Steve Reads

The Bookslut links to Philip Pullman’s defense of the movie version of His Dark Materials, which was supposedly stripped of anti-Christian sentiments within the book out of fear of the American Christian Right.

Précis of Pullman: the media need to learn what a metaphor is. I’m not anti-Christian; I’m against any totalitarian institution, whether that institution be religious or atheist or otherwise. Any movie that successfully understands that philosophy will be a valid intepretation of my book.

And while this makes sense, it also seems disingenuous. The question Pullman didn’t answer is: did the movie choose its specific intepretation of Pullman’s book because the book upsets conservative American Christians? If the book is not objectively anti-Christian, then the answer to this question is almost certainly “no.” (I’ve not read Pullman’s books, so I can’t weigh in here.) But in any case, he doesn’t seem to answer the question that really matters.

I got Wine working last night with essentially no labor; I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to sit down and try it out. I think I still have a lingering fear, before installing any sufficiently complicated Linux program, that it will be too difficult. But it almost never is; I think there was a time when I had problems getting mplayer to play DivX, but that was really the last time that I needed much tech savvy to get a program running. (Debugging problems — in Windows or Linux or OS X — is another issue, and seems to require savvy no matter where you go.)

But anyway, I got Wine running. Wine allows you to run Windows programs under Linux, at speeds comparable to their native Windows speeds. It’s really pretty bloody amazing. The instant goal was to run WordBiz, the Internet Scrabble Club’s program for playing the game over the Net; friend Seth and I have become Scrabble addicts in the past couple months, and we play each other every night. All it took to get WordBiz running under Linux was:

1. Install Wine. If you’re using any reasonably competent Linux distribution, this is a single command. Under Debian, it’s “apt-get install wine” (run as root, or with sudo); under Mandrake it’s “urpmi wine” or somesuch; and I gather that it’s something like “rpm -i wine” under Red Hat, though I have no experience there. (And you should be using the apt system anyway.)
2. Download and install the Java 2 Runtime Environment (JRE) — as a Windows program. So download it however you would ordinarily do so, then run “wine programName”, where programName is the name of the JRE self-extracting archive that you just downloaded.
3. Download and install WordBiz from the WordBiz link above, again using Wine (the command will be something like “wine WordBiz17.exe”).
4. Along the way, Wine will have created — and prompted you for the names of — a series of Windows directories. In my case these are under ~/.wine/fakewindows — there’s fakewindows/Program Files, fake_windows/Windows and so forth. When you install a program, it thinks it’s running inside of Windows, and it creates all the files and Registry entries that it normally would. So now that WordBiz is installed, change into the Program Files/WordBiz directory and run wine WordBiz.exe. If your experiences are like mine, it should run right away with no problems.

This isn’t a 100% drop-in replacement for Windows. For one thing, Microsoft doesn’t let you use Internet Explorer outside of Windows proper — that is, the only way to get IE is through an actual copy of Windows. (Microsoft continues to insist, falsely, that IE is inseparable from Windows.) Wine is a replacement for the Windows libraries, but it doesn’t replace the Windows applications. You’ll still need to buy a copy of Microsoft Word, say, if you want to run Microsoft Word.

I did also spot some glitches along the way. There’s some strange repainting error within WordBiz — possibly related to DirectDraw — wherein it leaves a trail as I drag letters from my slate of tiles to the board. Starting to move another letter will clear away the old trail, but it’s still irritating.

Lest the point be obscured, it’s really pretty amazing that this works at all — and works 90% correctly. I am running a 90%-functional Windows box within my Linux box. I’m almost certain it’s not this easy inside of Windows to run Linux programs.

