The Decline

Inevitable

2012-01-27T13:49:00.000-05:00

The Decline is dying of neglect. There were plans for a new journal built around some open source technologies. If that ever happens, I'll post a link here. In the mean time, I really have nothing to say anymore. I no longer recognize a place for myself in this world. Politics is thoroughly debased and ignorance comes only second to narcissism as society's ordering values. What can one say in or to a world such as this? "I prefer not to."

Anti-SOPA

2012-01-18T15:43:00.001-05:00

I support the Anti-SOPA / PIPA strike.

Bill Payin'

2012-01-17T20:45:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine is very kindly buying a Kindle Fire through my Amazon affiliate link. Thanks.

Update

2012-01-14T14:40:00.001-05:00

Next week, I'll be starting an adjunct teaching position at the local community college. This means that my 2012 income will be 1000% larger than it was last year (even if 0 times 1000% doesn't equal $1,000, you get the idea).

Airport Security

2011-12-23T11:46:00.001-05:00

Vanity Fair:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

Via Daring Fireball.

Perpetual Peace

2011-11-29T18:23:00.001-05:00

Quotes like this happen a dozen times a century perhaps, paraphrasing a sea change in European Weltanschauung. Via Ezra Klein's Wonkbook:

"I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity."

Habermas speaks out also. I'm still trying to parse this latest version of "More Europe; Less Europe" opinion writing. But insofar as the driving force of a Kantian Europe has always been the very non-Kantian economy, an economic crisis which unevenly distributes costs to certain countries suggests serious hurdles to a stronger union.

30 min Update: And then sometimes you move up one item in your well curated must read RSS feeds in NetNewsWire to find that The Economist also has a long discussion AND ties the Kant threads together.

Confidence Men

2011-11-05T12:01:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein reviews Ron Suskind:

But Suskind’s reporting seems, at times, to contradict his thesis.

Statistics in Hockey

2011-10-14T14:02:00.001-04:00

In a post to HOTH, a Daniel Wagner marshals Kierkegaard[1] against the specter of statistical analyses of sports, hockey in particular. Life, we are told in bold, Hegelian-inspired non-sequiturs, is too complex for the reductive lens of empirical models. Without an Archimedean point, the whole edifice of objective knowledge is a farce. Life is lived, or chosen, or something. To be fair, he is making a point about what is left out of statistics. I think this is important enough to respond.

I do not mean to denigrate Kierkegaard. He is without a doubt one on the most captivating writers of the 19th century. Nor do I wish to suggest I have no sympathy for the existentialist celebration of choice and contingency. But in making this point, which has little to do with contemporary social science or statistics[2], Wagner inadvertently demonstrates why we invented and use things like statistics and social scientific methods.

To be clear, I am not a statistician. I spent several years studying political philosophy in a social science department devoted to science. Therefore I have a somewhat tortured relationship to the harder sciences. And while as an unemployed philosopher I would like to believe that my knowledge of Kierkegaard is more valuable than say Nate Silver’s mastery of meta-statistics, this is not true when we are trying to answer most questions. Here, I hope to lay out the necessity of statistical or scientific methods, while pointing out where an effective critique can be leveled. In other words, both sides in this hockey stats debate are doing it wrong.

Why do we have statistics?

We should strive towards objectivity.[3] Let’s take that as a maxim. If you do not care about whether you are making true statements about the world, then this debate is moot. You can go ahead and pretend that Scott Gomez or Brian Campbell are not overpaid because they have some ineffable “something.”

To say “Scott Gomez is overpaid” is debatable. We should argue about interesting or important questions. How do adjudicate between different standards for evaluating the player? We offer reasons. Now, I can observe a player—let’s use Dan Carcillo—and say that one night he’s taking bad penalties and hurting his team with bad backchecking. You, my reader, might observe the same game and say that his penalties were important in creating energy and motivating a stagnant or disinterested team. Who is right? Notice, both positions are based on watching one player in one game. And indeed the scope of our question makes this set of observations appropriate. It is reasonable to use our personal observations to justify a judgment. And, indeed, we can then argue over those judgments.

