We went to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) in North Adams yesterday. It's a really interesting space in a lovely place. Last year there the main exhibition had to do with games, and it was, well, fun. Not moving or even particuarlyly enlightening, but fun. This year it focuses on Viennese art and it's not moving, not particularly enlightening and not fun.

It is absolutely the case that I don't know enough about contemporary art to be able to understand what I was looking at. But here's my new dictum for myself: When viewing an artwork adds nothing to the verbal explanation of it, skip viewing it.

E.g., the video screen that over the course of half an hour cycles through every visible shade of green? Skip it!

E.g., the purposefully dull paintings hung on a plain white cube that's a statement about the importance of context? Skip it!

E.g., the ten minute video of a guy digging a hole in the forest? Skip it!

You really ought to read Eric Norlin's coverage of the Microsoft Palladium Press conference. Unfortunately, with a 19.2 dialup connection on a line being shared by three families, I've been doing no browsing and didn't keep up with Norlin's (or anyone's) blog until he sent email saying that he's had enough abuse from mean-spirited assholes and is packing it in for a while. That's a shame not only for the noble reason — Eric's an important commentator and guide — but because I don't understand Palladium and Digital IDs well enough and was counting on Eric to explain them to me.

Also informative and full of pepper: Gillmor on the latest bad news from Washington.

Ryze.com promises to be your online business networking network and it might be a great service, but I didn't get past the privacy policy. It begins well and then gets worse and worse:

Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. share your concerns about personal privacy. Through the Ryze Web site, application and service, and through other contact with Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. as a company, Ryze Ltd., Aereal Inc. and affiliates may collect personal information and data including, but not limited to, application and web site usage data, viewing data, file transfer and e-mail data, and personal contact information such as e-mail addresses, mailing addresses and phone numbers. Additionally, Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc.'s applications and web sites may use technological facilities for tagging and tracking including, but not limited to, Web cookies, login usernames and other technologies to track and correlate data. Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. own and reserve all rights and all usage and distribution rights to any data it collects. Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. may share user data with parties including, but not limited to, business partners, affiliates, customers and licensees.

I'm about to head off for about two weeks to the land where the air is sweet and the Internet connections suck. Dial-up makes blogging as slow and difficult as the word onomatopoetically suggests. So, I'll still be blogging but probably won't be as responsive as I'd like to be.

Jeff Chapman points out an article and discussion at Geek.com about the Cyber Security Enhancement Act that passed the House of Reps on July 17 on a vote of 385-3, the lopsided majority just about ensuring that it was a vote based on expediency backed by ignorance. According to the article:

Before the Patriot Act passed, law enforcement needed probable cause and had to go through slow legal channels to get ISP information. After the passing of the Patriot Act, law enforcement could get ISP information more quickly if agents believed that it could be used to stop a dangerous situation. Now, under CSEA, law enforcement or any government entity (not specifically law enforcement agencies) can get subscriber information if agents/representatives of that group think it relates to a threat to national security

So any government agency could tap the Net without probable cause. No possibility of abuse there, eh? Why'd we need that stupid ol' Constitution anyway when we can trust all those government agencies not to abuse their powers?

David Isenberg's new SMARTLetter has his must-read analysis of the "utter crisis" in telecommunications, as FCC Chair Michael "Son of" Powell calls it. Isenberg puts it in perspective. For example:

Let's not call the current overcapacity situation a "bandwidth glut." Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. The scarcity folks — the telephone companies (and others) whose business is based on the fact that communications capacity is scarce, therefore expensive — are controlling this "glut" dialog. Nobody talks about a glut of clean air or a glut of traffic-jam-free roads. No — to an end user it is great to have a lot of cheap >network capacity.

and

Everybody believes that fiber to the home is the end game of the Communications Revolution. It is not expensive, about US$600 to $3000 per home with today's technology (and less in the future, and less with economies of massive scale). But just as Qwest's 1997 transcontinental fiber build-out fatally maimed domestic long-distance (including Qwest itself), fiber to the home would kill the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies.

Therefore, fiber to the home is not coming until the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies become considerably weaker.

and

ATM and SONET are not the only technologies that are becoming obsolete even as they're being deployed. There's DSL and MMDS and 3G and WAP and a whole lot more. Technology marches on. And it is not as if Telecom executives made the wrong decisions — mostly they made the best decisions they could at the time.

The debt movie is playing at the Global Crossing theatre and the WorldCom playhouse — but soon it will be playing at a telephone company near you. Verizon and SBC and BellSouth will not be immune ...

and

So if you hear that somebody is going to "enhance" the Internet — to make it more efficient, to Pay the Musicians, to Protect the Children, to thwart hackers, to enhance Homeland Security, to find Osama, or whatever — this is almost certainly propaganda from the powerful businesses that are threatened by the Internet. Remember that the Internet became the success it is today — and the threat that it is to existing telcos — because it is a Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.

