The 2-step tonic for political depression

I've not made any bones about it: This campaign has left me beaten down and depressed. Am I the only one?

So, here's my tonic. It comes in two parts: Part 1: Get out the vote. Part 2: Get out and vote.

If we get out the vote, we win. We could even win big.

And while democracy does not consist merely of pulling a lever in a voting booth, pulling that lever is so important that people have died to give us that right. That's what I remember every time I vote, and this will not be the first time I get choked up in a voting booth.

I'm depressed so I spend more time thinking about how bad it's going to be if Bush wins. But occasionally I am granted a moment of thinking how good four - eight! - years of Kerry can be. I believe we will see a type of strong leadership - principled, realistic and unmarred by meanness - that this country has not seen in a generation.

I gotta go call some strangers...

You can, too. Kerry supporters can sign up here to call from their houses. Bush supporters can go google it on their own; I'm not that much of a liberal.

When your wifi card doesn't work...

When your wifi card doesn't work under XP, after spending three hours futzing with drivers, I suggest you try this:

Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services. Look for Wireless Zero Configuration. Click on it. If it's stopped, start it. If there's no start or stop button, double click on it and change "Startup type" to "Automatic."

Or you could get a Mac which, because it is a closed environment, tends to be easier to live with.

Doom the Movie (not Doom the Presidential Prediction)

1. The Doom movie is in pre-production in Prague. Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave, Romeo Must Die) is directing and Karl Urban ("What business does an elf, man, and a dwarf have in the Ridder-Mark? Speak quickly", LOTR 2) will play the lead. The script is not the same as the script of Doom 3, which is the same as the script of Doom 1. which is the same as Die Hards 1-7, Rambo's 1-12, and every psychopathically sympathy-free mow-'em-down tale ever told ... and I say that as a fan.

The writer, 26-year-old Dave Callaham, has no other screenwriting credits. He gives away a bit of the "plot":

In the movie he [the space marine] is reunited with his sister, a scientist on the based named Samantha (to be played by Die Another Day villainess Rosamund Pike). They were separated after an accident that killed their parents and Callaham says, "They are a little estranged" However, strange things are afoot on the base as alien monsters begin to appear and both brother and sister have to put aside their differences in order to survive. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will also appear as Sarge, the head space marine...

In the interview, Callaham says that Id agreed to let him put in some real "character development." That's code for "I really want to make a Doom movie that will not only betray your vision, but will totally suck."

The interview got slashdotted. And here's a 145MB video about the history of Doom. I have not downloaded it.

2. The December issue of Computer Gaming World runs a "Duke Nukem Timeline" that points out: "Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched, and successfully landed on Mars in less time." Yeah, but did NASA have to worry about pixel shading? I don't think so. Ok, well, actually the NASA imaging software probably did, but, Duke Nukem is going to totally kick NASA's ass!

Our moon

Liz points us to a beautiful sequence of photos of the lunar eclipse, taken by Amy Desiree Goldstein.

Rebecca on WikiNews

Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows a little bit about journalism, has a terrific post on the proposed WikiNews.

Overall, I think it's an interesting experiment that is likely to turn into something other than is planned. What worries me most is their insistence on maintaining a neutral point of view, a policy that I believe mirrors the weakness of journalism that blogs redress. (Joi has additional concerns, as does the award-winning Dan Gillmor.)

The award-winning Dan Gillmor

Dan has won the 2004 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. So deserved. Not only is We the Media the seminal statement of how the Net is transforming journalism, Dan has been walking the walk before most of us could crawl.

Congratulations, Dan.

Two urgent questions

1. When the network newscasters announce who won Florida, what little self-effacing phrase will they use to introduce it? "We're ready to announce a winner in Florida, and believe me, this time we've checked our numbers and counted them twice..."? "We are calling Florida for Bush/Kerry, although with Florida the only thing you can expect is the unexpected..."? What's it going to be?

2. If one were to serve a house drink on Election Night, what should it be?

a. Suggest existing appropriate drinks for Bush supporters and for Kerry supporters.

b. Create your own drink and describe what's in it. E.g., for pessimistic Kerry supporters, you might suggest the Bush Oblivion ("take three a day for the next four years") . Or, Kerry supporters might drink Iraq Invasions: Mix together wild turkey and WMDs; if no WMDs can be found, substitute zero-proof beer. Bush supporters might prefer the Shock and Awe.

Steve Johnson's new book

Steve talks about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You. (Love the title). A snippet:

It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

Steve is one of my very favorite writers. He leads you through some complex topic and just as you're pleased with yourself for having understood so much, he turns you around and shows you some truth you hadn't noticed about where you've just been. Despite the powerful Writers Envy his work induces in me, I'm very much looking forward to his new book, which he thinks he'll be done revising in a few months.

Gonzo endorsement and dancing in the voting booths

If you haven't read Hunter S. Thompson's surprisingly enthusiastic endorsement of Kerry, drop a tab and go on over to Rolling Stone...

Fittingly, I got to this through John Perry Barlow's inspired rational madness: How to Overthrow the Government.

100,000 Iraqi dead

The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 civilians have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.

More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say.

This is a newspaper's summary of a study in the prestigious UK medical journal, The Lancet.

From the article itself:

The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8·1-419) than in the period before the war.

...Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

Is this proof that we should not have started this war? Of course not. But it should keep us from ever thinking that war is an easy answer to a hard question.

(You can read the whole article here. It requires a free registration.)

Fuck it. You know, I try to be reasonable. But it's hard to maintain the cool stoniness of reason when you're surrounded by a 100,000 corpses — women and children and men — even if your country is directly responsible "only" for most of them.

We have an administration that uses this war to win an election, yet it forbids us from seeing photographs of our honored dead. Then it crows that the Democrats will lose because we're "reality-based." A hundred thousand corpses around us is a lot of reality to ignore. Reality is going to catch up with us, and it iis going to hurt 100,000 times more when it does.

What have we become?

PopTech Infotoons

Peter Durand of AlphaChimp has posted the posters he did in real time illustrating each of the PopTech talks. (My blogs from PopTech start here.)

Prayers of Mass Destruction

Terry Heaton blogs an interview with Anniesj who got a friendly visit from the Secret Service after she blogged — irked by Bush's talk of prayer — that she was praying that God would inspire Bush and his pals to commit mass suicide. Anniesj seems to think she's actually done something worth being investigated for. Terry concludes:

...if you're a blogger, for crying out loud be careful about what you post, even in the comments section of somebody else's blog. The first amendment is not absolute, and it's pretty easy to find you.

I conclude that when the Secret Service can tell you what you are and are not allowed to pray for — especially when you're writing satire — this country has had it.

I personally pray the Rapture comes before Nov. 2 and that it takes Bush and his cronies to Hell to do some nation-building.

The Net is an echo chamber? Nah.

In an article in Salon in February, I disputed the idea that the Net consists of echo chambers:

...Even if I spend most of my online time in my echo chamber of choice, the minority of my time may bring me into contact with a more diverse range of opinions than I would have encountered without the Net. That seems to me to be the relevant statistic, however elusive it might be.

Micah Sifry at the new Personal Democracy Forum cites a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that says: "Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions."

Since the study supports my position, I have can only conclude that the study is deeply flawed.

PhotoShop Weasels

Mithras at Kos proves that the Bush campaign's latest ad doctors a small crowd into a large one.

Getting through till Tuesday...and beyond

ProgressiveMajoritySpeaks has posted a mp3 mix of Martin Luther King, Robert LafFolette and Paul Wellstone. Loop it and listen for the next 4 years...

RageBoy's brain scanner

Chris Locke weaves a nasty little web of ideas - personal, psychological, industrial, historical - over at this site that puts Maslow's self-actualization in a disturbing light.

My new tagline for Chris: RageBoy: Giving being fucking nuts a good name since 1985.

Bush giving the finger, on tape

Hmm, Candidate Bush overheard calling a NY Times reporter a "major league asshole." VP Cheney telling Senator Leahy to go "fuck himself." And now Governor George Bush giving the finger to the camera. All just part of the return to civility and Christian decency that this great man represents. (Ask yourself: What would Jimmy Carter do?)

Yes it's petty. I present it as nothing more than that.

This video comes courtesy of VideVote.org. Here's a description of the project, courtesy of Jon Lebkowsky:

Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we're putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day...We aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. This all began when the NY Times ran an article over the weekend saying the Republicans plan to challenge some voters at polling places - "winning through intimidation." We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible.

Citizen-journalists to the rescue!

Google browser browses the world

Jason Kottke in September guessed that Google is building its own browser. Slashdot got all slashdotty on that idea's ass. The supporting evidence: Google has registered gbrowser.com, they may be hiring people from Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, and there are reasons to think it makes sense for Google to do so...at least in terms of Google's ambitiousness.

I'm not good at this type of prognostication. (So, what type of prognostication am I good at? I accurately predicted that John Travolta would be a huge star back when he was a Sweathog. That concludes my list.) But, yesterday's purchase of Keyhole — yet another Windows-only service, as Dan Gillmor points out — got me to thinking. If Google is building a browser, what might it be like?

It would not be a Web browser. It'd be a world browser. It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it'd also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

And it wouldn't be just a browser. It would let me work with the information I've found: Manage my photos (Picasa), manage my desktop files, translate documents (Google Languages), shop...

If that's what Google's aiming at, they need a file manager (no big deal) and would probably want to have a e-wallet and maybe a digital ID offering (Whoogle? — currently owned by AK PRadeep in Berkeley).

The result would replace current browsers but wouldn't look much like them. You'd do so much of your daily work in it it that it would feel more like a desktop...

...which is where it gets really interesting.

Click here for a disclosure statement.

Victory for the Northeastern region! But defeat on the narrative front.

Apparently, athletes hired by the New England region were successful in their efforts to defeat similar athletes hired by the greater St. Louis area. I commend them all.

But, this leaves us with an incomplete narrative. The Boston team failed for 86 years because it was insufficiently grateful to a particular porcine athlete who went on to great success. This resulted in a curse. Now the curse has been lifted. But how? Did Manny Ramirez accomplish seven impossible tasks set for him by the wily Odin? Did David Ortiz slay a Minotaur? Did Johnny Damon pull a thorn from an enchanted Yankee's paw? Without knowing how the curse was lifted, the story just doesn't work, people!

GeorgeWBush.com rejects non-American visitors

Bush's official campaign site seems to be rejecting visitors from outside North America.

Yeah, way to build a coalition, George.

[Thanks to Paolo for the link. Paolo comments: "This must be the most stupid move in the short Internet history."]

Three from Trippi

I got to hang out with Joe Trippi yesterday. Here are three miscellaneous snippets:

Waiting for Hawaii. Hawaii, which went for Gore by 20 points, is now in play. Trippi's latest count of electoral votes puts the two candidates even...which means that the deciding votes may come from an archipelago where the polls don't close until 2pm on Wednesday, East Coast time.*

Both sides think they're going to lose. Apparently (= borderline rumor ahead), the mood on both campaign planes is dismal. Both sides think they're going to lose.

Tracking polls soften the blow. Tracking polls average results over three days. I.e., On Friday you see the average of W-T-F, and on Saturday you see the average of T-F-S. That means that if a small gap opens on Friday, you're likely to see a substantially larger one one on Saturday. This is bad news for Kerry if you watch Zogby but good news if you watch the Washington Post. (Zogby is good news for Nader, who has gained about 40% in the past 12 days, up to 1.1. On the other hand, if you're Libertarian, Constitution Party, Green, Other or Undecided, Zogby says you're screwed.)

——
*Joho guarantees that all its math is wrong.

Update: Zogby now has Kerry cutting Bush's lead to 1 point. By the logic of tracking polls, we should expect a further gain by Kerry tomorrow. (Fingers crossed, knocking wood, sacrificing small woodland mammals in particularly gruesome ways.)

Things not to ask yourself before walking down two flights of stairs to an open atrium

"I wonder how Jackie Chan would get down..."

How not to watch a Red Sox game

Every time a ball fails to clear the fence, assume that the players are already giving 110% and calculate exactly how many more percentage points were needed to make it a home run.

Supply the answer in the form, "If baseball player had only given ___%, that would have been a homer." Repeat until your wife and son go upstairs to watch in your bedroom.

Effective propaganda?

I think this ad is some fine propaganda. Does it work for you? Do you think it'd work on undecided voters?

Trippi class

Joe Trippi invited me in as a guest speaker at the seminar he leads at the JFK School of Government at Harvard. Man, that was fun, although I apparently depressed several students judging by the number of them who were googling for some variation of noose "how to tie". You know you're being depressing when, in response to a question about the world in twenty years, you use the phrase "surface dwellers."

I began with 15 minute informal talk about the miserable shape our democracy is in. But, I said, during the Dean months, I felt something different. I think we call it "hope." It came not from Dean or his policies. It came from the connection to other Deaniacs and the sense that it was in our power to make a difference together. The sense that democracy is ours and that it sounds like people talking with one another - that's what I loved about the Dean campaign.

I get some of that from the blogosphere. It's one place where the spark still lives.

Then I shut up and we had an interesting discussion about how realistic the Internet hope for democracy is. Trippi is less pessimistic than I am.

At the end, I asked for a show of hands: Who thinks Kerry will win, and who thinks Bush will? It was 50-50.

Proof of draft!

You've been dubious that Bush plans on bringing back the draft? Take a look at the front page of the Bush web site today. It features this photo:

Bush site prepares us for the sub-teen draft

Irony-dectomy

David Zucker, the producer of Airplane, Naked Gun, and Ruthless People, has made a movie — supported by the Republican Club for Growth (remember the "sushi-eating, Volvo-driving" anti-Dean ad?) — that lampoons Kerry for being a flipflopper.

Without the slightest sense of irony, Zucker promotes himself as a former Democrat who now is a Republican.

(Link from LGF.)

Carmeron Marlow at da Berkman

Cameron Marlow of Overstated.com and Blogdex is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. It's on Political Hacks, i.e., hacking politics. (His slide is here.)

He gives lots of examples of people using the Net to take advantage of information that's already been there. e.g., www.FundRace.org. Don't miss his analysis of the debates here and here. (That second link goes to an auto-summary of the debates. I once did the same thing for the book of Genesis.)

We played around a bit with a tool Cameron wrote that maps the frequency of phrases in the two candidates' stump speeches, mapped across time. Some surprises. Try searching for saddam, osama, health care, vietnam, lawyers, and teresa.

Die, telcos, die!

RCN provides our house with telephone service, cable modem, and cable television. I just switched another telephone line over to them because MCI charges too much for sucking.

But here's what I learned: RCN charges $7.00/month for Caller ID. Seven bucks for a service that is essentially free to them. Jeez. It makes me love my Vonage phone all the more.

(On the positive side, RCN silently upgraded its cable modem customers to 7 megabit service. Right now, DSLReports says I'm getting 5mbit down and an increasingly asymmetric 572kb up.)

