Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

The Thrill Is Gone

The proprietor of this blog (that would be me) is taking a long-deserved hiatus from blogging for the foreseeable future.

Comment on Comments

Apparently, I had 4 unapproved comments dating back to the middle of August, which I have now approved.

Apologies for the delay in approving comments; I don't know how they slipped under my radar. I will be more diligent in the future about comment approvals.

--The management

Where's My Money?!

Wikipedia cites the following statistics about readers of Barron's:

Its readership is 90.8% male, average age of 54, 93.8% of whom attended college, 44% of whom are employed in top management, have an average household income of $203,000, average personal income of $171,000, average household net worth of $1,228,000.

Where's my $1.2 million? I'm a faithful reader. Clearly, Barron's owes me some money. Anyone want to be my lawyer? I'm going to sue them.

The New York Times is Incompetent

No, this blog post has nothing to do with the latest hubbub over some indigintiy Michelle Coulter or Ann Malkin see in the Times' reporting on Iraq/gay marriage/abortion/immigration. Rather, this has to do with the failure of the Times to acknowledge the identity of the people who they quote.

The stupid, lazy bastards at the New York Times have the temerity to quote yours truly without attribution:

Others took issue with the hockey reference. "Given all the padding that hockey players wear, being punched by an opponent hardly is more significant than being hit by a toddler," one said.

That "one" would be me, and the quote is a comment left at Althouse's blog on this post of hers about John Roberts' writing style; specifically, his penchant for introducing sports references into his writing.

Althouse, it should be noted, noticed the reference to her blog in the Times and saw that I, and a number of people were quoted, without attribution. She, being a rather normal person, decided to fill in the details the Times left out (they can leak issues of national security but cannot cite the source of their quotes?!)

Light Blogging

Apologies for the light blogging as of late.

Been busy looking for a new job, studying for the CFA test in December and socializing in this great city.

More to come later in the week.

I promise!

Light Blogging

Apologies for the light blogging. More posts to come in the coming days.

Meanwhile, read about Paulson's appointment to Treasury Secretary here.

Good explanation of Goldman Sachs here.

Polipundit

Aside from the Da Vinci Code, the latest tempest in the blogosphere wars is illegal immigration, and, more specifically, the decision by a blogger named Polipundit to require that all the fellow bloggers on his blog hew to his line on illegal immigration (his line being slightly more sympathetic to said illegals than Tom "Build a Fence!" Tancredo).

Alarming News' take:

I can't help but see both sides of this coin. In the end, it's Polipundit's blog and he shouldn't have to share it with people he disagrees with so vehemently. On the other hand, debate and disagreement is good when it's between smart people who share the same goal--making America the best country it can be-- and it was good to have the debate happening all in one place.

The blogosphere is very impetuous, because of the immediacy of what we do, but I would urge bloggers and readers of Polipundit not to choose sides and to keep appreciating what all the various bloggers in this disagreement have on offer.

This sounds vaguely Clintonian in its evasiveness and prevarication. I commented:

Sorry, but Polipundit's position is rather stupid. Why host a group blog if a requirement is that no one will ever disagree with you, especially on an issue as contentious as illegal immigration?

Methinks Polipundit was graduated from the Pravda school of blogging.

He's a moron through and through.

Ann Althouse writes, perceptively, as always:

I haven't been reading PoliPundit or, really, any of the debate about immigration in the blogosphere. If I had been, I probably would only write about "tone and tenor of the debate." I consider immigration a complex policy problem, and I steer clear of ideologues spouting on the topic. I hear the President gave a speech on the subject last night and that he sounded moderate. Good. He's fending off the ideologues -- I hope.

But I'm interested in this dispute between Byrd and Polipundit and the problem of group blogs. Group blogs, like marriages, can break down, and when they do, they can dissolve quietly and present an unreadable face to the world, or they can let the ugliness show. When that happens on a very prominent blog, we're all going to look.

The idea that a coterie of bloggers must agree on an single issue seems rather antithetical to the impetuousness, as Alarming News would have it, of the blogosphere. If ever there were something about which the blogosphere should be proud, it is its impetuousness; impetuousness, it seems, allows ideas to flow freely (despite Buchanan's concerns about the free flow of ideas), and, from such an exchange of ideas, it is to be hoped, some sort of greater truth can be acquired by man.

But if a blogger's intent is to define the terms of debate, then what the hell is the use of the blogosphere?

I get religion: "Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life"

I received a comment to a post I wrote more than a year ago, which comment says, in part:

This just goes to show that there is no neutral ground in the whole universe. Where the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is not preached, some sort of perverse error is preached. On college campuses, the errors of postmodern secular humanism have replaced the gospel.

Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. If you truly believe that, then you will contend for the propagation of the gospel and you will contend for true righteousness and justice. Otherwise, you are in idolatry. Most college campuses are really idolatrous temples of secular humanism.

The connection of this incoherent sentiment to the post is not clear. The substance of the post, "Leftist College Professors" is that many conservative students seem to have adopted the idea that they ought to be freed from offense in their college classses. Liberal professors ought not bring into the classroom their liberal viewpoints lest conservative feel ideologically molested. I wrote, in part:

This is ignorant thinking for a couple of reasons. First, students go to college to be educated. Education, in part, deals with exposing yourself to views with which you are not familiar, or, better, views with which you disagree. How the hell are you supposed to develop a cogent argument in favor of your position unless you are able to understand the terms on which the opposition argues? Any lawyer worth his salt will tell you that his arguments are only as good as the degree to which he can predict the opposing argument. Similarly, any person is only well-educated to the degree that he can understand the opposing argument, anticipate its assumptions, and destroy it. Arguing that, if you are politically unaligned with your professor, you should not have to hear her thoughts on abortion, or evolution, or whatever else is the current bogeyman of conservative thought, is silly and does nothing to advance your education.

I stand by this argument. When did it become permissible to expect that no one will ever be offended? (There is, of course, the issue of a professor penalizing a student for expressing sentiments with which the professor does not agree, and I fully agree that such is an abominable situation, however, that was not the situation which prompted my original blog post.)

