Relevant History

Time for a new blog banner

It seemed like a while since I'd created the last one, and of course I had more complex, pressing things to do this evening, so I created a new banner for the blog. This one is from a September 2009 picture I took in London during my customary evening walk.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1) (I give it 3 stars).]

Typepad Strangeness

There seem to be some issues with Typepad right now. Grrr.

[To the tune of Thievery Corporation Feat. The Flaming Lips, "Marching The Hate Machines (Into The Sun)," from the album The Cosmic Game (I give it 3 stars).]

LOLCats meets OCLC

...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.

Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that

females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.

It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.

The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.

However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.

Thanks, Anthony!

[Update: Made it onto Boing Boing!]

Style sheet is changed

Really just a gratuitous post to see how the changes look.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "Green Book," from the album Everything Must Go (I give it 3 stars).]

iTunes-Ecto script is back

I've installed the script that puts my iTunes "currently playing" information at the bottom of blog posts. This was a standard feature with Ecto2, but it disappeared with Ecto3, and I never bothered to look for it. I'm glad it's back.

Back to work now. I'll reconfigure my style sheet later to take advantage of the class tags.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "The Boston Rag" from the album "Citizen" ]

My friends are media geniuses

First I made it onto BoingBoing. Then Jess' Sad Guys on Trading Floors got nominated for a Webby. Then, I discovered that Princeton professor, Renaissance historian, fellow ex-American Scholar board member, and all-around nice guy Anthony Grafton has finally done something he can be proud of: his son Sam-- who I don't think is named after the character in Shane-- had a hilarious letter read on The Bugle, my favorite podcast of all time. (Bugle 70, near the end. It's the letter about penis-shaped helicopters. I've never heard John and Andy laugh so much at a letter.) Clearly our eventual collective dominance of all media is inevitable.

New banner

I've changed the banner on the blog. I really liked the Budapest picture, but I no longer look like the person walking down the street, looking for the e-mail with directions to Kitchen Budapest.

The new banner, in contrast, is from a picture taken this weekend at Hidden Villa. I was camping with my son (though obviously not roughing it too much); the trip was really wonderful, I wanted to commemorate it, and I was bothered by the increasing obsolescence of the old banner. So....

I'm not the only one who has trouble talking to today's youth

A very funny exchange among Wonkette writers over using the term "Bonus Army" to tag a post about AIG:

The five-minute silence after the joke is what makes it COMEDY GOLD.

The end of privacy

Enabled by a combination of Bluetooth and incredible stupidity.

This afternoon I boarded a train from Washington bound for Penn Station.... I, along with all of the other passengers, were sitting quietly when the man directly behind me decided to make a phone call using his bluetooth. He was talking so loudly that I think most people in the car were able to hear him.

His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates. I wouldn't have believed it except for the fact that he identified himself to the call as Bob Robbins, who I learned is the leader of the firm's Corporate & Securities practice section, and was talking to Rick Donaldson, who I learned was COO. What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!

The first rule of Fight Club, people....

Favicon

I finally got the favicon working for this blog. In case you're wondering,

=

Sometimes I think the more pixellated one more accurately represents me.

Korean finance blogger arrested for being right

A Korean blogger who predicted the fall of Lehman Brothers has been arrested by the government.

Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future....

For months, both the media and the authorities have scrambled to identify Minerva, who has uploaded more than 100 anonymous postings in Daum, the country's second-largest Web portal. He achieved a prophet's status after he predicted the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, the crash of the Korean currency and the effects of the toxic U.S. mortgage crisis eventually engulfing South Korea.

Newspapers reported his predictions. The government scrambled to dispute his claims. Governing party lawmakers called for his arrest while financial market analysts admitted to avidly following his coverage. His commentaries typically attracted 100,000 viewers per posting....

Park Dae Sung's arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent - a crime punishable by up to five years in prison - came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.

As Robin Hanson comments, "Does anyone think Park would have been jailed for a mistaken optimistic claim, or that government officials will be jailed for making false claims?"

[via Overcoming Bias]

My friends are geniuses

Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The one upside to the downturn.

business, humor

What could they be writing about?

Apparently, Israeli security service Shin Bet has an official blog. I can't read Hebrew, so I have no idea what they blog about. Isn't this like MI-6 or the NSA having a blog?

According to the BBC, it's mainly for recruitment purposes-- kind of the CIA having a Facebook group or MySpace page:

The [four blogging] agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public.

