• 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.

• How the White House lost 5 million e-mails — Farhad Manjoo: Another tale of “upgrade failure.” The punchline here is that the Bush White House abandoned a Clinton-era automatic archiving system in favor of a manual system.

• Race Is On to Advance Software for Chips — John Markoff: Stanford, Berkeley and University of Illinois all plan labs to experiment with better ways to write code for multicore processors.

• 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?”

• ongoing · Multi-Inflection-Point Alert: Tim Bray essay suggesting that everything in the software world is changing at once.

• 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.)

• Assessing the Human Cost of Air Strikes in Iraq : Fresh Air: Terry Gross interviews Marc Garlasco, who went from a Pentagon job selecting “high-value targets” during the invasion of Iraq to a post with Human Rights Watch. High drama — the story cries out for the hand of a playwright.

• Firefox 3 Memory Usage — pavlov.net: I met Stuart Parmenter, a/k/a Pavlov, during his time at OSAF. Here he offers an in-depth explanation why Firefox 3.0 no longer leaks memory the way the older version did (meaning that if you kept a jillion tabs open for a long time, the way I do, the browser would gradually eat up your computer’s available memory). This is heavy technical sledding, but a fascinating document of just how much painstaking, drudgery-filled detective work goes into the fine-tuning of a software application.

• Newspapers and the Net: Where’ the Business Model, People? – Britannica Blog: Jay Rosen’s contribution to a big old round-robin at the Britannica site on the future of newspapers. There’s a quote from me at the end — thanks! — but this is the part that I want to clip:
  

  At many a conference I have attended on new media and journalism, some old pro whose subsidy is fast disappearing will (mentally) place hands on hips and say about the Internet as a whole, “Well, that’s all very nice, very Web 2.0, but where’s the business model, people?” As if that were some kind of contribution. I can’t tell you how disconcerting — and weird -– I find some of these performances.

  The funny thing is, those guys have been doing that as long as the Web has been around — pointing this lack of prospective revenues out as if it were not their problem but someone else’s.

• Tom Lehrer’s “That Was the Year That Was”: Lehrer’s best album, now in live video. I absorbed it as a young boy in the mid ’60s, listening to the LP, lying on the floor of my older brother’s room; I learned what nuclear proliferation was, and who Werner von Braun was, and what “genuflect” meant, and carefully untangled lines like “While we’re attacking frontally / Watch Brink-e-ley and Hunt-e-ley / Describing contrapuntally / The cities we have lost…” to try to understand them. Still holds up for the next generation; my kids are totally into “Pollution.”

• MAMK.net | Blog Archive | Discussion: The Power of Networks: Brian Eno and Clay Shirky. Two incredibly smart men with imposing hairless pates! Execrable audio, though it gets a bit better as the file advances.

Bit of a backlog from my travels!

• Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String: Smart Greg Costikyan essay about narrative and games.

• Martian Headsets – Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky provides the ultimate explanation of the browser backward-compatibility mess, and recaps why, in software, the battle between idealists and pragmatists must inevitably go to the latter.

• YouTube – Ken Ishii vs FLR – SPACE INVADERS 2003: Humanizing the enemy! Brilliant, hilarious, ultimately heartbreaking revisionist take on the classic video game. (Via Andrew Leonard.)

• Discussing True Enough. – By Steven Johnson and Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine: On the occasion of the release of Farhad’s book “True Enough,” Steven and Farhad tussle in Slate over whether today’s media world promotes or dilutes the availability of “truth.”

• helmintholog: The nerd is the enemy of civilisation: Andrew Brown cites some prescient excerpts from Weizenbaum’s “Computer Power and Human Reason,” including an early and comprehensive definition of the nature of the hacker/geek — pre-Steven Levy, pre-anyone else I can think of.

• Industry Giants Try to Break Computing?s Dead End – New York Times: Markoff on the new labs being established at Berkeley and U. of Illinois to figure out how to write software to take advantage of parallel computing.