AKMA has responded to my response to his thread on "differential hermeneutics." (He's also responded to email from Tom M.)

On the key question of whether there's something special about Scripture, we're not yet in agreement. And we may never be, thus providing an example of Differential Hermeneutics in Action. AKMA, and post-Modernism in general, wants to untie reading (= interpreting) from the meanings "behind" a text. In particular, the "right" interpretation is not the one that reconstitutes in the reader the author's original intention. There are lots of good reasons for recognizing this rupture between what we understand and what the author meant, and when it comes to scriptural interpretation the reasons include the terrifying result of believing that you have the right interpretation; armed with a belief that I know what God meant, I may feel justified in wreaking destruction on those who disagree.

And yet, if there is such a thing as revelation (and I am required here to note that I don't think that there is), doesn't it have to mean that God is telling us something in a way that we can understand? And if revelation tells us something that we can understand, then isn't it telling us what God thinks and feels — God's intentions? I don't see how you can exclude the possibility of understanding what God had in mind and still think there's revelation. [1]

So, here I am about to engage in the hermeneutic act of trying to figure out what AKMA has in mind. I think AKMA thinks that if we say that a hermeneutics of revelation tries to get at what's in God's mind, it has to be an "integral hermeneutics" that assumes only one interpretation is right, thus leading to intolerance. But that doesn't necessarily follow. Suppose we say that revelation expresses God's meaning in a way that humans can understand but God's meaning surpasses our simple understanding and overwhelms languagw. So, we are forced to engage our understanding together, through discussion and disagreement. Further, to speak in a way that humans can understand means to speak in way that can be reappropriated by each generation with its differences in culture and language; that's why scripture has survived the ages.

Why do I insist on this to AKMA? Because we share ethical/political aims. We want to be inclusive, not intolerant. We want a way of sincerely embracing people who also trying to understand God from widely divergent starting points. We don't want to slap people down and shut them up simply because they understand God differently. AKMA writes:

We�ll rely on people we trust, we�ll look back on what the ancients have taught us, we�ll try to help one another along, and we�ll try humbly to accept correction when people whom we respect suggest that we�ve got something important wrong.

What this doesn�t allow us is a stick with which to beat the annoying people who persist in promulgating erroneous interpretations; we can�t say, �That�s just not what it means!� (not in an absolute way). In response to mistaken interpretations, a differential hermeneutic would advise that we make as plain and persuasive a case for our interpretation as we possibly can, and let willful or foolish interpreters do their best.

If that's all DH did, then every tolerant person would agree to it. But DH says more than this. (It has to, for otherwise DH is nothing but tolerance.) It says that we cannot read the author's intentions:

Differential hermeneuts will, however, allow that different people will imagine [my emphasis] different authors, and there�ll be no way to pin a really real intention to a really real author and make from that a really final interpretation.

Granting the impossibility of knowing the real, final interpretation of the author's intentions especially when it comes to God, there's got to be more to interpreting than imagining, especially when it comes to scripture. If revelation is God speaking in a way that we can hear (and, by the way, can not hear or mis-hear), then there has to be more than what I as the reader bring to the party. That does not mean that there is a unitary meaning or a meaning that we foolish mortals can be confident enough is right that we can stop listening to others.

Earlier, AKMA explains the result that's driving his line of thought, I believe:

I�m not reluctant to ascribe authorship of Scripture (in some sense) to God, but I refuse to exclude people who disagree with me on this from my account of hermeneutics.

... <big snip>

..."the Bible� already constitutes an interpretive decision that includes some people and excludes others; ascribing its authorship to God narrows the body of agreeable interpreters even further. And (as a differential hermeneutician) ... I have to account for those people�s interpretations, too.

But I think AKMA doesn't have to exclude non-believers from his account of hermeneutics; he just has to exclude them from people he thinks are capable of understanding what revelation says. How can you believe that revelation is God talking to us in a way that we can understand — which to me simply means believing in revelation — without excluding atheists from the body of "agreeable interpreters"? When I say that scripture was written by barbaric humans (stone the witches, kill the homosexuals) and has less revelatory power these days than Updike's Rabbit series, AKMA ought to stop paying attention to what I say God meant by the book of Job [2]. You may still want to listen to me when I discourse about the history of Canaan or about Paul's word usage patterns, but I have announced that I am not engaged in trying to hear what God is saying through scripture. You can still "account" for my interpretation — DH explains why people have different interpretations and gives us a way to try to find value in them. You just won't count it for much. You will, however, keep in mind that all interpretation is situational and fallible, so you won't tie me to a stake and gather bundles of wood to show me the error of my thinking.

