My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for “always be closing”. Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal. I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30621.html">Andrew Orlowski</a> is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.

From a pre-war speech by Robin Cook: Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. ...

For the detail oriented, the Center for Cooperative Research put together a chronology of Bush’s movements on 9/11. (Via the Dead Parrots.) I can’t get very upset about Bush going in and doing his photo op — I know that on that day it took a while for me to react. It was, after all, incredibly shocking. What does strike me as strange is the reaction of the Secret Service. As is pointed out in the timeline, evacuating Bush should have been as high a priority as evacuating Cheney. ...

Dave rants (original) : The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization. Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.

I love my iPod. I’d long ago noticed that its alphabetic sort puts bands with “The” in their appropriate place; i.e., “The Beatles” sort into the Bs. Good. But I didn’t realize until yesterday that it does the same thing with “Los.” Yep, Los Straightjackets are in the Ss.

That was kind of an exciting Mother’s Day. My brother, my sister-in-law, and I had a nice trip down to the Cape to visit Mom, dined on fish and chips, and headed back up north. Right before the Sagamore Bridge, some guy in a Dodge Ram rearended us at around 40 MPH. Dodge Ram 2500s (original) are huge — I’m six feet tall and the hood of this thing was up to my chin. My brother’s Volvo is probably totalled; the Ram has a big dent in the bumper and that’s it. Impressive. ...

Iraq update: I haven’t yet been willing to say that we should give up on finding WMD in Iraq, although I think it’s pretty damned unlikely. Might be about time to take that step. The 75th Exploitation Task Force, which is the group in charge of finding WMD in Iraq, is getting ready to head home. (Via CalPundit.) Boy. Remember during the war when we were told that Saddam had issued chemical weapons to the Republican Guard? I guess when the Guard was giving up, they remained loyal enough to Saddam to destroy those weapons with methods so complete that we can’t find any traces of them. While they were slipping away into the countryside. ...

So… this (original) is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important? We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible. ...

Hey, it’s nearly time for a new Neal Stephenson book! (It was nearly time for a Neal Stephenson book a couple of years ago, but since he’s been working on going to space I think the wait is pretty forgivable.) Quicksilver is a historical novel, and is volume one of a … of a cycle. 944 pages. Booyah! The publishing monolith has provided us with an excerpt.

Yep, Richard Thompson really does cover “Kiss” on the bonus CD included in his latest album. It’s actually not that mindbending; it makes me want to hear him play guitar on Prince albums (Prince being a not that bad guitarist himself) but I don’t think he improved on the fundamental riff in any way. Which, come to think of it, speaks to Prince’s guitar skills. Psychedelic Republicans scores far higher on the wrongness meter. I kind of want these, but only kind of. My covetous instincts are sufficiently slaked by looking at the pictures on the Internet. I would, however, pay real cash money for a neocon Tarot deck.