sysrick.com

Start Taking Things Lightly. I ran across this great quote this morning after visiting my accountant (which, for me, is far more painful than going to the dentist). It's from the introduction to Paul Feyerabend's incendiary -- and now infamous -- book on the philosophy of science, Against Method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge
When choosing the term 'anarchism' for my enterprise I simply followed general usage. However anarchism, as it has been practised in the past and as it is being practised today by an ever increasing number of people has features I am not prepared to support. It cares little for human lives and human happiness (except for the lives and the happiness of those who belong to some special group); and it contains precisely the kind of Puritanical dedication and seriousness which I detest... It is for these reasons that I now prefer to use the term Dadaism. A Dadaist would not hurt a fly -- let alone a human being. A Dadaist is utterly unimpressed by any serious enterprise and he smells a rat whenever people stop smiling and assume that attitude and those facial expressions which indicate that something important is about to be said. A Dadaist is convinced that a worthwhile life will arise only when we start taking things lightly and when we remove from our speech the profound but already putrid meanings it has accumulated over the centuries ('search for truth'; 'defence of justice'; 'passionate concern'; etc., etc.) A Dadaist is prepared to initiate joyful experiments even in those domains where change and experimentation seem to be out of the question (example: the basic functions of language). I hope that having read the pamphlet the reader will remember me as a flippant Dadaist and not as a serious anarchist. Contemporary examples (to my mind) are fishrush, ftrain, and marek (if he would only get over his grief and put his fucking site back online!) [EGR Weblog]

Garfinkel: "The real wireless Internet doesn?t cos .... Garfinkel: "The real wireless Internet doesn?t cost $50 a month- - it's free."
Simson Garfinkel describes the new economics of wireless networking.
The other day, for example, I was at the Boston University school of journalism to have lunch with a friend, but he wasn't there. Realizing that I was half an hour early, I took out my laptop and discovered that I was getting an excellent signal from the school's wireless network. But I didn't just get a signal—the university's network helpfully gave my laptop an address on the Internet. Within moments I was downloading my e-mail and surfing the Web. When I shut down my computer 30 minutes later, the address was automatically returned to the university. And since the J-school's network wasn't running at full capacity at the time, even my minor use of bandwidth had no impact on other users. Total cost to Boston University: zero. (The same thing happened a few weeks later when I was at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.)...
[T]he increase in risk associated with having an open network is minuscule and, ultimately, irrelevant. Telephones in lobbies are so useful that most companies are willing to live with the risk that someone could use them to commission drug deals or call in threats to the White House. With the Internet as large as it is today, trying to increase security by restricting physical access is a losing proposition. Besides, if bad guys are actually in your building, keeping them off your wireless network is probably the least of your worries.LinkDiscuss(via 802.11b Networking News)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:22 [bOing bOing]

Somehow I missed Nat Hentoff's second piece about the Patriot Act, the one that discussed libraries. Big John Wants Your Reading List outlines the slippery slope librarians have been warning against.

"As I often do when Americans' freedom to read is imperiled, I called Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. I've covered, as a reporter, many cases of library censorship, and almost invariably, the beleaguered librarians have already been on the phone to Judy Krug. She is the very incarnation of the author of the First Amendment, James Madison.

As she has often said, "How can anyone involved with libraries stand up and say, 'We are going to solve problems by withholding information'?"

I called to talk with her about the FBI's new power to force libraries to disclose the titles of books that certain people are reading—and she, of course, knew all about this part of the USA Patriot Act. And the rest of it, for that matter.

Accordingly, the press ought to awaken the citizenry not only to the FBI's harvesting lists of what "suspect" Americans read, but also to the judicial silencing of bookstores and libraries that are being compelled to betray the privacy and First Amendment rights of readers."

Judith continues to fight the good fight - more power to her. Thanks to Library Juice for pointing this one out.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Urban navigation technique

"John writes: 'I have discovered a new urban navigation technique. If you're ever unsure as to which direction you're heading. Take a look at the satellite dishes. They're always pointing SW. It's like the moss growing on the north side of the tree!" Does this only work in northeastern North America? (via John!) [bOing bOing]

I hadn't thought of it, but I noted today that this works well in rural areas, too.

