Lawrence Lessig is looking for a few good congressmen:

It seems that there was one member of congress willing to introduce this bill, but the lobbyists got to him/her. So Prof. Lessig is calling on people to write their representatives and ask them to do something relatively small and achievable to redress the copyright imbalance that prevails today.

This, it seems to me, is a good fight, worth giving some long-haul energy.

One of the things I’m proudest of from my tenure as Salon’s technology editor was whatever role we played in helping the writing of Ellen Ullman — some of the most thoughtful, accessible prose on programming you’ll find anywhere — reach a wider audience. We excerpted her “Close to the Machine” when it came out in 1997, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her at the time. She later did some more memorable writing for Salon.

Now she’s written a wonderful novel called “The Bug.” You can read the excerpt here, and my new interview with her here.

Comillas49: “A father, a son, a friend, and a freakin’ big ocean.” Three men and the sea, and a blog to chronicle the whole thing. They leave from Newport in about two weeks, en route to Spain.

Reverse Cowgirl: The “You’re A Bad Man, Aren’t You?” Fundraiser.

A long long time ago I wrote a piece about the work of Edward Tufte — “data artist” and scourge of badly presented information — and I suppose that is why I found, in my mailbox upon my return from vacation, a copy of a new booklet he has written, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.“

It’s a wonderful broadside against the use of PowerPoint to dumb down the relationship between speaker and audience. Here’s one choice bit:

Tufte — whose analysis of failures in the presentation of data preceding the Challenger space shuttle disaster is one of the highlights of his previous work — also deconstructs a slide from a Boeing PowerPoint report on the damage to the Columbia shuttle. And the booklet offers a reprise of Peter Norvig’s hilarious PowerPoint rendition of the Gettysburg address.

The thing is all of 24 pages, but as Tufte’s readers know, he packs a lot into a page.

People who create software are forever trying to explain their somewhat obscure disipline by offering friendly analogies. The most common one is that making software is like building buildings. Recently there’s been some discussion of this notion, including an article on Kuro5hin suggesting that “the software construction analogy is broken.”

Maybe making software is more like politics, or writing laws. Or like writing music. Or like growing critters in vats. Or like…

Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are trying to broaden the thinking in this area and are organizing an event at an upcoming software conference that they call the Analogy Fest: “The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity, to create the circumstances in which clever people might have an ‘Aha!’ moment. We’ll do that by having semi-structured, small group conversations about papers that draw analogies between software development and something else.”

Sounds interesting to me. I think they’re still looking for more papers to make the event happen.

If you used an IBM PC in the 1980s — if you used one a lot — you came to know, and perhaps love, the feel of the old IBM keyboards. They were solid. The keys moved. They clicked. Over time, as every aspect of PC manufacturing faced the grim reaper of cost-cutting, keyboards became flimsy and disposable pieces of plastic. The touch and feel of the old IBMs became a lost artifact of the early PC era.

So I was thrilled to read (on MSNBC, via Gizmodo) that somebody is still making a contemporary equivalent of those old keyboards. They cost about $50, or five to ten times the price of today’s junky keyboards, but boy, I think it’s probably worth it.

I was mostly offline for a few days, on vacation, then intended to post once I was back home, but my machine at work that runs Radio rebooted and I couldn’t reach it remotely. I’m back now and the Radio is on again…