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May 9, 2005
Scott Matthews’ Bitty has a very cool bit of code that lets you embed one page in another, sort of like an iframe (in fact, it uses iframes) , but with better formatting and browser controls. For example, here’s what Joho’s RSS feed looks like as a Bitty window:
And here is IT Conversations:
And here’s a chiclet that launches a separate Bitty window. In this case, it launches the entire page, not the RSS feed:
It’s free.
MoveOn.org has announced the winner of its contest to create a Flash animation about W’s [Does anyone call him that any more? Or are we all now clear about which Pres. Bush we’re talking about?] Social Security plan. The winner, by Andy Menconi, is a pleasingly straightforward presentation that claims that there would be no crisis if SS tax weren’t capped at somewhere around $5,500/year.
I have a question: Are benefits also capped?
May 8, 2005
On Drinking a Cold One
The coldness you feel in your fingers
is your beer warming up.
Although I wrote that profundity at the little cafe near the end of the walk to the Natural Arch, I promise you that it is not the very very bad poem I mentioned in the previous post. That one has already been buried in a lead-lined container so that its smell won’t fell the local wildlife. [Technorati tags: poem DeepThoughts]
I’m actually writing this on the 9 hour flight home because I have been unable to get on line since yesterday afternoon. I realized that my need to be online roughly synchronizes with the Italian grad students’ need to step outside and smoke. Ah, one sweet lungful of bits is all I crave.
Anyway, yesterday was quite wonderful. After breakfast with Derrick, class started again at 10AM. We talked about Internet time (threads vs. moments), whether the experience of the Web will universalize or localize knowledge, and other topics like those. Have I mentioned how lucky I feel to be allowed to participation in such discussions?
At lunch time we went for one last meal at the same ol’ delicious restaurant (Hint: Real Italian restaurants make The Olive Garden look silly) where I learned that my participation was over; after lunch the students and Derrick were getting together to talk about what we had talked about. I felt bereft. I had only been with these people for 1.5 days, and yet I was sad beyond my expectation. Yes, they are all bright, but I don’t usually choke up leaving bright people. Because of some combination of their seriousness, openness, the connection of their beliefs to their personalities, and the integration of those beliefs with what matters in the world — also, they’re a fun and warm group — I felt I had come to know them in just a couple of days.
So, they went back to the meeting room and I went to my hotel to try to figure out what to see on the island. I would have gone to Marina Piccola (the small harbor) because it is less touristy, but, there were no buses in the afternoon from Anacapri to there. So, I took a bus to Capri. The person in the hotel had at first recommended that I walk from the Capri bus stop to Arco Naturale (all spellings approximate!), a natural geologic arch. But they said it was 2 hours each way. I pointed to my flab and explained I wasn’t up for a 4 hour walk. So they suggested the Giardini di Augusto.
To get there, you walk from the center of Capri, with its ridiculously swank stores, to the other side of the island, and then north for a bit. It’s only about ten minutes. The garden is nothing special when it comes to flowers, but the view is spectacular. You are on a promontory looking down some knee-trembling distance to the sea. To the left are the famous rock towers protruding from the sea. To the right is Marina Piccolo. On the map it looked like Marina Piccolo is about 5 minutes from the Garden. What the map doesn’t tell you is that town is down hundreds of feet. To get there, you can either plummet over the edge or walk down a set of switchbacks that would make a mule dizzy. I opted for neither.
So, I instead tried to find another site the hotelier had recommended, about ten minutes away. But along the way I saw signs for the Natural Arch and decided, what the heck, I can walk part of the way.
The streets start out by taking you up and then up some more, through residential areas that are only lovely and fascinating, not spectacular, inhabited by the locals serving in the aristocrats’ wonderland. As you walk further, you see actual agriculture, albeit on small plots. Along the way, I sat on a couple of benches, watching a cloud circle Capri’s highest peak, and, frankly, writing a poem too awful to share.
Soon the land becomes cliffs with conifers sticking up and nasturtia falling down. To get to the Natural Arch you have to decide to go down an indefinite series of steps. With a sigh I began and in only a few minutes was at the top of a natural rock arch that seemed about the size of the one in St. Louis. A more determined tourist would have gone down to its base, but I figured looking at up it wasn’t all that different from looking down on it. After a few minutes of staring I felt I had exhausted the experience, so I climbed back up and went to a cafe/restaurant (Trattoria le “Grottelle”) notched into the cliff along the path. You hear and smell a pine forest, but you are looking at the sea. I had an plain bottle of beer that was one of the best I ever drank.
Cafes at the end of walks are uniformly among my fondest memories. I don’t remember much about being in the Lake District in England with my wife-to-be 27 years ago, but I do remember the small tea shop at the end of a long walk through two green waves. Great tea. Great place to be in love.
The way back into Capri brought me through its Medieval District, a zone of twisty, hilly alleys (not all the same) that take you past the real stores of the village. I even found a hardware store.
Then I hung around the town center, shopping for little souvenirs for my children — “Here’s something for you to remember a trip you didn’t get to come on, kids! Enjoy!” — waiting to join Derrick for dinner with one of the deans of the University of Napoli, my host. Eight of us all together went to Paolino’s, an outdoor restaurant with a natural roof formed by the fruited branches of lemon trees. Somewhat spectacular. Much of the conversation was in Italian, of course, which I valiantly tried to understand, usually getting a few words and trying to figure out how, say, “New Pope,” “children,” “balcony” and “slap” could have been used in a sentence. It was a lovely evening.