Let me sum up (sorry for the length). AKMA writes:

I just don�t believe texts have �meaning� in any way that escapes our attributing meaning to them.

"Attribute" puts the bulk of the burden of interpreting on the reader; "imagine" puts all of the burden there. If we take "attribute" to mean "involves us" or "depends on us but not just on us," then we get what I think is a clearer picture. Every act of understanding is situated in a specific person, language, culture, and history. But if understanding revelation consists of nothing but me throwing meaning at a text, then there is nothing left of revelation. It is indistinguishable from me reading the words formed in my bowl of alphabet soup. If, on the other hand, revelation is God speaking to us in a way that we can understand, it doesn't mean that there is a unitary meaning and that those who don't get it are simply wrong. The advantage of differential hermeneutics is that we can say that the differences among those who are trying to hear the word of God engender the conversation that is the way to hear what God is trying to say.

So let me do my own rephrasing of AKMA's differential hermeneutics as I would apply it to scriptural interpretation: The way we humans can try to hear the word of God is by talking with one another. We aren't arguing about who does a better job of inventing meanings for a text that is incapable of speaking for its author. We're arguing about words written by God to speak to us — a voice we can hear, a voice that is there, although we can only hear it together and can only understand it imperfectly. Our conversation is aimed at hearing God's intentions more clearly. If hearing His intentions is impossible, then revelation doesn't speak and our conversation is mere chatter.

Two notes:

1. What I think is true of interpreting revelation I actually think is true of all acts of interpretation. I don't think we are as cut off from the author's intentions as AKMA seems to believe.

AKMA continues his deeply important blogging about what he calls "integral" vs. "differential" hermeneutics. (It begins here, goes here with a response to Tom Matrullo, continues here with a response to my email, and goes here.)

I hesitate to try to characterize briefly the difference between the two hermeneutics, but I'm gonna anyway. Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where "things" includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations. AKMA sides with the differentialists. (AKMA, if I got this wrong, set me straight!)

When AKMA first blogged about this, on July 10, it took me a while to muster a response, which I sent to him privately. I like his distinction and I also side with the differentialists. I wrote to AKMA with two aims. First, I wanted to know what he thought about what DH (differential hermeneutics) means for revelation. Is revelation a special type of truth-giving? If so, what does that do hermeneutics? Second, I suggested that AKMA still gave the sense (or was I merely projecting it?) that DH implies a failure: Too bad we can't get at a unitary meaning, so we'll have to settle for DH. Judaism, on the other hand, has taken DH for the past couple of thousand years anyway as quite positive. Judaism's interpretations - that is, the Rabbi's interpretations - are grounded by a text that's taken to be revealed but not susceptible to a fundamenalist, literal reading; by a tradition that preserves the losing arguments; by a tradition of how to conduct an argument; and by an embedding of interpretation into practice since the resolution of arguments over interpretation determine how daily life will be conducted.

AKMA responded to my comments with his customary brilliance and gracefulness. Here's one salient passage:

Differential hermeneutics, however, can locate revelation not in the text by itself, such that we�re left to assay the content of an unambiguous revelation that we can�t get at. Instead, differential hermeneutics can locate revelation in the shared practice of interpreting the Bible under the social, liturgical, communal, ethical conditions of participating in life under the Law, or under the Cross.

I'm not entirely comfortable with that, although I think there may be no practical difference in our positions. (As if I'm entitled to have a position in this conversation! Got to have standing before you can have a position.) I'm in the odd position of saying that I don't think AKMA is giving enough weight to the scriptural text. His view of DH finds all of interpretation's value in the play of differing interpretations and none in the meaning behind the text or the text itself. (Am I getting you wrong, AKMA?) So, we interpret revealed scripture and a restaurant menu differently because people encounter them "under different conditions, with a different stake in what they�re interpreting, and different goals in taking on the interpretation..." Notice that the difference is not that one text was written by God and the other by a person working in a restaurant.

But isn't something crucial and real lost if you can't acknowledge that difference? And if you'll momentarily grant an atheistic Jew the standing to ask this: Why does AKMA seemingly shy away from saying scripture is special because it's revealed? Is he worried that this puts us back into the game of thinking that there is a single, integral meaning behind the text, which in turn means that only one position is right and that we are justified in being intolerant of those who get the meaning wrong?

