I think I know the answer to this, but, we’ll see:

If bicycles are so damn good, why is it that I can walk up hills that I can’t bike up?

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Islamicate writes interestingly about gay marriage: Separate marriage from legal unions, written within the context of Hobbes vs. Rosseau.

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You know that memo that Ashcroft refuses to release, without invoking executive privilege or any other legal justification? (As Jon Stewart said in commenting on this, “Dude, you have to invoke something!”) NPR has published it as a 2.7MB PDF file.

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I’m on my way today to NYC for a get-together discussing the “Accountable Net.” I’d tell you exactly what it means but it’s an idea that’s just emerging and no one knows exactly what shape it will take.

I can tell you, however, that when someone was talking to me about it the other day, he pronounced it quickly and I thought he was talking about “a Cannibal net,” a freudian mis-hearing that represents my early ill-founded wariness.

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My friend Bret Pettichord got the following spam. It makes me so proud! (sniff sniff):

Subject: She’s got natural you know what, fake thick lips and has starred in several movies
Date:Wed, 9 Jun 2004 01:04:19 -0400 (EDT)

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Does it help to try to keep these two senses of links distinct? If not, then I’m more confused than I

dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqodtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo dtgvBrgvvkejqtf0eqo Um, where is the post I posted here earlier today? Anyway, I thought I had psoted an advance notice, taken from Scott Rosenberg’s weblog, of a Salon dual-review of two books, one of which is Small Pieces. But that post doesn’t seem to be here. Maybe I fucked it up. But the article is up now, lead story on salon.com — an excerpt: But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and “network effect” growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors’ eyes were transfixed by the business’s convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became “advertisements for myself” for the masses. “Communities of interest” — devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates — formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid. It’s this story that’s addressed by “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” — an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. “Bamboozled at the Revolution” is trade-magazine reporting; “Small Pieces” is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger’s musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli’s chronicles of boardroom chaos. Sorry if I’ve blurred a couple of different senses of links that should be kept distinct. On one level, we posit links as connections between people – as Kevin and David and I had in mind in speaking of connotation, affinity, etc. These occur via voice, interpretive inferences from collections of links, etc.. I think Alex Golub zoomed in on this in his piece about SPLJ. What struck me then, and comes into play here now, is that this all lies in the area of interpreting links – the hermeneutics of links. There is also the rudimentary functionality of links – what Ward calls the grammar – having to do with the the simple on/off way they work and how we use them. On the level of the current state of the code, we either 1) link or 2) do not link. If there is a link, we either 1. click, or 2. do not click. (More accurately, we have a few other “options” – we can run the mouse over and get an idea of where we would go if we clicked, and we can click and open a new screen (addition), rather than replace what is on the screen with a completely different screenful’o’content (substitution). I do both of these quite a bit.)

BTW, this seems to come from the now-moribund Small Pieces Gang Blog

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None of us were called for jury duty this morning, so I’m off for three years.

Too bad, because I was in the mood to make the wicked feel my wrath.

But seriously: Mixed-feelings rule.

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Off to jury duty this morning.

I recognize it as a civic duty, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it. I’ve got a bunch of uncivic things I’d rather do instead (like live up to my obligations to my clients, work on a book, blog, play Zuma…).

I have mixed feelings, but please-don’t-choose-me seems to be beating it’d-be-fascinating by about 2:1.

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Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs) gave an informal lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. Dave Winer recorded it and has posted the mp3. It was, of course, a terrific session; I am a huge fan. Howard isn’t optimistic (“Who can be these days?”) but he is hopeful. He’s working on establishing an inter-disciplinary study of cooperation.

Two little things I learned, besides having my Big Picture adjusted: First, the phrase “critical thinking” is considered by large parts of the country as a code word for communism. Second, Howard said that in blogging, we’re treaching one another how to think critically. He didn’t elaborate, but I take him to mean that by commenting and counter-blogging, we’re learning how to put an argument together and how to take one apart, how to evaluate sources, etc. Nice insight.

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Scott Kirsner is blogging the Boston Ideas conference. (I blogged it yesterday, at the same url.) Music, stem cells, the brain, biological computers…

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They Work For You lets you see everything your MP has said since 2001. You can also search by topic, with space to add your own comments. (Here are two examples from Perfect.co.uk, as well as The Guardian‘s coverage.) . Waaaay cool. We need this here in the Colonies.

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