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Links for May 18th 2008

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Had my head buried deep in writing this past week. Getting some traction, at the expense of other communications.

  • JoshKornbluth.com: My friend the monologuist has a great new website and revamped home for all his disparate activities. Ahh, the things one can do with WordPress these days!
  • Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? – New York Times: Don’t try to rid yourself of bad habits; just overwrite them with new ones. “New habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.” In other words, build the new interstate and the old state highway will fall into disuse!
  • The story of Obama, Written by Obama: New York Times does a full take on Obama’s literary career, gives my extraordinarily talented editor Rachel Klayman her due credit for fishing Obama’s first book out of the dead pile (after reading about Obama in Salon early in 2004!) and ordering a reprint. But what an odd piece otherwise — there’s this critical undercurrent about the money Obama has made from the books (the first real money he’s ever made in his career, and still a fraction of the personal coffers of the Clintons or McCain). On the spectrum of ways that politicians can earn some cash, surely writing books is at the more innocent end. And in this case it’s evident that the guy, you know, actually wrote them himself.

McCain’s bearings

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Bearings are the calculations a navigator makes to stay on course. “Losing your bearings” means, essentially, losing your compass — going off course.

When Obama last night suggested that McCain was “losing his bearings” in suggesting that Obama was in cahoots with Hamas, the choice of words was provocative, sure. Obama was saying that McCain presents himself as an unconventional high-road politician, but here had instead taken a low potshot. He’d lost his moral compass.

Here are Obama’s words:

“This is offensive, and I think it’s disappointing, because John McCain always says, ‘Well, I’m not going to run that kind of politics.’ And then to engage in that kind of smear, I think, is unfortunate, particularly since my policy toward Hamas has been no different than his,” Obama said.

The Illinois senator added: “For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination. We don’t need name-calling in this debate.”

But the McCain people’s charge that it was a cheap shot about the candidate’s age suggests that they have, um, further lost their bearings.

Now, if Obama had said “McCain has lost his marbles”? Yeah, that might’ve been a comment about age. And — since “bearings” also has another meaning, for mechanical parts that are similar to, er, marbles — maybe there’s even a little bit of a taunt behind the word choice, an extremely subtle reference to McCain’s reputation for sputtering anger. But that’s not what the McCain people are complaining about.

With one campaign organization on guard against racial digs and the other defensive about age-ism, it’s going to be a fun election season!

Links for May 8th 2008

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  • The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy): I first met McCarthy via the Well, many years ago; later she sublet an office cube at Salon’s offices. She is a writer of deep knowledge and great wit; her specialty is writing about the ways of animals. This is her delightful new blog.
  • Pentagon's Accounting Mess – Portfolio.com: Yet Another Federal Software Quagmire (cf. the IRS, the FBI, the FAA, etc.). An account of the Pentagon’s failure to upgrade its ancient mainframe-era accounting system; the tale unfolds in a building in Indianapolis the size of 28 football fields, and explains why the U.S. military cannot be audited. The Pentagon literally cannot tell you how much it has spent or what it has purchased. If you ran your family this way, they’d disown you.
  • Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence – New York Times: Profile of computer scientist and Bayesian expert Daphne Koller:

    “I find it distressing that the view of the field is that you sit in your office by yourself surrounded by old pizza boxes and cans of Coke, hacking away at the bowels of the Windows operating system,” she said. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like how does a cell work or how do we understand images in the world around us?”

  • Esquire Interview with Vint Cerf: “Over a period of a hundred or a thousand years, the probability of maintaining continuity of the software to interpret the old stuff is probably close to zero. Where would you find a projector for an 8mm film these days? …” (Actually, it’s still quite possible to do transfers of 8mm film today. Analog is more forgiving than digital in this way.)

What deep pockets say

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When the history of this strange and soon-to-be-concluded Democratic primary season is written, let it be noted that the candidate whose income was modest (in political-class terms) until his books became bestsellers was somehow framed as the representative of the elite — while the one who was able to dip into her own personal coffers to fund her campaign to the tune of $6 million succeeded, with a little help from the media, in casting herself as a woman of the people.