[The Shifted Librarian]

A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away . . .. Spacewar, the world's first video game, was an early hint that a powerful new entertainment medium was on the horizon, one that would ultimately bond Silicon Valley to Hollywood. [The New York Times: Technology]

For some time now I've been trying to think about where all these digital devices and technologies are headed. Both from an evolutionary perspective (where's it going) and from a speculative perspective (who's gonna make the real money). I'm a visual person, so I finally drew a little diagram of where I think things are going:
Now let me try and explain all of it.... The Problem: You have all of these technologies but for the most part they all live in their own little worlds. The one thing they all share in common is the need for storage space. And just like bandwidth scarcity today, it's storage scarcity that will keep these devices on their own little islands. Here's a deeper look at the technologies: Personal Video Recorder (PVR) - Devices like "TiVo" and "ReplayTV" allows you to digitally record TV programs, but they usually ship with pretty limited storage capacity. Some people have taken matters into their own hands and have added additional external hard drives to increase capacity. MP3's and Digital Audio (MP3) - Devices that allow you to store and playback any manner of digital audio files. Apple's new "iPod" allows users to store 1,000 files, but how long will that be enough? And what about a central storage area for other devices? Digital Images and Video (DVID) - Devices that allow you to record, play, edit, and broadcast digital images and video content. Everything from digital cameras to camcorders to Apple's new set of "iTools". These things are everywhere, but storage is scarce. Even with the biggest memory card/stick you still don't have a place to archive all of it. Home Entertainment Systems (HOME) - Devices that allow you to store and play a variety of digital content like CDs and DVDs. This is still a new technology, but Escient's FireBall is one such example. Again, these systems are great but there still needs to be some kind of larger storage device to put all your stuff. The Solution: What you need is a Home Storage Network. Think — machine full of large hard drives sitting in your basement next to the water heater (not too close though) that you can tap into from anywhere in your home. For those with a networking background just think — storage area network for people rather than corporations. Now, I think I'm on to something because a Google search yields next to nothing. (Unless that means I'm way off the mark.) But if you think of the volume of digital content (songs, photos, movies, etc.) people use today I think you can see the need to store all of this stuff in one place. And the amount of content is only going to grow. How big has your MP3 collection grown in the past three months? What about the next three years? Now this isn't rocket science. Which means someone or some company out there wouldn't have to do much to put this product on the market. (Hint, Hint). The only obstacle is having a convenient way to hook all your devices into it. I'll leave that to the technology people. This also poses an opportunity for other services and technologies to get into the mix. You'll need a Backup Service Provider that does a backup of all your stuff while you sleep. Or does disaster recovery in case your HSN fails or your house burns down. (You don't want to loose all of those digital photos of the kids when they were little.) The next possible extension would be a Local Sharing Network. Although I'm sure the lawyers would never let this happen, the whole idea is that you could share files in your HSN with people you choose. Again, I'm sure this ain't as simplistic as it sounds...but hey, no risk..no reward. I'm sure that there are a few more things that you could do, but that's up to you. So think it over. Play with the idea. And let "me" know what ya think. Should I run out and file the patent...or has someone already beat me to it? [Saltire News]

Jeremiah, a New Series from B5 Creator, Debuts Sunday [Slashdot]

Unknown. "All general statements are false." [Quotes of the Day]

Jules Renard. "Laziness is nothing more than a habit of resting before you get tired." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

How to TiVO-ize your PC [The Register]

Hack a PC, Get Life in Jail. Look out, online miscreants: A House panel voted unanimously to make some forms of illegal computer intrusions a crime punishable by life in Club Fed. Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate report from Washington. [Wired News]