I’ve often found that one of Linux’s great strengths is its ability to load files and run programs from virtually any format, operating system, or medium. Last year around Christmas, my dad and brother and I spent hours trying to get the Mac side of a Mac/Windows CD to load on my dad’s Windows machine; my brother had his Mac laptop but didn’t have his Mac CD-ROM drive, so the only choice was to open the CD on some other machine and transfer the files over. We couldn’t get it done under Windows without paying for some separate utility, but I promised them that when they drove me to Boston I would load the CD on my Linux machine and put the files up on my web server for my brother to download. It took less than 10 seconds when we got to my Linux machine (you just have to specify the format of the device you’re mounting — mount -t hpfs [deviceName] [mountPoint], I believe, in the case of Mac HPFS CD-ROMs).

Or take Samba, the standard way to share Windows files and printers and so forth with other computers running different operating systems. Using Samba, I printed over a wireless network to my dad’s Windows-networked printer downstairs; I’m almost certain that a Windows machine couldn’t print to a CUPS printer nearly as easily. (Note that OS X now uses CUPS, so Macs would have just as easy a time printing to a Linux printer as I would.)

This ease of exchange could have something to do with the varying incentives for free- and commercial-software producers. Without really thinking about it too much, it strikes me that Microsoft is not going to invest the time to make Windows open Mac disks unless a sizable number of people want it — unless, say, the total cost of developing it is less than the total amount of income it generates (specifically, the total amount of income that people wouldn’t have spent on Windows anyway). The incentives for free software are totally different; few people are expecting to make money from their hacks, so the calculus is totally different. Hackers write code to fix problems that they themselves are experiencing, so it seems reasonable to assume that more little annoying pain points will get fixed under Linux than under Windows.

Incidentally, there is a way to get Windows working 100% correctly under Linux, though I’ve not quite figured out how to get it to work: run an emulator. An emulator simulates a computer inside a computer; any software running inside of the emulator “sees” whatever processors, hard drives, peripherals, memory and so forth that the emulator pretends to have. It’s really pretty impressive. I’ve been playing a bit with a couple Linux emulators — bochs and qemu — and have not quite been able to get them to work. The trouble is that when I “boot” this virtual machine to a virtual CD-ROM drive — namely the Windows NT install CD — the imitation hard drive is completely blank. Adam Kessel suggests that this is because I need to format the virtual hard drive first — by booting to a virtual Windows boot disk, formatting the hard drive from there, then booting from the CD as I normally would. Something’s amiss, but I hope that I’ll get it working presently. One of the big reasons I bought this laptop is so that I could run Windows and thereby support my Windows clients. I hope also to be able to run Groove; we’ll see how well that works.

Yay me! I just finished Gideon’s Trumpet — Anthony Lewis’s book about the crucial Supreme Court case in which the Supremes ruled that all people are guaranteed the right to an attorney during a criminal trial. (The defendant, Clarence Earl Gideon, had had to defend himself because he couldn’t afford a lawyer and the state wasn’t required to provide him one.)

So that’s 52 books in 52 weeks. (The result would have been slightly less satisfying had it taken me until December 31 to finish them all, because a year contains one day more than 52 weeks, and we’re in a leap year besides.) That was oddly stressful, toward the end — odd, for a purely voluntary challenge to myself. But I won. Rock on.

I finished reading Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling a few days ago. One of the essays in there — attacking WTO protesters for imposing their own values on the third world — struck a particular chord.

I’ve not really made up my mind about globalization, if we’re careful in what we mean about globalization. At one level, there’s nothing to decide on: because of the spread of information technology and cheap international product distribution, it’s in many cases cheaper to get a product from outside the country than it is to get it from within the country. This is unavoidable, and trying to decide what we think about it is moot: unless there’s some massive backwards shift in technology, that kind of globalization is what we’ve got.

When people complain about globalization, I think they’re most often talking about what the New York Times covered in its article “The Free-Trade Fix” from a few years ago (my cache). (I was trying to think of a specific article, and a little googling suggests that that’s the one.) The idea is that global financial institutions make trade anything but free, so that talk of a level playing field within which Central American nations can compete effectively with the United States is patently bogus.

Or are we complaining about the effects of global “monoculture”? That is, do we object to the thought of having a Starbucks on every corner and everyone buying his meals at McDonald’s? I think that’s part of what the Times is getting at in today’s article about the effect of global supermarket chains on Central American farmers (my cache).