Error 405: This link works fine but nobody cares

I received yet another personal message from Marc Racicot today. He certainly seems to like me! This one says:

There's an old saying that goes, "All politics is local." As a former Governor, I couldn't agree more.

To reach the undecided voters, we need to make our message local as well. That's why we have created special web pages for every state - to tell every voter why President Bush is the best choice based on the local issues important to them.

We encourage you to share our Massachusetts page with friends, family and neighbors who live near you and may still be undecided.

www.GeorgeWBush.com/Massachusetts

It's with a certain satisfaction I report that the links leads you to this:

Petty of me, I know. But I'm afraid the only pleasures left are petty.

Eminem's screed

As a 53-year-old suburban dad, I am, let's say, outside of Eminem's demographic. But his vehemently anti-Bush Mosh (lyrics here) truly shizzled my nizzle. (I'm assuming it's good to have one's nizzles shizzled.)

Maybe you can tell me: Are his claims of self-importance ("Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness...", "I give sight to the blind") as egotistical as they sound, merely evidence of the young lad's lack of a self-esteem problem, or just part of the genre I need to accept?

Steve Johnson: Red Sox Fan

Steve Johnson, resident of NYC, recently switched his fandom from the Yankees to the Red Sox. I can't quote from his most recent post without giving it away - it's one sentence long - but go have a laugh.

Reason to Love Canada #341

Canada's equivalent of American Idol is a show that profiles individuals of great achievement in Canadian history. You then get to vote for your favorite. Currently in the lead position is Tommy Douglas, "the father of Medicare," followed by Terry Fox who ran across Canada after losing his right leg to cancer.

Meanwhile, in America we're trying to decide whether we'd rather watch The Swan or Who Wants to Blow Donald's Trumpet?

O, Can-a-DA...

[Thanks, Tim Bouma, for the link.]

Marc's bad idea, and a personal matter

I think Marc Canter's idea is, overall, a bad one because, even though his scheme provides transparency (yay!), as I understand it, bloggers who said bad things about a client would not get their contracts renewed (boo!); "Say nice things or we'll stop paying you" makes you less trustworthy. I'm in favor of bloggers making money from their blogs, but not if I now have to worry that their voice may have been bought. (See Stowe and Jason for more.)

And I want to set the record (= the index) straight on a personal matter. Marc quotes me from a fun lunch we had a couple of weeks ago in SF. He told me about his plan. I told him why I thought it would result in coercing bloggers into saying good things about his clients. I not only that I of course want bloggers to be able to make money blogging, but I suggested variations on his plan that I thought would put money in blogger's pockets without making us into shills. (Primarily, I suggested paying bloggers to blog about a product on the product's site, with full transparency, for a limited time with a non-renewable contract. Is it a good idea? I dunno, but bloggers would make money and I think wouldn't feel coerced into being positive.)

This is a tad awkward. Marc has generously apologized for running the quote and removed the reference to me. Thanks, Marc. I have therefore removed two brief paragraphs from this blog entry. one that whined about what I thought was Marc's mischaracterization of my opinion and another that was slightly light. I have deeply mixed feelings about editing blogs after the fact (excepting for typos, misspelling names, etc.), but I'd rather err on the side of civility.

Microsoft in violation?

In order to register a Microsoft product, you must get a .NET Passport. There are no alternative methods. I don't want to support Passport because I'm uncomfortable with Microsoft being in the ID business — and if I'm wrong, then I'll fall back simply on "I don't want one because I don't want one" — so now I don't get the benefits of registration (whatever those might be).

Isn't this coercive behavior? Can't someone please sue them? Thank you.

Michael O'Connor Clarke's new blog

Michael has started a Corante blog called "Flackster." Michael's one of the wittier writers around, so I look forward to this chronicle of life in, among and against the PR-osphere.

Red Sox question

I don't know anything about baseball — for example, are there rules about when you can use a pinch runner, or is it just random? — so pardon me if this is a naive question, but: Is this the first time that winning a World Series would make a team normal?

Jay Rosen's list

Jay compiles a fantastic list of "What's going on here that we don't understand, do we, Mr. and Mrs. Jones?" He asks for help understanding what thread runs among the topics.

I left a comment, basically repeating a post from a few days ago:

Great list, and I agree with Shrinkette: Sounds like you're gestating the blog entry we're all waiting to read.

I think you can see one of the pivot points in Stewart's refusing to be CrossFire's "monkey": The journalists want to entertain and the entertain wants to tell the truth.

The entertainer is the pivot here because I think part of the new -- but transient -- narrative is that "The media are the last to know"...and in particular, the last to know that they've lost their pompous, false claim on our trust. "The media are the last to know" is a comic trope since, obviously, they're in the knowing business. Hence, the narrative has become comedic. Their every protestation of seriousness -- from Dan Rather's apology to Sam Donaldson's toupee -- now only makes them look more ridiculous.

Go read the list and leave Jay a comment that makes sense of it all...

Personal Democracy blog

The new Personal Democracy site and blog lis off to a strong start. E.g., Cory takes the first solo with an article called "Will Congress Outlaw Your iPod?" The list of contributors looks great, starting with Micah Sifry, one of the organizers of the site.

[Note: It's a little awkward for me to tout this site since I'm one of the contributors, but, well, take a look at it and judge for yourself. Of course.]

[PT] Eloma Simpson Barnes

The political session ended with a performance by Eloma Simpson Barnes. She gave a Martin Luther King speech that had apparently been given to a northern audience while the Voting Rights Bill was still in contention. It sounds like a dumb idea: Her voice emulate's King's. Her intonation is pitch perfect. It's just weird.

...Except, it totally worked on me. I'm old enough to remember King - when I was a young teenager, I was in one of the marches on Washington - and Barnes' performance brought it all back to me. We were so lucky to have King. Our history might have been much bloodier without him. And we lost so much when he was murdered.

That voice. It made me cry.

[PT] Connected politics

John Sculley moderates. The speakers are Andrew Rasiej, Joe Trippi and Adrian Wooldridge. They each get ten minutes.

Andrew: "Politics is broken. Our democracy is broken." There are 513,000 elected officials in this country. The relationship has been top down. What we learned from the Dean campaign is the power of the person to person connection. "There are 513,000 egocentric politicians in the US. Not one of them is netcentric." If they were netcentric, they'd say: "My constituents know more than I do." [Shades of Dan Gillmor.]

We can use the Internet to support the status quo, which is how it's been up through now. Or we can use it to d something new.

Adrian Wooldridge: "Connected power is not necessarily leftwing politics." Internet tools will shift the country further to the right. Goldwater inspired the biggest political revolution in recent history. It was a populist rebellion. And the center of gravity of the US is very much to the right. We jail 5x more people than Britain. We are far more anti-abortion than Europe. 45% of us believe in the devil while only 13% of Britain does. And it's going to get more right-ish.

Trippi: Presidential candidates are different from us. If we were asked to carry a box for four years and not drop it or else the world will end, we'd say no thanks. But every four years, ten guys come forward and say, "Gimme that box."

The only hope for our democracy is the new community and trust-building that's happening on the Internet; we need to form power at the bottom to change a system that's not working. And it's not an ideological fight. It's about it becoming a more powerful democracy." The Net allows us to come together and "have faith in strangers." [Yeah!]

Sculley: Brooks says that Republicans like their presidents to be people of soul, above the fray. Democrats feel otherwise. Are issues not really as important as we usually think?

Trippi: The real problem is the broadcast media. The 6-second soundbytes.

Adrian: People dislike CrossFire because people are craving more subtlety and nuance.

Q: What good does connected campaigning do if you don't have good candidates?

Andrew: Netcentric means that the candidate arises from the group itself.

Trippi: The system is set up to keep interesting people from succeeding. Everything works against insurgents.

Adrian: Anti-Americanism will rise even if Kerry is elected because there it has structural causes.

Trippi: If Kerry loses, there will be a huge demand to change the Democratic party, either from within quickly or from without.

Trippi: It was the voter-to-voter connection that made Dean different. Kerry and Bush are both running topdown campaigns.

Q: Adrian, you say that the Republicans have the big ideas and the big think tanks. Will that change?

Adrian: The Republicans did that consciously. The Democrats need to do that, too. they need to agree on a simple set of goals, but it's not clear that the Left has that. The Left needs the sort of blodbath created by Goldwater so they can sit down and decide exactly what they want.

Trippi: If Kerry wins, my fear is that there will be a sigh of relief.

Adrian: The best thing would be if both lost.

Andrew: In a netcentric ecology, it's less necessary to label yourself as left or right.

Q: Why didn't Kerry take advantage of the Dean machine?

Andrew: Because they're idiots. But mainly because they're afraid. I wish someone had said during the debates that the thing we have to fear is fear.

Trippi: We're in the infant stages of this. We need to be talking about the common good. We need leadership to talk about this. And only the trust being built online will let this happen.

Trippi: The big shock of 2004 may be the importance of cell phones. Pollsters can't poll 'em.

Q: What rules could we change?

Andrew: Funding limits. Encourage local activism. [I missed some ... and all of these reports of answers are compressed]

Trippi: The system is set up to prevent insurgents. There's lot to change. It could happen in a single election cycle: If a third party candidate started splitting the vote with the Democratic candidate, momentum could move to the third party rapidly. "That's what happened with the Whigs."

Q: Will more transparency make it harder for politicians to take tough positions?

Trippi: The problem is due to people wanting to be in office permanently.

Q: What about the power of the special interests?

Andrew: Schumer has $20M in the bank which means he's subservient to special interests.

Q: What are the features of communities where source flourishes.

Andrew: Learn from open source. You'll find all the elements there.

Hip-Hop Mondale

Gabriel Chafetz, the son of a guy I love, has created a 28-minute film. I haven't yet seen it, but Gabriel says: "It's sort of a hip hop "get out the vote" documentary/musical starring Walter Mondale." How could it be bad?

There's a streaming version here. It's being broadcast in Minnesota on PBS.

Broadcast Times:
TPT 17 Saturday, October 23 at 8PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 24 at 11PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 31 at 5:30PM

[PT] David Bornstein

David Bornstein went to Bangladesh to learn about the Grameem Bank that makes loans primarily to women. He discovered that the program is working: Women are building businesses. Social entrepreneurship is important, he concludes enthusiastically.

He talks about a project to bring electricity to poor people in Brazil: single wires going to houses, grounded in the soil, low voltages. The project is also bringing solar panels to rural areas, renting them for what people generally pay for candles, kerosene, etc.

He talks about "child line" in India, now in 55 cities. It's a number you can call if you see a child in distress. It started with one woman who spent 3 years trying to get the equivalent of an 800 number for it. It's deeply affected India's child protection policies.

Ideas don't break through resistance, David says. Ideas are passive. Ideas need champions. They need marketing. They need to be shepherded through the system. And the government ought to fund social entrepreneurs.

[PT] Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center (yay!) talks about the global digital divide. He puts up the GeekCorps business plan:

To benefit from the Internet, you need geeks
There are few geeks in Africa
Geeks beget geeks ("Geekery is one of the last apprenticeship industries")
Geek + plane ticket = Geek in Africa

We need to spend on both plantains and PCs, he says — the immediate issues of feeding people and building a connected economy.

"Electricity turns out to be a massive part of the digital divide." Likewise, so is conectivity — there are 12 phone lines per 1000 people in Ghana, compared to 700 per 1000 in the Us. Plus, 78% of web content is English, but only 12% of the world speaks English as a 1st or 2nd language. This all ends up making a "relevancy divide": What is a rural farmer in Ghana going to get out of the Internet?

GeekCorps took a different tack. Rather than looking at the rural, unconnected poor, they worked with those who were readier to adopt technology. He points to the "Busy Internet" internet cafe in Ghana — 200 seats filled 24/7. An hour of use costs the price of one beer. And he tells about a local guy who builds wireless systems.

From this experience, Ethan learned that there's a ton of money to be made by bring the next billion internet users online, and it won't be the current major multinationals because we're idiots about the developing world. E.g., ilkone is an Islamic cellphone built by people who really do understand what Moslems might want in a cellphone.

We're idiots but it's not our fault, he says. Ethan has been mapping the areas the NY Times reports on. Not much about Africa, central Asia, or S. America except where the economies are booming. If you adjust them by population, Iceland (250,000) is tremendously over-covered and the Congo (52M) is under-covered. The best predictor for where the media looks is where the money is.

It's an old problem, he says, pointing to The Structure of Foreign News" (1965). So, why don't the media tell us about Africa? Ethan's looked at what we're searching for (looking at Overture's version of AdSense). E.g., searches for Brazil are generally for tourism and pictures of naked women. (He calls this study "internet sociology.") "We are a feedback loop for mainstream media." We're telling the mainstream media that we're not very interested in the developing world.

Why should we care? Because, as Tom Barnett says, the failed and failing states are the ones that are most dangerous to us, and we're not paying attention to them.

How to fix it? Hack the media. Peer production. We're all producers and consumers. The problem is that people write what they want to write, and we've shown we aren't interested in the developing world. So we need consciously to build "bridge blogs." Paradigm: Salaam Pax. We need to do this not only because Africans need to be on the Net but because we need Africans on the Net.

[Great.]

Social gravity

I fell into a social black hole last night.

The crowd was exiting from what was probably the best single day of PopTech in the five years I've been coming. A bunch of people I know and like were going to a cocktail party about a mile away. I decided not to go because ever since my freshman year in college, I've noticed that parties with loud music, people I don't know, and crudites push me into a recursive mumbling awkwardness that is only cured by leaving. (It's actually been diagnosed as a mild form of aphasia.)

So, I found myself on the too-pretty streets of Camden with no one to eat dinner with or even to whine to. I poked my head into a few restaurants looking for people I recognized. No luck. I had a quick (but too-expensive) dinner in an Italian restaurant, sitting at the bar (no tables were available), reading a magazine. Then I bought a copy of The Weekly World News ("President Finishing National Guard Service" — that's what all those long vacations have been about), went back to my motel room, and moped.

I am a social putz, no matter what The Washington Post says.

On the other hand, while spinning the dial last night, I saw a great Sarah McLachlan music video (is that what we call them these days?): "This video cost $100,000." It shows how that $100,000 was actually spent doing good around the world.

[PT] Grant McCracken & Barry Schwartz

Grant McCracken argues against the idea that consumers are given "empty choices." The title of his talk is "More is More."

1. Many choices that look empty, he says, are in fact structural: they represent actual differences in taste and preference. I.e., "Material culture makes culture material." Example: "Feminism" has led to so many ways of talking about femaleness that the term no longer has meaning. The profusion of choices in the market reflects the profusion of social and cultural distinctions. The market reflects how furiously inventive we've become.