Michael Moore versus Bill O'ReillyMichael Moore ma .... Michael Moore versus Bill O'Reilly
Michael Moore makes Bill O'Reilly look like even more of a wanker than usual in this interview transcript.
O'REILLY: But Enron wanted deregulation. They wanted competition, you know, so they could maneuver the market and do all kinds of things that they were...
MOORE: Yes, they were the people from Bulgaria.
O'REILLY: Look, I am not sticking up for corporate America...
MOORE: Right.
O'REILLY: ...in the sense that I know there are abuses. And those abuses should be dealt with by the Justice Department. But I differ from you in the sense that I feel that you want to take from people who earn money and give it to people who don't earn as much money. And that's not capitalism, see? That's not the country that we -- that's not the republic that we support. I'd be in favor of having a plebiscite to vote on it, if you want to change to France. If we want to be France, let's vote and see, you know.
MOORE: Have you ever been to France?
O'REILLY: I have.
MOORE: Yes, nice place. LinkDiscuss(via Fark)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54 [bOing bOing]

Freezing folliesFun things to do with liquid nitro .... Freezing follies
Fun things to do with liquid nitrogen. Physics is cool.
Freeze a can of shaving cream and then peel the can away from thecream. Put the canless cream into someone's car. Let the oven-likeheat from the car's sitting in the sun defrost the shaving cream.2 cans will fill an entire car. (Coulter C. Henry,Jr.)LinkDiscuss(via Electrolite)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30 [bOing bOing]

Also, I've collated my blogged TED trip reports for your reading pleasure. [JOHO the Blog]

Physics for Future Presidents.... Physics for Future Presidents

I'm back! Did you miss me? Wait, don't answer that. ; )UC Berkeley physics professor Richard A. Muller is teaching an amazing course called Physics for Future Presidents. Have you ever heard of those Physics for Poets classes? This is similar, only far cooler. And the book Muller is writing to accompany the course - with chapter titles like Explosions, Nuclear Weapons, and Secrets of UFOs - is available online!

posted by David Pescovitz at 17:14 [bOing bOing]

Groucho Marx. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." [Quotes of the Day]

The American Spectator / Gilder Publishing, LLC - Control & Creativity - The future of ideas is in the balance By Lawrence Lessig.

But just at the cusp of this future, at the same time that we are being pushed to the world where anyone can "rip, mix [and] burn," a countermovement is raging all around. To ordinary people, this slogan from Apple seems benign enough; to the lawyers who prosecute the laws of copyright, the very idea that the music on "your" CD is "your music" is absurd. "Read the license," they're likely to demand. "Read the law," they'll say, piling on. This culture that you sing to yourself, or that swims all around you, this music that you pay for many times over--when you hear it on commercial radio, when you buy the CD, when you pay a surplus at a large restaurant so that they can play the same music on their speakers, when you purchase a movie ticket where the song is the theme--this music is not yours. You have no "rights" to rip it, or to mix it, or especially to burn it. You may have, the lawyers will insist, permission to do these things. But don't confuse Hollywood's grace with your rights. These parts of our culture, these lawyers will tell you, are the property of the few. The law of copyright makes it so, even though the law of copyright was never meant to create any such power.

[ ... ]

So deep is the rhetoric of control within our culture that whenever one says a resource is "free," most believe that a price is being quoted--free, that is, as in zero cost. But "free" has a much more fundamental meaning--in French, libre rather than gratis, or for us non-French speakers, and as the philosopher of our age and founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, puts it, "free, not in the sense of free beer, but free in the sense of free speech." A resource is "free" if 1) one can use it without the permission of anyone else; or 2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally. So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free.

[ ... ]

In proliferating forms of signatures, searches, sorts and surveillance, digital technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To reestablish a balance between control and creativity, our aim should be to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford Law School and author of The Future of Ideas, from which this is excerpted.

