another reason to keep your website up to date

Someone might visit your website in order to get an email address.

Someone might read on said website that email to said address would go to a person who was an acquaintance.

Someone might send email to said acquaintance at said address, and when a reply was not immediately forthcoming, send another with a subject line like "Excuse me, are you sentient?"

It would be unfortunate if the recipient of the two emails turned out to be someone else entirely.

note: this post could also be entitled "another reason to look before you leap"

Conservative psychology and politics

It seems a lot of people lately have been noticing a pattern of fundamental differences between liberal and conservative politics--that the conservative faction is far more often the one that, for example, cheats on polls and refuses interviews and debates, argues using fists, jams the Democratic "get out the vote" calls, harasses the opposition by eviscerating cats and hammering nails into tires, has hypocritical pundits, etc. Yet as individuals, certainly the conservatives I know are just as ethical as the liberals, so how does this imbalance emerge?

A few of us were talking about it in the bar Friday night while ingesting the usual epiphanogenic (merlot) and it came to us, it doesn't stem from ideology it stems from psychology, and ratchets, and discrimination or lack thereof. Conservatives seem to have, or need, certainty, absolutes--they're not the ones driving around town sporting the "I could be wrong" bumperstickers, they tend to expound rather than query. This is correlated with a tendency to see things in black and white--either you're with us or you're against us, either you're good or you're evil--there's no desire to see or weigh shades of gray. (For ex. I've been told by a (conservative) coworker that I have no business expressing the belief that driving an SUV is more harmful to the environment, because I also harm the environment by driving, period--in other words only those who are 100% pure should make judgements, everyone else shouldn't). Given that politics by its nature does not reward candid behavior, a certain amount of deception is inevitable, which leads black-and-whiters to say "all politicians are sleazy" and newspaper editorials to say "both sides are equally to blame". And if you can't/won't make distinctions, you won't be turned off by additional sleazy behavior on your side, so there's no force acting to restrain the flowering of sleaze in your faction.

I do not know how we could go about improving this situation--perhaps more merlot next week will reveal the solution...

(disclaimer: this is obviously a generalization, will not apply in all instances. "pattern" and "generalization" seem to be synonymous...)

heroes

Via Sisyphus Shrugged -

"We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes."
- Fred Rogers, Pittsburgh's mystic patron saint of children

And most heroic are those who come forward when others would fear to. Terry McAteer is a hero. So too, for other reasons, is Bill Drake.

talk about obvious...

That "Belaboring the obvious" tagline doesn't seem to be very original. Slacktivist has been Stating the obvious since June 2002, and stickybuffalo.com has been belaboring the obvious since 2001. Guess that makes us an obvious triumvirate...

Don't miss Slacktivist's series on daily devotions with our president ("Once again, let's read along with President Bush in his daily devotional of choice, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers...") e.g. March 4, March 5. From 3/4:

...Chambers' theme is the sovereignty of God. This same theme is expressed in the old gag about summarizing the Old Testament in five words: "God is God. You're not."

That's a useful mantra for any head of state -- even for a state governor -- who appears to wield godlike power over the life or death of others. It's a reminder that God's rule and God's rules apply even to "the most powerful man on earth." Even those rules about just and un-just wars.

Maybe that's why the president looked so troubled this morning.

weblog browse strategies and results

How do you find the good stuff on (or via) weblogs?

You read a few good ones (ideally ones with plenty of outbound links), and you check the Daypop Top 40 ("a list of links that are currently popular with webloggers from around the world") for anything else big that you've missed.

confession: the authority here is but a single step ahead of the reader(s), today was my first visit to Daypop. The reward was Joel on Building [online] Communities with Software -

In software, as in architecture, design decisions are just as important to the type of community that develops or fails to develop. When you make something easy, people do it more often. When you make something hard, people do it less often. In this way you can gently encourage people to behave in certain ways which determine the character and quality of the community. Will it feel friendly? Is there thick conversation, a European salon full of intellectuals with interesting ideas? Or is the place deserted, with a few dirty advertising leaflets lying around on the floor that nobody has bothered to pick up?

Nice comparison of different online communities, their character, what design decisions led them there. Good lessons.

now we're even

From Lance Knobel last week -

According to The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire (subscribers only), Michael Drosnin, author of the ludicrous hoax The Bible Code, "gets meetings with Pentagon's top intelligence officer and CIA's No. 3, on his theory that bin Laden's hideaway is revealed in the Old Testament's ancient Hebrew".