However, what if we want to know whether Dan Carcillo is a valuable player over the course of the season? Over five seasons? Or if players of Carcillo’s type are as valuable over their careers as NHL general managers seem to think? In these cases, observations based on one game are not the best way to answer the question. And, worse, it is probably impossible for one person to watch enough hockey to answer the last question, regarding all players in all games (even restricting this to the games played since the lockout). Notice, the question here is not how complicated life is, but how — given that complexity — how can we ground our judgments in actual facts.

Statistics is a way of increasing our observations in order to make better judgments or answer more complicated questions. Increasing our observations allows us to be more objective because we are no longer restricted to the things we have directly experienced. When Wagner argues for a more encompassing measure of hockey performance, this is merely proving that we need the sorts of tools that social science provides.

What’s Wrong with our assumptions?

Wagner is correct that statistics is inherently limited. It cannot (and does not try) to describe life itself. This can appear as a deficiency if you think our goal is to comprehend the whole of existence in one go. If you understand the project of knowledge as progressive, iterative, and long-term, the problem is a lot less acute.

Regardless, practitioners need to be clear about the limits to their methods.

Is the data accurate? A blogger is spending his time recording scoring chances for the Flyers. Great. But when I use this data, I am limited by his accuracy in coding those chances, and his judgment in deciding what counts as a chance. If there are only twelve chances for the Flyers in one game and he mistakenly codes two chances, that is a pretty high margin of error. I have never tried to code zone starts and ends (for Corsi scores) but I imagine they are also difficult to get right. Statisticians will correctly argue that this problem dissipates as we get more data. But I have not seen enough discussion about data reliability to take them seriously yet.
Statistics are limited by what it is possible to measure. We cannot really measure “effort” or “grit” or “hockey smarts.”[4] That is the biggest reason why we do not see statisticians talking about “effort.” It is not that they do not appreciate it, but that it is impossible to quantify. Further, measurements are mapped onto models that describe how we think a factor is important. We cannot directly measure what we mean by “driving the play.” So we measure the things we can observe, add them together into a what we think describes “driving the play.” Does the addition of these data points add up to what we think it does? That’s debatable and I think most honest statisticians will admit there’s some slippage between the question and the model.
Wagner seems to be most annoyed by the inflated claims to predictive power made by statistics. In many ways, this conceit is a result of imitating the hard sciences, like physics, where repeatability (and thus prediction of future results) is the hallmark of scientific progress. In the social sciences, things are less clear. To Wagner, we look at career batting average and dismiss a player’s offseason conditioning. This would be a shame if it turned out that players routinely defy expectations. I suspect the outliers are few. Nevertheless, statistics should never be taken as deterministic. They are, or should be, primarily descriptive. To the extent that scientists, having drawn conclusions, then point to future expectations, this is considered by the scientific community to be an added feature that improves testability of the hypothesis. In other words, if the prediction does not come true, we have reason to doubt the model or the data or the researcher. Can Wagner point to any systemic errors revealed by these mistaken predictions? Or, really, any specific predictions at all? To be clear, this is a real problem with anti-statistics screeds. They rarely mobilize compelling, specific counter examples to demonstrate how statistical models misrepresent hockey.
A final, hockey specific point. Football and baseball are, in my mind, iterative games. Each down or at bat is a new data point. Thus each game is effectively divided into dozens of specific observations about pitch count, runners on base, etc. This gives an enormous advantage to modeling those interactions compared to a fluid game like hockey. Once the puck drops it is effectively chaos on the ice until the whistle blows. That is a much different kind of game to try and model statistically. Not that it cannot be done, but it is much more complicated to extract relevant data to answer specific questions. I’m thinking of shot counts: is a player scoring because he’s good, or because he takes a lot of shots? Is he accurate because he is getting better passes? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any way to effectively model the interactions of shot count and accuracy without ignoring some pretty obviously important stuff that is hard to measure in hockey. (I’m sure smarter people can improve and critique this example.)

