issue here. But you really ought to subscribe. It's free (as in beer, speech and thought).

Mill: Point-Counterpoint-Point

Scott Rosenberg replies to my reply to his wonderful appreciation of JS Mill. I'd said that I find Mill's rationalism overly optimistic. Scott writes:

I think it's probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us - steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives' optimism. And yet it's also clear to me that "On Liberty" intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways - to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals

Yup.

Things City-Boys Believe

If you just miss seeing a deer, it's not a big deal because another one will be along in 20 minutes.

Whatever size black bear you come upon, there is a larger one hidden in the brush behind it, watching its back.

Mosquitoes won't bite you if you walk confidently with your eyes straight ahead.

Bees know exactly what you mean when you give them the finger.

You can estimate the distance of a lightning strike by timing how long it takes after the sound of thunder for you to pull the pillow over your head.

Spiders are male mosquitoes.

Lightning never strikes the same person twice.

Turtles bury themselves in the mud all winter to survive the freezing cold. Robins do too, but much less successfully.

The sound bullfrogs make is a form of boasting. In most cases, it's totally baseless.

The problem with swimming within half an hour of eating isn't that you may cramp but that your center of gravity is moveable, causing an unappealing lopiness in your breast stroke.

Lightning never strikes the same person twice.

If you spot a snake anywhere, it could show up on any contiguous piece of land, indefinitely.

All snakes are poisonous.

The 60-cycle thrum of large herds of migrating hummingbirds makes conversation impossible for three days in Savannah Georgia and drives several citizens mad annually.

Dean Spam

People have been spammed by the Dean campaign. Sort of. This is from the executive summary at spamvertized.org:

This spam bubbled up in mid August, 2003. The Dean Campaign may have outsourced an email campaign to Emailresults.net, based on claims by Emailresults.net that the campaign would be opt-in. There was some sort of due diligence failure on the part of the Dean campaign, as a google search on "emailresults.net" shows numerous references to their propensity for spamming on the first two pages of search results.

After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day.

You want perfection? Get another candidate. And you'll want to give up on the Net also. But from what I can see, the campaign reacted admirably to its gaffe.

The fun part is watching the slashdot discussion try to figure out what "net savvy" means. E.g., written sarcastically: "I will only vote for people who can configure a Cisco router. That way, I am assured that their political stances, and agendas coincide with mine."

In a semi-related item, the Dean campaign blog quotes from an article about Dean by Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

Every time the press pooh-poohs his chances, every time they gloat over some trivial misstatement, every time they make fun of Vermont and describe his supporters as "Birkenstocked" "Deanyboppers," I think about the free ride the media give Bush, who says more false and foolish things in an afternoon than Dean has said in a lifetime...

Has your creativity been squished like a bug?

Cory asks:

Have you had your creativity and expression crushed by intellecutal property law? Did you have a business, a work of art, a blog entry or some other form of endeavor that was squashed by the threat or reality of a trademark, copyright or patent suit?

Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain are putting together a public-education campaign to disseminate IP law horror-stories to help people understand what the expansion of copyright and related doctrines has cost us all. They want your stories for the collection.

We'd like to hear stories from artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, librarians - or anyone with a personal story involving intellectual property law...

Doc's Mom

You can see so much of Doc in the rich photograph of his mom.

You're both in our thoughts, Doc.

The Tragedy of Coloring Books

For the past couple of years, I keep coming back to edges: how few of them there are in the world, how digital technology is founded on bits that are nothing but edges, how the online world overcomes the edginess of the technology that enables it, and how messiness is an ontological property: Reality is a mess.

And then you come to coloring books that train kids to see the world as edges to be filled in. Put down your crayons, kids. I have bad news: There are no outlines in the world, only swaths of color that are themselves fractally multi-hued.

Every edge has another edge but only if we look for it. When we die, we take our edges with us.

I think we can safely acknowledge that Rembrandt was a pretty fair sketcher. I assume that he began a painting by sketching its outline on the canvas. Nevertheless, his paintings aren't outlines filled in. The colors are contiguous and, because he's freaking Rembrandt, continuous. The outline underneath resulted from an edge-finding heuristic which then became a heuristic for its own erasure.

This is what we do: find an edge and then smudge it because we know continuity is more real than distinction.

In other words: Which came first, the fill-in or the edge?

Power Failure "Order of Magnitude" Quiz

According to the NY Times today, the outage was caused by a "reversal of the power flow": "huge amounts of electricity that had been moving east over the Great Lakes ...was suddenly sucked back," overloading power lines and causing power plants to disconnect themselves. "Dozens of power lines and about 100 power plants" were affected.

Your question this morning is: How long did it take for these 100 power plants to go off line? Some facts that may help you: Light travels at something like 188,000 miles per second. The blackout affected 9,300 square miles.

Answers that are within an order of magnitude will be considered correct. Winners will receive permission to skip reading a weblog of their choice for one week.

Use your mouse to select the seemingly blank space between the two X's below to see the answer.

X ——- 5 minutes ——- X

Macines, Networks, Outages

Paul Philp writes about how an outage can show you the difference between a machine and a network.

NYC Outage Photos

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link to this site aggregating photos of NYC without power.

Birth of a Blog

Tim Appnel writes about the closing of the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in Manhattan.