"Yesterday, I was minding my own business, walking down Newbury Street, and a homeless man hissed "stinking white bitch" at me and got some facts right"

Ann Althouse takes in Boston.

In Which I try to Explain How I Have More Traffic Than 99.99% of Blogs

Perhaps someone more conversant in descriptive statistics than I can imake sense of this, but my traffic stats over the past few days--in the absence of active blogging by me--have soared:

Thoughts?

Light Blogging

Due to new responsibilities at work, my blogging rate during the week will be significantly diminished. I will (try) to make up the difference on the weekend.

Blogging

Readers will notice that my posting frequency has diminished markedly over the past few weeks.

Readers should expect my sporadic posting to continue for the foreseeable future.

Blogging Notice

Blogging will be infrequent to nonexistent over the next several days.

Don't despair.

Go see a movie or have a drink. Surely there are better things to do with your time than read this blog.

Unhinged?

Wow.

Ted Barlow, of Crooked Timber fame, comments on Jane Galt's post about Ann Althouse's and Glenn Reynold's political moderationism* thusly:

it's hard for me to be impressed with Glenn Reynolds' moderation- even though he's pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-stem cells, with history of Democratic voting- because I can't read his site without feeling like I'm being kicked in the teeth for being a lying, anti-Semetic, Ward-Churchill-adoring, objectively pro-Saddam liberal plotting "on the other side". I don't take it personally when I read sharp criticism of Howard Dean, or Atrios, or Ted Kennedy, or whoever. But, probably foolishly, I do take it personally when I'm reading insults about "the left" or "liberals".

Yes, it is indeed "foolish" to be upset when Reynolds castigates the "left" or "liberals." Why blog if you have such a thin skin?

*A neologism, to be sure

Book from which Crooked Timber takes its name, here.

It would also help to spell "anti-Semitic" correctly but now I'm quibbling.

I Get Smacked Around by Ann Althouse

So Althouse blogs about the French lady with the new face who's addicted to cigarettes. The salient part of her post:

She's entitled to her pleasures as she defines them. This is a person who, on awakening from a deep unconscious state with her face chewed off, did not notice that something had gone horribly wrong but that she needed a smoke. That is some serious devotion to smoking.

I commented:

And a devotion to lung cancer as well.

Or is that too judgmental a thing to say?

To which Althouse responds:

Dave: You should consider whether I was being judgmental in saying leave her alone. Perhaps I'm saying that in her case, trying to live a long time and avoid cancer is a small matter. But here you are, trying to entice us into being judgmental about you being judgmental. I'm not going to fall down that rat hole.

Sounds like she already fell down the rat hole.

Why I Don't Read Powerline

Why I don't read Powerline.

I always suspected that there was something odd about 'em.

RSS Readers

One thing I like is intuitive software. I've been looking for a news aggregator for a while because the one I had been using, bloglines, basically sucks.

Google has a reader, which I find quite easy to use. Now, to figure how to get typepad to talk to Google Reader, and not bloglines.

A screenshot is attached:

Blog

Astute readers will note that my blog has changed its appearance. And my blogroll is (finally) back, and will likely be pruned and extended over the next couple of days/weeks.

Other changes may be forthcoming. Forewarned is forearmed.

--The management

On This Blog's Traffic

Something that I don't understand is that 99% of the traffic that this blog receives comes from Google queries that return this link.

Nicole's a drop-dead hotty, but what the hell does my blog have to do with the picture at that link above?

Picture below, for your edification (and enjoyment).

Disturbing

If you enter this search into Yahoo!, this page of my blog is the first item returned.

Disturbing, no?

Aspirations

Downtown Lad: "My comment board hasn't been this interesting since the Pope died."

If I Call It A Blog, Is It A Blog?

What's the purpose of blogging?

That's not a trivial question, as there's a growing sense among many corporate marketers that corproate blogs can be an effective way of communicating, in personable form, the corporation's message. There's always an inherent risk in these types of blogs because, if done poorly, or if obviously edited by the company's lawyers and accountants, it will quickly become apparent to many that the blog is no more than a marketing machine for the company, and its readership will consist only of the foolish and ignorant. It's not clear that a corporation interested in blogging wants to attract its foolish and ignorant customers.

So, if you blog with the intent of advancing the organization for which you work, you face the problem of at once advocating for that institution, and doing so in a way that does not appear to be plain advertising. If you fail at this balancing act, your blog loses its credibility and with it any of the readership you hoped to reach.

So what if a law school admissions officer decides to blog, in the explicit hope of communicating his law school's advantages to applicants? Ann Althouse notes that Harvard Law School's Admissions Dean has started a blog, and has some odd obsession with Yale Law School:

Readers over at Volokh Conspiracy react to the news that the assistant dean for admissions at Harvard Law School has a blog. But, of course, law school applicants will care, and they will read that blog trying to see through to what will help them. You can probably read between the lines and pick up some tips. There are all kinds of blogs. I'm tempted to say there are real blogs and fake blogs. There are the blogs written to express the thinking of a human individual and PR that takes the form of a blog.

The blog itself is very self-conscious about its institution's place in the law school firmament:

I've never understood the presumption that smaller law schools provide a better environment for studying law. That judgment seems arbitrary, especially considering that even the biggest law schools are not as big as many colleges.

But if that is true, then how do we define 'small enough'? Would a school be a better place to learn if it had 2 professors and 15 students sitting around a campfire thinking great thoughts, with the only grade being a High Pass?

I'd say no. I'd say there are a lot of things missing from that insular environment. Diversity of thought. Breadth of course options and areas of professional expertise. Opportunities to pursue research in any area of personal interest. Alumni network. And if you went to that 15-person school, the outside world would question whether you really got everything you could out of the experience.

For those who don't know much about elite law schools, here's the quick explanation: Yale Law School, which is regarded by ranking systems as the top law school in the country, is known for its very small class size and Harvard, which is regarded as the number two law school in the country, is known for its very large class size. Other than that distinction, it's arguable that they are the same crusty, anachronistic, ideologically myopic institutions.