To sum up: As a social scientist, I understand that “intangibles” matter. This is a straw man critique of statistics. No one denies that there are facts that fit uncomfortably under the scientific gaze. I also understand that my own personal horizon of observations is insufficient to say anything truthful, meaningful or worthwhile about the world. Statistics is one tool for expanding my understanding of the world; a tool with its own limits and strengths.

This is a poor exegesis of Kierkegaard, by the way. And if I am confused about the relevancy of Either/Or to hockey, comparing him to Hegel is not helping matters at all. ↩
Neither Kierkegaard, Hegel, nor the more recent possible example of Sartre were responding to statistics. Perhaps, Wagner might have referenced Marcuse or Horkheimer, writers who deplored the positivism of the post-War period. But even here, any discussion would have to take statistics as it is, not as critics would like to imagine it. This is a point about how we use historical figures to fight our battles for us. If I pull out Karl Popper and have him argue for or against social science, does that improve my argument? Or have I just made Popper into a puppet for my own views about hockey stats? ↩
There is a complex question indicated by the conjunction of should and objectivity. If you care about that, read a lot of Max Weber or Thomas Kuhn. ↩
Conversely, just looking at someone and saying he has “grit” does not count as a measurement either. ↩

53

2011-10-10T18:02:00.001-04:00

A Tiny Revolution:

I look at that and it tells me that I've failed, you've failed, we've all failed, and because of that we're all going to die. These people not only won't fight the killer billionaires stomping on their windpipe, they'll brag about getting stomped on and ask for more.

Several entries reminded of Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas? I want to resist my first reaction, which is to complain about false consciousness and ideology. I'm not sure if that's a useful framing anymore. But clearly some of these people are missing the point of the current national discussion.

Reprehensible

2011-09-15T19:53:00.001-04:00

As a citizen, you owe it to yourself to read Spencer Ackerman's expose of FBI anti-Muslim training materials.

What’s more, the Islamic “insurgency” is all-encompassing and insidious. In addition to outright combat, its “techniques” include “immigration” and “law suits.” So if a Muslim wishes to become an American or sues the FBI for harassment, it’s all just part of the jihad.

Certainly it is disturbing to find this kind of bias passed off as a kind of "objective" law enforcement science. I find myself more shocked that the FBI employs individuals who cannot distinguish between prejudice and social science.

3rd World, Here We Come

2011-08-08T20:45:00.001-04:00

Washington Post:

But just about the only reaction the market could muster to the downgrade was heavy, indiscriminate selling of every sector of the economy and record-setting hoarding of safe assets such as gold.

Oil Pipelines

2011-07-19T12:59:00.001-04:00

Washington Independent:

More than a week after Exxon told reporters that the pipeline that spilled 42,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River on July 1 carried only sweet crude the company admitted that the line routinely transports crude from the tar sands region. Exxon maintains that the oil that spilled was not of the more heavily polluting tar sands variety.

If we are afraid of nuclear energy mostly because of the possibility of a catastrophic disaster (e.g. Japan), why don't we feel the same way about oil pipelines through wildlife preserves, oil platforms in fisheries, or tankers crossing oceans? Shouldn't the same aversion to risk apply to both forms of energy?

The Beautiful Trap

2011-07-16T10:24:00.001-04:00

David Weigel:

In polls, the Bernie Sanders position of a deal that's 50 percent tax hikes and 50 percent cuts is the most popular option -- 32 percent support in Gallup. In Washington, it's what the crazy socialist thinks -- the rest of us agree that you can't raise taxes.

Review of Shop Class as Soulcraft

2011-07-11T10:07:00.002-04:00

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

By Matthew B. Crawford.