The tone of the blog is chatty, at times even facetious....
A Shin Bet official told the BBC that the idea was to inform the public that the agency offers work beyond just stopping Palestinian paramilitary attacks.

The official said that the agency had been cheered by the feedback from members of the Israeli public - keen to find out more about the jobs within Shin Bet, the pay and even the food.

And I must confess, I really like the combination of Matrix-ish background and silhouettes instead of photographs. It manages to be hip and sinister-looking at the same time.

[via ISN]

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Glock Jam," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

New banner

Obviously irrelevant to the two or three people who get this blog's RSS feed, but I've substituted the old text banner for a new picture, taken in Budapest by my colleague Anthony Townsend. It was too good not to use.

Even with the heavy vertical cropping, I think it works pretty well. I just hope it doesn't slow down the page loading.

Applescript for Ecto-Plazes integration

Last year I wished for a script that would grab my location from Plazes and include it as a Technorati tag. Tonight I discovered a script that doesn't quite do that, but still very nicely grabs your location and adds it to your post.

Not something I'll probably use much when I'm at home, but potentially a cool feature when on the road....

Posted from the end of cyberspace via [ plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Five things, in a bit

I see that Gene has tagged me with that "five things" meme thing. Okay, I'll do it shortly, after I take care of the very last revisions to this STS and futures article I've been working on forever but am now SO CLOSE TO FINISHING, and deal with this talk I'm giving tomorrow at PMI.

Tomorrow is a very busy day for talks: Josh Schacter is speaking at IDEO (I'm sorry I'll miss it), there's some great stuff happening at PARC, and a couple good things over at Stanford. Just one of those days.

[To the tune of Walter Wanderly, "Voce E Eu," from the album "Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 11: Organs in Orbit".]

Get me some of that

Today's Mercury News has an article about company's attempts to influence bloggers with free merchandise, cash, etc.. In December, Microsoft gave away a bunch of PCs loaded with Vista to well-known tech bloggers, and "marketing firms like PayPerPost.com, ReviewMe.com and SponsoredReviews.com routinely dangle cash -- as much as $1,000 -- before bloggers willing to write about a particular product."

The practice is raising the usual ethical questions (should I disclose that I'm getting money to write about this thing?), blog-specific questions (does the participatory nature of blogging make such efforts to secretly buy good press impossible?), and among many bloggers, the biggest question of all: Why haven't they called me? Personally, I'd love to write about my all-expenses paid trip to... just about anywhere, actually.

Though maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Last week at my kids' school, I had two different people recognize me from the blog. One of them had stumbled upon it while doing research about Peninsula, and appreciated having a view of a place that's hard to make sense of when you're on the outside. I'm not likely to get any new toys out of it, but I suppose one should be grateful for whatever influence one has in the world, expected or not.

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Another Star," from the album "Songs in the Key of Life".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, menlo park, Peninsula School

Quote of the day

OMG tuna is kewl. (Muffin)

[To the tune of Abbey Lincoln, "Windmills of Your Mind," from the album "Over the Years".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, cat

Post 2501

This is my 2501st post on this blog. Wow.

I've been writing a bit less because I've got what my doctor calls a textbook case of carpel tunnel, and a replacement computer that's been a bit weird to work with. The machine was a 15" Mac, and I found using it strangely disconcerting: I've gotten so used to the extreme mobility of the 12" the larger computer felt just a bit too big to carry without thinking about it.

As for the carpel tunnel, 20 years of typing, slouching, and video games seem to have finally caught up with me. I've got the brace now, have cut down on the Lego Star Wars, and am starting to try to figure out other things I can do. Though if I could just get a wrist brace that did something cool, like shoot Spiderman webs or give me incredible strength, I'd be okay with it.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Playing with the layout

I'm starting to get tired of having to do a complicated little resizing/formatting dance when I want to post pictures from my Flickr account on the blog (which is very often), so I'm going to play with the layout of the blog. Though this might inspire me to turn Vox into my main travel blog site, as I keep threatening to do.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Ticket To Ride," from the album "1".]

Ecto feature I want

Grab information from Plazes about where I am, and give me the option to include them as Technorati tags on a post. If I'm online and able to blog, chances are my location is discoverable by Plazes.

Extra points if I can associate those locations with certain other tags (such as a city name) or Typepad categories.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album "The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, geoweb, travel, Typepad

Gombe Chimpanzee Blog

I've played around a little bit with Google Earth now and then, or geotagging my Flickr pictures when the mood struck; but one of my colleagues showed me something today that just blew me away: the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog.

