Universal Address Book

The quest for the universal computer address book continues. For years I have wanted to be able to have one address book for all my applications on my computer at home, all my applications on my computer at work, my Palm, and preferably my cell phone. For some reason, software designers seem determined to balkanize the address book market, so that address books in different applications and on different platforms will not work together. It seems so simple . . and yet so elusive. I think that I am making some progress with a combination of Intellisync and Outlook, from which I am importing addresses to WordPerfect. Some progress . . . but a long way to go.

The Jungle Redux

Meat From Infirm Animals Is Banned (washingtonpost.com)

"Animals too sick or old to stand or walk will be banned from entering the food supply, federal officials said yesterday, in a move that would keep from 150,000 to 200,000 to "downer" cattle a year from going to the slaughterhouse."

This is progress? (Too little, too late).

Paideia

Scripting News: 12/31/2003

"Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you're gone?"

Dave Winer sums up the Greek heroic ideal.

Freedom of Religion Redux

Readers interested in Robert Scoble's recent discussion of freedom of religion may want to refer back to TPB's analysis of the Establishment Clause during the controversy over Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments sculpture and his follow up post in Unbillable Hours.

On the Shoulders of Giants

MoorishGirl observes that recent scholarship indicates that Nathaniel Hawthorne may have borrowed passages from a poem by James Russell Lowell, and speculates that computer searches through Amazon and Google will turn up more such borrowings.

The default assumption in modern society is that plagiarism is bad. This attitude is hard to reconcile with the fact that many of our greatest artists plagiarized freely and unashamedly. The most noteworthy example is Shakespeare, who blithely stole his plots from other authors. Chaucer was no better. And I am told that early Classical musicians freely lifted each other's musical themes. Scholars such as Jonathon Livingston Lowes have suggested that "borrowing" from other works and transmuting them into art is an essential part of the creative process. The question becomes, then, whether the modern emphasis on originality and copyright has enhanced the creative process or hobbled it.

The Narrow View

Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage

"The latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found widespread support for an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban gay marriage. It also found unease about homosexual relations in general, making the issue a potentially divisive one for the Democrats and an opportunity for the Republicans in the 2004 election."

Government of the bigots, by the bigots, and for the bigots.

Second Thoughts

Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves

"Not only does the overwhelming presence of slavery in early America cast a dark shadow over the sunny aspects of the founding, but it is also driving a huge rethinking of our history. Previous historians of early America, of course, never entirely ignored slavery (how could they?), but they did not bring its harsh brutality and its influence front and center in the way recent historians have."

Power Laws and Weblog Popularity

Clay Shirky gives a short explanation of the Power Law and its application to the number of readers each weblog attracts. The Power Law basically posits that distribution in certain kinds of networks -- whether weblog or wealth -- is weighted in such a way that a disproportionate share of resources -- readers or dollars -- are allocated to the top performers in a group. In other words, the most popular weblogs get most of the readers, just as a few rich people control most of the wealth.

I came across the Power Law upon reading the unfortunate news that BlogShares has closed.

Hiatus

It's been a long time since I last visited my weblog, but between work, the baby, and the Thanksgiving holiday, there has been little time for writing. I even had to pass on my little help manual for the GNOME System Monitor to someone else to update, since I could not meet the Thanksgiving deadline.

In addition, it is sometimes discouraging to go back over what one wrote in previous posts and realize how trite or stale it reads. Perhaps it should be some consolation that as I read my book about Coleridge -- The Road to Xanadu -- it becomes clear that Coleridge wrote some pretty turgid verse on the way to his three great poems.

Spam Relief

How do you spell RELIEF? Jay Allen has come out with a great blacklist plugin that helps address the recent wave of comment span that has besieged Movable Type users. For the moment, my weblog comments are certified Spam free!

More on Easterbrook

Roger L. Simon: GREGG EASTERBROOK AND ME

"But Easterbrook also informed me of something else that is highly disturbing. He has been fired from his job at ESPN. Gregg takes full responsibility for this (he wrote the original words that he regrets), but I, as one of his harshest critics, believe that ESPN has vastly overreacted. I urge them to reconsider their decision. I don�t think anybody who attacked Easterbrook wanted to see him fired. I certainly didn�t. To the degree that I am even remotely responsible for this I humbly apologize. I can only say this is another example of what we all know�words have consequences."