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Population: One

Big Dig

September 26, 2002
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After much twiddling around, www.innocence.com has moved and is now served off my shiny semi-new OpenBSD box in Somerville. Making new entries just got a lot faster; at some point I’ll try mod_perl again and see if that doesn’t speed up as well.

DNS hasn’t propagated as I write this, but it will in a few hours. And I suppose if you’re reading this, you know it’s propagated.

Let’s see. The new server is now my primary nameserver, and I’ll be letting the registrars know that next. The last piece is email (also probably the most nervewracking piece). Woot!

Meanwhile, an uprising

September 25, 2002
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There is much talk over here in the States of Tony Blair; of how well he gets along with Bush, and of course of his recent speech presenting the case against Iraq. No stauncher ally than the Brits. Yeah.

Well, or at least, none stauncher than Tony Blair. Andrew Sullivan’s article on the friendship between the two men says more than he realizes, I think. “Blair’s second intuition was that with George W. Bush, the most important element is always personal rapport and trust. He sensed almost intuitively that an intimate bond with Bush would give the British prime minister more influence than any other world leader in the post 9/11 world.” Yes, indeed. How much is that influence worth? Is it worth the trust of Blair’s own Labour Party?

53 Labour MPs rejected Blair’s speech on Monday, and 80 more may follow suit. Labour’s been downplaying the problem, but why else would Blair allow Monday’s vote to go through if he wasn’t leery of forcing the issue?

So it’s all very well to blithely wave off China and Russia’s criticism. Germany opposes Bush’s plan, and so does France? Well, at least the British support us. Except that polls show only about half of England thinks Bush is on target, and Blair’s own party is restless.

Would you like fries with that?

September 23, 2002
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The new Google News service kind of bugs me. The FAQ says this:

The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google’s web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Google News relies in a similar fashion on the editorial judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the Google News page.

Huh. So the most reported stories show up on Google News, which causes people to report the stories more, and so on. In engineering, they call this positive feedback. It is not always a good thing.

Mind you, Google’s always used algorithms like this for their search. Daypop, the popular (and currently dead) weblog search service, creates a similar effect with their Top Forty listing of popular links from the world’s weblogs. So this is nothing new, per se.

Still. I have a penchant for the unexplored, the new, and the underreported. It seems to me that Google is encouraging the homogenization of the Web, here. The algorithm is problematic when applied to news, and it has the same problems when applied to web search.

Discussing this is, alas, met with scorn from the weblogging community. Daniel Brandt is a bit of a loon, admittedly, and his personal stake in these arguments is well documented. But there’s some truth at the core of his complaints. Besides, you’d kind of expect Doc Searls to stand up for Google. He’s one of the guys who benefits from PageRank.

When Doc Searls says “Why is this bad? Because PageRank doesn’t give a fair shake to stuff nobody points to? What user would want that?” I am forced to reply, “Users who want to find stuff outside the beaten path.” PageRank is great for building up an initial concept of the Web; if you’re starting from scratch, you get an accurate picture of which sites are important. But from that point on, you make it harder for completely new sites to break into the rankings. New clusters of link relationships won’t be ranked as highly as the old clusters.

So that’s why Google News kind of bugs me.

Disclaimer: I used to work for AltaVista.

Nullify this

September 23, 2002
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South Dakota is about to vote on a constitutional amendment permitting jury nullification. This means that juries could vote not guilty on the grounds that the relevant law was unfair or otherwise misguided. The supporters have a site, and the South Dakota State Bar has this to say.

The actual amendment would rewrite Article VI, Section 7 of the South Dakota Constitution as follows. The changes are marked in italics.

In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall have the right to defend in person and by counsel; to demand the nature and the cause of the accusation against him; to have a copy thereof; to meet the witnesses against him face to face; to have compulsory process served for obtaining witnesses in his behalf; and to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the county and district in which the offense is alleged to have been committed; and to argue the merits, validity, and applicability of the law, including the sentencing laws.

The supporters don’t actually do a very good job addressing the arguments against jury nullification; there is, in fact, an existing mechanism for allowing citizens input into the law, and it is reasonable to ask whether or not 12 jurors selected at random should have the ability to override a majority vote of the entire populace. I think the answer may be yes, but I dislike the arrogance of claiming that the question is irrelevant. “Common sense isn’t.”

And the lawyers of South Dakota are not universally evil people who rely on scare tactics. Claiming that “they are insulting your intelligence” is the worst kind of populist rhetoric. Sigh.

So the impression I get is that South Dakotans in favor of jury nullification are not in fact capable of constructing or analyzing legal arguments, or logical arguments of any kind. This does not convince me that it’s a good idea to let South Dakotan juries decide cases based on their opinions of the laws involved. Sorry, guys; if you can’t move beyond populist rhetoric, you shouldn’t be trusted with more complex decisions on a jury.

Scenes from an exhibition

September 20, 2002
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Guilty pleasure: Billy Joel. I suspect this New York Times article is morosely grim even if you’re not a big fan, though. Or maybe it’s just pathetic. The man is certainly whining — but if he was more credible, wouldn’t there be something worthy about a guy who weighs the value of love so high against the rewards of fame? Instead, it’s just the Piano Man, and he’s hard to respect.

Broadcast media

September 20, 2002
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Doc Searls makes a really good point about the nature of weblogs, and I think it’s relevant to why I chose to move my daily meanderings off of LiveJournal. (Yes, I know some of you are reading them there. Don’t distract me.) He says, inspired by this comment by Clay Shirky, that weblogs are like radio. Webloggers are broadcasting to the world, rather than having a conversation with their readers. And you know, that’s pretty much true.

LiveJournal is much more oriented towards conversations. The community feature is perhaps the most obvious facet of this, but the friends pages are another one. You create a community with your friends page. I’ve had, on occasion, the experience of being surprised that two people on my friends page don’t know each other — “but they post right next to each other! How odd!” And, of course, since everyone can see who you’re friends with, there’s a tendency for friend groups to overlap like crazed Venn diagrams. It’d be kind of fun to crunch some numbers on that, see if it’s possible to find the friend clusters and how much they overlap, but I don’t really have the techniques.

I’d be curious to hear from any of my LJ readers: does my journal there feel any different than anyone else’s? Do you notice that I’m not really writing for that particular submedium? Do I look odd on your friends list, besides that I have links in all my titles and I ramble on at great length?