The Grinch who Turned Down Testimonials

I have problems with Orkut and other such e-friendship networks because they make binary the most analog of relationships. But I really hate testimonials. I am neurotically compliment-averse to begin with, but encouraging people to write little paragraphs praising one another cannot help but spawn an Economy of Bullshit.

What makes it worse is that the couple of testimonials I've gotten (and declined) have been from actual friends who thoughtfully crafted paragraphs that meant something to them and to me. And then I slam the door on them.

I wish Orkut would make this less awkward by letting participants opt out of receiving testimonials.

Cross-blogged at Corante Many2Many.

Marc Canter Banned

Marc Canter has been banned from Orkut, possibly because he linked to 300 friends in a week.

Hmmm. I've ranked every one of my Orkut friends as maximally fan-worthy, trust-worthy, cool and sexy, except for the handful of people who've asked me to be friends who I actually have never heard of before; they only get 2 stars out of 3.

So, will I be next? One can only hope...

Yule Adornoments

Yule Heibel is beginning an occasional series of blog entries about Adorno, in part because she thinks Heidegger has been getting too much air time. She promises to tell us what Adorno thought was wrong with the Ol' Nazi.

I used to know enough about Adorno to weasel out of any actual conversations about him. Now I remember nothing at all about him. In fact, I think I'm into negative numbers. So, I look forward to Yule's writing about this philosopher she cares about.

How much to RSS?

A reader at my new Corante blog complains that the RSS feed only contains about the first two lines.

Any thoughts about the wisdom of making the whole blog entry available via RSS? I'm inclined to do it.

Trying to buy a Mac

I installed Windows 2000 over Linux last night, a process that I expect is going to cost me my snack privileges in Hell. But I simply couldn't get my Linksys wireless card to work. One of the advantages of being a monopolistic software overlord is that companies make sure that their products install reaaaal easy-like.

Meanwhile, following the advice from y'all about getting a Mac for my father-in-law for the single purpose of browsing the Web, I called Small Dog and spoke with a helpful salesperson. I thought I wanted a used G4, sans monitor, plus a fresh copy of Panther. Small Dog has a G4 for $520 + $119 for Panther. But the salesperson warned me off of the hw because it's 2-3 years old and thus is likely to break. "It's like buying a used car. It's just got so many miles in it."

The salesperson at MacResQ tried to down-sell me, not up-sell me, which I appreciated. He recommended a blue-and-white G3 (400mH, 256Mb RAM, 20GB hd, 8.51 OS) for $500. He also recommended a 400mH G4 (128mb RAM, 20GB hd, DVD player) for $530; another 128MB of RAM, installed, is $40.

I'm leaning towards the MacResQ G4, installing PythonPanther, but I feel like a blind man in a room full of deaf computers. Any and all advice would be appreciated. And this time, shouting "Get a Mac!" is entirely uncalled for.

Thanks for everyone's advice in the comments. As a result, I just bought a 400mH G4 (20GB drive, DVD player, keyboard and mouse) from MacResQ, an extremely pleasant experience. I had them boost the RAM to 384; they charge $40 for 128 but gave me the 256 upgrade for the same price. Real pleasant folks to deal with, and were quite frank and helpful all the way through. I also bought Jaguar/Panther 10.2 for $40 off of eBay (original disks, unregistered).

So, in a few days, my little Mac installation adventure can begin. I'm looking forward to it.

More over at Loose Democracy

I've posted an appreciation of Joe Trippi over at my new Corante blog, "Loose Democracy."

(I haven't figured out my policy about cross-posting myself, so for now I'm taking the raw self-promotional approach.)

Pink on outsourcing

Daniel Pink in Wired gives a human face to offshore outsourcing, as well as providing a nuanced discussion of its political and ethical dimensions.

New blog

I've started off my new Corante blog — on how the Net is changing our democracy and politics — with a critique of Clay's provocative Dean meme.

The new blog is called Loose Democracy, and I'm open to comments, suggestions, criticisms, unfunded mandates and recall initiatives. And please remind me of the 4,000 people I've left off my blogroll...I have problems creating lists ex nihilo.

All I can promise you is that I will never make a mistake and I will never ever be wrong.

New service from Amazon

From Denounce:

Amazon Launches New Social Network Called "Pricekut"

Customers Can Now See and Comment
on the Contents of Other Customers' Shopping Carts

It's satire, ok? (Thanks to Brian Dear for the link.)

My dream

Last night I had a dream that I was trying to explain to John Kerry that the Internet is like free speech: Its value comes from its openness to possibility, and that the government should regulate it as little as possible.

Yes, I actually had this dream.

Behind the desk

Monday night I had to move my semi-built-in desk yesterday so the electricians could upgrade my wiring. As a result, I saw what had dropped behind it during the course of 8 years. It was pretty much the usual stuff, with a couple of exceptions:

One copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto
One copy of The Tipping Point
8 little screws used to attach hard drives to computer cases
12 uncurled paperclips used for resetting small hardware devices

Pretty much the story of my life.

Little d democracy

Note: Contains completely partisan Deanism...

I spent the day in Exeter, yet another picture perfect New Hampshire town, alternating between standing outside holding Dean signs and sitting in the unheated Town Hall, checking off voters on the Dean supporter list. Then, at 5pm, it was back to the Portsmouth HQ, phoning people to urge them to vote.

In short, I spent the day being a little-d democrat. This is the real thing: American democracy. People reduced to their singular equality. Each one of them nuts in her or his own way. With the kids in their winter caps with animal ears or jester's horns. Shuffling in, trailing the midwinter cold behind them. Seeing friends they haven't talked with in months or years. College kids voting for the first time. A grandmother and her grown daughter, both wearing festive mittens. A blind woman being assisted in the voting booth. A husband taking a pink ballot to vote for a Republican and a wife taking the blue. A beautiful baby asleep in a back carrier as the father repeats his name softly to the local voting official. The real thing.

Outside, the cold was the fact you tried to forget. Lots of Dean supporters, lots of Kerry supporters, some Clark, a few Edwards, and one lonely and very affable man with a Bush-Cheney sign. (Oddly, it turns out he likes Bush because he wants a balanced budget. He didn't accept my offer to take up a Dean sign.) We all shared our coffee and muffins. We laughed at the same jokes. All us Democrats know in a few months we're all going to be working on behalf of the the same person.

My back aches. My feet are sore. My butt is warming up. And I'm ready to do it again.

Driving NH'ers tomorrow

I'm going up to Portsmouth tomorrow at 7am to drive Dean supporters to the polls. I expect to be gone all day and thus won't be blogging.

While I'm out, the electrician will be running two 20 amp wires up to my office to replace the single 15 amp source. I sure hope this is the cause of my frequent frier program: Last night I toasted the Linksys router I've had for about 4 months; usually they last a full year. Sigh.

The Daily Globe and Internet

Chris Lydon's two-hour NPR show last night brought together some of my very favorite bloggers to discuss the effect of Internet and blogging on politics. There was a lot of talk about the "popping of the bubble" (as Ed Cone put it) with a healthy respect for what blogging has done for and to politics already. Chris is, of course, the best at what he does, and reminded everyone of the importance of blogging despite the Dean campaign's crash landing in Iowa.

Although many of the guests and Chris himself said that blogs are a grassroots tool open to anyone, the quite reasonable focus on high-traffic bloggers may have led people to think that the blogosphere is a new daily, opinion-based newspaper in which we can read columns by journalists and columnists who have important views that have, on occasion, shaped real world politics. Now, I love the A-List, at least the portion of it I read. And it's thrilling that these are people that we have made popular, whatever the network dynamics are that form A-Lists in the first place. But put 'em together, and the A-List is another daily paper.

Blogging strikes me as more significant than the creation of a competitor to USA Today, albeit one that's fresher, livelier, more personable. Blogs constitute conversations, social networks, and our proxy selves all at once. That's a trio no other "medium" has ever put together and, as Jay Rosen said on Chris' show last night, it's challenging our very model of authority.

Dean's bad idea

Declan reports on a bad idea put forward by Dean 15 months before he announced his run for the presidency (and six months after 9/11): Requiring users to insert an identity card — presented as an upgrade of today's drivers license — into a computer in order to log on. Apparently, the campaign is not responding to questions about this. It's certainly not an idea I've heard bruited about by the campaign, but I'm certainly not privy to every bruiting. (Thanks to Eric for the link.)

Dana Blankenhorn responds. (Ignore the nice thing he says about me.)