Penguin, 2009, 246 pp.

[Please note, my footnote links may not work properly. They are formatted via MultiMarkdown, but somewhere in the upload were directed towards www.blogger.com. I don't know why but the new version of blogger is giving me serious issues with this post.]

Crawford’s pean to the manual arts is a deeply conflicted and contradictory work.[1] Widely reviewed, and written for a popular audience, the book can be situated within the “localist-artisanal”[2] intellectual movement skeptical of the consequences of modern capitalism. However, the story is characterized largely by its unwillingness or inability to confront the tough questions implied by its thesis. Although it may be read “weakly” as arguing only that society should place a higher value on mechanical knowledge, Crawford often appears to endorse a stronger critique of consumer society and its cubicle-dwelling denizens. The limits of modern consumer culture are indicted in language that borrows from the culture critiques of both conservatives and progressives. Like Alain de Botton,[3] whose similar book was published at nearly the same time, Crawford is struggling with the monumental problem of finding meaning in a modern world. His solution–the virtues of manual labor–neglects the realities and tradeoffs that define the modern economy today.

In structure, the bulk of the book is given over to auto-biographical vignettes meant to illustrate moral lessons and learning opportunities. Crawford, despite his impressive credentials, refrains from preaching, using the ordinariness of his examples to include the reader in parable of moral self-perfection. Human life is intimately tied to the creation of the world around us. Our potential, in the Aristotelian sense of “telos,” is fulfilled by embracing craftsmanship. And, Crawford argues, the worker learns the virtues of patience, judgment, and community from his craft. We become better, fuller people by engaging in the things that Crawford praises. But if this were all he has to say, his book would not contribute much to the culture ferment of the modern world. It is the suggestion that the book is saying something much more profound and transformational that makes it so contemporary and ultimately frustrating.

Philosophically the book is about the tension between moral autonomy and alienation. The idea of moral autonomy is strongly associated with the work of Immanuel Kant. Crawford strongly criticizes, with little justification, Kant’s moral theory.[4] Nevertheless, it is clear that the virtue of judgment learned through a familiarity with the physical world frees us from infantalizing commodities. The most important contribution of Crawford’s book may be the expansion of “autonomy” to include the world built by human labor.[5] And again, although Crawford is critical of Karl Marx, alienation is recognizable underneath the surface of Crawford’s argument.[6] Commodity culture isolates the individual, protects them from the physicalness of their lives, and transforms our experience of the world into one of consumption and abandonment. Certainly this is not the metaphysical sense of humans torn from their essence (i.e. Marx), but rather that the commodity separates us from the knowledge that the our world is self-created. Crawford’s descriptions of modern office culture leave no doubt that modern society as a collective product now confront us as our enemy.

It is important to distinguish human autonomy from automization, since Crawford views the latter as a primary source of deskilling and existential harm.[7] The quantification of time in Taylorism was the beginning of a separation of worker from product. Now taken to an extreme, Crawford sees manager-speak, office culture, and even liberal politics as the consequent loss of responsibility for our creations. But if the goal is to cultivate a certain worldly regard through time-intensive labor, does not the time-saving practices allow us to pursue existential meaning and enjoy a modern standard of living? Are the mechanical arts a hobby for our free time, or does Crawford really wish for a more thorough-going reform of modern labor? If it’s the latter, how will we pay for the loss of productivity necessary to make our jobs less efficient, to reconnect producer and product, to glory in the process of making? He never tells us, although this is almost certainly the implication of his argument.

