Another way Blogging differs from journalism
When you give an interview to a traditional journalist, you are always at his/her mercy, because they can (re)shape the conversation to suit their purpose. One obvious way to turn the tables is to put your own transcript of the interview on the Web before the interviewer can get his/her version through the editorial filters and production schedules. Here’s an interesting report about a case where a well-known Blogger interviewee did just that.
The Track to Modernity
Fascinating article by Jack Beatty on how the US railroads standardised time — and changed the world. It happened on November 18, 1883, at noon.
“Nineteenth century America was a temporal wilderness. In the 1850s Americans set their watches in as many as a hundred local times. When it was noon in Chicago it was 11:27 in Omaha, 11:50 in St. Louis, 12:09 in Louisville, and 12:31 in Pittsburgh. In a century of riotous change, the railroad’s standardization of time stood out as a challenge to both nature and democracy…”.
Geeks and Hollywood: a puzzle
Browsing, as one does, the musings of the Geek community I am struck by a contradiction. On the one hand, the community is rightly hostile to the ‘content’ industries and their copyright thugs. On the other hand, community members seems obsessively interested in the products of these industries, particularly the movie business. I guess, for example, that there isn’t a self-respecting Geek in the world who has not already been to see the latest Lord of the Rings film. Loathing, as I do, Hollywood and everything it stands for, I find this odd. I contribute as little to its profits as I can (my children are the only conduit through which money trickles from me to Disney). I find our local Warner ‘Village’ entertainment complex physically repulsive, and boycott it because of what it stands for. Why doesn’t the Geek community do the same? Or am I missing something?
My New Year resolution is… I don’t make resolutions
But before you resolve to give up alcohol, consider this:
“The cardiac benefits of low-dose alcohol are evident in study after study. All over the world, moderate drinkers have healthier hearts than teetotalers, with fewer heart attacks from fatty plaque clogging the heart’s arteries and blocking blood flow.
In countries like the United States where heart disease is a major cause of death, this translates into a survival advantage: moderate drinkers live considerably longer on average than nondrinkers.
‘The science supporting the protective role of alcohol is indisputable; no one questions it any more,’ said Dr. Curtis Ellison, a professor of medicine and public health at the Boston University School of Medicine. ‘There have been hundreds of studies, all consistent.'” Cheers! Slainte! Salute!
The tyranny of certainty: and how to avoid it
Splendid lecture by Andrew Sullivan on the scepticism of Michael Oakeshott. Quote:
“Oakeshott’s conservatism, his defense of liberal civil society, liberal constitutionalism — of what many people today would call conservatism but which strictly speaking is a brand of liberalism — was based not on the notion that there are some rights of man that we can know for sure, let alone truths that are self-evident. It wasn’t based upon the notion that a free society generates more wealth or power. It was simply based upon the notion of the limits of human understanding.
This radical defense of liberalism on the ground of skepticism can be described in a certain basic way, which is that we cannot know. As an empirical matter, as a practical matter, human beings do not know the consequence of their actions. They cannot see the future. Their information and data, based on what has happened in the past, is extremely limited. We operate constantly, as human beings, in a fog–a mental, intellectual, psychological fog. This is our reality.
This fog extends not simply to abstract conceptions of what is true or not–which Oakeshott never fully abandoned, but gradually came to relinquish in his interests–but practically speaking as well. How do we know that what we’re going to do is produce the results we want? How do we know that a certain policy is going to bring about the consequences it is designed to bring about? How do we know, when we start a war, where we will end up in that war?
This skepticism leads Oakeshott to two very basic ideas. One is because no one–no one–has the right to certainty, we should do all that we can to prevent anyone with that certainty from running our lives. What this means is that you keep the principles of certainty out of politics. He was thinking, as Montaigne was thinking at that time, of theocracy. Montaigne lived in the time of the wars of religion, and tried everything he could both to uphold the existing norms of Christianity while quietly, bravely, interestingly, fascinatingly dissenting.
