Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

This is just a reminder to myself to check out the liquid three-column tableless CSS-only design and the liquid two-column tableless CSS-only design.

At the time of this posting, myself was unavailable for comment.

Apparently the recent spate of solar flares has been knocking out radios here on earth and possibly disrupting power plants (my cache).

What I’m wondering is: could this intense increase in magnetic field strength (I assume that’s what’s happening down here) harm humans? I suppose it would be just like sitting under an MRI for a while, which isn’t supposed to harm us at all, but I thought I’d check.

David Bernstein on Volokh.com quotes Lloyd Cohen approvingly. Cohen writes:

A most interesting article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Apparently, there is an increasing trend among employers to ask applicants for their SATs long after graduation from college. I find this heartening. The SAT is fundamentally an IQ test. While not the only measure of likely productivity on the job, intelligence is probably the most powerful and robust predictor. In the past college of attendance, major, and grades, while always subject to unreliability, were more powerful indices of both intelligence and other productive inputs than they are now. As these other predictors have become more debased it is good to see that the market is responding.

Precisely because of its value as an IQ test there are those who wish to transform the SAT into something else, and wish to narrow its employment. One wonders how—if they succeeed—the market will respond.

Bernstein notes the reasons why the SAT isn’t quite a measure of IQ — notably because you can boost your score somewhat by taking a prep course, and because it’s biased toward those who know English. Leaving aside the large debate about IQ (everyone should read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure Of Man), it’s worthwhile to ask how SAT scores change over time. If I took the SAT now, I’m certain I’d do better than I did when I took it; my vocabulary has improved, my math skills have improved, I’ve learned to think more logically, etc.

It seems to me that the premise behind using SAT scores when applying for jobs is that people’s IQ doesn’t change very much between the time when they took the test and when they applied for the job — even if 10 years or more have elapsed. So I see a few possibilities (assuming throughout that companies should care about IQ):

1. If it’s true that IQ doesn’t change that much, and it’s true that the SAT is a reasonable proxy for IQ, then I suppose it makes sense to ask for SAT scores.
2. If, however, SAT scores can change while IQ does not, then the SAT is a bad proxy and companies shouldn’t be asking for it.
3. If SAT scores can change and IQ can change, then companies shouldn’t be relying on either score — or at the very least, they should be retesting people who apply to their companies.

Note that this also skirts the question of how well the SAT correlates with job performance. I’m willing to bet I could devise a statistical model that doesn’t involve the SAT — only involves, say, the strength of recommendations from people whom the employer trusts — that predicts job performance better than the SAT does.

The Cohen quote suggests that grade inflation and the like have reduced the value of college grades and attendance records. I’m not sure if this is the case, even among schools that used to do without grade inflation. If it is, shouldn’t “the market” be addressing this in ways other than re-administering the SAT? For instance, if an A from Harvard really doesn’t mean anything anymore (90% of Harvard undergrads graduated with honors in 2002, if memory serves), and Harvard undergrads are in fact underqualified to hold jobs on the outside, then presumably the statistics will catch this, and fewer Harvard undergrads will find gainful employment. Harvard continues to have its great reputation at least in part because its students make lots of money on the outside. If there’s really a problem of grade inflation that shows up in bad employees, shouldn’t we be able to detect this in other ways? And if we can’t, doesn’t this mean that the market is failing to correct one of its own failings?

Something rubs me very strongly the wrong way about this SATs-for-jobs thing. It seems like precisely the wrong way to handle hiring, and the problem of decreasing academic standards.

Ed Felten, the well-known Princeton computer scientist and copyright activist, has some good comments about some recent exemptions from the DMCA’s anticircumvention provision. To refresh: those provisions say that you can’t, for instance, write a program to crack the encryption on a DVD, even if cracking that encryption is necessary for you to secure your fair-use rights. So if you want to make a copy of a DVD for your own use — as you’re able to do with VHS tapes — you can’t. The law has introduced a glaring contradiction: you have the legal right to make copies for yourself, but the law has also forbidden every possible way of making those fair-use rights happen.

Now the Copyright Office has issued a few DMCA exemptions:

The exemptions allow people to circumvent access control technologies under certain closely constrained conditions. The exemption rulemaking, which happens every three years, was created by Congress as a kind of safety valve, intended to keep the DMCA from stifling fair use too severely.

This time around, exemptions were granted for (1) access to the “block-lists” of censorware products, and (2) works protected by various types of broken or obsolete access control mechanisms.