2. Some of these empty choices are exploratory, he says. The market keeps giving things a try.

3. Some choice is not empty but "formative."

He goes through the Kaufmann Continuum to show that innovation starts out risk, then gets adopted by the mainstream and gets sorta boring. At least, that's what I'm getting from this. He concludes: Empty choice" is a source of innovation. Empty choicess are adaptive.

[I was never sure what he was arguing against.]

Barry Schwartz's topic is "More is Less." (He wrote the Tyranny of Freedom.)

No, we can't have it all, he says. The choices we face aren't empty. That's why they "torture" us. In his local supermarket he found 285 brands of cookies, 75 iced teas, 175 salad dressings, 40 toothpastes. We are given choices for just about everything, from retirement plans to college curricula. "And I don't think this is good."

Americans have more freedom of choice than ever before, we're richer than anyone ever, yet Americans are sadder than anyone ever before. (Clinical depression is 2x what it was a generation ago.) He says studies show that if you offer fewer choices, people buy more and are happier with their choices.

Too many choices make us unhappy because we regret lost opportunities. our expectations get escalated, and then we blame ourselves.

What really make people happy are close relations with other people. Close relations restrain, not liberate: To be close means to not be free to make choices for yourself. Your choice is limited by the fact that you care about others.

Going from no choice to some choice dramatically increases our well-being. But there's a point where having more choice decreases our well-being, he says. Being anything you want to be is only possible in world with limits. [Yeah, I hate it when school principles say "You can be anything you want to be."]

[He makes a great point, and he's a terrific presenter. But it bothers me that he equates choices about which of 275 cookies to buy with choices about careers and religion. Also, I think he overemphasizes choice and obscures the inescapability of the historic-cultural-linguistic situation into which we are born.]

Q&A

Bob Metcalfe: So, does wealth make us unhappy?

Schwartz: That follows from my argument. It's another reason to support income redistribution.

Bob: So my drive to have everything is socially responsible, since I'm keeping choices from other people.

[The discussion gets to what I think is the heart: If fewer choices make us unhappy, why don't we shop in smaller stores? And if we're not smart enough to recognize that too much choice makes us unhappy, who is going to decide on the constraints of choice for us?]

[PT] Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells wants to know how humans populated the earth. His research shows that the deepest, earliest split is in the African lineage. Hence, our common ancestor was African. And it looks like the split occurred only 60,000 years (2,000 generations) ago.

So, how did we populate the earth in that time, he asks. The route went from Africa to Australia, he believes. He goes to India to try to find the missing genetic marker — one found in Australian aborigines. He found it: M130, from 50,000 years ago. About 5% of Indians have it.

Why did we leave Africa 50,000 years ago, he asks. The Ice Age may have dried out Africa, forcing us to migrate. Also, we had the "great leap forward" in human culture.

He says there's a company that will look at your dna and tell you where you hang from the family tree. He says one in 200 men are descendents of Genghis Kahn. [I, on the other hand, trace my ancestry back to Ernest the Vexed.]

[PT] Ben Saunders

Ben Saunders talks about his solo trip to the north Pole. "I'm not a scientist, I'm not an -ologist. I just drag heavy things around." 72-days alone. The fourth person to have done this. When he go there, he says that there was nothing there, not even a pole. He said he'd known that, of course, but he still kind of expected there to be something, anything, there. When he was made it to the pole, he called three people ... and had to leave messages.

Why does he do this? He's exploring the limits of technology and human potential. Now he's headed toward Antarctica to retract Scott's (doomed) steps.

I can't imagine doing this. I can't even imagine wanting to do this.

[PT] Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman (more here (thanks Shannon) ) an artist who studies how culture sees nature. "There are very few boundaries between dead, alive, food, pet, and so on." He provides commentary on images of his paintings.

[PT] Brian Fagan

Brian Fagan gives a talk that spans several hundred thousands of years, spending some special time on what we can learn about dealing with the climate from 2,000 years of Egyptian history. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is a crime how little we know about how other people see the world and put the world together."

[PT] Richard Alley

As someone on the chat says, Richard Alley is "brilliant and twitchy." More kindly, he's an animated speaker. He shows photos of his ice-drilling expedition to Greenland. Is there global warming? Yes. He runs through the evidence. The biggest cause is fossil guels: The typical US driver buys 100 pounds of gasoline per week. We're burning fossil fuels a million times faster than nature created them. Global warming is a natural trend but we're making it much worse.

Most of the effects of global warming are negative for humans, he says. Some high-latitude economies will do better. But, it could dry up the grain-belt, kill off a whole bunch of species, raise sea-level and spread tropical diseases. [Ok, overall, I'm against global warming.]

It's hard to make it better but easy to make it worse.

He hypothesizes that the climate moves by staggering up and down. He shows a chart that shows that in the Ice Age, the temperature staggered but the CO2 level changed rather smoothly. Possible conclusion: Now that CO2 is rising again, we should perhaps expect big swings in temperature.

He shows satellite photos of the ice sheets in Antarctica. They're melting. These are just small ones. But it's possible the large ones will melt. Goodbye Florida.

We can do things about this. We can put CO2 into the ground, we can conserve, we can use solar. It might take 1% of the world's economy ($250B/year) to clean this up. Someone could make a ton of money doing this. , he says. [Yet another good presentation. And, great Tufte-esque display of numeric info, as someone on the chat pointed out.]

[PT] Tom Daniel

Tom Daniel's talks's title is "Bugs, Brains and Borgs: Reverse Engineering Moving Systems. It's a great presentation, but too rich to encapsulate via love-blogging.

He shows how complex and messy systems are. E.g., he shows footage of a hawk moth that hovers and sucks nectar from flowers at night and the flowers are moving. That's a lot of data to process. He shows a single cell in a moth brain that's excited if the visual field moves to the right and not if the world moves the left. [He credits the grad students who did the research — always nice to hear.] The neuron responds more slowly than the wings — it takes a couple of wing beats for the neuron to react. The neuron projects into the motor output region. Antenna strain sensors respond to changes in position faster than the visual systems do; that's how the moth knows its pitch and yaw. Another neuron responds to the neurons that sense these changes. This leads to the third thoracic ganglion that flexes the abdomen and slows the wing beat, controlling the flight.

He ends by talking about the fairy fly, the smallest flying insect. Its brain is so tiny that it's hard to understand how the neurons operate. He suggests studying it as a way to get new concepts in computing (with a nod to Janine Benyus).

This and Benyus' sessions are the prototypes of a PopTech presentation. Fascinating.

[PT] Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus talks about biomimicry: the conscious imitation of nature's genius.

She's going to give us "12 big ideas from biology" about how life sustains life. I'm sure not to get them all.

1. self-assembly
2. chemistry in water
3. solar transformations
4. the power of shape - from efficient fans to color without pigments to cldean without detergents
5. materials as systems
6. natural selection as an innovation engine
7. material recycling
8. ecosystems that greow folds - seware plants that mimic marshes
9. energy-savvy movement and transport
10.
11. sensing and responding - locusts don't collide
12. life creates conditions conducive to life

Great information. So many amazing examples, which I have not captured. (Sorry!)

[It just isn't right that we're halfway through PopTech before we've heard from a woman. It's worse than that. It's shameful.]

Here's an article on self-cleaning cars that uses the same technique as the lotus flower: Shape instead of detergents. (Found by Wayne Pethrick, posted on the PopTech chat.)

Laptop Desk

Ian Kahn just gave me a Laptop Desk from LapWorks. It's a plastic platform that unfolds on your lap to support your laptop and provide a mousing platform. You can also fold it and use it on a desk to tilt your laptop forward to a comfortable typing angle. Simple idea and it's making blogging from the Camden Opera House much more comfortable. Tthanks, Ian!

[PT] Bloggers dinner - Thursday

28 bloggers, 11 pizzas...

[PT] First session Q&A

Since the theme of the morning is "Happiness," I ask: I like happiness as much as the next person, but in the Bill Joy sense — a little act can destroy all life — aren't we doomed.

ze Frank: I'll handle this one. I've done a lot of research on happiness in single-cell animals. And, in that sense, no, we're not doomed.

Q: What about these emalis I'm getting from Nigeria?

ze Frank: They're all real. What you have to do is haggle with them.

Q: In taking the two kids out of Bhutan for the tour with the giant book ultimately make them less happy?

Michael Hawley: Not in these two cases. One wants to be a spiritual leader in Bhutan and the other wants to become a doctor.

Q: I hear Bhutan has a high tax for visiting.

Hawley: Yes. But there's only one flight in a day. Only 6,000 people a year get to see it. It's not a place where you rent a Hertz and bomb around.

Q: You haven't stressed enough that we need to engage in order to change the world.

Alex Steffen: Yes, there's lots of work to do. And thank goodness, President Bush has been a uniter ... against his policies.

[PT] ze Frank

Too funny. Punctuation as vengeance. How to write spam. How to dance properly. How to make a dancing puppet. When office supplies attack. Toilet-paper fashion. Haikus for a newly-neutered dogs. Too funny.

[PT] Michael Hawley

The impossibly talented Michael Hawley talks about Bhutan. He shows pictures of kids and says "These kids are from one of the poorest countries on the planet but there's a sense of health and wholeness about them." Remarkable photos. (Michael is affiliated with FriendlyPlanet.org)

He talks about how he came to produce The World's Largest Book, a collection of photos of Bhutan. [It's on Amazon.]

Great works, in both senses.

[PT] Alex Steffen

Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com says that we're doomed — too many people, etc. — but that there is in fact another world already here. He points to Jim Moore's Second Super Power, Howard Dean, Linus Torvalds, wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula is rengotiating the relationship between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, Alex says. Brazil is giving broadband to poor areas and seeing rapid economic improvement. He also points to the Internet Bookmobile, a merry-go-round that pumps water as kids play, a rollable water jug, and a flower that has bee nengineered to detect land mines. Then there's the pond scum that emits hydrogen.

[Very upbeat talk. But we're all doomed.]

[PT] Phillip Longman

Phillip Longman says: Unless the secular socities find a way to reproduce themselves, the future belongs to fundamentalists...that is, a new dark ages." (He's at the New America Foundation.) More exactly: Fallling birthrates will bring a breakdown of modern welfare states, and the inability of secular societies ro reproduce themselves will lead to the rise of fundamentalist states.

He goes through the numbers. I, of course, I can't evaluate them because, well, they're numbers. "Does the future belong to those who believe a higher power command them to procreate? On the surface, the answer seems to be yes." One conclusion: The future of America, demographically speaking, belongs to the Mormons, he suggests.

[My favorite slide title from this presentation: "An Aging Population Death Spiral" Quite the light-hearted talk! ; ) ]

[PT] Tom Barnett

Tom is the author of The Pentagon's New Map. I've been reading his stuff for a while. I don't know enough to be able to tell if what he says is right, but it sure seems coherent and compelling.

You ought to go read his stuff.

[PT] Jim Rygiel

Jim was the visual effects supervisor on Lord of the Rings. He's got a looong list of credits, LOTR is enough for me. "I could do Lord of the Rings on a laptop right now," he says. It would take longer — they had 6,000 CPUs on LOTR — but you could do it.

He shows clips of the animation process. He says that he doesn't expect digital effects to replace actors, except for stunts. [Last year at PopTech, one of the Pixar guys said that they won't replace actors because acting is an art that actors do better than animators.] He shows the big elephant battle from LOTR III (I know that's not what Tolkien called 'em, so just back off), variously exposing the layers of digital effects. It is a crazy-ass piece of footage, and seeing the layers was amazing. I went back to see the movie a second time when it first came out primarily to see that scene again.

He shows side-by-side clips of Andy Serkis and and Gollum in dramatic moments, closeups, to make the case that Serkis should have gotten a Best Actor Oscar.

He says that the industry is holding off putting in digital projectors because when that happens, anyone can make a movie and have it shown in a theater. The audience applauds.

[PT] Richard Florida

Florida says that the rise of the creative economy — where the real value is derived from creativity — is a fundamental change. You need not only technological creativity. You also need aesthetic creativity. You need cultural creativity. You need a people culture. And for that you'll do better by going to a place that's open culturally, that has lots of job opportunities, that has "energy."

[PT] Joel Garreau & first session Q&A

The thesis of his upcoming book, Our New Selves, is that we're at a hinge in history because for the first time technology is being applied inwardly more than outwardly. Are we engineering new types of humans? He says that every super power in the comics is either here now or will be "before your mortgage is paid off."

[I got swept up in the backchannel chat and have obviously done a crappy job blogging this talk. Sorry.]

Gladwell: Not all the superpowers ar here yet. E.g., we can't know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. [Also, no creepy stretchiness.]

Garreau: We're developing infallible lie detectors.

Gladwell: If I don't know if I'm telling a lie, how can you know?

de Waal: The people in the fields you (Garreau) are talking about don't know enough about primate behavior. Anger can be beneficial. Alter that, for example, and who knows what you will screw up?

Metcalfe: The guy who designed the Pepsi Challenge is in our audience. Was Malcolm's characterization accurate?

Guy: Yeah, about 75%.

Malcolm: My point is that things are more complex than these tests often think. E.g., people react to the packaging as if they're reacting to the product. It's better to observe human behavior than test it or ask for explicit explanations.

de Waal: I don't trust questionnaires at all. Observation!

de Waal: I get jittery about proposal to change human nature because we know so little about it and everything is tied to something else.

Metcalfe: Do you, Dr. de Waal, think that we should behave more like chimps.

de Waal: [laughs] No, we're all unique. For example, we have pair-bonding and families, which chimps don't. We should be aware of our primate tendencies.

Jonathan Coulton is doing songs to close out sessions. He was great last year and now is singing a love song to his Mac.

[PT] Frans de Waal

Frans says he's going to convince us that we're apes. He says that aggression also provides opportunities for reconciliation; aggression doesn't just drive us apart. He has lots of funny examples of how the body laguage of politicians establish dominance hierarchies — including the political reconciliation of Bush and McCain. And he goes through the ways in which chimps and capuchins support basic ideas of fairness and sharing. [Totally enjoyable talk.]

[PT] Malcolm Gladwell

He's giving us a preview of Chapter 3 of his new book, Blink. He's going to talk about the development of the Aeron office chair. When it was first tested, the testers said they hated it because it was ugly. Yet, it's become the best selling chair in the history of chairs. But after it became popular, the same groups said the chair is beautiful.

We find out what people like by asking them, he says. But the story of the Aeron chair shows that something gets lost between the feeling of a preference and the expression of a preference. What does this tell us about human nature? "Our preferences are extraordinarily unstable."

He points to problems with blind taste tests like the ones Coke and Pepsi run. First problem: If you only take a sip, you'll almost always prefer the one that's sweeter, but not when you drink the whole can. Home use tests give different answers than sip tests. Second: People pick up cues unconsciously. We can't explain how we do things or why we prefer them. Third: Asking people to think about what they prefer changes their preferences.

