Mark “Too Much Time on His Hands” Dionne writes, with reference to the zip code map:

Once upon a time my zip code and my social security number both started with the same three digits.

How many people have exactly the same SS number and (nine digit) zip?

I’m no mathematician — as I’m about to prove — but aren’t the odds of having them match 1 in 999,999,999? With a US population of 300,000,000, wouldn’t the odds of there being a current match be about 0.3?

Now, since I’ve never gotten a fact or a simple mathematical equation right, please enjoy yourself explaining how wrong I’ve gone. It’s on me!

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Microsoft’s Michael Connolly writes about Microsoft Spaces’ policy on censoring content. In order to make the site “appropriate” – and there’s a world of values buried in that word! – Spaces is not allowing the use of certain words in the URL you choose, the name of your blog or the headlines you write. You can, however, use all the nasty words you want in the body of your blog. Fucking A!

I understand why Microsoft doesn’t want casual visitors to be bombarded with blogs with dirty names. And it’s not such an unreasonable restriction (although the language it’s couched in is scary), especially if you’re aiming at cutting down on the excessive profanity, not eliminating it entirely. Nevertheless, there are times when a blog entry just isn’t the same if you can’t give it the headline “Fuck Bush!!!!!” Believe me.

It might help if Microsoft started calling it by its real name. It’s not “filtering.” It’s “censoring.” Filtering is when a content’s properties are used to move it into one of various buckets. Censoring is when you kill content. In fact, fitering would be a better solution for Spaces: Let each of us set the degree of profanity we’re willing to tolerate, and filter out the headlines and blog titles that fail the test.

Filter, don’t censor.

[I got to this via Scoble who by honestly criticizing Microsoft makes Microsoft look good.]

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Scott Kirsner points to the loads of creativity the Boston area is applying to the TV tech. (The link will break soon.) Of special interest:

Jeremy Allaire’s new company.
In the mid-1990s, Allaire’s first company, Allaire Corp., helped to simplify the process of building and maintaining a website. Last year, Allaire joined the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst as technologist-in-residence. Now, he’s starting a company with backing from General Catalyst. He won’t say much, but he’s interested in what he calls the democratization of video. “We have this situation where the number of people who can produce video programming is poised to explode, with inexpensive digital cameras and editing tools, and the existing distribution systems can’t support it,” he says. “You can’t have 100,000 people producing shows for cable television. The only thing that can support it is the Internet.” We’re all familiar with the Internet of text. Coming soon: the Internet of video.

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The beta of QuackTrack, from the folks at BlogShares, says it’s

The world’s largest blog index
330,000 links to 85,000 blogs in a thousand categories

It may be an excellent site (it was running very slow this morning) but they really ought to check the numbers at technorati (4,900,199), before making such claims. [Thanks to Troy Worman for the link.]

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I’d like to join in the commentary about MSN spaces, but two things keep me from getting past the home page.

First, I’d have to open a Passport account to join. Once Microsoft dropped its attempt to make Passport a worldwide digital ID standard I lost my rational reasons for refusing to participate. Now all I have are my irrational reasons, but they seem to be doing the trick.

Second, I’m uncomfortable with the imagery it uses on its home page.

Pretty girls making kissy-face? Please!

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This map by Ben Fry is cooler than it seems at first. Type z to toggle zoom. Type in a zip code. Backspace to delete numbers. Hold down the shift key and type in new numbers. Oooh! The quantitative display of numbers! Or the qualitative display of quantitative numbers. Anyway: Ooooh, zip codes!

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ToTheSource has sent out a brief essay by Dinesh D’Souza that gives some insight into the conservative majority’s point of view. I find myself agreeing with much of it, but then feel dismay and disappointment as D’Souza swerves, betraying a contempt for those with whom he disagrees. (I can’t find the essay online — what’s up with that, ToTheSource?)

He quickly traces the historical/philosophical roots of the notion that morality is grounded in following one’s inner voice. In his narrative, our inner voice gets increasingly removed from the larger, outer voice:

Augustine contends that God is the lamp that illuminates the inner soul. Rousseau broke with Augustine by severing this connection between the inner voice and any external authority. For Rousseau the inner voice is the sovereign and final authority.

This is the moral code that we have inherited today…

D’Souza avoids the easy rant against the “imperial self” (although the term gives away his attitude towards it):

…We are wrong to dismiss this as a mere affirmation of selfishness, a rejection of morality. It is a massive shift in the source of morality — away from the external order, toward the inner self. Nor should the new code be understood as relativism or nihilism. It does not affirm that “anything goes.,” It insists that the inner voice is morally authoritative and should be followed without question.

