Monthly Archives: January 2005

Did James Watt Really Say This?

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National Review points to this Bill Moyers op-ed which includes this line,

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Watt said a lot of stupid things — he was the guy who complained that the Beach Boys would attract “the wrong element” to a planned event. But did he say this line above?

Color me suspicious. The Grist article, which can be found here, gets key details wrong (emphasis added),

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back,” Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Watt was not fired over what he said in testimony to Congress. Watt was fired because he had a breakfast meeting with lobbyists at which he explained that the decisions made by his coal advisory commission would stand because, “I have a black. I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” Besides, Watt was fired in 1983, not 1981.

So Grist completely gets the details of Watt’s firing wrong, which raised my spidey sense. Moreover that sentence, “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back” doesn’t appear at all in Lexis-Nexis. It’s hard to believe that Watt could have said something that silly without anyone quoting it in the intervening 20+ years except Grist.

The statement is also inconsistent with other things Watt said when linking his Christianity with environmentalism. For example, in 1981 Watt testified in Congress,

I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. Whatever it is, we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

It’s certainly possible Watt said this — the man said enough wacky things for three lifetimes — but given the poor sourcing and the lack of any corroboration in Lexis, I consider the claim to be suspect.

I’ve e-mailed the author of the Grist piece asking him for a corroborating source on the Watt quote.

Update: The Grist author hasn’t replied personally, but he has provided a source for the Watt quote and it’s not looking good. Where would you go for a quote from James Watt? A book on environmental controversies in the 1980s? Perhaps any number of histories of the Reagan administration?

Nope, the apparent source for the quote is a recently published book about the Catholic church’s sex scandals! My library happens to own a copy so I’m going to check out what sort of sourcing author Austin Miles used later today.

DriveThruRPG.Com Goes DRM-Free

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Here’s the thing — I love roleplaying games. I never have time anymore to actually play one, but when I’m in the comic shop I just can’t resist the damn things. The problem is that RPGs are such a niche market that they can be very expensive. The Buffy RPG core book cost me $40 alone.

So enter DriveThruRPG.Com. They’ve been around for awhile, offering high quality PDFs of RPGs. Yes there are services like RPGNow and Steve Jackson Games’ new PDF store, but those tend to offer either a) materials from small, independent publishers (which tend to be very amateurish in the case of RPGNow) or b) reprinting out-of-print stuff, which is nice but I also want stuff that’s out now.

DriveThruRPG.Com fit that bill, but had one major drawback — their files were heavy on the DRM. Yuck. Thanks, but no thanks.

Recently, however, DriveThruRPG.Com has had a change of heart and began offering publishers the ability to sell DRM-free PDFs. Quite a few of them have decided to go DRM-free. According to the DriveThruRPG.Com site,

Our publishing partners are now able to offer their titles in either the standard DRM format or in a new watermarked, standard PDF. The new watermarking option imprints a small watermark on the bottom of each page of a PDF file at the time of purchase, making each such file purchased at DriveThruRPG a uniquely labeled file. The file is otherwise a standard PDF file that can be searched, text copied, printed and otherwise used like any other PDF file.

Many of our publisher partners are choosing to embrace the new format. So, hundreds of new and classic RPG titles will be available in standard PDF for the first time ever.

As far as the watermark, there is a small line of text at the bottom of each page giving the name of the person who ordered the PDF and an order number, so if they show up on alt.binaries groups or filesharing networks, at least they can trace back who released them and take appropriate action as the site warns,

Warning: If any books bearing your information are found being distributed illegally, then your account will be suspended and legal action may be taken against you.

I’m very glad to see that although they haven’t been converted yet, Eden Studios is going to be selling all of their books DRM-free on the site. Because I need a copy of Terra Primate on my laptop (and, at half the price of the book version).

Take a Deep Breath and Tag Those Posts — Or Not

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More than three years ago, Macrobyte added custom fields option to Conversant, the software I use to manage this and the rest of my web sites. That was like a revelation and I think I’ve exploit the feature more than anyone else using the software — I have some sites that have a couple dozen different fields and close to 2,000 values within those fields. The extensive, detailed categorization that has is one of the reasons my sites have been as successful as they have been.

Now the rest of the world has discovered “tagging” posts with categories (I hate that word “tagging” — sounds like I’m out spraypainting graffiti) thanks to services like Flicker, Del.icio.Us, Technorati and others. And that’s also brought a bit of a blacklash which goes something like this: tagging posts is a pain in the ass and users will quickly abandon it.

Dave Winer captures this view in describing why he doesn’t categorize his posts,

I’ve seen the same thing. I have a very easy category routing system built-in to my blogging software. To route an item to a category, I just right-click and choose a category from a hierarchy of menus. I can’t imagine that it could be easier. Yet I don’t do it.

It’s also very easy to add a new category, or to even reorganize my whole taxonomy. Never do those things either.