• collision detection: Will DIY geeks save American ingenuity?: Clive Thompson on the value of working with your hands:
  

  Only a few decades ago, most serious adults were expected to be fluent in basic mechanics. If your car or stove or radio broke down, you opened it up and fixed it… when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works….Neuroscientists have shown that working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating…. America is healing itself at the grass roots — rediscovering the mental joy of making things and rearming itself with mechanical skills.

  I second the point. It’s great, after hours of writing and web research, seated at a keyboard, to get up and work with real tools on real stuff. My new basement office is conveniently located adjacent to a sawdust-filled workroom for this very reason. (Well, actually, it just happily worked out that way.)

• The Case for Full Disclosure: James Poniewozik in Time argues that journalists should stop pretending they’re not human beings or citizens and be free to discuss their political preferences:
  

  If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it’s more important, and transparency in it is more essential.

  The reasons not to say whom you’re voting for boil down mainly to the interests of journalists, not those of readers and viewers. It would be a pain in the neck. Campaign sources would mistrust you. Radio hosts and bloggers would have a field day. Readers would become suspicious.

  But more suspicious than they are already? The biggest reason to go open kimono is that the present system does what journalism should never do: it perpetuates a lie.

  I have argued this for many years, most recently in 2004, when the Miami Herald told reporters they shouldn’t buy tickets to benefit concerts:

  If you believe that a reporter who contributes to a political campaign can’t write about politics, you’ve set an all-consuming trap for the entire journalistic enterprise. Your rule will keep widening its net: If buying a ticket to a political benefit is verboten, since the money from the benefit will end up in a campaign’s coffers, then the reporter should carefully refrain as well from buying a movie ticket from any studio that has used its profits to make any sort of political contribution. For that matter, better stay away from buying any product from any corporation that has chosen to give dough to any candidate. If you pay taxes, you’d better think twice about writing about any arm of the government to which you’ve contributed. And so on.

  It’s hopeless; the Herald’s staff might as well take vows of poverty, chastity and silence — and leave their paper’s columns blank.

• Rudy Rucker: Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality: A scientific view of why the idea of somehow reconstituting nature as “computational matter” can’t succeed and shouldn’t be tried: “Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. She’s not some piece of crap to tear apart and use up.”

• Dean Takahashi reviews Wagner James Au’s new book about Second Life: Au is an old friend and former occasional contributor to Salon. I’m delighted to see that his book is out. I haven’t had time to tarry in Second Life so I’m glad there’s a smart observer whose notes I can learn from. The book is called The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, and it’s available now at Amazon.

• LRB · John Lanchester: Cityphilia: Lengthy, much-recently-linked, comprehensible explanation of the financial mess we’re in and the opaque nature of derivatives trading.

• WTFs/minute: Cartoon illustrating the only useful metric of software-code quality.

• EETimes.com – IT pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum dies: I’m surprised that this obituary hasn’t circulated more widely. Weizenbaum was the creator of ELIZA, the proto-chatterbot program (here’s a Web-based version) that, in the 1960s, demonstrated how readily people will accept a crude rule-based simulation of conversation as the real thing — filling in the blanks, as it were, of a computerized persona. Then he wrote a great humanist critique of the digital-triumphalist perspective titled Computer Power and Human Reason — a book that all the geniuses at Google should be required to read as a healthy counterweight to their “algorithms rule!” world view.

• Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia’s soul | Economist.com: Inclusionists vs. Deletionists! I hear those words and can’t help recalling Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, in which Accelerationists battled with Deicrats. The labels — “inclusion” is far more appealing, and flattering to our self-images, than “deletion” — foretell the outcome.

• Failure to connect: Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune interviewed me for a column about the Net in movies.

• Time Out of Mind: Times op-ed points out that our organic experience of time is shaped by physical activities.
  

  Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time…. To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement… Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

  Which leaves us to wonder whether time spent at the keyboard is perceived as “nothing happening around us.”

• Village Voice — Seven Questions For John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:
  

  I go through times when I don’t write much, but I think “writers block” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t believe in it. I think the times when you’re “blocked” are transitional times when your inspiration is sort of trying to re-direct you toward the place where you’ll eventually end up. Thinking of this state as a “block” is really counterproductive, pernicious even: you’re not “blocked,” you’re on a detour, and maybe the sights aren’t as pretty, but they’re still really valuable. That’s my take, anyway. I mean, if you couldn’t actually move your hands to make the pen go across the page, that’s a legitimate block. Otherwise, sit down and work!