The debate about which type of school--large or small--is an interesting one, but it is a debate that needs to be settled by the person applying to the school. One should think that an admissions dean's observations about the inherent worthiness of one type of school over another is irrelevant, and, indeed, to the critical mind it should be obvious that the dean's argument is a stupid one. As Ann explains: there are two types of blogs, those written by people interested in expressing themselves, and those interested in advancing the institution's public face.

Clearly, someone in Harvard's Admissions office is very concerned about Harvard's public image.

(An interesting side note to the "Yale is the best law school" theory: my father, who was a corproate litigator in Manhattan for 25 years, told me that his firm would never hire Yale Law School graduates because the school trained its students to be academics, not lawyers. What does it say of the worth of a law school that its students were not considered skilled enough to be hired by a prominent corproate law firm?)

Typepad

Imagine you pay for a service, say, internet access, and the company from whom you are buying the service, is going through growing pains because its service has proven remarkably popular. Imagine that every now and then, there are service outages, some of which last for an hour, and some which last for several hours. And the severity and frequency of these outages varies depending upon your physical location.

What I've just described is, in a nutshell, the situation with which Six Apart, the owners of the Typepad blogging service, and their customers, have had to contend over the last month. Over the past week or so, Typepad seems to have gotten their shit together, as it were, and service now seems fine.

In any event, I got the following email last night:

Dear Dave,

Two weeks ago I wrote you to explain the problems that some of our users experienced last month and what we were doing to fix them. Today I want to tell you about the work we've done and our plans to compensate you for the inconvenience and frustration we may have caused you.
The progress we've made

Over the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena's Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes. We have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data storage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.

We are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused limited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our customers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12 days.

While we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to you.
Compensation for this less than stellar performance

We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with TypePad's speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don't have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you'll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

* While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

*The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

*The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

*I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

Which offer do you think I took? Do you really think anyone chose an offer other than the last one?

I Made the Wall St. Journal

At least its Real Time column, about blogging, available to subscribers, here.

How much traffic will be thrown my way? Probably not as much as an Instalanche, but more than most bloggers who link to me....

Blog Update

Astute observers will note that, after an absence, my stat counter is back, on the left, right under my mug.

Blogroll and other assorted features will re-appear in the next day or so as I have time to deal with such &@^$.

--The Management

Big Apple Blog Festival (BABF) For November 7th, 2005

First, let me thank A Guy In New York for the opportunity to host this week's edition of the Big Apple Blog Festival, more colloquially known as BABF.

Chad at Cake or Death reminds us that Greenpeace is sometimes its own worst enemy. Also check out his quote from Eisenhower: ""History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." I'm no fan of Eisenhower, though there is something to that quote that strikes me as true.

LawHawk informs the debate surrounding the rebuilding of Ground Zero:

If there is any need greater than the rebuilding of Ground Zero, I'd like to hear it from the Mayor or anyone else. Bloomberg is yanking Silverstein's chain around for no reason other than because he can.

Mr. Snitch notes how Apple's new OS, which can be run on Pentium-based PCs, is creating a base of very cheap, very powerful computers that threatens the status quo in the PC market.

If you're ever looking for a list of NYC bloggers, I highly recommend AlarmingNews. The blog is essentially political in nature, with wry observations on pop culture thrown in the mix for some flavor, but Karol (the proprietor of said blog) does a good job coming up with some blogs that I had never heard of. Some of the more interesting ones on her list, well worth checking out, are:

A Stitch In Haste, who bills his blog as "a collection of real-world libertarian, individualist and laissez-faire rants on law, economics, politcis, culture and other current events by an average, everday lawyer & investment banker and part-time pop scholar." You may not agree with everything he write, but it's all very well written and provocative. Recent posts include a comment on William Safire's recent column about the word "homosexual," and thoughts about Voter ID laws.

The inestimable Jane Galt, another libertarian blogger, blogs about the New Jersey gubenatorial election, as well as spending time in a place with no internet connection.

If Jane Galt's recipe for cookies made you hungry, then maybe you should head over to BABF proprietor A Guy In New York and read his entry about the Chinatown restaurant Chatham Square:

The food is delicious and includes steamed or baked pork buns, dumplings of all kinds (chicken, vegetable, shrimp) pork balls, chicken feet, sticky rice, spare ribs etc. You get all these fresh off the cart as they roll around – or you can order from an extensive menu. It’s an opportunity to be adventurous and taste a lot of different dishes – so best go with at least a couple of friends.

The Big Apple Blog Festival is listed on the ÜberCarnival page and in Carnival News.

To nominate your favorite blog post about NYC, or if you have a NYC blog and want to see something in the next BABF ... or you have a NYC blog and would like to host an upcoming BABF ... send us a short write up and a permalink to aguyinnewyork [at] gmail.com ... or use the Carnival Submit Form ... see you next week ...

You are free to repost the Big Apple Blog Festival so long as you leave this URL attached: Big Apple Blog Festival

- - - - - - - - - -

If you have any questions, see the BABF page at www.bigappleblogfestival.com

Thanks for your interest.

Chug

Althouse on Kos

Ann Althouse is upset because Kos is the most highly-read blog and it reads like, well, the bathroom stall in a junior high school's boy's bathroom.

Ann asks a reasonable question of her liberal readers:

Liberals, does it bother you that this is what your loudest voice on the web sounds like?

Well, I'm not a liberal, but I am opinionated, so I commented on Althouse's blog:

Kos is the most highly read blog for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that it appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Some, I would imagine, read it for entertainment value. Others read it because they themselves are angry, irrational, misinformed liberals who vehemently and reflexively oppose anything that looks like a fair-handed approach to anything the current Administration does.

I would remind you, as well, that the invective spewed forth on Kos' blog is no different in tone than that spewed forth by angry conservatives in internet chat rooms during Slick Willie's mad reign of our fair kingdom.

A hard lesson, I suppose, for those of us who aspire to inellect and cogency: salaciousness and vincidctiveness wins the popularity contest every time.

