It might be because I never got it, as opposed to my usual just being behind. See my last post. Please feel free to resend anything you sent in the last two weeks, if I haven't replied to you.
Today Mena posted that Anil Dash got re-organized again. He was given his 3rd title that I know of for this year. Now he has the newly created position of VP of the Six Apart Professional Network. Congratulations, I hope. It isn't being advertised, but as an incentive to join the Professional Network, Six Apart is currently giving away 5 author commercial licenses for MT 3.1 to people who sign up for TypeKey, then for the Professional Network, then fill out their survey. Not a bad deal.
Six Apart also announced that they released a new version of Movable Type, 3.1 and promptly got slammed for releasing a version with incompatible features. According to Brandon Fuller you can have your old plugins or dynamic pages, but not both, at least not without a lot of tweaking. The only exciting new features for users besides dynamic pages that I saw are delivered by plugins supplied by SixApart that SixApart is explicitly disclaiming any support for, which makes them a lot less appetizing than they might otherwise be. Personally, while delighted to have a licence to 3.1, I'm happy with my combination of pMachine, Wordpress and MT 2.661, and I'm in no hurry to upgrade my MT installations from 2.661, and judging from the other preliminary comments I've seen it doesn't seem like a lot of other people are as well.
Ouch. This is sad. When Six Apart has a bad year, it's bad. I really liked Ben and Mena when I met them at Supernova 2002, and they have hired some people I really respect, but I have to say that following Six Apart this last year has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I hope that early impressions of this release are wrong and that their luck turns soon.
The distance between theory and practice is always so much smaller in theory than in practice.
I spotted this as a sig on an email from Christian Traue on Dave Farber's IP list recently and loved it. How true, and how applicable to so many areas of life, as well as recent current affairs.
I finally went to the site of the photos from Chernobyl that everyone has been talking about. Everybody is right -- the photos are very powerful. If you haven't seen them, check them out.
There is a confirmed case of SARS in Taiwan, but it looks it was caught in the lab, like the case this summer in Singapore, and with any luck it won't spread any further. While I am not taking SARS Watch Org out of the mothballs I put it in at the beginning of the summer, it seemed worth noting.
Mostly a note to myself to check back on the WorkIt Event Listings on a regular basis. May also be useful as a model for the Berkeley Blog.
I expect that it will continue to be a light blogging week, at least if I have any brains, as I have early morning commitments every day this week.
I ran across the site for a documentary on how Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election. I haven't seen it, but it looks good. It is playing this February 7th and 11th at the SF Independent Film Festival. Might be worth checking out.
Like Jeremy, I just don't get what all the fuss is about. While the loss of the Columbia and the 7 astronauts is a tragedy for the family and friends of the astronauts, so is every fatal car crash a tragedy for the families and friends of those involved. Some people say that it is the romance of space flight. Well, I read the holy trinity of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein as a kid, Pournelle and Niven as an adolescent, and Dyson and Brin as an adult, and I still don't get it. By those standards, a shuttle to and from Earth orbit doesn't even qualify as space flight. I'm sorry for the people involved, but I don't see any larger meaning. All I can figure is that the media want to sell more advertising, the politicians want to milk our sympathies for their causes, and they figure that harnessing people's natural sympathies about accidents is a good way to do it. Well, please leave me out of it. From now on, this will be a Shuttle free blog.
Don Drake has put together a loop of radar images showing the debris raining down on Texas. The majority of it appears to have come down somewhere between Waco and Austin. I ask my Texas readers: does that mean anything?
The net is amazing.
Via Dave Farber's IP list.
Ever! www.authoritarian opportunists whocozyupto genocidal dictators-forpeace.org. What a hoot.
The Preacher has three great stories posted this week. This man can write!
Stayed up late last night catching up on the net. There is a lot of good writing out there. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been doing a great job explaining the blunders that the Bush administration has been and continues to make in regards to the North Korean situation. A sample:
The Brits and the French knew what they were going to do if Hitler called their bluff. They had a plan: go to war. And they did. They had, in a word, a plan.
What's the administration's plan with North Korea? They don't have one....If war is such an ugly and unviable option -- and it is -- then why in the hell did they provoke this situation in the first place?
Unraveling the Administration Korea Mumbo-Jumbo, Part I
I am not a religious person, but I find the writing of Real Live Preacher moving, and the issues he grapples with familiar. All of his answers aren't for me, but he asks a lot of the right questions. And some of his answers are right on:
I believe love is primarily a choice and only sometimes a feeling. If you want to feel love, choose to love and be patient.