Kerry and Dean in dead heat in NH

Democratic presidential contender John Kerry holds a shrinking three-point lead over Howard Dean on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, according to a Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby poll released Monday.

...Kerry led Dean 31 percent to 28 percent in the new poll, with John Edwards jumping three points to narrowly trail Wesley Clark for third place, 13 percent to 12 percent. Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman remained static at 9 percent - Wired News

Yeaaaarrrggghhhh. I cannot take the G's, cap'n!

The Republican Net Tax

David Deans writes about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's interest in slapping a tax on accessing the Internet.

What Jews think

Hanan Cohen sends along a link to the American Jewish Committee's 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion. The sample of 1,000 self-identified Jews, a representative cross-section of Americans, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points.

76% of us think caring about Israel is a very important part of being a Jew. Only 5% are more positive this year than last about the chance for peace. 81% of us think ""The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel," but 54% support the creation of a Palestinian state. 69% support dismantling at least some of the West Bank settlements. 60% support the current handling of relations with the Palestinian Authority. 63% think American Jews ought to support Israel even when we disagree with it. 76% believe 9/11 does not reflect the true teachings of Islam.

Only 16% of us identify ourselves as Republican. 51% are Democrats and 31% are independents. 40% of us are some type of liberal, skewing toward the "slightly liberal." 27% are conservatives. We voted for Gore over Bush 66 to 24. Clark, Dean and Kerry beat Bush 2:1. Lieberman beats Bush 71:24. We're more mixed about the Iraqi War: 54% disapprove of it, and 54% disapprove of the way Bush has handled the campaign against terrorism.

We definitely do not want tax payer funds going to faith-based programs (73%) and don't want government aid to religious schools (73%), but we do want "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance (66%).

97% of us think ati-Semitism in the US is a problem, and 37% think it's a very serious problem. (For perceived anti-Semitism in Europem the figures are 96% and 55%.) 67% of us expect global anti-Semitism to increase.

My own views frequently are outside what the survey says is the Jewish mainstream, so please spare me your rants. Thank you.

Return to Return of the King

(I just blogged this at BlogCritics.org)

We went to see Return of the King for the second time last night because our 13-year-old wanted to see it for his third time. My pre-VCR generation has trouble being entertained by a movie more than once, but there are exceptions. Lord of the Rings is one: Giant trolls, gargantuan elephants, catapults firing heads, fierce bad guys with faces made out of cookie dough, fire-tipped battering rams, stirring music, flying dragons, all in one scene. What more do you want in a movie? Even though it was my second time, I still had trouble finding a slack time to take a bathroom break. Thank goodness for Liv Tyler (or, as she's uncharitably known in our household, Mrs. Ed).

I have a small wager with my son. I say that Gollum will be nominated as Best Supporting Actor. He deserves it. So does Sean Astin, but as Best Actor; nominating him for Supporting Actor would confuse his character (Frodo's support) with his structural role in the movie.

And I will be personally outraged if LongBeard the Ent beats out Viggo Mortensen for the award for Best Acting by an Inanimate Object. IMO, Mortensen was way better, although I realize it's a topic about which reasonable people can disagree.

Reed on politics

David Reed — you know, the End-to-End guy — goes through the candidates one-by-one. He's captured a lot of what I think and feel about these guys.

This dance remix of The Scream that's been going around makes me laugh.

Close personal friends

According to the Butt Ugly Weblog, "orkut" — the name of the Google-affiliated artificial social network — is a slang term for "orgasm" in Finnish.

It turns out it's named after its creator, Orkut Buyukkokten, whose parents were either cruel or not Finnish.

On the other hand, what isn't a slang term for "orgasm"? I mean, even "Finnish" is, as in: "Didn't you Finnish yet?"

(Thanks to Janne Jalkanen for pointing out the dirty Scandinavian words.)

Linux out, Mac in, advice wanted

I've grown weary of reinstalling Windows 2000 on my father-in-law's computer, so I reformatted and installed Mandrake 9.2.

I've had problems before using Linux as a desktop system (starting around July 10 here), but this time I figured it would work. After all, my problems in the past had to do with trying to get the desktop up to Windows' level of application functionality, but my father-in-law uses his computer only for browsing. So, with just one application to worry about, Linux should provide the stability at which Windows curls its painted lip.

Mandrake 9.2 installed like a dream. It really couldn't be much easier. It detected all the hardware, even the sound card and printer. Mandrake has done a fabulous job with this.

But once you're up and browsing, you notice little things. For example, Mozilla needs the Flash plugin loaded. That's reasonable. And the installation process is pretty straightforward. Except that two hours later, it still wasn't working. The Flash files are installed in the (seemingly) right directory. But still every time Mozilla comes to a page with Flash on it, it pops up a notice that Flash needs to be installed. This is exactly the sort of unexpected error message that puts my father on the hot line to sys admin (= me).

After installing Flash, before launching Mozilla has started asking the user to select a profile. I could set this to "Don't ask again," but Mozilla (latest version, by the way) doesn't record the new profile I created 8-10 times last night. (I believed I screwed this up by initially telling Flash to install itself only for one user rather than system wide.)

I spent about three hours last night trying to get the system to be able to play any form of video file. No luck. Too hard for the likes of me.

So, putting Linux on my father-in-law's machine seemed like a really good idea. After all, he's already a Linux user because he has Tivo. But I think it's going to generate as many support calls as Windows.

(Oh, and did I mention that I've already had to reinstall Mandrake because a set of options mysteriously vanished from the KDE desktop and I couldn't figure out how to get them back?)

So, yes, he should get a Mac. Given his needs — browsing via a broadband connection — what is the best bargain (new or used) for him? And is there any way he can keep using the 15" flat screen he currently has instead of buying a new one? (Have I mentioned that price matters?)

The Doctors Dean with Diane Sawyer

I thought this was a good interview, despite Sawyer's alternation between being insipid and baiting them. It was the first time I've heard Judy Steinberg, and I think it gives a pretty good picture of what he and they are like, modulo their political concerns and Sawyer's entertainment concerns. (FWIW, I liked Steinberg a lot. The fact that she's about my age and grew up a couple of miles from where I grew up I'm sure has no affect on my feeling comfortable with her immediately.)

Salon has a good summary and analysis of Steinberg's presence in the interview.

Laughable Spam

This one made me laugh...so good, right up until the last word:

Dear PayPal member,

We regret to inform you that your account is about to be expired in next five business days. To avoid suspension of your account you have to reactivate it by providing us with your personal information.

To update your personal profile and continue using PayPal services you have to run the attached application to this email. Just run it and follow the instructions.

IMPORTANT! If you ignore this alert, your account will be suspended in next five business days and you will not be able to use PayPal anymore.

Thank you for using PayPal.

ogqolkel

I believe "Ogqolkel" was the Aztec god "The Deceiver."

The conscience of Ashcroft

In a speech to the World Economic Forum, according to the AP, "Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday urged nations...to fight corruption, which is costing the world economy more than $2 trillion every year."

"Follow our moral lead," Ashcroft said. "Surely in your own country you have a highly visible woman who is resented for her success. I urge you to go after her with the full power of the law. And God bless America."

Dean Aggregator

Mike Muegel, a Dean supporter, has put together a very cool little tool that aggregates blogs related to the Dean campaign. It sits in your system tray and pulls in entries from a whole bunch o' sites, and lets you cycle through them one at a time. In my experience with it over the past few weeks, it's been very well-behaved, updating itself cleanly. Desktop Dean is free, of course.

You could probably talk to Mike about having him do a version for some other topic you or your business cares about...

Credit Suisse on Self Organization

There's a fascinating set of papers on issues of self-organization and complexity given at a Credit Suisse First Boston conference last

"What a pretty baby!" Gov. Dean said, his face contorted with anger

If a respected paper such as, say, the Boston Globe, set out to drive down a candidate, what do you think they might do? Run a front page story saying that Dean's pep rally "Yeah!" was a sign of his anger? Nah, too outrageously slanted. After all, if it was an angry yell, what was it denouncing? Fury that the campaign was going to continue? No, Doc got much closer to it when he called it a Whitmanesque barbaric yawp.

But here's the money shot from the first paragraph of The Globe's front page story:

Dean found himself struggling to explain the reaction, casting it as a show of passion, while critics said it confirmed the angry streak they hear in his speeches and campaign rhetoric.

And the evidence that Dean was struggling to explain it? None. The critics who think it was a sign of his "angry streak"? Sixteen paragraphs in, the reporter, Sarah Schweitzer, finds a professor who wrote a book about the New Hampshire primary who says, "That moment crystallizes a lot about what's been said about him, that he's the angry man." This is such a clear case of media self-confirmation that it's almost touching.

