August 29, 2003
Direct Democracy
I've been wanting to comment on the California recall election for some time, but frankly, I haven't known where to start. By now it's a cliche to call it an embarrassment, and all the jokes about Arnie, Gary Coleman, Gallagher and various porn stars and purveyors have been made. So what we're left with is the reality: a wealthy man with an agenda hired signature gatherers to find a small minority of Californians willing to spend $60 million dollars on holding a recall election for Governor of California. People have said it's direct democracy run amok, and they are correct. A Google search pulled up a number of recent editorials regarding the direct democracy issue and the recall. I read through many of them and didn't find anything worth suggesting… but there is a decent article from The Claremont Institute, written in 1998, and obviously not directly addressing the recent recall, it nonetheless gives a good overview of why direct democracy in California is not always a good thing. The problem is that we elect and pay government officials to do a certain job… to develop public policy, to make, uphold and enforce our laws, and to generally protect and facilitate the public good. Direct democracy (initiatives, propositions, recalls) not only circumvents that process, but ultimately cripples it as well. All the tough decisions are left to the “public” … causing gridlock within our government and making special interest salespeople the marketers of our laws and policies. I am not naive, I understand that powerful and organized interests will always have influence in our government, but direct democracy just doesn't work when the room gets larger than x hundred people. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to show up and elect smart, caring, responsible people to represent us in our democratic government. We don't have decisions about health care, legal services or education made by a commitee of millions, we research, decide upon and hire trained professionals for those tasks… why would we treat something as important as our government and laws any differently?
August 28, 2003
State of the Weblog
Your attention is directed to this little article by Tom Coates, which does an excellent job of delivering a short “state of the weblog world” sort of address. I found this bit particularly interesting:
A future weblogging culture should be able to find counterpoints to arguments, to identify experts quickly and easily, and it should help good commentary bubble up effectively from new or low-trafficked sites. Mechanisms that help us know who to read, who to trust and who to ignore should be permeating the entire community invisibly and pervasively.
Aggregators may help one track and read a greater number of sites in an efficient manner, but as to helping good commentary bubble to the surface… well, that's a bit harder. As the number of voices increases, the possibility of a new or low-traffic site bubbling up seems tougher and tougher… in reality it's up to readers and weblog authors to push those voices forward and help them be heard in an increasingly crowded space. Don't get me wrong, more and more voices = a good thing, but one must fight the impulse to reaffirm a status quo that is affirmed enough already, and instead search the field for new fruit to reap.
August 27, 2003
MIT OpenCourseWare
A recent article in Wired Magazine about the MIT OpenCourseWare program got me very excited. I vaguely remember hearing about this when it was announced about a year ago, but then it slipped somehow to the bottom of my brain's inbox, destined not to resurface until now. Today I spent some time looking through the OCW site and previewing some of the course content and I came away from the experience feeling really enthusiastic about what MIT is doing. From an article published last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
MIT's project “is an excellent example of how a leading private university can practice what we call intellectual philanthropy in the world of teaching,” says Toru Iiyoshi, a director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
MIT's OpenCourseWare can be used by everyone from motivated self-learners and self-learning groups to teachers and students at other universities both in the U.S. and abroad. While certainly not a substitute for the experience of attending MIT, this program makes available unique resources from an exceptional pool of teachers and thinkers. I'm already combing the site to decide what course to try first on my own, but perhaps a more powerful use of these materials are organized study groups that can collaborate and work through the course content together in a semi-structured way. From the Wired article:
Ultimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses. Margulies says MIT is eager to find third parties to create tools that would enable learners or educators to easily organize and manage discussion groups using OpenCourseWare content. “We'd like to see self-managed OpenCourseWare communities,” says Margulies. “Our vision is to have this open source software on the site, as well as information that helps people build a learning community, whether it's in Namibia, Thailand, wherever.”
I don't want to sound like a cheerleader, but that is very cool. This is the stuff of education, of learning, of exploration. This is how we evolve. If our federal and state governments spent more time and money on these kind of initiatives and less time on (insert any number of negative things the current administration in Washington, DC is pursuing here), then we might get someplace as a species. Learning and exploration, communication and collaboration, these are the killer apps of the Internet… MIT's OpenCourseWare is a significant step toward providing important advanced educational resources for free to anyone with access to the Internet. What remains to be seen is what individuals and communities will grow up along side OCW and what they will do with the opportunities it provides.