Penn of Penn and Teller describes his experience with airport security, and trying to get a TSA agent arrested for grabbing his crotch. Hilarious and scary at the same time.
I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."
One of the amazing things that I read while disconnected from the net was a fascinating and seemingly paradoxical article by Abigail Zuger in the NYT on the benefits of drinking alcohol (in moderation). The thesis of the article is that "A drink or two a day of wine, beer or liquor is, experts say, often the single best nonprescription way to prevent heart attacks — better than a low-fat diet or weight loss, better even than vigorous exercise." Ms. Zuger goes on to cite several doctors quoting numerous studies that she says have more than proved her thesis. She has some great examples and analogies. Recommended.
The article raises two interesting issues. One, which she brings up in the article is what to do with this information, since, as she states, "for every one of alcohol's health benefits there is an equal and opposite risk if a single glass turns into three or four." What do you do with a drug that will be reasonably beneficial for a majority of people, but will be terrible for a significant and large number of people? Do you promote the drug? I have seen the effects of alcoholism up close, and it is awful, both for the alcoholic and the people around the alcoholic. I want to answer that you just make the information available to people to do with as they see best, and that is probably where I come to rest in the debate, but I worry that I am ignoring how big an effect marketing by people with an economic interest in what people belive can be. Just ask women who were prescribed Viagra for an imaginary disease.
Another interesting issue is epistemological. While I remember hearing some discussion of whether a glass a day of red wine was good for you, I had no idea that there was so much data on the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption and that alcohol was so beneficial. Like this summer's article, What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, on the public heath and medical establishments' hostility to the ideas behind the Atkins diet, this article made me wonder how much of what we accept as medical facts has no more basis in reality than what doctors used to deride as Old Wives Tales. It has also confirmed my belief that an ounce of good data is worth a pound of logic. Humans seem to be hardwired to be seduced by logic and reasoning. People can and do logically argue for all kinds of ideas that sound plausible, but which in fact turn out to be false when someone goes out and collects data.
This has undoubtedly been blogged from here to eternity, but it is too cool not to mention, if only so that I can find it again easily: Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage Find a book's ISBN number, see if your local library has it. Works with the Berkeley Public Library, as well as thousands of others. May save me hundreds of dollars.
Thanks, Jon.
I don't know enough to be sure, but the recent LA Times report of the internment of hundreds of Iranians living in America sounds a lot like the internment of Japanese Americans at the beginning of WWII. And American citizens are paying as much attention as they did in 1941.
Must we be participants in yet another injustice?
Updated 12/21/2002. Upon further reading, I don't think that the internment is on the same scale or involves the same types of rights violations as the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans, but it is still a really stupid idea. "Dear terrorists, please present yourself for arrest and humiliation." Yeah, right. I wonder how many more terrorist sympathizers were created yesterday?
I was proud to see a judge of the 3rd circuit court of appeals, Theodore A. McKee, write an eloquent letter on the Lott affair. What a disgrace to American democracy that such a racist politician was elected to Senate Majority Leader.
Is it not ironic in this day when the nation's elected leaders are rallying the country against terrorism, that the majority leader of the U.S. Senate would publicly endorse the terrorism that once governed a significant region of this country and greatly influenced politics at the national level?
Congratulations to Judge McKee for understanding what democracy is about.
Catch this great commentary from Texas on Karl Rove's recent ideas re taxes.
Nicolas Kristof has an excellent piece in the NYT about how much bigger a threat North Korea is to international peace than Iraq, and how little attention the US is paying to it. Choice quote:
President Bush finally turns out to have a clear, forceful plan to deal with North Korea's defying the West by restarting its nuclear warhead assembly line.The plan is to invade Iraq.
Read it and weep.
A fascinating article in the NYT about what scientists are discovering about the real connection between stress and disease. People have known about the connection for a long time, but only now are researchers able to prove the connection, and, more importantly, understand the mechanisms that control it. If I was going to medical school today, I would study endocrinology -- that seems to be a field that is just now coming into its own.
I'm sure everybody and their brother will be linking to Tim O'Reilly's article, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution, and with good reason. Tim O'Reilly takes a good look at his experiences in the book publishing industry and comes up with 7 lessons for the music and film industry:
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.
A far cry from the "it's stealing" vs. "they want to take away all our rights" debate so frequently heard. Highly recommended.