It's the blog of the Jane Goodall Institute, and the blog itself basically consists of pointers to things they post to (or more accurately, content that you read on) Google Earth. Click on one, and you're taken to a spot on Google Earth, and the blog post pops up.

It's incredibly cool. As Gene puts it,

It's a pretty neat hack and visually quite spectacular, although I'm not sure the use model is quite right.... Very nice contextual presentation, the aerial imagery really adds significantly to the writing. I just wish the posts had "next" and "previous" links so you could stay in Earth instead of using the chimp blog as a remote control. That shouldn't be hard, right? Just put a couple of .kmz links in?

Now I have to learn KML. Great. Another markup language.

[To the tune of Deep Forest, "Sweet Lullaby - Deep Forest," from the album "Pure Moods".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, geoweb

Let's see if this posts

Having some trouble with Ecto....

The kind of thing you don't ever expect to read

A sentence like this:

The three Germans behind Ballonmoleküle give lots of information on how to make molecule models out of long balloons.

Hat tip to my colleague Mike Love!

The perils of treating a customer-blogger badly

Josh Marshall, the proprietor of Talking Points Memo, kept his car in a garage owned by Central Parking. It was stolen a couple days ago, after one of the attendants left the keys in it.

It may come to very little, but Josh is blogging the whole thing. The company certainly comes across as not really caring what customers think of it.

[To the tune of George Harrison, "Behind That Locked Door," from the album "All Things Must Pass (Disc One)".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

My blog as a graph

Generated by Websites as Graphs:

I'm not really sure what this represents, but it's cool.

Via Fredshouse.

[To the tune of GrooveLily, "This Is Going to Stop," from the album "Are We There Yet?".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, internet, social software, visualization, Web 2.0

Congress has a blog

But they don't have a consistent editorial voice.

I wonder if it would win an award for Largest Group Blog?

Unfortunately, its has fewer surprises than an empty box of Cracker Jack. Ron Wyden thinks that intel failures aren't good. John Cornyn is against the concept of Congressional review. (Darned advocates of unilateral disarmament....) And Dennis Kucinich doesn't like bad stuff.

But what the Hell is Dick Morris doing posting?

And can proposals to make English the official language survive such poorly-crafted prose as

We have a national anthem and a national pledge, how 34 Senators think we should not have a national language is inexcusable to me and I think the House Conference Committee will agree.

Thank you, Sen. Inhofe.

[To the tune of Dobie Gray, "Drift Away," from the album "Best of Dobie Gray".]

Technorati Tags: politics

Whatcha wanna do, Chris? SPAM ATTACK, *$?%!F#&M$*!

I've noticed a serious upsurge in the amount of trackback spam I'm having to delete from this blog, and the couple others I manage. I tend to catch and delete it within a couple hours of it being posted, but I wonder how much effect deleting the trackbacks on this end really has? Does it affect cheap casino cruise ship tickets-dot-com, or natural xanax-dot-com, at all?

I think I'll just turn off trackbacks for a couple days.

[*With apologies to "Lazy Sunday."]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Japanese ambassador to Denmark blog, sort of

Japanese ambassador to Denmark Gotara Ogawa kind of has a blog: a series of letters about Denmark, posted on the embassy Web site. How many ambassadors do this, I wonder?

And how many ambassadors from Asian countries posted to Europe would write in English?

Actually, all of them, probably. Many could also handle French or German, I'll bet.

[To the tune of The Virgin Whore Complex, "Speakerphone," from the album "Succumb".]

Technorati Tags: denmark

I link, therefore I am... citing Mark Amerika

As anyone who doesn't exclusively read the RSS feed knows, the description of this blog is a quote borrowed from MIT professor William Mitchell's book Me++ : The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.

This evening I got an e-mail:

the line in your header - "I link, therefore I am" - was originally used in the mid-90's by Mark Amerika in his hypertextural piece Grammatron.

Sure enough, those are the opening words, written almost a decade earlier.

A quick Google search suggests that lots of people have come up with the phrase. I wonder if one can find an earlier use than Amerika's?

[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Hello It's Me," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]

CastillejaGlobal blog network

At Castilleja, the school where my wife teaches 8th grade history (and is now chair of her department), they're absorbed in a new week-long global thing called, well, Global Week. As part of it, each of the grades has several blogs. Forty-six, actually.