The consistent refusal to confront the economic conditions of his solutions is the most frustrating part of the book. As the owner of his bike shop–of the means of production, Marx would say–Crawford is protected from the Taylorization of his occupation. Not all mechanics can avoid profit-maximizing efficiency. Crawford’s own experience with office life is told in horrifying terms, as a sort of moral and existential wasteland, but one he was reluctant to leave because of his investment in education. But Crawford, for someone who claims no great economic advantages (although his father is a physicist, so he has educational or Bourdieu-ian social capital[8]), is tone deaf to the economic calculus faced by today’s students and blue-collar workers. Crawford claims several times that he was paid well as an electrician. Electricians may be well-payed, but this is far from a sure or quick thing. There might be other important considerations. Manual labor is hard on the body. He consistently idealizes the manual laborer and ignores the costs–medical, cultural, financial–of that lifestyle.[9]

It is also difficult to understand why it is only mechanical work that cultivates virtue. Crawford repeatedly criticizes electronics and computers in cars, a “black box” of impenetrable abstraction.[10] True, computer automated fuel systems (i.e. fuel injection) make it more difficult to repair cars in some cases. They may also make cars more fuel efficient, or allow a mechanic to offer a preliminary diagnosis of a mechanical problem via an error code. Strangely, from Crawford’s point of view the culture of computer programers might be the closest intellectually to mechanical know-how. Programmers, like mechanics, think in objects, trace processes, and must understand their project from the inside out. Additionally, there are many people who specialize in automobile computers. There are books and resources that allow the curious to learn how electronics and computer chips work.[11] Crawford detests computers because he does not understand them. As with his strident condemnation of motion-controlled water faucets, it is difficult not to think that Crawford is simply listing things that annoy him. He cannot answer why a computer engineer—or an educated scientist or even an English major—does not by diligently practicing their discipline engender the virtues Crawford prizes.

Crawford’s argument is one that has political consequences. If we believe that the type of work that we pursue makes us better, fuller humans then this should influence how we organize society. Crawford calls his argument “progressive-republican” without much explanation. By republican, he means to evoke the communitarian ethos that emerged from Michael Sandel’s critique of John Rawls. There are, of course, other proponents and sources for the modern communitarian, small-r republican political theory. Drawing on Machiavelli, Jefferson, Tocqueville, and others, these arguments weave a compelling narrative of the importance of community and social ties for democracy, ties which the modern world has left behind. Crawford only tangentially engages with this rich literature, yet he implicitly endorses much of their politics. The central role of judgment, and the pedagogical role of Shopcraft in this process, can only be properly exercised in a community of similarly educated citizens. There are many reasons to take such an argument seriously, though Crawford mentions none of the tradeoffs—not least of which is the implicit preference for stable social norms over progressive freedoms. Could a communitarian preference for social stability have sustained the Civil Rights movements, Feminism, or today’s gay rights? When we politically sanctify social power—place it outside of political contestation—we enshrine the existing power relationships in law. While this contrast is, and should be, itself contestable, Crawford does not broach the complex consequences of his arguments.

Worse he claims liberalism is an ideology that avoids leadership by diffusing responsibility and eliminating the complexity of political judgment. Liberalism is essentially an anti-political ideology. There are compelling and perhaps accurate reservations that have been leveled by diverse critics like Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and even Slavoj Žižek — so diverse as to defy easy categorization. A rejection of liberalism, a term that is itself complicated, implies little about which attitude towards politics should replace it. Crawford’s casual dismissal is troubling and lazy. It is possible, for example, to endorse political judgment and robust, local citizenship within much of modern Liberal theory. Crawford makes no effort to distinguish or explain his comments.

The book is frustrating because Crawford is talking about many themes I care about. Like Crawford I started working early, at 15, for a concrete company. As a family-owned company with a large industrial property, I was able to learn a variety of practical skills, including engine repair, before ultimately deciding to attend college and then graduate school. I should be in the target audience for Crawford’s book. Instead, I am confused by his politics and tortured by his abbreviated arguments. His glorification of horsepower seems tone-deaf to a world waking up to the challenges of sustainable living; His vision of judgment simultaneously expansive and myopic; and his philosophical education, from a premier program, nowhere in evidence.