But you can believe that scripture is special without becoming an integral hermeneuticist. Suppose, for example, one were to believe that:

1. God is the author of scripture.
2. Scripture in some way stands for God's beliefs and intentions.
3. The meaning of scripture overwhelms our mortal understanding.
4. Human understanding is always situated in a time, culture, community of practice, and language. Human understanding is only possible within such a situation.
5. Scripture is designed to maintain its meaning through multiple human situations, as human history unfolds.
6. Scripture needs a differential hermeneutics — a tradition of argument and discussion and the "proactive" preservation of differences.

Then you would be able to maintain that revelation reveals God's truth without resorting to the simplistic integral hermeneutics that has led our species down such dark alleys. And, I believe, that that position sketches the Jewish stance towards scripture, although my belief here is strictly second-hand.

I very much like AKMA's comments in his most recent blog about "performative criteria" — i.e., "testing truth-claims by living them out." A right interpretation isn't one that corresponds to the concealed meaning but one that enables you to live well. This is in response to Happy Tutor's blogging about post-Modernism as a way of avoiding responsibility. The Happy Toot writes:

Postmodernism is to be resisted not because it is false, nor because it can be refuted (you can't refute an ideology), but because the moral type it produces is detestable.

My initial complain about post-Modernism agrees with this. POMO produces academics who use it destructively to position themselves as the smartest person in the room, showing why everyone else is still stuck in "the old metaphysics." But POMO also captures a great truth, one that is liberating and is increasingly required for humans to continue inhabiting the planet. AKMA is a fearless partisan of the liberating force of POMO, and bless him for it.

What's missing, I believe, is a sense of the joy of being situated. Yes, we are "stuck" in a culture and a history and that inevitably colors our view of the world. And, yes, there is no escaping being situated to achieve a superior view, free of cultural bias and prejudice, that can identify the One Truth. But if we stop there, we are left with the POMO the Tutor abhors. The other side of this coin, however, is that being situated is a joy and would be a blessing if there were a God. Further, within a situation we have ways of discussing and conversing that give some views more standing than others. (That's why DH is important.) Further further, if there were revelation, it would provide a basic text that orients the conversation. Further further further, as Toot points out, practice and practicalities drive the important conversations, whether it's soldiers arguing over tactics or Jews arguing over whether telephone wires count as demarcating a bounded community (i.e., whether they count as an erev). POMO untied from situation — and from the life of practice that constitutes a situation — does indeed suffer from the tyrannical relativism both the Tutor and AKMA abhor.

British eDemocracy
The British government has posted a site with ideas for how to use the Internet to make democracy work better.

Open Recording Studio
Tom Poe is in the front of the pack creating a free recording studio to encourage the distribution of alternatively-business-modelled music.

Complexity Digested
The Complexity Digest is a good resource for finding what's being written about complexity.

Grant Gross, in an email, updates his excellent coverage of the Commerce Department's Digital Rights Management meeting, which I blogged a couple of hours ago:

During this workshop, the Commerce Department was just not interested in hearing from the public. So to get the point across that the public wasn't represented, the Free Software/Linux/fair use crowd almost had to shout and wave their hands.

Those tactics actually may have worked. Sources tell me that the Commerce Department is now asking around for suggestions on consumer advocates to include in a future workshop.

As for the EFF, Robin Gross tells me today that they've been invited to comment in writing, and the EFF is doing so.

Here's what I *think* happened: The Commerce Department just didn't comprehend that consumers might want to be part of this discussion about how to implement DRM. Groups like EFF just didn't fit the focus of this meeting, so Commerce set up this workshop with the goal of getting the IT people and the Hollywood people talking again, but made no provisions for the public to participate.

One of the attendees — Alexandra Davis — at the book reading I did last night posted a thoughtful blog entry on it. Although Alexandra liked the event overall, my answer to the question she asked disappointed her, and I can see why. She writes:

I asked what one could do if she say, received a rape threat in a chatroom or someone somehow obtained her personal information, and posted her phone number and address on the web. I expressed my frustration over the strong possibility that people who would do things like that, hack, threaten people, and invade privacy, were most likely complete losers in person, but because they had this one skill, a skill I'm probably smart enough to learn had I the means, I had to be afraid of them. I then asked if he had covered accountability for one's actions online at all in his book. Though he said that the dark side of the internet and accountability for one's actions online were important topics, he hadn't gone into them in his book. Perhaps they're supposed to be implicit in his assertions about the humanity of the internet, but I was still disappointed and became skeptical...

Alexandra's recounting is accurate and fair. But her question is one of many important ones for which I have and will have no answer worth listening to. Accountability is a hugely important issue, and a really tough one that involves everything from psychology to philosophy to digital IDs. Sorry, Alexandra. I wish I did have an answer.