And I though I ran a lot of blogs.

It's an interesting experiment, especially given that there's a big generational difference in blogitude: I gather that some of the faculty have limited experience with the medium, while some of the students are deep into Livejournal and MySpace-- very different kinds of blogs, with very different rules of etiquette. I'm not sure how many teens encounter blogs in a pedagogical context, and it'll be interesting to see if they respond to their presence in the classroom (very broadly defined) as a good thing, or an intrusion-- the equivalent of a grown-up trying to use slang.

After all the work my wife and her colleagues have put into it, I hope they get a conference talk or journal article out of it!

Technorati Tags: blogging, education

Brilliant baby clothes

As someone who's blogged about his kids for almost three years now, I really like this handmade onesie:

[via David]

Technorati Tags: blogging, children

One of those trends you kind of expect

I think we all knew it was just a matter of time:

Report: More Blogs Than Humans on Earth

In its year-end report, the International Council on Internet Punditry (ICIP) says that the number of web logs, or 'blogs' in the world has now surpassed the number of humans.

And as with cell phones, the small Scandinavian nation of Finland is a world leader:

Finland, one of the most wired nations, is the most blog-heavy, according to the ICIP. The ratio of blogs to people in Finland is 13 to 1.

"Yes, we Finns certainly love our blogs," said Pukka Valonenen, the Finnish Minister of Culture and Minister responsible for online opinion, when informed of the report's findings. "We use them to say many bland, inoffensive things. Often, we voice inane or blatantly obvious political opinions on them as well. It is great fun."

Technorati Tags: blogging, humor

Darren Rowse on blogging

I started blogging in late 2002, right around the time that Darren Rowse discovered the medium. Given that we've both gone from being enthusiastic amateurs to pros, I was interested to discover his "18 Lessons I’ve Learnt about Blogging:"

In November 2002 I first heard the word blog after a mate e-mailed me a link and said I should consider starting one. Within 24 hours I’d created my first blog (a blogspot blog that doesn’t exist today). Since that time I’ve run 20+ blogs (most have survived, some have not) and I’ve also transitioned from hobby blogger to part time blogger to full time blogger.

P.S. And when will we stop calling it blogging, and just use the term "writing?" An increasing amount of the content on my blog isn't written, but is automatically generated by Plazes, Last.fm, flickr, del.icio.us, etc.; yet when we talk about "blogging," what we mean is the content that we create consciously, not the content that we generate in the course of living our lives online (or increasingly, living our lives within reach and view of some app that talks to a server somewhere).

Technorati Tags: blogging, work

Pure genius!

This is a brilliant commentary on the ephemerality of most reading-- and the way that texts permeate our lives: the "RSStroom reader personal news delivery system."

Here's the full-sized picture. Well worth a click.

[Thanks to the ever-watchful Nicolas Nova.]

Technorati Tags: blogging, design, reading

Two very determined TrackBack spammers

Two trackback spammers, blog57.com and blogjeeves, have sent something on the order of 100 trackbacks to this blog or Future Now in the last few days. Typepad seems to try to ban them, but they just come back a couple hours later.

I have to wonder how many blogs they've hit? And is there a special circle of Hell for people who do this?

[To the tune of Robert Goulet, "You've Got a Friend In Me (Wheezy's Version)," from the album "Toy Story 2".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Comment and TrackBack hold

Because of an amazingly persistent TrackBack spam, I've turned on the TypePad feature that puts comments and trackbacks on hold for verification. Apologies to anyone who feels inconvenienced.

Another cool NetNewsWire feature

As I mentioned earlier, NetNewsWire now has a browser functionality. One useful thing you can do with it is paste in a Web site's URL, and NNW will automatically hunt around for an RSS feed for it. If it finds one, a little blue button shows up; click on it, and you add the feed to your subscription list.

No more hunting around for the orange Feedburner icon, or the "syndicate this blog" hyperlink.

Basically it's a way to get lazier. But in a smart way.

Technorati Tags: blogging

It's not ALL tacit knowledge

One of my favorite blogs is English Cut, a blog written by Thomas Mahon, a bespoke Saville Row tailor. (Don't know what "bespoke" is? Find out!) It's a brilliant example of work blogging, even if it's about stuff I can never afford. I find his description of the world of Saville Row, his explanations of the differences between various tailors and manufacturing methods, and the various complicated judgments tailors have to make when creating something for a client, absolutely fascinating.