For one thing, this doesn’t go nearly far enough: there should be an exemption to allow circumvention in defense of fair use.

But secondly, I’m pretty sure Congress requires libraries to install censorware products on their computers. The only way libraries can find out which sites are blocked is to use some circumvention technology. Quite apart from the DMCA, isn’t it pretty ridiculous that libraries can’t just discover this information freely? They have to employ third-party technology to break through the encryption on a censorware product, just to give them access to a list of sites that they ought to have access to to begin with. It’s ludicrous. And it continues to reveal the truth in what Larry Lessig and others have been saying for a long time: “code is law.” If the law provides enforcement to privately written software code, then that software code (“West Coast code,” in Larry’s terminology) is just as much a part of the law as legislation (“East Coast code”).

Wow. Continuing to read President Bush’s press conference: I can’t even get my mind around how clearly President Bush evaded this question, and why no one called him on it:

QUESTION:  . . . Perhaps, the clearest, strongest message you have ever sent from any podium has been what you like to call the Bush doctrine. That is to say: “If you feed a terrorist, if you clothe a terrorist, if you harbor a terrorist, you are a terrorist.”

And I’d like to follow up on the Middle East. You have noted that Yasser Arafat is compromised by terror. Condi Rice has said he cavorts with terror. You’ve both noted that he is an obstacle to peace. He has, in political terms, chocked off your last two Palestinian interlocutors.

What is it that prevents you from concluding that he is, in fact, under your own definition of what a terrorist is, a terrorist, and should be dealt with in the same way that you’ve dealt with Saddam Hussein and Charles Taylor?

BUSH: Yes, well, not every action requires military action. As you notice, for example, in North Korea, we’ve chosen to put together a multinational strategy to deal with Mr. Kim Jong Il. Not every action requires military action.

As a matter of fact, military action is the very last resort for us. And a reminder, when you mention Saddam Hussein, I just want to remind you that the Saddam Hussein military action took place after enumerable United Security Council resolutions were passed.

Not one, two or three, but a lot.

And so this nation is very reluctant to use military force. We try to enforce doctrines peacefully or through alliances or multi- national forums. And we will continue to do so.

Amazing: the question was both a) why Arafat isn’t a terrorist by Bush’s own standard, and b) why we don’t use the military to stop Arafat. Bush answered b), then veered back to Iraq, then summarized, and never touched on the meat of the Arafat question. It’s too bad the reporter didn’t ask the Arafat question and then leave room for a followup.

Argh! I’m reading President Bush’s press conference (my cache). Within a few sentences of the start of the conference, he says:

Liberating the people of from dictatorial regimes was an essential step in the war on terror. The world is safer today because Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are gone.

We are now working with many nations to make sure Afghanistan and Iraq are never again a source of terror and danger for the rest of the world. Our coalition against terror has been strengthened in recent days by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1511. This endorses a multi- national force in Iraq under U.S. command, encourages other nations to come to the aid of the Iraqi people.

I’ve heard a fair amount of debate over how, specifically, Bush connected the Iraq war to an imminent danger of attack from Iraq, or to the war on terror. George Will said something about this recently (my cache):

The administration’s critics would be more credible if they had a few doubts of their own concerning their own judgments, such as their reiterated insistence that only mendacity can explain the failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction. After all, they say, Rumsfeld, the president and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell repeatedly asserted that Iraq’s weapons programs posed an “imminent” threat.

Such assertions by those three officials may have numbered zero. Rumsfeld is more bemused than angered, and certainly not shocked, that critics profess themselves shocked and angered because he, Powell and the president supposedly said, repeatedly, something that none of them actually ever said. At least, says a Rumsfeld aide, an electronic search finds not a single instance of them using the argument that Iraq posed an “imminent” WMD threat to the United States.

This gets back to something I wrote a while ago: the systematic way in which the media — at least during the Bush Administration — will take an enormous problem (whether Bush tried to convince the country that Iraq was somehow connected to the war on terror, and that it owned WMDs), boil it down to one or two cases (did Bush ever say the word “imminent”?), thereby trivialize the whole thing, and push the issue off the front pages by repeatedly focusing on those few trivial cases.

When Will comments that no one ever used the word “imminent,” he’s ignoring what’s right in front of his face: that Bush has been trying for well over a year now to convince us that Iraq has anything at all to do with the war on terror, when in fact it clearly doesn’t. This latest press conference is a perfect example.