FWIW, I don't go into the dark side of the Net in Small Pieces because it is a partisan book — there are enough nay-sayers — that tries to get at the roots of the (positive) excitement about the Web. There are lots of things worth discussing that aren't in the book.

The always-provocative Arnold Kling suggests in an email that we take a look at the Semant-o-Matic site that uses latent semantic indexing to search blogs. The current site is an open source test bed, indexing only 11 blog sites, but the idea is provocative. Here's how I understand it, from the site's readable and informative explanation of searching and LSI.

When you click on the "Find more like this one" button on a search site (= "Similar pages" at Google), the site does an analysis of the word usage pattern on that page and runs a query to find other pages with similar patterns. LSI does this not when a user presses the button but as it's indexing the page so that it always knows other pages that are similar to the first one. So, when you do a LSI search for, say "French Impressionism," it finds not only pages that contain that phrase but also pages that are similar to ones that contain that phrase. Thus, an LSI search might turn up a page that talks about 19th Century painters concerned with the play of light in paintings of haystacks even if it never uses the phrase "French Impressionism." (Of course, it may also turn up a page about Haystack Calhoun, the old professional wrestler. playing with the lights in the arena.)

David Gallagher, author of the article that proposed the Google First Name Top Ten Award says that there's some "back story" to his article. (E.g., apparently there's a photo he is suppressing.) He also has an entry about the Making Of his piece on Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri that ran in the NY Times. His blog has lots of pictures, too, including one of a handlettered sign advertising "Waterbaloons already filled - 10 cents" — it could be a New Yorker cartoon if it weren't already a photograph.

Anita Rowland writes:

I took action to add a blogroll to my site when I was shocked, shocked, to find Anita Bora ranked higher than me! Always before the only Anita ahead of me was Santa Anita Racetrack.

We've been teasing each other about it since: http://www.anitarowland.com/gmarchives/00000384.html

On an unrelated note, Euan Semple (who is moving The Obvious weblog to http://www.theobviousblog.net/blog/) writes:

I thought of you as soon as I saw this:

In the righthand column you'll see a little face drawn in blue. That's my "blogchalk," Daniel P�dua's attempt to provide some semi-standard metadata so we can search for weblogs more precisely. The metadata goes like this:

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Boston, Brookline, David, Male, 51-55!

Mark Dionne points out (via Ray Kurzweil) that Crash Bandicoot, one of the most popular Playstation games, was written in Lisp. Why would a modern game be written in a dead language? Because it ain't dead. The power of Lisp isn't in its conspicuous use of lists and parentheses. As Andy Gavin, the co-founder of the gaming company, explains:

With lisp one can rapidly develop meta constructs for behaviors and combine them in new ways. In addition, lisp allows the redefinition of the language to easily add new constructs, particularly those needed to deal with time-based behaviors and the layering of actions. Contrary to popular belief there is nothing inherently slow about lisp. It is easy to constuct a simple dialect which is just as efficient as C, but retains the dynamic and consistant qualities that make lisp a much more effective expression of one's programming intentions.

Paul Graham has argued in favor of Lisp in a more systematic way (as I blogged in February), raising the question of what constitutes a "higher level" language. (Here is a keynote Paul gave.)

So, do I program in Lisp? Nah. It's such a pain in the ass for someone like me who writes mainly little utilities for himself like a tiny text processor that automates the production of HTML tuned specifically to the needs of this blog. (Well, actually — he says with a little pride — it also stores the blog entries in a text base, lets me browse through them, and automatically assembles and formats selected blog entries for inclusion in my newsletter, JOHO.) So, what's the choice of a non-manly hobbyist programmer like me? Um, Visual Basic.

Here are a couple of answers to the question I posed about Verisign's attempt to own the "Domain Waiting List" market. Right now, you can sign up with various companies to claim existing domain names if and when they are not renewed. I wondered in my blog what happened if two people both claimed, say, "amazon.com" using different services and that domain became available. Who would win? And is that the problem that Verisign is proposing to solve, enriching itself in the process?

Udhay Shankar says, yes Verisign's solution would solve the problem "for those people who don't have expensive lawyers, and who can't move WIPO or whatever. This would probably exclude Jeff Bezos. ;-)

The One True b!X writes:

Verisign is attempting to regain too much control. As it stands right now, what you sign up for with waiting list services as they currently exist is a service in which the company will TRY to snag your desired domain once it returns to the pool of available domains.

Verisign's proposal creates a waiting list service (provided soley by themselves and SnapNames) which will take precedence — if someone "reserves" a domain thru it, they are guaranteed to get it when it becomes available, because it doesn't return to the general pool of available domain names, where it can be competed for.