I don't like that fact, but it is one I have to accept. There is a lot of truth to the idea that most people do not want to think critically about an issue but rather would like merely to have their own biases affirmed by like-minded people. This would be the lemming effect.

Blog Notice

Formatting and layout changes will be evident today as I play around with the blog. So the blog may look different from its usual appearance when you read this.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Big Apple Blog Festival

I like spinach dip.

Apparently, one who likes it even more than I saw fit to name his blog, well, spinach dip.

In any event, he hosts this week's Big Apple Blog Festival (AKA BABF).

Yours truly will host next week.

Question: Am I a conservative? I am called such in this week's BABF but I really don't see how the label applies. I'm a wiseass, to be sure, and critical of liberals and their pieties, but aren't I equally skeptical of conservatives' hobgoblins?

UPDATE: I got a very nice email from the proprietor of spinach dip who explained, quite cogently and perceptively, I think, his appellation of me as "conservative":

I picked "conservative" since I got the sense that your problems with liberalism were with the ideology while your criticisms of conservatives were with their methods and excesses, not conservatism
itself.

Outside of merely calling me a libertarian, I cannot think of a better description of my set of political beliefs than that.

Thoughts on Blogging

When asked why I blog, I suppose I could respond, as some wit reportedly did when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, "because it's there." It being, of course, the blogosphere. The blogosphere is a ready-made audience for my ramblings.

Alas, there are better reasons for blogging. I started to think about this as I read a column in the Wall St. Journal's online version, called Real Time (link via paid subscription only), which explores, generally, the intersection of technology and culture. This week's column is about the nature of blogging, and the obsessiveness with which one can pursue this pasttime. The columnist chose to write a blog about the Mets:

On the day pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, we put up one post each. We agreed we'd quit when it wasn't fun anymore, a retirement I figured would come by the end of spring training. What I didn't expect was that I'd become obsessed with our traffic -- or rather, with our utter lack of it.

When the stats came in for that first day, we had 159 page views, most of them attributable to the two of us obsessively reloading to verify our blog was still there. Our daily page views settled at around 100 for February, and I was pretty sure those stats were inflated. One basic problem: Google didn't know we existed. Rather than wait for the search engine's spiders, I submitted our blog to Google, the other major search engines and various blog aggregators. Greg, meanwhile, was doing things the tried-and-true way, letting his considerable cast of Met-loving acquaintances know what we were up to.

The columnist invited his readers to submit their own stories via email about their experiences with blogging, and so here is my email, formatted with live links and a few other emendations:

The most immediate thoughts that come to mind are:

1) Traffic stats. For a long time, I had an obsession with them. I adopted a strategy wherein I would
find a controversial piece of news, blog about it and then shotgun an email to the "big" bloggers, hoping they would link to me. That gambit worked twice, I recall, once with Andrew Sullivan, and once with Instapundit. My traffic shot through the roof, to the point that I could continually click the refresh button on my traffic counter, and see it increase by double digits. But after that, the traffic wore off, and with it, my interest in tracking traffic. I basically resigned myself to the fact that I would never be a big blogger, and that my interest in blogging was more due to a need to express myself, and not to satisfy my ego.

2) Blogging popularity. Blogging is not as pervasive as we bloggers think it is. I know many very well educated people who either have never heard of blogs, or don't read them at all. Some of this is due to ignorance--the bloggers are a group of raving lunatics, is the popular refrain--and some of it is due to the fact that conventional media ("MSM" is the pejorative term, I believe) satisfy their news needs well.

3) Access. I have found, via blogging, that I have access to some of the finest minds of the day (Gary
Becker and Richard Posner being only the two most obvious and prominent examples). But I've had
more than one long email exchange with professors in a variety of fields through my blogging. I even had one blogger think that I was David Friedman, famous anarcho-capitalist libertarian, and son of Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman. Alas, I am not he.

4) Intellectual and editorial independence. Like many other bloggers, one of the things I cherish most about my blogging is that my words are my own. I own my words, and my arguments, without input from anyone else. To some degree, this accounts for the unvarnished nature of many blogs-- replete as they are with grammatical mistakes, typos, and inaccurate claims. But one of the interesting things about the blogosphere is the degree to which it is self-correcting. Much like Wikipedia or open-source software, the blogosphere seizes on inaccuracies, exaggerations, or distortions, and from the chaos order emerges. (The obvious example of this phenomenon would be the Dan Rather scandal, but there are many, many others.)

In short, I've found that as I came to realize blogging as an opportunity for me to argue with the world, and express myself for all to see, blogging became less a game of counting traffic stats and more a game of trying to post at least once a day. It is a great intellectual exercise, and it keeps the critical faculties sharp. Finally, I know of no purer expression of the importance of the First Amendment than blogging.

I Don't Get Podcasting

Ann Althouse podcasts.

I'm listening to her podcast.

She just told an interesting story about being pregnant in the early '80s, while going on an Episocpelian retreat. One of the attendees smoked; Althouse was worried about the kid developing in her body. So she got off the West Side Highway, in Manhattan, and found a cab...and went home.

And now she's talking about Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court Associate Justice.

Interesting, I suppose. She likes the way Breyer talks, and Scalia as well, because they were law professors--they have the professorial tone about them. So she likes the way they talk.

One of the reasons she likes Breyer is he reminds her of Andre Gregory, from the movie My Dinner with Andre [ed: never saw or heard of the movie. Will check it out on Netflix.]

OK, well, I still don't get the appeal of podcasting. It is interesting to hear Althouse's voice--I didn't really have a sense of what her voice sounded like, but now I do.

But what do I get from listening to a podcast that I don't get from reading text?

Not much.

Now she's back on Scalia and his professorial tone. Something about electric blankets? Do any Supreme Court members have wacky spiritual ideas? [Ed: Scalia and Opus Dei?]

OK, over and out here.

Algorithms Are Stupid, Or, I Resist Pigeonholing

A web site, unpartisan.com, has pigeonholed me as a "conservative" blogger. That is as apt a description of my political ideology as it would be for one to refer to John Ashcroft as, say, a pornographer.

Which is to say I hardly fit into the "conservative" label.