During the continuing discussion of Gregg Easterbrook’s rather silly point about spirituality, someone pointed to an article on Salon explaining string theory (my cache). As far as magazine-length treatments of the subject go, it’s doing well, but when I see quotes like this

String theory essentially attempts to bridge the gap. The central idea is that instead of thinking of subatomic particles as points, it may be more helpful to think of them as strings that vibrate in particular ways. Like a violin string that vibrates one way to produce C and another to produce F sharp, these subatomic strings vibrate in one way to produce a photon and another to produce the quarks that form protons and neutrons.

Using this metaphor, it may be possible to reconcile quantum mechanics, which deals with gravity as an exchange of particles, with relativity, which considers gravity a fundamental feature of space and time. The math gets fearsome because the familiar four dimensions (three of space plus time) are not enough to describe the framework in which the strings have to work. With Witten’s unification from 1995, it takes 11 dimensions to do the job. (This is actually an improvement — earlier versions of string theory required as many as 26 dimensions for the explanation to work properly.)

I have to issue a yellow card. Like I said, I realize that they’re working within the confines of their medium. But what does it mean for a particle to have a certain kind of vibration? How is this vibration different from the random quantum motion that all matter moves in? How is it different from the macro-level vibration that we hear in an actual violin string? The article has given us a few metaphors that — to my mind — don’t actually explain anything.

As for the mathematics becoming fearsome because four dimensions are somehow easy, I beg to differ. That’s not four Euclidean dimensions; it’s four curved dimensions, meaning that the very way we measure distance is different from the way we measure it here on earth. I’m told that learning differential geometry is the way to understand this. Differential geometry has always scared me. It’s really hard math. Anyone who tells you that four-dimensional curved spaces are easy is fooling himself.

Higher dimensions, however, aren’t intrinsically more difficult than low dimensions. Once you’ve learned how to do mathematics with matrices, you know a compact way to handle very high-dimensional problems.

This is the trouble with my limited set of knowledge: I know just enough to know how little I know, but not enough to actually make good use of what I know. And I always want to learn more about things that I’m really never going to use (even in the abstract way that one uses philosophy). It’s frustrating.

The article ends in a tone of awe:

If the string theorists succeed, however, our lives may very well change at the most profound levels. We’ll know how gravity works, everywhere from within an atomic nucleus to between galactic clusters. We will know what holds the universe together and what makes it work. A branch of physics will be complete, an explanation of life seamless. For now, the hunt is still on.

Perhaps it’s just my limited vantage point, but I don’t see how understanding physics at that level would change the world fundamentally. I understand how discoveries in physics have changed us profoundly before — Copernicus’s and Newton’s discoveries reshaped their worlds — but the article doesn’t give me much reason to believe that string theory is on the same level. Even relativity theory didn’t change our lives at a profound level; it’s a remarkable discovery, and I think we’re all better off for it, but it doesn’t seem to have been a life-changing event. It didn’t fundamentally alter the average human’s perspective on how the universe is put together, in the same way that Newton made much of humanity believe in a clockwork universe. I’m certainly open to suggestion on this point, but relativity theory and string theory just don’t seem to hold a candle to Newton.

Moreover, even if string theory turns out to be a perfect synthesis of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, there are still a great many complicated phenomena that will be beyond our grasp: the weather, and how organs work, and why animals seem to have this thing called a “mind,” and why some people have unsatisfying sex lives.

No one ever claimed, of course, that discovering fundamental laws in physics would solve these problems. The terminology, though, convinces a lot of people that physics can stop when it has solved the lowest-level problems. In my mind, I’d much rather see attention turned away from string theory and turned toward understanding how those very low-level physics processes interact to form high-level phenomena.

Both Crooked Timber and Chris Genovese have some good comments on something Gregg Easterbrook wrote about “invisible realities”: namely, why scientists will accept high-dimensional universes but won’t accept the idea of a single parallel plane of spirituality. The response is obvious — namely, that scientists won’t accept any claim unless it sits on evidence, whereas claims about a plane of spirituality have no such basis.

I’m more taken by the discussion surrounding his post on Crooked Timber, which is a really smart group of academic bloggers (philosophy and poli-sci professors, I think) and smart readers. One commentator wrote

Easterbrook had a big story in Wired, I think, a while back about religion and physics. As usual, he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

I think the story he’s talking about is “The New Convergence” (my cache, or a newly laid-out version). I leave it to the reader to decide whether it’s as silly as the Crooked Timber poster thinks it is.