You can register your opinion at ICANN until the end of July, and you can sign an online petition against the Verisign proposal here.

Dotster, which has been my favorite place to register domain names, is circulating a letter to all its users asking for us to tell ICANN that we don't like Verisign's proposal for the "secondary domain market." As far as I can tell from this, Verisign is proposing that SnapNames be the only authorized provider of the "Domain Name Wait Listing Service" that lets a user grab an existing name as soon as it becomes available. So, if I want "www.amazon.com," I can pay a service a subscription fee so that if Amazon forgets to renew its registration of "www.amazon.com" it goes to me. Verisign — the owner of Network Solutions. which is the monopoly ICANN was established to break up — apparently would be the only one entitled to offer this service, which is currently widely available on the Net. It would charge $24/year whether or not the name came available, whereas other services charge less and only charge if the user succeeds in getting the name.

Now, here's what I don't understand. If two people register for "www.amazon.com" with different services, and Jeff Bezos forgets to put "Renew domain name" in his Palm Pilot, which of the two wins? Is this the problem Verisign is attempting to solve?

Let me know how I feel about this so I can register my opinion at ICANN by the end of July, and so I know whether I want to sign the online petition against the proposal.

W. David Stephenson, with whom I wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald about why the Homeland Security page sucks, has two followups:

1. Adam Gaffin has cited it in his NetworkWorld Fusion blog. Adam points us all to the Homeland Security Monitor, a resource on security issues.

Jeneane points us to Ann's blog. Marek is in the hospital. Something is wrong with his stomach. Apparently, no one knows what yet.

Marek's voice is powerful, beautiful and truly unique. And treasured.

Those of us who don't believe in the power of prayer will have to fall back on the old standards: superstition and hope.

Because I am still on The World's Slowest Net Connection - I'm actually picking up CompuServe reruns from 1987 - I have not been able to listen to the following link, but I trust its provenance: an email from RageBoy. I reproduce it here in its entirety:

http://www.rageboy.com/blogger.html

RB leaves late-nite voicemail for Gary Turner. Ricky don't lose that number. Hear one of the World's Top-50 Business Thinkers say "fuck" a lot, propose a massive panty raid on Blog Sisters, and explain how blogging is the necessary and inevitable precursor to Systemic Ass-Yodeling & Wide-Area Telephony (SAY-WAT). Rare mutant RageBoy image appears courtesy AP Wirephoto archives.

David Reed is no fool so if he's excited — positively — about possible changes to the FCC's policy on licensing spectrum, then so am I. His blog entry has links to lots of comments filed with the FCC, including his own. (Whether the FCC listens to any of the sensible comments is a different matter.)

David Stephenson, with whom I wrote an op-ed piece for the Miami Herald a couple of days ago pointing out how stupid the Homeland Security web page is, writes with an update:

We heard your complaints, America, and took action. We hope you enjoy this new, larger picture of me on the Homeland Security web site.
-Shrub

If CEOs ought to be held responsible if the financial disclosure statements they sign are wrong, then are you saying that Ken Lay's excuse that he was misled by other managers ought not to hold and that Kenny Boy ought to do hard time?

Are you confident that no CEO could be misled by crooked accountants or an errant CFO in any part of her or his business? For example, might a "lawyer's mistake" result in a member of the board of directors filing notice eight months late of a major stock transaction that has the appearance of insider trading? Ought the Board Member do hard time?

No, Bush is once again over-simplifying vastly complex problems so he can use his Blame-and-Punish strategy to give us the delusion that they're under control. Terrorist attack? Pin it on one evil-doer so we have someone to track down rather than addressing the complexities that give rise to terrorism. Widespread corruption in business due to the systemic flaws in the way our stock market works? Pin it on CEOs and threaten to jail them. Failing educational system? Reduce the problem to what can be diagnosed by federal, standardized tests ... and then punish the schools that need the most help.

The problem is that even if we get rid of the evil-doers, we will still have a world in which the next evil-doer will seem to make sense to a whole bunch of people.

Some nice puns:

Gary Unblinking Stock has three pointers for us.

First, there's a list of philosophical humor. I'm laughing. I think.

Second, Gary lets us know that the mnftiu book, Get Your War On, is coming soon. You can sign up to get a signed copy for $20 with all profits going to landmine clearance efforts in Afghanistan. (Here's the latest Get Your War On comic strip.)

