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Hey, it’s nearly time for a new Neal Stephenson book! (It was nearly time for a Neal Stephenson book a couple of years ago, but since he’s been working on going to space I think the wait is pretty forgivable.) Quicksilver is a historical novel, and is volume one of a … of a cycle. 944 pages. Booyah! The publishing monolith has provided us with an excerpt.
May. 10th, 2003
The Neighborhood Diner has opened up their patio and, apparently, closed their inside dining area. Or something, but anyhow they wouldn’t let me in, so I had the patio experience under somewhat more breezy conditions than I was prepared for. Less wordily: it was a little chilly and I had no sweater. But the food was good as always and it’s nice to be outside. Next time I’ll bring my laptop down and check for wireless.
Meanwhile, for those of you who’ve wondered what an airplane full of naked people would look like, now you can find out. Real naked people, not naked porn stars sprawled out on top of each other or anything. Life’s surreal.
The Eater of Meaning is a Web page filter that is somehow so mesmerizing I find it worth linking to. (Via the Redhead.) Through its eyes, I discover that this blog is “Populates: Onerous. It’s wheelers I talmudization to mystics. Gaming, polarity, andrea lingo I donner’t wanderings to formulator abolishment.”
And how happy am I to know that my blogroll contains such worthies as “Boiling Boiler” and “Officer Winslow Opinion”? Not to mention “Theraputic Volunteer Consternation.”
“Meandering, forever thorny of your whorls’ve wong wharton an airport fully of nakedness peony wound loots likeness, now younger canvassing finicky outwitted. Reawakens nakedness peony, notably nakedly port stanchion spreadsheet outlive on topsy of each otherwise or anyhow. Lifted’s surgeons.”
The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization.
Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.
So… this is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important?
We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible.
Yes, it feels kind of odd to be saying that we shouldn’t be making information more accessible. Hm. Perhaps it’s a UI issue. Complex interfaces that jam too much info in front of your face are bad. You have to think about what the user actually needs. In this case I’m not sure there’s any need for the user to know how many incoming links Technorati has counted; it isn’t ever going to be useful information in the determination of whether or not to click, so why put it there?
Yep, Richard Thompson really does cover "Kiss" on the bonus CD included in his latest album. It’s actually not that mindbending; it makes me want to hear him play guitar on Prince albums (Prince being a not that bad guitarist himself) but I don’t think he improved on the fundamental riff in any way. Which, come to think of it, speaks to Prince’s guitar skills.
Psychedelic Republicans scores far higher on the wrongness meter. I kind of want these, but only kind of. My covetous instincts are sufficiently slaked by looking at the pictures on the Internet. I would, however, pay real cash money for a neocon Tarot deck.