Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Round up the usual links

by

Holidays allow for a certain amount of catchup reading. Here’s some of what I enjoyed:

Gary Wolf’s piece on the Dean campaign’s use of decentralized, Internet-style organization didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t gleaned already from decentralized reading — but it put all the pieces together beautifully, and should be required reading for those inside-the-Beltway pundits who still don’t understand what’s happening in their world.

If you want to understand what’s happening to the U.S. economy — for instance, why inflation is so low, and why jobs are so scarce — Charles Fishman’s piece on Wal-Mart in Fast Company is eye-opening. Since Wal-Mart is notoriously close-lipped, and so are the people who work with it, in order to put the story together, Fishman had to use the old reporting trick of finding sources among former employees of Wal-Mart partners. (Since the article’s point is that Wal-Mart’s demand for low prices sometimes drives its own suppliers out of business, there were more of these than might normally be typical.) The piece ends up portraying a company — “Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith’s invisible hand” — whose brutal efficiency at driving its suppliers’ prices down has served as an accelerator to globalization, a boon to consumers’ pocketbooks and a giant engine of economic dislocation for American workers. Classical economists would see nothing but good in the result. But the turbocharged displacement of livelihoods and corporate stability gives one pause.

For fun at the intersection of geek culture and high culture, there’s Alex Ross’s New Yorker piece on the subterranean kinship between “The Lord of the Rings” and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. I don’t agree with everything Ross says but it’s a smart piece for those of us who are fans of both masterworks.

Finally, here’s a BBC story by a psychologist who claims that good luck isn’t a matter of luck at all. “My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.” [Link courtesy Metafilter]

Happy New Year!

Yearend fugue

by

Blogging from me will be light over the holidays. Any spare time I get over the next week will be devoted, weather allowing, to building my kids a swing set in the backyard. But before the eggnog haze descends upon us, a few choice links.

First, Mother Jones has an interview with Tony Kushner in which the “Angels in America” playwright states, with crystalline precision, the essential fact of the 2004 election. This should be etched into the consciousness of everyone who hopes that things in the U.S. can be put back on course:

  Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote. Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn’t have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is.

MJ: You’re saying progressives are undone by their own idealism?

TK: The system isn’t about ideals. The country doesn’t elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great.

One light of hope this year is that the citizenry has important and still-underestimated tools at its disposal to egg its leaders on to greatness. If you’re keeping up with the blogosphere you may be sick to death by now of reading about the power of many-to-many decentralization, “social software” and the Dean campaign’s remarkable online successes. But what if you’re stuck inside the Beltway? Frank Rich’s Sunday column this week serves as a useful reminder that most of the Washington press corps remains utterly and pathetically clueless about what has already happened during this election cycle. Jay Rosen’s annotation of Rich’s column is well worth reading, too.

So we’re fortunate to live at a moment when the technologies many of us have enthusiastically embraced for two decades are showing signs of achieving social and political ends beyond simply bringing delight to geekdom or fueling the stock market. Cory Doctorow has good words here:

  The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

(And Kevin Werbach points out that technology and policy are always intertwined.)

Finally, as many of us retreat from the daily grind to take year-end stock, I want to offer you this wonderful passage that Kevin Kelly cited earlier this month on his Cool Tools blog. It’s from a book titled “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,” by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that I will have to add to my 2004 reading list.

  The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Which, I suppose, is an anecdotal version of the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” But I prefer the Samuel Johnson version: “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.”

Thanks to Salon’s subscribers for keeping us going through these thin years — and special thanks to all the Salon bloggers for keeping their “quantity” and “quality” fires stoked. Happy holidays to all.

Till death and taxes do us part

by

Read this paragraph from Sunday’s New York Times lead story on a poll about gay marriage:

  Attitudes on the subject seem to be inextricably linked to how people view marriage itself. For a majority of Americans — 53 percent — marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people oppose gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of Americans say marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people — 55 percent — say they support gay marriage.

The problem begins here with the word “largely.” Because marriage in the U.S. is not “largely” religious or legal: It is — unfortunately, I think — defined equally as both. This has led us to the current paradoxical mess.

If you are someone who feels that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” then I can understand that, if your religious beliefs tell you that gays shouldn’t marry, you don’t want them marrying in your church/synagogue/mosque/house of worship.

