Scripting languages have more options than bisexuals….
— John Lim, in “Developing Reliable Software with Scripting Languages”
The article itself is a bit over my head, but that wonderfully choice quote had to be saved. Via The Fuzzyblog.
The Two Towers
Just got back from seeing Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Oh my lord.
At this point, if Peter Jackson doesn’t get some sort of special achievement Oscar after Return of the King is released, I’ll be quite surprised and dissapointed. Fellowship of the Ring was an excellent film, and a masterful job of adapting what was for years considered an “unfilmable” literary work to the screen — but the possibility was there that that could have been a fluke. Here, Jackson had the task of following up the blockbuster success of LotR:FotR with a “middle movie” that had neither a definite beginning nor end to its story. While because of that LotR:TTT admittedly cannot stand entirely on its own as a single entity (and I would hate to be someone in the unenviable position of attempting to watch LotR:TTT without having first watched LotR:FotR), as the second chapter in an epic saga, it is far and away an absolutely incredible achievement.
More thoughts follow — not entirely spoiler-free, though, click through at your own risk….
Own yourself
An excellent article from Anil Dash on some of the side effects of Google’s ability to find anything — and anyone.
Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren’t technologically savvy don’t realize that statements don’t fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they’re completely trivial.
We’re all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that’s on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.
Google’s ability to track people down often can be truly amazing, though admittedly, it does pretty much require you to have a somewhat unusual name or e-mail address to use for the search. For instance, Googling for ‘michael hanscom‘ does find me, but not until the sixth link, and even then it’s just my name buried within Phil‘s FOAF file. However, Googling for my online pseudonym of ‘djwudi‘ brings up link after link related to me, either posts here on my site, or comments I’ve left in various other places around the web.
What to do about this ability to be ‘found’ on the ‘net? Well, the best things to do may just be to accept that nothing you put on the web is truly private, and become active in taking control of what information is out there, as much as possible.
I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.
One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.
That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.
To that end, I think I’ll be picking up www.michaelhanscom.com soon, most likely pointing it here. Comments to other sites, where previously I’d use ‘djwudi’, I’ll probably start using my real name now. As long as I’m me, in a world where incredible amounts of information can be found with just a few clicks of a mouse, I might as well take control of who I am.
Well, of course!
Lott said he would survive any challenge to his post as majority leader, and Tuesday he picked up the support of a few GOP senators, including Alaska’s Ted Stevens, who vowed to “defend my friend.” Others who have voiced support for Lott include Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Michael DeWine of Ohio.
The comments from Stevens, the second-most senior Republican senator, were one of the strongest endorsements of Lott since he set off a political firestorm when he praised Thurmond’s unsuccessful presidential bid at a birthday party December 5. Praise of that campaign drew condemnation — from President Bush and others — because Thurmond ran on a segregationist platform.
Stevens said he believes Lott meant the comments as praise for Thurmond as a military man and longtime Senate colleague — not praise for his past segregationist ways. He said Lott’s comments have been blown “out of proportion.”
From CNN.com, “Lott vows to fight for leadership job”
Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sen. Stevens’ turn the Senatorial spot over to someone else — though that’s not likely to happen until he dies. Ah, well.
Caught by the Zeitgeist
I’ve been having a blast recently watching the effects of current trends on my little corner of the ‘net here at djwudi.com. Last October I ran across a website claiming to be a protest against the latest installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, ‘The Two Towers’, equating its title to the WTC attacks of Sep. 11th. Seeing this as something ridiculous and fairly laughable, I posted about it.
Over the past week and a half or so, as the release date for LotR:TTT has grown closer and closer, that entry on my site has suddenly been getting a highly unusual amount of interest. While I figure my primary regular readership consists of somewhere around ten people (mostly family and friends, but I know I’ve picked up a few other readers over the past few months), I do get a fair amount of one-time visitors finding my site through search engines, so when a comment popped up on that post on Dec. 9th, I wasn’t all too surprised. But then another comment appeared. And another. And another! What the heck?
I wondered at first if I’d been linked to from another, more high-profile site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. After going through my referral logs, it seems that this is all just due to people finding that page through searches, primarily from Google. At the time of this writing, Googling for “two towers protest” returns my page as the third primary link, and according to my site statistics for the past week, that has become the third most popular page on my site (197 hits during the week of 12/8-12/14, just behind my index page at 220 hits, and the index page for The Long Letter at 279 hits)!
