Circumstantial Conspiracy

Chip recommends a long article by Ron Callari of The Albion Monitor (reprinted in Alternet.org) that provocatively lays out the circumstantial evidence that It’s the Oil, Stupid. Many fascinating tidbits loosely joined. For example, Zalmay Khalilzad, former consultant to Unocol, the oil company that was negotiating with the Taliban for a pipeline, “is the Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member responsible for setting up the post-Taliban ‘Pro-Unocal’ regime in Afghanistan.”

Monitor.Net is a stronghold of lefty conspiracy theories and outrage (“Olympic Torch Bearer Uniforms Made In Burma Sweatshops,” “Could Irradiated Mail Cause Super-Anthrax?”). Just because they’re lefty and conspiracy theories doesn’t mean they’re not true.

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Defendant Relationship Management

Rageboy points us to an article at Wired about profitless companies successfully suing disgruntled customers who go on line to say mean things.

And they say there’s no viable ecommerce business model!

(By the way, I know for a fact that RB ran the blog entry at least in part so he could use the word “fucknozzle” as in “Xybernaut chairman and CEO Edward Newman is a nasty, frightened little fucknozzle.”)

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Note to AKMA

First, you know my teasing you about your ecclesiastical circumlocution was entirely affectionate, don’t you? I did somehow manage to omit the part saying your blog entry containing the circumlocution is as generous of spirit as always.

Second, in today’s entry situating yourself among the various possible religio/theologico disciplines, you write:

I entered the “postmodern” discourses by way of biblical interpretation, in deed by way of literary interpretation.

Did you intend the “in deed” to be two separate words? Seems appropriate. Where can we read what you think about the possibility of reading the Bible without a faithful commitment (of some sort), i.e., the Bible as literature? Can it be done? (I’m curious in part because I’ve been attending a small Talmud class taught by a brilliant rabbi although I am at best agnostic about whether Scripture is divinely revealed.)

Third, I continue to read your book What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (Fortress Press), a model of clarity about one of the murkiest of topics. Totally enjoyable. (Amazon reports it only has one copy left, but more are on the way.)

Fourth, herewith my Proof of Objectivity: You suck. (In the future, I may just abbreviate this to “POO: ____” with selected insults where the blank is.)

Fifth, is this a blog entry or a public email?

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InformationWeek’s Three Topics

While going through a stack of InformationWeeks yesterday, it struck me that you could divide the magazine’s contents over the past few months into three evenly divided piles: The usual technology reports, security concerns, and how business is becoming more decentralized and more hyperlinked.

Yes, this is a backhanded response to Dvorak.

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Puzzling

A friend (you know who you are, Steve) points us to the Wonderlic 12-minute IQ test given to athletes to see if they’re smart enough to fall down instead of up. The site gives a 5-minute version and sample scores for various professions.

As with all such tests, I turn out to be a freaking genius … but only if given enough time. (Steven Wright: Everything is within walking distance … if you have enough time.)

So, who’s smarter, a brainiac who scores high on an IQ test sitting in a sealed room or a normal person who scores higher on the test in the same amount of time but with access to the Internet … and a way-smart buddy list?

An engineer I know likes to “stress test” prospective employees by asking them to come up, on the spot, with the algorithm for determing the angle between the hour and minute hand of a clock at any given time.

My attempt to distract him by reciting the theme song to “The Fllintstones” in the voice of Barbara Walters did not work.

There’s an entertaining article in this week’s New Yorker about Henry Hook and other puzzlemaniacs. One of them famously took on another puzzler in a timed test to fill in a crossword puzzle written for the occasion. The first guy won handily … even though the second guy was the author of the puzzle.

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From RageBoy with Tough Love

RB quotes himself to remind certain, ahem, people what the Cluetrain Manifesto was actually about. (The whole book is online for free, by the way.)

And don’t miss the sensible rave review of Gonzo Marketing at Smart Business.

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Dang Diddly Darn!

Please hie yourself over to AKMA’s site today if only to see how a man of the cloth manages to avoid saying “Blow me.”

On the other hand, AKMA gets to sign his email “Grace and peace” while I’m stuck with the polite-sounding grunt “Best.”

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Raymond: Cheap PCs Kill Microsoft

Eric Raymond, open source guru and lead guitarist of Guns n’ Linux, says that the asteroid that will kill the Microsoft dinosaur is a waaay cheap PC:

“When the price of a PC falls below $350, Microsoft will no longer be viable,” Raymond said in an interview with ZDNet UK. “The reason is that if you sell something below that price, you can’t afford to pay the Microsoft tax and still make money.” He said the best illustration of this is the handheld PC market, where Microsoft software powers relatively expensive devices, but has no presence in the lower-end market.

It seems to me that for a way-cheap PC to get over the perceived hurdle of being cut off from the mother’s teat of Microsoft, it will position itself as an application-specific device, and the obvious application is Internet connectivity, and the obvious company to pursue this is AOL. Bring on the Linux-based AOL PC’s! Where’s that RedHat-AOL deal when we need it?

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Download: Oscar Scorer (beta)

In my never ending quest to waste my time, I’ve written a utility for your Oscar party. People enter guesses about who’ll win the Oscars and then, as you click on the actual winners, it totals the score. (This would have been easy for someone else to do with a spreadsheet, but my irrational fear of rational numbers causes my hands to tremble past the point of typing whenever one of the beasts crawls across my desktop.)

This is beta software! If you’d like to try it, you can download a zipped file here. It’s about 800K, almost all of which is the Visual Basic DLL. (To uninstall it, you just erase the files you installed.)

Price of Admission: Your soul. (I.e., it’s freeware for Windows users.)

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