The real problem is that we have trouble distinguishing between things that are truly ugly and things we have trouble being articulate about because they're too new.

Conclusion: We have to be skeptical when customers say "No." And we have to understand that we don't always understand our own hearts.

[Excellent talk and a great start for PopTech. And Gladwell is so good at making points by telling stories. But I'm a little confused. In some of his examples, the problem is that our prefs are unstable. In others, the prefs are real but we don't report them accurately. In others, the test itself is flawed so the real prefs that we express accurately - we really do like the sip of Pepsi better than the sip of Coke - don't reflect prefs outside of the testing environment. I assume the book lays all this out

[PT] Audio stream

IT Conversations is (are?) streaming PopTech live, here.

[PT] At PopTech

I'm at PopTech for the next few days, which looks like it'll be an exceptional conference. I'm helping out with the official backchannel chat for attendees, which will probably prevent me from live-blogging it. But I don't like live-blogging anyway. I only do it because Im too lazy to go back to my motel room and actually think about what I've heard.

I'm sitting in the blogger's corner of the Camden, Maine, opera house. We have the power. No, really, this corner is where the power outlets are. I'm sitting next to Halley. Lots of friends in the audience.

Shh. The upbeat shut-up-we're-starting-music is beginning and Bob Metcalfe is about to come on stage to kick things off...

Theme of the conference: The Next Renaissance. First session's speakers: Frans de Waal, Joel Garreau, and Malcolm Gladwell. Not bad!

Shelley's Blogopedia

Shelley's had a damn fine idea for how to create an overview of blogging:

The purpose behind the IT Kitchen was to provide an overview of weblogging, the nuances and the ins and outs and that sort of thing. Sort of like many of the handbooks about weblogging that have been published online by various people (see Rebecca Blood’s). However, instead of just providing static content, there’s an interactive element to it, a community participation, which allows people to ask questions as the material is published, or even provide their own material in support of a topic.

Want to know how to blog? Interested in the nuances? This blog-and-wiki is going to be one of your first stops.

Meanwhile, this is causing wikiphobia in Jeneane. (My guess is that Jeneane's over it already, so don't bother sending the get-well cards.)

Metadata without tears

Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses:

But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.

He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of "ethnoclassification" (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it "folksonomy.") He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we're making for ourselves.

Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell's article on "collaborative knowledge gardening." I've also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he's talking about.

Presidential bubbles

From CNN today:

The founder of the U.S. Christian Coalition [Pat Robertson] said Tuesday he told President George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that he should prepare Americans for the likelihood of casualties, but the president told him, "We're not going to have any casualties."

I hope Kerry goes big with this, along with Bush's statement that he's not too concerned about Bin Laden. Daddy Bush may not have known how much a quart of milk costs, but sonny-boy's fiction-based presidency is getting us killed.

Stewart's re-mastered narrative

When you come down to it, Jon Stewart's segment on Crossfire was actually sort of lame. He told the hosts that they're playing into the hands of the politicians and corporations, but he didn't tell them how. He called them hacks but didn't explain in what sense. He said they were degrading democracy but not what an alternative might be. When people replay this segment in ten or fifty years, they'll wonder why it mattered.

Nevertheless, I believe this was a seminal moment in the re-framing of the media. To be precise, the moment came when Stewart refused to be Tucker Carlson's funny "monkey." Now who's the entertainer and who's the seeker?

"The outing of Cross Fire is an underground hit," as Jock Gill says. The fact that Stewart's appearance was lame and yet so powerful is evidence of just how important his appearance was. We are so desperate to hear someone say the simple truth: The mainstream media is as unknowing about itself as a 14-year-old admiring himself in a mirror, convinced his new haircut makes him cool.

And then Jock connects this, correctly IMO, to the fate of the "master narrative." Jock points to one important feature of the new framing that's developing: We are beginning to view ourselves as the media. "We the Media," as Dan Gillmor says it in the title of his book.

But Stewart's got it even right-er. In fact, Jock puts it well in the title of his blog piece, taken from Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man": "Something's happening here but you don't know what it is ... [sneer] do you, Mr. Jones?" (Damn you, Jock! That's the cliche I was going to use for the title of this piece!) The new frame that's developing, I believe, isn't just that we are the media. It's that the media are the last to know.

That's why Stewart is the perfect messenger: The media are in the business of telling us what's going on, but it turns out they don't have any idea what's going on with themselves. Now that's funny!

And so the old framing will end not with a bang but with a giggle.

(And so blog entries will end not with a thought but with a cliche.)

Does anyone have a contact at The Daily Show? If so, can you suggest that they get Jay Rosen as a guest so he can talk about master narratives? (And, yes, I know I've used the phrase loosely in this piece.)

Blogumentary

Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary about blogging is being shown as part of the Get Real festival on Nov. 5 at 7pm in Minneapolis. I haven't seen it yet, but Chuck did send me a link to this clip which not coincidentally shows me. He informs me that this was shortly before, through the magic of digital editing, I'm crushed by Chris Locke in a Godzilla suit.

"Blogging for women and girls"

Natalie Davis (GratefulDread) is leading a workshop in Boston on "Blogging for Women and Girls" November 13 and 14. Here's a snippet from description:

Blogging is emerging a powerful opinion-making force, but though the technology is fairly cheap and widely available, most blogs are still written by men. This workshop will teach women and girls the basics of blogging, from the technical aspects of blog publishing and maintenance, to developing a personal voice, style, and area of focus, to how to drive traffic to your blog. (At Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston)

Admission requires submitting a written statement by October 22. See the Center for New Words site for details.

More on Stewart on Crossfire

The Washington Post has an article on the followup to Jon Stewart's blurting out the truth on CNN's Crossfire.

Note: While the Washington Post article is quite amusing, it avoids blurting out the truth: Crossfire, as Stewart puts it, "blows."

(Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)

Somaliland blog

Here's a part of the world — Somaliland — I knew nothing about, but, now, thanks to this blog, I know at least a little. Ah, the power of a single voice.

VoIP crime

US citizen Ilya Mafter has been detained by the Belarusians for committing the crime of Voice over IP. The government says that he caused about US$100,000 in damage to the country's telephony providers " as a result of illegal communications services using IP telephony that were organized by Mafter."

[nb] Next Billion

The Next Billion conference raised one question above all others (and thanks to Ethan Zuckerman for pointing this out): Will the companies feeding the world its first billion cell phones be the ones to provide the next billion? The answer seems to be no; the markets and its needs and the necessary business models are just too different.

Me on small talk? Um, yeah, whatever. Now let's talk about me.

Roxanne Roberts, Style columnist for the Washington Post, writes about the art of making small talk, and, oddly, cites me. Her three rules:

1. Shut up and listen.

2. When in doubt, repeat Rule 1.

3. People, even the really shy ones, like to talk about themselves and will do so if you know how to draw them out. You have to be genuinely interested. You have to check your ego. If this is done right, they walk away thinking you're great.

Sounds right, unless, of course, the person has also internalized Roxanne's first two rules.

Roxanne interviewed me because in a previous issue of my newsletter, I defended small talk. I appreciate the mention. But I have one small correction that matters to nothing but my vanity. Roxanne writes: "Weinberger says he didn't become skilled at making small talk until he was 40..." Not quite. I am still bad at small talk. Those who have met me will attest to the awkward silences and the extended bouts of conversational twitching. What I actually told Roxanne is that until I was in my 40s — embarrassingly late — I had totally the wrong idea about how to talk with people I don't know. I would talk about something interesting to me instead of trying to find what was interesting to the other person. D'oh. But "skilled at small talk"? Just ask the person whose shoes I've been inspecting.

[nb] Panel

I was on a panel with Ethan Zuckerman and Colin Maclay (moderated by John Palfrey) about the obstacles to spreading VoIP connectivity. We spent most of our time talking about Ethan's opening statement in which he said that if you want to get VoIP into developing nations, you're probably going to have to compromise a little. For example, he's proposed to Ghana that they tax calls outside of the country in order to give a small and temporary subsidy to entice providers to provide access to rural areas. The group here apparently doesn't like the idea of any subsidies. Ethan doesn't particularly like them either. His point was that systems are being put into existing infrastructures that are typically over-regulated and that are not going to go overnight to no regulation. (Ethan, if I get this wrong, please correct me!) [I personally am a liberal and not a pure free market extremist like many here, so I'm not always against subsidies.]

Judith Meskill has blogged will be blogging the session.

[nb] Tom Eisenmann

Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business talks about how to get to the next billion. We need ubiquitous VoIP and thus ubiquitous broadband, he says. Maybe this requires a push from cable because the local carriers (ILEC) will not cannibalize themselves otherwise. He thinks startups alone are not likely to suffice.

He thnks startups alone aren't enough to get to a billion because their quality of service isn't good enough. (Tom Evslin says that all calls are going over multiple networks so no one can guaranatee QoS.) Not to mention that the cable companies have the marketing clout.

He thinks that enterprise acceptance of VoIP will create demand for the same features in the residential market. There might be a beneficial race to the bottom.

He presents some facts: 95% of homes are within reach of cable. 64M homes in the US already have cable video service, constituting 62% of the homes within reach. 89% of homes within reach have cable modem service offered to them. Of those, 18% have cable modems. Cable companies are marketng VoIP aggressively. Morgan Stanley predicts 14% of homes within reach of cable will be using VoIP by 2008.

Tom does a case study of Cox cable and concludes that they are providing a service that emulates "normal" phone services, and charge for it accordingly. They handle IP voice as if it were IP traffic. They have "soft switches" but in every way it looks to the customer like plain old circuit switched telephony.

A study shows that people first want reliable access to 911 (74%), always on (69%), accurate and easy bills (63%), and low cost (57%). [Sounds like a market that doesn't know what's possible. And if it knew what "low cost" means in a VoIP world — I think it's $0.03/minute to London from the US with Vonage — "low cost" would probably climb to the top of the list.]

Why aren't they innovating, I ask. Tom says that it's because they've been an unregulated monopoly and just don't think that way. Bob Frankston adds that they're afraid of opening the pipe because it'll kill their video business. Jeff Paine of Utstar says they just don't think that way. Besides, he says, VoIP is just a small part of their business.

Three scenarios: 1. ILEC's go extinct and a patchwork prevails, or municipal broadband steps in, or they are propped up. 2. Dueling duopolists (ILEC Video vs fiber to the neighborhood or satellite). 3. Duopolist Detente (Cable stays out of the voice business and the ILEC stays out of the video business, and we all get locked into monopolies). Tom goes into these possibilities in some depth.

(Tom says RCN is bankrupt. Ulp. They're my provider. Bob Frankston says that "bankruptcy compost" can be fertile.)

[nb] Tom Evslin

Tom Evslin of Evslin Consulting keynotes from his seat at the tables arranged in rectangle. He talks about the early days of Voice over IP (VoIP) in 1997. He founded ITXC, recently sold to Teleglobe), to connect the little carriers that were emerging.

The greatest importance of VoIP is in the democratiziation of access to the network, tom says. "VoIP has democratized and lowered the barrier to entry," he says, pointing to David Isenberg's classic paper. "There's no question that VoIP is here."

He says that he went to Europe recently and instead of paying a buck a minute for phone calls, he brought a headset with him, connected via the broadband offered at all the hotels but one, and made Skype Out calls for pennies. [Here's an interesting article.]

Tom says that wifi is the next VoIP, an industry/infrastructure ready to take off.

He's worried about the lobbies arrayed against VoIP. He recommends the VON Coalition as a counter-lobby. He also thinks that, although he's generally a free market guy, some regulation may be required to ensure that "the last mile monopolies aren't used to stop the provision of services." Maybe, he says.

He says that the movement of support jobs to India is a huge success made possible by the low cost of communications. A middle class is growing in India. But not in sub-Saharan Africa. He describes instances where communication has transformed poor villages in Bangladesh. The same model worked in Uganda. [Here's the model as described in the Grameen Foundational Annual report: "Today there are over 25,000 village phone operators in Bangladesh. “Phone Ladies” earn extra income for themselves (an average of $71 per month, more than twice the average Bangladeshi’s monthly income), while allowing others in the village to conduct business or keep in touch with friends and relatives from a distance."]

He says he thinks he knows how the industry is going to go. "Think of a box," he says. It has to be self-powered. It's satelllite linked to geostationary satellites. The box has wifi or wimax coming out of it. "This box, dropped almost anywhere in the world, creates a cloud of IP connectivity over a couple of square miles, depending on the geography." This, he thinks, is a better solution than the phone ladies reselling the existing cellular network. And, besides, people need more than voice. They'll need all sorts of IP connectivity. At first, people will use the cloud with cheap wifi phones, but eventually computers will get there. "Even if the box doesn't make engineering sense, and it makes anticorruption sense because it doesn't need to connect to a monopoly." He talks about the need for microcredit and maybe subsidies, but, as much as possible, these boxes and the provision of services over these boxes (which need not be the same) should have a local stake with local gain in order to encourage development.

He recommends a series of small scale steps, done on the "edge" of the network.

[Great talk. Discussion follows...]

Bob Frankston says it's more important to spread opportunity than solutions. But there's a feaful desire in the US to define the solution narrowly; we're afraid of the open, decentralized model. People are afraid of Skype, he says, because the contents are encrypted. He introduces the term "ambient connectivity," i.e., everything is connected without your even thinking about it. We need to find a model for this. The key piece missing is pervasive encryption because right now it's not safe to share your connectivity.

David Isenberg wonders what Monique Maddy of Adesemi thinks how Grameen microcredit model might work in Africa. She says she wouldn't invest in the "phone ladies" model because the cost of cellphones is coming down so fast that the barrier to entry is too low.

Eileen McKeough has been operating a Somali telcom for 7 years. She liked it when Tom talked about getting revenues to the phone ladies since you have to get money to the edge, not just technology. She talks about a Grameen project in Bangladesh where a benefactor pays for Skype Out for a village. She'd like someone to get a premium number in the UK so people could call in and the revenue could be shared with the village. (She mentions that Bangladesh legalized VoIP this week.)

Tom says that telephone numbers are an asset that can be divorced from the physical infrastructure. He recommends organizations use Vonage which allows you to use a US area code wherever you are, thus lowering the cost of calling in and out.

Raj Sharma of Nextone wonders if there's room for premium services for business. He wouldn't at this point be willing to put his business on Skype.

David Isenberg says that Skype has twice the audio bandwidth of conventional telephony. He says the question is when latency and jitter will be good enough for business. David says research shows latency is going down dramatically, heading towards 50ms or less anywhere on the Net. It's showing the effect of Moore's Law. So, Raj's concerns are real but temporary. Plus, the ability to integrate with IP text, IP photos and IP everything in a few years will flip the concern: "You mean I have to use a conventional phone for my business call? What a drag!"