August 25, 2003
Words and their meanings
The other night at dinner I caught myself using the word “panoply.” Obviously, there's nothing wrong with the word, and I didn't use it incorrectly, but I felt slightly guilty the moment I said it because it is one of those words (not unlike “epiphany”) that is are easy to use without knowing exactly what it they means… so when I got home I looked it up, actually I looked them both up, but everyone knows what epiphany means, so let's focus on panoply. I had used it to mean something like “a colorful assortment”… as you can see from the definition, I wasn't wrong, but I did not know that the word has protective(armor) undertones, and that the “assortment” might have a more ceremonial feel to it. Language is a living thing and all that, but it seems only right that if you are going to be part of its evolution that you make an effort to know where its been before passing through your lips.
August 22, 2003
Details
My mother is fond of telling me that I don't “give enough details” when I'm reporting news and such during our regular phone calls. She attributes this failing to gender, assuring me that my sister meets or exceeds her expectations in this department. I guess sometimes I'm feeling chatty and sometimes not, it's a mood thing.
There is no question, however, as to the value of details when writing prose or making photographs. In a sense, that's what it's all about in fact. When writing is good, details construct the scene… they transport you. The same multiplicity of detailed elements makes up imagery, be it painting, drawing or photographs. Most importantly, in both cases the writer or the artist has chosen the details they present. This construction is both what makes the end result creative, and necessarily from a single point of view. The things I write or the images I make are slices of my reality, but they are also the slices I choose to present… the details I choose to share.
A moment I observed almost ten years ago still surfaces in my mind every now and again. I was taking the bus home from downtown on a unusually warm Saturday afternoon. I was sitting in the back, and directly in front of me was a man and woman, obviously a couple, probably in their late twenties. They looked both comfortable and content in their own skins, and with each other. I don't remember any other specific details about their appearance, except that the woman was wearing a tank top of sorts, showing the skin of her upper back and shoulders. I think they were attractive but not at all exceedingly or stereotypically so. What I really remember is that they weren't really talking or even looking at each other, but that the woman was very softly touching the back of the man's neck, right at the hairline, a sort of gentle, all most absent-minded caress… I thought it was the most beautiful instant… I remember wishing that I could somehow paint that moment, so that looking at the result might make people happy in a quiet and deep way.
That's today's detail.
August 20, 2003
BBC News Styleguide
Yesterday I became aware of the BBC News Styleguide, by John Allen, thanks to a link over at Lockergnome. Though specifically aimed at professional broadcast journalists, this is a guide that would benefit many a weblog author. From the BBC Training & Development page:
Nigel Paine, head of BBC Training & Development, says: 'This is not a 'do and don't' list but a guide that invites you to explore some of the complexities of modern English usage and to make your own decisions about what does and does not work.'
Richard Sambrook, director BBC News, says: 'This styleguide will help make your journalism stronger and connect better with audiences. As my first news editor on a small weekly paper used to say:“Keep it plain and keep it simple.” It still holds true.'
This is an excellent guide, complete with nice subject heading bookmarks in Adobe Acrobat to make navigating to a particular section quick and easy. Other pluses: it's free, and it's advice from the most respected news organizations in the world.
August 18, 2003
Vandalus phantasticus
We all have fantasies that we can't act upon… I often walk past a Hummer H2 parked on the street in our neighborhood and want to kick it. It might sound silly, but the damn thing's existence just makes me want to kick it. I mentioned this to my wife and she confessed to similar leanings… though hers are slightly more confrontational. I characterize the typical Hummer H2 owner as “a dweeb with a lot of money (or credit) and no taste.” Also, the guys that own these things (and they must be 99% guys) must have small penises. I hate saying that, but only because I fear the googlebot and it's indexing of the P word… but it must be said. So my fantasy tonight as we talked about this is that I make up a nice little stencil that says “small penis” and that in the middle of the night we go out and spray paint it on the side of the Hummer H2's doors… of course we can't really do it… because I believe in the rule of law and private property… but it's tempting nonetheless… My wife thinks things like the Hummer should be against the law and we would be justified in these actions… but that sort of rationalization is a slippery slope… before we knew it we'd be stenciling every SUV in San Francisco (hmmm). Anyway, I'm not up for anarchy just yet… and if this idea creates copy-cat type events I am not responsible. Ideas don't spray paint stencils on Hummer H2s, people do.