Oakeshott’s defense of a small government, therefore, is not based on what traditionally conservatives believe it to be based upon. It’s based upon the lack of knowledge of any group of people in knowing what on earth they’re doing. Keep the government small so it can do as little damage as possible. Whenever certainty arises in public debate, question it, suspect it, doubt it. And alongside this, a form of government, a form of statesmanship, of politicking, which deeply understands the limits of its own knowledge, which moves forward with a sense of judgment, not certainty; by prudence, not conviction….”
In a strange way there are some parallels between Oakeshott’s philosophical approach and the end-to-end design philosophy of the Net’s architecture. And an appropriate humility towards the future on the part of its designers, who knew that they could not know what people would use the thing for in the future.
Mea Culpa, says former Editor of The Industry Standard
James Ledbetter, writing in the “NYT”. Well, it’s nice to see a bit of humility, but given the arrogant hype his magazine peddled during the dot-com boom, a longer term in Purgatory would have been more appropriate.
The case for Big Brother?
From Salon:
“On Aug. 28, 2001, a 33-year-old Egyptian flight-school student named Mohamed Atta walked into a Kinko’s copy shop in Hollywood, Fla., and sat down at a computer with Internet access. He logged on to American Airlines’ Web site, punched in a frequent-flyer account number he’d signed up for three days before, and ordered two first-class, one-way e-tickets for a Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Atta paid for the tickets — one of which was for Abdulaziz Alomari, a Saudi flight student also living in Florida — with a Visa card he had recently been issued.
The next day, Hamza Alghamdi, a Saudi man who was also training to become a pilot, went to the same Kinko’s. There, he used a Visa debit card to purchase a one-way seat on United Airlines Flight 175, another Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. The day after that, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza’s brother, used the same debit card to purchase a business-class seat on Flight 175; he might have done it from the Hollywood Kinko’s, too. And at around the same time, all across the country, 15 other Arab men, several of them flight students, were also buying seats on California-bound flights leaving on the morning of Sept. 11. Six of the men gave the airlines Atta’s home phone number as a principal point of contact. Some of them paid for the seats with the same credit card. A few used identical frequent-flyer numbers.
It’s now obvious that there was a method to what the men did that August; had someone been on their trail, their actions would have seemed too synchronized, and the web of connections between them too intricate, to have been dismissed as mere coincidence. Something was up. And if the authorities had enjoyed access, at the time, to the men’s lives — to their credit card logs, their bank records, details of their e-mail and cellphone usage, their travel itineraries, and to every other electronic footprint that people leave in modern society — the government might have seen in the disparate efforts of 19 men the makings of the plot they were to execute on Sept. 11, 2001. Right?
We could have predicted it. That’s the underlying assumption of Total Information Awareness, a new Defense Department program that aims to collect and analyze mountains of personal data — on foreigners as well as Americans — in the hope of spotting the sort of “suspicious” behavior that preceded the attacks on New York and Washington….”.
A nest of pirates
Jon Udell’s Blog: “I was shocked to discover a nest of pirates yesterday, operating brazenly right here in my hometown. They were gathered in a large nondescript building, reading and talking quietly and in some cases listening to music. Some kind of social club, perhaps? Yes, but with a profoundly subversive theme: “sharing” content. This establishment houses large collections of books, magazines, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs. And it “shares” these with its patrons. I watched in amazement as people left the building carrying armloads of these content assets, which they “borrow” without paying a nickel to the copyright holders. It’s frightening, really. Who knew?”
How to find out who’s linking to your Blog
Fascinating tool. A bit sobering when one examines links to, say, Dave Winer’s Scripting.com. Also illustrates the kind of influence Dave must have on the community.
The Internet was 20 yesterday
January 1 1983 was the day when the switchover to TCP/IP was made. One of the most significant dates in our history, IMHO. (But then as the author of a brief history of the phenomenon, I would say that, wouldn’t I?) “Call it one small switch for man, but one giant switch for mankind.com”, was how Wired put it. Personally, I would have left out the dot-com bit.