Raj agrees but wonders what will happen when some fraction of our 6 billion people are using the Net at the same time for phone and video, etc. Then it will be a "best effort" service.

Yes, says David, but the capacity of the Internet has continually increased apparently without limit. Plus, he's done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that shows that even if we were all online at the same time, there'd still be a hundred dark fibers in a single cable line. (He admits that his calc is "silly" because the value of the variables can only be guessed at)

Rick Whitt of MCI — author of the crucial A Horizontal Leap Forward— says that there's plenty of dark fiber available.

There's discussion of MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). Bob says it's really an attempt to turn the clock back to circuit switching. [Circuit switching establishes a real, continuous circuit from phone A to B. Packet switching sends out the bits with the address of B and allows the wisdom of the net to route the packets.]

[NB] Next Billion Conference

I'm at a small conference — 25-30 people — sponsored by VON and hosted by the Berkman Center, called "The CEO Forum on the Next Billion: Finding ways to move access to communication from 1 billion people on earth to 2 billion and beyond."

Daniel Berninger introduces the morning. The meeting is for non-incumbent telco providers who usualy are competing against one another but today are going to talk about growing the market. Wireline phones, he says, are decreasing in number. Going to 2 billion users is good for users, good for the world, and good for the industry.

(I originally agreed to lead a session here, but when I found out what the topic actually is — the regulatory threats to VoIP — I panicked and bailed. Fortunately, the gallant John Palfrey of the Berkman Center stepped in and will lead a panel of Ethan Zuckerman, Colin Maclay and me, all Berkpeople.)

I still like X1 better

IMO, X1 beats Google desktop search in every regard but two: price and branding.

I like X1 better because:

- More parameters mean more flexible search

- X1 lets me tell it to update the index once a day rather than continuously; I don't like giving up even my idle cycles.

- If I exit Google, it doesn't pick up whatever came in while it's off. That's a bad design flaw

- X1 shows me many more results at a time than does Google

- X1 shows me the entire document, not just a sentence or so. I don't have to open the originating app. I can even copy from the doc. - X1 indexes more than just Microsoft products, including Netscape and Eudora (It temporarily has stopped indexing Thunderbird, but they're working on it.) - X1 has been incredibly responsive to suggestions and beefs over the past few years. We'll see how Google does.

X1 is on sale for $75 (usually $100), which is infinitely more expensive than free. If I didn't already own it, I might buy it for $75, but if I were X1 I'd drop the price to $49.00. Ah, free advice, what can't it recommend?

Iraq photos

I've subscribed to a feed of Flickr photos tagged as "Iraq," and some are astounding. Here's a photo of Saddam being captured, and here's one of our soldiers' coffins.

Liz on Al-Anon

Liz has a helpful post about what actually goes on at an Al-Anon meeting: "I wonder sometimes if more people might be willing to go if they had a better sense of what it would be like." She gives a straightforward description that is likely to help some people who, like Liz, have an alcoholic in their lives.

Who's on first?

From the Harry Shearer site comes this RealAudio clip from his ooold comedy group, The Credibility Gap. It's a clever play on the old Abbot and Costello routine. I hadn't heard it before...

Dan Gillmor does Well

Dan Gillmor is in the midst of an interesting discussion of his book over at The Well.

Homes of the rich

This afternoon, my wife and I went on the annual house walking tour sponsored by the Brookline Chorus. For $25 each we got to inspect the insides of six old homes in a beautiful part of Brookline. Gorgeous.

So, here's my question: Why are they rich and I'm not?

Oct. 15 issue of Joho the Newsletter

I've published a new issue of my newsletter. (You can subscribe for free, you know.)

The instinctive president vs. reality-based initiatives

From Ron Suskind's scary article in the NYTimes about Bush's aversion to facts:

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

Another snippet:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Yeah, that famous Bush instinct. As he said after his first meeting with the tin-horn Stalinist Putin: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul." Good call, George.

Not inhaling

I was re-reading Doonesbury's Greatest Hits: A Mid-Seventies Revue — I read from it every day because that's how my Liberal Overlords send me their coded messages — and came across this strip from 1976, when Gerald Ford was in office and his son Jack had acknowledged that he (Jack) smoked pot:

It got me thinking. Perhaps Clinton's "But I didn't inhale" remark was intended as a joking reference to this strip. Then, once it got taken seriously, Clinton felt like he couldn't correct the record for fear of looking like a liar or like someone who doesn't take drug "abuse" seriously. Or, perhaps he just didn't want to raise the drug issue again: "Actually, I did inhale. And I held my breath until I felt the sweet fumes aerating my brain, raising me to a higher consciousness." (Actually, my own multi-decade experiment with marijuana led me to conclude that it lowered my consciousness, albeit rather enjoyably.)

Coincidence? Yeah, probably. But it's Sunday, so Joho should run a comic strip, right?

A couple of pages later I found another strip that took me down memory lane:

Glenn Fleishman's book info blog

Glenn Fleishman, who you know from his work explaining wireless to the rest of us, has started a blog about, well, here's what he says:

I'm launching this site in the interests of starting conversations about the way in which book details -- author, title, subject, and even page count -- are collected, sold, disseminated, updated, broken, and misused.

Take a look. It's pretty damn interesting stuff.

Stewart on CrossFire

I only caught the last five minutes, but it seemed like Stewart is pushing harder on his shtick: Blurting out the truth. He's becoming our public conscience. Has a comedian played this role before? There certainly have been comedians who were funny because they were truth-tellers — Lenny Bruce on culture, Richard Pryor on race, Billy Connelly on his life. But have any had the political focus and cultural impact Stewart has?

Dave points to this transcript, these bittorrent captures in wmv and avi, and this mp3.

Bush's inner narrative

Fascinating article by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic that tries to discern what moves Bush to act. Primarily, it seems there's an heroic narrative running through his head. The piece is filled with its own disparate stories of weird presidential decision-making that make sense within the article's thesis.

Jot looks cool

Jon Udell has posted a demo of Jot; you see the screen and hear Jon's interview of Joe Kraus, Jot's co-founder. It looks very cool: A wysiwyg wiki with forms, email integration and the ability to pull in information from around the Web. Note: The demo loops, so if after 15 mins or so you think Joe is repeating himself, well, he is. (See my Blog Disclosure: I am on the board of advisors of Socialtext, a competitor.)

Isn't it election day yet?

Can we please just have election day already? We've heard everything we're going to hear. All that's left are $100M in stupid ads. Can we please just get it over with tomorrow?

Thank you.

Jay explains

I heard the last five minutes of NPR's On Point show tonight, just as Jay Rosen was explaining why Farnaz Fassihi's email about the reality of life in Iraq has hit so hard when other journalists have discussed the same issues in print. I was in the car, so I won't do Jay's point justice, but he said that it was a matter of language and tone (what I might call "voice"). The official reportage keeps itself flat and safe, Jay said (approximately) because there are so many forces ready to pounce at the slightest sign of "bias." So, when we hear a voice that speaks the truth and that "bears witness" (Jay's exactly-right phrase), we listen.

My sense was that most of the show was devoted to the question of why Fassihi's email evoked such a reaction, and Jay banged the nail on the head for them. They should have asked Jay first, and then they would have 55 minutes to talk about John Edward's hair or W's back lump...

Wendy and Joey Up a Tree, B-L-O-G-G-I-N-G

Wendy the Redhead and Joey the Accordian Guy are getting hitched. And they have already produced a bouncing baby blog. (Dowbrigade has a charming post about this happy event.)

Derrida again

AKMA takes issue with Steven Johnson's assessment of Derrida, which I had pointed to.

AKMA, who seems disappointed that Steve thinks "the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones," writes:

I think one might argue that "deconstruction" was a merely instrumental sidetrack for Derrida, whose greater projects involved explorations of metaphysics, justice, and meaning. He undertook deconstruction as a throat-clearing — then he spoke, ardently and forcefully, on topics which other people wanted to claim that he couldn’t consistently speak.

I never got past the throat-clearing and thus Steve's assessment rings true to me; the Derrida I tried to read seemed to take throat-clearing as its subject. I couldn't find any engagement in a matter beyond itself, and it seemed not playful but irritating and smug. (I am not saying I'm right. In fact, I'm pretty much saying I'm wrong.) AKMA recommends Derrida's Limited Inc. as a good place to start understanding Derrida, so I've ordered it from Amazon. AKMA hasn't led me astray yet. (And is this an appropriate place to again recommend AKMA's intro to PostModernism?)

Annotated debate

From Kevin Marks, Boy Genius:

I took Dave Winer's mp3 , and the joho chatroom transcript, and synced them up.

http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/johodebate.mov

Even handier in QT player, as you can search for words there.

Hybrid audio/text gang-blogging.

Enjoy.

Thanks, Kevin! This is a really interesting experiment. I'm just a little nervous about the semiprivateness of a chat being exposed in the full public of the Web, but, hell anyone could have joined. The joining of the sound and audio does change the medium if only because in this instance the chat goes by line by line so you can't see the entire scrolling transcript. (And I should perhaps explain that the random references to "doggy-style" are an homage to Halley's scathingly funny post about bed and breakfasts (blogged here).)

Worthwhile Magazine ships

Worthwhile magazine, about what makes working life worthwhile, is shipping its first issue. (Yes, it's on paper. Its blog is pretty lively, though.) You can view pdf's of its table of contents and a handful of articles here.

Halley, who had a lot to do with getting the blog going, is a senior editor, as am I.

Howard Dean: Pitchman

Want to know what cognitive dissonance sounds like? Yahoo Local is running radio ads featuring Howard Dean pitching their product. You can hear it here.

It's a funny ad. In both senses. And it sure raises some questions: Why the hell is Howard Dean pitching products? Although the ad is charmingly self-deprecating, why would Dean want to put himself in William Shatner Land? Couldn't he have waited until after the election? Is this a form of fund raising for his group, Democracy for America? And what will Dean be pitching next? Sedatives? Throat lozenges?

It's a coup for Yahoo Local. It does not feel like a coup for Dean, although because the ad is so funny and self-mocking, it could be a lot worse.

[Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to Yahoo Local.]

Bogus Contest!

What product endorsements would make sense for Kerry? Bush? Nader? Other politicians?

How to become a terrorist

An odd email arrived today. It begins:

We would like to introduce our new-born site, where you can shop around most wanted and needed items in your life. Our weapon section has wide range of hard-to-find machine guns, silencers, armour-piercing ammos and others.

First of all, let\'s check our 3 top-selling items:
1. Russian surface-to-air missle SA-14 \"Gremlin\" (upgraded analog of SS-16 \"Strela\") from our supplies in Kazakhstan.
Due to high demand, it takes about 4 weeks to backorder that item. Weight is 10,2 kg., lenght - 1427 mm. You can make a huge party and you can have tons of fun launching your \"Gremlin\" with your buddies.

2. Israeli bestselling submashine-gun...

It's just about 100% certainly a phony: There is no url given and the 800 number and fax numbers are both Verisign's. The msg came through APNIC, an Asian ISP. If you think there's anything more to this than a joke or a lame attempt to spur some bewildering calls to Verisign, let me know.

Saving you typing

Doonesbury today refers to a column by Republican Rep. Doug Bereuter. As a public service, you can click here instead of typing in the 3-line url yourself. In the column, Bereuter explains why he thinks the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Why, he actually cites Paul Krugman!

Bereuter is not running for re-election.

Instant poll of one

Personally? Having just seen the last debate, I've decided to vote for Kerry.

Chatting our way through the debate

Don't forget, if you want to join in a general-purpose snarkfest during the debate tonight, tune your IRC client to irc.freednode.net and join #johodebate. (Details here.)

Britt on Going Upriver

I missed Vietnam by virtue of the quirky granting of conscientious objector status, but reading Britt is like remembering what I never lived through. His review of Going Upriver within our political context and his Vietnam experience is reality-based and remarkable.

When everything is known

David Isenberg points us to an amusing Flash envisioning of what it'll be like when databases fall in love and get married. Um, a little more literally, it depicts a phone call to a pizza delivery place.

Gonzo Marketing revisited

I've been re-reading Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing and I've been struck again by what a damn good book it is. Chris writes so well, and so entertainingly, that it's easy to forget how profound his ideas are. Gonzo is a visionary work, which is not a word applied to many (any?) marketing books. And it's got more ideas in its little finger than most marketing writers have in a lifetime.

So why didn't Gonzo knock Who Moved My Stinky Stinky Cheese off the best-seller list? It didn't help that Gonzo was published a couple of weeks after 9/11. (Oh, thank you, terrorists!) And, frankly, I don't think the title helped: It sounds like it's about how you can pull off wacky marketing stunts when in fact it dismantles marketing's basic assumptions and points it in a new direction: micromarkets, voice, engagement.

There's plenty I disagree with, and, sure, a voice as strong as Chris' doesn't appeal equally to all, but so what? At least there's lots to disagree about and at least it has a voice. Go buy a copy for a friend in marketing...

Halley's bed-and-breakfast rant

Halley is hilarious (and ribald) about why she hates b&b's.

I hate them too, but my reasons don't require me to use the phrase "doggy-style." In part it's because, as Halley puts it so well, "The kooky couples who decide to run them are eavesdroppers at best and psychotic quaintmongers at worst." Ok, that's a tad harsh (but funny), but it's true that, in my experience, the owners often trangress the lines. For example, the owner of one b-and-b carefully pointed out to us a coffee table book the cover of which had a photo of a baby emerging from a vagina. "That's our daughter," she said proudly, leaving it to us to decide if she was referring to the baby or the vagina. Some questions are better left unasked. (Of course, that left our coos of "Gosh, so beautiful!" unfortunately ambiguous.)

Even when the owners are not characters played by Kathy Bates, I have other issues that make bed-and-breakfasts only a little more appealing than sleeping on a tarp spread out in a parking lot. For example:

The owners pretend to be delighted to see you.

You have to pretend to be interested in their collection of 19th century compass tips.

Your strained conversations with the owners come precisely at the moments when you don't want to have a strained conversation: When you're checking in after a long trip and when you want to read a newspaper while eating breakfast.

The obsessive orderliness of their house silently rebukes my own slovenly appearance.

Apparently I am supposed to be so fascinated by my room's knotty pine paneling that I won't want to watch TV.

Before you leave in the morning, you have to examine your room to see what kind of impression you're making.

Stealing the towels takes a special kind of courage.

Debate chat

I enjoyed chatting with a bunch of you during the previous debate. So, let's do it again. I'll set up a channel at irc.freenode.net called johodebate, starting around 8:45pm (Boston time). You're all invited

If your chat software works the way mine (HydraIRC) does, you go to File -> Connect, and then click on Freenode as your server. Beneath that you should see irc.freenode.net. Click on that one. Once the window opens indicating that you're connected, in the type-in field at the bottom, type "/join #johodebate" except without the quotes.

