The US Food and Drug Administration has decided tentatively that meat and milk from cloned animals are the same as from normal animals, so it is not going to require those products to carry special labels.

Too bad.

It’s not that I think cloned food is dangerous. I’m not a scientist, but I believe them, and from what I can see—and, I haven’t looked into this at all, so the following opinion is worth less than the time it’s taking you to read it—cloned food is safe. But that’s not the point. I’d still like the labels to note that the animals were cloned because more metadata is always good. If people don’t want to eat clones for whatever reason, they should be enabled to make that choice. In fact, we’d be better off with full access to the information about what we’re purchasing. Where was the cow raised? What was it fed? What was its weight? What was its body fat ratio? How old was it? Did it get to roam free? Did it have a sweet smile? What was its sign? We’re better off being able to access it all, no matter how farfetched.

But, because of the nature of non-digital reality, taking up label space with a notice that the meat is cloned would itself be metadata indicating that the government thinks such information is worth noting. Metadata in the physical world is a zero sum game.

And that means not only is it true that (as Clay Shirky says) “metadata are worldview,” physical labels are politics. We are forced to make value-driven decisions by the constraints of the physical (labels take up valuable space), the biological (human eyes require fonts to be sized above a certain minimum) and the economic (it is not feasible to attach an almanac of information to every chicken wing). But online, all those limit go away…

…except for the economic. It would be expensive to do a cholesterol count for every slaughtered cow (assuming that cows have cholesterol) simply to gather information that so far nobody cares about, but there’s plenty of information that we’re gathering anyway or for which there is predictable interest—e.g., cloning—that we could make available online (via a unique identifier for each slab of flesh). There would still be politics in the decision about which information to put into the extended set, but it would be a more inclusive, bigger tent, allowing customers to decide according to their own cockamamie values.

And isn’t cockamamie consumerism what democracy is all about? [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy metadata clay_shirky cloning ]

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I know my blogroll is suffering from link rot, so during this holiday interstice, I decided I’d finally get around to fixing it up. But first, to make it super-easy, I decided to put it into an iframe, an html widget that pulls in content from another file. That way I could simply edit a simple file and do so simply, without having to go into the Movable Type template editor. (Yes, I looked at one of the MT plugins, but it requires MT v3.3, and upgrading to v3.2 is a lot like installing 3.3, which I am certain I will screw up.)

So, today I’ve spent several simple hours trying to figure out how to get an iframe to size to its contents. It’s more complex than I can handle. PartMost of the problem is my own vagueness about how the object model works. For example, in the many solutions I found via Google, I’m never quite sure whether the code goes in the container document or the contents document. So, I try both. Every possible freaking variation. Some of the problem is that the object model is so rich with possibilities. Some of the problem is that there are differences among the browsers, so you first have to ask politely (and programmatically) which browser is in use and then provide the appropriate function. And part of it is that it’s too damn hard.

So, I’m giving up for now. And, believe it or not, I’m consoling myself by going back to the chief object of frustration in my life: MythTV.

I just love the holidays, don’t you? [Tags: iframe holidays html javascript I_am_an_idiot reasons_to_drink]

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Computer Gaming World after many years has dropped its numeric reviews. Instead it reviews in prose. But, probably in response to reader complaints, it has recently re-introduced numeric reviews…just not its own. Reviews now include the numeric reviews given by other other publications. Thus does CGW climb the meta-tree, aggregating information even from competitors. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous metabusiness reviews computer_gaming_world ]

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Discover magazine in its year-end round up reports on an experiment done by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins (covered here in New Scientist) in which he gave 36 patients either psilocybin or Ritalin. They were told they’d be getting an hallucinogen but not in which of two or three sessions they’d receive it. More than 60% of the essence-of-mescalin eaters reported having a mystical experience, while only 11% of the Ritalin consumers achieved mystical one-ness. Thus, the experiment concludes there’s truth to the common idea that mescalin helps you get your mystic on. But, says Griffiths, you should not try this at home because psilocybin can also cause schizophrenia. (Ah, remember in the ’60s when schizophrenia was just another lifestyle choice?)

All that’s fine, but isn’t the fact that a full 11% of the people taking Ritalin had a mystical experience the interesting result of this experiment?

Just for the record, whatever that is, I took mescalin a few times in college and shortly thereafter. I had a mysticalish experience, but it felt more like “This is what a mystical experience would be like, if I were actually to have one.” Interesting, but not worth the potential damage. But, it was The Sixties, so it was pretty much required.

(Ah, remember the ’60s when we were all required to be nonconformists?)

[Tags: mysticism religion drugs mescalin psilocybin sixties shrooms ritalin]

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Steve Garfield, video blogging pioneer, reports that his mother was on TV recently talking about how blogging has improved her life. Millie Garfield’s blog is My Mom’s Blog. Her series of videos, “I Can’t Open It,” ought to be required viewing by any container manufacturer. [Tags: steve_garfield millie_garfield blogging ]