Jonesing for the truth
| :: |
Thursday, September 11, 2003 |
She's Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe
I was told that my blog is moldering, so I've decided hiatus is over.
What's up with me: three more days in Berkeley, four days in Washington DC with mom and dad, then I'm in Dublin for a long, long time.
It's been a trying few weeks. My packing and moving was considerably slowed down by a nasty, nasty case of...I don't know for sure, since I don't have any medical insurance, and I never bothered to go to the doctor. I think it was bronchitis or something. That was three weeks ago, and it's just finally starting to go away. Anyhow, packing was like 40 minutes packing, 20 minutes napping...not a good situation.
However, I did manage to pack my stuff into every square inch of my ministorage space, and pack only about seven 18x18x18 double-corrugated 275 lb. test boxes for international shipping via the good ol' US Postal Service.
I'm on the verge of hysteria, but trying not to think about it.
Gawker
Subject: Sushi Options. New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison evidently makes excellent use of their paralegals. According to a memo...
Washington Post: Editorial
Nice Work
Washington Post: Editorial
A Busted Play
Washington Post: Editorial
Mr. Pollard's Plea
Washington Post: Editorial
An Apology Would Help
Washington Post: Editorial
To Honor Service
Washington Post: Front Page
'In Our Hearts and Prayers'
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Smoking Killed Five Million Worldwide in 2000 (Reuters). Reuters - Smoking killed nearly five million
people in 2000, accounting for almost equal numbers in the
developed and developing nations and painting a bleak picture
for the future, scientists said on Friday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Stone Age Settlements Found Underwater in Britain (Reuters). Reuters - Archaeologists have stumbled across the
first underwater evidence of Stone Age settlements in Britain.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Study Predicts Giant Wave of Extinctions (AP). AP - Hundreds of species face possible extinction in the next two decades if more land is not set aside to protect them, a study released Thursday said.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Batman Goes "Psycho"; Bale Cast (E! Online). E! Online - Christian
Bale, who carved up costars with a chainsaw in American
Psycho, will don the Dark Knight's cape and cowl for the latest
big-screen Batman, Warner Bros. announced Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Chong's Bongs Land Him in Prison (E! Online). E! Online - That recently proposed Cheech
and Chong reunion movie may be up in smoke--at least for the next
nine months.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Microsoft Admits New Windows Problem (AP). AP - Moments before a top Microsoft executive told Congress about efforts to improve security, the company warned on Wednesday of new flaws that leave its flagship Windows software vulnerable to Internet attacks similar to the Blaster virus that infected hundreds of millions of computers last month.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Christian Bale to Play Next 'Batman' (AP). AP - Holy casting news! An "American Psycho" has been picked to star as Bruce Wayne in a new "Batman" movie.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Apple sued by The Beatles over iPod, ITMS (MacCentral). MacCentral - Apple Computer Inc. is being sued by Apple Corps. The parent company for music legends, The Beatles, has begun legal proceedings against Apple Computer, citing breach of contract for the suit, according to Fox News.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Times of Sept. 11 Attack, WTC Collapse (AP). AP - The beginning of the end of the World Trade Center was at 8:46.26 a.m., when hijacked American Airlines flight 11 smashed into the north face of the 110-story north tower.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
U.S.: N. Korea Nuke Plant Activity Stops (AP). AP - Plutonium reprocessing activity at a key North Korean site has apparently ceased, U.S. officials said Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Security Experts Warn of Repeat of Blaster Virus (Reuters). Reuters - Microsoft Corp.'s warning
of a newly discovered security flaw in Windows prompted experts
on Thursday to urge computer users to update their software to
avoid a repeat of a devastating attack similar to the recent
Blaster worm.
RSSlet
September 12th, 2003 -- 12:07 AM EDT.
(September 12th, 2003 -- 12:07 AM EDT // link)
Okay, from the ridiculous to the sublime, only in reverse.
Adam Nagourney's piece in the Times gives the standard run-down of Wes Clark's seemingly imminent announcement of his candidacy. He puts a bit more flesh on the story than Dan Balz in the Post and leaves less doubt about the outcome.
But look at the quote he got from Mark Fabiani ...
He's an intriguing figure. You spend any time with him and you realize he is a prestigiously talented person with an extraordinary record. He would be a very potent candidate.
Here's my question: what the &#$% is a "prestigiously talented person"?
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 11th, 2003 -- 11:39 PM EDT.
(September 11th, 2003 -- 11:39 PM EDT // link)
This piece by Dan Balz is Friday's Washington Post strikes me as a very accurate assessment of the swirl currently whipping around Wes Clark and the pressure on him to get off the dime.
-- Josh Marshall
anil dash's daily links
nice discussion on laptop bags. doug's endorsement has pretty much convinced me to pick up a waterfield. behold the power of blog marketing.
anil dash's daily links
like jason kottke's design?. it's not considered polite to take a design without credit or compensation. Design and content © 2002-2003 Tommy R. Young?
anil dash's daily links
don't just rip off one six apart site.... this bizactions blog rips off our Everything TypePad weblog
anil dash's daily links
...rip off two of 'em. and their homepage rips of movabletype.org
anil dash's daily links
taking the city's pulse two years later. a great roundup that feels optimistic to me
anil dash's daily links
new york's always been tough. in terms of buildings destroyed and economic impact, the great fire of 1835 was far more destructive than the 9/11 attacks, though far fewer lives were lost
California Insider
Times Poll shows recall in dead heat. The latest LA Times Poll is out, and the Great Poll Debate will continue. Just a few days after the Field Poll showed the recall leading 55-40, the Times has it in a dead heat at 50-47. The Timesâ candidate...
jwz
be my google.
So, the power was out at the club last night, and again this afternoon, and will be again tonight, and apparently this is on purpose: a "scheduled outage" of whatever their euphamism is for "we're turning off your lights; you're welcome." They called last week and told us about it ahead of time. But now I'm curious about why (is it construction? did they just feel like it? what?) and I can't find any info on PG&E's site or on the local papers' sites. Surely this stuff gets written down somewhere? Anyone know where?
By jwz@jwz.org.
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
9.11 & Oliver. I can't remember September 10th, 2001. I've tried really hard to reconstruct my memories and figure out what happened on that day "before" but it's a blank. It's as if that day was wiped clear, as if nothing of any...
birdhouse.org
High ASCII Madness. FileMaker is more than happy to set users up with "value lists," which coyly store multiple values in a field -- a concept that's pretty much anathema to "real" databases. Values in the list are separated by a weird ascii character. To forge a bridge b/w MySQL and FileMaker, wrote a routine to grab each element in a form array and insert this weird character between each. If all elements were named perfectly, FM would...
MetaFilter
Annihilation Time in Milwaukee.
Annihilation Time in Milwaukee An abrasive flier for a house show on Sept. 11th, leads to a visit from the FBI an subsequent house eviction. Life under the Patriot Act or repeat of
the assassination ball?
MetaFilter
9/11 - Things that make you go hmmmm.
20 unanswered questions about 9/11 - "Why after 730 days do we know so little about what really happened that day? No one knows where the alleged mastermind of the attack is, and none of his accomplices has been convicted of any crime. We're not even sure if the 19 people identified by the U.S. government as the suicide hijackers are really the right guys."
MetaFilter
Deanster.
DeanLink is a new service from the Dean Campaign.
Dean +
Friendster =
DeanLink. The tech savvy presidential campaign strikes again. What's next? DeanTorrent? Where do you think all this technology will go after the campaign is over?
MetaFilter
Apple sues Apple over Apple.
Apple Corps Ltd. sues Apple Computers over
AppleMusic. "When it first happened with the iPod, we said, "What could they be thinking?" said a Beatles legal insider, who agreed that posters announcing the iPod from "AppleMusic" were among the most egregious violations. "They knew we had the agreement, and that we'd won a lot of money from them already."
MetaFilter
Faklng Cultural Interest.
Is That A Masterpiece Or What? Oh, Give Me A Fucking Break! It's definitely a
what, right? The great thing about growing up is you stop caring about what is admired and respected by those you admire and respect and settle down to liking what you actually like. I can remember studying and pretending to love, for instance, the films of Eisenstein; Syberberg or Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet; the writings of Kierkegaard, Proust, Musil, Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor; the artworks of Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella or Morris Louis; the music of Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis or Luigi Nono. Now, I admit I think they're all quite boring. All lies; damned
lies! And yet...and yet I think this article by
Tom Utley is thoroughly philistine and brutal. Still: could it be that we all fake it to some extent? When we're young, at least? Have you ever lied about your taste? Are you ashamed?
MetaFilter
Frank and sobering interview with Paul Krugman..
Frank and sobering interview with Paul Krugman. Krugman: If you ask Norquist or the Heritage Foundation about where the economic and social policy intelligentsia really stands, their aim is to roll us back to Herbert Hoover or before. Norquist actually thinks that we've got to get back to before the progressive movement [approx equal]¥ã- before the McKinley era, which actually is one of Karl Rove's guiding lights as well. So there's definitely an important faction in the Bush administration and in the Republican Party that really wants to unravel all of this stuff and basically wants us to go back to a situation where, if you are unlucky, and you don't have enough to eat, or you can't afford medical care, well, that's just showing that you weren't sufficiently provident. And then, for these people, there would be no social safety net whatsoever.
Other people in the party, and other people in the coalition, have deluded themselves into thinking that somehow this is all going to be painless, and we're going to grow our way out of the deficit. Other people really don't care about any of that and are viewing their alliance with these people as a way to achieve their social goals -[approx equal]¥ã basically roll back the revolution in social mores over the past few decades.
kuro5hin.org
The Multiple Heteronyms of One Poet. Fernando Pessoa was a mastermind born in the late 1800s who fooled entire nations and important personalities into a web of fantasy and art using conventional newspapers and magazines to create a world of imaginary people, circumstances and places. His intricate web was revealed to us 50 years after his death, when his sister donated a chest with over 27 thousand documents written by him. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these were written by more than seventy heteronyms he created, who were capable of producing not only poems but critical works, philosophical tracts, novels, plays, horoscopes, letters and interviews. Heteronyms: a concept stronger than pseudonyms, they were literary alter egos with intricate imaginary lives of their own.
RSSlet
September 11th, 2003 -- 3:57 PM EDT.
(September 11th, 2003 -- 3:57 PM EDT // link)
Aha! More news about Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi's 'he's-begging-to-be-our-VP' dirty tricks campaign against Wes Clark. This from the just-posted edition of USNews' Washington Whispers ...
And forget about that talk that all the retired four-star general and former NATO boss wants is the veep nomination. Supporters say that's a dirty-tricks campaign pushed by rival Howard Dean who's scared of a Clark candidacy. Says Frisby: "Wes Clark firmly believes that he is the best choice to be president, not be vice president or hold any other government post."