Play nice. No trolling. And I get to decide who to kick.

Derrida was not superman

Derrida is dead but not erased. Steve Johnson has blogged a memoir that, in a couple of paragraphs, puts Derrida in a perspective that others have spent volumes trying to get right. Snippet:

Ultimately, I came out of that period with the feeling that deconstruction was ultimately an accurate, legitimate, and surprisingly understandable critique of the way language produces meaning. (Or it least it could have been understandable, if its proponents weren't so insistent on having their writing enact the contradictory, self-erasing property they were trying to document -- which is a bit like a evolutionary biologist choosing to write a paper using strands of DNA.) But I also came to feel that the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones; extremely important to deal with if you were, say, a philosopher of language --but not all that important if you were trying to analyze a novel, or a political movement.

When Derrida was coming to prominence, I was hanging out with Heideggerians who viewed Derrida as someone who would spew irksome contradictions merely to have something to say...pretty much exactly what non-Heideggerians thought of Heidegger. I never made it over Derrida's intelligibility hump. In fact, only now am I reading Foucault with the respect — awe — he deserves. Maybe I'll make it to Derrida before I die...

Takin' My Country Back

I don't know much about country music, so I can't tell if this song is any good, but I like the idea of it...

And here's a one-minute remix of Bush's performance at the first debate. The remix is called "Hard Working George." (Thanks, Mike O'Dell for the first link and John Driscoll, for the second.)

Nuisances and lies

Kerry says that we need to do everything we can so we can return to a time when terrorism is merely a nuisance. Bush says that Kerry thinks terrorism is merely a nuisance. Both quotes are getting play on the media. So, will this be the time when Kerry says, "Are you so unconstrained by truth and decency that you will say anything to get re-elected" ... and America listens?

Kerry says we need to return to a time when terrorism is merely a nuisance. Bush says we're going to win the war against terrorism. Is this the time that Kerry says, "We will hunt down and kill every terrorist we can find, but the day you, Mr. President, stand on an aircraft carrier and declare 'Mission Accomplished' in the war against terrorism is the day you let down America's guard" ... and America listens?

The UN International Atomic Energy Agency reports that nuclear materials have vanished from Iraq:

The U.S. government prevented U.N. weapons inspectors from returning to Iraq — thereby blocking the IAEA from monitoring the high-tech equipment and materials — after the U.S.-led war was launched in March 2003.

Yup, we had the foresight to guard the Oil Ministry but not the nuclear materials. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Is the Colorado race really this bad?

I'm in SF for half a day to keynote an e-learning conference. Since I'm in a hotel room, the TV is on. I'm watching a rerun of Sunday's Meet the Press featuring the two candidates for Senate from Colorado, Ken Salazar (D) and Pete Coors (R). Man, it makes me glad I'm from Massachusetts. Based on this joint interview, they are a sorry pair.

(Here's The Advocate's coverage of the show.)

Viacom is The Man (in the bad sense)

Outlandish Josh reports that Viacom is refusing to run ads (see one here) from Compare, Decide, Vote that compare Kerry and Bush on some Youth-Oriented Issues and find Bush wanting. Viacom has not said why they've rejected the ad. Sumner Redstone, the owner of Viacom, is a Bush supporter.

Electronic voting sample ballot

Test your luck with Florida's sample electronic ballot...

Dred Scott, activist judges and Bush's brain

From Friday's debate:

MICHAELSON: Mr. President, if there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who would you choose and why?

BUSH [pleasantries snipped]: I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick.

I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words "under God" in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all — you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We've got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

Clearly, Bush considers the Dred Scott case to be a bad decision by an activist judge who is not a strict constructivist. Actually, the case wasn't about whether slavery was legal; that was not only taken for granted, it was written in the Constitution. The case was actually about whether slaves had enough standing to sue in a federal court. Chief Justice Taney said not only didn't they have the standing, but the Missouri Compromise unconstitutionally violated the right of property owners to transport their property — whether it's a chair or a slave — anywhere they wanted. Scott's legal owner could not be denied his rights as a property owner, Taney wrote, basing his opinion on the Fifth Amendment's promise of due process. This is from Taney's decision:

...Thus the rights of property are united with the rights of person and placed on the same ground by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. And an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, without due process of law, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States, and who had committed no offense against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law...

Note that in this passage, the person being deprived of property is not Scott but Scott's owner. That Taney didn't need to explain that shows just how embedded was the Blacks-as-property "frame."

Then we get this mind-twister of a sentence from Bush:

That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all — you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America

Here's what I think happened in Bush's brain:

Dred Scott= slavery ok. Dred Scott decision bad.

US Constitution says "All men created equal."

ALARM! ALARM! ALARM! Is that in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence? ABORT THE SENTENCE! ABORT!

Go for safety: "It [the Constitution] doesn't say that."

Ditch the entire thing. Go back to "Dred Scott bad": "It [Dred Scott decision] doesn't speak to the equality of America."

Taney was an activist in that he could have ruled narrowly on whether Scott had standing to bring suit. Instead, he ruled on the issue that Scott was raising, in effect saying, "No, you can't sue, but we're ruling against you anyway." That's not a very good example of what it means to be an activist judge. Worse for Bush, Taney's decision was based on a narrow, literal and strict construction of the Constitution's meaning.

Anyway, I, like all Americans, was impressed that this shard of 8th grade American History class had remained lodged in Bush's brain.

Paperwight adds another dimension when he points out that the anti-abortion movement often thinks of itself as modern-day abolitionism. To them, Dred Scott is to slavery what Roe v. Wade is to abortion rights.

God needs a better script doctor

I feel cheesy being moved by the death of Christopher Reeve. With all the suffering in the world, my values must be pretty screwed up to be saddened by the loss of one pretty-good actor who, crippled in a rich guy's hobby, got medical care reserved for the earth's elite. Yet his public optimism was a welcome rebuke to our normal values. And, because of his accidental identification with Superman and his determination to walk again, he was in a story arc that was supposed to have ended better.

So, what the hell, I'm going with it: I admire the courage of his values and am sad about his death.

Bayesian spellchecker?

In the '90s, IBM had a machine translation project that bested rule-based translators simply by using probabilities deduced from analyzing the word usage patterns in a large corpus of manually-translated material. (They used the French and English versions of the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament.) Now Bayesian spam filters are all the rage, using word frequency analyses of known spam and non-spam to decide which folder to put a particular message in.

So why not use similar analyses to guide spellchecker alternatives? An analysis of my corpus of documents would reveal that the putative word "cheast" is more likely to be "cheats" if used near the word "game" and "stuck," but more likely to be "chaste" if used near "Britney" and "supposedly." Given how well Bayesian spam filters work - they work really well - I might even want to say that if the spellchecker is, say, 95% confident, it should make the change without asking me, while enabling me to review all the auto-changed words, of course.

I am a genuine admirer of Microsoft Word's spellchecker; in fact, it's one of the things keeping me from switching to Open Office. Not only does Word's UI let me correct errors the way I want, jumping from clicking on a list to editing in context, but its first suggestion is almost always the right one. So, I assume Microsoft has analyzed some generic corpus to get the probabilities right. Why not analyze my corpus, too? And do it folder by folder, across time, and by document type. Why not?

The Long Tail

Did I really manage not to link to Chris Anderson's great piece on how the-rest-of-us bloggers are changing the nature of the entertainment market? D'oh!

This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.

Not to mention the social effects of having 5-10 million people creating webs of written relationships.

Philosophy action figures

Philosophers as you've always imagined them. (Thanks to Adina for the link.)

Bush's URO

Geodog, in a comment, points to Cryptome's investigation of the Unidentified Rectangular Object under Bush's jacket during the first debate. Not only does he conclude it was probably a receiver, he has photos of possible devices and lists the frequencies that could be used to provide one's own commentary direct to the presidential tympanum. Cryptome also links to a site with 28 photos that make it pretty clear that the appearance of a URO is not due to, say, a solar flare.

Now the NY Times has noticed, so it's an Official Item.

American Phrasebook: Addendum

When I visit a country, I like to learn how to say the usual polite things: Hello, Goodbye, Please, Thank you, It was like that when I got here. Starting two years ago, I've found myself learning a new phrase:

I am sorry about George W. Bush

German: Ich bin über George W. Bush traurig

Spanish: Estoy apesadumbrado sobre George W. Bush

French: Je suis désolé au sujet de George W. Bush

Italian: Sono spiacente circa George W. Bush

Portuguese: Eu sou pesaroso sobre George W. Arbusto*

Chinese (simplified): 我是抱歉关于乔治・W. 布什

Japanese: 私はジョージW. ブッシュについて残念である

Korean: 나는 조지W.부시에 관하여 유감스럽다

Russian: Я огорченн о George W. Bush

Greek: Λυπάμαι για George W. Bush

Canadian: I'm so sorry aboot George W. Bush. Sorry for bothering you with this apology, eh?

---
*Why Google's language service translates Bush's last name as a noun only in Portuguese (as far as I can tell) remains a mystery. Babelfish does not.

Ephemeral artefacts

Mark Federman, Chief Strategist at U of Toronto's McLuhan Program (where I spent one night a week for a year in the late 70s at a graduate seminar led by the master himself) has put forth a fascinating paper on the way in which the way in which we bind time and space is changing. He asks:

In our world of instantaneous, multi-way communication, everywhere is here and every-when is now. What is the nature of the artefacts that are characteristic of our pervasively connected culture?

He posits ephemeral artefacts as his answer: "An ephemeral artefact exists precisely in the present, and can only be experienced at the moment of its creation."

There are lots of provocative ideas in this piece (I particularly like his notions of "interpassivity," the dominance of touch on the Net, and the Net as an acoustic space), but I have questions about the primary one:

Mark looks to art as a precursor of the future and finds examples of artefacts that have both the characteristics to which he points: They are ephemeral and involve us both as performer and performance. But might they be simply oddities, not precursors? It seems to me that we're trending in the other direction. As I look at the Web (which, granted, is not all of life or all of the world, dammit), it seems to me that many of its most important artefacts aren't ephemeral. Some are short-lived — JibJab productions are good for a couple of days maybe — but Mark means by "ephemeral" things that exist only so long as we experience them. Aren't many of the truly "binding" artefacts on the Web not ephemeral? For example, while with blogs there is no separation of performer and performance, blogs are persistent. They are our bodies on the Web, binding our selves through time. I think their temporality is absolutely essential to their nature and their success. So, am I not looking far enough ahead? Are blogs already yesterday's news?

If there were any justice...

...Right before you die, they'd explain all the magic tricks.

Chatting through the debates

About 10-15 of us had a grand ol' time in a chat room during the debates. Frankly, we were much more entertaining than the candidates.

I'll set up another chat room next Wednesday for the final debate before the apocalypse. See you then?

Let's watch together

Just a reminder...I'm starting a chat at 8:45pm (EDT, i.e., Boston time) tonight for anyone who wants to kibbitz during the debate. Go to johodebate at irc.freenode.net. Details here.

Blog electoral predictions - and the eve of the end of days

I woke up this morning imagining it's election night. As soon as polls have closed in each state, the networks are busy projecting the results based on their exit polls. "With 2% of the vote in, ABC is calling Pennsylvania for Kerry, 52% to 48%." You know, that type of thing. But as the night wears on, the networks have to eat their predictions with an unusual frequency. "We've got a change. With 35% of precincts reporting, we are now moving Pennsylvania into the Republican camp, 53% for Bush, 46% for Kerry, and 2% for Nader." One after another, states are flipped.

And then the networks begin to notice that some of the flips occurred where the electronic voting machines were doing the tabulation.

The Democrats, no longer shy about pursuing electoral matters vigorously through the courts, demand recounts wherever e-voting was used. The most basic pillar of democracy — that the electoral process is honest — has been toppled. Three months later, the matter is still in the courts and the people are in the streets.

Now, onto something more fun. Mathew Gross, the former lead Dean blogger, has asked bloggers to take a guess, before the 2nd debate, at what the final electoral tally will be. I ran historic and current polling data at the precinct level through my simulation software. Then I ignored the results and took the following wild-ass guess:

Popular vote*:
Bush: 64.3%
Kerry: 51.8%
Nader: 1.1%*

Electoral vote:
Bush: 275
Kerry: 262
Nader: 0

*Numbers do not add up to 100% because of over-enthusiastic e-voting machines.

Best. Debate rumor. Ever.

Salon has a sober consideration of the blog-based rumor that Bush was wired with a receiver so that he had a direct line to the voice of God (i.e., Karl Rove) during the first debate. It is an hilarious rumor that I am delighted to pass along as delightfully unsubstantiated.

Children of Abraham

Children of Abraham has posted an exhibit of photos by young Moslems and Jews:

Children of Abraham 2004 is an internet-based collaboration which has involved over sixty participants (interns) between the ages of 15-21 from twenty-three countries in the development of an online photo essay that highlights the core similarities between Judaism and Islam. An advanced interactive website has enabled these interns to discuss their work, and to engage in frank, probing dialogue on sensitive issues of culture, religion and politics.

...Many of the interns came from parts of the world where they have had no contact with the other faith. Maria Ali-Adib, a Syrian co-director of the project, was impressed by the openness displayed by interns during this process of discovery...

...More than 1,500 photo images were collected and some 3,000 postings submitted on the discussion boards. The project will have a fall photo exhibit available to be accompanied with comments from the interns. Current efforts include the formation of Muslim-Jewish dialogue groups by interns in their schools and communities, and a compilation of the summer’s online discussions for use as educational material.

Let's watch the debate together!

Wanna chat during the debate tonight? I'll set up a channel at irc.freenode.net called johodebate, starting around 8:45pm (Boston time). If you want to get all snarky and dry one another's tears of frustration, c'mon in.

If your chat software works the way mine (HydraIRC) does, you go to File -> Connect, and then click on Freenode as your server. Beneath that you should see irc.freenode.net. Click on that one. Once the window opens indicating that you're connected, in the type-in field at the bottom, type "/join #johodebate" except without the quotes.

Play nice. No trolling. And I get to decide who to kick.

Tomorrow's news today

Bush Bounces Back in Spirited Debate

After a lackluster performance in the first presidential debate, President George W.Bush was forceful and focused in last night's debate, an encounter marked by the most direct accusations yet.

Sharing a stage at a town hall style debate at Washington University that was supposed to focus on demestic issues, the most dramatic moments nonetheless came as the candidates circled back to Iraq. Senator John Kerry, emboldened by polls shifting in his direction and by a week of bad news for the President on Iraq, repeated twenty-three times that the President is "out of touch" with the reality of the situation in Iraq and with the American people. But it was the President who had the sharpest words: "On September 10, America maybe could have gotten by with politicians. After September 11, America needed a leader. I am that leader. My opponent is still just a politician who'll say whatever he has to to get elected."