From James Sisk comes the following call to action:

I just finished reading up on the most recent linking case in the Danish courts, and came upon an idea I'd like your feedback on, (and possibly you help spreading). The basic idea is this: although there are many out there who would like to control who does and does not link to there sites, even the biggest of the big shots need use more then we need them. So. Any organization that restricts free linking gets "blackblogged" ( I want credit for this term). If you don't let everyone link freely to your site, then none of us will link to you at all. Imagine if Google said, due to the restrictive policies of the church of Scientology, Google does not list links to their sites. Even if the Googles and Yahoos didn't buy in, the risk of damage from losing the links they like, would almost certainly force a higher level of tolerance for the ones they don't.

James Sisk
Senior Instructional Designer
Epic Learning

Good idea, but since this won't happen only on blogs, maybe it should be "de-linking" or "a-linking." "Hypolinking"? "Hacksawing" (to cut the links)? Or the old word for this: "shunning." "Connect-shun"?

Some nice writing by Halley about what we lose as adults. And some nice writing by AKMA about e-learning within the larger context of learning and teaching.

Dave Rogers points to an article from the WS Journal (by Lee Gomes) posted at MSNBC about whether the cyberworld needs its own cyberlaws.

Is there really a cyberspace full of �cybercitizens� who need only be accountable to their own �cyberlaws�? A loose-knit group of law professors is bucking one of the big fads in the legal field by calling that whole idea �cybersilly.�

Eric Norlin writes:

I guess at my core i'm a die-hard capitalist — I have an insanely optimistic faith in the ability of the marketplace to sort itself out (please don't send emails about MSFT monopolistic practices)...

I pulled up all the grass in our front yard this spring. That's a small task since the yard is about large enough to bury two people comfortably (or, as my mother used to describe the capacity of a friend's cabin cruiser: sleeps 4, fucks 8). I then sprinkled "meadow mix" and waited for my garden to bloom. But, the only plant I recognize is crab grass, which I have been dutifully pullling. Otherwise, I can't tell a weed from a flower, so it's all a-growing.

In 50 words or less, please apply this to:

a) The Web
b) Being a parent
c) The endocrine system
d) Something of your own choosing

Dan Gillmor is attending a seminar at Harvard on Internet law and is blogging his notes. But Dan's notes are better written than the final drafts of the rest of us. And his notes on Lawrence Lessig's session on exactly how we can - and will, according to Lessig - lose what's most important about the Internet are a superb critical summary of Lessig's position. Read it and weep. Or, better, read it and fight.

Hylton Jolliffe writes: "I wanted to point you to another real-time blog on ILAW that you might find interesting and worth pointing to. It's edited by the Berkman's Donna Wentworth: www.corante.com/copyfight/." Well worth visiting. (Dan G points to this site also in his bloggage from the seminar.)

Jon Schull is visualizing blogthreads. To him they might look something like this:

Bob Frankston adds a critique of Bluetooth to the blogthread that began with my blogportage of a contretemps between the estimable Landry and the venerable Bricklin (or was it the venerable Landry and the estimable Bricklin?) and continued here (Bricklin) and here (Fleishman, Peterson, Marks).

I've written a lot about Bluetooth and don't want to revisit it again but will risk some short and brief comments. Bluetooth reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant – each feels a part and presumes that it represents the elephant. People find some claim about Bluetooth they like and assume that it is the best way to get that particular aspect. But Bluetooth is like the days of dedicated word processors – they couldn't compete with the ability to quickly evolve products on generic PCs.

Bluetooth would simply be a curiosity as the triumph of marketing over reality were it not for the damage of sucking the energy out of the wireless marketplace. Just a few quick bullets before I run down to the dinner waiting for me:

• Replacing a cable. This is a lie. If that were the goal, then I'd be able to get a generic cable replacement rather than a better way to get to my cell phones.

• Replacing a cable. It doesn't just replace a cable, it requires I not use a cable since Bluetooth insists that the protocols work only over their transport and no other. I can't even use a wire as way to go faster or use less power.

• Lower power. I don't see any reason why the cost per bit for IP is any lower. The low power is an artifact of the higher level protocols which are designed to reduce traffic for trivial apps. If you use it like 802.11 you blow the design point.

• Low power? If it's so important use IP over HomeRF.

• Low power? It is it so important then provide power management for 802.11

• Cheap. Cheap is 100% about volume. Color movies are now cheaper than black and white. I can make anything cheap by assuming a volume of a billion units per year. 802.11 is shipping and thus has the advantage.

• Bluetooth requires I use 802.11 Bluetooth's design point is so limited it can't be the only protocol so why bother? In order to do all the things a normal user wants, even if you have Bluetooth you will still need 802.11. [Later addition: Bluetooth�s profiles and applications and radios are all tied together and tethered by their accidental properties. Bluetooth�s competition is not 802.11, it is the concept of IP and the separation of transport from applications. If you like the Bluetooth profiles you can use them atop IP but, as you may notice, they don�t seem to have enough value for that to be considered worth doing.]