What I can’t decide, though, is whether I have any right to complain about monoculture. Yes, I despise as much as anyone the fact that a lot of American cities look like a lot of other American cities, or that looking out the window on the Paris Métro on the way to the Gare du Nord revealed the presence of a “Paris Fried Chicken.” And I reject the blithe slathering of “consumer choice” on every available surface: after millions of other Americans have chosen McDonald’s, my “choices” are likely to be drastically limited. New restaurants won’t start near McDonald’s because they just can’t compete; McDonald’s, in virtue of its size, can exploit economies of scale that small chains cannot.

And that’s part of where my confusion comes in: what does orthodox economic theory say about the “level playing field” that is supposed to exist between McDonald’s and my corner burger joint? If there’s any reasonable way in which I’m allowed to say that there’s a level playing field, I’ll say so; but it seems to me that there isn’t. The market seems anything but open to new entrants, which seems to undercut one of the main legs beneath the free-market ideology.

That said, isn’t all this cheap food helping the third world? Yes, of course, industrial food production comes with its own dangers (The Jungle probably doesn’t happen as much in the U.S. anymore, but what about meat that’s distributed in poorer countries with weaker food regulations?), and millions of tons of pollutants get dumped into the world’s rivers every year because industrial food conglomerates demand higher yields. (Which could spawn a tangent about the capitalist world’s obsession with growth, owing to its legal obligations to stockholders. Another time.) But with all of that taken for granted, industrial food production does bring cheap food to a lot of people who might not have been able to afford it before. How many Americans can eat cheap hamburger today who couldn’t have afforded it early in the 20th century? What effect does this have on the American life expectancy, American productivity, and so forth? So despite its demonstrable flaws, doesn’t industrial production do a lot of good for a lot of people?

Which is why it’s not clear to me that jobs lost to globalization — meat-packing moved offshore, for instance — are harmful. If a low-paid foreign worker takes a job working for pennies a day at a foreign factory, is there any reason to think that he could do better at another job? Isn’t it reasonably clear that he chose that job over other options available to him? (Unless we’re talking about slave labor, which is an entirely different discussion.) Brad DeLong made this point a while back. And on the American side: if we get cheaper meat, that means that maybe we can spend the money we’ve saved on different things — say, clothes that also come from the same foreign country.

I don’t discount other problems with globalization — say, that there might be a race to the bottom between other nations to get the cheapest labor and thereby attract increasingly mobile capital. The U.S. has a minimum wage to protect against this sort of behavior. And some foreign countries’ lack of protection for worker rights is obviously a problem.

But on the independent question, “Should I lament the disappearance of native farmers in Central American countries?” I have to confess that the evidence is inconclusive to me. Would someone like to give a good retort about the evils of globalization?

Googling for a link about Porter Exchange in my last post, I discovered an article by Paul Krugman mentioning the Exchange. It discusses a really interesting-sounding article by “Browne and Sass” about why New England’s economy works as well as it does (or did — I wonder whether the same analysis applies now that the dot-com bubble is over). A little more googling suggests that the article is Lynn E. Browne and Steven Sass, “The Transition from a Mill-based to a Knowledge-based Economy: New England, 1940-2000,” which appears in Peter Temin, ed., Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Sounds good to me, so I’ve promptly ordered it from the library.

I’m in hot — and I do mean hot — pursuit of finishing my 52nd book this year; I’m 51.5 books on the way to that record. But I happened to forget to put the final book — Gideon’s Trumpet — in my backpack before I got on the subway this morning, although I did have a copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in there. So I started reading it — a book that I’ve been eagerly awaiting for at least a couple months. I was 250th or so on the Minuteman Library Network’s waiting list for it, but I just got a copy of it for Christmas.