In any event, unpartisan.com explains:

Much like the way news stories and blog postings are chosen, blogs listed on this site are chosen by a number of criteria and are categorized by a computer algorithm. This algorithm takes into account the criteria described above in determining which blogs should be listed in order to ensure that only the most popular and relevant blogs are polled. The categorization of blogs is determined by which types of blogs link to you and who you link to. If the majority of sites that link to you are known to be conservative and the majority of the sites you link to are known to be conservative, you get lumped in with the conservative blogs. This tends to work close to 98% of the time, and saves me the time of analyzing every single blog that is listed here. If you were miscategorized, please let me know through the feedback form and I'll be happy to fix it immediately.

You be the judge: is the algorithm faulty?

See this and my post, to which they link, here. By "conservative," this web site must mean "finds the Census Bureau to be useless." That is hardly an accurate understanding of the word "conservative," though it is true that a lot of conservatives, if not all, have nothing but emnity for the Census Bureau. But just because I share a common lament with conservatives does not mean I am one. After all, I share with pot smokers a penchant for the smell of marijuana smoke, but that does not make me a toker. Etc., etc., etc.

Aggregating political content on the web is fine; attempting to pigeonhole many bloggers' perspectives into "conservative" and "liberal" ideologies is a faulty and limited way in which to do so.

From my perspective, centrists are much more interesting than ideologues; neither the Powerlines nor the Crooked Timbers of the world hold much interest for me.

"[I]n the cacophony of trivia, vitriol and bombast that fills the blogosphere, useful nuggets have been hard to find"

That well-wrought phrase appears in an article about companies that sell "blog analysis" to advertisers and marketers:

Blog watching helped advertising giant WPP Group PLC craft a new promotion aimed at teenagers for its Chicago-based client U.S. Cellular Corp., says Bethany Harris, senior vice president of WPP's G Whiz Entertainment unit. Using technology from Umbria Communications, a Boulder, Colo., company that aims to identify demographic groups online based on their speech patterns and discussion topics, G Whiz concluded that teens were "really anxious" about exceeding their cellular minutes, often because parents make them pay if they talk too much. The teens also resented being "ambushed" by incoming calls that pushed their minutes up. Ms. Harris says that led U.S. Cellular to offer unlimited "call me" minutes.

Marketers say bloggers' unsolicited opinions and offhand comments are a source of invaluable insights that are hard to get elsewhere. "We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror," says Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, a Chicago public-relations firm.

I'm skeptical about the utility of such "analysis," at least based on examples of conclusions reached by blog analysis: Cellphone companies have learned that teenagers fear exceeding plan minutes; minivan makers learn that kids love minivans, but teens don't; and camera makers can learn that customers want "long-lasting photos."

None of these conclusiosn is non-obvious.

Stupid San Francisco

Via Ryan Sager, and others, comes news that San Francisco is thinking of regulating blogs.

Some aspects of the proposed blog law strike me as naive, if not just impractical. Leaving aside the fact that it's a dangerours precedent for government to have any involvement in blogs or their regulation, consider the following piece of the proposed legislation:

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

Blog traffic is notoriously inaccurate, as is all website traffic. This has more to do with a lack of agreement among any web site publisher about what constitutes a "hit", a "page view", etc. These are technical details that a legislator should not be expected to appreciate (if, indeed, a legislator can appreciate anything). But, the very unreliability of blog traffic statistics suggests that any law that bases itself on a set level of traffic is an uneforceable law.

Uneforceable law, of course, is not only ineffective, but it is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.

This is the type of legislation that, by the nature of the unanswerable questions it raises, proves yet again the astounding capacity for idiocy by our beloved bureaucrats.

That Which Is Obvious...

That which should be obvious to all is obvious to few.

Parody

Michelle Malkin, who takes herself to seriously, is parodied.

Instapundit, who is too clever to take himself so seriously, is is also parodied.

Tagline on the Malkin parody site is as priceless as a Ferrari: "suspended somewhere between meltdown and total hysteria."

Links to parodies via Ace of Spades.

Men and Women Sitting in a Tree

I put this post under the category "Blogging" becaus it's in response to another blog post, but I'm not sure what a better categorization would be.

In any event, Jacqueline Passey writes a blog post which should attract attention, but likely won't. She writes, as a woman, what women think about sex and men. Obviously, hers is a single voice only, and there are women who have different persectives, opinions, experiences, and conclusions than she. Nonetheless her post is instructive, but ultimately limiting:

A lot of women...end up disliking men in general. Most of them still want children and help raising those children, however, and thus tolerate men and sex to achieve those goals. Once those goals have been achieved and they don't need men or sex anymore, many women lose interest in both. Often women feel justified in using men this way because they have learned to see men as abusers. What's really sad about this situation is that the men they use this way are usually the good guys who want to treat their woman well (even if they don't always understand how), because most of the bad ones don't agree to marry women and have children with them in the first place.

I wish I knew how to solve this problem. I'm one of the lucky women who has never had much reason to dislike or distrust men: I wasn't molested or otherwise abused as a child. My first sexual experiences weren't forced, coerced, or pressured. Although I did suffer some minor sexual assault as a teenager, I also knew enough good guys to know that it wasn't representative of most male behavior. My early lovers were skilled and considerate. So I grew up to love men and enjoy their companionship and sex.

If my own experience can be used as an example of how to "grow" women who love men and have positive attitudes towards sex, then maybe the answer is for men to do a better job of policing their gender. Stop tolerating men who abuse women and little girls -- pay attention and prosecute this abuse much more vigorously. Teach boys to treat females with respect and consideration. Learn where the clitoris is and what to do with it! It's not enough for you to be a good guy, you also need to prevent the bad guys from turning women against the male gender.

In short: many men treat women like crap, and many women seem to take it as par for the course that men are supposed to treat them like crap. To educated, enlightened individuals (and I like to consider myself both educated and enlightened) this is not a good situation. Women don't deserve, in my opinion, to be treated as sex objects, men should not use their size or strength to intimidate women in to sex or anything else the woman does not want to do, etc.

