The new issue of David Isenberg’s newsletter is out, and it’s as rich as usual. Top topics in this issue are:

1. Notes from the Intel Capital CEO Summit: How Intel has earned David’s respect

2. David Dorman’s Multiple Personality Disorder: A brillilant analysis of the Nethead vs. Bellhead personalities of AT&T’s CEO.

3. Four Scenarios for “The Internet Five Years Out”: Four ways the “last mile” problem will be solved (or, ulp, not). (Open Spectrum isn’t one of them.)

Eventually, David will post the issue here. But you really ought to subscribe. It’s free (as in beer, speech and thought).

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Scott Rosenberg replies to my reply to his wonderful appreciation of JS Mill. I’d said that I find Mill’s rationalism overly optimistic. Scott writes:

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us – steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways – to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals

Yup.

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If you just miss seeing a deer, it’s not a big deal because another one will be along in 20 minutes.

Whatever size black bear you come upon, there is a larger one hidden in the brush behind it, watching its back.

Mosquitoes won’t bite you if you walk confidently with your eyes straight ahead.

Bees know exactly what you mean when you give them the finger.

You can estimate the distance of a lightning strike by timing how long it takes after the sound of thunder for you to pull the pillow over your head.

Spiders are male mosquitoes.

Lightning never strikes the same person twice.

Turtles bury themselves in the mud all winter to survive the freezing cold. Robins do too, but much less successfully.

The sound bullfrogs make is a form of boasting. In most cases, it’s totally baseless.

The problem with swimming within half an hour of eating isn’t that you may cramp but that your center of gravity is moveable, causing an unappealing lopiness in your breast stroke.

Lightning never strikes the same person twice.

If you spot a snake anywhere, it could show up on any contiguous piece of land, indefinitely.

All snakes are poisonous.

The 60-cycle thrum of large herds of migrating hummingbirds makes conversation impossible for three days in Savannah Georgia and drives several citizens mad annually.

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People have been spammed by the Dean campaign. Sort of. This is from the executive summary at spamvertized.org:

This spam bubbled up in mid August, 2003. The Dean Campaign may have outsourced an email campaign to Emailresults.net, based on claims by Emailresults.net that the campaign would be opt-in. There was some sort of due diligence failure on the part of the Dean campaign, as a google search on “emailresults.net” shows numerous references to their propensity for spamming on the first two pages of search results.

After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day.

You want perfection? Get another candidate. And you’ll want to give up on the Net also. But from what I can see, the campaign reacted admirably to its gaffe.

The fun part is watching the slashdot discussion try to figure out what “net savvy” means. E.g., written sarcastically: “I will only vote for people who can configure a Cisco router. That way, I am assured that their political stances, and agendas coincide with mine.”

In a semi-related item, the Dean campaign blog quotes from an article about Dean by Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

Every time the press pooh-poohs his chances, every time they gloat over some trivial misstatement, every time they make fun of Vermont and describe his supporters as “Birkenstocked” “Deanyboppers,” I think about the free ride the media give Bush, who says more false and foolish things in an afternoon than Dean has said in a lifetime…

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Cory asks:

Have you had your creativity and expression crushed by intellecutal property law? Did you have a business, a work of art, a blog entry or some other form of endeavor that was squashed by the threat or reality of a trademark, copyright or patent suit?

Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain are putting together a public-education campaign to disseminate IP law horror-stories to help people understand what the expansion of copyright and related doctrines has cost us all. They want your stories for the collection.

We’d like to hear stories from artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, librarians – or anyone with a personal story involving intellectual property law…

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You can see so much of Doc in the rich photograph of his mom.

You’re both in our thoughts, Doc.

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For the past couple of years, I keep coming back to edges: how few of them there are in the world, how digital technology is founded on bits that are nothing but edges, how the online world overcomes the edginess of the technology that enables it, and how messiness is an ontological property: Reality is a mess.

And then you come to coloring books that train kids to see the world as edges to be filled in. Put down your crayons, kids. I have bad news: There are no outlines in the world, only swaths of color that are themselves fractally multi-hued.

Every edge has another edge but only if we look for it. When we die, we take our edges with us.

I think we can safely acknowledge that Rembrandt was a pretty fair sketcher. I assume that he began a painting by sketching its outline on the canvas. Nevertheless, his paintings aren’t outlines filled in. The colors are contiguous and, because he’s freaking Rembrandt, continuous. The outline underneath resulted from an edge-finding heuristic which then became a heuristic for its own erasure.

This is what we do: find an edge and then smudge it because we know continuity is more real than distinction.

In other words: Which came first, the fill-in or the edge?

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According to the NY Times today, the outage was caused by a “reversal of the power flow”: “huge amounts of electricity that had been moving east over the Great Lakes …was suddenly sucked back,” overloading power lines and causing power plants to disconnect themselves. “Dozens of power lines and about 100 power plants” were affected.

Your question this morning is: How long did it take for these 100 power plants to go off line? Some facts that may help you: Light travels at something like 188,000 miles per second. The blackout affected 9,300 square miles.

Answers that are within an order of magnitude will be considered correct. Winners will receive permission to skip reading a weblog of their choice for one week.

Use your mouse to select the seemingly blank space between the two X’s below to see the answer.

X ——- 5 minutes ——- X

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Paul Philp writes about how an outage can show you the difference between a machine and a network.

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Thanks to BoingBoing for the link to this site aggregating photos of NYC without power.

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