In between, we get a repetition of the Angry Man meme:

Dean has sought to soften his image by layering speeches with references to community. Yesterday, he described his campaign as one of "hope" and himself as a "neighbor." But he has erupted at times on the campaign trail — he recently berated an insistent Iowa voter for interrupting him.

And the evidence that the community theme is an addition to a core of anger? And the evidence that this has been "layered" onto his speeches not because Dean believes it but in order to soften his image? And the evidence that he has "erupted" more than once on the trail? And when Bush silenced hecklers, this was certainly evidence that W is The Angry Man, right?

Schweitzer doesn't miss the opportunity to selectively quote the person on the street to make the point that she wants to make, the sleaziest practice in professional journalism: "Bob Scipione, 66, a retired biochemist of Bedford and a committed Dean supporter, offered this explanation: 'The man has to be out of control to beat Bush.'" Sarah, what possible justification do you have for choosing that quote from that person? I'd love to know.

If this sort of biased reporting is unwitting, then the Globe ought to get a reporter with some wits. But, unfortunately, the problem is bigger than that. Jay Rosen is right. It's the power of The Narrative. It is no less shameful for it.

Some generous words of support for Deaniacs from Michael Moore, who's supporting Clark. Subtext: There will be plenty of time for you to support Clark once Dean's run is done.

And more medicine for the heart from Doc.

I just realized that I blogged in November about another article that struck me as just as lazily biased as this one. Same author. I've taken a guess at her email address and am sending her the links. Sarah, my comments are working. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

Isen on Cato

David Isenberg examines the language of the Cato Institute's shabby paper on Internet policy. (Lessig has also written about it, as have I.)

Trademark protection at its mightiest

Microsoft continues to press its case against a 17-year-old Canadian high school student named Mike Rowe because his web site is mikerowesoft.com and he refused their offer of $10. Ten dollars! I know it sounds cheap, but you have to remember that these are ten American dollars.

You have to sympathize with Microsoft: Tons of people are going to end up on Rowe's site by mistake simply because they typed every letter after the "i" wrong.

By the way, I just registered www.mykrowzoft.com. (I would have taken mykrowsoft.com, but someone in Hawaii already owns it.) Bring it on!

Guess-who addresses the National Press Club?

On Sunday, I came in at the middle of a talk being aired by the local NPR station. Someone was outlining what sounded like a progressive approach to Voice Over IP and to telecommunications in general. Oh, there were so worrisome phrases — for example, freeing up more unlicensed spectrum but not addressing the broader licensing concerns — but my grasp of the issues is weak enough that I figured I was just getting them wrong.

Turns out it was Michael Powell, chair of the FCC, addressing the National Press Club.

Well, I'll be.

(I'd trust people like David Isenberg, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks, and David Reed to do a better job evaluating this speech than I can.)

Atomic Posters

Mike O'Dell has found a site that features posters from the '50s with an atomic theme.

What the hell were we thinking?

(See also how to survive a nuclear blast with only a hat.)

New Boot Screens for XP

BootXP is cheapware that will let you replace the screen Microsoft shows you as XP boots. You can download some alternative screens here, some of which express an amusing skepticism about the reliability of Microsoft technology.

Congrats to...

Congratulations to the Kerry supporters. Edwards', too.

See you in New Hampshire :)

If you're not Hugo Diamante, ignore this message

Hugo, I'm trying to respond to your email but my msgs keep bouncing. If you read this, could you please send me a msg with another way to reach you? Thanks.

Lessig on Cato

Larry takes on and takes apart the intellectually dishonest Cato article on Dean's Internet policy. Here's a snippet:

Apparently Cato thinks the end-to-end neutrality of the original internet was a weakness. Governments do too: It's harder to regulate internet behavior when intelligence is at the ends; so too is it harder to protect legacy business models when intelligence is at the ends. But while I understand (and even predicted) why governments and legacy businesses will therefore fight the end-to-end character of the Internet, I don't get why a libertarian would. A libertarianism guided by principle — rather than contributors — would embrace the values of the end-to-end network. Cato does not.

Findory: Collaborative news aggregator

Greg Linden stumbled across "The Daily Me? No, the Daily Us," an old Wired piece of mine that pointed to a disadvantage of personalized news sites: they don't build communities the way paper newspapers do. (Look, it was an interesting idea in 1995.) Here's an excerpt, chosen because of its quaint reference to that other Iraqi war:

The fact that the document I'm looking at is the same for all who receive it has other important effects. It establishes a baseline of expectations about what we, as a community, are all supposed to know. If, at the height of the Persian Gulf War, we encountered an American who said he or she had never heard of Desert Storm, we would have learned something important about that person.

In short, the act of publishing - which, at its root, means "making public" - helps to establish a public in the first place...

Anyway, the important thing is that Greg points to Findory.com, a fascinating personalized news aggregator. There are no profiles to fill in and no groups to join. Every time you click on a story to read, the site takes it as an indication of your interests. When you return to the home page, it will have adjusted the spread of stories it thinks you care about. If you click on a link to an article that it turns out wasn't interesting, you can delete it from the list of articles you've read.

The privacy policy seems exemplary. There's no registration required. No information about you is stored except for a random number stored in a cookie that's associated with the list of articles you've read (according to the FAQ). It explains how it works its magic in this hard-to-parse sentence:

The algorithm combines statistical analysis of the article text and of users who viewed the articles with information about articles you previously viewed.

I'm guessing that this means that it goes one step further than Google's "find more like this one" option. Google (presumably) does a word usage analysis of an article to find other articles with similar patterns. Findory (I'm guessing) does a word usage analysis of the article and of the article lists of others who have clicked on it, and then compares that with an analysis of your own list. (There are only two problems with this explanation: I probably got it wrong and it's more confusing than the thing it's trying to explain.)

The site also throws in articles outside of your statistically-derived profile to enable serendipity. It does not, however, get past the problem my Wired article points to. But, then, it's not intended to.

A footnote says that "Findory News is provided in cooperation with Memigo." Memigo's banner says:

Memigo recommends news articles you will be interested in based on your ratings and those of other users that are similar to you. The memigo front page can be overwhelming; check out this guide for more details.

Seems about right. Lots of articles, ratings, comments...I want to spend some more time there...

Are you a true tech believer?

Scott Kirsner has an amusing quiz in the Boston Globe today (gone tomorrow) that will tell you if you are a "true believer," i.e., a computechnologist who was in before the Net, or would have been had you been born in time. Here's the first question, as a sample:

You know the name of the first computer software company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, in 1982. It was eventually acquired by Computer Associates in 1989. (Two points.)

I did very badly on this quiz, even when I gave myself credit for answers I knew I knew but couldn't quite recall.

RB minds the mind

RageBoy talks a quick trot through AI, cognitive psychology and philosophy, proving once again that autodidacts are the best educated people on the planet.

Since RB ties me into the piece — I am not worthy, I am not worthy — let me answer the question he ends with: "I don't know quite how I got here from Fodor's funny take on Dasein."

Here's how you got there, muh friend. In a few pithy — and NC-17 — paragraphs you raise the notion of Dasein, and then take us through the clumsy way AI has tried to reincorporate the baby it threw out with the bath water: the mind. But, as you quote Bruner as saying, mind "has been technicalized in a manner that undermines the original impulse." (BTW, I've never read Bruner. Thanks for the tip.)

So, here's the connection, as if you didn't know, you sly boots. Dasein is Heidegger's term for human existence. He uses it precisely to keep his readers from making the mistake Bruner says AI has made: thinking of the mind or self as a thing. Consciousness is always of the world, Heidegger says (building on the insight of Husserl, a Jew he later betrayed). We experience the world, not a thing-like self. In fact, you can't find a thing-like self even if you look. Nor can you find a self experiencing inner representations of an outer world; that concept comes not from experience but from having certain ungrounded theories about consciousness. We are always beyond ourselves in in time, too, understanding the present in terms of the future we're heading ourselves towards. So, Heidegger used the weird term "Dasein" — "being there" — to keep us from thinking too easily of our minds and existence as being substances or things.

But there's more...We are in the world not as knowers but as creatures that care about ourselves and our fellows. That is, the "of" in "consciousness of" isn't neutral or rational. It's how the world matters to us.

Anyway, read RB. He's got a head full of ideas that are driving him insane.