People have been making something of a stink about the White House’s robots.txt file (my cache), which forbids search engines like Google from indexing certain files. Among the list of excluded files are a number of files with the word “Iraq” in their names. People have asserted that this is the White House trying to rewrite history so that future researchers will not be able to dig up what the White House actually said about Iraq. As Mark Kleiman writes: “I’m willing to stop using the term `Orwellian’ to refer to this gang as soon as they’re prepared to stop using 1984 as an instruction manual.”

I’ll grant the possibility that this is what the White House is doing, but if so it doesn’t seem like much of an Orwellian move. Robots.txt is a strictly advisory standard: no web crawler has to adhere to it. That said, the most widely used search engines do adhere to it, because otherwise no one would let those engines crawl their sites. But the point is that if the White House really wanted to rewrite history, it would delete these files altogether. And if it thought certain documents were incriminating, it wouldn’t put them on a public website and then declare in an unencrypted text file that those documents are incriminating.

That said, I’m trying to look at random files within robots.txt, and most of them seem like nonsense. For instance, most of the excluded URLs look like this selection:

 Disallow: /holiday/2002/pageant/iraq Disallow: /holiday/2002/pageant/text Disallow: /holiday/2002/panoramic/iraq Disallow: /holiday/2002/panoramic/text Disallow: /holiday/2002/petsculptures/iraq Disallow: /holiday/2002/petsculptures/text Disallow: /holiday/2002/text Disallow: /holiday/2002/whtree/iraq Disallow: /holiday/2002/whtree/text Disallow: /holiday/iraq Disallow: /holiday/media/iraq Disallow: /holiday/media/text Disallow: /holiday/text 

The trailing “/iraq” and “/text” show up a lot, but they seem to have been added in for no reason; they’re not even valid URLs. That is, http://www.whitehouse.gov/holiday/2002/whtree/iraq isn’t a valid URL, but http://www.whitehouse.gov/holiday/2002/whtree/ is. In many cases, it looks as though the “/iraq” has been tacked on for no good reason. I have no idea why they might have done this. Maybe within that list of nonexistent “/iraq” files are a few that they really don’t want people to see, which they’ve hidden under mounds of junk URLs.

The appropriate response for those who cherish open government is to download all the files from the White House that they can get their hands on. Like I said, robots.txt is advisory; it’s not as though the White House has a law of physics on its side.

This does bring up an interesting question, though: if the Bush Administration faces a trial in a few years over what they did and did not say, and someone presents as evidence a web page taken from the list of disallowed pages above, how easy would it be for the Administration to deny that they ever wrote that page? Web pages don’t have signatures attached, so no one can verify their author. How do we prove that someone wrote a web page?

Via Jason Kottke: Security consultant Bruce Schneier — a man whom I admire deeply — has a “well, duh” kind of article (my cache) in Newsday explaining why passenger profiling doesn’t work: a high rate of false positives, the diversity of terrorists (they’re not all Arabs), etc. He also makes what should be an obvious point about the Bill of Rights: the government isn’t allowed to investigate people based on generalized suspicion; if it’s going to sic law enforcement on you, it must suspect that you — because of things that you’ve done, not because of the ethnic groups that you’re a member of — are guilty of something. If it has this sort of suspicion, it must tell a judge. This is what our Constitution buys us.

It’s a very “well, duh” sort of article, but the amazing thing is that the points Schneier is making — while quite obvious — aren’t obvious to a lot of Americans. If they were obvious, the government’s ineffectual antiterror laws would never have happened, because the American public would have dismissed them long ago. Thankfully a lot of civil libertarians have been paying attention. It saddens me, however, that the people who care about our constitutionally protected liberties are just a few interest groups and the hackers who glom onto them. Shouldn’t everyone be paying attention?

I only recently “got” the big idea behind the autotrack, and I find it incredibly cool. Hence I’d like to describe it here, if you’re interested. (Thanks to Adam and Chris for helping me to learn about this stuff, and thanks to Adam specifically for helping me implement it within Blosxom.)

