Smallpox is tough to grasp, but here's a helpful point of comparison. We don't have a very precise picture of the death toll of either smallpox or World War II, but in rough terms it is reasonable to estimate that smallpox killed ten times as many people in the 20th century as died in World War II.
Think for a minute, let that sink in. Smallpox killed an order of magnitude more people than the event that we (that I, at least) generally think of as the ultimate horror.
For your Monday morning reading, I offer the tale of smallpox in Aralsk, a Russian city on the edge of the Aral Sea, the last outbreak of the disease in the then-Soviet Union, a tale of some mystery and intrigue.
Nardi and O'Day (Information Ecologies) use, as a case study, a MOO-like environment called "Pueblo" used in an elementary school for poor students.
It sounds like the kids are just MOOing, but there is much more at work than that. When the kids use the text-based role-playing, world-building game, they're really writing, but in a much more rich and meaningful way than the traditional "write a paper, hand it in to the teacher" model:
When participants create descriptions like the one Starlight wrote for her palace, they add to the ambiance of the virtual world. Participants are motivated to write well because of the enjoyment they give to themselves and others - they can create experiences for others who visit their creations.
As Jo Talazus, Longview's principal, says, "This is a far cry from `put your papers in the basket on the desks.'" It is vastly different from preparing an assignment for a teacher (an audience of one) who is expected to grade the work, rather than enjoy it.
Howard Rheingold also writes about Pueblo. with some statistics to back up the success of the methodology:
Elementary school students find college-level mentors in the virtual world who show them how to build their own worlds, and encourage them to read and write expressively and skillfully. Longview students learned social skills, and they learned that college is a possible future for them. Then some of the students, most of whom are from low-income families, can help their parents learn to read and write, using the same technology. The response was so overwhelming that the project had to add higher-speed access lines and more access points.As for practical educational impact, according to the first study, Hughes and Walters report: "Students participating in the summer program made 1.06 years gain on a standardized reading test as compared to 0.58 for those not in the program. Students who were able to access the system for 360 minutes during the fall of 1994 averaged 2.4 years of gain from 1993 to 1994 on standardized reading tests."
This supports the value of the sort of open-ended, text-based role playing games that Nora and her friends play. And it's a fabulous demonstration of the sort of evolution that software and computational systems are capable of if you recognize that the groups of humans using the system, rather than just the computer itself or the computer and a single user.
Dave Mason, one of my predecessors as head of the GNOME Documentation Project, once said something to the effect of, "I don't want to be a hacker."
I'm starting the arduous process of building the next GNOME, 2.4, which exists only in ugly bleeding edge, generally unworkable CVS code. I failed with the usually robust and reliable jhbuild scripts, because of some mysterious auto* tools problem. I turned to the less usable but still quite functional vicious build scripts. and had some modest success. As you can see from the picture, the fonts are an unreadable melange of lovely colors (Telsa suggested it was "impressionist"). But despite certain usability shortcomings, it's rather a victory, since I at least was able to build it at all.
Which brings me to the theme of today's discourse. In order to be a usable and contribuing member of the community, I need to be building the latest bleeding edge stuff. But in order to do that, I need to spend a significant portion of my available GNOME time on the building part, which leaves less time than I would like for the "contributing member of the community" part.
The problems are not completely intrinsic. The build scripts are intended to greatly simplify this stuff, and when they work smoothly I'm usually ahead of this game. But there's an inevitable wrestling match to get the very latest stuff working, and the only real way to do the job on an ongoing basis is to bulk up and wrestle it to the ground.
Sigh. I think I'll go for a bike ride.
American Military Operation Name Generating Device
(Thanks to Dan Gillmor.)
You may think the air of extreme witlessness impossible to mimic, but is the man on the podium the authentic Dubya, a trained stand-in or an animatronic lookalike?
I had one of those classic free software moments this morning that reminds me of why I so strongly prefer that world to the world of commercial software.
I had recently built the latest unstable version of Gnumeric, the GNOME spreadsheet, but the first time I fired it up, it crashed unusably. I dutifully filed a bug report (users' way of giving back to a project, and an important part of what I think of as the free software social contract). My report left Jody Goldberg, the lead developer scratching his head. He volleyed back a few questions, I answered as best I could, and the bug sat unsolved.
Last night I ran into Jody on IRC and he asked if I'd figured out anything more. I hadn't, guilt set in, so I set in to rebuild Gnumeric a couple of different ways to see if I could learn anything. Nothing.
Then this morning, there was an email in my inbox. Jody had figured it out, and fixed it.