But. There's at least one point on which I agree with social conservatives. That point is that, at the end of the day, your behavior is determined, in large part, by the moral values instilled in you by your parents. For better or worse, parents, or surrogate parents, or grandparents, or whoever raised you, have the biggest influence on all manner of facts about your life: your socioeconomic status, your educational attainment, your attitude towards people of the opposite gender, your political views, your religious practices, etc.

Therefore, I would argue that a large component of one's attitude toward the opposite gender is determined by the examples one's parents set. If you are a woman and you find yourself contantly being pressured into having sex you don't want to have, or you find yourself in an abusive relationship, odds are you are engaging in behaviors learned at the knees of the female who raised you. Similarly, if you are a man who always finds yourself pressuring women into having sex, or you serially abuse women, you do those behaviors not because of some conscious desire on your part to engage in such behaviors, but rather becase such behaviors are inimical to your identity. They are behaviors learned at a young age.

Women who think men don't treat them with respect would do well to consider the behaviors in which they engage, and men would do well to consider the same. Behaviors are learned. Behaviors can be good or bad, productive or destructive. A child whose mother is treated well by her husband or lover will likely learn to either treat women well, or, if the child is a girl, learn to engage only with those men who treat her well. Women must assume responsibility to be treated in a manner they wish to be treated; men have a responsiblity to treat women humanely. Denying responsibility on one gender's part only ignores the self-destructive behaviors in which man and woman engage.

Small World

So, I'm checking my RSS feeds and I see Daniel Drezner has posted about dark chocolate. Given that I like both his blog and dark chocolate, and I'm not sure why a political science professor at the University of Chicago is blogging about chocolate, my taste buds told me to go to his blog and take a look.

He quotes a Newsweek article in which my friend Clay Gordon, a self-described chocolate connoisseur, is quoted. But I didn't know Gordon was quoted in the article until I followed the link on my RSS feed to Drezner's blog.

So: to whoever turned me onto Drezner's blog (I have no idea who), thanks.

There's also an article in the most recent Forbes about gourmet chocolates.

WANTED: HTML EXPERT

This is one of those "blegs." Take a look at my blogroll on the left.

You'll notice it's all discombobulated. More seriously, it's not alphabetical.

My sense of order requires that it be alphabetical. How do I get that to happen?

I'm on Typepad, obviously, but I don't think that's relevant. But maybe it is...

Why I Rely on my Innate BS Detector

Why I rely on my innate BS detector. See first comment for further explanation.

Empiricism, Medicine, Law, Schiavo

New blog added to the blogroll. I like to think I am respectfully insolent but I don't pull it off as well.

One of my pet peeves (or areas of interest, depending upon your wont) is the hostility some religious people have to science. Respectful Insolence has a number of interesting posts about one of the main obsessions of anti-science religious people: evolution.

Also see this post in which he discusses receiving an email letter from a California law firm asking for testimony from doctors about the Terri Schiavo case. See a reprint of the letter here. What was that Shakespeare line about lawyers?

A bizarre world we live in.

Condoleezza Rice Has Inspired a Blog?

Condoleezza Rica has inspired a blog?

Link via Shanti Braford.

Aiding & Abetting

Radley Balko at the Agitator is a whore:

I also thought I'd take this opportunity to whore myself and ask for your support. I don't do this often. About once a year, I think. And in only one post. And I wouldn't even do it this year except that I have a whopper of a tax bill. It's nice when your freelancing career gets a little momentum. Not so nice when you see the bite the government takes out of it!

But if he's a whore, I would be aiding and abetting if I donated. If you wish to associate yourself with prostitution, go over there and donate. Me, I'd just like to see prostitution legal.

Newspapers & Obsolescence

When I was a kid, reading the New York Times was akin to quoting Shakespeare, or discoursing on Goethe: it spoke to a cultural cachet and educational attainment at odds with most of humanity. It was, in a word, an elitist activity: educated, professional men and women, and their children, read the New York Times because they wished to edify themselves about the world at the hands of the old grey lady.

For a long time, this sort of beneficent cultural authoritarianism worked wonders. The New York Times reported on the issues it decided important, and wealthy New Yorkers (and other similarly cultured Americans) would discuss those articles with the reverence of Talmudic scholars poring over ancient holy books.

Understand, of course, that such pretensions were of course artifice; there have always been people who have disagreed with the Times, and vehemently so. However, in the absense of mass communications platforms like the internet and the blogosphere, most opposition to the Times and its admittedly liberal slant were muted, plaintive cries in the proverbial darkness. The progenitor of the modern conservative movement, William F. Buckley's book God and Man at Yale would have had much more of a cultural impact if it had been released on the web, but the internet was an academic backwater in the 1970s, much different than it is today. In the 1970s and 1980s (and, indeed, for most of the 20th century), the New York Times held the cultural cachet it did for one reason and one reason alone: its authority devolved from its place as "the newspaper of record" in the nation's capital--the city from which all capital flowed, from which all large corporations kept their house, and the city in which the country's wealthy and powerful lived and socialized. I am describing an anachronistic New York City. (If you think the nation's capital is or ever was Washington, DC, you are sadly mistaken and likely an idiot. See this for an explanation of DC's illusory power.)

New York City no longer holds the same place in America's culture--many of its biggest corporations are no longer based in New York, and many of its wealthiest citizens no longer live in New York City (or simply never did), and there are many powerful Americans who have never set foot in New York City, or, if they have, have no clue about what "New York" represents in the country's culture. As the United States has grown bigger, more complex, and more diverse, the impact of New York on the rest of the country has diminished somewhat, and, therefore, concurrent with the rise of mass, networked communications platforms, so has the influence of the New York Times. Indeed, the slow demise of mainstream media, and the inexorable rise of the internet's influence on national conversation has indirectly affected New York City, and, with it, its most powerful newspaper.