Leave it to TPM to bring you the scoop
first.
And in this just-released AP story signaling Clark's decision to run, see these two grafs ...
While mulling his options, Clark has met with several presidential contenders who covet his endorsement and might consider him for a vice presidential slot. He met Saturday with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who said it is too soon to talk about political alliances. "There is a lot of vetting that would have to be done before you would have those kinds of discussions," Dean said when asked whether he had discussed the vice presidency with Clark.
In other words, the Dean camp is trying to pooh-pooh the bogus spin they
floated to the
Washington Post only yesterday.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave ...
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 11th, 2003 -- 12:32 PM EDT.
(September 11th, 2003 -- 12:32 PM EDT // link)
Is the Dean camp trying to set up Wes Clark? (Yep, I'm talkin' about you, Joe!) This piece 
in today's Post says Dean and Clark "discussed the vice presidency at a weekend meeting in California." Read down into the article and there doesn't seem to be that much there there. But the story got picked up on CNN too. And now the story of the day is not those very active discussions Clark is having about his own presidential run, but the potential 'Dean/Clark alliance'. And if Clark decides to get into the race after all, doesn't that mean that he wobbled, that as recently as this week he was thinking of taking the number two slot from Dean, or endorsing Dean? (His opponents want to play to the 'indecision' meme, remember.) I think that's what some people would like us to think. The Post calls those people "sources familiar with the [Dean/Clark] discussions." But I think we can imagine who those folks might be.
-- Josh Marshall
Corante: Social Software
24 Hour PLATO People. It does not get any more 'L33+ or 0LD SK00L than
the PLATO system, the O.G. of social software. It looks like PLATO may get some of the recognition it deserves, from a book-in-progress called
PLATO People:
The PLATO system, started way back in 1960, was developed as a technological solution to delivering individualized instruction ... As the system grew and evolved, it became, pretty much by accident, the first major online community, in the current sense of the term. In the early 1970s, people lucky enough to be exposed to the system discovered it offered a radically new way of understanding what computers could be used for: computers weren't just about number-crunching (and delivering individualized instruction), they were about people connecting with people. For many PLATO people who came across PLATO in the 1970s, this was a mind-blowing concept.
Yep.
The Research Questions page is asking for help
Then, there's the personal and social aspects: I'm interested in learning about how people made friends (or enemies) via PLATO; about their experiences in PLATO notesfiles and P-Notes and TERM-talk; how PLATO affected their lives and careers; those kinds of things. Who out there (besides me!) met their spouse through PLATO?
with these questions and more. If you're interested in PLATO, watch this space, and if you used it or worked on it,
get in touch with Brian Dear, the author.
Corante: Social Software
Wired on the political uses of Flash Mobs. Wired has an article on
the use of Flash Mobs for political ends:
During a flash mob event recently held in Prague, an independent journalist attempting to photograph the gathering was beaten and detained by security guards, according to mob organizer Daniel Docekal and other participants in the event.
Docekal had organized the mob as a protest against local laws that prohibit the taking of photos or videos in supermarkets and malls.
as
predicted in the CS Monitor:
And what is, for now, a "raw capability" as Shirky describes it, could easily become a political tool: "All of the organizers of public action who are looking at this stuff now, from the Moral Majority to the Sierra Club, are thinking, 'OK, is this something I can use to accomplish my goal X?'"
Corante: Social Software
Buzz Maker: Interesting but not there yet. I group social software into two broad categories -- active, and latent. Active social software actually supports social interaction, eg.g
Meetup,
Hydra, Uncle Roy,
IAwiki.
Latent social software is software that derives value from social systems, and makes the results available to third parties --
blogdex,
Technorati,
historyflow.
The Waypath Buzz Maker is latent social software that indexes weblogs and graphs up to 5 word frequencies against each other. Here, for example, is the graph for the words Friendster, Fakester, and Tribe.net:
Unfortunately, as you can see, the data is nearly worthless. It suffers from several classic mistakes -- the database was too small in the beginning to be worth using, collapsed again in August, and is being added to cumulatively, so all searches also collapse at the end. In addition, the word count is not indexed to overall posts, so even if occurrences of a word are falling in relative terms, it can still be presented as rising if its absolute numbers are going up.
The thing that interests me most about Buzz Maker is not the data from it -- the site's creators may or may not ever fix the methodological problems -- but rather the fact that there are a number of such attempts out there to visualize data from social systems (as with Ben Discoe's Friendster graphs which I posted about earlier.) Like recent work on social networking protocols and services, collaborative groupware, and meme and word-burst tracking, the engineering required for this type of latent social software has become simple enough that a small number of people can accomplish a lot in a short time. Even if the Buzz Machine never gets good, its a harbinger of a lot more social visualization tools showing up in the next couple of years.
xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE
Interactive Visual Explainers. "Interactives are one of the first experiments in interactive journalism. They are brief Web-based interactive visual explainers. They are designed to explain complex concepts or ideas. Of late, they are usually created in Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director. Since the practice is new, different names are used to describe it -- 'Flash Infographics,' 'Motion Graphics,' and 'Interaction Graphics' are some we've come across. We like 'Interactives' because it embodies interaction -- the building block of the Web -- and thus does not bring across any preconceived notions from the print world."
xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE
Bad names to use for directories. "It's not enough to use different browsers (or even BrowserCam) to check your site's appearance. Back in May, I featured a company called Blackbaud, who makes software for non-profits. Their most important image -- which talked about Blackbaud's new 0% financing and 'how easily you can afford the building blocks of success' -- wasn't visible because they put it in a directory that was blocked by Norton Internet Security's ad-blocking feature."
xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE
Listamatic. "Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list using samples from Eric Meyer, ProjectSeven, SimpleBits, Jeffrey Zeldman and others."
xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE
BBC - Audio Interviews. "Listen to BBC audio interviews with ACTORS, ARCHITECTS, BROADCASTERS, CARTOONISTS, COMPOSERS, DANCERS, FILMMAKERS, MUSICIANS, PAINTERS, PHILOSOPHERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, PLAYWRIGHTS, POETS, POLITICAL ACTIVISTS, RELIGIOUS THINKERS, SCIENTISTS, SCULPTORS, SPORTS FIGURES and WRITERS."
Gawker
New York Magazine Meeting. Yesterday's full-staff meeting of New York sounds to be, with one exception, quite dull: threats of murder in the event...
Gawker
Gawker Stalker. Gawker Stalker sightings are provided by readers. Send yours to
tips@gawker.com. In today's superlative edition: Al Franken, Larry King, Nick...
Gawker
Britney's Tat: Update!. From Aidin Vaziri's interview with Taryn Manning, who appeared with Britney Spears in Crossroads: "Q: When you made the movie...
Gawker
Subject: Sushi Options. New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison evidently makes excellent use of their paralegals. According a memo being...
California Insider
Hasen on 9th Circuit hearing. Rick Hasen, who filed a brief in support of the ACLU position in the punchcard case, offers his analysis here of the 9th Circuit court hearing today. In much greater detail, he echoes the wire service view that the three-judge...
California Insider
Seeds of a deal?. People listening closely to Tom McClintock throughout the campaign know that heâs always implied he believed voters would drop him for Arnold Schwarzenegger on Election Day if they concluded that he had no chance to win. Now heâs made that...
Tomalak's Realm
WIRED:
BigChampagne is Watching You. But even as the industry as a whole litigates, many of the individual labels are quietly reaching out to BigChampagne, turning file-sharing networks into the world's biggest focus group. In the beleaguered music business, this market research strategy that dare not speak its name is fast becoming the Nielsen ratings of the peer-to-peer world.
Economist: World
Indiana politics
Economist: World
Nepal's turmoil
anil dash's daily links
simon's scans of hitler at home. i noticed these when he first put them up, but i wanted to make sure everyone got a glimpse
anil dash's daily links
MS starts to outline Eolas-driven browser changes. looks like plugins might have to be called by DHTML or include a dialog box when starting up
anil dash's daily links
September 11th in a hundred years?. yes, they want to kill us all, but there's never been a time in our country's history when that wasn't true
anil dash's daily links
vh1's awesomely bad dictators. ernie's in top form. all he needs now is some italicized parts in chinese!
anil dash's daily links
nice wapo writeup on biz blogs. i think almost all the ones listed are powered by MT. woo hoo.
anil dash's daily links
movable type in hindi. i don't speak your crazy moon language!
anil dash's daily links
features removed from Dreamweaver 2004. good riddance to all of 'em
anil dash's daily links
more background on Monday's "light cycle". i love fireworks, and i love central park. i can't wait.
jwz
Happy "Reichstag Fire" Day.
Heather McNamara: Veronica, what're you doing tonight?
Veronica Sawyer: I don't know, mourning, maybe watch some TV. Why?
Let us reflect, shall we?
By
jwz@jwz.org.
Morons Dot Org
Random: Say so long to Chong's bongs. Actor/comedian Tommy Chong has been jailed for selling pieces of glass on the Internet.
Morons Dot Org
Random: Stories we missed on Sep. 08, 2003. Here are URLs that were submitted to our queue on Sep. 08, 2003 but didn't make it into actual stories...
MetaFilter
Anti-Religious Discrimination or Seperation of Church and State?. The Bush administration has today
stepped into the Supreme Court[approx equal]¥ús next major church-state case, by siding with
the ACLJ and asking the high court to allow a state merit scholarship to be applied towards a degree in theology at a Christian College. Is this a valid example of the separation of Church and State, or unreasonable anti-religious discrimination? More inside.
MetaFilter
Mid-Autumn Festival.
Tonight, for several Asian cultures, is the
Mid-Autumn Festival. People gather to watch the
full moon, tell
stories, and eat
mooncakes. San Francisco Chinatown is holding its own
Moon Festival as well.
MetaFilter
One Can Dream.
Bush Resignation Hailed by World Leaders
[Washington] The surprise resignation of the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush, on the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on America, was hailed by chiefs of state throughout the world.
MetaFilter
Operation Find Don.
Operation Find Don Operation Find Don. Sars, of
Tomato Nation, is looking for a man that she met near the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, and she's asking her readers for help. All she knows about him is that he lives in Jersey City and that September 11 is his birthday. Can a six degrees of internet separation approach work?
MetaFilter
necial to Nipissing.
New Words! New Words! The OED's quarterly update is up. You can now officially use: 800 number, anime, first person, incentivize, ish, JPEG, Klingon, Kwanzaa and xeriscape, plus a whole mess of words between "necial to Nipissing."
MetaFilter
Television is going to hell in a lavendar handbasket.
