Steve Reads

Dude, it’s an eyesore. Look at this building and tell me that “By any rational measure, One Western Avenue is a solid piece of urban design.” (Image cached.) I don’t think this makes me a Luddite. As my friend Seth wrote in a review of The Fountainhead:

Oh, one more side point. Maybe it’s not really a fair question, but how do you actually feel about the “modern” architecture of post-WWII America? You know, the kind of architecture of which the brilliant and forward-thinking genius hero is a proponent? With few exceptions, I find it uniformly cold and ugly — arrogantly so. And that’s how I feel about this book as well.

Mr. Sparkle is, in fact, disrespectful to dirt.

What book, you git? The “we freaked out for no reason” book?

Listen, I see the point that a lot of people have made, namely that the police (“in this post-9/11 world”) were unavoidably going to overreact, and that it’s a good thing that they did. Other countries would have blown up those things immediately. Etc., etc. All of that is fine. But here’s the thing: it was a prank, they fooled the city, and they committed no crime. Get over it, and stop acting like you hold any moral authority here.

I have comparatively little to say about Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the “dual revolutions” (the Industrial and the French), because I’m pretty sure I’ve only just finished the first act. Hobsbawm’s goal seems to be to explain the world we live in now as a consequence of the dual revolutions, and he’s spinning out his tale slowly and carefully. The first volume deals with the period from the start of the revolutions to their logical culmination in the revolutions of 1848. The way Hobsbawm tells it, the latter revolutions were in some sense inevitable given how the French and Industrial Revolutions played out. The lives of the poor in industrial cities grew intolerable; the bourgeoisie formed as a class and gained power; liberal politics, viewing men as atoms colliding in the marketplace, began its quest to be the only admissible political conception; the materialist worldview became the only socially acceptable one, powered by industry and by the rise of science; art — in the person of a Ruskin, say — violently rebelled; and the whole dance took its perfection of form in Karl Marx. (Says the man who has, embarrassingly, not yet read Marx.)

If I’m reading Hobsbawm right, the mechanics of the twin revolutions forced all of this to happen, and forced its eventual resolution in 1848. His knowledge of history, in its grubby details, is too profound to let him take this inevitability too far, but in broad outline he seems convinced that the dual revolutions created tensions that could only be resolved in one way. The powder keg explodes in the very last sentence of this volume; a better tease to lure me into the second one could not be devised.

Hobsbawm has a certain style that I can’t quite pin down, but which is in many ways difficult to pierce. For one, the mass of evidence he lays down is imposing. But it’s all in the form of sketches, with very few quotes from actual people. In part this may be because he expects me to know things that any educated person should know; if recent reading has taught me anything, it’s that I’m not especially well educated.

An educated person should also be able to handle the highly recursive structure of his paragraphs. He’s a very top-down writer: he’ll mention the broad point he wants to make, then dive into the details and break each of them down into subpoints. He continues this for a few layers, and if you’re paying close attention you can connect all of them. Hobsbawm’s prose doesn’t necessarily remind you of where you started as he moves along; he leaves that up to you.

The book could stand to be better footnoted, and it would make this reader happier if the for-further-reading notes were at the end of each section; a for-further-reading on how the dual revolutions impacted art, for instance, would be lovely. As it is, the book recommendations are all crammed together past the endpapers; I didn’t realize they were there until perhaps 2/3 of the way through.

All of this is in the way of cavilling, however. Hobsbawm’s argument is clear and convincing, and does an excellent job synthesizing all of European history during a 59-year-period into a 300-page book. I can’t wait to start the next volume.

Some responses to one of Hobsbawm’s critics are below the fold.

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Please get less godawfully-frightening poster families:

Whatever is happening to them at the time of this photograph is not positive. I would not like it done to me.

Viacom demands YouTube pull down videos:

Feb 2, 2007 — NEW YORK (Reuters) – Viacom Inc. <VIAb.N> has demanded that Google Inc.’s <GOOG.O> online video service YouTube pull down all of its video clips after they failed to reach an agreement, the company said.

About 100,000 video clips from Viacom-owned properties including MTV Networks and BET has been asked to be removed.

Viacom said its pirated programs on YouTube generate about 1.2 billion video streams, based on a study from an outside consultant.

Google must have known this was going to happen. They bought a service that they knew was engaging in massive piracy, and they didn’t change it a bit. This isn’t like buying out Napster and then neutering it. Google has been readying for this fight since the beginning. I can’t wait to see what comes of it. This is Old Media versus New Media.

(Via Josh Marshall)

Great article by Bradford Plumer. (Via Chris, and included below the fold.) I’d need to read the original studies, because I do take issue with some of Plumer’s interpretations of the numbers. For instance, when he says that between “1979 and 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans saw their after-tax incomes triple, while those of the middle fifth grew by only 21 percent and those of the poorest fifth barely budged,” the natural question to me is: what happened to the incomes of those who were poor in 1979? The stat that he gave doesn’t address income mobility. He has a few small sins of omission like this, but the story is pretty clear: we now have a very clear idea of the precise ways in which wealthy people control politics. Worth the 5-minute read.

