Possibly because of the “Pray for Cynicism” banner adorning the bottom of my blog, Mark Dionne sends along a link to Pray for Reason, a site that wants us to win the war of prayers against those who are praying for Bush’s reelection. (More here…)

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Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of
Microsoft:

On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to
index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would
just happen. The voracious spider wouldn’t stop there, though. The next
piece of low-hanging fruit would be the Web pages you visit. These too would
be stored, indexed, and made searchable. More ambitiously, the spider would
record all your screen activity along with the underlying event streams.
…

Interesting idea! And couldn’t we implement enough of this to test its usefulness pretty quickly? After all, macro programs such as ActiveWords already watch our every click and stroke. I believe ActiveWords already keeps a history. Of course, that wouldn’t tell us the precise state of, say, the word processing document when we jumped over to our browser window and typed in an URL, but it might still be useful.

When I say “might,” I mean it. I’m not at all sure I’d actually use
such a system. It might feel invasive and it might have to operate at such a low
level that it introduces deep-seated instability. More worrisome, I tend to be so distracted in my work patterns
that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not be a good way of
searching for the threads of activity.

Behavior obviously contains clues
about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the
clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a
word processing document, there’s a chance the first inspired me to write
something in the document, although it’s also possible that I got bored
reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the
Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

A Semantic Behavior Index could be better at inferring third-party intent
from behavior than we humans are, although it’s hard to see it getting
better at interpreting my behavior than I am. But it doesn’t have to be that
good to be useful. The question is, would it be useful to have a searchable
table like the following:

Would something roughly like this be feasible? Worth indexing? Would it be useful without that fourth column, since that’ll take up a lot of HD space? Or would it all be nothing more than noise and an invitation to come invade our privacy?

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Here’s a feature I’d like in a mail client: Wait for Message (WFM).

Sometimes I’m expecting a message from someone that I want to make sure doesn’t get washed down the spam drain. So, I’d like to specify an address or keywords and have my mail client notify me when it arrives. After I acknowledge receipt of the message, by default it removes the search string from the WFM list. This is like a white list that plays favorites.

I tried building this in VBA for Outlook but succeeded only in creating a time-space loop that dims lights all across our neighborhood, although it actually shouldn’t be very hard to do. (It obviously gets more complex for those who use server-based spam filters.) Do any XP clients currently do this?

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Gary Lawrence Murphy has a thoughtful and funny response to my piece (comments here) on why I’m not a pacifist any more. An excerpt:

…Dr. Who, on detonating a bomb in an evil tyrant’s lair, was asked by his companions why he’d left his pacifism in this case. He replied, “Sometimes you just have to blow them up” — Krishna too tells Arajuna that some battles are justified, because yes, sometimes there is a complexity that goes beyond the way we wish the world was going.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that human beings respond primarily to connectionist values, that is, their behaviour is determined more by the history of reinforced patterns stored in the associative computing device in their biology than by those tricks of logic and sense we’ve painfully taught that biology to do. It is a testament to our ability as a creature that we have evolved any ethics or culture at all, so we can hardly expect perfection.

We should instead cheer if we see even the slightest moral reserve…

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From Bob Morris writes in response to my newsletter article on how VoIP works:

A Dedham MA provider, www.rnktel.com sells prepaid VoIP which is $.01/minute to most places in the world (Latin America being the major exception, where it is (a)poor connections and (b)$.06 and up). On their web site you give your credit card and get $5, $10, or $20 worth of billing. They send you a pin number by email.

In their case, you call an access number in the 781 area or one in RI. No one I know has reported finding $.01 service in other parts of the country though. The complete price list is on their web site.

On weekends it can be difficult to get to their access number. Clearly this is not an issue for modem-based services such as you described.

I program their access number in one button, my pin in another, and a few of my regular overseas callees in others. In fact, because I have a two-line phone, I have two pins running at any one time and can set up 3-way conference calls. (Tricky when my collaborator in Australia and I need to talk to our colleague in Germany. Somebody is up a wee bit late or a wee bit early….).

The setup time while your phone dials all those numbers is a bit of a nuisance compared to just dialing the long distance number, but we all need to slow down our telecomm lives anyway.

I also have the numbers in my fax memory buttons. So we are talking about sending faxes for about $.01-$.02/page anywhere in the world.

Plus, these pin numbers also help you control weight. Here’s how, in the actual words of my Taiwanese graduate student (who is so trim that I can’t imagine how she came to this): “Every time I go into MacDonalds and start to order fries, I think to myself: ‘Wow, if I don’t buy these fries I can talk to my parents for an hour and a half on the savings!’ ”

No need to thank me for the cost savings. All part of the JOHO service… (PS: Bob has no connection with the service he’s recommending.)

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Michael O’Connor Clarke is looking for advice on how to handle a racist hosting service. I don’t know what to tell him. If you do, please do so, and then let the rest of us know. Thanks.

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Sign a petition asking The Boss to play a concert on September 1 with proceeds going to defeat Bush. The organizer, Andrew Rasiej, has already put Giants Stadium on hold for that day.

Hell, let’s draft Bruce for VP…

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I received a mail-merged message from a manager at the Egloos Korean weblog service (from OnNet) asking me to send a message congratulating them on their first year anniversary. They’d post it on their site. In return, “I expect this opportunity can extend to a further discussion for development of cooperative relationship between us.” Ah, the gentle scent of remuneration.

I don’t know much (= anything) about Egloo. Should I be congratulating them in public?

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I had a long talk with Timothy Falconer yesterday about this, that and the other thing. I’d interviewed him for an article for Wired a few months ago; he’s doing some very interesting things with photos and the Semantic Web. This morning he blogs:

Yesterday I developed my first “wet-lab” photographic print in more than twenty-five years. What amazes me most is that nearly nothing about it has changed in all that time. The chemicals and equipment all look and work the same, the brand names are the same, the process is the same. This is both surprising and consoling, given that my chosen field (computer software) usually changes every 25 days, never mind years.

I don’t know nothing about photography, but aren’t the days of wet labs numbered, except for tiny specialty jobs? Won’t digital cameras get to the point in, say, ten years where there is simply no advantage to film cameras? Or will photophiles be able to make the quality case that analog audiophiles successfully make now? (Keep in mind that you’re talking to someone who sets the audio quality for his MP3s to “Dixie Cup and String.”)

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Lavasoft’s Ad-aware program is one of many that lacks the extra line of programming code that would change its status report from “One new objects” to “One new object.” Ad-aware is excellent and free, so I don’t mean to carp. I only raise this because it brought to mind the following question:

Why in English is it “zero objects have been found” instead of “zero object has been found”? What makes zero plural? Why can’t we have the flexibility accorded to “no” as in “No objects have been found” or “No object has been found”?

Equal right(s) for zero!

(Need I mention that the rigorous and regular application of the combination of Ad-aware, HijackThis, McAfee, WinPatrol and Spybot is failing to keep my dughter’s XP system free of spyware and malware?)

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