Unlike the previous debate in which the President was perceived by many as being tired, irritated or unprepared, President Bush was direct and upbeat last night, at one point asking the moderator, Charles Gibson, if he could give a "big ol' Texas hug" to the woman whose question Gibson had just read. "That's not in the 32-page agreement you both signed," Gibson said. "I know," said the President playfully, "but sometimes a hug is more important than some old rules. Senator Kerry, John, you wouldn't say no to me giving that woman a hug, would you?" As Kerry looked flustered and speechless, Gibson denied the President's request. The woman's question had to do with the conflict between Title 12 of the Medical Aid for America Act and provisions of the Employee Reimbursible Tax Code.

Senator Kerry repeatedly tried to paint a picture of the President as "dangerously out of touch," "protected from the truth by a coterie of advisors who believe they can reshape the world and history unilaterally." In response to a question about No Child Left Behind, the Senator again turned the topic to Iraq and the previous debate, saying, "You continue to misrepresent, even here tonight, what I said in plain view of all America. You're not deaf. You're not dumb. And you were there [at the debate]. So, America has to conclude that you're misrepresenting my words on purpose."

Senator Kerry, seeming not as comfortable with the town hall style debate as with the format of the previous debate, was perceived by many as stiffer and more condescending than his opponent who seemed to find his sea legs. For example, PResident Bush prefaced his responses to many questions with an expression of sympathy or light remark. While the President made a habit of referring to the questioner by his or her first name, Kerry looked directly at the home audience and delivered unaltered portions of his stump speech. In one response that seems likely to be excerpted by the Republicans for their ads, the Senator waved his finger rhetorically at "those who would harm this country" but was caught by the camera as seeming to wave it in the face of the questioner who looked alarmed by the gesture.

"This was not Kerry's best night," admitted a senior aide to the Kerry campaign off the record. "The format favored President Bush who, one on one, is charming and likable. We'll be watching the tapes very carefully." Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Bush/Cheney campaign committee, said: "America tonight saw the Bush they know and love: A world leader who speaks plainly and is working every day to keep them safe."

At the debate, the candidates answered questions about health care, education, stem cell research, the Patriot Act, the environment, the economy, race relations, and what advice they would give to their favorite baseball team.

Rosen on Satullo on Blogs and Journalism

Jay approvingly annotates a column by Chris Satullo in the Philadelphia Post about blogs. "What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out," says Satullo. "Because power prefers lies. Without journalism, lies flourish and liars rule." Whether it's bloggers or big media journalists, that's what matters. And, from that point of view, having an citizenry engaged in unearthing, checking and appropriating facts works towards the same end as journalism: "...helping the public life of this nation work well."

Know someone at the Library of Congress?

I'm looking for someone to talk with at the Library of Congress about its classification scheme. I'm interested in its history, how they modify it, its relationship to the Dewey system, and how the digitizing of information is affecting it. If you know someone there I could talk with about such stuff, would you please send me an email? (evident.com is the domain and self is the name.)

And a preemptive thanks to you all!

Why there are undecideds

It is easy to be dismissive of undecided voters. Who are these people? How can anyone be undecided in such a glaringly obvious election? But that feels patronizing and simplistic. Most undecided voters seem to me to be victims of a political process that seems alien and unresponsive.

— Jonathan Alford, "Looking for votes, finding America," an account of a week spent campaigning for Kerry, in Salon.

Berkman Web of Ideas tonight: Truth, Objectivity and Blogs

I'm leading the first in a series of discussions at the Harvard Berkman Center tonight. You're invited: 6pm at the Baker House on Mass. Ave in Cambridge, MA.

I'm petrified, of course. It'd be better if I knew exactly what I'm going to say in my 20-minute discussion opener. I'm thinking of something like this:

Wikipedia has frozen the page about Bush because it was being flip-flopped so fast. Instead, Wikipedia wants to come up with a non-controversial core of facts. Why? Because that can serve as an authority for all.

This reliance on facts is interesting. Some of us (including me) thought the Web would join facts and values more firmly than ever because of the dominance of voice on the Web. Instead, are facts separating out? And are facts becoming commoditized? [I wrote a draft of an article for my newsletter on this topic last night on the plane.]

Go back to the basic notion of truth: Correspondence of a proposition with the world. Truth is abstracted from individuals (and from voice?), according to this idea, since it doesn't matter who utters the proposition. Authority comes from trust that this particular source removes his or her (and historically, of course, it's mainly been his) interests and utters true (objective) statements.

Blogs seem to change that. They are full of voice expressing interests. Does this mean that they are only accidentally true at best? Or are we seeing the emergence of multi-subjectivity that has the authority of objectivity? Will facts become commoditized and conspicuously split off from the voices that try to find the truths that facts support?

As you can tell, I haven't figured out how to pull this together in a coherent way. Also, I desperately need questions to stimulate the conversation if and when it flags.

Brad doesn't suck. Brad is our future.

On the 20-minute bus ride from the hotel to the Microsoft campus yesterday, I got to sit next to Brad of Brad Sucks, "a one man band from Ottawa, Canada." Omigod. What a role model.

I assume I'm the last person to find and love his site, at least if there's any justice in this world. Just in case, this is from his FAQ:

Why would I buy your music when you give it away for free?

Well I don't know, but people have been doing it and I hope they continue. Maybe they like a CD to hold in their hands, maybe they just want to support artists, maybe it's just flat-out pity.

I put my music online because I want people to hear it. I'd obviously love to make a living making music, but if the worst-case scenario is becoming a well-heard artist that never gets paid, I can live with that.

So, on his site you can buy his CD for $5 (including shipping!) or download the very same music for free. If you buy the CD, it includes the MP3s to encourage you to share them. You can also buy his music from iTunes, from which he gets 65% of your money, a somewhat better deal than being squeezed like a Tropicana orange by a record label that uses some of its profits to sue your fans. I just bought his CD from Magnatune, who pays him half of what you choose to pay them ($8-$18) because I want to support Magnatune and I don't like the thought of Brad wasting his time sticking CDs into mailers when he should be recording. That's why we have middlepeople.

As for his music: What possible good would it do to get a Musical Judgment from someone who lost interest in contemporary music in 1977, The Summer of Eh. All I'll say I that like Beck and I like Brad. (The line that just played: "I can tell by your middle finger that you're warming up to me.")

[Note to our Canadian friends: You don't have to say "Ottawa, Canada." It's your damn capital. You don't hear us Americans saying "Washington, DC, USA." Thank you, and keep up the good work.'

Pestiside: King-maker

As Erik D'Amato writes in his Hungarian blog:

In a stunning upset likely to send shockwaves throughout the so-called "blogosphere," recently-launched Hungarian-American website Pestiside.hu yesterday beat recently-launched Hungarian-American website www.georgesoros.com in the race to be the first Internet weblog, or "blog," to successfully throw a significant electoral contest.

At issue was the presidency of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hungary:

The Hungarian AmCham has ceased to be an institution dedicated to promoting the "American" way of doing business, and is instead now a local symbol of the most "un-American" of bad business habits, including cronyism, cartelism, non-transparency and even a degree of media coercion.

Erik exposes the issues, including a possible conflict of interest for the incumbent. Did Pestiside make the difference in the election? Why don't we just say yes? After all, aren't all politics blogal?

The short life of instaspin

The flood of emails from both sides spinning each detail of the debate has gotten to be hilarious. Email is not the right medium for this. We can wait ten or fifteen minutes. Besides, your chattering makes you sound frightened and like you don't trust us. Shhhh. Drink some cocoa. It'll be fine.

[MS] Microsoft Research

[NOTE: I have to the plane and am posting this without rereading it for typos or thinkos. Sorry.]

Susan Damais is from Microsoft Research, a group of 700 people in 55 scientific areas in 5 labs, from Redmond to Beijing. Susan says that each group does some search research. And she tells us that her presentation isn't under the 20-ton Microsoft NDA.

"What's missing with search?" she asks? Now it consists of a query box and results list. You can do processing in between, but you can also do user modeling, domain modeling, and the context of information use. What are the user's intent? What are the relationships among people and informaion in the world? And what is the user trying to accomplish? ("Despite what you informavores believe, most people don't search for the sake of searching. They search to get answers." — rough paraphrase.)

She and others have been working on "Stuff I've Seen" (SIS). Right now, each domain has its own way of searching — we search blogs differently than we search email. SIS wants to give "unified access to heterogeous, distributed content" (mail, files, rss, etc.). It has to be fast and flexible. And you should be able to search from whatever context you're in, preferably with "implicit queries": "Queries are generated in context and results are shown in context." "We've learned that people, time and metadata are important."

She talks about "memory landmarks." Cognitive science has shown that we organize memory around landmarks, e.g., not "It happened on Oct. 5" but "It happened when Mt. St. Helen's blew up." They want to use this to facilitiate search. In one prototype, there's a set of memory landmarks, both general (world and calendar info) and personal (appointments and photos) they show to the right of the results list to provide cues to help you home in on the information you're looking for. "I think we can get computationally at some of hese things that make information memorable."

With personalized, users don't all get the same results, she says. How can you personalize search without requiring people to maintain a profile, she asks. They can compute similarity based on a variety of apramets, combvine the personalized and standard results, and redisplay. In the prototype, as she moves a slider toward the "personalized" side, the results change, so that a query on "bush" starts to show more results about Vannevar Bush. (The personalization is based on looking at the user's email, etc., and doing some form of ) It is not changing the query; it is re-ordering the results. [It's a cool demo, but anything with a slider just has to be cool.]

She talks about novelty analysis, using the "Difference Engine" they've built. E.g., how do east and west coast newspapers cover Mt. St. Helen's, or how blogs cover the election vs, how the media do. They have a prototype called News Junkie that pesonalizes news using onfromation novelty: What's interesting and different? Given a lead article, how different are the new news articles coming out?

Eric Brill heads the Text Mining, Search and Navigation Group of Microsoft Research. He talks about the "paradigm shift" from thinking that documents are the chief object of search to think that it's about information. That is, there may be information in documents that isn't really what the difference about. Or, instead of getting a list of documents in response to a query trying to decide if the invasion of Iraq was justified, suppose you were to get a page that displayed the relevant information.

They have a question-answering system called "AskMSR" that gets 70-75% accurate. So, if you ask "Who did Britney Spears marry in Las Vegas," you get a list of answers with probabilities; click on the suggested answer and you get the documents from which it's derived. It gets right "Where as Steve Ballmer born" but wrong "Who ran against Bush in 1988," to which it answers "Bush," with "Dukakis" as the third suggestion. But, as Eric says, if you have a grain of intelligence, you'll actually figure out what the right answer is.

It works by mining a text base looking for strings that look like potential answers. But then they run into natural language issues. But information redundancy helps. E.g., the answer to the question "Who killed Lincon?" shows up tens of thousands of times on the Web, so they don't have to disambiguate "Booth altered history with a single shot at Lincoln"; they can pick their answer. Or, "How many times did Bjorn Borg win Wimbledon?" You can find lots of strings on the Net like "Bjorn Borg blah blah blah wimbledon bla bla blah 5 blah blah," that, in their redundancy, make the answer (5) more probable. [Cool way to harness the wisdom of the web, at a statistical level.]

If you have a source like Encarta that is reliable but not redundant (i.e., it only has one entry that answers the question "When did the Titanic sink"?), you can combine it with the words found (statistically) on the Web around the Titanic to do precise queries against Encarta.

Finally, he talks about noisy channel information finding. For example, in spelling correction the system tries to figure out what the original (intended) spelling was based on the misspellings introduced by a "noisy channel." We're moving from "doe sthe page contain the query terms" to "Does the page satisfy the information need."

Lili Cheng heads the Social Computing Group. Her group created "the personal map," an app that models your social relationships as exhibited in your inbox/outbox, clustering based on who you email together. Her widget also has a slider that moves people into groups based on their groups. [Also cool. I tell ya, that slider thing never fails.] Then they took all of Microsoft's public email lists and did the same sort of charts, a sort of "Six Degrees of Bill Gates."

She shows us Wallop: "Socializing and sharing media in the context of your social network." It's a slick social network app with a bit of an emphasis on photo sharing. So far, only 424 have been invited into Wallop and 219 have added content. Wallop pays attention to implicit as well as explicit data, inferring your social network. People want to control it, but not have to control it all the time.

Wallop aims to integrate with the rest of your desktop, especially email.

They;re currently looking at how you scale it while maintaining privacy, and how to enable the system to adapt to user behaviour patterns rather than vice versa.

[microsoft] Swag

At the Search Champs private conference I'm at, Microsoft has been giving out excellent swag: A copy of Money, Office and Flight Simulator, a logo-ed windbreaker, sun visor and golf shirt, and a thumb storage device....all packed in a logoed-backpack. I'm too mature and self-knowing for swag to affect me, but I'm beginning to think that Microsoft has been badly misunderstood and under-appreciated. Plus, today we get to go to the Microsoft Store where we can spend up to $120 on heavily discounted Microsoft products. Unfortunately, I'm leaving before the trip to the store, so I assume I'm allowed to download $120's worth of copyright-challenged Microsoft products via BitTorrent at Suprnova.org or the P2P network of my choice. That's right, isn't it?

Microsoft took us out to a lovely dinner last night. I sat with three Microsofties and, as always, was impressed with how crazy smart they are across such a wide range of interests. We talked frankly about the day, but also about Aristotle and the birth of persistent taxonomies, whether math escapes science's revolutionary paradigm, whether art anticipates science, and why I don't know what the hell I'm talking about when I mouth off about Wolfram. I had a great time and learned a whole bunch.

Sorry, I'd like to be snarky, but I'm just telling you the truth.

Today we have continuous access to the Net during the sessions. Thank you.

The Tour of Duty tour

ThisIsRumorControl.com ("a blog dedicated to the “ground truth” that the war on terrorism is worth fighting, and al-Qaeda worth defeating, but the current U.S. policies in pursuit of these goals are failing our country in its moment of need") is asking pumping a lecture series by Bobby Muller, head of the Alliance for Security, which is part of the Vietnam Veterans for America Foundation. Got that? I don't, but if you're interested in hearing Muller — Nobel Peace Prize winner as a co-founder of International Campaign to Ban Landmines — talk about the draft and the right use of force, here's the schedule.

Genuine websites

In about two minutes of poking around, I found one article I'm tempted to respond to in disagreement and a software recommendation that looks promising, so I figured I'd pass the link on to you. It's a sorta-monthly webzine about Ilke Akdeniz's ("one miserable freelance web designer") ideas and opinions on web design, published out of Istanbul.

Ah the sound of the human voice. Gotta love it.

Spinning our own eyes

I understand why Ken Mehlman, as the Bush/Cheney campaign manager, in his latest msg pounds on Kerry's "global test" statement, as if working with allies is the same thing as giving them a veto. But I can't figure out how he can talk about Kerry's "repeated denigration of our troops" at the debate. I mean, we were there. We heard him. Kerry could not have been more straightforward in his honoring our soldiers.