That makes sense. But if you believe that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” shouldn’t you want the government out of the marriage business entirely? Why do you think the government should enforce your religion’s dictates? Wouldn’t you be a tiny bit worried that the government that enforces your religious beliefs today might turn around tomorrow and enforce someone else’s?

In all the overblown rhetoric about the “sacredness of marriage,” people seem to be forgetting the obvious: No American court has the right, and no court is going to be able, to dictate that any particular religious denomination must perform the service of marriage for gay couples. But just as the courts can’t tell your clergyman whom to marry, your clergyman shouldn’t be able to veto who your government can and can’t confer the legal benefits of partnership upon.

The only sensible way to balance religious freedom and civil rights here is to disentangle marriage’s spiritual and legal threads. Let every denomination define marriage according to its particular teachings and beliefs. Then invent another word to cover the legal aspects of marriage and make sure that the arrangement — its commitments and its benefits — is available to every citizen, gay or straight. That way, the religious traditionalist doesn’t have to feel that his sacred word “marriage” has been compromised by the state, while gays can have their due legal rights — and get married, too, in more liberal denominations that want to welcome them.

Of course, the religious right isn’t interested in achieving this sort of clarity. Its leaders understand just how much they stand to benefit from the continued blurring of legal and religious doctrine in the debate over gay marriage. In fact, the proponents of a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to male/female couples aim to blast a gigantic hole in the wall between church and state.

The good news is, in 30 years the whole issue will be moot, because so much of the hostility to gay marriage is concentrated at the aged end of the demographic spectrum. Today’s open-minded kids are tomorrow’s democratic majority. And even if it should pass now, today’s “sacredness of marriage” amendment is as doomed as yesteryear’s Prohibition.

Bonus link: Read Dahlia Lithwick’s hilarious Slate piece on “what’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage.”

Costikyan vs. the Times

by

Greg Costikyan takes apart yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story on videogames:

  We then have some yada-yada from Bonnel about how games are similar to primitive dance, which is nonsense; the case he could, and should, be making is that play is as fundamental to humans as story, and games thus appeal to a fundamental part of what it is to be human, just as stories do. But this would, of course, sabotage the argument that games are form of storytelling–which I don’t think I need to debunk again…

More quake

by

KCBS says USGS reports it as a 6.4 earthquake near San Simeon (halfway down the Cal. coast between SF and LA)… That’s a fairly big quake: not as big as 1989’s, which, if memory serves, was 7.1 or so, but thankfully (for those of us not living near San Simeon) far away from California’s population centers. A quake that big in the Bay Area or LA would probably have caused considerable damage. Unclear what sort of damage you might find in nearby towns; I’m sure we’ll hear more soon.

Quake

by

Our office tower just started swaying. Stopped now. Seems like there was just a medium-size quake in the Bay Area…

Microsoft, Longhorn, blogs

by

My latest column is up today: It offers an overview of Microsoft’s vast Longhorn juggernaut — and a bit of praise for the company (yes, we’re capable of that when it’s warranted) for letting loose its horde of developers to blog about their work on the new operating system. How many will still be blogging in 2006 or beyond, when Longhorn finally ships? We’ll just have to wait and see.

S.F. blackout

by

The huge power outage in downtown San Francisco yesterday left our offices without power for 27 hours. Our colocation center, where most of our web servers are situated, held up fine, so Salon’s basic site remained live throughout, but some of our back-end services were affected. We’re working this morning to clean up any remaining snafus.

Face time

by

Edward Tufte’s diatribe against PowerPoint, which I wrote about six months ago, is back in the news thanks to some recent exposure in Wired.

Tim Bray articulates something important about this subject that I learned several years ago: Slides should complement a talk, not replicate it:

  …You have to get away from the idea that what’s in your slides is the content of your presentation. Slides aren’t big enough or rich enough or smart enough to themselves contain any presentation worth listening to for more than about ten minutes. Instead, your slides are a visual auxiliary to your material; no more, no less.

You can build slides as a set of illustrations to parallel what you’re saying, or even offer a comic counterpoint to it. Some really adept speakers use slides as a sort of loose score, creating a riffing rhythm between slide and speech (Lawrence Lessig is a master of this technique). The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides.

In an age of information overload and telecommunications abundance, the simple fact of a speaker and audience sharing a physical space and real time is precious. A speaker owes listeners the courtesy of turning to face them and giving them something of herself. If all I wanted to do was read your slides, I can download them, thanks.