The loss of the working class union movement and the bankruptcy actually-existing communism has displaced much of the significance of “work.” We do indeed need to recapture the meaning of labor in our modern world. Shopcraft as Soulcraft sadly is merely an invitation to reflect on a project neglected.

Matthew B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. (Penguin Books, 2009.) ↩

This phrase appears in Kelefa Sanneh’s New Yorker review. See also reviews in the Christian Science Monitor and New York Times. ↩

Botton’s book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is less focused on redeeming a lost praxis then probing the modern condition through a series of bizarrely tangential stories. Botton’s book is through and throughly less edifying and less deserving of serious engagement. Read together, Botton and Crawford demonstrate how far we are from understanding what was once the most fundamental relationship of the human condition: labor. ↩

Crawford reads Kantian moral theory as isolating individuals by confining moral decisions to mental rules (p. 201). This is technically correct, but it ignores the reasons why Kant pursued his strategy. In other words, Kant can be read more sympathetically. Crawford prefers, again with no justification, moral commitments based on “solidarity.” He offers the dubious standard that only solidarity provides him with a reason to act morally after he has recognized it as a binding rule. Kant scholars might recognize this reservation as similar to the “fact of reason” quarrel. Through Hegel to Axel Honneth, a preference for some kind of connectedness over the apparent isolation of Kantian morality remains a fundamental and salient difference in moral theory. Exploring this difference might have clarified much of what Crawford means by “judgment” and solidarity. Absent this, his lazy reasoning is typical of how he employs philosophical sources in his book. It is unfortunate that his faith in his audience’s capacity for labor is not matched by a similar faith in their ability to grasp complex philosophical ideas. ↩

Crawford sees the world has manipulatable, and constructed, by human agency. Yet, he does not reflect on the creation of physical space and it’s effects on democracy or judgment. Admittedly, this might have taken him farther afield of his argument. See also, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Blackwell, 1991; French original 1974). ↩

Page 186. It is a shame that Crawford so violently misreads Marx’s theory of alienation and surplus labor. ↩

My conjunction of two dissimilar terms–deskilling from economics; harm from philosophy–is one example of how Crawford’s text operates on two incommensurable levels. ↩

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. ↩

One obvious cultural difference is a casual and pervasive misogyny in manual labor. As the New Yorker review pointed out, Crawford’s book “is, in large part, a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a post-manly age.” Nowhere does Crawford suggest that mechanical knowledge will engender a mutual respect across gender, class, or religion. His politics are communitarian, but apparently local, homogeneous, and masculine. ↩

Page 60. ↩

For example, the Arduino project is a hobbyist community built around a integrated computer unit. Other examples include Make Magazine and Instructables. ↩

More Bachmann

2011-07-05T18:56:00.001-04:00

Ed Kilgore:

As a candidate who doesn’t want to get confined to a social conservative ghetto in an election year that is revolving around fiscal and economic issues—and as someone with a well-earned reputation for extremism—her strong “constitutional conservative” stance indicates, but only to those who are trained to listen, a decidedly radical agenda that is at least as congenial to rabid social conservatives as it is to property-rights absolutists or anti-tax zealots.

Bachmann is the celebrity candidate of the moment, enjoying both polling success in Iowa and spurious attacks on her husband. What I’ve concluded reading some of the journalism on Bachmann[1] is that she runs an effective campaign with little of the disorganization that has marked Sarah Palin’s inner circle. More importantly, she has message discipline and a competent staff. Of course, all of this is in service to a truly radical agenda.

By David Weigel and Matt Taibbi, among some others I can’t recall. Update: Jonathan Chait.
↩

Moral Worldview

2011-07-05T12:13:00.001-04:00

Bachmann via Steve Benen:

We too are at a crucial time today. And I think it is for us to remember, that if we do as Chronicles tells us, if we humble ourselves, and pray and confess our sins, and turn away from our wicked ways, and ask an almighty God to come and protect us and fight the battle for us, we know from his word, his promise is sure. He will come. He will heal our land. And we will have a new day.