[Privacy Digest]

Memoirs of a genre heroJudith Merril -- author, ed .... Memoirs of a genre hero
Judith Merril -- author, editor, activist -- was one of the most important people in my life, and I'm not alone. She founded the science fiction reference library in Toronto that bears her name, started the Cecil Street Writer's Workshop (where I critiqued and was critiqued for more than a decade), and founded the Writer's Workshop at SEED Alternative School, my alma mater. I met her when I was twelve, and even then she encouraged me to pursue writing.
For years and years, Judy worked on her memoirs. I heard her read from them more than a decade ago at a literary event, and they were fantastic, really racy and funny and thoughtful. She died before she'd completed them, and her grandaughter Emily (a pal of mine and another genre writer) completed them from Judy's notes, conversations, tapes and files.
Finally, Judy's memoirs, "Better to Have Loved," are in print and available. I've just finished reading Emily's intro and the sample chapter that are posted on Emily's site, and they're wonderful. I'm slavering for the book.
Here's Spider Robinson on Judy's contribution to the field:
"She is far more than merely a national treasure. She is a planetary treasure. The one common writer's ailment she has apparently never suffered is carpal tunnel vision. So long as she is loose in the world with a typewriter and a telephone, no bullshit anywhere is safe. And her typewriter has recently been upgraded with seats and an airbag.
"Without Judith Merril, neither science fiction nor Canadian science fiction nor Canadian literature nor the world at large would exist in their present form. Whatever we may make in future of the start she gave us, we who care about Canadian fantasy and science fiction may take some small comfort in being able to say that it is, at least to an extent, all her fault."And here's some genre history from Judy herself:
My editor was a man named Anthony Boucher. That wasn't his birth name. Like me, he had different names at different times in different spaces. In the world of speculative fiction he was Tony Boucher, author, critic and editor, co-founder of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the first - and for many years the only - literary magazine in the field. His other enthusiasms included detective fiction, opera, religion, mathematics, martinis and logical debate. He was the only person I ever knew who made me wonder - briefly, but seriously - if the Christian concepts of the soul and survival in heaven might possibly contain some validity, simply because I had never known him to be wrong in an argument. He was one of the first true loves to leave me by dying - almost 25 years ago - and because he did somehow manage to believe in Heaven, I can still occasionally imagine I am addressing him when I write. Tony liked to describe science fiction as "the literature of the disciplined imagination".LinkDiscuss(Thanks, Emily!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38 [bOing bOing]

TED Saturday This was an extraordinarily good day .... TED Saturday

This was an extraordinarily good day. The only weaknesses of the day are weaknesses of TED's format itself: the presentations are non-interactive with the audience and with one another so it is very difficult to develop ideas. For example, if a Nobel prize winner raises a provocative issue in his allotted 15-20 minutes, there's no Q&A, no panel, and no further discussion by later speakers who, by and large, have labored for months polishing a presentation from which they dare not swerve.

This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts' lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the "ideas are viruses" meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn't it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we're just picking the ideas we don't like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of "virus" under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all ... if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer.

Here are some more highlights:

Steve Jurveston had 7 minutes to talk about the nanotech revolution. Fascinating but way too abbreviated. He expects revolutions in computing, medicine, materials and manufacturing in 5-10 years. He also pointed out in passing that the human genome is smaller than MS Office.

Nobelist Kary Mullis gave a country-boy reminiscence of his discovery that the scientific method is a human invention. After giving a vivid sense of what "doing science" means to him, he attacked politicized science, taking global warming as his example. He cited two recent studies that found no warming in the past 50 years, throwing into doubt the "More CO2 = More Warming" hypothesis first formulated 100 years ago.

Next came Richard Dawkins who pissed me off mightily. He's obviously one of our great minds but ... he's got an impressively blinkered view of religion. I wholeheartedly agree with his main point: American culture needs to accept atheism as a mainstream belief, and I liked his proposal that atheists come out of the closet in order to legitimize the atheist position. But he wrapped this in a virulent and, frankly, ignorant attack on religion. I wanted to go up to him afterwards and say: "I hate science. Scientists experiment on animals." He would reply (I imagine): "First of all, you twit, astronomy, physics, etc. don't experiment on animals." Then I would pounce, it being my fantasy and all: "Exactly. And a critique of religion-in-general is just as twitty." It genuinely irks me that he recklessly conflates all religions as if they all reject science, all insist on blind faith, and all appeal only to the weak-minded. (The fact that my wife, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is one of the clearest-headed people I know, is an orthodox Jew certainly doesn't affect my attitude :)

Josef Penninger gave a fascinating presentation on his genetic research that may result in treatments for osteoporosis, arthritis, and pain management. More interesting, however, was his explanation of discoveries about how particular genes work. For example, the gene that controls the death of cells is also used by the body to "sculpt" fingers out of fetus's webbed mass. I spoke with him afterwards and found him to be shy and friendly. (Yes, you can be both.) When he talked about his new institute, he talked mainly in terms of human values. Emotionally, he felt like Dawkin's mirror image.

