Wednesday, April 17, 2002
DIY eBay, sort of
My cousins' family recently cleaned out a lot of stuff from the old folks' place, and it includes a heap of the following:
National Geographics from 1912 to 1942Womans Days, LOOKs, LIFEs, Holidays, Saturday Evening Posts, from the 40s through the 60s, including many from historical datesQuite a few historical date newspapersOther stuff like that
If you're interested in some of it, write me and I'll pass it along.
Blogs of piece
James Wolcott in Biz2.0 seems to think blogs sort into the same handy left/right compartments that convenienced print journalism for the last X decades. I'm not so sure. At SXSW a few weeks back I asked the audience to tell me with a show of hands how many were left of center politically. Most hands went up. When I asked how many were putting their politics on the line in their blogs, most hands went down.
I believe the truth is not anywhere between old extrmes, but within the personal dynamisms (thank you, Virginia Postrel) that impel us to write stuff in public. And, as I said earlier, fear. A lotta folks are a little chickenshit right now, and with good reason. It's a small world. If you don't know people who are being killed, some people you know problably do, and don't take kindly to preachy pacifists blogging from safer corners of the world. I don't blame them.
Speaking of cross-pidgeonhole political whatevering, Virginia is dwelling lately on the Brownback bill, which would criminalize cell cloning, largely (I suppose) on stasisist grounds. (Hey, it's new to me, so I make assumptions.) To catch up on the subject read the Franklin Society petition along with me and see if it's something that revs your nyets as well.
And if you're born under all these stars?
All the visible planets will be lined up in the evening sky for the next month or so. All will point toward the Sun that illuminates them all. Thanks to Steve for the link.
Bonjour?
JY is working on communicating with Google's new API.
Good Fortune
Peter Lewis has a blog. Great stuff, too.
Thanks to Dave for the pointer.
We're all between this together
Nice thoughts on interspace from Michael E. Rubin.
PACking heat
Here's a piece on GeekPAC in Newsforge. (Semi-related links here.) There's more coming up over in Linux Journal. Stay tuned. Or better yet, get tuned with a Dose of Don. Strong, funny stuff. He even knocks JPB's DotIoC, probably without knowing I quote it in a piece that goes up later today.
Is the canary looking sick?
David Berlind is all over IBM on the patent thing. The piece just linked follows up on this one.
40F4
Here's my favorite error message of the day.
Not speaking of Brit humor, I'll be spending an extra four days in London in June or something (as certain folks from over there seem to be spending extra days over here). Recommendations are welcome.
Who am we?
Nice discussion of digital identity at Kuro5hin.
Meanwhile
This is good (if old) news.
And with that I've said my peace
Mike takes issue with what I wrote below. Among other things, he says I damn the war bloggers with faint praise. I think I offer heaps of praise. In fact, I believe that war bloggers (along with bloggers in general) get a bum rap. But it's a plain fact that to advocate war is to advocate killing and death. Goes with the territory.
Mike says, "the equivocation and silence of the non war bloggers is deafening." I fail to see equivocation in standing foursquare against killing. But I do agree that the silence is deafening, or at least creepy. Frankly, it's fearful. These are not safe times to oppose war. Blogging is personal. All of us, regardless of our opinions, are highly exposed.
A couple months ago a columnist in the National Review wondered where the pacifist voices had all gone, and attributed their silence to the bankruptcy of their principles. But he was wrong about that. They're just scared. Not many of them have the courage of Mohandas Ghandi or Martin Luther King, nor the willingness to risk exposing their families to the often unpleasant consequences of pacifist speech. (Although maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're just listening.)
But we could use some peace bloggers. Other than Hanan Cohen, I don't know any; and I don't have the urge to become one, because I'd quickly become nothing else. [Later...] One just showed up in the discussions section.
Meanwhile I'll point once again to George Lakoff (scroll down to "The Fairy Tale of the Just War"). A more recent piece in the same vein is here.
It's not more complicated than that.
Yesterday I pointed at Hanan Cohen's Death Does Not Justify Death, and today I'm catching email shit for it (though nothing on the Web yet, surprisingly). I've been pointed by one email to this piece in the National Post, about a UN document, reportedly endorsed by 40 countries, supporting use of "armed struggle" to establish a Palestinian state. I believe Hanan's one-liner speaks against that document as much as it does against any other justification of killing and violence.
There's plenty of pro-death talk in the world of blogs — though we abstract is as pro-war. In fact, I believe some of the best blogs (most well-reasoned, funny, wise, artfully written) are what we call war blogs. I link to some of them often (and some of them link to me).
In fact, I believe the war blog movement may be a more powerful political force in the long run than all of conservative talk radio and print journalism rolled together.
And hey, maybe the war bloggers are right (in every respect of the word).
I still believe killing does not justify more killing. Sorry. Can't help it.
Used authority is good authority
The Authors Guild has its panties in a knot over the sale of used books on Amazon.com.
I'm not with them, for the same reason I'm not with newspapers that insist on selling last month's newspaper rather than putting it on the Web where people can link to it, and where it does far more to increase the authority of the paper than it does to bring in hard income.
Coolest melting stars off Earth
Comet Ikeya-Zhang is now circling the North Pole. At my lattitude, it seems to look its best rising in the NNE around 4am just to the right of Cassiopeia's W.
The biggest model rockets on Earth
These things take off from just down the road from my house. Trying to figure out exactly when they take off seems to be a bit of a bear though.
We saw one once, and now we want to see them all.