Rare sighting of Google error message

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We have become dependent on Google as a part of our Web infrastructure (too dependent, some say), in part because Google’s reliability record is so superb. All of which makes the receipt of any sort of error message from any dimension of the Googleverse worthy of note.

Today I tried to access my Google Calendar. Instead I saw this:

GoogleCal Error

A minute later, my calendar returned. But for an instant, I got to thinking about life without Google.

Feelies redivivus

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I discovered only by chance that Glenn Mercer, one of the key figures in one of my favorite bands of all time, the Feelies, put out a new solo album last year. This led me on a whole rediscovery-tour of the post-Feelies bands: Wake Ooloo, Wild Carnation (just ordered their 2006 Superbus), Speed the Plough, Yung Wu.

If you don’t know them, the Feelies started out on their first album with a sort of jittery New Wave hyper-strum (one song was aptly titled “The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness”). Then the original rhythm section (including drummer Anton Fier) left, and with a new lineup they took a more pastoral turn on album two, The Good Earth, and finally settled into a Velvet-Underground-meets-Television groove for a handful of further albums before breaking up.

I loved pretty much everything they did, and when I pick up a guitar and idly strum, more often than not it’s one of their tunes. Their choice of covers was always spot on: you can find live recordings from the ’80s of them playing Jonathan Richman’s “Egyptian Reggae” and Wired’s “Outdoor Miner,” and Yung Wu, whose lineup seemed to include the entire Feelies, even recorded that wonderful Brian Eno/Phil Manzanera ditty, “Big Day”.

I don’t think they were capable of recording a bad track, and at their best (as on “Higher Ground”) the exquisite guitar leads are like a flight of angels. But their vocals were always modestly buried in the mix (I think this heavily influenced early REM) and they never found the following they deserved.

Now, according to the Feelies Myspace page, it appears the Feelies are reuniting to play some dates in NY over July 4. Too bad I won’t be there.

Yahoo/Microsoft collapse, the morning after

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I thought the Microsoft/Yahoo merger would be a disaster for both companies, but the news of Microsoft’s withdrawal of its offer should not be greeted with cheers in any quarters yet. Most reports of the story have noted the possibility that this is just a feint on Microsoft’s part. I could be wrong, obviously, but I can’t believe Ballmer and company are abandoning the field. It’s just not their DNA. They fight to win. They hate to lose. They throw chairs at walls when they’re frustrated. The antitrust ordeal made them more cautious in public, but I can’t believe they’ve become pussycats in private. If they’re really giving up, it means that Microsoft has become an utterly different company from what it used to be, and I just don’t see that.

Sure, after the last few months they may feel (accurately) that an acquisition would result in mass exodus from Yahoo because of corporate-culture incompatibility –i.e., it appears that everyone at Yahoo hates Microsoft’s guts, and everyone at Microsoft despises their counterparts at Yahoo (I’m talking about the corporate leadership — engineers tend to be more catholic in their perspective, at least sometimes). But what Microsoft wants from Yahoo is market share, not talent, so I don’t think this really matters to them.

Instead, they’re saying to Yahoo, “OK, you don’t like our price? Let’s see how you like what the market does to your share price, what the shareholder suits do to your legal budget, and what the withdrawal of our offer does to the other negotiations you’ve got going.” It’s a smart hardball move, at least in the short term. We’ll see how it plays out over the next couple of weeks.

Other interesting first takes:

Paul Kedrosky — “Yahoo (and maybe Microsoft too) reminds me of that crack suicide squad in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

Kara Swisher — “Kind of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but not funny in any way at all.”

Mike Arrington — “Google was the big winner in a Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition attempt, no matter what the outcome. But among the possible outcomes, a broken Yahoo and a frustrated Microsoft almost certainly result in increased market share for Google.”

Clay Shirky and the cognitive surplus

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“You know, much of England was drunk on gin for 20 or 30 years during the 18th century.”

I studied English history, but my brother studied it more deeply than I did. So when he told me that, a long time ago, I filed it away in the back of my brain as an odd fact worth exploring at some point in the future. The file has been undisturbed ever since, until I watched Clay Shirky’s talk at the Web2.0 Expo.