A really good reality show for gay people would be five gay men dying of AIDS. Changing the channel has gotten so much easier since the invention of the remote control. Who doesn't love free speech?
MetaFilter
Once more into the....
Fantastic images of a Great White Shark breaching (leaving the surface of the water, like a whale or a dolphin would). Note - they apparently usually exhibit this behavior when they are killing/feeding, so those with delicate sensibilities shouldn't click.
MetaFilter
Blackspotsneaker.
BlackSpotSneaker: Adbusters aims to take on Nike at their own game, by selling unionized, fair wage sneakers with the hopes of gaining marketshare that rival's Nike's multimillion dollar ad machine.
MetaFilter
One Day's Pay.
One Day's Pay is a not-for-profit org that promotes September 11th as a "national day of voluntary service, charity, and compassion."
Why not take a few minutes or a few hours to help those in need? As an extension, we could all blog our efforts and share via trackbacks or links in the comments. In my mind, as good a way as any to commemorate a tragedy.
MetaFilter
Think We Can (French) Kiss and Make Up?.
Think We Can (French) Kiss and Make Up? Two years ago it was "
I'll always love and support you". It only took a little while, though, before the arguments began. But there are always counselors to help you
work on the relationship. There is even
talk of reconciliation. And anyway, this love-hate relationship has been going on for
almost three centuries.
kuro5hin.org
Sweet Surrender. At the center of the universe is a horribly wounded angel. Its wings are torn and blackened, its skin plastered with a dull purple blood that never seems to grow totally dry. It is disfigured, mangled, covered in seared, faintly glowing cracks. The face is fixed in an eternal, unchanging expression of pure, limitless joy. The eyes are empty sockets. The arms are eternally outstretched, because they are tied in place. It is nothing anyone would call conscious, and is only in the barest, barest sense of the word still alive. If anything resembling awareness remains, that awareness consists of nothing but an infinite field of gridded black and white squares, a test pattern scattered with dancing dots that shift and jump and blur into one another. It would be tempting to say this is consciousness, but in fact the angel is not aware of the test pattern. It simply is. This test pattern is useful.
kuro5hin.org
Foreign Minister of Sweden Anna Lindh Stabbed to Death. Anna Lindh, foreign minister of Sweden, was stabbed in the abdomen with a knife in a shopping mall in central Stockholm yesterday afternoon local time (10 September). She passed away in the hospital during the night due to severe internal bleeding. She was one of the most prominent and popular politicians and public characters in Sweden and had strong opinions, for example against the war on Iraq, which she was not afraid to voice. She was only 46 years old, and predestined as successor of G[ring]ran Persson, the leader of the Social Democratic party in Sweden and sitting prime minister.
Sam Ruby
RSS in Depth. Slides for the Seybold Session
Sam Ruby
Picking Wiki Bones. Don Park: Trying to understand the Wiki technology is like dissecting a
Humming Bird: it's difficult to find the meat.Ê In flight, it's
wonderful.Ê Take it apart to see what makes it tick and there is
nothing there, just bits of feathers and bones put together using spider
web and Harpy dust.
Sam Ruby
An editable web. Joe Gregorio: I had never even considered applying the AtomAPI to a
Wiki. Having deltas off a wiki show up in my aggregator, and then being
able to edit that page directly, without having to open the page in my
browser, seems like a killer application of the AtomAPI.
Sam Ruby
Well Formed Comments. My comment system is based on a number of regular expressions which seem
to work tolerably well in most instances when coupled with a preview
function.Ê Unfortunately, the results are not quite as goodÊ
when used in a API context.Ê So, today, I finally did something
about it. ...
Sam Ruby
More noncense. Welcoming back Tim Ewald to the blogosphere with a suggestion of two
bits of low hanging fruit for improving the security of the new
MsComServices. ...
Sam Ruby
Nonce. Nonce is a funny word that plays a serious role in a number of security
implementations. ...
Sam Ruby
MSDN top 10. Phillip Pearson: Having never done anything with SOAP before, I thought
I might as well start here and hack up a Python wrapper for the
service.Ê Presenting: microsoft_com.py. Cool! I took that as a
starting point, focused on a single operation (top 10 popular en-US
downloads) and removed all references to any toolkit or XML
parser.Ê Here's the result. Clearly the bulk of the logic is the
handling of Web Services Security UsernameToken. Extending this to
support other services would not be difficult.
Sam Ruby
AtomDigest via urllib2. Mark and Joe's prototype AtomAPI implementation in Python uses the low
level httplib classes.Ê This means that things like proxy support
needs to be explicitly added. An alternative is to use the higher level
urllib2 classes which not only have proxy support built in but also
Redirect, Basic Authentication, HTTP Digest Authentication, and HTTPS.
Here is AtomDigestAuthHandler as well as a testauth.py program
implemented using urllib2.Ê You can run it for yourself, and see
the output here. Undoubtably, this will reinvigorate the
RestEchoApiPutAndDelete debate.
Sam Ruby
Well Formed Writing. Jon Udell: To ante up for this game, you have to produce well-formed
content. The mainstream blog-writing tools aren't helping at all. Most
well-formed writing is done in emacs, still. Can we please change that
soon? It can be done with SGML.Ê It can be done with regular
expressions.Ê But, in general, I agree.Ê Converging on well
formed XML will encourage spontaneous integration.
Sam Ruby
HTMLifying and unHTMLifying. If you look around, you can find feeds with titles with escaped HTML
markup, and content that is plain text.Ê However, your application
may very well want plain text titles, and HTML content.Ê One of the
basic premises of Atom is that such data will be unambiguously
identified.Ê atomef.py extends lazydom.py with two methods toHtml
and toString to handle such conversions. ...
Sam Ruby
Lazy DOM. Creating XML to Python mappings seems to be quite popular these
days.Ê Here's mine.Ê Expect this to evolve over the next few
days.
Sam Ruby
Now printable. This morning I got a request to make the layout of this page more
suitable for printing.Ê I've gotten the request before, but this
time I finally got a round tuit. ...
Sam Ruby
Wikis, Grafitti, and Process. Clay Shirky: Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I
was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only
ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people.
Update: Ben Hyde has an excellent counter-rant. While I agree with
pretty much everything Ben is saying, I will still tend to be skeptical
when I hear people suggest process solutions to people problems.
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
9.11.03: Rise Above It All. Never Forget....
Orcinus
'Nothing is out of bounds for them'
. Atrios the other day posted on the news that in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, "the burning ruins of the World Trade Center spewed toxic gases 'like a chemical factory' attacks despite government assurances the air was safe," and that these gases i
mamamusings
writer's amnesia. Does anybody else ever have the experience of looking at something they’ve written a few months earlier, and not recognizing it all as their own work? I’m sitting here trying to work on my paper for the AoIR conference, and the obvious starting point is the abstract for the talk. Now, I wrote that abstract. (I even went back and checked my outgoing mail file to be sure. Yep, it’s a verbatim version of the abstract I sent to Alex back in February.) But I’ve read it over about ten times tonight, and I’ll be damned if I can recognize...
mamamusings
accordion guy makes me laugh. Days like today, which are shot all to hell by meetings and administrivia, are when I most need a good laugh. Today’s good laugh was brought to me by Accordion Guy (aka Joey deVilla, who I sure hope will be in Accordion City when I’m there next month for AoIR). He blogged about an accident at Lockheed-Martin involving a satellite. According to the news report, The mishap was caused because 24 bolts were missing from a fixture in the “turn over cart”. Two errors occurred. First, technicians from another satellite program that uses the same type of “turn over cart”...
mamamusings
fall frenzy. This is a crazy quarter in terms of traveling. Normally I don’t travel much, if at all, during the academic year (except during breaks). But this quarter, I have three back-to-back trips in October and November. So today has been travel arrangement day. :P October 16-19 I’ll be at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) annual conference in Toronto, where I’ll be on a blog-related panel that Alex Halavais put together. Minor detail…I need to write the paper. Ack. (It’s based on some earlier work I did related to Usenet, so I’m not at ground zero. But I’m still a...
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
New Loan Rules May Price Out Home Buyers (AP). AP - Manufactured homes are a popular choice for low-income families, but new regulations from mortgage giant Fannie Mae could price some of those would-be homeowners out of the market.
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Microsoft advises users to download patch (USA TODAY). USA TODAY - Shortly before a Microsoft executive told Congress about its computer-security efforts, the software giant Wednesday said it may be vulnerable to a new Internet virus.
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Springsteen Nets $36M in Giants Stadium (AP). AP - It's a big payday for The Boss.
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Gen. Clark Reportedly Is Asked to Join Dean (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has asked retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark to join his campaign, if the former NATO commander does not jump into the race himself next week, and the two men discussed the vice presidency at a weekend meeting in California, sources familiar with the discussions said.
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Barry Column Turns Table on Telemarketers (AP). AP - Telemarketers are now screening their calls, instead of the other way around.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Clark Set to Enter 2004 Presidential Race (AP). AP - Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark has told friends he is likely to become the 10th Democratic presidential candidate, a move that could shake up the crowded field just four months before the first ballots are cast.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Deutsche Bank Sues NY for Sept. 11 Damage (Reuters). Reuters - Deutsche Bank AG(DBKGn.DE) is seeking
to hold New York State liable for more than $500 million due to
property damage done to its building following the Sept. 11
attacks on the World Trade Center.
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Dumb and Dumber: Robbers Foil Themselves (AP). AP - Two would-be robbers left an Indiana convenience store empty-handed after getting into an argument about the contents of a note they handed to the clerk.
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Man Must Share Pension with Ex-Wife's Husband (Reuters). Reuters - A German court has told a man that the
pension he used to share with his ex-wife must now be shared
with her widowed husband, authorities said on Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Insurers Sue Terror Groups for 9/11 (AP). AP - Besieged by claims resulting from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, dozens of insurance companies filed lawsuits Wednesday seeking $300 billion in damages from terrorist groups and companies and countries accused of supporting terrorism.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
A Bad Trip for Tommy Chong: Nine Months in Jail (Reuters). Reuters - Actor Tommy Chong of the spaced-out,
dope-smoking comedy duo "Cheech & Chong" was sentenced to nine
months in prison and fined $20,000 on Thursday for distributing
marijuana pipes over the Internet.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Jobs, Tourists and Nail-Biters: Taking the City's Pulse After 9/11 (The New York Times). The New York Times - A statistical snapshot of the city two years after the World Trade Center attack produces many grim numbers and some hopeful ones.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Berlusconi Backs Off Mussolini Quote (AP). AP - Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was quoted Thursday as saying that Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini never killed anyone and only sent people away on vacations in internal exile, a claim that distressed Jewish leaders.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
America Reflects on 9-11, Two Years Later (AP). AP - Two by two they stepped forward at ground zero Thursday, the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, grandsons and granddaughters of the Sept. 11 victims, mournfully reciting the 2,792 names of the World Trade Center dead.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Powerful Hurricane Isabel Intensifies in Atlantic (Reuters). Reuters - Hurricane Isabel grew into a monster
storm with 160-mph winds on Thursday as it moved across the
Atlantic Ocean on a path that was expected to take it well
north of the Caribbean islands.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
30-, 15-Yr Mortgage Rates Drop (Reuters). Reuters - Average interest rates on U.S. 30-
and 15-year fixed-rate mortgages plunged this week after
reaching their highest levels in more than a year last week
following a report that showed little improvement in the labor
market, Freddie Mac said on Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
UK Al Qaeda Sympathizers Cancel Pro-9/11 Events (Reuters). Reuters - A radical British Muslim group which had
planned to call four meetings across Britain to praise the
"magnificent 19" September 11 hijackers, was forced to cancel
the events on Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Study Shows the Pill Can Relieve Endometriosis (Reuters). Reuters - Women with endometriosis can relieve
their pain and bleeding by using birth control pills
continuously, researchers said on Thursday.