To get some sense of this book’s promise, here’s a footnote — a footnote — on page 35:

The example cited by Mr Honeyfoot was of a murder that had taken place in 1279 in the grim moor town of Alston. The body of a young boy was found in the churchyard hanging from a thorn-tree that stood before the church-door. Above the door was a statue of the Virgin and Child. So the people of Alston sent to Newcastle, to the Castle of the Raven King and the Raven King sent two magicians to make the Virgin and the Jesus-child speak and say how they had seen a stranger kill the boy, but for what resson they did not know. And after that, whenever a stranger came to the town, the people of Alston would drag him before the church-door and ask “Is this him?” but always the Virgin and Child replied that it was not. Beneath the Virgin’s feet were a lion and a dragon who curled around each other in a most puzzling manner and bit each other’s necks. These creatures had been carved by someone who had never seen a lion or a dragon, but who had seen a great many dogs and sheep and something of the character of a dog and a sheep had got into his carving. Whenever some poor fellow was brought before the Virgin and Child to be examined the lion and the dragon would cease biting each other and look up like the Virgin’s strange watchdogs and the lion would bark and the dragon would bleat angrily.

Years went by and the townspeople who remember the boy were all dead, and the likelihood was that the murderer was too. But the Virgin and Child had somehow got in the habit of speaking and whenever some unfortunate stranger passed within the compass of their gaze they would still turn their stone heads and say, “It is not him.” And Alston acquired the reputation of an eerie place and people would not go there if they could help it.

These first few pages suggest that I am in the hands of a master storyteller. By all indications — including a conversation with a very cute girl in a Porter Exchange Korean restaurant — this is a book that I’m going to love. I’ve heard it described — within just a few months of its release — as one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written.

What’s more, I met its author, Susanna Clarke, during her appearance at the Boston Public Library recently. She was sweet, and we had a nice — though short — chat about her book, the movie that has recently been optioned on it, and the evisceration that has apparently been performed on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series out of fear of the American Christian Right. This nice conversation is in sharp contrast to my experiences with Jhumpa Lahiri, whose books I will never buy again. (How else to punish her for disrespecting her fans?) I wish Clarke all the success in the world.

 . . . And I can’t wait to get into Jonathan Strange.

I keep trying to switch away from mutt, my favorite email client, to something nice and graphical like Mozilla Thunderbird or Ximian Evolution. I want to switch not because mutt is failing me, but because I constantly try to sell free software to the great unwashed, and command-line stuff — mutt is a terminal-mode program, typically with blocky white text on a black background — tends to scare people. One does quite a lot of day-to-day Linux work with a GUI — I use Firefox, straw, and KOrganizer all the time — but for some reason it turns out that mutt is just better for what I need.

You don’t realize all the quirky needs you have until you find tools capable of meeting those needs, but mutt — for all its faults — meets them the best; it’s advertising itself properly when it says that “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” I save 99% of my incoming email into folders using only two keypresses (one to press ‘s’, for ‘save’, and the enter key to tell mutt that it’s chosen the right destination folder with the help of rules I’ve defined); I can choose email signatures based on the recipient (a formal one with my name and address for business clients; an often silly or mildly offensive one for anyone who wouldn’t care); I can filter every outgoing URL through shorlfilter so that long URLs never get cut off at the end of lines; and I can turn off that shorlfiltering when messages go to my mother’s work account (which stupidly deletes every message with a shorl URL, for no good reason that I can discern). Perhaps most importantly, mutt uses my standard text editor for message composition, so any style rules or macros that I’ve defined make their way into my mail. As far as I can tell, no GUI email program does these things. I wish they did; that would sell me on them, which would in turn make it easier to sell Linux to my friends.

I was just trying to find the GNOME FAQ, so I checked out GNOME’s website, spent about 10 seconds there, then decided to google for it instead. And there it is.

Assuming sites are google-friendly, this makes me wonder if the concept of a “website” as a specific server — even a virtual server, residing on a machine alongside a lot of other servers — is way out of date. Why bother even working on your site’s navigation if its pages can more easily be accessed through Google?