Fun to watch, certainly. Not sure if I’ve picked up any more regular visitors or not from all this, and while it didn’t really lead to any discussion per se (more a lot of somewhat amusing self-righteous indignation and rambling, for the most part), it is kind of cool to see one page on my site with eighteen seperate comments posted, mostly from people that aren’t regulars (that I know of, at least).
Y’all come back now, ya heah?! ;)
Who’s protecting Eli Lilly?
Drug company Eli Lilly is the maker of the drug Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that used to be a common ingredient in childhood vaccines. There is now substantial evidence that due to the mercury content, Thimerosal may be the cause of autism in many, many children, and Eli Lilly has been facing a number of lawsuits from parents looking for some help in caring for their children that were affected by the drug from this company.
Unfortunately, at the last minute, a provision was inserted into the Homeland Security Act that protects Eli Lilly from these lawsuits, moving the suits from state courts to a federal ‘vaccine court’ where damages are capped at $250,000.
And apparently, nobody knows how this piece of legislation got into the bill.
Now there is a $10,000 reward being offered for anyone who can identify who inserted this provision into the Homeland Security Act.
Lots more information on the issue can be found on TomPaine.com’s links to articles, with Counterspin digging into the background a bit.
(Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the heads-up.)
Goodbye Gore, hello…
Now that Al Gore has decided to step out of the ring for the next presidential race, the field looks pretty wide open. A few months ago, or even now, there wouldn’t be much chance of ousting Dubya from office, but who knows where things might stand in a couple years. In the meantime, I don’t really know much about any of the other potential Democratic candidates, so it was nice to see a quick rundown on the current possibilities over on BackupBrain last Sunday. Definitely gives me an idea of who to keep an eye on.
Lieberman: He’ll definitely run. …but there’s not a chance in hell that he could win against Bush in the general. Deplorably, there are too many people in this country that still will not vote for a Jew for president.
Kerry: He’s already running. …my issue with Kerry is part of the problem that Gore has: he’s so cautious, you think that everything coming out of his mouth has been pre-digested, run by a focus group, and vetted six ways from Sunday.
Edwards: Not this time, John. He’s smart, attractive, and he’s from the South, all of which helps a winner. But he’s a first-term senator, and he’s still finding out how things work in Washington.
Gephardt: He’s run for president before. He lost. …under his fabulous leadership, last month Democrats lost the best chance to regain the House for the next decade. He’s on the wrong side of many issues for me.
Daschle: He’s been a crappy Majority Leader. Period. Last week, he let Trent Lott off the hook for his racist comments, for pity’s sake. He can’t see a friggin’ red-meat issue when it slaps him in the face.
Howard Dean: (who?) This guy is already running. …at the moment, he’s the candidate with the best lineup on the issues. He’s a doctor, has, by all accounts, been a pretty good governor, and is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That works for me. …I like this quote: “I have no patience with ideologues. I think they’re fundamentally disturbed.”
Biden, Feingold, Dodd, Wesley Clark: Puh-leeze.
I’m Karl Barth
“We reject the false doctrine that the church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”
You are Karl Barth!
You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don’t care much for other people’s opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their way, even when you have things figured out better than them.
What theologian of the Christian Church are you?
(Via Doc Searls [who also came out as Karl Barth])
Blogs: 1, Lott: 0
It’s been really fascinating over the past week or so to see Senator Lott’s comments create such a stir (and rightly so, I’d say) — primarily because it’s entirely possible that his comment just may have gotten swept under the rug had the ‘blogosphere’ not started voicing their outrage.
John Podhoretz of the New York Post recognized the work that various bloggers did in keeping the story alive in his column last Friday. This, then, has led to an interesting debate on just how much credit really can go to the blogging world — during which a link was posted to a Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz that also credits the blogosphere with keeping the story alive.
Neat to be able to watch a bunch of independent writers across the ‘net catch the ‘big boys’ of media napping.
Giant sea sparrows?
An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), “Beginning Again,” by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.
— Correction in The New York Times, Dec. 15th, 2002 (via Metafilter)
As mr_crash_davis pointed out, “Not ‘No giant sea sparrow is endangered by…’, but ‘No giant sea sparrow is known to be…’, just in case one turns up somewhere.”