A picture named billg.jpgI have a theory that it’s like desktop calendar software, which people were very excited about in 1985 or so (they called them Personal Information Managers or PIMs). Seemed like every new Mac software product had a calendar in it. John Sculley and Mitch Kapor were singing their praises. Users got all excited about them too, and set them up imagining how great it was going to be to finally have an orderly life. They happily entered appointments, until they spaced out or got lazy and didn’t enter one. All it takes is one for the excitement to turn to guilt. You don’t even want to look at the thing because you screwed up. Quickly you never use it. I’ve seen this happen both in my own work, and in others.

The category stuff works the same way. At first I delighted in the ease of routing stuff to categories. Eventually I would only route to one or two categories, and then I stopped altogether. Not because it wasn’t easy enough, but because the guilt had taken over.

People like Dave and others are basing their guilt on a fundamental misconception, however, that categorizing posts has value only if you do it to every single post. But adding metadata has value even if you only end up tagging 1 in 50 posts or 1 in 100 posts.

I’m a categorization freak, but I am also fundamentally lazy and sometimes I just don’t feel like categorizing my posts. So, I don’t. For example, all of the articles on this page are ones that I was just too lazy to bother categorizing when I posted them. And that’s okay.

Even a little metadata can add a lot of value. For example, you might be a hockey fanatic and decide, you know, that the only posts you really care to tag are the ones related to hockey. Why should you feel guilty over not obsessively categorizing everything? You shouldn’t. Go on with your life. Get over it.

The other error I think a lot of people are making is assuming that tags only have value in relation to services like Del.icio.us and Technorati, etc. The single best use of a categorization scheme is to present a page or pages on your site that show, for example, all of your posts about hockey or, taking it to the next level, having an RSS feed of all of your posts about hockey.

What’s the payoff? Traffic. The one thing that most bloggers share is they seem to want more traffic. From my experience, tagging posts and then aggregating them on topical pages will drive traffic to your blog/web site like nothing else. I am definitely not an A-list blogger and get very little traffic directly from other bloggers, but I’m currently averaging about 40,000 page views/day thanks to search engine friendly topical pages.

Of course most people probably aren’t as interested in obsessively categorizing everything as I do, but sites I run where I have done only minimal categorizing, that categorizing has helped push the traffic levels to relatively high numbers compared to what I see other bloggers — even very popular ones — out there reporting they receive.

Dave Winer, Derek Powazek, and Search

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This post in combination with this post certainly should win Dave Winer some sort of award. I’m thinking, though, that it would be the Internet equivalent of the razzies.

Derek Powazek mentioned on his weblog that in 2000 Winer referred to him as “brain dead.” Winer took umbrage at that on Scripting.Com, saying,

Anyway, I’d love to see the pointer to where I supposedly said he was brain-dead. If I said it, I apologize, that would be a really mean thing to say, and obviously not true. On the other hand, I probably said his design was brain-dead, which is an opinion, a way of saying it could stand a lot of improvement. I’ve done tons of brain-dead design myself, and lived to tell the story. And here are all the citations for Powazek on this blog. You can see there’s a good mix of praise and criticism.

One of the brain dead things Dave does, IMO, is rely on Google for searching his own weblog. So the citations link above uses Google to provide a list of all the blog posts he’s done which mention Powazek.

The kicker is that the “brain dead” comment occurred on Scripting.Com right here, but because of the way he’s configured the Google search’s output, it doesn’t show up unless you actually visit the archive page. In fact, even if you search for the exact text, “brain damaged” (not brain dead — Winer apparently edited the post), the post still doesn’t show up in the results.

And for this, Winer (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) thinks he deserves an award,

Anyway, I don’t get awards, but I wish I did. Given a chance I would certainly nominate this site for best technology in a weblog, if only for the cool Google-powered search, illustrated above in the post about Powazek. Did you know it uses the Google API in conjunction with the local content database to only give you the bits you’re looking for. It’s a big thing, and as far as I know, of all the millions of weblogs they’re tracking at Technorati (thanks to weblogs.com, by the way), this is the only one that has such a cool search command.

Yeah, it really helped him drill down to “only give you the bits you’re looking for” in this case. There’s a reason millions of weblogs aren’t using “such a cool search command.”

And still, Winer will never understand why people treat him with such hostility when he greets them with sentences like, “Your site [Powazek's] is the most brain-damaged weblog I’ve ever seen.”

Gee, it’s so surprising that negative bickering sucks up all the energy among folks concentrating on syndication.

Are Computers Ruining Chess?

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The New York Times had a story earlier this month about the problems faced by high level players in the computer age. This story wasn’t about computers beating humans at chess, however, but rather about whether or not lesser human players are obtaining unfair advantages because of the proliferation of databases of chess games that make it possible to study their play with computers and occasionally beat them by finding obscure flaws in their game.

The Times opens with the case of international chess master Jay Bonin. According to the Times,

Mr. Bonin is more active than most elite players, but he is doing what most serious players have long thought is necessary: playing frequently to stay in peak form. Now, however, because of the widespread availability of databases of games and the growing strength of chess software, such activity may actually be making it easier to beat him.