This morning, I awoke at 6 to take a bus to the boat to the train to the train to the plane to the plane to the taxi home. Total travel time should be about 22 hours, if all goes well. But, unlike usual, I’m not complaining. I’m only sad to leave Italy — although I am jumping out of my skin as I write this two hours into the transatlantic flight, eager to see my wife and children — a place to which I have no historic or genetic connection but which always feels oddly like home. [Technorati tags: italy capri]
May 7, 2005
From the AP, about the founder of Craigs List:
Craig Newmark told Associated Press editors and writers in a bureau visit, his newest fascination is community journalism.
Newmark hopes to develop a pool of “talented amateurs” who could investigate scandals, cover politics and promote the most important and credible stories. Articles would be published on Internet sites ranging from Craigslist to individual Web logs, or blogs.
This is how stuff happens. In this case, it’s the classifieds eating the rest of the paper. Go, Craig! [Technorati tag: journalism]
Gen. Janis Karpinski has been busted to colonel but not because of Abu Ghraib. According to an article by Lee Worden, the Army’s report says specifically:
“Though Brig. Gen. Karpinski’s performance of duty was found to be seriously lacking,” the summary said, “the investigation team determined that no action or lack of action on her part contributed specifically to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”
So, somehow a woman has taken the fall in way that enables us to continue to deny systemic responsibility. If Kafka hadn’t died so young, he would have had the opportunity to die laughing.
I was thumbing through an Italian newspaper in my morning hunt for cognates when I realized that while the information in the paper is noise to me, I am fluent in the metadata. I know that this is a headline, that is an ad, this is a caption, that is a pointer to the page on which the article is continued, this is a table of contents, that is a byline.
Of course that’s predictable: The information in the paper is primarily linguistic while the metadata is typographic and positional. Nevertheless, my fluency in metadata extends to every newspaper in every language I’ve ever seen, from Chinese to Twi. Metadata: The new Esperanto. [Technorati tag: metadata]
Elaine Scarry, in On Beauty and Being Just, on the modern fear of acknowledging and discussing the beautiful:
Even if we could be persuaded that loooking at beautiful human faces and forms were harmful to ther persons we seem to be admiring, it is not clear why the entire world of natural and artifactual, physical and metaphysical should be turned away from. It seems that at most we should be obligated to give up the pleasure of looking at one another. [p. 62-63]
Another difficult day to capture, which are, of course, the best days to have. (And the worst.)
I wandered through the perfect little town of Anacapri as work was beginning. It is carefully kept, in the manner of towns that live by creating memories. The buildings are small and many of the shops are quotidian, although others sell tourist gimcracks and the artifacts of fashion. Every turn offers at least one loveliness: Yellow flowers poking through a gray bamboo wall, a gate that opens up the aromas of a garden, a modest church newly painted a brazen white.
After breakfast with the course professor, Derrick de Kerckhove, at our lovely little hotel, the Bella Vista, we went back into the town to a 100-year-old building recently redone as a meeting center. The eleven of us filled the main room, its windows facing the sea. The grad students are engaged in projects concerning the sociology and philosophy of the Internet, topics such as the nature of scientific knowledge on the Net, the semantics of the Web (which embraces but is not the same as the Semantic Web), the Web as a public sphere, and the nature of space and time on the Web. Over the course of nine hours, broken by three hours for lunch together and time apart, we talked about whether there is a morality implicit in the Web’s architecture, why we talk about the Web in spatial terms, how the Web is affecting the nature of the self, whether we should understand history by looking for patterns or emergent phenomena (or both or neither), and more.
We went straight from the meeting room to Capri, a ten-minute bus ride through hairpin turns, each of which caused me to hold my breath involuntariliy. (I am not a fan of heights, so I want credit for, during the break, walking up the remnant of the mountain on which Anacapri sits.) We wandered through the center of the town, which caters to a social class several rungs up from Anacapri’s visitors. I wasn’t terribly comfortable in what little I saw of Capri. It seemed to be an Audrey Hepburn sort of place, selling clothes I wouldn’t wear at prices I can’t afford. But, I don’t want to judge a town by its swankiest part. In any case, the 11 of us sat on the veranda of one of the central hotels, drinking champagne we’d bought to toast the death of the Broadcast Flag. We were gently chased out by a young waiter who said that he was glad we had cause to celebrate, but that he would get in trouble if he let us stay.
So, we came back to Anacapri, had dinner in the same family-run restaurant as before. Topics included: Favorite Tarantino films, Half Life 2 and Steve Johnson’s new book, why marijuana is still illegal, comparative attitudes towards homosexuality, why flirting is no longer a social norm in the US, why it’s worse to get a blow job than to start a war, and how scientific learning is being liberated by metadata that expresses its degree of credibility.
To my surprise, we then all took a midnight walk along a path that led us to a scenic (= terrifying) view down the mountain and across the sea and up to stars as close as I’ve ever seen them. [Technorati tag: capri]
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