Odograph.com

An interesting slate article popped up last week:

But a curious transformation is occurring in Washington, D.C., a split of foreign policy and energy policy: Many of the leading neoconservatives who pushed hard for the Iraq war are going green. James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and staunch backer of the Iraq war, now drives a 58-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius and has two more hybrid vehicles on order. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and another neocon who championed the war, has been speaking regularly in Washington about fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels.

At first sight that’s pretty surprising. Could it be that the we-support-our-troops-SUV-drivers will take note?

Reptile Rants has a good snippet from the San Diego Union-Tribune, by Gregory Benford and Martin Hoffer (full article):

Crichton’s new novel, “State of Fear,” takes on global warming and climate change. He lards it with arguments against the reality of climate change and includes many references to the scientific literature, including one of ours. In a recent speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco he even cited our paper from the peer-reviewed journal Science. Such attention can be heartwarming to scientists, but not this time – because Crichton gets the science wrong.

I did some Technorati searches yesterday on “Crichton” got really depressed. There were some people pointing from Crichton’s book and to scientific rebuttals … but there were perhaps as many who took Crichton’s book as their endpoint. There are readers out there who take Crichton as their scientist and his novel as their textbook.

I hope that things like Benford’s article will shake all the way out to them.

[update: in my travels yesterday I also learned of the US Climate Change Science Program, a US government site, that appears to accept global warming. I thought they were the last hold-outs ... ]

An entry at yesterday’s Hack the Planet starts with a good observation, but ends with a bad example:

When I see an academic paper with its own domain and a note that the paper “does not provide information that might allow its work to be duplicated” (for the good of the public, naturally), I am immediately reminded of Michael Crichton’s lecture about politics masquerading as science.

While it is curious when a paper gets a domain, I’m more concerned with the Crichton quote. As much as I enjoy Mr. Crichton’s work, I think he has fallen into the politics-as-science trap himself.

I think he has done his readers a great disservice.

[update1: good slam over at the LA Times]

[update2: a more serious answer from the Brookings Institution]

Everything is becoming ephemera.

This struck me a few years ago, as digital cameras started to catch on, and my friends started to post pictures to various sites. There were hundreds of new photos every day, and despite that surge in supply, many of those early users copyrighted their snapshots in the vain hope that someone would swoop down to buy them. The numbers were against it.

The new explosion is in the written word. There are the millions of blogs out there, with thousands more created each day [technorati]:

Today, Technorati tracks almost five million weblogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

This exploding production may create a new kind of media, but the fraction that needs to be preserved as our history falls.

I say this despite the fact that I love old books and old photos, or perhaps because I think the focus should be there. We might have 100,000 California sunsets recorded in 2005, but we can’t go back and get 100,000 more images of California in 1905. We might have 100,000 responses to Sun’s OpenSolaris project, but we can’t go back and get 100,000 responses to Ford’s new motorcar. No, those old images (and handwritten blogs) are lost as they decay or are discarded.

Our history is lost through attrition as our new ephemera explodes around us (yes, including this post).

My one hope is that a lot of the past might still remain, safely on someone’s dry, dark, shelf. Maybe, given technology for the conversion, and a green-light from the government, we will be flooded with scraps of the past as well as the present. That would be nice, but I’m not sure how high to hope.

(See also the “podcasting explosion” as a new source for digital ephemera.)

I enjoyed reading Sixpence House : Lost in A Town Of Books. There is a great deal on the web about this town (Hay on Wye, in Wales).

It comes to mind after the previous post because it describes the progression of books from:

• front rooms in America
• to back rooms in America
• to resellers of various sorts
• through auctions in bulk
• to a strange town in Wales
• where books might be resold, or
• end their lives rotting in a field.

It’s actually a cheerful book, the life of books is celebrated more than their death.

Thanks to Cory at BoingBoing for posting this notice:

The US Copyright Office is investigating whether it needs a system to clear the way for people who want to use “orphaned” copyrighted works that have no visible rightsholder. They’re seeking public comment on this.

I’ve sent my reponse:

I am sorry that I don’t have time for a longer response, but I do feel strongly that we are losing our history as orphan works decay.

As you are certainly aware (I think your call for comments implies) there is a risk, as copyright is extended, that the term of protection will outlive the physical existence of many works.

Books rot (or as in the case of my high school yearbooks, they were eaten by termites!), films decay, and I’m sure CDs and DVDs will cloud. As that happens, and as items fall out of favor, they will be discarded. They’ll be sent to the landfill.