• It's all about paying for connecting by making the cell phone the center of the universe. Even if you accept that I simply use a second cell phone in a PCMCIA slot in my laptop.

• Cell phones are bad designs anyway and date back to FM modulation tricks in the 1970's and now are mainly ways  to pay for foolish 3G investments.

• Bluetooth is awfully slow.

• Bluetooth is IrDA with the same mistakes of being too clever and treating IP as a third class protocol over a simulated serial path

Enough – I could go much further in dissecting and trashing Bluetooth but this dead horse is already leather.

The real point, however, is that Bluetooth is a bad design that has the advantage of making expansive claims that have no basis in reality. Demos will work very well and that is a bad sign since it means that that which is not the demo is given short shrift.

Bluetooth – why should anyone care except insofar that it is a way to annoy us.

Glenn Fleishman, journalist to the stars and WiFi enthusiast, takes up the cudgels against the comments from Dan Bricklin I ran about the inadequacies of BlueTooth.

We're in the early phases of Bluetooth which is now clearly a technology that will be here to stay. I used to be a Bluetooth denigrator, but having seen it survive some early nonsense (overhype by its backers, lack of hardware, lack of standards, a terrible 1.0 stack, etc.), it's got a lot of advantages.

Advantages over 802.11:

1. No set up "cost": ad hoc networking is and will continue to be a pain with Wi-Fi which is Ethernet sans fils (I mean without strings, but I might have said without parents). Bluetooth doesn't have setup and breakdown costs, which reduces power use, network traffic, and user complexity.

2. Bluetooth is low power: it will work in devices in which battery life is at a premium.

3. Bluetooth chip costs are plummeting: yes, of course, it's ridiculous that you pay $150 for a Bluetooth adapter, but, frankly, those are proofs of concept right now. In less than a year, you'll buy a Bluetooth-equipped printer that may cost less than $25 more than a similar non-BT model.

4. Another point on ad hoc networking: Wi-Fi *must have* a base station to allow more than two devices to talk to each P2P. This is an inherent limitation of the protocol. If you want to have 3 devices exchange data, you need extra hardware, or one of the devices must turn itself into an infrastructure node which requires special software (available for Mac OS 9, for instance, but not Mac OS X yet or possibly ever).

Some of this will change as discovery technology improves. Apple's great interest in offering discovery over several media (FireWire, wireless, wired, etc.) means that Bluetooth's discovery protocol could be less important.

Wi-Fi can "discover" other devices, but it doesn't know what to do then unless you join a network.

In a follow-up email, Glenn writes:

I thought Bluetooth was a lousy idea. However, they're going to make the chips so small soon that they'll be able to do some of the very cheap, very powerful concepts, like embed them in otherwise ridiculous devices (books, flexible drawings, e-paper), and make them super cheap and super low power.

Wi-Fi devices must conform to the certification process (otherwise, they're just plain 802.11b), so they have to have minimum power and distance compliance.

Jonathan Peterson responds with an email supporting what seems to me to be Bricklin's main problem with BlueTooth:

The real problem with bluetooth is that it isn't an open transport standard that anyone can build on. You want to build an atomic clock wristwatch that acts as a timeserver to keep all your devices in sync (a cool idea if I say so myself)? Not only will your users have to dick around with it incessantly to convince everything to take time information from it, but the manufacturer will have to apply for certification to 7 Layers AG, you they won�t be able to sell the product until it has been approved.

How long would current WWW technologies have taken to mature if Tim Bremmers-Lee et al had to submit everything for ISO approval before moving forward with implementation?

Which among other thoughts I blogged of course:

Kevin Marks writes:

I know you have trouble with numbers, so here's a handy guide to relative speeds in orders of magnitude

BlueTooth is 10 times faster than a 56k modem
USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth
802.11b is as fast as USB
10baseT is as fast as USB
100baseT is 10 times faster than 10baseT
FireWire is 4 times faster than 100baseT and 40 times faster than USB
Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times faster than 100baseT

BlueTooth was designed to replace the slow things on USB (mice, keyboards, serial ports - the oens tht run at the slow speed).

Halley runs Jeneane's transcription of RageBoy's comments on NPR about weblogs. Well put, RB.

Meanwhile, RB blogs some spam promising to enlarge his penis. A quick calculation shows that had I responded to every spam offer to enlarge my penis, my dick would currently be 2.36 miles (3.64 kilometers) long. Ok, ok, like all men, I rounded up my starting length. It'd really only be 2.357 miles long.