Shirky tugs on that bit of information as part of a much larger argument that’s well worth a view (it’s about a 15-minute video — he’s also posted a transcript). In brief, he suggests that the English were so stunned and disoriented by the displacement of their lives from the country to the city that they anesthetized themselves with alcohol until enough time had passed for society to begin to figure out what to do with these new vast human agglomerations — how to organize cities and industrial life such that they were not only more tolerable but actually employed the surpluses they created in socially valuable ways.

This is almost certainly an oversimplification, but a provocative and fun one. It sets up a latter-day parallel in the postwar U.S., where a new level of affluence created a society in which people actually had free time. What could one possibly do with that? Enter television — the gin of the 20th century! We let it sop up all our free time for several decades until new opportunities arose to make better use of our spare brain-cycles — Shirky calls this “the cognitive surplus.” And what we’re finally doing with it, or at least a little bit of it, is making new stuff on the Web.

This argument is in some ways just an extension of Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (I’m in the middle of it, so, you know, maybe it’s all in there, though he says it’s not). But it also frames the larger sense I’ve had, from the moment I first saw the Web in 1994, that its importance lies in its potential for displacing TV.

It was the first medium I’d encountered in my life that looked like it had a chance of somehow challenging or eroding TV’s primacy in our world, and eliminating some of the distortions TV has rendered in our culture and politics. I’d spent the first part of my career chronicling a venerable medium — live theater — that has never properly recovered from the ascent of TV, so you know who I was rooting for.

Recalling a conversation with a TV producer skeptical that the participatory Web was anything more significant than LOLcats and World of Warcraft addicts, Shirky argues, “However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Marianne is cuter….It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

And so, because somebody chose to write a Web page rather than watch another sitcom, today you can read all you want about Britain’s Gin Craze on Wikipedia.

Flashback 9/11

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I’ve been spending a lot of time digging through the blogospheric record of 9/11. And it’s brought back some of my memories of those tense days and weeks — less tense in San Francisco, certainly, than in New York, but jittery nonetheless.

And I can’t help thinking, again, as I have before — on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, and again at the five-year milestone — how miserably the U.S. has fared in pursuing its interests since the towers fell. President Bush had a good first couple weeks (after a bad first couple of days), followed by an awful rest of the decade.

In the days after 9/11, we didn’t know whether there were more attacks in line. There was anthrax in the mail and fear in the air.

But we also had a measure of political unity, unthinkable now; an outpouring of good will from around the world; and a national resolve to bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice.

If you could somehow send a messenger from today back to that packed joint session of Congress that Bush addressed on Sept. 20, 2001, Joe Future would have to say something like this:

“I’m sorry to tell you that, nearly seven years later, you won’t have captured Osama bin Laden. You’re going to have a big scare about anthrax-tainted letters, but you’ll never find out who sent them. You’re going to depose the Taliban only to let them survive and prosper. You’re going to invade Iraq, commit America to a disastrous open-ended occupation, and give the Islamists a whole new banner to recruit under. You’re going to bankrupt the Treasury, trample the Constitution, and drag the name of the U.S. through the mud.”

Such a prospect would, of course, have been unfathomable.

UPDATE: I didn’t even realize when I posted this last night that today is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s hubris-laden “Mission Accomplished” stage show. Thanks to Amos in the comments for pointing out.

Everything connects

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For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write:

John Muir quote

One reason I became a writer is that I love the sensation of finding connections. It can stun me, make me laugh, or help me feel that I understand the universe just a little bit better.

I’ve spent the last few months researching my next book. I’m nowhere near done (and will continue!). I could conceivably, and profitably, devote whole additional years to further research.

But I’ve also reached a point in my labors that I now recognize from previous large writing projects. My brain feels like it’s overflowing. And everywhere I look, whatever I’m looking at seems to connect to what I’m writing about. Everything is hitched to everything else.

That means it’s time to start writing.

The exhilarating and painful work of trying to preserve that apprehension of interconnectedness on the page always involved some amount of disappointment, at least for me; where the apprehension is oceanic, the written end-product is finite.

But a completed book has one advantage over a vague sensation: it can be shared. So here goes!