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Archives for March 2007

Denise Caruso’s “Intervention”: What we don’t know can hurt us

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Biotech is not a field I’ve immersed myself in, and I have been — like, perhaps, many of you — content to place a simple boundary on my worries about its impact, on the assumption that smart and dedicated people were already deeply engaged in assessing and managing the risks we are taking in that area.

Then I read Denise Caruso’s eye-opening new book, Intervention, and realized that such complacency is a very bad bet. Intervention is a passionately argued, carefully documented critique of our society’s narrow approach to defining, and dismissing, the potential risks of biotech products.

I worked with Caruso many years ago at the San Francisco Examiner, and since then have followed her career as a technology pundit and more recently a nonprofit think-tank founder with admiration, mostly from afar. When I heard that she’d self-published her book after a publishing-house deal fell through, I set up an interview with her. It’s now live on Salon. Here’s a brief excerpt:

You spent years writing about the technology industry. How did this book come about?

It was sheerly out of reaction to meeting [molecular biologist] Roger Brent. He laughs when I say this, and I say it with all the love in my heart, but he’s one of the most macho scientists I’ve ever met in my life. His lineage — in academics, that means who your Ph.D. advisor was — is a guy named Mark Ptashne, whose Ph.D. advisor was James Watson. When I met Roger, his attitude was: What’s a nice girl like you doing being afraid of eating genetically modified food? Don’t you know that you could eat 10 kilos of Bt potatoes [Bacillus thuringiensis is used to modify crops transgenically for insect resistance], and nothing would happen to you?

I didn’t know that much about biology. But when he said that, I said, “I don’t think you actually know that to be true. I don’t know how you could know that to be true.” And we went back and forth on it, and he finally conceded — which I was really surprised about. He said, “So how do we protect the public, but not stop science from progressing at the same time?”

Goats galore

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I originally got hooked on the music of the Mountain Goats by listening to the first four tracks of the album “We Shall All Be Healed,” late one February night three years ago. The riffage of these low-tech rock songs reminded me of the Velvet Underground songs I grew up with, and formed memorable frames for the mysterious lyrics of John Darnielle — evocative, in songs like “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Letter From Belgium,” of sacred rituals, ancient science fiction plots, and David Lynch movies. (It was only later that I figured out that the whole album is a kind of memorial to doomed meth addicts Darnielle had hung with in his youth.)

As I made my way through the Goats’ voluminous back catalog I came to understand that these full-band song arrangements were the exception to Darnielle’s rule of recording mostly with an acoustic guitar, solo into a boombox mike — and touring, most of the time, as a duo, with bassist Peter Hughes.

All of which is by way of preface to a report from the last two evenings that I spent, enraptured, at the Independent (the venue I knew formerly as the Kennel Club), watching the Mountain Goats metamorphose into a rocking band. Yes, friends, the Mountain Goats are now a power trio, with a drummer joining Hughes and Darnielle and the latter trading in his acoustic for a natural-wood Telecaster after the first few songs of the set.

How did it sound? Wonderful. The last time Darnielle swung through San Francisco he gave a subdued show at the Bottom of the Hill; beset, apparently, by the flu, his set leaned heavily on the hushed falsetto of so many of the tunes on his most recent album, “Get Lonely.” (His voice was so shot he essentially turned over the vocal chores on “No Children” to the sing-along crowd — an event preserved in MP3 and celebrated in the blogosphere as an instance of band/audience bonding.) This week, those songs remained part of his set, but they have assumed their rightful place as the slow songs, serving as mood- and pace-changers rather than centerpieces.

The new full-band mode gave the Goats a chance to rearrange much of their catalog. Songs like “Jaipur,” “The Pigs That Ran…”, “The House that Dripped Blood,” “Quito,” “Lions Teeth,” and “See America Right” all emerged with extra-hard edges and careening speeds. Darnielle performed even more unexpected transformations on “Peacocks,” from Tallahassee (the quiet 6 a.m. song got an infusion of mid-tempo energy); and on “Dance Music,” which traded in some of its bop for some bittersweetness; and on “Dilaudid,” a desperate love song given a tougher bite.

