Massachusetts lawmakers postponed a vote that could have put gay marriage up for popular vote in 2008 ballot, which likely means the proposed amendment is dead.

While I’m not just certain that allowing gay marriage is the right thing to do, I’m overjoyed about it, I understand that there’s an argument for putting it up for a vote. But I’m happy that my state today decided not to put it on the ballot, and not only because it means my position won’t be overturned in the near future.

First, in our system, we allow the judicial system to recognize and preserve rights against the will of a majority of voters. This seems to me to be one of those rights.

Second—and I understand that this will be completely unconvincing to those who think gay marriage is an abomination—although I think an anti-gay marriage amendment would fail if put to a popular vote in Massachusetts, having to wait two years for the outcome of an election would put some families under terrible pressure.

It may take a decade or two or even three, but I do believe in my heart that eventually the rest of the country will catch up to Massachusetts… [Tags: gay_marriage massachusetts rights politics]

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I’ve been using Tab Catalog for a while, but it seems to have gotten better. I’m not sure if that’s because the Firefox 2.0 version was upgraded or because somehow my preferences got switched, but I’m enjoying it a lot in either case.

Tab Catalog shows thumbnails of the pages in your tab bar. So rather than having to rely on the truncated names in the tabs, you can go for the gestalt. Since I often have twenty or thirty tabs, being able to see the pages themselves is very helpful. Very cool. And free, of course.

Thank you, Shimoda Hiroshi. [Tags: tab_catalog firefox utilities tabs]

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The Democrats are (smartly) committed to a 100 hours of introducing legislation that defines them as a party, little things such as raising the minimum wage from Debtors Prison level to full Squalor.

But after six years of watching the worst president in our lifetime strut his time upon the stage, don’t you think the Democrats are entitled to a little fun? In those first 100 hours, what legislation could the Democrats pass just for the pure hell of it? Require Bush to deliver the State of the Union topless so we can all see how amazingly buff he’s gotten on our watch? Hold hearings, complete with subpoened witnesses, charts and graphs, to determine which is worse, war or blow jobs? Trade in all presidential limousines for Priuses (Prii?)? Replace the opening prayer at Congress with a Moment of Gloating?

It’s been a long six years… [Tags: doep puzzle politics]

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I’m interviewing Paul Graham tonight as part of my perpetually intermittent Web of Ideas discussions at the Berkman Center. (Yes, you’re invited. It’s at 7pm and we serve pizza, just in case Paul Freaking Graham isn’t enough of an enticement for you! [map.])

We’re going to be talking about his Taste for Makers article. Here are some of the issues I think I want to talk with him about:

I think the article isn’t so much about the role of taste as about what makes good design. Some of the elements he lists have directly to do with taste and beauty. Some are just good design principles. But I want to focus on simplicity, which Paul thinks is a virtue shared by art, science and engineering.

First, I’m unconvinced about the importance of simplicity. Sure, simplicity is often good in design, but that’s sometimes because we define “simple” as “what is necessary,” so sometimes our preference for simplicity works out to a tautological desire to exclude what doesn’t need to be included.

Also, simplicity is the current fashion. It’s not clear to me that it’s a permanent design principle. I’m not convinced that a Bronzino or Van Eyck would be better if we got rid of that damn detail. Nor am I convinced that the Parthenon would look better if we filled in the flutes in the columns or that Chrysler building is ruined by all that damn Art Deco trim.

Perhaps we’re at a point where art and science and programming diverge. Science (often) aims at finding the simplicity behind the apparent complexity of the universe. Engineering usually aims at efficient solutions, excluding the extraneous which introduces cost and more paths to failure. Art doesn’t always aim at simplicity. It just as frequently tries to expose the complexity of what looked simple. Thus, perhaps the union of art, science and engineering maintained by Paul’s essay isn’t fundamental, although there are certainly historical periods in which they align.

Finally, I think this raises the metaphysical roots of Paul’s argument. What is it about the universe that puts simplicity, taste and beauty at the root of the order we find in science and the order we construct in engineering? Were the Greeks right in thinking that the world is fundamentally orderly and that therefore knowledge and beauty were deeply aligned?

So, come on to the Berkman Center tonight. Despite this blog post, we’ll have plenty of time for open discussion with the awesomely talented programmer, painter, enterpreneur and writer, Paul Freaking Graham. [Tags: paul_graham berkman design beauty]

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Brazil is on the verge of requiring everyone to log onto the Net with their social security number.

This does for free speech what requiring people to sign every stupid statement they ever made would do. [Tags: brazil digital_rights anonymity]

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On an election day that will determine America’s course, CNN just sent out a news alert under the title “Breaking News” to let me know that Britney is divorcing K-Fed. [Tags: journalism media]

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Lisa Williams is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk. The room is packed. Dan Gillmor introduces her. (She generously credits the Berkman Center with supporting her and helping her develop her ideas.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing. It sounds choppy only because of the way I’m taking these notes.]

