The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair will give a speech to Labour Party supporters on Oct. 2 saying among other things that the Taliban’s times is up and that the United States and other nations will launch a devestating attack on Afghanistan for harboring bin Laden. This follows George W. Bush’s statements earlier today that the United States was ready to strike back at those responsible for the 9/11 attack. War before the weekend? It certainly is starting to look that way.
Day: October 1, 2001
Fear of 10/11(?)
I had a really weird experience tonight. Seth Dillingham and I were e-mailing back and forth about some issues with my dedicated server. I looked at my calendar and proposed going ahead with something on 10/11.
Just seeing 10/11 like that sent chills through my spine. As Seth put it in his reply to my e-mail, “I’d be happy to skip it and go straight to the 12th.”
I imagine there will be a lot of similar emotions on the one month anniversary of the terrorist attack, and probably a lot of fears of possible new attacks. The thing I find weird about the whole thing now is that life goes on.
On the one hand, of course, it’s very gratifying to see that terrorists can’t quite bring down civilization that easily. On the other hand, it’s kind of eerie to think that 6,000 people can just disappear off the face of the Earth, and yet people return, eventually, to what they were doing before.
Of course my life has returned to normal in large measure because the only person I knew who was actually in the World Trade Center at the time managed to escape safely. There are obviously many people whose lives won’t return to normal for a very long time.
Page Views Galore
Just the monthly updating of the web site log file statistics. As you can see on the monthly logfile stats page, September 2001 was the second biggest month for traffic since I started my web site way back in 1997 (which on the Internet feels like it was 20 years ago).
Meanwhile, the breakdown by sites shows continuing strong growth on the animal rights site, which should accelerate as the flat bb system made possible by some recent feature upgrades in Conversant has attracted quite a few old users back to the site.
The big surprise was LeftWatch.Com which almost doubled its August traffic. The reason there seems to have been the 9/11 terrorist attack — several older articles dealing with terrorism or Afghanistan had huge traffic in September, not surprisingly.
All in all, a very good month.
Metadata Madness
There have been several major upgrades to Conversant, the software that powers this web site, including a feature Macrobyte calls Custom Fields, but I personally think of as Metadata Madness (think of those bad television ads for car dealers).
Pretty much everything on this web site is actually part of a database. Things like the text of a message, the creation date, the author, the subject, etc. are essentially fields in that database. Storing information in a database presents a lot more possibilities than static systems.
Metadata — data about data — expands that power and makes it possible to manipulate data in lots of very cool ways.
Conversant already had an excellent metadata tool called “Labels.” On this site, I used those to lumps stories into categories. This story, for example, is assigned to a label called “Web.” Other stories are assigned to lablels like “Computer Games” or “Religion.”
Custom fields let me take that to the next level. For example, after all of the writing I did on the 9/11 attack, I wanted to create a page that would feature just the stories I’d written about that attack. I suppose I could have created a new, separate label for those stories, but then that would defeat the purpose of having broad categories.
Instead I created a “keywords” text field — which is now a field that all messages on the site have — and simply assigned all the 9/11 stories with the keyword “9/11.” You can see the results in this test page.
I’ve also added a short “description” field, though haven’t yet implemented it on this site. For an example of how this can come in handy, visit http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2001/ and notice how the more recent articles have short descriptions after them. This text is also used on the front page to summarize text (though at the moment I have to copy and paste this text into weblog entries, but this feature will be integrated automatically in an upcoming update of the weblog).
At the moment I’m mostly using these free-form text fields, but custom field option also offers date fields, popup menu fields, and list/combo fields.
Using a combination of these you could really build some powerful applications. For example, there is only 1 record in the database at the moment, but I’m using the custom fields to rebuild my database of animal rights terrorism that will be fully searchable on a number of different fields.
And that’s really the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of really cool things you can do with this, and as I get more into it I’ll be posting more examples.
The important things, as far as I’m concerned, is offering yet another sophisticated way to manipulate existing data. In today’s Dave Winer talks about software like Blogger and Manila as idea processors. I love that concept, but the problem with strictly outline and chronologically based processes is that neither hierarchical outlines nor a chronological ordering make it very easy to connect related (or unrelated) ideas and see the big picture.
For example, the other day I wrote a brief snippet slamming Salon.Com for its story about 9/11 and sex. That’s still fresh in my mind. A year from now, I am not going to remember that at all, much less guess which day I wrote that on. But I will be able to see that, and all related stories, by visiting the 9/11 page or a similar page of Salon.Com-related stories.
Although other people tell me they enjoy my web sites, everything I write is largely for my own benefit and future use. Being able to easily create and edit metadata makes it extremely easy to take the varied daily writing I do and organize it in a way that has long term value beyond what I’m interested in at the moment.
How Much Would El Al-style Security Cost?
I’ve seen a lot of news reports lauding Israeli airliner El Al’s famous security measures, but none of the reports estimated how much it would cost to have such a system in the United States. So here are my estimates.
USA Today reports that security for El Al costs $90 million a year for the airline which only runs an average of 40 flights per day. That works out to a security cost of $6,164 per flight.
American Airlines, which is the largest airline in the United States, was running 2,400 flights per day. Assuming similar security costs, that means it would take almost $5.4 billion per year just to protect American Airlines flights with that level of security.
Could Osama bin Laden Receive a Fair Trial in the United States?
What if the United States somehow manages to capture Osama bin Laden and bring him back to the United States? A friend and I were joking that that bin Laden’s only hope might be to use the Chewbacca defense.
But on a more serious note, could bin Laden possibly receive a fair trial anywhere in the United States? Could a jury possibly be assembled that would fairly weigh the evidence against bin Laden? Wouldn’t such a jury rationally fear retaliation and other consequences if they voted to acquit bin Laden?
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me it would be extremely difficult for bin Laden to receive a fair trial in the United States.