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Jamie Forrest points me to a report on the awfulness of Graydon Carter’s restaurant called Waverly in Grenwich Village. Now, I didn’t know who Graydon Carter was before reading the article, but now I do. I also didn’t know about this restaurant, where one can apparently spend $100 per person in 90 minutes; again, my ignorance has been rectified.

I point out the article both because it’s very well-written — grippingly, really, for something as pedestrian as a trip to a restaurant — and because I think that companies should pay dearly when they traffic in bad customer service. This is my own little attempt to increase the bad-review multiplier.

(Post included below.)

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I’ve had this idea for a little while, whereby we hook up Linux documentation to a MediaWiki installation (MediaWiki being the software that runs the Wikipedia). Me, I find the Linux bug-reporting process kind of cumbersome, and even when it tries to be friendly — e.g., Bug-buddy — it doesn’t quite work. The Debian command-line bug-reporting tool, reportbug, is quite good as far as command-line tools go, but that’s not saying much; it’s certainly beyond the reach of beginning Linux users.

But everyone loves the Wikipedia, and it’s pretty usable by novices. So wouldn’t it be cool if you could view and edit Linux documentation through the Wikipedia interface? The whole Wikipedia editing process would stand behind it; presumably there would be a lot of people — project leaders for that Linux package, say — standing behind it paying close attention to see that it’s not hacked. More to the point, by putting Linux docs into the actual Wikipedia (as opposed to in a MediaWiki installation somewhere else), thousands or millions more people would see it and edit it. Every time someone searched for “pattern matching,” he might land on the documentation for grep, say. The documentation would get better, and more novices would get involved. That could only help the open-source community.

I love this city’s libraries so much. I’d like to help them out. Seems as though I could best contribute by helping them add features to their online catalog — e.g., a book recommendation service like Amazon has. I wonder if they let non-MLN employees contribute.

P.S.: They have a Firefox search plugin. That’s cool.

Apparently the cops didn’t know what was going on when there was another bomb threat in Newton. A parent called in to ask what to do, and the cops had no idea. Reminds me of a few months ago, when I was still living in D.C., when a police helicopter — at least that’s what I presume it was — with a searchlight was flying in circles around my apartment, with its searchlight trained on the then-vacant lot nextdoor. I frantically called the cops down the street (16th and V, I guess), wondering whether they were, for instance, hunting a madman on the loose in my neighborhood. They picked up the phone and I said, “Hi, there’s a helicopter flying around above my apartment.” The woman replied, “Yes, there is.” I asked, “Do you know what it’s doing there?” The woman replied, “No; I just got on my shift.” I asked, “Does anyone there know what the helicopter is doing?” She replied, “No; we just had a shift change.”

Your tax dollars at work.

Why is the U.S. Court of Appeals releasing oral-argument recordings as WAV files?

I’m downloading it as we speak, at the blinding speed of 20 KB/sec. At this rate it will finish downloading about two hours after I get to work tomorrow morning. But once it’s done downloading, I am going to encode it as an MP3 for the benefit of The World.

P.S. (1 Feb 2007): Still going, now at 8 KB/sec. 13 hours to go.

I love Boston. I love that the city would shut down because of a “bomb scare,” and would blow up one of these “bombs” that was “planted” at Sullivan Square. Well, people, here is your “bomb”:

Statement from Turner Broadcasting

The “packages” in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger. They are part of an outdoor marketing campaign in 10 cities in support of Adult Swim’s animated television show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. They have been in place for two to three weeks in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Parent company Turner Broadcasting is in contact with local and federal law enforcement on the exact locations of the billboards. We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger.

Shirley Powell
SVP, Corporate Communications

Thank you, non-functioning city government. I really do love you.

If you don’t have an appreciation for the finer points of dysfunction, this city will be hellish for you.

P.S. (1 Feb 2007): So they arrested a guy. He’s charged with “placing a hoax device.” According to that link, that crime is defined in Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 266, Section 102A½. Doesn’t seem applicable to me, but then I don’t see where the “½” is either.

But in any case, is this really a hoax? The idea of a hoax is that you want to convince people of something, when in fact that thing isn’t true. It’s not at all clear that anyone was trying to scare anyone else. It was an ad campaign. If they’re guilty of anything, they’re guilty of not properly forewarning the city. Or were they in fact trying to pretend to have a bomb? Seems unlikely to me.

(Police-department news link via Universal Hub)

P.P.S. (1 Feb 2007): My former coworker Jeff Chausse asks:

Gee, could all the indignation of the local authorities just possibly be redirected anger at their own foolishness?

(Via Universal Hub)

The lighted panels, according to Turner, have been there for two to three weeks. So not only are they foolish for freaking out about lighted panels, but they’re foolish for not having done their jobs for three weeks — if their jobs involve blowing up lighted panels.

P.P.P.S. (1 Feb 2007): Bruce Schneier wraps it up nicely, while also mentioning the MBTA’s wasteful, inefficient, and possibly illegal random-bag-search program. I’ve meant to mention: the timing of the “hoax” on the same day that the search program was revealed to be useless is pretty great.

P . . . S. (2 Feb 2007): James Grimmelmann makes a great point: Turner should pay the defendants’ legal fees. If they don’t, we should boycott the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.