Digital Democracy Teach-in

Here's the current draft (still under discussion) of the description of the session I'm leading at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-in:

The common wisdom -- that the Internet is just one more tool in the campaign box -- is wrong. Experience so far seems to show that to effectively using the Internet means giving up some of the most basic assumptions about the nature of campaigns as top-down, one-to-many, marketing efforts. This raises more questions than answers: Is the Internet reshaping campaigns, political parties and the electorate? Are the most important effects of the Internet the ones we expect or are they emergent? Are any of emergent effects apparent yet? If using the Internet effectively means remaking a campaign in its end-to-end image, will only certain campaigns use it? Is the excitement about the Internet's role that of early adopters? What is the role of a candidate - and a leader - in an Internet-based campaign? We will share what we've learned so far and discuss all these issues and more in a conversational and interactive session.

I'm supposed to talk for 15-20 minutes and then lead a directed discussion with the audience, in the majestic style of Jeff Jarvis' brilliant session at BloggerCon. Ulp. But there will be a really interesting bunch of people in the audience I can call upon.

I'm thinking of beginning my presentation by saying that there's an existential paradox at the heart of voting. It's not a logical paradox, but one that we live: We're individuals voting our hearts but we are reduced to being merely one among millions. We let ourselves be reduced to a simple binary switch — ballots are T/F exams, not essays — and we rejoice in it.

This then would lead me to talk about the paradox of massed individuals that I think the Dean campaign's use of the Internet has begun to crack: How do you scale personal involvement? The old broadcast model of politics can't do it...

The Digital Democracy Teach-in happens Feb. 9 in San Diego, the day before the O'Reilly Emerging Tech sessions start.

John Perry Barlow on Spalding Gray

A sad, funny, beautiful response to Spalding Gray's absence.

Push UPS

As I continue to try to figure out why my office eats computer equipment for breakfast, I'm thinking that my Uninterruptible Power Supply may be inadequate. Everyone who reads this knows more about electrical stuff than I do, so perhaps you can help me...

I have an APC UPS Pro 650, 650 VA, 400 Watts. My computer has, I believe, a 450W power supply. I also have a 22" CRT plugged into the UPS. So, I think that my UPS isn't up to the task. It's

So, do I need a heftier UPS? If so, what specs should I be looking for? And any recommendations for brand?

Comments are back

Thanks to some hard work by a couple of folks, especially Boris, and a new version of MovableType released specially to fight comment spam, you can once again leave comments.

We, the media

The Dean campaign has created a page that aggregates blogs from supporters who have gone to Iowa to support the Governor — a real-time, partisan, participatory newspaper.

Inept Cato analysis of Dean Net policy

The Cato Institute has just released its analysis of Howard Dean's "Plan for the Internet." This is one of the sloppiest pieces of thinking I've ever seen from an organization named after a Roman.

The author, Adam Thierer, begins by quoting from the Principles for an Internet Policy on the Dean site. He interprets "No one owns the Internet…. It is ours as citizens of this country and as inhabitants of this planet" as meaning " [G]overnment must treat the Internet as one giant collective resource and regulate accordingly." Wow. (For the record, here's the sentence he leaves out: "The Internet does not exist for the unique benefit of any group or economic interest." He omits it presumably because it implies that the Internet does have economic meaning, which works against the Birkenstocky impression he wants to convey.)

It gets much worse:

Dean's Internet platform contains the key elements and catch phrases of a more sophisticated master plan for cyberspace concocted by a group of academics and public officials who advocate a "commons" vision of collective Internet governance. Their agenda consists of a three-pronged strategy: (1) Infrastructure: They want telecom, cable, and broadband high-speed networks subject to collective rule via a heavy dose of open access regulation, structural separation or even outright public ownership. And they want the Internet to be treated as a collective asset subject to "democratic rule" through a variety of "nondiscrimination" mandates and other regulatory controls. (2) Spectrum: They want most of the electromagnetic wireless spectrum to be treated as one big commons with very limited exclusive property rights. (3) Intellectual property: They want to water down IP rights and greatly expand fair use rights and the public domain.

And what is the evidence that this is Dean's view? None is cited because none exists. The Dean campaign has not issued an Internet policy. So where does this "master plan" - with no master and no plan - come from? The next paragraph begins:

The triumvirate of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, prolific Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the New America Foundation (NAF) think tank deserve special mention since their advocacy of a cyber-commons has been particularly vociferous.

The rest of the article explains Dean's Internet policy by assuming it's the same as the "triumvirate's". The only problem is that neither Copps nor Lessig have declared themselves supporters of Howard Dean. True, Lessig is on Dean's Net Advisory Net, but that explicitly does not imply that he backs Dean. And the New America Foundation does have two Deans on its Board of Directors, but one is dean of the London Business School and the other is a dean at Johns Hopkins.

So, leave aside the outrageous ascription of one person's beliefs to another without the slightest evidentiary gesture. The content of the article is equally poorly thought.

Are markets and property rights really antithetical to openness, ideas, expression, knowledge, culture, diversity, and democracy? History shows that the exact opposite is the case. Markets and property rights have served as the foundation for those virtues...

Fine, except the triumvirate (as far as I know) doesn't argue against markets and property rights. They argue for open markets and at least one of them — Larry the Good — has created a mechanism by which creators can maintain fine-grained control over their creations.

Thierer concludes, striking a faux reasonable note:

...Certainly there is a place for some commons within our society, but that society should be structured and governed by property rights. The commons crowd seems to reverse that equation by suggesting we need to carve out a little room for property rights in a world of collective rule. And that sort of thinking is downright dangerous, for if we allow ourselves to believe that collectivism is the central organizing principle of cyberspace, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Treating the Internet, broadband networks, spectrum, and IP like socialized property will not lead to a cyber-nirvana but to a scarcity of those very things if the Dean-Copps-Lessig vision of cyberspace collectivism prevails.

Thierer acknowledges that the "commons crowd does not regard capitalism and markets as inherently evil or exploitative." But he misses the real point: The question isn't whether the Internet is socialized property or private property. The point is that the Internet isn't property. It's a protocol by which "content" is made accessible and communication is enabled. But, of course, Thierer sees property everywhere he looks: His complaint about the FCC's policy of licensing spectrum isn't that it needlessly concentrates power in a few hands but that spectrum ought to be property that can be owned, not just licensed. (Adam, here's a hint: This makes as much sense as suggesting that the government sell colors to companies...because spectrum is color. And here's another hint.)

Further, why is it that "society should be structured and governed by property rights"? Does the Cato Institute value property rights over individual freedom? Even if the Internet consisted of property — an arguable metaphoric reach — why on earth should we think that property comes first? Whatever happened to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

But Thierer is arguing against a strawperson in any case. None of the Triumvirate (AFAIK) advocates getting rid of copyright, for example. Larry certainly has consistently maintained that the control granted by copyright and Creative Commons licenses does indeed help to make for a responsive, vibrant market. Thierer knows this and acknowledges it at the beginning of the passage quoted above. But in the last sentence he ignores the sentence he just wrote, writing that the "commons crowd" advocates "socialized property." Except for the "socialized" and "property" part, that's exactly right.

What a load of crap. And it's too bad, because an honest reading of the Dean Internet Principles should be music to the ears of those who believe in liberty and free markets, the way conservatives used to.

Clay Shirky, in a msg to a mailing list, writes about the Cato Institute:

They have simply gone off the rails on the idea that there is no difference between collective action and merely aggregated individual action.

It would be fun to ask them their view of, say, standards bodies.

An excellent clarifying question...

Note: My comments are still read-only as I recover from the damn comment spammers.

Balinese water

John Fritz blogs about a paper by Steve Lansing about how attempts to "optimize" the traditional Balinese water supply actually disrupted the social and ecological systems, and not in the good, trendy sense of disruption. [Disclosure: I know John because I'm consulting to Icosystem, the company he works for.]

Comments down, maybe coming back soon

You still can't comment on entries on this site. I had to turn comments off after getting 1,000 comment spams in two hours. I hope to have a fix in a day or two.

Thanks for your patience, and special thanks to some folks who are helping me: Boris Anthony and Karl.

Applied PoMo

Terry Heaton is a "New Media consultant" in Nashville who's writing a book: TV News in a Postmodern World. His latest essay, "News Is A Conversation," builds on and around Doc's cluetrain meme. Terry also blogs about something like Applied Post Modernism with lots of good info and ideas.

CBS - Content Banishment Syndicate

Advertising Age writes:

Anti-Bush Ad Contest Submits Super Bowl Commercial. A spokesman for CBS said the Viacom-owned network has received the request from MoveOn to run the ad in the Super Bowl, but added that the ad has to go through standards and practices before CBS will say if it can run an advocacy ad during the game. The spokesman said he didn't think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices.