Yes, it isn’t “anything goes,” but the imperial self is still non-moral. Imagine that when we’re born, we “imprint” on the third person we see and believe that morality consists in being true to #3. That’s not “Anything goes, but it’s not moral. So, why is doing whatever #1 says any more moral than doing what the random #3 says? But D’Souza doesn’t draw that conclusion. Instead, he proffers what at first sounds like respect for this alternative view of morality:

I do not believe that this new ethic of the Imperial Self can be completely uprooted, as some people who bemoan the decline of the old moral consensus would like to do. But I am also concerned with the moral danger of conceding final moral authority to the Imperial Self. Human nature is flawed and the “voice within” is sometimes unreliable and sometimes wrong. As Immanuel Kant warned, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Perhaps a more practical goal is to contain, and perhaps to roll back, some of the excesses of the new ethic of authenticity. This involves a recovered sense of the moral sources that continue to inform our moral self-understanding, sources that can be found in our religious and ethical traditions but which have disappeared from our public debate. The urgent task at hand is to recognize the power of the new ethic of authenticity while steering it toward something higher, to ennoble the self by directing it toward the good.

There’s a bunch of signs and signals going on here. On the one hand, we have the imperial selves. D’Souza has made it clear earlier in the article who they are, for the imperial self:

…was first adopted by intellectuals and artists in England, France, and the United States. These elite groups, of the kind that dominated the Parisian café, the Bloomsbury society in England, and Greenwich Village in the United States, have been living according to the bohemian code for a long time. What changed in the 1960s is that these values, once confined to small enclaves in society, now became part of the social mainstream.

Then we have the traditionalists who “bemoan” the decline of the “old moral consensus.” Think: The preaching Christians who chastise and berate on the channels you skip over. D’Souza is distancing himself from them.

Then there are the moderns like D’Souza who recognize that ideas have histories and who adapt to modern practicalities. These moderns recognize that you can’t reform hippies; they’re always going to insist on “doing their own thing.” They’re too far gone to ever become truly moral the way D’Souza is. The best you can do is try to redirect the inner light to better moral goals.

There’s arrogance there. It’s one thing to think that following one’s inner light is only accidentally moral — like happening to imprint on a moral #3 — and another to recommend dealing with those who hold such a view as if they were children.

And there’s also some pernicious line-drawing by which only those who believe in a particular “external moral order” get to count as moral:

One can no longer make a public appeal to the external moral code. The Clinton sex scandals were clear proof of this: some Americans considered his actions morally scandalous, but others thought it was no big deal.

Say wha’? Many of us who thought that Clinton’s adulterous blow jobs and lies about said blow jobs were not enough of a big deal to impeach him but still think adultery and lying are morally wrong. Thinking that MonicaGate was blown out of proportion (so to speak) by a right wing that was lying in wait doesn’t mean that one forsaken all external moral codes.

In fact, here surfaces the danger of D’Souza’s view: External moral codes disagree in theory and in application. With the Clinton example, D’Souza reveals that he’s playing a game of shirts vs. skins in which those who do not believe in a particular moral code are bohemian hippies who immorally follow their own “inner light.” But the real game is that we have skins of many colors and shirts of many stripes that desperately need to figure out how to share a planet. That can’t be done with either of the positions D’Souza gives us: Follow your inner lighters can’t do it because they have no way to mediate disputes with inner lights that point elsewhere. Eternal moral coders can’t do it unless they accept that they don’t have a lock on what that their external authority (um, G-d) says.

D’Souza’s compromise is phony. Doing an end run around someone’s immorality does morality a disservice.

By the way, D’Souza’s notion that our “religious and ethical traditions” have “disappeared from our public debate” is a hoot. Was D’Souza away during the recent election year?

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Adam Kalsey of Pheedo volunteered to help me through my recent MovableType upgrade spasm. Comments were showing up in the “pending approval” pile even though I’d configured MT to not require moderation. He talked me through installing the upgrade to MT-Blacklist (Jay Allen’s commentspam-fightin’ superhero). When that didn’t do the trick, Adam figured out that although I’d renamed the old MT-Blacklist files, I hadn’t renamed the extensions; MT was still loading mt_blacklist_old.pl because it loads anything with a .pl extension. Thus, MT was using a version of Blacklist that didn’t know about moderation, screwing up MT. I deleted the old Blacklist files and now my blog accepts comments.

Thank you, Adam, for your time and your expertise. And it was great to have a chance to talk with you outside of a textbox.

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UPDATE: Comments are not down. Comments work. If you find they don’t, please let me know: evident.com is the domain and self is the address.

Progress, but here’s the latest problem: You can enter a comment. The system acts like everything is ok. But your comment doesn’t show up . I do see it in the editing interface, though. Any thoughts? If so, you’ll have to email them to me: [email protected].

Comments are down because I upgraded to MovableType 3.1 and apparently I have MTArchive set to an undisclosed location. I can’t find where the variable is set. If you know, could you please send email to [email protected]. Thanks.

Nope. The archive path is right. The problem is that all of the comments now have “.static” appended to their name. I’d still be happy to have your email-ed help, though…

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You don’t have to be Christian to get a kick out of Minor Santa, an MP3 with vocals by O’Reilly’s Sarah Winge. All you have to be is really tired of the Top Ten Yuletide loop echoing in every mall and many of our skulls. It was recorded in ’96 but I just heard it; we Jews aren’t as up on the Christmas ditties as we should be…

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