From BBC News, Nov. 2001 article on Dr Bashir Mehmood, past director of the the Khushab nuclear reactor in Pakistan -

In the 1980s he was ridiculed for putting forward a method for calculating the temperature of hell and for suggesting that genies could be controlled and their energy harnessed.

He is the author of the book The Mechanics of Doomsday: Life after death.

According to the online retailer IslamicBookstore.com, the book is "a most interesting scientific analysis of the actual mechanics of Doomsday and the fate of the various planetary bodies, based on signs derived from statements in the Koran".

improving childrens' education

Just ran across this retrospectively obvious idea (as in, fascinating but makes you feel dumb not to have thought of it) on Amitai Etzioni's Personal and Communitarian Reflections weblog (via Lance Knobel) -

Small town America still sometimes comes up with ideas all should consider. Pass on the word: The Lebanon, Pennsylvania school district plans to include evaluations of parental involvement with student report cards. The evaluations may include sections on whether the parent attends parent-teacher conferences, returns forms that have to be signed, and whether the child comes to school healthy and properly dressed. Those who receive negative evaluations would be offered suggestions and their child could be assigned a mentor (e.g., community volunteers or high school students). (Harrisburg Patriot, 2/11/03)

more journalism links

The Coming Plague author Laurie Garrett goes to Davos as reporter for Newsday, fires off candid email about her perceptions to her friends, which propagates all over the net, much to her dismay. Scott Rosenberg has the story -

...I think what irked a lot of people on the Net was the feeling they got that the story she told her friends was very different from the one she was likely to tell readers of her "official" work.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people feel that reporters know a lot more than what they actually put in their stories -- that the "real story" of our times is the one that reporters tell each other over beers, and in for-private-distribution-only e-mails, rather than the one they tell in their formal stories...her reaction of outrage and violation at the viral-like spread of the e-mail ...reinforces readers' hunch that they've just gotten a fleeting glimpse of how journalists talk to each other when they think the mike is turned off.

Great lazy journalism example - this excerpt doesn't do it justice -

..."The point this study makes," says McKenna, "is that when given a choice, more voters prefer investing regional transportation dollars in a new monorail system...."

Pelz, a light rail advocate, denounced the poll as "fraudulent." Pelz believes the poll used false information. According to Pelz, the poll implies that monorail will relieve congestion, but Pelz insists monorail will not relieve congestion; the poll claims light rail will cost more than monorail, but according to Pelz, the monorail will be as expensive as light rail; and Sound Transit does not agree that light rail will average 20 mph...

name that tune

The Yubanet link (here) re the Preserving the American Dream (anti-smart growth) Conference led me to this other report, with quotations. See if any of this sounds familiar -

The emerging assault on smart growth does not appear to have the laudable aim of getting planning to function more intelligently and effectively. Instead, it appears aimed at discrediting the entire notion of using government to promote beneficial development patterns.

One of the speakers in the "Preserving the American Dream" conference, David Strom of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, urged opponents of smart growth to "be relentless in undermining the credibility of your opponents." Strom said a campaign that the Taxpayers League ran against a mass transit proposal in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area depicted pro-transit leaders as practitioners of social engineering. "No one knew what social engineering was," Strom said, "but it sounded bad. We made it sound like they were a bunch of commies."

Strom told smart-growth opponents to wage merciless attacks. "We often make the mistake of assuming this is a battle over who has the better facts," he said. Quite the contrary, whether smart-growth policies are adopted will hinge, he asserted, on whether voters can be persuaded that the typical smart-growth leader is "a pointy-headed intellectual fascist" trying to ruin people's lives.

Michelle Thaxton, executive director of the South Carolina Landowners' Association, told the group to avoid engaging in complex discussions about smart growth. "You don't give any human more than three to five points, or you lose them," Thaxton said. "The press likes sound bites, phrases," she said. "They write that thing [newspapers] on an eighth-grade level."

Responsible Journalism II

The Union published the results of last week's online "poll" today, and sure enough, it showed 70% were in favor of impeaching Gray Davis. So the interesting thing to do now is to randomly survey Nevada County households and see how the "online" and "random" percentages compare. In other words, quantify the amount, if any, of online "poll" bias (which could be an artifact, or could be deliberate) & the direction in which it is skewing the results. This would be news.