By the way, I also had a chance to talk briefly with Dean Kamen. "Since Segway challenges so many of our habits and many of our institutions," I asked, "how do you see it getting accepted? Who's going to adopt it first? Where will the breakthrough be?" "I wish I knew," Kamen said while standing, as always, on his Segway. But, he said, things are looking up since the Segway's introduction: Automobile companies don't hate it the way he thought they would and two states have passed laws allowing Segways on sidewalks.

Steven Pinker, whose work on language and the brain is brilliant and too hard for me, gave a highly understandable preview of his new book that argues that there is indeed such a thing as human nature. He pointed to four reasons we fear that idea: We don't like the inequality of capability it implies, we think it means that we are not perfectable, it seems to imply determinism and it seems to suck all the meaning out of life. He gave brief, effective counters for each fear.

Next up was Deepak Chopra, a popular spiritualist. He opened up by saying that Dawkins "seems to be a bit of a fundamentalist [laughs from the audience] and even perhaps a bit of a bigot [gasps from the audience]. He then spent his twenty minutes trying to erase science's distinction between observed and observer, using indeterminacy and quantum leaps as his proof points. He spoke the language of physics fluently, but even I, whose lack of understanding of quantum mechanics is truly deep, spotted some misunderstandings. I think. Besides, his approach can't possibly convince scientists because he's not telling them anything they don't already know.

Quincy Jones talked about his life. Frank Gehry chatted about his life as an architect. Chris Bangle, BMW's chief designer, told an amusing story to show that love and trust are at the heart of the collaborative process.

Overall, it was an amazing line up of intellect, squeezed, alas, into slots as small as veal pens — with just as much room to move around.

This is Richard Saul Wurman's last year as the head of TED. Next year, Chris Anderson, founder of Business 2.0, will host it. Chris is promising to maintain TED as it is, but it remains to be seen if it can weather the departure of its leader and icon.

---

By the way, I managed to leave out one extraordinary presentation yesterday. David Macauley cycled through about 100 drawings in 20 minutes to show the process by which he created his upcoming book about Rome. (What's the graphical equivalent of thinking out loud?) He is such a magnificent artist. [JOHO the Blog]

Mark Twain. "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." [Quotes of the Day]

"The Matrix" Website Updated. Click on the keyboard twice, and enter the password "reload" to get to the new material. There's QuickTime VRs, on the set shots and most likely a slew of new hidden stuff. Happy searching. [Gretchen just gave me a red pill. I wonder what that means?]

[C:PIRILLO.EXE]

CNET NEWS.COM Interview - Trouble ahead, trouble behind. Totalitarianism. Urban pathology. The death of creativity. These are the fears that keep John Perry Barlow awake at night.

The co-founder of the 12-year-old Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) tries not to be bleak. But he sincerely worries that Microsoft will usurp e-commerce and AOL Time Warner will seize media, and the two forces will extinguish dissenting voices in a "diabolical" plot to own the economy and the human mind.

But Barlow, perhaps best known as a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, isn't entirely forlorn. He's optimistic that courts will soon strike down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 agreement that banned online distribution of companies' intellectual property. And he's hopeful that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates--the smartest man Barlow says he's ever met--will hatch a plan to control the Internet that is so ridiculous that it will spark a public boycott that ultimately will topple the software giant.