First there was TrackBack. It’s just a phenomenally good idea, and it’s like the opposite of a hyperlink. When Person A links to Person B, Person B would quite often like to know that Person A is linking to him or her — if, for instance, A and B are having a debate. So Person A sends a “TrackBack ping” to Person B, telling Person B’s website that someone is linking to Person B. Person B’s website can do with this information whatever it wants. One good idea is to assemble a list of pages that link to the page in question, thereby achieving something like web-page threading. Smart clients could follow all the links around all the related sites, and assemble a “map” of a given topic: I discovered this information here, and then someone linked to me, and then someone linked to him, etc. You could get lots of cool information about which news sites are the most important (in the sense that when they publish a story, the largest number of sites link to it).

The trouble is that the act of pinging, as described, is too manual; you have to use a separate application to send the ping. So along comes autotrack. When I link to a plain old HTML page, autotrack looks inside that HTML page to find “meta-information” describing where the associated TrackBack ping should go. Every post on my site has such meta-information; it looks like this (look in the source code to see it):

 <!-- <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://laniels.org/cgi-bin/weblog/books/murakamistory.html” dc:identifier=”http://laniels.org/cgi-bin/weblog/books/murakamistory.html” dc:title=”A new story by Murakami” trackback:ping=”http://laniels.org/cgi-bin/weblog/books/murakami_story.trackback” /> </rdf:RDF> –> 

So now I’ll automatically send information back to anyone I link to, as long as that person is using TrackBack meta-information. Even if they’re not, I can provide additional information to autotrack to make it link properly.

There’s one additional cool thing: WriteBacks. The comments page attached to each post on my site will display any comments from a website that tracks back to me. So if you have a site, and you write a page commenting on a post within my site, just send me a TrackBack ping; an excerpt from your page will show up within my comments. Pretty cool, I think.

Adam Kessel was fond of Kill Bill. In case it wasn’t clear, I admit the possibility that rational people can disagree over this movie. For myself, though, I found a lot of things wrong with it.

Adam has some interesting comments on originality in film which I’d like to address. Right now I’m going to get a cup of coffee, though — a ritual which cannot be interrupted on pain of death. More soon.

Some recent proposed state laws (via the Bookslut):

EXEMPTIONS FROM SALES TAX (H 2168, H 631)- The Taxation Committee held a hearing on a proposal to exempt all books from the state’s five percent sales tax. Current law exempts only school books and books used for religious worship. The hearing also included a measure exempting energy efficient refrigerators, dishwashers and washing machines from the tax.

Not bad. Kinda cool, actually. Then we have

RED SOX CHEER- A few hours prior to the seventh game of the American League baseball championship game, Red Sox fan Craig Rourke of Somerville filed a bill making “Red Sox Rule” the state’s official baseball cheer. Rourke hopes this positive cheer will replace the unofficial derogatory anti-Yankees cheer. He filed the measure with the help of Senator Cheryl Jacques (D-Needham).

I love my state.

 . . . It is, however, disappointing when an intelligent critic like Roger Ebert loves vacuous and self-indulgent trash like Kill Bill.

I’m not going to say very much about this film, which I saw a few weeks ago, because I think that would be granting it more stature than it deserves. I will say this, however: even by its own standards, I think it’s trash. It’s trying so hard to be more than a standard action movie. It’s even trying very hard to pay homage to classic Bruce Lee movies. It’s trying to do all of this with a distinctive visual style. I think it fails on all those counts: it’s a blood-and-guts movie which I spent a good long while trying to appreciate on a deeper level. There is no such level to appreciate it on. I then tried to appreciate it for sheer visual style and innovation. I can’t: it’s The Matrix Reloaded with swords. And yet it’s Tarantino, which immediately buys it a couple more stars from otherwise intelligent critics.

I also hope that any film would try to give you some reason to watch it instead of the thousands of films you could rent on a given night. Why watch Kill Bill, for instance, when you could watch the 1985 action flick Commando? I can’t think of a good reason, honestly; Commando was the first movie that came to mind when I wanted a comparison. Both feature a hero or heroine progressing through Little Boss after Little Boss on the way to killing Big Boss. Both feature cool weapons (machine guns or rocket launchers in Commando; swords in in Kill Bill). Both feature graphic deaths and spurting blood. (Most action movies will give you death, and most will give you blood, but only the rare few will give you blood that spurts.) In short, I see nothing in Kill Bill that you couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. And in the end, what else is a movie trying to do if not carve out some tiny piece of uniqueness? This seems like a rather low hurdle to hit, but somehow Kill Bill fell under the bar.