I am very conscious that between myself and people who believe in the above statement there is an unbridgeable gap in worldviews. It's not just the "America-in-moral-decline" rhetoric, but the belief that change occurs only by praying to an absent-but-immediately-present god that I find truly incredible. It is this kind of displacement of judgment–from the believer to an absent mover–that vacates and absolves the believer from the complexities of moral ambiguity, and thus of judgment itself. The world is tragic. And moral judgment cannot (should not) obscure the inherent complexity of a tragic world.

Triumph of Wall Street

2011-06-24T14:49:00.001-04:00

Krugman & Wells:

Whatever the deeper story, however, Madrick’s subtitle gets it right: what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America. Despite what some academics (primarily in business schools) claimed, the vast sums of money channeled through Wall Street did not improve America’s productive capacity by “efficiently allocating capital to its best use.” Instead, it diminished the country’s productivity by directing capital on the basis of financial chicanery, outrageous compensation packages, and bubble-infected stock price valuations.

Reviewing Madrick's Age of Greed.

Bachmann

2011-06-22T20:57:00.001-04:00

Matt Taibbi:

Imagine Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics.

Blog Update

2011-06-21T11:25:00.001-04:00

I've upgraded to a newer template on a whim. Now I have to relearn all of Blogger's proprietary CSS or Cold Fusion tags, whatever they are. In the meantime, I've removed the never-updated links and the banner art is all not-centered. Someone remind me what the benefit is of upgrading to the new templates?

NetNewsWire Wishlist

2011-06-18T20:09:00.001-04:00

Before WWDC -- Apple's big developer conference -- Black Pixel purchased NetNewsWire from its creator. I started using RSS feeds in 2003 when the presidential election news threatened to overwhelm me. Plus it was a more unobtrusive way to read the news at work. When I got my first Mac in early 2004, NetNewsWire was the first application I installed. I've been using it on a daily basis ever since. I'm not a developer, but as a heavy user I have some thoughts about what I'd like to see. They may not be practicable either because of business concerns or technological challenges. Here is my unsolicited advice, offered to the empty room of the internets.

Instapaper: I love the hotkey to send an article to Instapaper. But when I'm reading, I want to read both my reading list and my RSS feeds in a single environment. It's one task or mental context, and my brain doesn't want to open Safari or Fluid to see my Instapaper account. NNW already has a browser built in. Why can't you bake in Instapaper Beyond into a dedicated browser tab? Add the folders to the left-hand column (I only have a few folders, but close to 150 feeds and I browse by folder). I can see benefits for the developer of Instapaper too as Apple prepares to eat his lunch (at least partially).
Safari-like Reading Mode: The three column layout has always been the most useful for me. This makes the view a bit unbalanced if I'm trying to read just the right-hand part of my screen. Can I get a single keystroke to pop the article into a full-screen, distraction-free reading mode? Safari Reader already has a feature like this, as does Readability. When I have to open a Web site to read the full article, I have an AppleScript, run through FastScripts, to format the page with Readability. I'd love for this to happen within NetNewsWire, especially since Readability is making moves towards a subscription based model. I don't know if Apple is allowing access to Reader in the same way they let developer's hook into WebKit.
Mark up to here read: Like Google Reader's "Mark all 15 articles Read" I want an option to mark all the feeds from the top to my selection read. I sometimes skip articles because I don't care about the headline. This is more useful in the columned view.
Syncing: The "Lite" code is indeed faster, and I'm sure that Black Pixel will be building on that to create the new full version. I don't really like Google Reader, but I'd like to sync my reading list with my iPhone and right now NNW is really slow on my 3G. I am using Reader until the iPhone 5 is released. If I'm moving between my computer and, say, the bathroom, a synced reading list is important. It's the single feature that has slowed my adoption of NNW Lite.