Recent articles by All Axess describe how Darnielle is in full-throated form again, moving nimbly from a feather-light whisper to a piercing pleasing bray, never losing grip of the syllables that define each moment of each song as unique. As he bangs away on his electric guitar, jaw dropped open an inch or two to release a goofy “I still can’t believe I’m doing this!” smile, he looks like he has moved through all the pain in his songs, found his own little corner of nirvana and invited us in. (Here’s some good descriptive writing about his performance style.)

John Vanderslice joined the band for the conclusion of both shows, adding to the fun and layering “Palmcorder Yajna,” “Half Dead” and “This Year” with some extra exquisite crunch. Then the young women of Pony Up, the warmup act, trotted out to sing backup on Darnielle’s devotedly straight-faced cover of Thin Lizzy’s ode to vernal rebirth, “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

It’s a great time to see the Mountain Goats. Go if you can. They’re playing again tonight at the Bottom of the Hill. Full tour schedule here.
[tags]mountain goats, john darnielle[/tags]

Leaking entities

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Today’s software is built up in layers, like sedimentary rock that has been accumulating over many generations. In Dreaming in Code I wrote about how sometimes the lower layers poke up through the surface, like angled strata of rock, disturbing the placid interface surface. (This was merely a metaphoric restatement of Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions.)

Examples of this are all over the place. This morning, for instance, I went to have a look at the new beta of My Yahoo (here’s the TechCrunch report). And here’s what I saw at the top of the page:

Notice the center button. This is, of course, an HTML code or “entity” representing the “non-breaking space”, and it is rearing its ugly little head onto the shiny new AJAX-y fresh My Yahoo screen.

Presumably some designer or developer entered that data long ago, maybe long before anyone ever thought it would end up labeling a button in this environment. Or maybe it was coded consciously that way with the expectation that the HTML data, including the non-breaking space code, would be transformed by the My Yahoo application in such a way that each layer would understand that it was looking at an HTML entity and handle it properly. However it happened, the bug exposes a layer of the software you were never supposed to see.

It’s a tiny bug, to be sure, on the first day of a public beta. It will probably be gone soon. But such “entity” codes have made their way often enough over the years onto Salon’s home page — so I find it a little reassuring that these things happen even to the experienced and well-staffed team at Yahoo.

CyberSalon notes

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Last night’s Berkeley CyberSalon panel was great fun — thanks to Eric Allman, Chad Dickerson, Lisa Dusseault and Jaron Lanier for sharing their thoughts, and to everyone else who showed up with their time, their questions and their trenchant comments. (I had not known that both Jaron and Lisa have very recently become parents, and if I had I might not have presumed to ask them on the panel, but I’m very glad I did, and grateful that they put aside their parental duties long enough to participate.)

One of many highlights for me was the moment when Eric hauled some old inch-thick booklets out of his briefcase — one contained the entire set of Internet (then Arpanet) protocols from the late ’70s, bound in a mere single volume; the other was a complete list of the network’s users. My, things have changed.

There’s a downloadable podcast/MP3 file of the whole event if you’re curious.

Code Reads #8: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

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Code ReadsThis is the eighth edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s classic essay on open-source software development, is now 10 years old. I first read it soon after its publication. At that time the term “open source” was newly minted, and the movement was in the news chiefly because (a) it seemed to offer a threat to Microsoft, and (b) Netscape, at a late stage of its war with Microsoft, had decided to release its browser code under open-source license. I was editing Salon’s technology section in those days, and one of our central projects was Andrew Leonard’s thorough coverage of the open-source phenomenon. (He interviewed Raymond in early 1998.)

I think it’s fair to say that today CatB (as Raymond and others now call the essay) has proved its importance independent of its place in the long-concluded browser-war saga. I’ve reread it several times over the years since, and each time find something new and valuable.

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