And no, this isn’t just Steve Hating All Action Movies. I’ve tried very hard to judge the film on what appear to be its own internal standards, and even by that measure it comes up lacking. Just to make sure it wasn’t Steve The Film Effete, I saw it with a couple people whose film tastes are drastically different than mine — less arty, perhaps, and both more prone to liking action films. They and I left it with the same confused feeling: was there more to this movie that I just didn’t get? I think we all agree: nope. It tried really hard to rise above, but didn’t.

I’m likely to avoid watching the next Tarantino flick (even after the Kill Bill series is over) until people whose film taste I trust have come back with many thumbs up. It’s really too bad, because I adore Pulp Fiction. Reservoir Dogs, for all its nihilism and violence, is at least stylish and desperately evil. Kill Bill, on the other hand, contributes nothing to film except disdain for the medium.

One final note: throughout Kill Bill, I was reminded of Orson Welles’ quote about Federico Fellini (from David Thompson’s

I heard stirrings about Amazon’s book archive a while ago, then got email from my friend Amy discussing it today, then read Larry Lessig referencing a Wired article about it (my cache) today. It’s a great idea, but parts of it kind of irk me. For instance, when you search for a word in the book,

u can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume — which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages in the archive, and they won’t be able to view more than a few thousand pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book.

I have no problem with their limiting you to a certain fraction of a book’s length in any given month, or limiting you to a certain number of pages overall. But why do they have to do this, and only distribute the search results to you as digital pages rather than raw text? I would much prefer to get raw text, which I could then quote in other places. I wouldn’t mind being limited to 20% of any book’s length, but I’d like to have full access to that 20%.

And of course I’m pretty sure that this will be hacked in no time. Sure, any one reader will be limited to 20% of the book, but a team of readers could coordinate to assemble a full book. Also, if the text exists as GIFs or JPEGs, it’s probably rather trivial to convert those files into raw text. That point isn’t really relevant to the rest of what I’m writing, but I think the general point is always good to reiterate: companies should just stop trying to pretend that any technological crippling will ever last.

The article’s central theme is that Amazon’s system is straddling two concurrent demands among Internet users: the desire to have an enormous text database, and the desire to keep reading actual, physical books:

It makes people buy books. But Amazon’s scheme would never work if users really wanted their books in digital form. The magic of the archive lies in the assumption that physical books are irreplaceable. The electronic text is simply an enhancement of the physical object.

I think that quote is a stretch. Amazon’s system isn’t addressing people’s need for books; having a digital page on-screen is nothing like having a physical page in front of you. Nor is having a digital page of the Amazon sort anything like having a raw-text copy on hand (except to the extent that the former can be hacked to produce the latter). We could certainly do better if we wanted to please both worlds.

Let me say, before this comes off sounding negative, that I wholeheartedly praise Amazon for what it’s done. In my ideal world, every printed word would be available on the web. Amazon’s starting on that road, and for that I salute them.

Update: Continuing to read that long article, I see this quote:

As part of the Million Book Project, Kahle has created an Internet Bookmobile that produces decent-quality paperbacks of out-of-copyright books for about $1 each. The bookmobile consists of a Ford Windstar minivan with a satellite dish, a computer, a printer, and a binder.

How wonderful! That makes me so excited, and makes me wonder when the bookmobile will come my way. The bookmobile website, oddly enough, isn’t clear on when the ‘mobile will hit Boston.

Update 2: the rest of the article is just tremendously positive on the future of online books. I hope the bookmobile idea takes off, and that the future is as bright as the article suggests. I’m really quite excited.

A friend recently noted that his work on a blosxom plugin “cribbed” from another blosxom plugin. He’s not embarrassed about this, nor should he be: the nature of ideas on the Internet is that they get “stolen” and built upon.

I’m realizing more and more that the Net has pushed people very quickly to consider the nature of ideas and governance in broader realms than the Net, based on their Net experiences. People have realized for a long time that musicians steal ideas from each other all the time; that’s how progress happens. Computer software just codifies this (now that I think about it, literally: it turns this idea into code). When the code is right there in front of you, you can’t deny where the influences come from. The open-source community is pathologically honest in what they “steal” from and what the problems with their code are.

