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Monday, November 22, 2004 |
Useit.Com: Undoing the Industrial Revolution. We typically overestimate what can be done in the short term. Improvements seem so close we can smell them, but human behavior and social institutions are slow to change. At the same time, we underestimate what will happen in the long term, because changes accumulate and accelerate. [Tomalak's Realm]
8:24:44 PM 
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The Daily DeLay.
Investigative bloggers are taking on Tom DeLay. Following Joshua Micah Marshall's lead in trying to figure out just which legislators voted for the DeLay Rule, David Donnelly has created The Daily DeLay, a weblog for tracking just who voted for the rule, and who opposed it. (The DeLay Rule is a rule change by House Republicans that will allow a legislator indicted by state prosecutors to remain in a leadership post, passed because Majority Leader Tom DeLay may face prosecution in Texas.) This is another case where bloggers won't let a story die: in addition to the Daily DeLay, Technorati shows a number of bloggers that have linked to the CNN version of the story, as well as 3544 entries that mention the DeLay Rule. (I suppose that'll be 3545 after I post this...) (Thanks and a tip o' the SmartMobs hat to Micah!) [Smart Mobs]
8:24:39 PM
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Bush, in Colombia, Says He Will Seek More U.S. Antidrug Funds. The president did not mention a specific sum, but he was effusive in his praise of the Colombian leader's antidrug efforts. By By DAVID STOUT. [NYT > International]
I dunno. Maybe they should see about stopping the pesticide spraying before all the coca plants are Roundup resistant. (I heard a thing about this on public radio awhile back -- that the plants have mutated and that the pesticide spraying now amounts to weeding for the coca farmers.)
8:20:15 PM
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Kevin reports on:
FIRST SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO
The FCC announced Friday it has approved, for the first time, use
of a
software defined radio (SDR) device in the United States. This new
class of
equipment allows users to share limited airspace, increases flexibility
and
reduces interference concerns. Software defined radios can change the
frequency range, modulation type or output power of a radio device
without
making changes to hardware components. This programmable capacity
permits
radios to be highly adaptable to changing needs, protocols and
environments. For questions regarding the SDR proceeding, contact Mr.
Hugh
Van Tuyl at 202-418-7506. For questions regarding the certification of
SDRs or the Vanu applications, contact Mr. Joe Dichoso at 301-362-3024.
[SOURCE:
Federal Communications Commission]
I've
blogged about this before both here and at
t'other blog, usually under the term "cognitive radio."
4:41:28 PM
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Perfect 10 sues Google, saying Google provided folks on the Net
with unauthorized links to hundreds of thousands a images of nude
models on sites Perfect 10 publishes.
The
complaint is at Palfrey's site (PDF).
11:39:44 AM
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From boingboing:
More on modern pirates
 After posting my entry about modern pirates who eavesdrop on satellite-based mobile phone calls, a couple of people have send in some amazing stuff about pirates.
Xeni sez: "Check out these photos Eric Pasquier took of the pirates. Link (Sample shown here)
"Also, see this related story which uses some of Pasquier's amazing pirate photos." Link
Chris O'Connor sez: "This is a lovely listing of all sorts of modern piratatical activity reporting for shipping companies and includes semi-detailed descriptions of pirate attacks." Link
Anonymous sez: "Fun story on piracy, but not entirely accurate. According to Dr. Peter Chalk, a piracy expert at the RAND Corporation, piracy in the Straits of the Moluccas does not usually end up in killing of the crew *unless* the crew resists. (Of course the situation may be different off Brazil or Africa.) Usually they're just put off the ship on a lifeboat and the ship and cargo are stolen. The ships sometimes get reused, and sometimes are simply set adrift after their cargoes are offloaded and resold. This piracy is far more common than we the public hear about. Dr. Chalk estimates that about 10% (or less) of ship hijackings are reported. Link
6:50:54 AM
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Distributed reporting.
Finally catching up with email and read a neat notion from Jay Rosen. He noted that Josh Marshall was getting his readers to call their representatives to see whether they had voted for the DeLay Rule since (a) the votes weren't recorded and (b) the reps would be more likely to level with voters than with reporters. "Great example of blogging doing journalism one better," says Jay. Right. It's distributed reporting: The people do the digging.