The Motley Fool
Harrah's Gains, Gamers Lose. Horseshoes acquisition is good business for Harrah's.
The Motley Fool
Foolish Collective. A quick and dirty discounted cash flow tool.
The Motley Fool
Krispy Kreme Goes to Wal-Mart. Plus, higher rates hit Home Depot, and flying Southwest.
The Motley Fool
Privacy vs. Access. The good, bad and ugly of the House's amended Fair Credit Reporting Act.
The Motley Fool
Staying With Quiksilver. Speedy revenue and net profit growth keep the apparel company outperforming the S&P 500.
The Motley Fool
Showin' Enron the Slammer. Opening a new chapter in Enron, the first company executive is sentenced.
The Motley Fool
Don't Blame China. The real threat to American jobs isn't the trade deficit with China, but anti-free trade policies.
The Motley Fool
The Whys and Hows of Saving. Saving is critical, so learn why and how to do it.
The Motley Fool
Krispy Kreme Goes to Wal-Mart. Starting next month, the company will test five locations inside Wal-Mart stores.
The Motley Fool
Tribune's Safer "Sex". Are Tribune's "Sex and the City" rerun rights worth getting excited about?
Fanatical Apathy
Nine Eleven
California Insider
Wait til Arnie's auditor sees this one. The state has reached agreements with most of its public employee unions on the salary concessions that are supposed to save taxpayers money. But what they really are planning to do is put 5 percent of the workers' pay on...
California Insider
Davis apologizes for slur. The governor apologizes for his remark that you "shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state." But he doesn't apologize to Schwarzenegger, and he demands that Schwarzenegger apologize for supporting a 1994 ballot measure also backed...
MetaFilter
Scorecard of Evil.
Scorecard of Evil "Two years into President Bush's term, the damage he has done to the nation and the world is incalculable. On issue after issue, Bush does what's good for big corporations and right-wing extremists at the expense of the public. The Wage Slave Journal offers this scorecard to help you keep track of all of the evil deeds Bush commits and, more important, to provide a record for your perusal when November 2004 rolls around."
MetaFilter
The Little Almost People - Bacteria. Ahhh bacteria, our little friends, what can't they do?
Fight Off AIDS Virus in Women?
Check. light up our world?
Check. Wipe out all the little fishies in the sea?
Check. Eat our flesh?
Check. Change out CDs?
Check.
Heck, they may even
work together better than us so it's important you
Know your good and bad bugs, or just
Learn more. The cute little buggers even have their own
Museum.
MetaFilter
But where are the Frenchmen?.
They come in quest of the Grail. Some people believe the Holy Grail is hidden someplace in or beneath this small fifteenth-century chapel near Edinburgh. Or maybe it contains other knowledge and relics acquired by the
Knights Templar in Jerusalem. Or perhaps . . . well, there's not much that someone at some time has not believed about
Rosslyn Chapel.
MetaFilter
Heraclitus the Obscure - Now Without Flash Animation!!!.
Heraclitus of
Ephesus, sometimes called
Heraclitus the Obscure: We only know him through 100 gnomic quotes and aphorisms
--I loves me some gnomic aphorisms!--all direct from or inferred in the comments of various authors of Classical literature, of which
no one steps into the same river twice is the best known.
Mark Cohen,
J. H. Lesher and
Cynthia Freeman provide excellent introductions.
John Burnett's 1920 translation is another academic standard. Jonathan Barnes. whose Penguin Classic
The Early Greek Philosophers has the best contemporary translation, wrote
Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour. Here are the jampots of
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Bertrand Russell and
Martin Heidegger. And here, in passing, is a taste of the jampot of
Jorge Luis Borges. Heraclitus coined the word
enantiodromia.
John William Corrington's
Logos, Lex, And Law is also of interest. Heraclitus figures strongly in the
Archetypal Psychology of Carl Jung and
James Hillman, the latter especially in his discussion of the
Soul.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Swedish Foreign Minister Dies of Injuries (AP). AP - Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, touted as a future prime minister, died Thursday from multiple stab wounds, the second Swedish politician to be murdered in the Scandinavian country in 17 years in a rare act of public violence.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Lawyer to Sue Jews for Biblical 'Plunder' (Reuters). Reuters - An Egyptian lawyer said Wednesday he was
planning to sue the world's Jews for "plundering" gold during
the Exodus from Pharaonic Egypt thousands of years ago, based
on information in the Bible.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Foreign Views of U.S. Darken Since Sept. 11 (The New York Times). The New York Times - The war in Iraq has led to a vision of America as an imperial power that has defied world opinion through unilateral use of military force.
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Eat more dogs, Cambodians urged (Reuters). Reuters - Cambodians are being urged to eat more dogs as part of a crackdown on stray mutts wandering around the
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more dogs as part of a crackdown on stray mutts wandering
around the capital of the southeast Asian nation.
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Solemn Ceremonies Mark 9/11 Attacks (AP). AP - The voices of children marked the profound horror and grief of Sept. 11, joining in song at ground zero Thursday and reading the names of 2,792 loved ones who died there exactly two years ago.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Report: Dean Asks Wesley Clark to Join Campaign (Reuters). Reuters - Democratic presidential candidate
Howard Dean has asked former NATO commander Wesley Clark to
join his campaign if Clark does not run himself and the two
have discussed the vice presidency, The Washington Post
reported on Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
ABC Reaches Deal on Sept. 11 Footage (AP). AP - ABC News said Wednesday it had acquired the only known video footage of both planes hitting the World Trade Center, and expects to begin airing it on the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
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Times of Sept. 11 Attack, WTC Collapse (AP). AP - The beginning of the end of the World Trade Center was at 8:46.26 a.m., when hijacked American Airlines flight 11 smashed into the north face of the 110-story north tower.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Swedish Foreign Minister Dies After Stabbing (Reuters). Reuters - Sweden's Foreign Minister
Anna Lindh died Thursday after being stabbed by a mystery
attacker, but her government declared her killing would not
prevent a euro referendum from going ahead Sunday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
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Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Computer with 3-D Display Planned by Japan's Sharp (Reuters). Reuters - Notebook computers that show images in
3-D will be put on sale in Japan and the United States next
month by Sharp Corp. (6753.T), the company said Thursday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Virus Writers Mark Sept 11 with New Batch of Bugs (Reuters). Reuters - Internet virus writers marked the
two-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks in their own
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Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Weight Gain from Antipsychotic Drugs Is Reversible (Reuters). Reuters - A common side effect of many
antipsychotic medications is increased appetite and weight
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patients. And even if they do gain weight, they can shed the
extra pounds with diet and exercise, or even by switching
medication.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Huge Climate Experiment Starts Friday - All Welcome (Reuters). Reuters - A climate prediction
experiment which is expected to involve two million people
around the world and produce a probable forecast for the 21st
century will be launched on Friday.
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Stone Age Settlements Found Underwater in Britain (Reuters). Reuters - Archaeologists have stumbled across the
first underwater evidence of Stone Age settlements in Britain.
Dan Gillmor's eJournal
Memories of Sept. 11, 2001. We were in a car heading back toward Port Elizabeth, South Africa, several hours ago, when we came upon a...
Dan Gillmor's eJournal
Highway Africa's Real-Time Newsroom. Rhodes University, site of the Highway Africa conference, boasts South Africa's best-regarded journalism department, by all accounts. For evidence, check...
How to Save the World
HOW MUCH IS YOUR BUSINESS WORTH?: A PRIMER ON BUSINESS VALUATION.
Disclaimer:
This article simplifies the method used by business valuators to
determine what value a business might command in the market. It is not
in any way a substitute for a professional valuation, and the author is
not a professional business valuator. It is for reader interest only,
to inform you about some of the factors and methods used in business
valuation.
 The
value of any business, just like the value of your house, is the
highest amount that an informed buyer would be willing to pay for it.
The marketplace is the final arbiter of value. Nevertheless, there are
some rules of thumb that can be used to make an educated guess what a
buyer might be prepared to pay.
The traditional rule of thumb is that a business is worth the Present
Value of its expected future net cash flows (i.e. cash taken in less
cash paid out). The discount rate used to compute the Present Value
should reflect the risk (uncertainty) of realization of those cash
flows -- the higher the uncertainty, the higher the discount rate and
hence the lower the business value. This assumes that the business is a
'going concern', i.e. that it makes sense to continue to operate it to
realize those future cash flows. If this computed value is less than
the liquidation value of the business (the realizable value of the
assets less liabilities if everything was sold as-is today) then the
business is worth its liquidation value instead (and consideration
should be given to winding it up).
Here's a step-by-step method for computing an approximate 'going concern' value:
- Separate the assets and liabilities of the business into operating assets and liabilities, real estate assets and liabilities, and investment assets and liabilities (those not essential to the operations of the business).
- Calculate
the normalized annual cash flow of the business. To do this, start with
the average annual pre-tax operating income (exclude income and
expenses related to investment assets and liabilities)
over several recent and projected fiscal years. Add back to this any
expenses that don't involve cash: depreciation and amortization,
discretionary management bonuses (beyond what a professional business
manager would be paid to run the business), and non-recurring expenses.
Subtract any non-recurring income and the average annual capital
expenditures needed to keep the capital assets of the business in good
operating condition. The result is the Normal Pre-tax Cash Flow.