It's also a great example of how many professionals have nothing to lose by talking at length about their work: as strangely compelling as I find reading about drafting patterns and worsted numbers, knowing about them will never make me a world-class tailor. Most professional work is like this: the formal stuff that you can describe is but the tip of the iceberg of your knowledge, and as often as not, the important stuff remains submerged even to you.

However, not all of it is tacit knowledge: for example, in one recent post (which I'm catching up through the miracle of NetNewsWire 2.0), he tells you how to recognize a suit from Anderson & Sheppard. (It's all in the pockets.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, culture, London

I may not need my Web browser much longer

The newest version of NetNewsWire incorporates a Web browser-- probably one that real techies would dismiss as underpowered, or something, but it makes Web pages look like they do in a real browser. It even does tabs.

I noticed this when I was downloading the new version this afternoon, and thought, Boy, that sounds like a useless feature. It's not like I don't have four different browsers on my Powerbook (that I know of; I'll bet there are some older versions or an unused beta of Opera somewhere on my hard drive).

Boy, was I wrong.

Know those irritating RSS feeds that only deliver headlines, or the first X number of words? (Like, say, William Arkin's brilliant Early Warning, or the indispensable WorldChanging?) I never liked them, because I had to look at the feed in the reader, then open the link in my browser and read to rest of it.

With this new version of NetNewsWire, though, I just command+click, and the post opens in a new tab. Yes, switching between apps isn't a giant inconvenience; but it's been just inconvenient enough to discourage my using an RSS reader. Now, between the ability to open Web pages and integrate with Ecto, what used to be an "RSS reader" becomes "my main interface to my blogosphere."

Given how much of my reading online consists of following a particular set of blogs-- and I do a certain amount of clicking around on some blogs just to see if they've been updated recently-- this holds the potential to really change the way I work online. Just as Ecto has become more indispensable to my writing life than Microsoft Word, NetNewsWire could now become more important than Firefox. The latter could become the thing I use when I'm doing research-- essentially, it becomes the interface for activities that begin with Google searches-- while the former could become a more efficient way to keep track of, and actually read, the blogs I want to follow.

Technorati Tags: blogging, reading, software

NetNewsWire and Ecto working, playing together

For some reason, for the last couple months I fell out of the habit of using my RSS reader, NetNewsWire. In the interests of trying to make my blog reading more efficient, I'm trying to get back into it. (Though I suspect this could be one of those More Work For Mother-type moves that ends up absorbing more time than it actually saves.)

One of the things that made the news reader less attractive that it should have been was that it felt like it introduced another step in the process of reading blogs, identifying the interesting things, then blogging about them.

However, the new version of NetNewsWire lets you connect the reader to Ecto, which greatly reduces the effort required to blog about something I've seen in my news reader. Very cool.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Blogging, academic careers, and self-fashioning

NYU professor Robert Boynton writes in today's Slate about the contradictory responses to blogging in the academy. It's a very interesting piece, because it manages to capture some of the cross-currents and contradictions that are bound up in academic responses to blogging. I'll highlight two.

[To the tune of Prince, "Pop Life," from the album "Around the World in a Day".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, university

Getting "not even wrong" wrong

Oops. Bob McHenry gently raised the issue of whether Einstein should be credited with the "not even wrong" phrase, as I did in my post about scientists' blogs as a resource for STS:

Alex, I think the "not even wrong" line is usually attributed to Wolfgang Pauli.

Coming from Bob, I took that to mean, "Look it up, stupid. Everybody knows this." Turns out Bob's right (not something that was really in question).

But there is, as we used to say in my old line of work, a teachable moment in the error. (Actually, full disclosure: I never used the term "teachable moment" when I was teaching, on the grounds that all moments had some kind of pedagogical potential.) A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a piece about the phrase, and its renewed popularity:

[T]he withering comment for which he's best known combines utter contempt on the one hand with philosophical profundity on the other. "This isn't right," Pauli is supposed to have said of a student's physics paper. "It's not even wrong."

"Not even wrong" is enjoying a resurgence as the put-down of choice for questionable science: it's been used to condemn everything from string theory, via homeopathy, to intelligent design. There's a reason for this: Pauli's insult slices to the heart of what distinguishes good science from bad.

But while Pauli was famous for having said this, the documentation is pretty sketchy. Interestingly, Peter Woit himself grappled with this problem:

When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal....

Turns out that the term doesn't show up in Pauli's correspondence; it seems to be something he just used in person. Woit continues,

I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.