August 15, 2003
Geek "Collectibles"
Yesterday I visited the albatross that is my storage space, located off of the street formerly known as Army in San Francisco. I was thinking that I MUST clean this space out and stop paying to store crap. Towards that end I was going through a few boxes and discovered the first two issues of Wired magazine… the original issues… purchased from a newstand in Santa Fe, New Mexico almost ten years ago. Just like buried treasure… “These are true geek collectibles,” I said to myself in my blue locker under highway 280. Wrong! Then I came upon a pristine copy of the Mac OS X Public Beta in it's nice folder with manual and support (or lack thereof) documentation… “This box is a goldmine!” I exclaimed. (Well, I didn't really exclaim, but I did think it rather vigorously). Wrong again. So to make a long story short, I still have a locker full of fairly worthless shit hanging around my neck like an albatross, sucking money from my bank account just to keep on existing… but this ancient mariner has had enough… Donate, recycle or perish by the end of August is my new motto. Now where'd my copy of Zork I go? That's gotta be worth some ca-ching.
August 13, 2003
The Julie/Julia Project
Though it seems likely that I am the last person on earth to hear about this fabulous project and the wonderfully engaging resultant weblog, I'm going to mention it anyway in the hopes that other clueless people such as myself might be informed. The Julie/Julia Project came to my attention this morning in an article in the New York Times by the talented and charming Ms. Amanda Hesser. Hesser writes about Ms. Julie Powell, whose project over the last year has been to work her way through the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Louisette Berthole, Simone Beck and Julia Child, while executing every recipe in the book (536 recipes in 365 days) and writing about the experience as she goes. My wife spent an hour reading Ms. Powell's weblog this evening and loved it. I plan to delve into it tomorrow and I suggest you do the same.
August 11, 2003
New Site Design
As you've hopefully noticed at this point, we're sporting a brand new design and site layout as of just a few hours ago. Some things may be a bit wacky for the next day or so as things get tested and tweaked and such, but any kinks should be resolved fairly quickly. More details about the new layout can be found on our About page, but suffice it to say that the new design is the result of combining my all too abundant opinions with the seriously amazing web design prowess of Mr. Andy Arikawa (of The Daily Flight fame). Let us know what you think!
August 08, 2003
New Manual of Style
You know you're a geek and a bibliomaniac when the publication of The Chicago Manual of Style: Fifteenth Edition gets you all excited. I get the print edition of the New York Times and sometimes I get a day behind on some sections, so I just read this article today about the publication of this new editon. I love how thrilled the editor is about the book, it's contagious:
“I am so excited about this manual I can't even talk!” Ms. Samen said, interrupting herself on the phone the other day as she was describing the proper use of regular size and smaller size capital letters.
There's something about pretty reference books… the promise to make me a better writer… to answer all my style questions… to make me correct… that fills me with a certain contentedness by simply having them on my desk.
August 06, 2003
Please remove your dog from the shopping cart
Has it always been the case that only half the people in the world know how to behave properly? Or is it simply a symptom of our narcissistic times…? Tonight I saw a couple at the grocery store that were straight out of Best in Show. That, in and of itself, would be fine, even amusing, but in this case they had their dog in the grocery store… and not just in the grocery store, but they had put their forty pound dog in the shopping basket. Am I the only one that thinks this both bizarre and totally inappropriate? I love dogs… but a) they aren't allowed in the grocery store and b) even if they were, does it seem polite to one's fellow shoppers to use the store shopping carts to carry a dog? Can we all step back and practice a little common courtesy? Ok, end of rant. In tomorrow's episode we'll examine the people that graze the bulk food bins as if they were at a buffet…