This “theft” leads to a quick process of generalization: 1) I can steal from other people’s code, build on it, give back to the community, and not feel bad about it; 2) So maybe I can do this with music (making mash-ups and so forth); 3) Maybe intellectual-property law in general drives at the wrong goals, by denying us this productive theft; 4) Laws only make sense inasmuch as they promote socially valuable goals, and maybe intellectual-property law isn’t socially valuable anymore. The hacker community seems to have moved through this process rather quickly; I wonder how long it will take the rest of the country to move there. Clearly a large portion of the country has decided to download MP3s illegally; I wonder if it’s because they’ve developed this broader consciousness of the law, or whether they just like downloading MP3s. The latter is important too — it’s a new reality that the music industry has to accept, which I’ve written about before — but it’s not really relevant to the political-awareness discussion.

(more…)

I’m in the middle of The Adventures Of Augie March right now — one of Saul Bellow’s classics, apparently. First, it’s worthwhile to note that Bellow is showing up everywhere recently. There was a mock series of letters ‘twixt Bellow and football coach Bill Parcells (my cache) on The Morning News. Then there was a talk about Bellow at the Boston Public Library, accompanied by a discussion on WBUR that morning. Just the other day, George Will decided he had to be a wanker and reference Augie March for no good reason other than to say that Don Rumsfeld was born in Chicago:

Like Saul Bellow’s Augie March, Rumsfeld is “an American, Chicago born,” and Midge Decter, in her just-published biographical essay “Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait,” correctly says he is still not a Washingtonian, but remains a “child of that prairie-driven culture of vitality.”

I’ll grant you that it’s an amazing opening paragraph, however:

I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

I suspect that Bellow’s publisher has done a great job reminding people that it’s the fiftieth anniversary of Augie March’s publication. Even people like Will, who don’t know that they’ve succumbed to marketing, are part of the act.

I’ve just begun the arduous trek toward getting outfitted for a fragrance. My friend Liz — the lovely, the nasally gifted, the Recently Exercising Her Butt At A Gym Class Using Some Inexplicable And Enormous Rubber Ball (which I find hilarious) — sent a message to her Yahoo! Groups mailing list (well worth the free subscription to her daily musings) describing her fine nose, and in particular the multifarious scents she can pick out in a perfume. I was intrigued, so I asked whether she could help me choose a cologne sometime. She jumped at the chance, and here — scarcely 10 hours after reading her message — I sit with a collection of tubes, each purporting to reveal a small but essential portion of The Platonic Scented Me. The next few days will prove vital in the olfactory life of your humble author.

At the same time, I’m a little scared, for reasons that are probably unrelated to the scent. I’ve been having some real troubles with my head recently, starting with a dizzy spell on October 9th and continuing into a migraine this past Sunday. Since Sunday, I’ve had a faint but persistent feeling of heaviness, like I’m going to explode into a migraine at any moment. It hasn’t happened, save for a mild headache that I have right now. Still, this is far more headaches than people are supposed to have.

I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m doing my best to eliminate causes — foods, dehydration, smoke — but nothing seems to be doing the trick. So I find myself getting scared to go outside and do anything, because I’m worried that a migraine or a dizzy spell will erupt while I’m out.

I wonder if it’s common to imagine the worst. I’ll be honest: the thought — just a thought — that I have a brain tumor has occurred to me. My rational mind tells me to be  . . .  well, to be more rational, and to calm down. But it’s hard to do so when the threat of excruciating pain hangs over me.

It’ll be good when I get a job. Then I’ll have health insurance and will get a full set of tests. I’ll also get some work done on my right shoulder, which I messed up during a fall down my friend’s stairs several months ago, and which burst into a lot of pain recently while sidearm-throwing a baseball on the beach.

I’m just a mess, aren’t I?

(Oh, and the connection with Liz’s fragrance-shopping is that I wondered whether different smells might trigger a migraine. Their origin seems mysterious to a lot of people. A tangential connection, I’ll admit.)

Because of some unexpected turbulence with the entriescache plugin, I needed to go through all my stories and remove the string “meta-creationdate:[some date]”. This would have been an enormous headache had I had to do it by hand, but the following single command did it:

for i in find .; do cat $i | sed s/meta-creation_date.*$// > “$i.bak”; mv “$i.bak” $i; done

Unix weenies probably already knew that, and I probably should have attained that level of comfort long ago. I guess I’m still at the point where enormous timesavers like this really make me marvel.

I didn’t notice until today that my body spends probably 20 minutes on the crawl upward through sleep toward consciousness. I’m aware that I’m awake, but my body refuses to let my eyes open. Then they open, blink, close again, stay there for a while, ponder the comfort and coolness of my sheets, reopen, and maybe then get up.

This is, I think, some definitive proof that waking up to an alarm is evil and against god.