I've emailed Richard Somerville the editor suggesting that they do the story.

another Blogger lesson learned

Compose your posts somewhere off in a text editor, then copy and paste them into Blogger. If you compose within Blogger, and you make a minor mistake (for example, you hit the Post button when no longer online) you may find your post is gone for good.

and perhaps, depending on what was in it, it is good. Generally it will not make you happy though.

I hate this

Hell is a place where you have to make phone calls to hostile strangers for eternity.

...which I was going to do tonight. but I lost my nerve, or rather was mistaken in believing I possessed it in the first place. could pick up phone but could not dial etc.

It was a grand plan though. Too bad we are only graded on the implementation.

how would *you* explain the internet?

From Net tech saving the world, a metafilter thread
talking about bringing pedal powered wireless access to rural Laos and digressing to an African village -

At the time, we explained the Internet to them (I had to explain what I did for a living). In the end, we settled for describing it as a system whereby you could ask any question, and get ten answers back. You didn't know whether the answers were right - or whether any of them were right. But you'd get answers.

Blogger tips

Today I helped Eric set up his Booktown radio show's blog using Blogger; he was using Netscape on a Mac, and while it worked ok there was a hitch, namely the "Post" and "PostAndPublish" buttons were invisibly "offscreen" to the right, and in order to see them he needed to type in a long line of text (which could be just all spaces) that caused the frame to scroll itself leftwards. So if you're doing things on Mac and/or with Netscape and you can't see these buttons you may need to do likewise.

Also you might not be able to use Blogger if you've set your security settings to be more stringent than the defaults (disabled cookies maybe?)--if so, you won't ever get to the "edit your blog" page, it'll just keep redirecting you to log on (without saying why). If this happens, reset your security settings to default then try again.

And if you've turned off image loading, you won't see the tabs. you will feel that something is missing; you will be right.(ed.)

And don't start your post with curly brackets, which I think was my original sin. Special characters in general can be dangerous. (I am in a position to know, having written code that barfed on them myself)

If you publish your post but it doesn't show up on your webpage, click on the "Options" button on "Edit this Post" and see if it's posting to the future. Sometimes it decides to do this, for no reason that I can see.

BTW (which BTW stands for "by the way") putting up a weblog costs you nothing if you stay with normal blogger (ie not Blogger Pro) and you host it on blogspot.com--there'll be an ad on the page but as you can see it's tasteful, or for $15 you can make the ad go away. So we are not talking a big (or any) investment of money here. Just time...

your weblog's target audience

If you write a weblog, it'll have very different content depending on who you're writing it for--and, if it's a "one size fits all" blog, it'll have the usual problem of not fitting anyone well. As I see it these are your possible (and possibly overlapping) target audiences--

1. Yourself. A weblog can be your commonplace book, where you store interesting links, quotations and ideas for later reference, and you don't necessarily put much energy into gluing disparate thoughts and URLs together with text. So it could just be a list of links with a few words describing each.
   
2. Your far-flung friends and relatives, who'll be interested in what you're up to these days. They'll care about your insomnia and the loud neighbor next door.
   
3. Your neighbors (loud or otherwise), who may be newcomers to the web and to weblogs. They'll care (a little) about what a weblog is, why to have one, who the Grand Olde Persons of blogging are. And if they're not reading other weblogs and you're writing for them then you can fill yours with interesting links that you found on other weblogs, and they won't complain that yours is yet another rehash of the Same Olde Stuff.
   
4. Your mother. 'nuff said. Expect it to happen.
   
5. People who share your subculture and opinions, with whom you can rant and ditto and feel united and powerful and in general rouse the rabble as Michael Moore did when he appeared at the Bowling for Columbine screening at the Nevada Theatre last fall (presumably not realizing that the oft-maligned (including by M.M.) Union's publisher was also present (and lashed out in response from a more powerful pulpit, which was followed by a decisive 20-vote margin on election day. (success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan...)). This strategy can backfire.
   
6. People who don't share your subculture and opinions, which is where you & they get the most learning done. One of my favorite weblogs in this category has been Andrew Tobias's -- enough columns on finance to keep the wealthy visiting, enough on issues of social justice to keep them thinking. And a tone of respect throughout.
   

And all of this I guess brings up a question...who are you? I'm curious...for all I know you're nobody (note absence of web counter on page) but if not, feel free to drop me a one-line answer.