The Peierls obit relates an anecdote in which "a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’"

Had Pauli had a blog, though, I'll bet the term would have shown up there. Of course, given my earlier post, I would think that.

Technorati Tags: blogging, physics, science, STS

Scientists' blogs and the sociology of knowledge

If some smart STS graduate student or new Ph.D. isn't already on the ball, someone should look at scientists' blogs as a resource for writing the sociology of knowledge.

A little while ago I happened upon string theorists' blogs, and while I know next to nothing about string theory, nor can I really follow most of the discussion (the math is way too advanced for me), it strikes me there are a circle of people-- among them Peter Woit's povocatively-titled Not Even Wrong (a reference to a famous Einstein Wolfgang Pauli dismissal of a critic's work as "so bad it's not even wrong"), Lubos Motl's Reference Frame (a relativity reference, I believe), the String Coffee Table-- who are taking public the kinds of discussions and arguments that, in the past, historians were lucky to find recorded in letters or private notebooks.

Usually, records of this kind of discourse were pretty second-hand: X tells Y about what he heard A said to B about C's latest theory at the open bar. I was beyond thrilled to find notes passed during monthly meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society: that kind of thing almost never survives long enough to become part of the documentary record.

Now, thanks to blogs-- and more important, the behavior they enable, the kinds of detailed record-keeping that they allow, and the way they can themselves become a medium for conducting discussion-- the number of opportunities for writing a Great Devonian Controversy for contemporary science go up. (The bookcase industry should watch this trend avidly.)

I don't know how many scientific communities have members who've taken to blogging; and I suspect that for physicists, blogging may feel a bit like the sorts of conversations that you have at conferences and workshops. Plus they've been early adopters of IT for scientific communications, what with ArXiv and the like. If you stick to string theory, you get to wade through chatty posts like

Nikita Nekrasov has analyzed Berkovits' pure spinor formalism or, using his more general words, curved beta-gamma systems.... As we discussed previously, the pure spinor formalism makes the whole superPoincaré symmetry manifest. The price we pay is a curved system of ghosts - bosonic objects "lambda" that live in the space of "pure spinors".... (from Lubos Motl's blog)

and

I thought it was very cool when, about a year ago, I learned that Milnor proved there were 7-spheres which are not diffeomorphic to the standard 7-sphere. (from David Guarrera's Worldsheet)

--but there's also a lot of back and forth about questions like whether string theory is similar to intelligent design, whether some bigwig's talk at the Kavli Institute at UCSB was any good, notes from conferences, and the like.

Overall, for scholars interested in sources that get them closer to fine grain of the history of ideas and practices, or for scholars interested in studying scientific communication in its own right, this seems like a natural field to try to exploit.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," from the album "Abbey Road".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, physics, STS

A highly specialized blog

lowercase L

It drives me nuts, too.

[thanks, Jason]

[To the tune of The Beatles, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," from the album "1967-1970 [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: culture

gVisit map

Here's a map (using the Google map engine) that shows where recent readers are coming from.

I'm finding it awfully cool to see this information. "Hey! There's someone from Lisbon! And someone from New South Wales!"

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Fire On The Mountain," from the album "1977-05-08 - Barton Hall, Cornell University"-- an absolutely fantastic performance (the hyperlink goes to an MP3 of it. Share the love....]

Technorati Tags: blogging, internet, space

gVisit

I've added something called gVisit to the site. What it does is record the locations of visitors, and put them onto a Google Maps-generated map. We'll see how it works.

Technorati Tags: blogging, internet

Discussion board spam?

I'm working at home for some of this morning, as I was up until all hours putting together slides for a presentation that's now looming.

I'm noticing a new kind of spam attack: comments that hyperlink to posts on public discussion boards that consist of nothing but links to porn sites. I wonder about the evolutionary logic of this development. Are we now dealing with extraordinarily cheap porn sites (parasitism)? Is it more likely that comments won't be deleted if they point to a discussion board, rather than to porn sites directly (mimicry)? It's more work for the spammers, but for the person reviewing the comments as well; does that play into it, especially given that the number of blogs that hold comments for approval seem to be growing (in my totally unscientific opinion)?

[To the tune of Yes, "Into The Lens," from the album "Drama".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

RSS feeds?

Is it the case that the RSS feeds only update when there's a new post? I haven't seen any movement....

[To the tune of Radiohead, "I Might Be Wrong," from the album "Amnesiac".]

Technorati Tags: Typepad