Robin Hood Google
September 30, 2005
It looks like we have a dog and cat fight going on between Google’s print library project and the Author’s Guild. As far as I can tell, Google is creating the digital equivalent of a mammoth set of index cards that should be a boon to researchers. Here is part of an article in this week’s Linux Weekly News that tells Google’s side of the story. The article also gives the Author’s point of view. Scroll down the page to see the Google print article.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 29, 2005
If you wrote an article for a magazine and quoted a sentence or two, likely no one would complain, because it’s so obviously fair use, so why is it a problem for Google to do the same thing with books? And what is the difference between Google collecting the world’s content made available on the Internet so as to make it searchable and collecting keywords from the world’s books? Copyright holders can opt out. If Google Print violates copyright law, why doesn’t Google, period?
A common theme on both sides of the argument goes like this: Google has had a fantastic idea, one that can benefit the human race, and almost everyone hopes there is a way for them to do this. It’s just a question of how to do it right. Google is shouldering the expense and effort of making a library card catalogue, so to speak, of the world’s knowledge and offering it free to the world. Can anyone *not* want that to happen?
Authors should want to be included so they can be found. The world does its research now predominantly online, and authors, particularly authors whose works aren’t selling like hot cakes, have everything to gain from being included in Google Print.
This is a good example of what can happen when a technology advance threatens established industry. Who do you think will win this one?
Dave, all for authors getting rich
Hinterland Ahoy!
September 29, 2005
Why do so many Americans live on our three coasts, especially in areas subject to hurricanes and earthquakes, when they could freeze and swelter in the comparative safety of the central states? Joel Kotkin offers an unusual answer in a recent WSJ article.
More broadly, as a nation, we may want to consider ways to encourage greater development further inland. Americans have been crowding into the coasts for generations, even though one of our great assets is the broad interior hinterland. Our continued population growth — from 310 million now to 400 million by 2050 — may make repopulating the hinterlands more economically viable. Instead of offering “homesteads” or funds for repeated rebuildings on the crowded, and sometimes dangerous, coasts — particularly in below-sea-level New Orleans — it might make more sense to encourage settlement and investment deeper into our nation’s interior.
This was the essence of much of 19th-century federal policy, which gave incentives for canals and railroads, as well as providing cheap or free land on the Plains. This could also bring new life to parts of country that have been losing jobs and people for a generation, but may now be ready for revival. With the Internet and small-jet travel, some of these areas, such as the Dakotas, are already showing signs of becoming more competitive in the national and global economy. It is a trend worth boosting, and may come to be the most attractive strategic lesson to emerge from Katrina and Rita.
Mr. Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “The City: A Global History” (Modern Library, 2005).
Our Government is expert at providing economic incentives to influence our behavior, mostly in perverse ways, unfortunately. For instance, we subsidize cotton and sugar production to guarantee that we will pay the highest prices for these commodities, and we keep marginal tax rates high to discourage the entrepreneurs that fuel our economy. You get the idea.
If it is really beneficial for the country as a whole to more evenly distribute our population (and I wouldn’t want to bet that it is), Mr. Kotkin’s ideas make a lot of sense.
Dave, not really wanting more neighbors.
Got any barbeque sauce?
September 28, 2005
It will probably be decades before President George W. Bush’s mark on history will be clear, or at least disinterestedly argued, but one straw in the wind may be this week’s column by Peggy Noonan.
George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce? The great Bush spending spree is about an arguably shrewd but ultimately unhelpful reading of history, domestic politics, Iraq and, I believe, vanity.
Noonan, one of President Reagan’s speech writers, usually has something worth reading about the passing scene. Here she argues that big spending on the part of this Republican administration is not simple-minded throwing money at problems, but the result of a calculated misreading of, as she puts it in the above quote, history, domestic politics, Iraq, and vanity.
Very interesting. Take Noonan’s thesis, add a pinch of gold dust (The Mogambo Guru), stir in a cup of libertarian economics (Arnold Kling), brush it with a bit of biblical eschatology, and you get a brew of utter despair for the inspiration of future generations. Now that the Europeans and Americans have botched up the “good life,” is it time to pass the torch to the Asians?
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we humans are a pretty adaptable bunch and will somehow survive the machinations of even the worst bunch of bureaucrats and politicians, and ours are not (yet) the worst that western society has known.