Even if a site’s organization is ideal, it’s going to be hard for any website to compete with the ease of use that Google brings me: I don’t need to learn the quirks of a new website (are adjacent words joined with ‘AND’? Does the default search look at the entire website, or just the subset that I’m in now?), and the Google toolbar sits right in the corner of my web browser; I can get to it by pressing Ctrl+K, which is unlikely to be true of any website.

It’s interesting to think that the world’s web-linking community does a better job organizing a website than devoted sysadmins do.

I was just reminded for no good reason of 826 Valencia’s fish Karl — 826 Valencia being a cool little spot in San Francisco (can you guess its address? I think you can) where volunteers gather to help students (largely poor ones, or does it matter? Help a brother out, Jon) learn to write. It’s also a pirate store (yeah, you heard me right), and they have a nook up front devoted to Karl. Karl is awesome. I would say that Karl is the man if that weren’t manifestly untrue.

With any luck, if I get my dream job (cached), I will be much nearer to Karl: 826 Valencia is about 1/3 of a mile from EFF. Pray that I get this job, people.

Actually, while I’m on the topic: I’m both frightened and excited at the prospect of getting this job. Leaving Boston would be a huge trauma for me, and there would be a ton of people whom I’d miss. But it would be the opportunity of a lifetime for me, and there’s no possible way I could turn it down. On the one hand I hope I don’t have to make the decision, but on the other hand there’s no real decision to make. But I’ll try not to count my chickens until they’ve hatched; I had a phone interview today, and it went as well as could be expected. Now I’ll just have to wait and see.

It may only be the online edition, but the New York Times mentions Firefox’s ascendance in the web-browser market (my cache). And it’s actually rather straightforward and assumptions-questioning, in a way that the Times’s reporting rarely is:

Gary Schare, Microsoft’s director of product management for Windows, has been assigned the unenviable task of explaining how Microsoft plans to respond to the Firefox challenge with a product whose features were last updated three years ago. He has said that current users of Internet Explorer will stick with it once they take into account “all the factors that led them to choose I.E. in the first place.” Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn’t I.E. come bundled with Windows?

Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla’s Firefox must prove it can smoothly move from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed “a bit of a free ride.” If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company’s browser free on every Windows PC, I’d be more careful about using the phrase “free ride.”

Go Firefox. Though at some level I wonder whether a poster to Slashdot is right that the success of open-source packages reduces people’s incentives to move to open-source operating systems. I have my doubts about these concerns. For one thing, what if everyone were using OpenOffice, Firefox, and Ximian Evolution? Then wouldn’t Windows lose a great deal of its success-through-inertia? What’s preventing you from moving to Linux if every one of your apps is open-source? Of course, this raises another question: if you’re getting by just fine under Windows using open-source apps, then why bother switching to Linux? But it’s at least an open question, and I’m glad someone asked.

Today is Laptop Day. All times will now be measured relative to today, which is Day 0 in the A.L./B.L. (After Laptop/Before Laptop) scale. (Or perhaps BATE/ATE — “Before the After Today Era/After Today Era”) This thing is so sweet. It’s 5 pounds, which seemed like a lot when compared to the 2-odd pounds of the ThinkPad X40 (mine’s an R51), but it doesn’t seem noticeable; this thing is slim and light and awesome.

It came preinstalled with Windows XP. That had to go, and soon it did, to be replaced with Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu installed in about 60 seconds, which I hope puts the final nail in the coffin of the “Linux is difficult to install” meme. My only trouble with it is that I wanted to see about leaving XP on a small partition (say, 3 or 4 gigs), so I wanted to resize the existing (40-gig) Windows partition, wipe out the IBM recovery partition (a few gigs set aside on every ThinkPad so that IBM doesn’t have to ship recovery CDs with its machines), and install Linux on the 35-odd gigs of hard-disk space left. If it’s possible to do this within the Ubuntu install routine (which is, as far as I can tell, the sarge install routine), it’s not obvious. It’s perfectly clear how to do this within Mandrake. For users switching from Windows to Linux who still want to leave a Windows partition on their disks, I’d probably recommend Mandrake. It has some usability advantages over Ubuntu, but they seem mostly confined to the installer.