No matter what, I’m sure preservation will be an incomplete process, but it is genuinely terrifying that preservation is in so many cases prevented by law.

Yes, let’s find a way to allow the preservation (and distribution and enjoyment) of orphan works. If there are people out there willing to invest the time and money, let’s not have a law standing in their way.

Thank you,

[my name and address]

I hope you’ll send your comments as well.

[update:] I should have said something about the expense of clearing an orphan work. If it costs $$$ (or even $) to clear a work before preservation, roadblocks will remain.

I’m back to the main purpose of this site, which is to learn by doing. I’ve been tweaking the look of things and becoming more comfortable with CSS in the process. I’ve also tweaked a little of the text in previous posts. I haven’t been doing much written communication lately, and my sentence structure shows it.

I picked the “odograph” word a while back, just because it looked good and was rarely used. Now it seems appropriate that it can mean a device to measure distance traveled “especially by a pedestrian.”

This is my pedestrian site.

I read a few days ago about the FBI fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

A lot of people see this as a FOIA issue, and I did at first, but after listening to this presentation on pervasive computing, I look at it very differently. The “crime forecasting” section is in the second half of the presentation, which doesn’t discus this case or FOIA at all. It is about how many law enforcement databases are only set up for “one key” searching, and so on. It dovetails perfectly with the story of keywords in the CBS article linked above.

The FBI is just embarrassed and trying to take attention away from how bad their search systems really are.

The scary part? Search is pretty central to their jobs, pretty central to catching bad guys, and pretty central to keeping us all safe.

It looks like they really weren’t trying to hide those other files (in the CBS story). I looks like they really couldn’t find them.

Think about that.

(I can’t remember where I first saw the story, but I’ll attach this post as a trackback to POGO’s coverage.)

I think I went through the normal stages as a Sun user: First awe at the power of open systems, Second recognition that their business model needed a line between open and closed, and Finally a disgust that they seemed to redraw that line repeatedly and capriciously.

Just for recent operating system changes (leaving aside Java) I remember:

• Strong Solaris on Sparc ($$) and Weak Solaris on Sun x86 ($)
• Strong Solaris on Sparc ($$) and Weak Linux on Cobalt x86 ($)
• Strong Solaris on Sparc ($$) and Weak Solaris on Sun x86 ($) … again
• Solaris for Servers ($$) and Linux for desktops ($) … preposterously
• and now of course signs that they want Solaris everywhere

It is pretty obvious that Sun thinks they can compete with Linux everywhere (and IBM’s Linux everywhere), and that their Linux strategies are nothing more than a staged retreat as they get Solaris desktops ready to ship. I figured that one out the first time Sun dropped the “Solaris for Servers and Linux for Desktops” line. When 90% (or whatever) of the commercial Linux users were using Linux for Servers, that big lie had to be leading someplace. They are now well into the transition.

So we wrap back around to the demand that IBM support them (and their competition with IBM’s Linux).

That seems so weak. If you go to war with someone, you don’t stop halfway and beg him for help.

(This was a comment on this post)

Podcasting convinced me to get an mp3 player.

I found a device that works great for cross-platform storage and audio (on Linux, Windows, or Macintosh). I use a Cruzer Micro 512MB flash drive with a Sandisk MP3 Companion. The Cruzer Micro is a handy flash drive that I can carry in a pocket all day with no worries. I can take it computer-to-computer and listen through the computer’s sound card. It doesn’t require any software to be installed on that computer (be it Linux, Windows, or Macintosh), it just works. I plug the Cruzer into the Companion when I go for a walk.

I started by listening to real “podcasts” but found that I prefer recordings of Tech seminars. ITConversations is the best source I’ve found for those, but Google will turn up a few more.

Since I only listen sometimes, I don’t do background downloads (true “podcasting”), but I do use RSS … and Bash.

I use two scripts based on bashpodder.shell. To quote from the README for my version:

This package contains a pair of scripts (check.bash and fetch.bash) which are based upon Linc Fessenden’s original (bashpodder.shell).

The main differences are that my scripts are designed to be run interactively, and can handle Evil Genius style torrent mp3s.

I start by running check.bash, and then edit its output file (new_mp3). When I run fetch.bash it just picks up whatever is in new_mp3, and gets those files. I made this change so that I can get just what I’ll really listen to – and so I can skip a week or two of a podcast and then grab a couple of the most recent.

My tar file may be found here