- Next calculate the amount of unutilized financing available
to the company. A common rule of thumb is that lenders will lend up to
50% of the realizable value of equipment, 60% of the realizable value
of working capital (receivables plus inventory less trade payables),
and 75% of the realizable value of real estate assets. From the sum of
these three calculations, subtract current debt on these assets (bank
loans, mortgages, lines of credit etc.) The result is the Unutilized
Financing. Now multiply the Unutilized Financing by the company's
current borrowing rate (ask the bank for current rates on these types
of loans) to compute the Interest on Unutilized Financing.
- Now determine an appropriate Capitalization Rate (the
inverse of the discount rate used to calculate the Present Value). For
private companies this rate will usually be between 1 and 8 while for
public companies (with greater liquidity and access to capital) this
rate will usually be between 1 and 12. Some factors to consider in
determining what rate in this wide range to use include: stability of past
earnings, intensity of competition, barriers to new companies entering
this market, business reputation, reliance of the business on existing
management, key personnel and key customers, stability of supplies used
in operations, financial strength of customers, business growth
potential, business liquidity, profit margins and turnover (how quickly
inventory is sold and replenished). Adjust the capitalization rate for
tax by multiplying by (1 minus the current effective tax rate). It's
usually advisable to determine a minimum and maximum Tax-Adjusted
Capitalization Rate, since this is so subjective.
- Next, take the Normal Pre-tax Cash Flow from step 2,
subtract the Interest on Unutilized Financing from step 3, and multiply
the result by the Tax-Adjusted Capitalization Rates from step 4. Then
add the Unutilized Financing from step 3, and add the fair market value of
the net real estate and net investment assets from step 1.
|
Let's look at an example. Suppose your business has $100,000 of net
operating assets (cash, receivables, inventory, equipment, less trade
payables and operating loans), and $150,000 of (net of mortgages) real
estate assets, and $50,000 of (net of investment loans) investment
assets (at current realizable value after any taxes). Suppose that, averaging the last
three years' actual income and the next two years' forecast income, and
adding back each year's depreciation expense, you compute Normal
Pre-Tax Cash Flow to be $200,000. And suppose you could theoretically
borrow an additional $100,000 on your real estate assets at 10%
interest. And let's say your business is computer animation, which is fast-growing
but very competitive, so you determine an appropriate pre-tax
Capitalization Rate range to be 4 to 6 times (i.e. discount rate of
17-25%), and Tax-Adjusted Capitalization Rate range to be 3 to 4.5
times. In other words, the business risk is such that if it were you
investing in it, you'd want to earn a 17-25% pre-tax return on that
investment (average per year over time) -- a high rate, but in the zone
any 'venture capitalist' would expect.
Applying the calculations above, $200,000 Normal Pre-Tax Cash Flow
minus $10,000 Interest on Unutilized Financing, times 3 (minimum) or
4.5 (maximum), plus $100,000 Unutilized Financing, plus $150,000 Real
Estate value, plus $50,000 Investment value, equals $870,000 (minimum)
to $1,155,000 (maximum) total theoretical value of the business. |
Professional business appraisers have developed sophisticated methods
of determining appropriate capitalization rates based on analysis of
recent comparable business sales. Also, some assets have additional
value (or in some cases diminished value) depending on the tax
treatment they will receive in the hands of the buyer, or when
ownership is transferred. In addition, the tax and accounting treatment
is different depending on whether it is the business entity's shares,
or the assets and liabilities, that are sold, and this also affects the
business' value.
If you're interested in learning more about business valuation, here's
a Powerpoint presentation that shows many of the techniques that
business appraisers use, and much more detailed valuation formulae. But
remember, these calculations are the theoretical value
only. The computations are only as good as the quality and validity of
the underlying assumptions and forecasts. And the market often behaves
in unexpected ways, ascribing value because, for example, the purchase
offers synergies or sentimental appeal to the buyer. In addition, buyers sometimes ascribe too
high or too low a capitalization rate because of inaccurate perceptions
of the risk or growth potential of the business.
And sometimes the real value of the business is in its key management
members and employees, who, if they're not motivated to stay with the
new owners, can severely reduce or even eliminate the business' value
to a purchaser. That's why few owner-managed businesses command the
market price their owners expect. A surprising proportion of all
mergers and acquisitions fail to add as much value to the buyer as
expected.
I'd like to see a Monopoly-type game that used these theoretical
valuation calculations to set and constantly adjust prices for each
property on the board, and allowed players to buy and sell any
property, with some serendipitous variation in the calculations built
in to make the game interesting and life-like. It would be a great
educational tool that, if it also included a simulation of business
operations, could help provide our young people with some valuable
entrepreneurial skills and insights. Anyone for Sim-Biz?
|
Morons Dot Org
Morons in the News: Fundies against California's SB71 Proposal. The Campaign for California Families (CCF) is trying to get Gov. Davis to veto SB71, which promotes "The Homosexual Agenda"
Morons Dot Org
Random: No WTC News Here Today. If you want to wallow in agony, watch network TV. I you want to avoid it, stay here.
Morons Dot Org
Random: Howard Stern officially Declared "News". Howard Stern's morning radio talk-show has been declared by the FCC to be a "bona fide news interview" program.
John Robb's Weblog
The 2003
Singularity conference is starts tomorrow in Palo Alto. An excellent
schedule. Nice
list of sponsors. Great job.
John Robb's Weblog
Question: Was the election of George Bush (Jr.) the trigger for 9/11? It's interesting to think this through.
John Robb's Weblog
Here's an example of how weblogs can have influence on corporations.
Plaxo is a start-up with substantial
investment capital. A quick look at
Google shows how weblogs are influencing the information flow on the product they sell (both
pro and
con reviews). What is the value of a highly ranked review on a product keyword in Google? A couple years ago, I was talking to PR insiders (off the record) and the consensus estimate was that a positive product mention in the WSJ or NYT would cost $100,000 (what is
worth depends on how well the company can monetize it). Positive mentions in other publications scale down from that. What is the third and fourth link on a product name in Google worth using this benchmark? Given that it has a high level of persistance (and that people often use Google as a means to find the company/product site), it could easily be worth $40-$50 k. Given that, why aren't PR agencies all over webloggers that do product reviews to ensure that the reviewer gets all the relevant information needed to make an objective review? I guess they are too busy sending out press releases that nobody reads.
Gawker
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Gossip Roundup. á Uma's giant brothers to kick Cheatin' Ethan's ass. Fight proposed for 3:30 p.m., after 8th period, behind the cafeteria....
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Bonnie Goes It Alone. New highly-paid Star editor Bonnie Fuller (who, we hear, really impressed her new staff when speaking of her great affection...
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Porn's Back!. Lushy clothes-shedding celebutante Tara Reid is undoubtedly pole-dancing with joy today. In the first good thing to happen to New...
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Greedy Dick Grasso. Greedy Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso, Wall Street's own little Veruca Salt, finally gave up on getting $48 million in...
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Post Takes Down News. We expected more competition between the tabloids today. But as you can see, the Daily News just rolled over and...
The Motley Fool
10 Top Winners Since 9/11. Tom Jacobs finds some surprises amidst market's biggest gainers since 9/11.
The Motley Fool
You Like Pop-Ups. Judge errs in clearing the way for even more pop-up advertising.
The Motley Fool
Google's Big Day. Here's to five great years of Googling.
The Motley Fool
Adobe Is Brick Solid. ePaper profits help drive a solid quarter.
The Motley Fool
Rising Rates Sink Home Depot. Rising interest rates are to blame for Home Depot stock's recent stumble.
The Motley Fool
Remembering 9/11. On the anniversary of the terrorist attacks two years ago, Jeff Fischer reflects on what's important.
The Motley Fool
Southwest Up in the Air. Will profitability be hurt by unions or smaller planes?
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
Moment of silence
kuro5hin.org
Personal Meditations on September 11th, 2 years Later. I grew up during the relative quiet of the Cold War. I always wondered what it would be like to live during a trying and dramatic moment in history, such as during World War I or World War II, or during the Civil War in the United States. I don't wonder anymore. And that isn't a good thing.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Plugged In: Making a Video Screen Out of Thin Air (Reuters). Reuters - In a museum in Tampere, Finland,
Ismo Rakkolainen's fog machine conjures up the Mona Lisa on an
invisible sheet of water particles.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Naked Male Statue Stirs Jamaican Art Debate (Reuters). Reuters - A sculpture meant to
celebrate emancipation has sparked heated debate in Jamaica's
capital over its frank portrayal of a naked male slave.
MetaFilter
It's getting hot in here.....
Greenpeace obtains smoking-gun memo: White House/Exxon link Did conservative elements in the White House provoke an Exxon front group to sue EPA to suppress a report on climate change? That's the question that two State Attorney Generals have asked US Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate, after Greenpeace uncovered
a routine email in a Freedom of Information Act request.
California Insider
Clinton to pray for Davis. The ex-president will begin a campaign swing for Davis at a south Los Angeles church. It's not clear if he will stump for the gov beyond Sunday. Here's an AP story....
California Insider
GOP lawmakers seek to invalidate drivers license. Thirty-eight Republican members of the California Legislature have signed a letter asking United States Attorney General John Ashcroft to invalidate the California driverâs license as ãa reliable and acceptableä form of identification and documentation. The letter comes as Republicans seek...
California Insider
Arnold's eco-adviser. Arnold is beginning to learn how difficult it might be to govern California, a centrist state, from the center. One day after being hammered from the left on his environmental credentials, Schwarzenegger is being hit from the right on the...
California Insider
The Tom and Arnold Show. With Peter Ueberroth out of the race, all Republican eyes now turn toward State. Sen. Tom McClintock, and the effort by some party leaders and the Schwarzenegger campaign to get him to withdraw. The problem for Schwarzenegger is that while...
California Insider
Voter reg and the recall. Voter registration numbers released recently by the Secretary of State were a bit muddled because they included the regular purge of voters who have died or otherwise moved on since last year, making it difficult to discern what effect, if...
California Insider
Last-minute education bills. With a flood of legislation headed to the governorâs desk at the close of the legislative session, among the bills still pending are three education-related measures amended at the last minute to dramatically change their content. They are: AB 163...
Salon.com
"I know God will hate me for this, but God is unfair". On May 18, 21-year-old Rasheed Sahib, a U.S. G.I. and a Muslim, was fatally shot in the chest by a member of his unit in Iraq. The army says it was an accident. His family isn't so sure.
Salon.com
PATRIOT missile. Attorney General John Ashcroft takes his weird "we must save the USA PATRIOT Act" roadshow to New York. He's finding it a much tougher sell now than it was six weeks after 9/11.
Salon.com
The K Chronicles By Keith Knight. My wife has been beating me ...
Salon.com
Right Hook. Bill Kristol applauds President Bush for "dropping the pretense" that everything's under control; Andrew Sullivan says that more terrorist violence in Iraq might not be a bad thing. Plus: Cato's Stephen Moore says Howard Dean is tougher than the GOP thinks.