I can imagine a score of stories where this would work: You ask your readers to call their congressmen to find out a stance and put together a chart (a wiki would work better for this than blog comments, by the way). You have your fellow bloggers each tell you whether the newspapers and TV and radio stations in their town covered a story you think is important and even have them all call the papers' editors to ask why not. I think a lot of our open-space tax dollars are wasted on space nobody'd want anyway, so I could ask people to take pictures of stupid open space purchases near them. But it's not restricted to bloggers alone: A smart reporter could start a blog and ask readers what's happening in the communities they cover. [unmediated]
6:48:58 AM
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File Sharing Growing Like a Weed. Contrary to messages from the music industry, not all file sharing rips off artists. Weed, a peer-to-peer file sharing program, provides a way for people to share music and pay artists. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]
6:47:48 AM
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He should know, of all people: The Heckler's Code. Sports fans should be held responsible if their behavior at games goes out of bounds. By Robin Ficker. [NYT > Opinion]
6:47:45 AM
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Cory has
just finished the last page out of 2,700 in total in Neal Stephenson's amazing, astounding, frustrating, hysterically funny Baroque Trilogy. Finishing books that are this ambitious conveys a real sense of accomplishment on the reader, and not just because my shoulder will ache less for no longer being weighted down by several pounds of Stephenson in my bag.
The Baroque Cycle began with Quicksilver, which set up the story: Daniel Waterhouse, a distant ancestor of the lead character in Cryptonomicon, is the son of a revolutionary puritan in 17th Century England who escapes revolution, plague and fire in the company of Sir Isaac Newton and the founding fathers of Natural Philosophy, the rationalists who dissect dogs and swill mercury and invent science. His adventures in and out of London are set in motion by Enoch Root -- not an ancestor of Cryptonomicon's Enoch Root, it seems, but the actual Enoch Root, hundreds of years before Cryptonomicon's action. (Another major element here is the simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton)
The story picks up in The Confusion, where we get to spend a lot of time in the company of Bob and Jack Shaftoe (ancestors of Cryptonomicon's Bobby Shaftoe), who are engaged in swashbuckling, globe-spanning adventures that contain, among other things, the best swordfighting scenes I've read since The Princess Bride. At the center of all of thisi is the Duchess Eliza of Arcachon-Qwghlm, a distant ancestor of the Qwghlmers from Cryptonomicon.
Finally, the story concludes in volume three, The System of the World, which brings together all of these characters in London as they hurtle towards the fusion of the old system -- alchemy, superstition and regency -- fuses with the new -- money, rationalism, mercantilism.
The historicity of these books is borderline alarming. Stephenson has researched so many goddamned interesting factoids about pirates, the birth off the monetary system, natural philosophy, alchemy, the court of the Sun King, the functioning of London's ancient prisons, the nature of sewage disposal in early metropolises, and many other diverse subjects that you can practically open the books to any page and find five cool trivia questions to baffle your friends with on e.g. long plane trips.
The storylines are convoluted in the extreme: they twist and turn on themselves, surprising and delighting.
The characters are Stephenson's best: funny, likable, roguish, brilliant, and insightful, and they serve to illuminate his research, and almost never seem like an artifice for this purpose.
The books' strengths, however, are also their failings. They are slow in many places, bogged down in detail (especially the intrigues among the many royals), as though Stephenson was bent on conveying the sheer tedium of life in the 16th and 17th centuries. The convolutions in the plotlines veer back and forth between intriguing and confusing.
For all that, these books are like a good curry. They're mild and interesting when you first taste them, but after you've swallowed, they grow on you, spreading a warm fire throughout your digestive system, making beads of sweat appear on your forehead. Since finishing the first two books, I've been practically haunted by them. Ever time I spend money, or walk through London, or see a ship, or think about math and science, some snippet of those books springs to mind, a lens through which to reexamine my thinking and assumptions.
The System of the World is no less moving: even as I drew toward the conclusion, it was already working at me, making me think hard about the world around me. Though reading these books was, at times, a chore, it was a chore that paid off handsomely.
I'm nearly there, too, and trying to savor every last bit of Baroque Cycle goodness. It's struck me that this third installment is in a way Stephenson's post-911 book (as Pattern Recognition was Gibson's and The Zenith Angle Sterling's). This trilogy really is about the system -- the systems -- of the world. Well plotted (a feat in itself over 2700 pages) and conceptually rich, with characters I really want to know about, I'm amazed that these books don't collapse of their own weight. But they don't.
6:45:05 AM
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Fair Use for $350 (Donna Wentworth).
Planet Simpson:
I paid $350 (in US funds) to use a handful of quotes from Radiohead songs in my book. [...] I was not required to fork over a single dime to quote from The Simpsons itself, nor to quote at length from Tony Hendra's excellent book Going Too Far, nor to quote from Foucault or Mark Twain or David Foster Wallace. But to use 87 words from the collected lyrics of Radiohead? Three hundred and fifty simoleons. Roughly $4.02 per word. (Which, incidentally, is more than double the highest amount I've ever been paid per word to write for a magazine or newspaper.)"
[Copyfight]
6:32:04 AM
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