I'll buy lunch for anyone who's had service that good with shrink-wrap software they paid for.
I was too young to really get what Bob Loney was trying to teach us young Upland High School distance runners, but in retrospect it seems like he knew what he was doing.
He didn't call those pain-in-the-ass quarter mile repeats "interval training" and was more interested in motivational talk than the science of lactate thresholds. But I remember the workouts well, how much I hated them - 10 quarter miles at race pace, run one, rest to catch your breath, then grab onto the next one. We'd run them in groups so we'd get a feel for racing, which was part of his motivation I'm sure. But mostly it was teaching our metabolic systems about where the lactate threshold was, what it felt like to bump up against it. If we really worked them hard (which I rarely did - I was a pretty lazy teenager) we could push that threshold up a little bit, get a little extra speed out of our legs before the lactic acid burn set in.
I'd fogotten those workouts for a long time, but they immediately popped to mind when I started riding intervals. I'm much more rigorous now, using a heart monitor to set peaks and recovery rates and time the results. But it's amazing how close the basic interval workout matches the rhythms of Bob Loney's workouts those many fall afternoons on the Upland High School track.
They work. There's a hill out of Corrales that Jaime and I have been climbing on our Wednesday rides. It comes about an hour into our rides, and it's not a long hill, but we're usually flying on the run-up to it, so my heart rate is always near the lactate threshold before we start. Jaime invariably drops me on the first little uphill, which he did three weeks ago. But I kept hammering, and about three-quarters of the way up I caught him. This is unheard of. I never catch Jaime on a hill. My heart rate was near pegged at about 95 percent of max, but rather than blowing up there, I was able to hold it the whole way up the hill.
Blessed be thy intervals, for they will train thy heart.
Bob came to mind this morning as I ran up my heart rate again and again. He used to make us do 10. Today I managed 12.
Maciej Stachowiak has a powerful antidote in his March 22 blog to those who would use the word "fascist" to describe Bush's policies in Iraq. Words matter, and the experience of Maciej's family in Poland suggests that, whatever one feels about the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq, one should be careful in the one's choice of words:
I know all about dictatorship, and fascism, and totalitarianism and empire. My family and my country of birth have lived through them all.I am going to give the benefit of the doubt to people who freely toss around these kind of words in reference to America or Bush. I'm going to assume they simply don't know what they are talking about, or have not thought through it fully. I have no great love for Bush or his policies. I think the USA Patriot Act was a cheap and unconstitutional power grab, and I am not sure his course of action leading up to the war was the wisest.
But there is no way you can compare this to real dictatorship or real empire. Iraq is not going to disappear from the map, or become a vassal state. America isn't going to turn into a land of bread-lines or secret police knocking on your door in the middle of the night. We are not going to commit genocide or leave a whole nation laid waste. No one is going to be liberating starving prisoners from American labor camps. In fact, our military is trying its best to kill as few people as possible and to destroy as little as possible.
(Thanks to the ubiquitous Dave Mason for pointing this out.)
Sure sign of spring - Lissa and I rode bikes out past the Bueno Chile plant, past the junkyard with the line of old Volkswagen vans along its back fence, our first long ride of the spring. The winter birds you sometimes see in the farmers' fields down there, in Albuquerque's South Valley, are gone, replaced by carefully leveled fields awaiting their seed. The cottonwoods aren't greening up yet, but the elms, evil invaders that they are, show signs of leaves sprouting.
The air had the soft feeling of the first sunny day after a week of rain, which is a feeling we don't often get here. We saw ducks in the ditch splashing and flailing and trying to make new ducks, a squirrel running along the ditch bank, a load of fresh graffiti down by the elementary school - all trappings of spring.
Some discussion recently on the GNOME Docs List about how to best raise the Google ranking of the GNOME Users Guide. Our problem is that there are a bunch of old versions about that are out of date but still rank high. One way to raise the ranking, of course, is to link to it, which I am doing here.
The New York Times had a story Thursday about how kids use instant messaging that is relevant to my current reading about Information Ecologies. The chapter I'm now reading defines the complex way in which an information ecology takes place - the interplay between the technology itself and the people who use it. The authors make the important point that the technology alone is not determinative. The authors say:
We cannot overemphasize a key point here: only the participants of an information ecology can establish the identity and place of the technologies that are found there. Indeed, this is a responsibility, not just an opportunity.
This contrasts with the luddite view (my word, not theirs) that technology is beyond our control and bends us to its amoral will.