Update:

Smart Lists and Rules: I forgot my biggest feature because I wasn't using NNW on my home computer when I was brainstorming. Smart lists are already part of NNW. They find a keyword and sort all the posts into a handy folder. I use the feature mainly to create a "Mark as Read" folder to avoid tedious topics like Facebook or Sarah Palin. It would be great if we create a few "rules," like any mail program, to sort, file or perform a task on certain criteria. For my "junk folder," it would be great to be able to mark them read, or hide them, or whatever without having to click a button. But with a bit of thought and feedback, I'm sure there are lots of useful rules that might be helpful.

Lunch with Assange

2011-06-16T00:18:00.001-04:00

Atlantic Wire:

The enigmatic former hacker who founded the site and keeps the title of editor-in-chief is auctioning off lunch with himself, followed by a seat at a Frontline Club conversation with himself and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, "discussing the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and what it means for the future."

I am trying to decide what would be more annoying: lunch with a megalomaniacal tech genius or lunch with a frenetically, brilliantly obscure philosopher...

Weiner

2011-06-07T22:25:00.001-04:00

Andrew Sullivan:

For my part I couldn’t care less what sort of pictures or messages Weiner has been sending around the Net, and it’s an imposition to be required to care; to be unable to avoid the topic. I find that I have no interest in Congressman Anthony Weiner’s sex life or virtual sex life whatsoever.

I care insofar as it seems a symptom of the narcissism that now pervades public service. What people are we producing as a society? What people are we recruiting as state and federal representatives? Sex doesn't matter. But this sort of stupid, id-driven, public immolation does. How can we think this kind of stupidity doesn't effect policy?

Palin Emails

2011-06-07T11:53:00.001-04:00

We're releasing hundreds of emails–by definition originally in electronic form–to the public as a 250-pound, paper book, then:

MSNBC will be scanning the entire store and putting it online for free. (Atlantic Wire.)

Brilliant. USA!

Get me to the Church on Time

2011-06-05T18:48:00.001-04:00

I always believed that I would be married in a Catholic church. After all, I grew up Catholic. I do believe that marriage has lost something of the "before god and neighbors" that it traditionally meant. Instead, we obsess about dresses and flower arrangements.

I will not be married in a Catholic church. I have not attended a mass in years, nor do I believe God, if he exists, cares very much about my actions. It is not my agnosticism that drove me from a Catholic wedding but the deeply troubling child abuse scandal. My Catholic relatives continue to ignore these events or treat them as a few corrupted priests. But if the distinction between Catholicism and Protestants is based largely on the authority of the Pope and priesthood, this scandal rocks the foundations of the church's raison d'etre. None of this matters very much to me except insofar as I cannot in good conscience stand before such a untrustworthy authority to vow eternal commitment to the most beloved person in my life.

This poses a bit of a problem since there are precious few of these kinds of authorities left to which such a promise might be addressed. The alternative officiants are various Protestant ministers, new age gurus, or friends credentialed last week. I find the idea of a friend officiating a moral commitment somewhat underwhelming. Of course, it's true that in the strict sense I only need to make this promise to myself and my partner. But the performance of that promise is the reason we have weddings. Maybe we replace authority with extravagance as a way to simulate lost gravitas.

(My sister said the Church made her and her husband attend hours of counseling and tests. As my brother-in-law said, I am not sure why an unmarried priest is giving me relationship advice. Their assumption is probably that most problems can be solved by prayer. In any event, I am not anxious to put my partner through that nonsense either.)

Who Was David Foster Wallace?

2011-06-05T18:25:00.001-04:00

For DFW aficionados like my brother, Quarterly Conversation has a symposium covering all his work, not just his new posthumous Pale King.

(The Awl also published a piece a few months ago probing into the depths of DFW's depression. From what I heard, since I am ashamed to not read every article on DFW, the author treats his illness with the condescension of someone who lives in a world of lollipops and rainbows. There seems little point in romanticizing or dismaying Wallace's internal odyssey even if his work can never be separated from his death.)