Having worked with Debian, Mandrake, and now Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative), I’d recommend Mandrake if I myself were going to have no continuing relationship with the machine on which it’s installed: Mandrake’s good as a “fire and forget” distribution. If, however, I were going to administer the OS for a long time, I’d probably suggest Ubuntu.

Here I sit in a coffeeshop, happily using their WiFi and eating their pastries. It’s been a very productive day. Getting out of the house is a great way to force myself to do work.

If anyone is interested in looking at the best arguments in favor of “intelligent design creationism,” the book Intelligent Design Creationism And Its Critics looks really good. It might help me to view creationists as something other than troglodytes. I’ve had a very, very hard time doing otherwise; I think I’ve read a fairly good selection of their arguments, and they’re as far from convincing as flat-earthers are.

But if you’re interested in reading that book, it seems like the best possible defense of intelligent design.

While we’re at it, I want to read J.B.S. Haldane, as well as John Maynard Smith and R.A. Fisher. Anyone want to dig into mathematical biology with me? (Those of you who can suggest specific books by these guys are, as always, welcome to do so.)

P.S. (10 August 2005): I just noticed that Scientific American, in its 15 Answers To Creationist Nonsense, recommends IDC&IC. Nice.

Enfant terrible James Grimmelmann links to an article describing President Bush’s plans to disable civilian GPS during a national emergency. James rightly notes the idiocy of the idea. My question is: why is GPS still run by the government?

George Will interviews Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney this week, and among other things writes that Romney

has done, or facilitated the doing of, some fine things, such as scrapping the Clean Elections Act, the Massachusetts mishmash of public funding and limits on political contributing and spending that was, Romney says, “designed to protect incumbency in the most extreme manner.”

I’m going to dig for an authoritative description of exactly what went into Clean Elections. Whatever its content, I’m fairly certain that the House passed it, the state’s citizens voted to fund it, the state’s Supreme Court said that the state had to provide funding for it, and yet it’s never gotten funded. If my memory serves, in other words, the scuttling of Clean Elections is possibly the most blatant violation of democratic (lowercase-d) process in decades.

If anyone feels like finding a conclusive description of the process, I’d be grateful. I’ll do my own digging as well.

I think I’ve finally found a vitamin that matches Flintstone’s vitamins for sheer chewable pleasure: Walgreen’s 500 mg chewable vitamin C with reduced sugar. Goddamn they’re good.

So my question: is there any reason why taking too much vitamin C is bad? Does it crystallize in my kidneys and give me ebola or something? Nutritionists, help a bruthuh out.

Republicans are considering forbidding filibusters for judicial nominees (my cache) during the next term, and they probably have the majority to make it happen.

Our government is filled with defenses against the tyranny of the majority; that’s what the Supreme Court is, for one thing. Filibustering is another safeguard. For Republicans to suggest banning it is to remove another pillar from beneath our democracy.

Media kvetch: the article says,

During Bush’s first term, Democrats successfully filibustered 10 of Bush’s 52 nominees for appeals courts, while acceding to the confirmation of 35 others. The appeals court confirmation rate was low, but not as low as the rate for President Bill Clinton’s second term, Democrats said.

This is the standard “balance as a defense of laziness” approach. Either the appeals-court confirmation rate was lower during Clinton’s second term, or it wasn’t. In either case, give us numbers; don’t play “he said, she said” with an objectively-answerable question.

Yes! Perfect! In the coming months, Google will be working with Harvard to put the full text of the University’s public-domain books on the web. (Via Brad DeLong.)

I hope Google continues to not be evil. This Harvard project is a very unevil thing to do.

How does the copyright work here? Obviously they’re putting only public-domain works on the web, so there’s no copyright problem there. But what if some competitor — say, Microsoft — decided to sponge off Google’s hard work and duplicate all the public-domain books within its own search engine? Clearly the law should discourage that, unless I’m missing something; it shouldn’t frown upon little bits of copying here and there, but it should discourage wholesale copying.