It was started 30 years ago and was the first in the US and is the only out of hospital birth center of its kind in NYC. (It shouldn't be the only one, but it is.) They are being forced to close September 1st. Their current malpractice insurer refused to renew their policy with 6 weeks left on their policy and the best quote any other would give would be a 250% plus increase, into the millions annually, for 1/6th the coverage they used to have. They simply cannot operate under those terms — they are a not-for-profit organization with 30% of patients on medicaid.

...They aren't going out with a whimper and are organizing various forms activism to bring this situation to light while trying to help patients make alternate arrangements. They want to keep these type of healthcare options available to women and their families. I've helped them setup a weblog to communicate to their patients and the public ...

Star Material

You too can host your own radio talk show! That, anyway, is the conclusion I reached after my interview with VoiceAmerica.com, "The Leader in Internet-Live Talk Radio."

Two days ago, I got a message on my answering machine asking me if I'd be interested in hosting a talk show on "marketing and business." A little broad and not exactly what I'd present as my area of special expertise, but apparently talk shows on dimly remembered philosophy courses and why Bush is a stinky liar just aren't in demand. So I called the guy back. What the hell. The receptionist informed me that the guy who called is actually the personal assistant to the executive producer. She wasn't in either. So I called back the next day and was told the guy is the personal assistant to another executive producer. In fact, he's the close personal assistant to all the executive producers.

Today's exec producer got on the phone and told me, in a stream into which a word could not be fitted edgewise, that he's willing to invest $20K-30K in giving me a weekly show. I get to pick my guests and topics. He handles the marketing and sales of advertising. Of course, I do have to make a little investment of $300/week for 12 weeks, but it's really just to keep me honest. The producer makes no promises that the show will succeeed, although his personal retention rate is 78%.

Do they have audited survey figures, I ask? Now now, that wouldn't be fair, he replies. I might look at the figures for a show like George Lucas' educational series and think that I'll get numbers like that. So, no, I can't see any figures. But, I say, I'm not that stupid; I just want to get a sense of what counts as success. No, says the producer, that might mislead me.

How did they hear about me, I ask. Apparently, they're always on the lookout for talented people with fresh points of view. They monitor the Web, look at published articles, try to keep their ear to the ground. In other words, he's never heard of me.

I'm sure my turning down the offer was a huge disappointment to VoiceAmerica. Believe me, I felt bad about leaving them with a gaping hole in their schedule. So, I'll be happy to pass your name along to them. For a fee, of course.

I'm just trying to keep you honest.

RandoSpamo

Several people have noticed an uptick in spam that includes strings of words unrelated to the topic of the spam or to one another, apparently in an attempt to fool Bayesian spam filters into thinking they're legitimate. (Popfile is nonetheless capturing most of them.)

I don't have any idea what program these randospamos are using, but there are plenty of generators that go opposite the way, putting together words that (based on a particular corpus) are likely to go together. See Fun with Markov Chains where you'll find Alice in Elsinore, gibberish generated by intersecting Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland.

Liberian Spam

With Charles Taylor out of office, it hasn't taken long for the Liberian version of the Nigerian scam to surface in my inbox:

I am Mr. Jonson Tubman, former Special Assistant to the Liberian President, Mr. Charles Taylor, who just stepped down from the office of the President due to rebel's insurgency who wants to overthrow his government. President Charles Taylor, in his bid to fend-off rebel insurgency, and since he could no longer trust the army generals, confidentially put in my care, the sum of $18,000,000.00 (eighteen million United States dollars) in one instance for the purpose of purchasing arms and ammunitions should the need arise...

You know, that Mr. Tubman sounds awfully sincere. I might as well send him all my banking information...

Cost of War

Chip sends us to a page with a running counter toting up the cost of the war in Iraq, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office. It also lets you choose form a list of US towns to see how much it's costing viewed locally. Sure, the page is a gimmick, but it's a useful one, helping us to get our heads around some 8-figure numbers.

Business Is Baseball

Jeff Angus, who has written about tech and business for just about everyone, has started a blog called Management by Baseball on a topic suitably off-beat: The lessons business can learn from baseball. His thesis is that:

Everything You Need to Know About Management You Can Learn From Baseball. It applies lessons I learned as a baseball reporter and management consultant. The work takes those lessons and shows how people can become better managers in any kind of organization by applying lessons learned from the National Pastime.

Used Car Bifurcation

We had the archetypal used car experiences yesterday shopping for a commuter auto for our college-bound daughter.

We went first to Cypress Auto in Brookline because they sponsor lots of community events and groups. Also, my wife's brother has done business with them. Also, when they petitioned the zoning board for permission to expand, their neighbors testified on their behalf. And we were treated great. It's a small lot — about 20 cars — with the prices in plain view. They took our car to the adjoining service station they own and told us that they'd give us $4,000 for our 1997 Dodge Caravan (40,000 miles) because of the huge, metal-grinding lip a bike rack created at the top of the the back access door. (Cars.com says the trade-in value is probably around $3,300. Edmunds' more thorough form pegs it at $5,100, but neither place has seen just how bad our back door is.)

Then we went to a local Dodge store. Huge parking lot of cars. Icycle-forming AC in the showroom. They offered us a free drink, but the lost all interest when we said that we wouldn't actually be buying then and there. Not only were there no prices on any car, but the salesperson wouldn't tell us any prices. He wouldn't tell us the trade-in value of our car until we're ready to buy. And after showing us the first used car, he said that for our daughter's safety and peace of mind, we really should buy her a new Kia, starting at $12,000. After all, we wo