Dan says that he’s proud to be associated with Lisa’s PlaceBlogger.com project. (Lisa runs H20Town.info, a place-blog for Watertown, MA.) PlaceBlogger began with Lisa betting Jay Rosen that she could find 1,000 placeblogs. So far, she’s found 700. A placeblog “is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time.” It’s about the “lived experience” of a site. “It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism.” (She says there are almost 20,000 incorporated locations, so 1,000 would be 5%.)

PlaceBlogger.com (designed by Bryght) helps people discover sites that talk about their area. It’ll let you download an OPML llist of sites so you don’t have to come back. Among the goals, in addition to the helping people find placeblogs: Help drive a geotagging standard and encourage Drupal development. Also, it will provide data for answering the Big Questions about the role of citizen journalism.

Lisa says her biggest obstacle is “personal doubt.” She sometimes thinks it’s the “stupidest idea” she’s ever had. But, she says, she forces herself to get over it. [It is not a stupid idea, Lisa.] She shows a pre-alpha aggregation of local stories about election day.

Future developments: Live mapping. Aggregating tagged material from the larger Web. Letting users have personal views.

Early on while doing H20Town she had the insight that almost all “small towns are cities are comic operas with property taxes.”

PlaceBlogger only gives headlines and the first 200 characters of the post in order to move readers out of PlaceBlogger and to the placeblogs. (The headlines and characters come from the blogs’ RSS feeds.)

Most of the placeblogs, she says, are on the borders of cities, communities of 25-70K, perhaps because they’re in a media “shadow.” She’s done some analysis and projection that shows that if placeblogs increase at the current rate, by 2010, they’d cover 102M people, some percentage of which would be readers. She believes you need consistent contributions by a small group of dedicated people to make more casual contributions possible. (Baristanet is an exception; it has lots of consistent contributors, she says.) That’s good because you can do a lot with a little.

She says people should beware the Wizard of Oz syndrome, in which one is awed by what turns out to be just a little man behind a curtain.

Next steps, she says, include getting placeblogs on newspaper sites, going through Petersen Guide to colleges because college towns tend to have lots of placeblogs, sweeping the counties for blogs, and hoping that people will identify their placeblogs. [Real estate sites also should be interested in pointing people at PlaceBlogs.]

Challenges to placeblogs: Lots of placeblogs have relatively small readerships because they’re local, which means they don’t do well with advertisers.

Q: When will PlaceBlogger be visitable?
A: Later on this evening you’ll be able to apply to see the alpha. I’m particularly interested in people using RSS aggregators to read it to see if it breaks.

Q: (Ethanz) In my community, there’s a large set of placeblogs that are hateful and useless. How are you going to put context around such posts?
A: The left column on the home page is my blog where I can provide context. In the center, the “recent popular content” provides a different type of filtering.

Q: Do you do any filtering? Do you accept all placeblogs?
A: I don’t want to aggregate political blogs that talk about national issues because they’re too easy to find. I haven’t found any porn placeblogs or any KKK placeblogs. I’d take it on a case by case basis.

Q: What’s your vision for this? That people will find local blogs or that people will browse blogs around the nation? Or both? Or neither?
A: I’m a terrible predictor of what people will want.

[Tags: lisa_williams citizen_journalism journalism media berkman placeblogger watertown]

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My father-in-law, Marvin Geller, has a good idea for Deval Patrick, assuming (knock wood) that Patrick wins the governorship tonight. MG suggests that Patrick invite Grace Ross, the terrific Green Rainbow party candidate, to his acceptance event, and have her speak first. After she concedes, he should thank her “for her intelligent contribution to the debates and indicate that he would like to have her have a job in his administration.”

Cool idea. [Tags: politics deval_patrick]

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Allison Fine at Personal Democracy Forum rounds up some of the scarier and more ridiculous problems with the current generation of electronic voting machines, including the fact that J. Alex Halderman writes:

The AccuVote TS machines — all of them — really can be opened by a key that is widely used for hotel mini-bars.

Ulp.

(I’m doing poll watching tomorrow.) [Tags: democracy voting_machines politics allison_fine ]

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I’m going to talk with Paul Graham as part of the intermittent Web of Ideas series at the Berkman Center this Wednesday evening at 7pm. You’re invited. And we serve pizza.

Paul Graham is a software guru, entrepreneur, essayist and painter. Inhis essay, “Taste for Makers,” Paul argues that successful design, from math to software to painting, relies on the same aesthetic principles. Taste is therefore not a matter of subjectively appreciating fine works but is a required capability for creating great software. But is taste as timeless as Paul suggests? Do the design principles Paul points to result from aesthetic or functional characteristics? And why should we think that the visual and the programmatic, the artistic and the functional, the physical and the virtual might all be beautiful in similar ways?

I’ll interview Paul for a while and then it will be open discussion. Paul is deeply knowledgeable and thoughtful, so this ought to be fun. (Note: The Berkman Center moved around the corner this year. It’s now at 23 Everett St in Cambridge. [map]) [Tags: berkman paul_graham web_of_ideas]

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