Salon.com
Bush's big lies, continued. In claiming that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, Bush is heralding a self-fulfilling prophecy: He claimed Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism, and he turned it into one.
Salon.com
"Star Trek's" new moral frontier. UPN's "Enterprise," back for its third season, has saved the Trek franchise with messy, moving and ambiguous story lines torn from the 21st century.
Salon.com
King Kaufman's Sports Daily. Ohio State appears ready to rid itself of Maurice Clarett, which would give him something few big-time college athletes have: Options.
Salon.com
Not just another "nerdy white guy". At the memorial service for Anita Borg, her colleagues and friends vow to continue her life's work, carving out room for women in the world of computer science.
Salon.com
Cracks in the base. As Lieberman smacks Dean on Israel and Sharpton says Democrats neglect blacks, the party could wind up squabbling over how to maintain its dominance with Jews and African-Americans.
Salon.com
She wants to start over. Now that I have a girlfriend, my ex-wife wants to get back together!
Salon.com
Mixed signals. "If you lay a hand on me," she said,"I'll break every bone in it." Then she told me to lick the tuna fish off her finger.
Salon.com
Joe Conason's Journal. I respect Spinsanity enough to praise and cite it in "Big Lies." But this time they stretched to find enough "mistakes" in my book to cobble together an article.
anil dash's daily links
NY Times on CA campaign blogs. covers Huffington and Gruener's TypePad weblogs. cool.
anil dash's daily links
bizarre boingboing wrapup on the gawker intrigue. i've been fending off offers for my daily links all day
Orcinus
This smear must stop
. It's time for Glenn Reynolds to explain himself.
Today, the renowned Instapundit continues to repeat the charge that MEChA is a racist organization by comparing it to Jim Crow:
But the fight against racial prejudice at the highest levels of the Democr
Orcinus
The Brown Peril: Origins
. Robert Cruickshank, a fellow Seattleite, writes in about the Mecha controversy:
It is primarily a right-wing attempt to smear a Latino candidate by raising a meme that is very closely related to the "They Keep Coming" tradition of GOP attacks on Latinos
Art of the Possible
Test of my dad's account. OK, if this works, it will appear to have been posted by my Dad. Word: this message will self-destruct. No warranties implied or cetera....
Sam Ruby
Moscone Bomb Threat. SFGate: Thousands of people were evacuated from San Francisco's Moscone
Center on Wednesday, during Oracle and Seybold conventions, after
someone threatened to blow up the building. No bomb was found. The
person, who authorities believe has made similar threats in the past,
contacted the convention center about 1:20 p.m. saying a bomb had been
hidden "in a dark place" and was due to go off in an hour. OK, so why
were we asked to leave at 3 p.m.?
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
Sacrifice? What's That?. There was a Democratic proposal to repeal the tax cut for just the top 1% (aka "the ultra rich who owe some of their success to the collective security and health of the United States") in this country to help...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
The Little GOPer Does It Again. Britney's nude for Rolling Stone Oh my. (nsfw)...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
Alt Media. This article about P2P rating service BigChampagne is quite interesting, though for me I'm looking at it from less of a music industry perspective and more of an overall entertainment thing. It would be great if someone could release animation...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
The Pre-Dubya Dubya. There's four years we'll never get back. Senate unveils bust of Quayle Quayle's white marble bust will stand alongside history's other vice presidents around the Senate chamber. It is to be placed next to the bust of the elder Bush,...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
Why Does This Man Still Have A Job?. More dumb statements from Rumsfeld. Jesus. More Troops Will Destabilize Iraq, Says Rumsfeld "I don't believe it's our job to reconstruct the country," said Mr. Rumsfeld, who just returned from a six-day trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. "The Iraqi people...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
The Tipping Point?. It's been interesting in the past that just when Bush seems vulnerable, he works in concert with Rove to present a speech and the administration and their wonks "flood the zone" in order to steer perception into their favor. I...
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
Rummy Pack Your Bags. A protestor disrupted The Arrogant One's speech today, no doubt he would advocate such dissent to just go away....
Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid
The "Standing On Corpses" Presidency. Once again, Bush uses 9.11 as a political tool to pass the very un-American Patriot Act II. "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" I guess not. America has gone...
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Microsoft Warns of New Critical Hole in Windows (Reuters). Reuters - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) on
Wednesday warned computer users about a new critical security
hole in its Windows operating system that could allow an
attacker to gain control over a computer, delete data and
install unwanted programs.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Microsoft Admits New Windows Problem (AP). AP - Moments before a top Microsoft executive told Congress about efforts to improve security, the company warned on Wednesday of new flaws that leave its flagship Windows software vulnerable to Internet attacks similar to the Blaster virus that infected hundreds of millions of computers last month.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Couple Drives From Argentina to Alaska (AP). AP - After a 40,000-mile drive from Argentina to Alaska, a couple's dream to reach the Arctic Ocean in their antique car stalled with their goal in sight: The oil fields separating them from the ocean had closed to visitors for the season.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
US Revising Food Pyramid to Slim Waists (Reuters). Reuters - The U.S. government on Wednesday
moved forward with its plan to refashion its well-known Food
Guide Pyramid to help pear-shaped Americans eat less and
exercise more.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Bin Laden's Whereabouts Sought in New Tape (AP). AP - Intelligence analysts were looking for clues to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts in a new videotape that shows him in Afghan garb, walking past wildflowers and tufts of green grass on a rocky mountainside.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Only 42 'Missing' From WTC Attack on 9-11 (AP). AP - Among the 2,792 names on the official World Trade Center death toll are 42 people actually listed as missing ÷ not dead ÷ because their remains have not been identified and their whereabouts on Sept. 11 cannot be established with certainty.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Bush Marking 'Sad' Sept. 11 Anniversary (AP). AP - Marking what he called simply a "sad anniversary," President Bush intends a deliberately low-key Sept. 11 of sober, quiet remembrances.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Chile Honors Allende on Pinochet Coup Eve (AP). AP - Salvador Allende, the Chilean Marxist president deposed in a coup, was honored Wednesday in a ceremony at the palace were his life ended 30 years ago.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
S. Korean Man Kills Himself at WTO Protests (Reuters). Reuters - A South Korean activist stabbed
himself and died on Wednesday in violent anti-capitalism
protests at a World Trade Organization meeting in Mexico's
Caribbean beach resort of Cancun.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Nation Readies to Honor 9/11's Victims (AP). AP - The thousands killed on Sept. 11 will be honored where they died and across the nation on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks Thursday, with cities falling silent, names read aloud, wreaths laid and bells tolling for the dead.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Math Trouble Linked to Brain Coding System (Reuters). Reuters - If you're bad at math, it
may be because you have an abnormal brain.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Dental Research Reopens Debate Over Black Death (Reuters). Reuters - More then 650 years after it wiped out
half of Europe, scientists have reopened debate about what
caused the Black Death.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Panda in China Sets Fertility Record (AP). AP - A 19-year-old panda has given birth to her 13th cub at a breeding center in China's southwest, setting a new record for fertility among the rare animals, the official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Ben and J.Lo a No-Go! (E! Online). E! Online - Matt
Damon, Bruce
Willis and Jennifer
Lopez's "decoy brides" need new weekend plans.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Bin Laden: Make Iraq a Graveyard for U.S. (Reuters). Reuters - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden made a
surprise appearance in a videotape aired on Wednesday to mark
the Sept. 11 attacks, along with his top aide who urged
fighters to turn Iraq into a graveyard for American troops.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Official List of 9-11 WTC Victims (AP). AP - Here is the official list of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. The list was compiled by the city of New York.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
U.S. Muslims Work Past Shock of Attacks (AP). AP - Within hours of the 2001 terror attacks, the windows at the Masjid Bilal mosque were smashed, and someone had left a message on the answering machine threatening to burn it down.
Yahoo! News - Most Emailed
Man Who Lived in Arizona Cave Expelled (AP). AP - A man was evicted from a cave he had lived in for 11 years after pleading guilty to using a national forest for residential purposes.
New York Times: International News
Bin Laden Is Seen With Aide on Tape
RSSlet
September 11th, 2003 -- 1:08 AM EDT.
(September 11th, 2003 -- 1:08 AM EDT // link)
Two years ago today I rolled out of bed in the morning, still semi-conscious and half asleep. As I walked into my living room --- the TV was still on from the night before --- I saw the second plane slam into the World Trade Center and explode in an orange and black fireball.
I'll never know whether that was a live shot or a replay of the images from a few minutes before. It was just after nine. Still groggy, I had a hard time processing what I had seen. I knew it was a big deal. But I didn't at first grasp just how big a deal.
When I sat down at my desk my girlfriend was already typing out messages on IM from her office at work. Had I seen? Where was I? They (she worked on Capitol Hill) were next, she said.
Beside watching the plane crash into the building, what stands out in my mind about those few minutes was that I asked her why she was so sure it was terrorism.
Partly --- mainly, I think --- this was because I was still only half awake and still trying to process what I had seen. I'm not sure in those first moments I was quite clear on how large the planes were. But certainly part of what was happening was that I was still for a moment living in a pre 9/11 world, where something like this was still hard to comprehend, hard to imagine.
Then she said something like: Two planes one after another in to both buildings? What do you think it is?
With that, suddenly everything snapped into place. The sleep fell from my eyes. My mind cleared. Everything was obvious.
A few moments letter she typed out a quick message: they were evacuating.
This weekend I watched a CNN documentary about September 11th. 'Documentary' is probably too grandiose a term. But the images and recollections still cut into me. Perhaps more than I'd expected, perhaps because it had been some time since I had seen some of these pictures.
There was one set of images that got to me most, ones I didn't remember seeing before. As we all have, I'd seen many times the crushing images of bodies falling the hundreds of feet from the upper floors of the towers. But I hadn't seen or didn't remember the close-ups, the zoom-ins of people on the upper floors leaning out the windows and waiving shirts or clothes into the air, trying to grab the attention of helicopters circling nearby, hoping for help.
To me these sorts of images are worse than all the rest, the bodies falling, all of them. There is something unbearable about seeing people clinging to hope when, you know, there is no hope. Their fate is sealed; they just didn't know it yet. Those were the pictures that even today made me grit my teeth and twist up my face.
Watching brought me back to the newness and rawness of those first hours and days. I recalled the images of the president getting the first word from Andy Card about the attacks, the later ones of his touring ground-zero and talking to the assembled search and rescue crews. I found him an inspiring leader in those moments. And not simply because it was such a traumatic event. I never thought much of the criticism that President Bush didn't get back to Washington till late that evening. I thought he served admirably in those first days.