Have you seen the ad, the one that won MoveOn.org's contest? What possible standard or practice does it violate? Is our country stronger because a TV network refuses to air an ad because it criticizes our president?

(Thanks to Dan Gillmor and Sheila Lennon.

Cursed computers

I have had more than my share of hardware problems. While I'm waiting for the electrician, or someone like him, to put a second circuit into my office, I'm having problems that defy the physics of electromagnetism.

Two days ago, my son's computer crashed. The hard drive - about 1.5 years old, well within the MTBF for drives in our house - was making ugly, repetitive crunching sounds, as if it were doing sit ups, and Windows XP Home was refusing to boot because NTOSKRNL.EXE had gone all corrupt. The drive was so far gone that I couldn't put a new copy of the file onto it. It wouldn't even let me reformat it and reinstall Windows.

Three days ago, my father-in-law's PC also bit the dust. The hard drive is fine, but Windows 2000 was refusing to boot because NTOSKRNL.EXE had gone all corrupt. I might have been able to copy that file onto it, but I didn't have one with me, so I'm reinstalling Windows — it's easy on his because he only runs one app: a browser.

Both machines are protected by Symantec AntiVirus. Both use RCN for broadband access. Other than that, they have different operating systems, different applications, different usage patterns. All they have in common is my aura.

Could be a virus, of course, although I haven't found reports of one that eats that particular file. Apparently, this problem is sometimes caused by boot.ini crapping out. But why on both machines at the same time?

I should never have shot that guy in that graveyard that night.

The Head Lemur replies, via email since my comments are still down:

ck the harddrives. IBM 40GB made in Thailand have problems. The spindle bearings go bad resulting in the clicking of the armature hitting the surface, causing the disk to wobble, causing the armature to hit the surface, and so on. NTOSKRNL.EXE is one of the first files needed, sitting on the first track the computer accesses during boot. having the armature hitting the spot where it sits, makes this unrepairable. you can't record data on a surface no longer there to recieve it. Maxtor drives suffer simular problems.

Comments are down

My web host (friends of mine) unplugged the comments module after the first 1,000 spams came in within two hours. I think you can still read comments but you can't write them. I'm going to try installing David Raynes' script that lets you turn off comments on scripts older than n days until I can install James Seng's script that will require commenters to type in a verification code displayed on the page. Thanks to BurningBird, who also offers a MySQL command that will strip out all comments between two named times.

In the meantime, if you need to reach me, I'm at my usual emai1 address, which you can construct by connecting self to evident with an at thingy in the moddle and a dot and a com at the end.

Damn spammers.

Comment Spam Flood

I just got 500+ comment spams (mainly for zoo sex, apparently) from someone who changes IP addresses every 3 msgs and changes the offensive link in every message. This defeats the MT Blacklist program I've been relying on.

Help! I don't have time to manually strip out 500 spams. I will have to close comments (if I can figure out how to do so for all previous entries).

Speak spoof to power

So, the Club for Growth runs this ridiculously nasty commercial that slips into self-parody as a couple says: "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving...[etc.] freak-show back to Vermont."

The Dean blog responds by posting the ad and a new version with dubbed voices so that the couple is now explaining why they're supporting Dean. It's a totally amateur job, and is intentionally funny because of that.

Now the blog is hosting a make-your-own-postcard page where you can make your own list of the sort of Dean supporter you are.

The blog notes that "frequent blog commenter 'jc' has been collecting more responses than we can publish here," so it links to her page where you can read postcards that are funny, touching and completely human:

Niece-spoiling
chai-drinking
Jeep-driving
Springsteen-listening
Dean Supporter

Trail hiking
Nature loving
Honda driving
Sushi eating
Blog reading
Hard working
Healthcare lacking
Dean supporter

Take all this together and you have a real Webby way to respond to the mass media!

Funny depressing, not funny haha

Jeff Jarvis has some excellent transcriptual commentary on the unintentionally hilarious Tim Russert segment on blogging.

Get Smart with Isenberg

David Isenberg is thinking about holding a real world get-together — he's calling it WTF — for his readers and people like his readers. I've been to get-togethers David's put on and they've all been great experiences — I met wonderful people and learned lots.

Let's not retire the Hitler comparisons

[NOTES: 1. At no point in the following do I compare George W. Bush to Hitler. 2. All those who take quotes out of context will be prosecuted, or at least whined about.]

Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, suggests a New Year's resolution in her Boston Globe column today (which will be de-linked by the Globe tomorrow):

No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.

Likewise, Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby thinks any comparison to Hitler is hate speech. Not to mention the field day the conservative groups are having with the fact that two of the 1,500 entries into the MoveOn.org ad contest compared some aspects of this administration's policies to Nazi Germany's. (Oddly, none of these commentators have complained about the Bush administration's repeated characterization of opponents of the Iraq war as "appeasers," a direct reference to the British policy of appeasement that failed to stop Hitler, or about its use of the phrase "Axis of evil" with its implicit comparison to WWII's Axis.)

So, let me come out firmly against stupid, thoughtless comparisons of anyone to Hitler. Often such comparisons commit an informal fallacy: Because person A is like Hitler in property P, A is like Hitler in property Q, where Q is Hitler's evilness. That's not only fallacious, it trivializes what is important.

But ruling out all comparisons with Hitler and Nazism can also be a way of forgetting what should be remembered.

Here's one thing I think should be remembered: Nazi Germany's unfathomable evils were perpetrated by one of the most civilized of cultures. Yes, "civilized" is a loaded term. Deconstruct it as you will, Germany — a country that gave us many of the West's most revered artists and philosophers — seemed to be operating well within the norms of Western politics and culture. Yet it democratically voted in Hitler and watched (or worse) as it murdered its children and rolled tanks into its neighbors' cities.

I don't know, and I don't believe it can be known with certainty, whether there were particular aspects of the German situation that made it susceptible to turning evil. Certainly Germany's particular way of being evil was rooted in the particularities of German history and culture. But one big lesson I take from this is that cultures that are convinced they are good can nevertheless become evil. And they can be evil when they think they are at their greatest.

That's why I think Cathy Young is profoundly wrong. We should learn from the horrors of Nazi Germany that it can happen anywhere, even here. But, we should not expect it to happen in the same way, with concentration camps, jackbooted soldiers and a hypnotic demagogue. In fact, we are so aware of those particular forms of evil that we're less likely ever to fall for them. We need to remember Nazism especially when we're looking at the forms of evil that do not mirror the particulars of the Nazi expression of evil.

Before the death camps and the invasions, there were the steps that somehow led a country to embrace great evil. The Nazis came to power not by military takeover but through an election. Each subsequent step seemed justified or was at least so palatable that there was no civil uprising. We honor those who fought Nazism and we remember those whom Nazism murdered by being vigilant about the steps we take, for we understand that some steps can lead a country from good to evil.

So, yes, comparing Bush to Hitler is worse than stupid. But we forget the lesson that we should have learned if we don't publicly notice that some steps our country has taken could lead our great nation into evil:

Demonizing enemies
Questioning the patriotism of dissenters
Monitoring the political expressions of citizens
Establishing a special class of offenders who are removed from the protections of the judicial system
Lowering the intensity of the threat required to justify preemptive action
Disregarding world opinion
Playing on fear in order to sway public opinion
Lying in order to get us to invade another country

Do these acts make us into Nazi Germany? Of course not! Is any of these acts on a scale with death camps or the invasion of Poland? Not in the least! Each may be entirely justifiable: It may be the responsibility of a courageous country to ignore world opinion in some instances. Some dissenters may actually be unpatriotic. It's possible that our enemies are demonic; I have nothing good to say about Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Even so, we should take such steps with open debate and genuine trepidation. Shutting off the conversation does not help us preserve our genuine American values. We should remember that it can happen here because it did happen there...and also that if were to happen, the it would certainly be different. Is it happening here? That's exactly what we should be talking about, even if our answer is a resounding No.

If all comparisons to Nazi Germany are out of bounds, then we're saying Nazism was sui generis, unique, something from which we can learn nothing about how we humans can go so astoundingly wrong. And that truly dishonors all those who suffered its horrors.

Mitch makes a good point about why MoveOn's open posting of ad entries is as American as multimedia pie.

Amazon Easter Egg

Type "old fart" (no quotes) into the search box at Amazon. Act now! (Thanks to Dan O'Neill for the info.) (If that doesn't work, try here.)

