• Do as Experts Say, Not as They Do – WSJ.com. This little piece from the Journal will break your investing heart. You know all that good advice you read from the experts about diversifying, rebalancing your portfolio on a regular schedule, not thinking you can pick stocks, and so on? It seems that the gurus dispensing this advice do not follow it themselves. Even, yikes, John Bogle, who has always struck me as one of the heros with a head on his shoulders: he says he hasn’t rebalanced his own portfolio since 2000.

• OEDIPUS THE KING (OF THE ROAD).

  This was kicking around last month. You might’ve seen it already. I hadn’t. “Daniel Nussbaum has retold the story of Oedipus using 154 of the more than 1 million California personalized license plates registered with the state’s Motor Vehicles Bureau.” A sample:

  ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING.
  LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.
  OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD?

  Pretty great.

• Chicago Reader| Chicago Needs a New News Model: And here are a couple ideas—just add cash.: The story of the Tyee, David Beers's experiment in nonprofit Web journalism in Vancouver.

• DigiDave | Communication is Key: Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left: David Cohn's opus on how Drupal powered the Dean campaign. A rare piece of writing that ignores the boundaries between technology coverage and political reporting — warms my heart.

• Dehnadi and Bornat's study of programming aptitude: Effort to devise test to find who will be a successful programmer. Via Clay Shirky on Boingboing:
  

  the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness: “To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.”

• Want Real Stimulus? Try Universal Health Care – BusinessWeek: A comprehensive plan for national health care isn't a distraction from solving the economy's woes, it is one of the central things the government can do to improve the economy in both short and long terms.

• Unlikely Words » Comprehensive Election Reactions Round Up – A Reference: A sort of digital time capsule for the 2008 election moment.

• MediaBugs: an open service for anyone to report, track and try to resolve errors in media coverage: My project in the Knight News Challenge has made it into the second round. Have a look and post a comment! [Update: unfortunately this link no longer works — Knight seems to have taken all the applications down from public view.] It’s been tough to focus on this while trying to finish the book but they write the checks, so they get to name their deadlines. I’m excited about this idea — applying the concept of bug-tracking software as used in open source projects to the news media, a proposal I first floated years ago (followup here; of course the idea has since evolved). We’ll see whether I get the chance to try to build it.

• My Father's Vote – Andrew Leonard: My friend Andrew writes a moving piece about his father, the great critic John Leonard, who died last week.

• Twitter / denise caruso: @scottros crap! 1500 words …: Denise Caruso wonders: what’s a reasonable target for how many words to write in a productive day? I’d Twittered at the end of the day yesterday that, having written 1500, I was ready to quit. She’d been aiming for 3000. I think it all depends on your style (I tend to polish as I go along rather than speed-drafting rough cuts for later refinement). Also on the overall size of the project. I’ve been writing roughly 1000 words per day for months now (with breaks for family, interviewing and other research). There’s a different pace to a marathon than a sprint…

• Taking note: Outlines and Meshes: Interesting thoughts on the nature of outliners springing off a post I wrote a couple years ago that still seems to get regular traffic. Maybe there’s something to this outlining thing…

• It’s worth fighting for: On her blog, a Tampa newspaper intern praises her editor’s speech about newsroom change in the wake of layoffs, sparking a huge debate among veteran ink-stained wretches.

• Justice Dept. Admits Error in Not Briefing Court (NY Times): The Supreme Court’s ruling recently that convicted child rapists shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty depended on evidence from a review of existing law. After the ruling came down, a blogger found that some recent additions to the military code of justice undermine the courts argument — facts that you’d think the Bush Justice Department would have known. More incompetence on the administration’s side is hardly news, but it’s a notable instance of the “enough eyeballs” principle at work.

• Lamentations of the Father: Ian Frazier’s classic, more resonant to me now that I have been a parent lo these eight years:
  

  Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room.

• Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? – New York Times: I guess it’s not news that learning new things is good for you, but here’s some neurological explanations for why and how the brain-stretching happens.

• Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes – Esoteric Curio: Forecast: less and less predictable spikes in traffic to sites, including small sites, at greater and greater magnitude.

• An Attack That Came Out of the Ether – washingtonpost.com: Thorough, fascinating gumshoe effort traces the false “Obama is a Muslim” email to its murky roots. Why am I not surprised that the Freepers play a prominent role?

• J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement : Harvard Magazine: Rowling’s excellent talk focuses on the value of failure:
  

  The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

  Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

• Blogopticon | vanityfair.com: Chart professes to track popular blogs along two axes, news/opinion and scurrilous/earnest, but it is ridiculous and riddled with errors (BoingBoing started as a webzine? who knew!) I mean, Valleywag is more earnest than scurrilous? Huh?

• Jane Hamsher: Mayhill Fowler and the Sock Puppetry of Politico: While everyone is complaining that Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter to Clinton (and yeah, she should have, but he should have known he was on the record, too, right? He’s the pro?), the Politico editor argues that sockpuppetry (disguising yourself in blog comments) is no big deal. How frequently can the pros shoot themselves in the feet before there’s no foot left to shoot?

• Opera releases 9.5 edition of browser: been using Opera as my primary browser since 2000 or so. Firefox is great too — 3.0 due out soon! — but Opera does some remarkable things, and I still find it more responsive to the way I work (millions of open tabs, nearly all the time). Though with Firefox 3.0 I’ll have to consider, once more, whether to switch.

• Brainstorm: The Wikipedia Style – Chronicle.com: “Wikipedia is, indeed, a marvelous source for a quick date, fact, definition, event. But in style, most entries are deadening. Students assimilate the idiom every time they call it up.”

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!

• YouTube – UKULELE – BLITZKRIEG BOP: Says it all.

• 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.