Now comes news that the New York Times has debated charging its web readers for its content. This is of course a stupid thought, and would only insure their eventual irrelevance. Techdirt recently posted some incisive analysis of the New York Time's apparent obliviousness to the folly of their proposal:

What's unfortunate is how clear it is that publishers simply don't get what's happening around them -- and how they're hastening their own obsolescence in the name of "protecting existing business models." The reporter quotes an analyst saying "Newspapers are cannibalizing themselves," as if that's a bad thing. The fact is, if they don't cannibalize themselves, someone else will -- and then they've got absolutely nothing. In a discussion about another (smaller) newspaper, the editor claims that they decided to charge "to save the print newspaper." That's backwards thinking. It's like saying a buggy maker refused to build automobiles to "save the buggy business." It doesn't work that way. As if to prove that, the article notes that paper subscriptions are still decreasing -- though, this is hidden quietly at the end of that section. Meanwhile, the article includes other misunderstandings about other newspapers. For example, the Washington Post claims that the current registration process is great because "you're getting information from your users and you can target ads to your users, which is more efficient for advertisers." Except that's not true. Plenty of studies have shown that newspaper registration files are filled with dirty data, often doing much more damage then good while also opening them up to legal liability by presenting data to advertisers which is likely filled with false information. The problem with newspapers these days is that they're missing two very important cultural changes. First, is that there no longer is a captive audience. If you don't make it easy to work with you, then people go elsewhere quickly. That means registration or charging drives people away for good. Second, is that many people no longer view the news from solely the consumer perspective -- but also from the ability to share the news with others -- and registration and charging makes that more difficult as well.

One basic principle of market economics is that, given a choice between two sources of information, over time, most people will go to the source of information that proves itself reliable and efficient. People have no or little incentive to continue to use information sources that place unreasonable demands on them, especially when they can get similar information elsewhere. Onerous and intrusive registration requirements--especially those for online versions of newspapers--are especially vulnerable to this principle precisely because registering is an inefficient process, in consideration of the fact that there are many thousands of other sources of information available on the web.

Yes, there are dubious sources of information on the web, but the newspapers cannot rely on the idea that people need newspapers to determine which sources are good and which are bad. People, especially smart people--those people to whom we want to listen--have innate bullshit detectors and can generally tell when they are reading something of dubious value. (Yes, there are always exceptions to this rule, but the population of idiots is fortunately not large enough to significantly impact one's ability to find quality information independent of newspapers.)

In short, it is as certain as two plus two equals four that charging for online access (with the Wall St. Journal being the notable exception) is a plainly bad idea. Some, however, are not so sure of the certainty of this folly. Betsy Newmark at Betsy's Page, for example, to my mind, spends entirely too much effort trying to appreciate the subtlety of the Times' "reasoning":

The New York Times has a story about newspapers evaluating whether or not to charge for their online content. It really becomes a game of chicken between the papers. If just one or a few papers start charging, everyone will head on over to the ones that are still free and it won't benefit those charging much. The fact that the Wall Street Journal can charge $79.00 for online subscriptions says more about the WSJ reader base than it does about the viability of charging for other papers. I can't imagine paying for any individual paper, but I suppose that if all the papers were to start charging, I might think about it. Perhaps I'd pay for a one-time subscription to a group of newspapers. The New York Times would not be on my lest.

Charging for online reading would surely put a crimp in political blogging since so much of what we do feeds off of stories in the press. We have to hope that the online ads start working for everyone.

I can just picture a time when I explain to my grandchildren about the glorious era when you could read almost any paper in the world for free.

Now, I'm not one of those militant bloggers who believes mainstream media no longer has any value (if, indeed, it ever had any value) and I'm not going to claim that MSM is dead as disco, but clearly, the situation has changed, and newspapers that want to play the role of proverbial buggy whip maker will only find themselves increasingly obsolesced and irrelevant. This is as plain as it is that the Soviet system of communitarian agriculture would lead only inexorably to mass starvation.

UPDATE: The always-eloquent Ann Althouse has more thoughts.

The Blogosphere Attacks Hahvahd "Business" School

Pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd and think about this one. Harvard "Business" School, which confers Masters in Bullshit Administration to anyone savvy enough to score 800 on the GMAT, has illogically decided to reject those applicants found to have "hacked" into Hahvahd's admissions files to see where their application stands.

Except, it is not so much "hacking" per se as it is prying into other levels of the directory hierarchy. Allow Techdirt to explain:

Following the decision from a group of top MBA programs to deny admission to anyone who made use of a security hole to check on the status of their admission a bit early, some of those rejected students are fighting back and saying that there was nothing ethically wrong with what they did. When you look at the details, they might just be right. First of all, this wasn't so much "hacking" as it was changing the URL once you logged into the system. Second, there was no way to make any changes. All the applicants were doing was checking on their status. Finally, there was no clear indication that this wasn't allowed. Many applicants were told it was a way to check on their status. Of course, the schools are unlikely to change their minds, now that this has received so much publicity. It's a "cheap" way for them to appear tough on ethics -- when the lesson we're really learning is that publicity concerning how strong you are on ethics trumps an actual look at the ethics of the situation. Of course, maybe they really are training future managers for the workplace. It appears that it's the same logic that Boeing is working under these days. The appearance of being tough on ethics is more important than actually being ethical.

Many corporate ethicists use the phrase "to avoid even the appearance of impropriety blah blah blah" by which is meant "we don't want anyone to claim we condone good ethics, therefore you must abide by these utterly illogical rules that make your life harder but our lives easier." Here's my quick take: Hahvahd outsourced development of its web site to a web design company, or some other unrelated entity. In so doing, it did not specify the security measures to be put in place to insure that applicants could not verify their application status. Therefore, whoever designed the web page through which applicants communicated with the school chose the most efficient design from their perspective. A curious, or web-savvy applicant decided to amend part of the URL, and voila! information on applicant status appears.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy notes that the "hack" these applicants used was not really a hack at all but merely a function of human curiosity. He quotes one Phillip Greenspun:

The ApplyYourself code had a bug such that editing the URL in the "Address" or "Location" field of a Web browser window would result in an applicant being able to find out his admissions status several weeks before the official notification date. This would be equivalent to a 7-year-old being offered a URL of the form http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20030817-utah-air-to-air/ and editing it down to http://philip.greenspun.com/images/ to see what else of interest might be on the server. Someone figured this out and posted the URL editing idea on the BusinessWeek discussion forum, where all B-school hopefuls hang out and a bunch of curious applicants tried it out.