How can Clark win?

Dean opted out of the campaign finance reform law because its cap on fund raising would have meant that this spring, even though he'd raised the maximum allowed, he'd be out of money. He might have the nomination sewn up, but he'd have to sit on his hands as Karl Rove spends $150M against him, right up through the Democratic Convention in August. What candidate could survive that type of blitz?

So, let's say Gen. Clark wins enough primaries to become the nominee. Clark has opted into the campaign finance reform law, so he'll be out of money in March. Or maybe in May. Either way, how is he going to win the general election? What is the Clark strategy for winning? Does anyone know?

(If you tell me that blogs will enable a candidate to withstand a $150M negative TV campaign, I will ask you to send me a sample of what you're smoking.)

Blogging the Market

George Dafermos has posted a paper titled "Blogging the Market: How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations." Given that nothing is truly comprehensive, this paper edges in that direction. It begins, in the Abstract, with these words and in this tone:

Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases

and it ends like this:

YOU CORPORATE BUREAUCRAT, STANDARDISED VOICE IN THE MARKET WILL BE ASSIMILATED OR ANNIHILATED. THE CHOICE IS YOURS: SPEAK WITH A REAL VOICE, TELL US A STORY AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION OR BECOME DEFUNCT.

In between it covers a huge amount of ground. I'm sure I'll be returning to it frequently as I try to remember who said this or that insightful thing about weblogs.

Besides, how could I not like a paper that refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto as "infuriating"? :)

(Thanks to John Robb for the link. Also, here's a PDF version that doesn't have some of the formatting problems of the HTML rendition.)

GPS Navigation #3

On my first trip with my Garmin navigation system (Model 2610), I got lost within a quarter mile of home.

Well, I didn't get lost because that doesn't happen when you have an omniscient navigator. I did manage to make a wrong — unindicated — turn, I think because I was not used to how far away an intersection is when the navigator says that I should turn left in 400 feet. A few seconds after you make the wrong turn, the navigator calmly says that you are "off course" and recalculates the route. As a result, it took me through back streets all the way to my destination (Halley's apartment), a route substantially different than the one it plotted for me when I came back and didn't make wrong turns.

That aside, it's pretty damn impressive. The pre-turn instructions are timed well. The map zooms appropriately so you can see where you are and where you're supposed to be going. It would help, though, as Halley pointed out, if it gave you a verbal "Right on!" when you've managed to make a turn correctly; some of us (me) are so pathetic that we need the encouragement.

It did route me home in a sub-optimal way. I'm sure the route looked like the fastest on paper, but you really don't want to go through Harvard Square at 6pm on a Saturday night unless you have to. Also, while it's legally possible to make a left onto Comm Ave the way it told me to, you'd have to violate the laws of physics to do so, particular the clause that says two bodies can't occupy the same space at the same time.

I'm still finding it confusing to create routes. It's a highly compressed UI. But I'm getting better at it.

The weirdest thing is, though, that while it certainly is getting me from A to B better, I now have even less of a sense of where I am. I don't know how what cities I passed through or what roads I'm on. All I know is that I have to make a right turn in 400 feet.

[Episode 1. Episode 2.]

The power of Joi

So, I'm at this big Dean organizing event in a hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I plug in my wifi card just for kicks. And — surprise! — it tells me I'm getting signal, which is surprising since the event and the hall don't have any wifi transmitters. So, I look at the properties of the connection:

This would be great except Joi Ito is some thousands of miles away, telling Sony executives what they need to know about the future of media, a fact I confirm with Boris Anthony, Joi's blogmaster who happens to be at the Dean thing.

And, no, there wasn't really any wifi working, ad hoc or otherwise.

Navigator #2

Off on a 1.5 hour trip tomorrow with the new Garmin GPS navigator. Part one takes me 20 miles away to Halley's place; I've never been in that neighborhood and it sounds like it's a bit tricky to find. Then it's on to Portsmouth, with Halley and Jackson, to a Dean meeting. So, this should be a good test.

I'm having trouble with the UI for requesting routes. When I do a text search for an address, three times out of three it's told me that it doesn't exist, although if I use the map zoomed in all the way, I can find them, and the system accepts them as valid waypoints. Odd.

BTW, Gary Turner writes amusingly (as always) about his own experiences with GPS navigation.

Overly-pleasant spam

Here's an unanticipated effect of spam.

Spam showing up in blog comments increasingly tries to pass itself off as a genuine comment. So, I've been getting spams that say how interesting my blog is and how much they care about what I have to say. How touching!

Other comment spam disguises itself in the form of some bromide so generic that it can apply to any blog article and so bland that no one will object to it. For example, "Pamela Woodlake" recently spammed an entry on Andrew Odlyzko's comparison of broadband and cell phone adoption rates with the heartwarming comment that "A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." The URL she gave as hers, however, is for some weight-loss hokum.

Frankly, I'd rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.

Trusting the ballot

According to an article in yesterday's Miami Herald:

In Tuesday's special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate...

The percentage of nonvotes — 1.3 percent — is modest compared to the days of ''hanging'' and ''pregnant chads.'' But in Tuesday's race, every vote was crucial. In a seven-candidate field, Ellyn Bogdanoff beat Oliver Parker by just 12 votes.

The non-votes may be due to Democrats entering the voting booth only to discover that there were no Democrats on the ballot. But the mere suspicion that the machines are at fault is intolerable in a democracy.

Insect-Part Limericks

The Annals of Improbable Research's newsletter version — and check out its new blog — is running a limerick contest:

Investigator Steven Slap recommends that we recommend the book "Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods," by Alan R. Olsen, Thomas H. Sidebottom and Sherry A. Knight.

We commend Investigator Slap for his recommendation, and recommend that, for conversational purposes, everyone refer to the book as "Sidebottom's classic 'Fundamentals of Microanalytical Entomology: A Practical Guide to Detecting and Identifying Filth in Foods.'"

Readers who have read the book (which we have not) are invited to submit limericks in tribute to it or to specific portions of it. We will publish the best of these either here in mini-AIR or on the WHAT'S NEW blog (see below).

Here's my entry:

The book by Sidebottom is lunch-
Time reading for a scary bunch
    Who look into their meal
    With a bug-eyéd zeal
And savor its every crunch.

You can send your entry to:

FILTH-IN-FOODS PAEANS
c/o marca@chem2.harvard.edu

Navigator #1

My Garmin 2610 GPS navigator arrived this afternoon, on time, from CompuPlus, a cheapie online merchant. But I had to help my son with his homework when all I wanted to do was play with my new toy. Damn homework!

The unit seems smaller than I remember it from my friend's car. But such is the illusion of consumerism.

The installation instructions are mediocre. The software installed pretty easily despite that, although I'm not sure that my registration went through. I got a mysterious error code. But the mapping software seems to be unlocked, so I'm proceeding.

When you turn the unit on indoors, it defaults to showing you China and displays a "Locating Satellites" message, which may or may not be the case.

You load up the two disks of North American maps that come with the system and you click on the regions you want to install onto your device. An inconspicuous note in the window frame tells you how many megabytes of mappage you've selected. Since my unit comes with 128MB of memory on a flash card already installed in the system, I picked 127.9MB of maps, which covered all of the Northeast, up to about 50 miles west of the Hudson in NY and upper NJ. Then you tell the software to save the maps into the GPS unit, which you've connected by USB.

It transfers slowly. The meter says it'll take about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the first time through it got to the 15 minute mark and only then told me that I'd selected too many maps. So I knocked it down to 126.9MB and we'll see if it craps out again. It'd be real handy if it'd warn you about this before you spend the time uploading. Sigh.

The upload screen grays out the choices for waypoints and routes, so I'm a little nervous that after I've uploaded all the mapping data, I still won't be able to tell it that I want to go from my house to my in-laws' house. (They live over a mile away so I need electronic help getting there. Really.) But we'll see.

Anticipation...

Hairy Club for Growth

Halley is making light of the Club for Growth today, and manages to work us around to a Joe Conason piece on the hypocrisy of rich addicts who are hardliners about drug users except when they're them (so to speak).

Bush in 30 Seconds

A team of celebrities is determining the winner of MoveOn.org's contest for amateur commercials countering the Bush administration's policies and propaganda. But we wee folks get to vote on winners in three categories: Funniest, Best Youth Pitch, and Best Animation. Some of the 12 entries are very well done and quite amusing.