As the documentary moved toward the aftermath, I wondered whether those thoughts of mine would seep into the present to color what's happening today.
They didn't.
What I felt wasn't continuity but the jarring contrast, the cheap, obvious lies, the hubris, the tough-talk for low ends, not so much the mistakes as the tawdriness of so much of what's happened, especially over the last eighteen months. Fred Kaplan has an excellent piece in Slate this week about the missed opportunity of September 12th. "By the summer of 2003," writes Kaplan, "it could fairly be said that most of the world hated the United States, or at least feared the current U.S. government." That sounds like such an extreme, over-the-top statement. "Hate" is a pretty subjective word. But it's hard to read the papers regularly and not realize that what Kaplan says is true. It's sickening.
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 10th, 2003 -- 11:41 PM EDT.
(September 10th, 2003 -- 11:41 PM EDT // link)
Up-is-downism from Michael Ledeen on CNN ...
Lou Dobbs: Have we really seen a significant change in the way in which our allies deal with us over the course of the past two years? ...
Michael Ledeen: No. I think, basically, that France and Germany have alienated the rest of Europe. They're the ones who have been more unilateral than anybody else. And the French invaded the Ivory Coast, never once went to the Security Council, never once even went to the European Council. And nobody said boo. So what we're seeing here is just the usual ebb and flow of political concerns, varying from one government to another. The anti-Americanism of today is nothing compared to anti- Americanism back in the 1970s during Vietnam or even in the 1980s, towards the end of the Cold War.
...
Lou Dobbs: This administration has apparently chosen to acknowledge some humbleness, some humility by going back to the United Nations. Are you both in any way assured by this new direct, by this administration on the issue of at least Iraq -- Clyde.
Clyde Prestowitz: Yes, I think it's a positive step. I think he did the right thing. But again, in a kind of churlish manner, it was kind of OK, I know you didn't agree with us, but we're in trouble and send soldiers and send money, But we're not going to give up any control. I think it's important that we go to the u.n. I think we have to be prepared to share some of the power, some of the decision making.
Lou Dobbs: Clyde, we have to turn quickly. We're running out of time. I have to turn to Michael Ledeen. Last word, Michael.
Michael Ledeen: We're not in trouble. We're doing fine. And we will do better yet. What we're doing is providing a fig leaf to countries who want to join with us and want to participate in Iraq, but for one reason or another, feel they need some kind of blessing from the United Nations before they do it.
A fig leaf.
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 10th, 2003 -- 10:19 PM EDT.
(September 10th, 2003 -- 10:19 PM EDT // link)
Department of Homeland Security.
36 billion dollars ...
Current Projected Cost of War-fighting and Reconstruction in Iraq.
241 billion dollars ...
Having a president who's got a friggin' clue.
Priceless ...
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 10th, 2003 -- 9:24 PM EDT.
(September 10th, 2003 -- 9:24 PM EDT // link)
Here are the results of a comprehensive poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland. They're bad news for the White House.
A summary of the findings in the Financial Times includes ...
SIXTY-FOUR PERCENT of respondents said that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East increased the likelihood of terrorism, 77 percent thought there were widespread negative feelings towards the U.S. in the Islamic world that enhanced terrorist recruiting, and 54 per cent thought the US had been too assertive in its foreign policies. In addition, 81 percent thought a key lesson of September 11 was that the U.S. needed to work more closely with other countries to fight terrorism, up from 61 percent in a similar poll more than a year ago.
The poll was conducted between August 26th and September 3rd. And it's only fair to say that that was one of the worst foreign policy weeks this White House has ever had.
But these numbers do show that the White House has serious vulnerabilities on foreign policy and national security issues. The 2004 election could well turn on whether the Democrats will nominate a candidate who has sufficient credibility on national security issues to exploit those vulnerabilities.
-- Josh Marshall
RSSlet
September 10th, 2003 -- 8:59 PM EDT.
(September 10th, 2003 -- 8:59 PM EDT // link)
Today when taking questions about Iraq, President Bush said, "I will once again make that plea" for money and troops from other countries.
I guarantee you that the president's handlers in the room gritted their teeth or drew blood from their lower lips when they heard the P-word come out of the president's mouth.
Just for starters, what would the Standard and the National Review have said if Bill Clinton had used that word in the context of seeking help from other countries?
(Actually, scratch that: What will the Standard say? They're getting as much distance from this administration on this as they can.)
This is what we call a Kinsley Gaffe, the unintentional and deeply embarrassing statement of the truth.
The truth is that we do need other countries' help. But it's only the president's folly which has put us in the position of needing to beg.
-- Josh Marshall
kuro5hin.org
A World Map of the Mind. I have always been interested in maps. Especially in how the maps people draw tell something about the way these people see the world. For a while, I tried to get people from different countries to draw me a map of the world and compare the results. This didn't work very well. Most people thought it a test of some kind and found their own lack of geographical knowledge insulting. The World Map of the Mind project is a second attempt at this project, this time electronically.
kuro5hin.org
Three Deaths. ...and memories of the War fade further.
Rayne Today
Warning: I'm down to 2% of space, gang. I may not be posting tomorrow!
Best,
~Rayne
Rayne Today
All that blather = Aha! Or,
Interhemispheric brain activity mediation through networked communication
Some of you were brave enough to plow through my meandering, rambling blather about communication and brain hemispheres the other day. Thank you for being so tenacious. <smooch>
There was something missing at the end of it all, an unsolved-for-X thatâs been hanging open-ended since I blabbered and posted.
Aha! I reached a rather amusing theory after reading Tom Coatesâ post today about Friendster as a neocortical prosthetic and his previous post from May about social software. Unfortunately, my conclusion is inductive and not deductive; Iâll have to hope somebody can solve-for-X independently.
Humans seek rapid adoption of specific communication channels, to overcome shortcomings in their own local neural network. Specifically, the human brain is hop scotched, with language residing in one hemisphere, processing of speech in the other hemisphere; pattern recognition resides in another spot and relationship management in yet another sector of the brain. Itâs something that evolved over time in an opportunistic fashion, literally moving with the wind if William Calvinâs work on brain size and climatological conditions holds water. Itâs not the most efficient of mechanisms; itâs prone to numerous breaches due to congenital defects and injury as well as developmental retardation during key periods of brain growth (ex. the first three years of infancy and childhood).
Perhaps it is the issue of brain growth over the last handful of centuries that drives us now; humans in western cultures have grown substantially even in the last two hundred years due to improvements in nutrition and the availability of food. The current rate of C-section births could be related to larger-brained children resulting from this wealth of nutrition. Could it be that recent advances in human brain growth have increased the patchiness of our language and communication processing?
We are continually tasked with trying to increase the level of throughput between brain hemispheres, to mediate the conversations between the different portions of the brain. We are using networked external media to facilitate that conversation between brain halves, while facilitating the conversations between others and ourselves.
Engelbartâs work on augmentation to which Coates refers hints at this process; Coates appears to be working on and around the topic when he mentions ãcompensating for human inadequacies in processing·general appropriate filtering mechanisms·ä. Unfortunately, both are looking largely at communications between individual and independent brains ö between unique individuals ö versus the on-going communications we have between the two brains we as humans possess. The primary shortfall that we are augmenting is the communication between our right- and left-brains; the secondary shortfall augmented is communication between humans.
Is it possible that the lesser version of autism, Aspergerâs Syndrome, is mediated through the use of networked communications? Are those of us whose left-brains do not communicate well with the right-brain (or are left-brain dominant), cannot process human relationships adequate because of diminished or obstructed right-brain function, are using the internet and other networked methodologies to facilitate communication? (Does this explain why so many persons who work in the technical industry supporting the internet have a higher occurrence of Aspergerâs Syndrome?)
Is it possible that those of us who are challenged by language processing facilitate communication by using a methodology that may operate at slower speeds? Spoken word, for example, is processed at 12-15 phonemes per second (and is processed in the right-brain), where visual cues are processed at 8-9 phonemes per second; a substantive portion of speech is not visual, perhaps as much as 50%. This means that at least a third of information is lost if a recipient cannot process spoken speech, relying on visual cues instead. Is it possible that written word in combination with symbols may be processed much faster by users who are so impaired? Can the medium that allows them to consume information at their own pace offer them a chance to play on an even field with those who can process spoken speech normally?
Is it possible that using networked communication/social software allows for a narrowing of bandwidth, a filtering of information to a manageable rate of flow and processing, which users who are challenged by limited interhemispheric processing will find easier to manage?
Because communication is essential to the welfare of the human as individual and genome, it is a prime directive to seek improvements to communication. We are innately hardwired, hard-coded, drive to seek improvements; if there is an obstruction, we seek to augment or by-pass it in order to fulfill this prime directive. The extensive use of language in communication may be the single greatest differentiator between humans and other species; would it not make sense that we are compelled to augment that differentiation if it is the single most important factor to our success as a species?
We are chatterboxes. We have to be, itâs what made us successful.
On the other hand, maybe we should shut up already.
Rayne Today
RantsCounterRants: Lieberman's ãWeâve always done it this wayä bullsh*t
Most of the time Joe Lieberman just annoys me. Heâs a wuss, the kind of guy who makes nice with everybody while trying not to get his hands dirty. I picture him in golf pants and polo top, a drink in one hand and the other in his pocket, watching people working on his lawn or in the kitchen.
F*ck that ö itâs not going to work where weâre going; we need something more than a guy whoâll stand on the sidelines spouting platitudes and policy. We need somebody whoâs going to go to the mats, duke it out, street brawl, mix it up and make things happen. Lieberman isnât that guy.
Worse, Lieberman thinks the way the U.S. has handled Israel and Palestine for the last fifty years is good enough and that changing it would be a threat to peace:
ãDean said last week that the United States should not take sides in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He denied tonight that he was advocating a significant policy change but said there is no way for the United States to help bring peace to the Middle East without being a "credible negotiator" trusted by both sides. "It doesn't help, Joe, to demagogue this issue," Dean said. "We're all Democrats; we need to beat George Bush so we can have peace in the Middle East."
But Lieberman vigorously disagreed with Dean's assertion that his position was the same as that of former president Bill Clinton and said the governor was abandoning American values and threatening an important alliance. "Howard Dean's statements," he said, "break a 50-year record in which presidents, Republican and Democrat, members of Congress of both parties, have supported our relationship with Israel based on shared values and common strategic interests."ä
F*ck that, too. Fifty years of taking sides brought us 9/11. Fifty years of taking sides brings us the same news every day, that another Israeli/Palestinian is dead, that there is no peace.
Continuing to be partial as we have been will bring us another 9/11 -- possibly on a scale we canât begin to imagine.