At the same time, ordinary copyright shouldn’t apply here, should it? There shouldn’t be a life-plus-70 copyright on Google’s transcription of the public domain. The law should encourage Google to provide this kind of public service, but we don’t want to make Google the sole provider of digitized public-domain works for the next century. But at the same time, if we don’t want to use Google’s (hypothetically) copyrighted transcription of a public-domain work, we have alternatives: we can transcribe it ourselves or we can use another site. So is there a good argument to be made that Google deserves a copyright here? Or is there some more limited form of protection that prevents en masse copying of the Microsoft variety suggested above, while allowing, say, anyone to make a copy of the book they’re downloading? Offhand, this seems different than the standard fair-use exemption. That exemption, as this non-lawyer understands it, wouldn’t allow you to make a full copy of a copyrighted book, but would allow you to copy small portions of the book.

Lots of questions here. I’d value any legal input.

P.S.: Ah. Looks like the New York Times has picked up the story. Apparently it’s bigger than just Harvard’s library. Beautiful.

P.P.S.:

Harvard officials said they would be happy to use the Internet to share their collections widely. “We have always thought of our libraries at Harvard as being a global resource,” said Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard.

Anyone who has tried to get into Harvard’s libraries if he is not a student can attest that Summers’s statement is the most delicate, exquisite kind of bullshit.

P.P.P.S.: The article doesn’t say whether Google will scan into some easily-manipulable and non-proprietary format, like raw text with HTML formatting. My fingers are crossed that it will choose the least evil path here.

The Bookslut says of Michiko Kakutani’s review of Michael Crichton’s latest novel, “Michiko 1, Crichton 0.” Indeed.

There’s a class of author — is “technothriller” what I’m going after here? — that specializes in books filled with authoritative-sounding science or, in the case of Tom Clancy, guns. You can read a Clancy novel and think you know everything about automatic weapons without ever laying your hands on one. Or pick up a Grisham novel and speak as though you knew anything about the “class-action-lawsuit crisis.” I know people who cite television shows as evidence of their debate points. How do you even argue with that? “Sitcoms are not reality” might be a starting point, but if people are at the point where they’d bother citing fiction to begin with, then the debate is already lost.

I’ll stop.

Just to spread the news to my tiny corner of the blog world: Bernie Kerik’s withdrawal from consideration for the post of Homeland Security secretary apparently had nothing to do with “nanny troubles” and probably a lot more to do with an arrest warrant that a judge issued against him a few years back. (Ultimate source is Newsweek [my cache], which isn’t exactly a conspiricist rag. Those of you who think blogs are largely a melting pot of lies and bullshit might take some consolation in this.)

Maybe I’ve gone off about this before, but can anyone explain to me why we have a department of homeland security? My understanding is that the Department of War became the Department of Defense after World War II, when the government insisted that an offensive war just wasn’t possible or desirable anymore, and that it would focus on defense exclusively. (I’d like some find a citation for this.) If that’s so — or at the very least, if the name means what it suggests — then why do we need another Cabinet-level agency to take care of homeland defense? Isn’t that an admission that the Department of Defense isn’t doing its job?

Relatedly, why does the Department of Energy handle nuclear-weapons plants? I realize that in any sufficiently complicated organization, there will be multiple reasonable ways to divide authority; in this case, it’s probably a question of dividing by technical competence (nuclear power being the DoE’s skill, whether military or civilian) or dividing along military/civilian lines. But it just doesn’t make much sense to me. If anyone knows the relevant policy/history, do let me know.

Slashdot links to a lawsuit against Google by the American Chemical Society over the name of Google’s new service, Google Scholar. ‘The complaint contends that Google’s use of the trademark “Scholar” for its Google Scholar literature-search engine constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition.’

Intellectual-property folks out there: is this as ridiculous as it sounds? Because if it really hinges on the word “scholar,” doesn’t that seem like an awfully neutral term? Does this lawsuit stand any chance of going anywhere?