Waiting for GPS

My GPS navigation system should arrive today. I forewent all birthday and Chanukah gifts from my family in order to build up a fund for the device, a Garmin 2610. It's a perky little number that sits on your dash and tells you, in a silky voice that forgives all your directional transgressions, how to get from A to B.

I'm not a particularly good driver to begin with, but I spend most of almost every trip trying to envision how the road I'm on links up with the road I'm trying to get to. The rest of the time I'm having mini anxiety attacks, worrying that I'm on the wrong road or in the wrong city. See, I've only lived in the same neighborhood for 17 years, so you can understand why going to pick up milk is an adventure that requires road maps, emergency flares and a sextant.

I am just missing some synapses. To me, right and left are like red and black on the roulette table. But two recent incidents really scared me.

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled into a gas station and asked my wife which side of the car the tank is on. (The cars only three years old, so I'm still getting used to it.) My wife, knowing my directional stupidity, said "It's on your side." I still pulled in on the wrong side.

Then, yesterday, I said that my son was "up in the basement." I really thought I had mastered up and down. Fortunately, that smell of burning plastic came from a misguided science experiment.

But my problem isn't just with basic spatial orientation. I can't visualize how the parts of my world connect. When driving, I'm constantly surprised that this road leads to that one. To plot how to get somewhere, I have to laboriously piece together scenes of intersections, and often I just can't do it. I also have no sense of which areas are near other areas.

So, I'm hoping that my new GPS system will let me focus on the important part of driving: Talking on the cell phone.

NOTE: Now would not be a good time to tell me that instead of paying $750 for a Garmin, I could have done the same thing by wrapping copper wire around a $0.59 Boy Scout compass and sticking it into my Palm Pilot. Thank you.

The Portrait of Joho Gray

BoingBoing pointed to a site that PhotoShopped celebrities into old age and zithood.

Since I have on occasion been cruel about celebrity faces, I thought it only fair that I PhotoShop my own visage to see what I might look like at the decrepit age of, oh, I don't know, 53:

1972 college yearbook

30 years later (artist's rendition)

(The depressing thing is that despite using every deformation I know of in PaintShop 8, this picture still has aged better than I have.)

E-Dem at E-Tech

The O'Reilly Digital Democrary Teach-In's lineup is now online. It's sorta kinda part of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which was a must-attend event last year and promises to be as good this year. The Teach-In — bring a flower and anything written by Howard Zinn — looks like it'll be a great day with some fabulous folks who are actually making a difference. (Disclosure: I'm on the conference committee, but that doesn't mean I'd lie to you about being excited about the event.)

Making up the story

I will admit it's a little thing, but it irks me. The Boston Globe today has an article by Joanna Weiss about the Clark campaign "blasting" a leaflet from the Dean campaign. In order to build the narrative, the fourth paragraph says that "Clark aids said that the Dean attack was a sign that...the presidential race might be evolving into a two-way battle..."

The fifth paragraph then validates this point of view:

A New Hampshire tracking poll released this week by American Research Group indicated Clark in second place behind Dean, pulling ahead of ... Kerry...

The sixth paragraph continues the story:

A USA Today poll indicated Clark and Dean in a statistical tie nationwide.

Hmm. The first poll mentioned has Clark at 16% and Kerry at 13%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. The second one has Dean with 24% and Clark with 20%, with a margin of error of 5. The Globe article ignores the margin of error in the NH poll but includes it in the national poll. Why? I can only presume because the story tells better that way.

Clark is coming up quickly in the polls. That's an important story. We could do without shading the statistics to make it "tell" better.

The Globe's lead story today is Bush's immigration reform proposal. I read all three articles in the set and I still don't what Bush is proposing or how it's different than what currently exists. This is some bad reporting.

Here's a Q&A from the Miami Herald that I found much more helpful.

It turns out that the proposal, which does not give illegal immigrants the right to apply for permanent residency, sets up a "guest" status where "guest" means "Willing to pay a fee to take a job so crappy that, even during the worst economy for jobs since the Depression, no American is willing to take it." Be our guest to do our back-stooping, subsistence-paying labor! You're welcome!

(Are FAQs becoming more useful than inverted pyramids in telling non-narrative journalistic stories?)

Dean Support-o-Meter

The Club for Growth, a Republicanish group, has spent $75,000 to air an ad in Iowa that features a couple saying, "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding...[etc.] ... freak-show back to Vermont."

One has to wonder why. If Dean is the weakest candidate against Bush, why is a Republican group working so hard to keep him from getting the nomination? In fact, why would Karl Rove be telling the world that Dean is the candidate he would most like to run his boy against? Surely Karl is too devious to be giving the Democrats such good advice!

Anyway, thanks to the Club, we now have an easy way to gauge whether Dean is the candidate for you:

By the way, in response to this ad, Dean supporters donated an additional $280,000 to the Governor's campaign.

Charles Taylor at Salon has a good review (i.e., I generally agree with his assessment) of the ads created by amateurs as part of MoveOn.org's contest. He particularly likes Charlie Fisher's "Child Play." Me, too. As Taylor says:

If I were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark, the impact and economy of these ads would make me think twice before I shelled out big bucks to some media professionals.

Collaborative Mapping

Edward Mac Gillavry has a paper on collaborative mapping that comes at the idea from a different angle than does Matt Haughey's suggestion that someone combine a mapping system with a Slashdot-like system to do collaborative routing:

Collaborative mapping is an initiative to collectively produce models of real-world locations online that people can then access and use to virtually annotate locations in space.

Mac Gillavry points to two aspects of collaborative mapping: 1. Generating maps by mapping with your feet, so to speak. For example, at Waag.org, you can see maps of Amsterdam generated by aggregating data from people carrying GPS devices. 2. Collaboratively annotating locations with content that is displayed on location-aware devices.

A wiki for every street corner!

(In case you're wondering why mapping stuff has started showing up in this blog, it's because I'm working on an article on it for Esther Dyson's Release 1.0.)

Things you never knew why they existed

Mike O'Dell points us to a hard-to-fathom game at the Things You Never Knew Existed site.

Why this counts as a game is a bit of a mystery...

Damn social Web!

I sent an email to a friend this morning asking for help thinking of technology people who meet a particular parameter, you know, along the lines of "Do you know any techies who ____?" Unfortunately, my friend forwarded my hastily written mail to about 20 people who might also be able to fill in the blank.

One of those twenty mentioned Metcalfe's Law in her reply. Someone else talked about the need to supplement that law in order to understand a different aspect of social dynamics. Someone else commented, contradicted, expanded...

Now those 20 people — strangers — are engaged in a conversation about social network dynamics.

This leads me to a conclusion: The Web is more social than I am.

New Rule: If you don't know me, don't call me

I just posted this at Corante Many2Many:

I like Skype. It lets me make phone calls for free to the other 4M people who have signed up for the service. The calls go through my computer and they work real good.

But I've just gotten my second random phone call from some well-intentioned stranger who wants to know if I want to chat. Actually, I don't. If you call my Skype number randomly, the odds are just about perfect that you're going to be interrupting something that I'd rather be doing than speaking with a stranger. And here's how you know that: If I wanted to be speaking with a stranger now, I'd be on the Skype phone calling one. If you can get through to me on my Skype line it's because I don't want to be speaking with a stranger now.

Thank you for your attention.

Request for Open Source Mapping help

Anyone care to review the following snippet, about open source GIS projects, for accuracy, completeness, fairness, etc.? It's part of a much larger piece on the GIS industry. I'm on short deadline here...

<Draft>

One of the leaders at this point is the University of Minnesota's MapServer. It was initially developed as part of the ForNet forestry management project, funded by the state of Minnesota and NASA. While the MapServer lets an application display a browsable map, the site notes it, "is not a full-featured GIS system, nor does it aspire to be." The US Geological Survey announced last month that it will use the MapServer technology to help build The National Map, an open source map server with access to 20 terabytes of data from TopoZone.com (a site created by Maps a la carte, Inc.). TopoZone's map data comes, in turn, from the USGS as well as other sources.

There are other open source GIS web servers and applications. For example, GeoServer [led by whom?] implements the OpenGIS Consortium's Web Feature Server with the noble aim of making the citizenry better informed about matters geographic. PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the open source Postgres SQL database. GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), an international effort hosted in Italy, Germany and at Baylor University in the US, is strong in producing map graphics.