I want to slap Liebermanâs pasty face and tell him to stop using Clinton as a shield. Everythingâs changed in two yearâs time; the policies of the Clinton Administration wonât work now to clean up the mess these elephants are making. Lieberman canât even bother to work hard enough to make his own policy on its own merits; heâs got to use somebody elseâs work, like Clinton or Gore.
The only side the U.S. should choose is that of innocent children ö regardless of their country, regardless of their parentsâ politics. The children need us to be impartial and caring. The children need us to act like grown-ups when their own parents canât. Both the children of Israel and Palestine need us to step up to the plate and hold both sides accountable for their actions, so that there is no more childrenâs blood shed.
That goes for the rest of the Middle East. No more hungry and abused children, no more children living under the stress of war. No more children who grow up needy and angry, who come and attack other children whoâve in turn grown up angry with them.
Those should be the real American values Lieberman protects: it's all about the children.
He no longer merely annoys me; you can guess how I really feel about him now, Iâm sure.
The Motley Fool
Semis Fall Out of Bed. Plus, XM shorts squeal, and Freddie and Fannie on a leash.
The Motley Fool
Xoma's Raptiva Boost. Genentech-partnered psoriasis drug gets FDA panel recommendation.
The Motley Fool
Fannie and Freddie vs. Jason - Even Scarier. The White House wants to bring Freddie and Fannie to heel.
The Motley Fool
Semis Fall Out of Bed. The semiconductor run-up runs into a dead end.
The Motley Fool
Choosing a Nursing Home. It's not pleasant, but the government might be able to help.
The Motley Fool
Duke Energy Corporation. "...ultimately the PUC is responsible for the financial health of the utility even they never want to admit that."
The Motley Fool
La-Z-Boy Moves On. President's resignation shouldn't derail this household name.
Fanatical Apathy
Until We Got to Ellis Island, it was "Barbinowitz...". The Saudi government has outlawed Barbie dolls, saying, "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and...
mamamusings
spam filtering stupidity. I found out yesterday that I hadn’t received two very important emails from NSF regarding an upcoming PI workshop in Albuquerque. I never saw them, they never got a bounce message. That’s not good. So my co-PI (who also didn’t get them) investigated. It turns out that the piece of crap email server that our department uses—a FirstClass server that’s intended for conferencing, but has had an SMTP and POP server stapled onto it—has some fascinating default settings. First of all, it considers anything that has more than four recipients “junk mail.” Since the message from NSF went to a...
Gawker
Britney's Tat. We're disturbed by how many of you have requested information on Britney Spears' tattoos after seeing her slanchy Rolling Stone...
Morons Dot Org
Reader-Submitted: "Queer Eye..." isn't reality TV.... Another one of those "Family Coalitions" is at it again, this time targeting "Queer Eye..."
Morons Dot Org
Random: Stories we missed on Sep. 07, 2003. Here are URLs that were submitted to our queue on Sep. 07, 2003 but didn't make it into actual stories...
Washington Post: Editorial
. . . And At Home
Washington Post: Editorial
Patriot (Act) Games
Washington Post: Editorial
What's Going Right
Washington Post: Editorial
Since That Day . . .
David Harris' Science & Literature
On petitions for a death penalty moratorium. I was reading
Jen's blog
and she asked people to sign a petition calling for a moratorium on the
death penalty in Arizona. Let me say at the outset that I agree these
sorts of petitions should be created, I had some niggling thoughts.
This is what I posted in her comments:
As much as I support a petition against the death penalty, is there any real chance it can be effective?
The
reason I pose this is that Maryland had a moratorium on the death
penalty recently while the University of Maryland Department of
Criminology conducted an extensive study of the application of the
death penalty.
The report concluded that the death penalty was
applied inequitably, with black criminals far more likely to be given
death than whites. For this reason, the moratorium should stay until
this can be resolved.
Note that this doesn't even necessarily
argue for abolition of the death penalty, just the smaller step of
making sure it is applied fairly - and it fails even that.
The governor of Maryland, when he commissioned the study, agreed to abide by the recommendations of the criminologists.
So
far so good - but then the election happened and the new Republican
Governor Ehrlich immediately rescinded the moratorium and promptly
promised to start putting people to death again.
He argued that
the advice of experts in the field was not really relevant because he
should be able to decide on a case-by-case basis using his personal
opinion as a guide!
But making it case-by-case is exactly the
cause of the problem. The law is supposed to apply equally to everybody
and as soon as you begin to allow personal judgements to influence the
results, you end up with biases intruding. That is exactly what the UMD
study showed - personal biases affected whether or not a particular
criminal was given the death penalty.
So even though a
moratorium was declared, and the government of the time agreed to stand
by the results of the study, all it took was another election to have
it all thrown out...
Yes, we should sign petitions but we need
to do more because simply convincing the government of the day to
declare a moratorium is too little, too tenuous and too unstable.
Rather,
we need a far better understanding in society about criminal justice
issues. Most of all we need to get away from the empty rhetoric of
"tough on crime".
We KNOW (based on a multitude of studies) that
what is done in the name of "tough on crime" increases crime rates
rather than decreasing them. "Tough on crime" is not about being tough
on crime. It's about exerting our basest human instincts for revenge
and punishment. It's also become this crazy political tool in which we
see (primarily Republican) politicians fighting each other to see how
many people they can put to death.
It doesn't have to be that
way - and it isn't that way in many other countries around the world.
It is a peculiarly American condition that means the US currently has a
greater proportion of its population in prison or jail than any other
country at any time in history, including Russia under Stalin.
An excellent series of articles about international views on "tough on crime" is at:
http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/specials/crimeandpunishment/
If only we could see that sort of coverage in US media...
David Harris' Science & Literature
Light makes asteroids spins line up. Not only collisions but also the forces of sunlight can cause asteroids
to tumble, just as they appear in so many science fiction movies.
This result appears in tomorrow's issue of
Nature.
Whereas collisions tend to make the rotations random, the light
pressure causes the spins to align in one of two main types of rotation.
A family of asteroids that was formed billions of years ago should be
spinning in random directions due to collisions between them. However,
the asteroids were found to be rotating with very specific spins and
orientations. The unexpected behavior can be explained through the
difference in heating of the sides of the asteroids closest to and
furthest from the sun. Essentially, photons are reflected or absorbed
and re-emitted on the side of the asteroid closest to the sun. Although
the force on the asteroid is tiny for each photon, over billions of
years, there is enough of an effect to significantly influence the type
of rotation that the asteroid will undergo.
Radio Free Blogistan
Bomb threat at Moscone.
Well, I was sitting next to Ross Mayfield and across from Tim Bray in the speaker's lounge at Seybold when they told us that a bomb threat had been called in to Moscone North and South (where the Oracle conference is taking place) so just to be safe they asked us to evacuate Moscone West (where Seybold SF is taking place). I got out of the area. It's 9/10 after all. And just now (a few hours later), I was driving up Market warchalking and just found an open wifi relay around Market and 16th-ish. (I pulled over to check my email and post this entry).
Radio Free Blogistan
Buzznet's Seybold community gallery.
Marc Brown pinged us to invite vistors to the Seybold Buzznet Gallery.
You can sign up to post any photos you take from Seybold (if you're here) or to view photos if you like no matter where you are (assuming you have web access and can see).
birdhouse.org
Happy Billionth, Unix Time. A couple of days ago the Unix clock -- which measures time in elapsed seconds since the epoch (January 1, 1970) -- ticked its billionth tick. Planes did not fall out of the sky. What did happen is that computers "paused for a second, then changed to 1 billion and 1 seconds." I confess that I used to store "real" date/timestamps in my databases. Discovering the total liberation afforded by reinterpreted Unix timestamps opened several...
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....
Half an hour, two years ago.
[If the link won't work for you, copy it and open it with Quicktime. High bandwidth required.]
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in memoriam.
The Miracle Survivors -
In Stairwell B of the North Tower, 16 people lived amid the avalanche of concrete and steel. But surviving was only the start of their struggle.
Everyone handles things differently. Some want to move on, others need to remember. Some thought that to commemorate 9/11, it might be appropriate to have a dedicated thread that would be a repository of links and comments. Miguel started such a thread for
9/11/2002. And for those who may not have read it, here is
the Mefi 9/11/2001 thread.
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The Online Knowledge Magazine.
Mistupid.com - The Online Knowledge Magazine "a collection of stupid stuff, not necessarily information you need to know, but who is to judge?"
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Some of your oebase belong to us!. Many MeFites have mentioned they love
emusic. Today, I found out that the former General Manager was
Dave Allen, one of the founding members of Shriekback and Gang of Four. He has a [approx equal]¥[fl]new[approx equal]¥ÿ site,
oebase, which has a great selection of CDs and DVDs (for sale), a music (industry) blog, and a bunch of free mp3s.
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The Man, The Donkey, The Toolbox.
Divine architecture or crafty workmanship? Mysterious guy shows up on a donkey to make a spiral staircase for the
Loretto Chapel that defies structural possibility. Made
mainly of wood, it contains no support beams and uses only wood pegs to hold it together.
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Shocker? Pucker up? Oh, the possibilities..
Ol' Brown Eyes is back. Photo mosaic of POTUS. NSFW if someone's standing in your cubicle looking over your shoulder, but from a distance it's relatively innocuous.
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So It's Come To This.
Testicle Theater - NSFW, if you can't close your browser before the person over your shoulder says "Oh, Scarface! What's that playing Pacino - is it... it looks like..."
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HeavyTV.
HeavyTV screens different full-length movies every week for broadband users. Showing this week:
Airheads,
Live From Baghdad,
Pacific Heights and
Extreme Ops.
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Privacy around the world.
Privacy & Human Rights 2003. This report by
EPIC and
Privacy International reviews the state of privacy rights in 56 countries around the world. For anyone concerned about
video surveillance, there are
a variety of ways to respond.
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50 Reasons to Not Vote for Arnold.
Metro Santa Cruz's 50 Reasons to Not Vote for Arnold for Governor
And no, none of the reasons are because of awful movies like
Jingle All the Way or
Junior.
Real reasons like the fact that he's a chauvinist, his father was a Nazi, he used to run the President's Council on Fitness and now admits to using steroids to win bodybuilding competitions, he has no plan on how to fix the state's budget issues just that he's gonna clean house. Or the fact that he made up the story about gang raping a black woman for the Oui interview back in 77' (think about that, he lied about participating in a gang rape, that's pretty demented behaviour).
Interesting reading and damned scary if this is the next governor of the 5th or 6th largest economy in the world.
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Free.Pro.Blogger.
Free.Pro.Blogger. Bucking the
Free to Fee trend,
Blogger Pro is going Free, and sending refunds/t-shirts to current Pro subscribers. (more inside)