It is hard to argue that this is "unethical" or even morally wrong. This is merely the way servers serve information. Information is organized in hierarchies. Kerr, who is a law professor, and who recently wrote a law review article about laws relating to unauthorized access of computer systems opines:

If this explanation is accurate — and several correspondents have suggested to me that it probably is — it means that the applicants didn't actually do anything that could reasonably be described as "hacking in" to a computer. As I understand it, the ApplyYourself computer had effectively posted everyone's admission decision on the web, just without broadcasting the URL. The applicants then followed the advice posted on the BusinessWeek discussion forum on how to find the public webpage that listed (or would eventually list) their admission decision. No one hacked into anything. The applicants just visited a public website.

This raises two questions: First, was visiting the website in this way a crime? And second, were the business schools justified in rejecting people who had done it? On the legal question, I think the answer is "no." The basic crime here is unauthorized access to a computer; the federal government and all 50 states have such laws. It just so happens that I recently wrote a 70-odd page law review article on how to interpret these statutes. To make a long story short, the cases interpreting these statutes are all over the map, but I am fairly confident that no court would hold defendants criminally liable under them for visiting a public site in the way they did.

As for whether the business schools were right, their response certainly seems like an overreaction to me. My guess is that the admissions people read the press reports and believed that the conduct was quite different from what it now seems to have been. If my technical understanding is right — still just an assumption at this point — automatically rejecting a candidate for admission seems too harsh. It seems rather odd to deny someone a spot at Harvard Business School for visiting a public web page.

Security is important. Preventing unauthorized access to a web page, or preventing a curious person from accidentally discovering how to access a web page are serious problems. Those people in charge of developing web-based communications platforms, such as in Harvard's case, would do well to understand web design, social engineering, and innate human curiosity. No one is at fault here but Harvard, and their fault lies solely at the feet of their own ignorance.

Methinks the Blogosphere Doth Protest Too Much

Apparently, some reporter named Dana Milbank is an unreconstructed liberal, full of that "bias" we keep hearing about. The Wall St. Journal reports in tomorrow's edition (link via paid subscription only) that Milbank, a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote for the White House pool reportage certain mundane details about a trip taken by Bush to the Capitol to meet with various lawmakers. The Journal recounts Milbank's notes, as bloggers have apparently seized upon these notes as evidence of bias on his part:

"Our protagonist departed the White House near unto 9:20 this morning, bound for the Capitol in a determined effort to find Gary Condit," Mr. Milbank wrote. "The big news of the day was made when our protagonist spoke about education. He declared that education is 'a passion for me.' In addition to this startling revelation, he made a case for free trade and his faith-based initiative."

Shortly after Mr. Milbank wrote the report, it was passed on to the conservative National Review magazine, which printed it verbatim under the headline "The Real Dana Milbank?" The dispatch then got posted on various conservative blogs, and even today is sometimes seized upon as evidence of what they consider Mr. Milbank's liberal bias.

"Milbank repeatedly calls Bush 'our' protagonist and 'our hero' -- which might be seen as cute and playful coming from a Republican or moderate, but which are definitely insulting coming from a rabidly partisan Bush-hater like [him]," fumed the Ace of Spades HQ blog in October. In January, blogger Lyndon Paj mentioned the pool report in a critical article he titled "The World of the Washington Post's Dana Milbank."

Mr. Milbank says the criticism is unwarranted: the report was a tongue-in-cheek protest at being kept out of the president's meeting with the Republican caucus, not a dig at Mr. Bush. "If somebody reads it out of context, it might look like something completely different," he says.

Regular readers of this blog will note that I am no friend of the left, and have more in common with the right than I do with anyone else. But, based on the information given, it seems a stretch worthy of a contortionist to take from Milbank's snarky use of "protagonist" and "our hero" that he is necessarily biased against the President. Further, the notion, as put forth by Ace of Spades, in the quote above, that such words evince a "rabidly partisan" attitude on the part of Milbank is an egregious example of rhetorical sleight of hand. Bloggers have gotten mighty high on themselves these days, especially on the right, and it seems to have become au courant for righty bloggers to seize upon every possible shred of sentiment possibly unfavorably disposed to their preferred politician as prima facie evidence of political bias.

Look, I'm under no illusion that there is not bias in the MSM; I have argued before that I think eliminating bias is an impossible task, either in the blogosphere or in MSM, and that conservatives are as prone to bias as liberals. Further, I believe that objectivity--a goal to which MSM claims to hew, and to which many bloggers claim MSM pays scant heed--is an impossible goal in practice. Language is malleable, mutable, and the bane of objectivity everywhere. A high schooler parsing poetry can discourse quite well on the difference between connotation and denotation, and part of the beauty of the English language is that a given word or phrase can have many connotative associations. Bias can be inferred nowhere and anywhere. Objectivity exists in chemistry and physics, not in prose.

That said, it still stands that there are claims of bias, such as the one discussed in the Wall St. Journal, that are so laughably insubstantial as to call into question what precisely bloggers mean by bias. If anything can be called "bias" then bias has no meaning and the bloggers cavil meaninglessly. I would like to think our efforts count for more than naught.

UPDATE: I emailed the author of the article a comment, which follows:

Mr. Cooper,

I read with interest your recent article in the Wall St. Journal regarding White House press pool reportage and bloggers' use of these notes to indicate bias among the press corps. I have to admit that, based on the information given in your article, claims of "bias" on the part of Dana Milbank ( with whose work I am unfamiliar) seem unsubstantiated.

I blogged about your article here: http://dfriedman.typepad.com/dave_friedmans_blog/2005/03/methinks_the_bl.html

In the interest of disclosure, I should let you know that I certainly am no friend of the left, and I do tend to perceive liberal bias in much of mainstream media; however, I do not think that such a perception is license to claim bias without justification. I think many blogge