Of course, the open source projects generally don't provide all the functionality that the commercial services do. For example, if you give MapPoint or ESRI's map server a list of points you want to visit, you will get back an optimized routing map. MapServer and its like don't offer that functionality. But, because the open source map servers are non-proprietary, the community can add the features it needs as it needs them. For example, the Rosa Java Applet is one among several tools developed by the DM Solutions Group that add functionality to the MapServer, enabling users to interact with an image of a map by clicking, pressing buttons and dragging and dropping. Open source lags commercial development in this space, but it is good enough for many applications...not to mention it has the advantage of being open source.

</Draft>

Thanks!

Grassroots ads

MoveOn.org has posted the selected nominees in its create-an-ad contest. If I weren't on deadline, I'd be watching them right now...

Happy Sylvester

Hanan Cohen explains why Israelis refer to New Years Eve as "Sylvester":

It's just because Israel is a Jewish state. The [Jewish] new year holiday is celebrated on the eve of Tishrei 1st. People who immigrated to Israel from western countries still wanted to celebrate the "old" new year, like at home, but could not say that they were celebrating the new year so they used instead the Catholic name of the day, Sylvester. That's why the Jews in Israel celebrate the event using a name of a Catholic saint.

Hanan also points to an article about the 25% increase in poverty in Michigan.

Why I'm supporting Dean - The short answer

Dave Rogers asks, in a comment to my posting about canvassing for Dean, why I'm supporting the Gov. Here's my reply:

If you matched my positions up with the candidates' (see the WBUR vote by issue quiz), it'd come out pretty much a wash among all of them except Lieberman. So, although overall I prefer Dean's stances, I'm not voting primarily on the issues. There are two other reasons I'm supporting Dean.

First, I think he has the best chance to beat Bush. There are clearly reasonable arguments about this and I have never made an accurate political prediction. But it still seems to me that we can't win by competing for the center. We did that and "lost" last time. We need instead to energize the base and bring in new voters. I think Dean has the best chance of doing that.

Second, win or lose, I think Dean is transforming politics. He's giving people hope. (Despite what the Republicans and the media say, hope outweighs anger in the Dean movement, IMO.) He's breaking the mold of traditional broadcast politics. He's genuinely committed to giving citizens a voice and letting us self-organize. I think we (the grassroots) are laying the groundwork for something new and important. So, even if Dean loses the nomination, I will be proud to have worked for him.

Since beating Bush is my number one priority, of course I will work for and contribute to the campaign of whomever the Dems nominate...although my ardor will be dampened if it's Lieberman.

Some friends of mine are considering switching from Dean to Bush (!) because they doubt Dean's commitment to Israel. They are especially exercised by Dean's referring to members of Hamas as "soldiers." In context, though, he was calling them soldiers in order to support Israel's policy of assassinating them. I don't see how this indicates any weakness in his support of Israel, although it was obviously stupid politically.

Does social software matter?

I've posted an entry at Corante Many2Many on whether social networks such as LinkedIn matter...

Are plane crashes news?

Can anyone tell me why an entire news cycle was taken up by the crash of a plane full of tourists? Of course it's a tragedy for the dead and their families, but once terrorism was ruled out early on, why was it the headline for the day and the lead story every hour on the radio news?

Slow news day? Yeah, except for a probe about to land on another planet. And Afghanistan on the verge of giving itself a constitution. And the New York Times claiming that Pakistan is the hub of the international traffic in the requisites for making nukes. And the Office of Management and Budget reporting that the new budget is going to halve the deficit in five years by cutting healthcare for veterans, job programs, housing vouchers and biomedical research. And a long-time Democratic representative switching parties because his district was repeatedly denied funds because he was a Democrat.

What does a plane crash tell me about my world? Why do the media think that it warrants my attention the way that, say, a Malaysian bus plunge doesn't? Why does a plane crash matter?

(Note: 24 people died in traffic accidents in George over the long Christmas holiday weekend.)

Catherine Seip awards her own Dubious Achievements to the media. (Thanks to kausfiles for the link.)

Lisa Williams - four days away from giving birth - comments on this entry and points to a few sources of statistical information: the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the American Fact Finder, and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. She writes:

People get all worked up about welfare when it is a tiny percentage of each tax dollar; all that fuss about the NEA? We spend more on military bands.

Happy upcoming birthday, Lisa!

Shoe leather for the Gov

It should rain when you canvass for a candidate. Not a downpour but enough of a drizzle that your hair is plastered to your head and your shirt never gets quite dry. And it should be cold. Glove cold. And the first person you meet should definitely not agree with you. Easy virtue isn't worth it. (Accidentally leaving your umbrella, hat, cell phone and lunch at the local campaign headquarters is purely optional, however. Sigh.)

I'm home and dry now. My shoes are off and my feet are up. I feel good that I did a little tiny bit today to help get the Governor into the White House. I knocked on the doors of the registered Democrats and Independents marked on the papers the Portsmouth Dean HQ gave me. Most weren't home. (Where do the people of Portsmouth all go on a rainy Saturday? Or did they just see me coming?) Some were Dean supporters. One woman worked with Dean's wife in an ER in Vermont. Another said she's supporting Dean because she's in health care services — no further explanation required. A bunch politely declined to talk with me. No one volunteered that they were supporting another Democrat. The very first person who responded said, "I'm supporting President George W. Bush" with a semper fi stare that nearly knocked me off his stoop. His neighbor is also supporting the president, but thanked me for coming out on a day like this. I thanked him for thanking me, and he thanked me back.

I spent most of my time in an apartment complex where most of the people I spoke with were not the ones listed for those apartments; apparently it's an area with high turn over as the economy shakes people out of their jobs and homes. One young woman was trying to decide which Democrat's position on education is closest to her own. She's preparing to be a teacher. I started to say something about the failure of No Child Left Behind, but she beat me to it. "This insistence on testing, and on blaming schools and teachers, is ridiculous," she said. That's Dean position, I replied. "Whoever we get will be better than Bush on education," I said, and she agreed. I said that I was supporting Dean not just because of the issues but also because I like the way he makes decisions: look at the facts, come to conclusions, change your mind if the facts change or if you were wrong. It'll be good to have a person of science in the White House.

For those who weren't home, I left a Dean brochure. I wrote "I hope you'll consider Gov. Dean!" on each and signed it "- David W., a wet volunteer." No one told me to do that. In fact, when Joe at the Portsmouth HQ gave us our instructions, he said, "When someone answers, tell them a sentence or two about why you're supporting Gov. Dean." No Message of the Day. No scripted talking points. Just go forth and converse. Cool.

I came back to Portsmouth earlier than the rest of the canvassers because I wear out sooner. And the luck of my day continued: My drive home coincided with a particularly good episode of "This American Life" on the radio.

Canvassing for Howie

I'm off to Portsmouth, NH, this morning to go door-to-door for Dean. I'll let you know how it went...

e911 cell phone location query

Mind some dumb-ass questions about cell phone location technology and policy for something I'm writing? I'm having trouble finding a site on the Web that talks about this at a sufficient level of ignorance.

I understand that by 2005, 95% of cell phones in the US need to be able to broadcast their location with an accuracy of 50-150m. This is part of the FCC's e911 ("Enhanced 911") act. Here's what I don't understand:

1. The wireless carriers are required to track that information only if you make a 911 call. But will my cell phone be broadcasting its location continuously, or only when I make a 911 call?

2. I'm confused about the tech used by cell phones to determine location. Is it GPS? (If so, what happens when I'm indoors or in an urban canyon? And, if so, a GPS device receives; it doesn't transmit. So does the location information just get encoded as a header or something in a 911 call? In all calls?) If it's not GPS, what is it?

I'd ask smarter questions if I could. And, of course, please feel free to correct the part that I think I understand, too.

Shwirtz in Israel

Jacob Shwirtz has moved to Israel and has taken his blog with him.

Dramatic excerpt:

It wasn't long in the coming. I have now lived through Israel's first terrorist suicide bombing since moving here (on Christmas day). From what I understand, it wasn't too far away from the apartment. I had no idea what was going on until the phone rang - waking me up from a nap (still dealing with jet lag) - it was my mother wanting to know if everything was ok. Everything was ok except for my nap.

Undramatic excerpt:

The Irish pub was the only place I had seen a Christmas tree since arriving in Israel. It is weird but I almost missed Christmas in New York. The holidays aren't over yet - New Years is just as big here as in New York. For some strange reason they call it the "Sylvester."

New company blog

Kyle Shannon is blogging his new company, Invention Asylum. Should be fun.

Best of 2003

In alphabetical order:

1967
Ann
Breathing
"Crepuscular"
Curry
Duke Ellington
E-minor
Foo
Grape-nuts and yogurt
Haha
Italy
Metadata
Monday, May 12, 9-10:30am
Progeny