Yeah, yeah, I understand the logic: If you think a war is mistaken, you must also think the soldiers are mistaken. It's stupid logic, but I understand it. What I can't understand is why the Republican campaign thinks that, given Kerry's actual statements and his demeanor, which we saw with our own eyes, we're going to fall for this one.

(The subject line of the message is: "Fight the Spin - Spread the Truth!" Beyond spin and all the way to chutzpah.)

Australian dissertations online

Australia is going to put records of all doctoral dissertations online in a searchable database. Great news, although I suppose technically it means that the Web has just gotten a bit more boring.

The article is a tad ambiguous. I think the database will contain the metadata, including an abstract, and not the dissertations themselves.

So long, and thanks for all the blogs

Ev's leaving Blogger and Google because he accidentally discovered that the the light he was blocking because of screen glare wasn't itself coming from the Internet.

Blogger.com was where Joho started. So, thanks, Ev for your role and your work. I look forward to seeing your next contribution, but for goodness sake, there's no hurry!

Microsoft Search Champs - morning

There are about 35 white folks here, half from the US and half from Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and one from S. Africa. We're here to provide "feedback" to Microsoft's search development efforts. We are also obviously here to help us feel good about the efforts.

Attendees include people I've already met in the real world:

Buzz Bruggeman
Liz Lawley
Chris Pirillo
Robert Scoble
Dave Winer

Overall, based on how people introduced theselves, here's the breakdown:

3 Search manipulators
2 Search bloggers
2 Mobile experts
7 writers/journalists (almost all international)
Internet rebel
5 site developers
2 Librarians
Musician
Story-teller
One woman

Plus there are a handful for MSN Product managers, PR people, and some Microsoft Research folks,

The NDA

We have all signed an NDA. A guy gets up to explain why and what it covers.

What we may not talk about: Product specific details (including images, features, demos, etc.), release schedules or plans.

What we may talk about: Purpose of event, basic event details, "what we talked about over cocktails"

If we have any doubts about what can blog, we can "run it by" Sean, the marketing guy who's put the event together. If we fail to comply with the NDA we will be kicked out of the program and there could be "legal ramifications."

The content

Having gotten past the NDA awkwardness - Microsoft is entitled to offer to show us stuff they don't want us to talk about - we are now given a couple of hours of presentations that turn interactive faster than perhaps Microsoft expected. It is a lively discussion, let's say. Some cool features and widgets, but also evidence of Microsoft's unthought benevolent paternalism.

And, without having to run this past Sean, I believe that's all I may say at this time.

Liz's take.

Oh, good lunch. Creamy Mac and cheese for the veggies.

Off the air

Microsoft is not providing connectivity during the conference I'm at, so I'll be off the air for awhile. Frankly, it feels like they're trying to hijack my attention and I resent it.

Later: Microsoft listened. Sort of. They've brought in enough lines for most of us to connect. Unfortunately, they have left them turned off until lunch lest our attention wander where it will go. So, I have been unable to google terms I don't understand, check out web sites people have mentioned, and chat with Liz (who's sitting next to me). Sigh.

Republican remix

Here's a remix from the Republican Convention ("Keeping America Scared"), via Liz via Joi. I haven't been able to see it because of my sub-par connection here in the hotel. (BTW, I got to hang out with Liz at the fun drinks-and-snacks fest Microsoft put on for its "Search Champs," i.e., people it's going to show some of its search software to tomorrow. Lucky me! Liz is here as the sole representative of all women.)

Off to Microsoft

I'm traveling today to be "briefed" (i.e., schmoozed) by Microsoft at an event I'm not yet sure I'm allowed to mention. I'll let you know. (And, yes, they're paying my expenses.) Rest assured, neither facts nor the Beast's warm embrace shall sway me from my prejudices.

Barlow on why he's supporting Kerry anyway

John Perry Barlow, brillliant and frank, explains why he's supporting Kerry for President, albeit maybe not for prom king.

Anyone want to webcast my seminar?

I'm leading a discussion on Wednesday at 6pm at the Berkman Center house to which you're invited. If you're coming, care to - ulp - webcast it? I understand it's easy with them Mac thingamajigs. If so, let me know so I can post it the info...

Does this look funny?

Here's a boring photo I ftp-ed to my site. In both FireFox 0.9 and Internet Explorer, the bottom two thirds are purple. Yet if I download the very same file to my Windows XP and use a local viewer (ACDSee or the one built into PowerDesk) it looks fine. It seems to happen with any photos over a certain size. This leads me to think that it's a display glitch in the browser...but in both browsers? Any explanations forthcoming from you oh-so-smart people?

The problem seems to have been a bug that's fixed in the latest version of imagemagick. The image was corrupt, and now it's not.

GBlog launches

I don't no knowthin' about it (whoops, I seem to have mexed up my missages), but GBlog looks interesting from its home page. It's free for personal use, claims to be good for "nanopublishing" of "niche blogs," and says it has a bunch of anti-comment-spam features. As the site notes, the info is sparse at this point.

Electric Ghost Buster

Are my long, long days of frying electronic components finally over?

Long-time readers (Hi, Mom!) know that I go through computers, computers, hard drives, hard drives, hard drives, stereos, monitors, laptops and even high-end surge protectors the way I go Frosted Flakes — an entire box at a time.

So, about 6-9 months ago, we paid the Louis Pearson electric company to investigate. Their diagnosis: I needed two new 20-amp lines pulled into my office. That required replacing the electric panel we'd put in 10 years ago. A thousand dollars later, the situation was still SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fried Up. Plus, my new, soon-to-be-fried uninterruptible power supply tells me that I'm actually pulling well under 10 amps in my office, and thus didn't really need the 2 new cables.

Yesterday, Walter Nowicki, Master Electrician came by. Here's his report:

Investigate voltage issues. Findings:
No ground at phone or CATV
Loose ground at offset nipple customer panel. 24-22 volts from ground to neutral
Broken coupling at grounding electrode conductor
No house side bond
No supplemental grounding loose node
Loose ground at tenant panel

After tightening the offset nipple (ok, so I don't look in the mirror that often), the voltage differential went waaaay down. (Please do not ask me questions. I do not know what I'm talking about. I can't even read Walter's handwriting precisely.)

Here are thumbnails of my new hero, Walter Nowicki. Why, I'm even tempted to give him a wiki! (Click on the photos to see them full-size.)

Main panel - disconnected strap from neutral

Loose ground connection - "nipple" between panel and meter

Tenant's panel - no bushing on power coming in

Main cut off - Ancient as Capone's vault

Grounding pipe needs work

Current where there shouldn't be

Walter J. Nowicki, Master Electrician

Micah's new home

Micah Sifry has a new blog address. Not only do you get pungent analysis by a guy who knows politics and knows progressive organizing, it's yet another tasty design by Bryan Bell.

Facing Bush

The DNC has released an ad that boils the campaign down to Kerry's uptilted chin and Bush's unfortunate facial body language (bodily face language?). Yes, politics has now been reduced to as close to nothing as possible. But, given that Gore lost the first debate because he sighed in exasperation at Bush's unknowing incoherence, maybe turnabout is fair play. Might as well complete the degradation of democracy and get it over with.

Berkman seminar: Web of ideas

I'm leading the first in a series of open discussions at the Berkman Center this Wednesday at 6pm. You're invited. Here's the blurb the Center sent out:

Join us on Wednesday, Oct. 6, at the Berkman Center [Baker House, on Mass Ave. in Cambridge] at 6 pm for the first in a series of discussions, led by David Weinberger, on the effect of the Web on how we understand ourselves and our shared world. Each session will begin with a 20 minute discussion-opener, followed by open conversation. (Food will be provided.)

Oct. 6th topic: Objectivity, Truth and Blogs

Wikipedia.org -- the grassroots encyclopedia -- has frozen edits to the page about George W. Bush because supporters and detractors were revising the page at a head-spinning clip. Wikipedia's aim is to present an article that contains the core of acknowledged facts about the President, with links to pages that argue many sides of the issue. This assumes that there is an objective core, an idea that dedicated Post-Modernists would dispute. For the rest of us it raises interesting questions about the Web's effect on authority. Is the multiplicity of voices on the Web in fact leading us to a stronger division between fact and opinion than ever before, rather than the fusing of fact and values some have expected? And is authority moving to groups instead of to individuals? Are we seeing the development of "multi-subjectivity," that is, webs of subjective commentary that, because of their diverse viewpoints, can "compete for truth" with objective sources. What's the locus of truth on the Web?

Iraq reality

WiserBlog runs a letter home from Farnaz Fassihi, staff reporter and Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. It is a devastating portrait of the situation in Iraq. Here's just a snippet:

Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war.

...The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war

The New Yorker has an article this week that paints a bleaker picture in another dimension. Hussein's ethnic cleansing, dispossessing Kurds to make for ethnically pure cities, has created fault lines that are already cracking wide open. It is an ugly, frightening future.

The Republican take

Email from Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager:

President Bush spoke clearly and from the heart last night about the path forward - toward victory and security - in the War on Terror. The President spoke candidly about the difficulties facing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as these countries prepare for their first free elections. The terrorists will continue to fight these steps toward freedom because they fear the optimism and hope of democracy. They fear the prospects for their ideology of hate in a free and democratic Middle East.

President Bush detailed a path forward in the War on Terror - a plan that will ensure that America fights the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan - not in America's cities.

John Kerry failed the one test he had to pass last night: he failed to close the credibility gap he has with the American people as his record of troubling contradiction and vacillation spiraled down to incoherence.

More here.

Copyrighting God

ToTheSource reviews What the Bleep Do We Know, a movie that pretends it's scientific but is actually a recruiting tool for Ramtha, "the 35,000 year old 'Ascended Master' and 'warrior spirit' god of Atlantis who channels himself through JZ Knight." The article says that Knight

...has even copyrighted Ramtha. A psychic in Vienna had the audacity to claim in 1992 that Ramtha had also contacted her. She started channeling Ramtha for fun and profit just like Knight does. Knight sued her and won exclusive rights to all of Ramtha’s relayed messages.

Wow. You can copyright a god! And those bioethicists think copyrighting strands of human DNA is controversial.

See AKMA's blog for a less light-hearted example of copyright abuse.

[bn] Overview of Nethead Bellhead conference

After spending Tuesday at the Bellhead/Nethead conf (live blogging begins here) that brought together FCC officials, telecomm folks, and some telco rebels, the magnitude of the gap in thinking is more apparent to me than ever. And it does not make me feel good.

As I meet more and more FCC folks, I find I'm having the same reaction as I do in general with Microsofties: What terrific, bright, well-meaning, funny, serious people...so how does the overall entity end up working against my interests so consistently?

As I see it — and believe me, I am waaaay out of my depth here — the basic problem with the FCC is that they have a set of goals that are often worthwhile (from my POV, natch) taken in themselves but that don't match up well to the nature of the Internet. So, they either propose altering the Internet itself or introducing "small" changes that could have huge effects. It's like approaching the ocean with the aim of farming it. Nothing wrong with farming the ocean, except that your tractor rusts. So, you suggest changing nothing about the ocean except that it's wet. (I am willing to admit that this is not necessarily the finest analogy humans have ever devised.)

The fundamental "problem" — the wetness of the Internet ocean — is that on the Internet, all bits look alike. The bits carrying Osama's voice setting up an attack are indistinguishable from the bits carrying a photo of Pamela Anderson's pubic hair. We're not used to that with our communications networks; the telephone network knows much more about the messages traveling over its wires. So, it seems quite reasonable for Congress to tell the FCC (via CALEA) that the FBI is allowed to wiretap calls going through Voice over IP just as they can wiretap calls done over the normal phone network. But, in order to make that possible, you have to get everyone who makes software that could conceivably be used to carry voice over the Web to comply with putting in back doors for the FBI. Instead of having a wildly innovative environment where anyone can try out any crazy idea on the Net, companies will have to get vetted by the FBI first. Sure, this should only apply to telephony companies, but would you risk the penalties if turns out someone can use your app in ways you didn't intend? Likewise, it's reasonable for Congress to want to impede copyright violations, but because there's no way to distinguish protected from unprotected bits, the FCC gives us the Broadcast Flag requirement that adds bits to the stream...and then requires makers of the digital playback devices to respect those bits. Bit by bit, so to speak, the Net ecosystem is being altered. As with any ecosystem, small changes can — will — have unexpected consequences.

I don't know how to meet the demands of various stakeholders in our culture and economy. But monkeying with the wetness of the Internet ocean seems to me to be the worst possible way. And we seem to be losing the conceptual battle to convince the FCC that it should not be trying to regulate wetness at all.

Susan Crawford knows an awful lot more about this than I do. I highly recommend her reflections on the conference.

Would Dean have done better?

Back when Dean was Da Man, one of the things that kept me going was the thought him and W squaring off in a debate. So, having seen Kerry last night, do I think Dean would have done better?

I actually think not. If Dean were debating W, I would expect more jabs. Kerry has the rhythm of a howitzer. But it worked for him. I think Kerry gained more votes for himself than Dean would have. I think Dean would have done well, but Kerry is more presidential, i.e., he talks slower and is taller. Yes, here in America we're focused on the essentials.

Of course, W wouldn't have had the same flip-flop charge to repeat ad nauseum (which I thought Kerry answered definitively only in the very last line of the debate: Hussein was a threat, but the question is how you respond to that threat). Karl Rove would certainly have come up with another theme with even more devastating results. Maybe it'd be that the ship of state needs a calm and steady hand, not an angry nut job. Plus the Republicans would have (rightfully) pressured Dean to unseal his gubernatorial records, and then would have spent 3 months finding and distorting everything they could.

On the other hand, I still believe that Dean's campaign strategy was better than Kerry's: Instead of running for the center in a fight over the handful of undecideds, run as a real alternative and hope to energize the I Don't Vote party. On the third hand, Dean would have provided so many opportunities for the Republicans to trash him. By now, we'd probably have heard $80M worth of ads claiming that Dr. Judy Steinberg, his wife, had once prescribed cough syrup with alcohol in it to a 12 year old. With their politics of unerring irony, the Republicans would claim that Dr. Steinberg believes drinking is good for minors.

I am still deeply disappointed by the demise of the Dean campaign, but more because of the character of the campaign than because of the candidate. And I believe that someday — not in this election even if Kerry wins (please please please please) — we will take our country back. Or at least what's left of it.

Kerry for presidential

Perhaps you could hear my long sigh of relief. I thought Kerry was clear, concise, determined and offered a better set of solutions. Bush looked startled and confused and, for my money, kept repeating lines that Kerry's very presence refuted.

The bad news is that I was certain that Gore creamed Bush, Mondale creamed Reagan, Carter creamed Reagan...