Which brings us to Joyce Cohen's story in Thursday's New York Times. It's a delightful romp about the way kids' IM away messages have become a fundamental tool for communicating with and entertaining one another:
Away messaging, a function of instant messaging, has become something of an obsession on college campuses, providing communication, entertainment, procrastination and social life all rolled into one. "Students go online just to read their friends' away messages," said David Jacobson, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, who has taught courses examining away messages. "It's a whole new dynamic that's really remarkable."
The software engineers who created the "away message" had no idea it would be used this way. These kids have bent it to their will.
I'm book-flitting and found an interesting title at the library on technology and culture called Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day. They bring both software design and anthropology to the task, and are interested in splitting the baby between luddites and technoenthusiasts. This is an approach that interests me.
The fundamental question they are posing is this: Given technology's presence in our lives, how can we best bend it to our will rather than bending to its. This question is central to the familial revolution triggered by our acquisition of two mobile telephones. I have resisted this for a long time, been dismissive of it, argued repeatedly that I've never seen a need, nor wanted the tether that a phone implies. But our three lives have become a logistically complicated three-body problem, and we realized a few weeks ago that a cell phone could be an enabler and a solution rather than an ankle weight. Nora's activities are multiplying - theater, several clubs at school, tennis - and giving her the ability to call us on the move from one to the next in order to coordinate transportation, food and other necessities seems like a practical value. And allowing Lissa to be untethered while still executing her self-imposed role of enabling Nora's complex youth also seem like a practical value. So Nora and Lissa now have cell phones.
We'll see how the experiment works.
The question of whether or when to resume new nuclear weapons design work is now formally on the table with the Bush Administration's request to repeal a ban on U.S. research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
I am careful here in my personal blog not to express my own views about issues I cover as a journalist. I have what I believe is a good working relationship with both the leaders of the nuclear arms control community and leaders of the nuclear weapons community. I have spent more than a decade talking to both, and I deeply understand their arguments and the passion with which they make them.
Succeeding as a journalist in such a situation requires an odd state of mind - the ability to fully hold, entertain and understand contradictory viewpoints. I need to be able to embrace the arms control community's argument that nuclear weapons are a fundamental threat to humanity. I need to be able to embrace the weapons community's argument that nuclear weapons prevented ("deterred", to use their careful word) world war for half a century.
I've spent countless hours doing that in this case - the bookshelf behind me of nuclear weapons policy books is filled with heavy tomes on the subject. Ultimately it has been a morally exhausting experience. The experience has allowed me to write sympathetically about both, and robbed me of any views of my own. In this case, an unwillingness to share my own views is not artifact or journalist's deceit. It is genuine.
For most of the last five years I've hated writing about nuclear weapons for that reason. Grappling with this largest of questions is just too hard. But I do it anew this year because the question is back on the table, freighted with new nuances, in the context of a new world.
This is not me:
John Fleck, in his stage performance 'Blessed Are All the Little Fishes,' confronts alcoholism and Catholicism. During the course of the performance, Fleck appears dressed as a mermaid, urinates on the stage and creates an altar out of a toilet bowl by putting a photograph of Jesus Christ on the lid." Justice Scalia, concurring in NEA v. Finley.
As I mentioned yesterday, I've been taking CD's with me to work so I have music to help drown out the chaos around me when I need to write. I've been listening on the computer headphones, but decided yesterday to plunk down the astronomical sum of $28 and buy a portable player. It was a better idea than I realized.
First of all, the sound - Cheap electronics just keep getting better and better. But the really interesting part is the psychology.
I took my new toy with me yesterday afternoon to the library. I popped on the headphones and was in my own little world, surrounded by a bubble of personal space and privacy, oblivious to those around me. I guess this is the same bubble I've been needing at the office, a safe space in which to work. But I never imagined it would be transferable, able to follow me as I travel the world at large.
I grabbed three CD's on my way out the door yesterday morning. (I've been using headphones to listen to music at work lately to drown out the chaos on days I need to write - mostly jazz, music without words.) I took Birth of the Cool, Brilliant Corners and Saxophone Colossus. I was looking at the lineup on Birth of the Cool and noticed Max Roach on drums. I grabbed the Sonny Rollins. Max Roach on drums. The Monk. Max Roach on drums.
So is there just one jazz drummer?
Actually, it was just a coincidence. I went through my jazz CD's when I got home and there were lots other drummers. But it made me think that I don't really pay much attention to the drumming. I pay attention to most of the other players, but the poor anonymous drummer....
So in tribute to Max Roach, I'm going to start paying attention.