• Largehearted Boy: Sam Means Interviews John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:
  

  …The new means of distribution aren’t things we as writers or singers or whatever (“content providers” UGH ICK GROSS) ought to be having dumbass discussions about at the level of “shall we? or shall we not?” Because yes, we shall, and no, we don’t have any choice in the matter, and yes, actually, it’s all to the good. You can whine about spilled milk, or about the horse leaving the barn, but these are negative ways of talking about it. I mean, in a sense, you might as well ask “how do you feel about people having conversations?” – how I feel about it is beside the point. The only question that big corporations ought to be asking themselves are, in this order: one, how can we do something with this that our customers/audience/whatever will enjoy, and, two, how can we make money off it so everybody gets paid and we can keep the ball rolling? For me the sticking point is mainly the moronic sort of talk that the whole new paradigm inspires on both sides of the discussion – people thinking of labels as The People In Suits!! t3h ev1L v1LLa1nz!! and labels imagining that they’re going to be able to control the marketplace, which is a weird delusion anyway, because the customer has always controlled the marketplace. It’s in the nature of marketplaces to be controlled by customers, unless there’s some heavy monopoly culture, which there isn’t….

  Bottom line is that you can’t tell your audience how to enjoy what you do; our job as entertainers is just to do what we do as best as we can, and if there are corporations whose job it is to turn what we do into money, their job is to do that without being gross and embarrassing about it, and then to fairly share the profits. As a rule, the bigger corporations are 0-for-2 on these last couple of points though.

• Why Is Software Development So Hard?: James Maguire of Datamation interviewed me.

• Think Progress — The legacy of Bush’s presidency.: This “are you better off?” chart comparing January 2001 to the present (big version here) is an explicitly partisan document produced by the Democratic Caucus. It’s full of statistics, which probably makes some voters’ eyes glaze over. Nonetheless: it’s a pretty devastating indictment.

• The real reason Google’s clicks are flat (Skrentablog): You know those recent headlines about Google’s ad growth slowing? Rich Skrenta says this was the result of Google tweaking the design of its ads, reducing the clickable space to reduce bad (i.e. mistaken) clicks.

• Is software too soft? — Jon Udell:
  

  …Nobody ever gets into a car and asks: “Hey, where’d the steering wheel go?” Software is essentially metamorphic, and none of us — if we’re honest — can deal very well with that… Sometimes I wonder if computer interfaces simply have too many degrees of freedom for most people to ever really be comfortable with. And if handhelds will become ascendant not only because the devices are mobile, but also because the interfaces aren’t so aggressively metamorphic.

  Apple is doing its best to turn handheld interfaces into easily-metamorphosing software…

• Programmers At Work: Susan Lammers is making her excellent interviews from the 1984 book Programmers At Work available on the Web via a new blog. I wrote about a 2004 reunion event, in which many of the original interviewees participated, soon after I’d gotten the contract to do Dreaming in Code.

The first interview there is with Charles Simonyi. (I wrote at length about him in Technology Review last year.)

• YouTube – White Rabbit: The Jefferson Airplane oldie paired with images from the original Star Trek series. Loving and hilarious. Ungtold multitudes have already viewed it; but have you?

• Rewind: Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: Will Sheff’s paean to Neutral Milk Hotel. Though I like the album in question a lot, I have not found it life-changing in the way Sheff describes. On the other hand, what can you do but bow in the direction of such passionate writing:
  

  In a world that constantly seems crass and cheap and mean, where cynicism is the dominant philosophy and sarcasm the dominant conduct, where what matters most is showing off what you can buy, where the most popular television programs encourage us to laugh at ordinary people willingly allowing themselves to be publicly frightened and humiliated for money, this record shows you the world trembling with beauty, transparent, enveloping, able to be redeemed or destroyed by how much love you bring to it, and, ultimately, holy.

  Sheff is the singer/songwriter for the band Okkervil River.