Mr. Bonin said that he recently lost a tournament game to a weaker player who had not competed in years, but who had sprung a surprise move on him in one of Mr. Bonin’s favorite openings.

“The line he played reeked of preparation,” he said.

This is obviously not cheating, but quite a few people including Gary Kasparov and international chess master Gregory Shahade tell the New York Times they think it has made chess openings less fun and creative. As The Times reports,

Before people started using databases, a player who came up with a new move in an opening might be able to use it several times before enough people found out about it to start preparing for it. Now innovations are known almost as soon as they are played. “The profit maybe is very small,” Mr. Kasparov said. “You can only use it one game.”

Of course, as The Times points out, it was in large part due to the urging/suggestion of Kasparov that the preeminent chess database, Chessbase, added sophisticated searching so people can easily find all the games where Kasparov or any other players ends up in some specific position and then analyze how the player reacts, making preparation that much easier.

There are some contrarians. Estonian grandmaster Jaan Ehlvest contends that rather than allowing weak players to beat stronger players, the major effect of computers has been to accelerate the speed at which players realize their potential. According to The Times,

Mr. Ehlvest added that in any case he did not believe that computers made people better than they otherwise would be. Instead, they can help them reach their potential sooner.

“Now you see 14-year-old grandmasters because they accumulate information much faster than in my day,” he said.

Source:

Chess players give ‘check’ a new meaning. Dylan Loeb McClain, The New York Times, January 13, 2005.

The Difference Between Iran and U.S. on Human Rights

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Iranian President Mohammad Khatami recently took umbrage at the U.S. State Department’s complaints about Iran’s persecution of Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She was recently issued a summons to appear in court, but the Iranian government refused to tell her what sort of charges she was facing.

This prompted the State Department to express “grave concern” over the court proceedings. Khatami struck back, citing the poor U.S. record on human rights at Abu Ghraib prison,

Now they [the United States] must respond to the crimes committed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and their relentless killing of people in all parts of the world in the name of freedom and democracy and the support they provide to the brutalities and atrocities committed against the Palestinian people.

Abu Ghraib provides a nice counterpoint between how Iran and the United States handle human rights abuses that occur in prisons.

One of the ring leaders of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., was recently convicted by a military court and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Contrast this with what happened to the murderers of Zahra Kazemi, a female reporter with both Canadian and Iranian citizenship. Kazemi was arrested on June 23, 2003 after taking photographs of a prison in Tehran. Kazemi was assaulted in prison, apparently by a prison official, and died of her injuries a couple weeks later.

Iranian officials first tried to claim that she had suffered a “stroke,” but later conceded that she had died as a result of a blow to the head which caused brain hemorrhaging.

Iran charged a security official with beating Kazemi to death, but he was acquitted. Iran’s official story today is that Kazemi was standing when she inexplicably fell to the ground, hit her head, and sustained the fatal blow that fractured her skull.

Source:

Iran’s Khatami raps US on rights. The BBC, January 15, 2005.

What Is Conversant?

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Seth Dillingham recently created a nice, long summary in outline form to answer the question he hears from clients — What Is Conversant? Its pretty exhaustive, and I don’t really have anything to add to the specifics.

To Seth, Conversant is groupware. To me its a sophisticated toolbox for categorizing, arranging, ordering and indexing information that really is realtively easy to use.

There are some very nice, very easy-to-use blogging software platforms out there like Movable Type. They’re very good and very powerful for what they do, but its difficult to do things outside the blogging model with them.

On the other hand, there are extremely powerful but also extremely difficult-to-use (at least for non-experts) content mangament systems like Mambo. I don’t have time to take a course in PHP to administer my web site.

Conversant lives in the happy middle with all the power of a system like Mambo but with a much shorter learning curve. If you need a site that goes beyond the blogging basics, but don’t want to deal with learning programming or hiring someone to install and code the specifics (as I would have to do if I were going with something like Mambo), Conversant hits the sweet spot in the power vs. convenience tradeoffs.

Two Cool Things About Blue LED Inventor Winning $8.1 Million

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The Register recently reported that the man who invented the blue LED, Shuji Nakamura, reached an $8.1 million settlement with his former employer, Japanese chemical company Nichia.

Its still a lot less than the $189 million Nakamura was initially awarded, but a decent deal considering.

Second, the headline the Register uses for this story is, “Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer.” I’d just like to add my long-held opinion that the word “boffin” to refer to “a scientist, especially one engaged in research” is simply the coolest word ever in the English language (well, at least the coolest clean word). It is a shame that the word is not used widely in other English-speaking countries besides Great Britain.

According to WordSmith.Org, the term is considered slang and its origins are partially obscured,

If a pocket protector could be considered an official accessory of a nerd, white lab coat, glasses and clipboard would be the equivalent for a boffin. The term first appeared as a moniker given by members of Britain’s Royal Air Force to scientists doing research on radar. But like most slang, the how and why of this are unknown.

Source:

Blue LED boffin wins $8.1m from ex-employer. Tony Smith, The Register, January 13, 2005.