I'm currently poking my way through Tree Rings and Telescopes, a biography of A.E. Douglas written in the 1980s by George Ernest Webb. Douglas was the astronomer who invented the science of dendrochronology around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to study sunspot cycles, figuring they would be reflected in growth rings in the trees. What he ended up inventing was a fundamental tool for archaeology and for climate research. It was a time when it was still possible for a scientist to be a great generalist - for an astronomer to have a profound influence on fields completely outside his own.
Called a source at the Friends Committee on National Legislation this morning. The music while I was being transferred through their phone mail: Give Peace a Chance.
My goofball daughter sent me this:
| This is my little bit of the Mandelbrot set. I got it from the mandelbit generator. You can get one there too. |
Methinks I must have raised her right.
That alleged (has it been formally alleged?) dirty bomber Joseph Padilla is entitled to legal counsel might seem obvious, but U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey had to reach back to none less that Wittgenstein to undercut the government's logic for trying to deny him access to a lawyer:
The government's argument summons from obscurity an abstruse problem - that because no rule can determine its own application, it may appear that there can be no binding rule - that was picked apart on the philosophical dissecting table toward the middle of the last century by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and since has ceased to vex those inclined to contemplate such matters. Compare Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 198, at 80e (G.E.M. Anscombe trans., 3rd ed. 1958) ( But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.")
(Link from Steve Aftergood, who characterized the judge as having written "triumphantly and with thrilling erudition.")
From the Journal:
Rushing to war in Iraq would ignore the success of inspections in containing Saddam Hussein's military machine, according to Paul Stokes, the retired Sandia National Laboratories weapons designer who headed up nuclear inspections in Iraq in 1994 and 1995.
In particular, Stokes noted the important distinction between chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Chemical and biological weapons aren't good for much, he said, and nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein doesn't have.
One of the things that hooked me as a bicycle racing fan was the elegance with which the peleton responded during the 1995 Tour de France to the death of Fabio Casartelli. Casartelli hit a cement post along the side of the road on a wicked high-speed descent in the Pyrenees.
The next day the boys on the bikes, led by a young Casartelli teammate called Lance Armstrong, rode together in silence, choosing not to contest the day, allowing Casartelli's teammates to the front at each of the bonus sprints so they could collect the prize money for Casartelli's widow.
I was reminded of that today by this. It's the boys from Cofidis crossing the finish line as one in today's stage in Paris-Nice, a hot little stage race slowed by the death of Cofidis rider Andrei Kivilev, who crashed out yesterday. He died after a night in the hospital of a freakish head injury (the sort that would not have killed him, it is being said, had he been wearing a helmet). The riders did not race today, riding the stage together in quiet tribute to the popular Kazakh bike racer.
5:45 p.m. in the newsroom, with our network down - bedlam on deadline. Unsure when the geeks would get it fixed, we were starting to improvise with floppy disks, reconfiguring stuff as we went. High tension.
Into the midst of this came a barbershop quartet, singing birthday greetings to our copy desk chief. It was surreal.
Dave Mason sent me a note when I said I'd been reading Grahama Greene, saying I read too much science, and he was glad to see I'd been reading some fiction. Thing is, I picked it up from the library because I thought I'd been reading too much science, and thought I should read some fiction.
Dad suggested the book to me years ago with a chuckle over the amusing premise - a guy in the '50s recruited to spy for the British in Cuba, makes up his "agents", makes up his reports. He's a vacuum cleaner salesman, and to tart up his reports, he sketches by hand the pieces of the latest vacuum cleaner model, adding a human for scale to make it look like some giant evil Cuban war machine.
It's a dark and funny book, but the best bits were unexpected - the touching relationship between Wormold and his daughter, Milly, the bittersweet joy of being the father of a teenage girl, the darting in and out of her world, trying to know it while one still can:
He couldn't afford the time not to love. It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him.
I have too many blogs already - Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere - a pre-existing publisher in the case of the Journal and Advogato, which provides a built-in audience. There's comfort in that. The Nuke Beat's just a hare-brained experiment, which may or may not work. But they all have something in common, which is me. There are times when, writing for one or another, I feel uncomfortable. Too much free software ranting is prolly a bad idea on the Journal blog, and I've never been entirely comfortable bragging about my incredibly smart and talented daughter on Advogato.
That's why I decided to consolidate things here. By no longer hiding behind the skirts of an existing publisher, I lose built-in audiences, but that seems fine. I'll still do the other blogs when my whim suits their audience (and in the case of ABQJournal, I get paid for that, which still amazes me). But if Tim Berners-Lee's original idea of the web as a medium for both reading and writing has any meaning at all, this is it, so my Inkstain web site must reflect that.