The 54-year-old owner of an Apple PowerBook--festooned with Grateful Dead bumper stickers--sat down to chai tea in his rent-controlled apartment overlooking San Francisco. Donning black leather pants, cowboy boots, a turquoise necklace and a cell phone earplug, the self-declared "techno hippie" talked to CNET News.com about dot-communism, cattle ranching and the hallucinations of the masses.

[Privacy Digest]

02/23/02 21:53 CET. David Denby at the New Yorker describes Gosford Park perfectly: "Altman achieves his dream of a truly organic form, in which everyone is connected to everyone else, and life circulates around a central group of ideas and emotions in bristling orbits." It's not a movie for everyone (don't go if you don't like meticulously paced films without explosions), but I can give you no better recommendation than the fact that TV Guide and Time magazine both panned it.
Storytelling, the latest from Todd Solondz (who brought us Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse) is a movie in the same vein as his previous two films, as well as films like American Beauty and Rushmore, and even similar to Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The characters in these works are all dysfunctional from the point of view of mainstream America, even though they are all arguably a part of that mainstream. And even though the characters in these films are all performing these weirdly depraved acts (with Happiness on the depraved end of things and Rushmore more on the weird end), it seems more human to me than some rah-rah patriotic war film with Mel Gibson or Denzel's latest recycled plot. [Kottke.org]

Jonathon Delacour in his blog points to a great web site for all us beer lovers:

Whiskey River | has a fucking beautiful, delicious, tender quote from the master of humanity, Jorge Louis Borges. Read and taste heaven and dance to the beat of your heart and embrace all of life in this quote.

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?"

[soapbox]

Elmore Leonard interviewCool interview with Elmore .... Elmore Leonard interview
Cool interview with Elmore Leonard, author of "Get Shorty," "Be Cool," and many others.
"I usually start with an image. For this book, I had this picture of the diver, a guy who lives on the edge. I thought that would make an interesting character. Out Of Sight started when I saw a picture of a female federal agent outside a Florida courthouse with a gun on her hip. I don't know what my books are going to be about until I'm at least 100 pages into them. I never know how it's going to end."LinkDiscuss(Thanks, Amanda!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40 [bOing bOing]

Anatole France. "When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." [Quotes of the Day]

What goes around. ABC.net: Karma works [via WebWord] Game theory experiments in how to minimize the tragedy of the commons by making the history of your actions more transparent, thereby allowing you to establish and maintain a public reputation. eBay works on this principle (with their buyer/seller feedback system), and, to a lesser extent, Amazon (with their metareviews of reader reviews). [diveintomark]

Adam Curry: "Its brain-training."  [Scripting News]

On 7th Day, Science Fair Rested. What happens when 4,000 scientists gather for 876 talks in six days? Illuminating reading, that's what. Mark K. Anderson reports from Massachusetts. [Wired News]

Get Your War On The new mnftiu is available. We'r .... Get Your War On

The new mnftiu is available. We're watching genius unfold.

Thanks, Gary for the early warning. [JOHO the Blog]

BTW, for everyone who's afraid to look bad on the Internet, I recommend Dogma 2000, the cure for all ills. "The words in your brain are not written in a correct way." Amen!  [Scripting News]

John Ruskin. "In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: And they must have a sense of success in it." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Love your geek? Let them know with geek e-cards! Besides "I love you" - other card-topics include congrats on your new PC or Apple - R.I.P. to your old computer... [C:PIRILLO.EXE]

William S. Burroughs. "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

CANADIAN WARSHIP SEIZES TANKER IN... WAIT... CANADA HAS A WARSHIP?.  

14792 » February 14 11:57 AM. Where in the world is Neal Stephenson? The Web page of Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, etc., explains how busy he is writing his new book. (Quicksilver, according to this old interview.) The site's fabulously cranky, and a refreshing alternative to marketing sites for artists and authors, but no further explanation is forthcoming. [MetaFilter]

Privacy Foundation: Interview: David Brin's Naked Truth About Privacy.

In a polarized environment where opinions on privacy are simplistically reduced to "for" or "ignore," David Brin's concept of "The Transparent Society" (the title of his 1998 book) is a nimble approach that appears more relevant by the day.

Brin's cleverly-argued thesis is a spin on the arms race code of "Trust, but verify." For Brin, the supposed trade-offs between liberty and security are false dichotomies that could be resolved with, "Access, but accountability."

A scientist and sci-fi author as well as a non-fiction writer, Brin prophetically envisioned in "The Transparent Society" that an act such as the destruction of the Twin Towers by terrorists would usher in a new era of government surveillance. "The important point is that once the bureaucracy gets a new prerogative of surveillance, it is unlikely ever to give it up again," he wrote. "The effect is like a ratchet that will creep relentlessly toward one kind of transparency, the kind that is unidirectional."

Trying to prevent such government "sight" is pointless, according to Brin, who maintains that it is much better to seek "oversight" to watch the watchers, a pragmatic position at odds with many techno-libertarians and privacy advocates.

[Privacy Digest]

The quantum theory of laundry: "the disappearance of entire loads can be explained by the existence of the finite probability that all of the socks in the main compartment have taken on the wave function of the lint trap and subsequently turned to lint. This further implies that instead of accusing someone of stealing your socks, running the machine while empty for long periods of time will increase the chances of retrieval of most of the socks".  [Kottke.org]

Get your Hunter S. Thompson fix.   [Recent polls by a secret U.S. government agency indicate that 83 percent of teenage girls in America say they would rather be violated at airport Security checkpoints than board a commercial airliner with potential Terrorist passengers who have "not been thoroughly searched for bombs and deadly weapons." More than 90 percent said they were "very frightened by Arabic-looking strangers," and 42 percent said they had "willingly granted sexual favors to uniformed law enforcement officers since Sept. 11, 2001."]

NPR.  Great commentary by David Weinberger on Weblogs (Real).  For my 15 readers. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

14741 » February 13 8:41 AM. For Lent, I'm Giving Up Not Drinking Cocktails - What About You? I collect cocktail books but there are two web sites* that are just as good as the best bartender's bible. The first is Dale DeGroff's. The second, sadly discontinued but still invaluable, is Paul Harrington's. Both are very personal and reveal a deep knowledge and love of this quintessentially American and civilized art form. Cocktails may very well be the only truly democratic and universally accessible pastime. They can be made at home quite cheaply by anyone and be just as delicious as the very best served in the very best bar to the richest imbiber in the world. Not to mention their incredible Valentine's Day potential... so what's it to be, pal? *Webtender, Drinkboy and Esquire's cocktail guides pale by comparison [MetaFilter]

Salon.com Books | Big Brother is watching you read.

Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased. Bookstore owners and privacy advocates say that's scarier than a Stephen King novel.

[ ... ]

Although many people aren't aware of it, in the eyes of the law buying a book is different from buying a bicycle or a pack of cigarettes. Through the years, the protections accorded materials covered by the First Amendment, such as books and newspapers, have evolved to protect the institutions that provide those materials as well. So when law enforcement officials say they just want information about the books a suspect purchased, booksellers and civil rights advocates see the demand as something that could erode book buyers' privacy and First Amendment rights.

[ ... ]

In fact, according to Finan, less-publicized demands by law enforcement for customer information have become "alarmingly" more frequent over the past two years. And not only independent booksellers, but giants like Borders and Amazon, have been subpoenaed. In perhaps the most egregious case, authorities ordered Amazon to give them a list of all customers in a large part of Ohio who had ordered two sexually oriented CDs. Independent booksellers have been especially hard-hit by these cases. And fighting them without the benefit of a corporate budget or in-house counsel means hefty legal bills and months, if not years, of hassle.

[Privacy Digest]

Shearer sticks it to everyone.... Excellent article on Harry Shearer and his Le Show. If your local radio station does not carry it you can stream his shows from his site. A sane voice in an insane media world. Harry Shearer's Le Show site.

14734 » February 13 7:29 AM. Proof that the movie "Best in show" was not a joke. We have a winner! I am a big fan of dogs but I think this is a bit goofy. Honestly, some people are just a little bit to crazy. [MetaFilter]