In spite of them we will continue to love, to quarrel, to marry, to beget, to scratch out our living as best we know how - just like our ancestors have always done. For most of us, at the level of our daily lives there is no reason to despair, especially as we ponder God’s redemptive history spanning many millennia.
Dave, feeling better, now.
Small Cars Can Be Safe, Too
September 27, 2005
WSJ.com - How U.S. Shifted Gears to Find Small Cars Can Be Safe, Too
For decades, whenever the federal government leaned on auto makers to improve fuel efficiency, the industry had a ready response: Research showed that lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles weren’t as safe as their heavier, gas-guzzling cousins. Even shedding as little as 100 pounds could lead to a serious increase in traffic fatalities.
The result has been a virtual standstill in fuel-economy improvements for cars, trucks and sport-utility vehicles over the past 20 years.
Now a wave of new studies and technologies — strong, light materials, better airbags and smarter designs — are beginning to break the logjam. The upshot: A big shift in government thinking that is paving the way for regulators to revamp fuel-economy rules for SUVs and pickup trucks for the first time in three decades.
Another article of false faith bites the dust. One of the reasons I own a SUV is for protection against my aging reflexes and to improve the odds of surviving a crash. I would much rather drive a smaller, more environment-friendly vehicle, since most of my driving is around town and not on the highways. According to the WSJ article, there may be some hope, if I live long enough.
All of which reminds me of a lesson learned from last week’s drive from Lake Ozark to the the Ozark forest south of Springfield, Missouri. About 75 miles of that drive was on Interstate 44, fighting packs of eighteen-wheelers at 75 mph. It was not a good experience, and I felt relieved when I got off the Interstate and onto the back roads, as hilly and twisted as they were.
On the trip back I avoided the Interstate and stayed on older highways. The trip may have taken a bit longer, but it was much easier driving, at least for this old fogey.
Dave, thinking there is a lesson here somewhere.
Flipper - Armed and dangerous
September 26, 2005
I’m fairly sure that I saw this on a gravestone somewhere, sometime.
Here lies poor unlucky Ambrose,
Done in by a vicious black Bottlenose.
He felt just a prick,
But it made him so sick,
That he left behind several sweet widows.
Or maybe I was thinking of this article in the Guardian Unlimited.
The Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina
It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.
Shouldn’t SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING about this menace? Let’s refer the matter to one of our redneck militias deep in the Ozark woods. Do they have a navy?
Dave, far too dumb to separate truth from fiction in cases like these.
Schröder’s Putsch against Reality
September 26, 2005
Nothing like having a grandson living in Berlin to whet one’s interest in international politics. My ignorant interest (to most Americans, Government by coalition is a mystery) led me to this article in SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Political Roulette in Berlin: Schröder’s Putsch against Reality
[Schröder] has staged the first putsch in German post-war history, a putsch against reality. On the evening of the election, he announced that he had no intention of allowing Angela Merkel to take the helm of a possible grand coalition between his own party and the CDU.
… Suddenly the German political stage has turned into a Las Vegas casino, where everyone furiously plays poker by day and watches Siegfried and Roy, the illusionists, put on their act by night. But in Berlin the illusionists’ names are Gerhard Schröder and Franz Müntefering, who, it turns out, have shown themselves adept at transforming mice into elephants, poodles into tigers.
A political circus it certainly is, reminiscent of our own election in 2000; Gore vs. Bush.
Before I get too cynical about the political process in free nations, I remind myself that it sure beats most other systems. Let the show go on!
Dave, trying to be a disinterested observer.
Galatians 3:19-22
September 25, 2005
3:19 Why then was the law given? It was added because of transgressions, until the arrival of the descendant to whom the promise had been made. It was administered through angels by an intermediary. 3:20 Now an intermediary is not for one party alone, but God is one. 3:21 Is the law therefore opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that was able to give life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law. 3:22 But the scripture imprisoned everything and everyone under sin so that the promise could be given–because of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ–to those who believe.
Paul continues to talk about the Jewish law. He now deals with the “why” of the law, saying that it was given by God because his beloved human creations had been badly screwing up. His goal for His people was for them to be righteous, but the law was not to be the vehicle to righteousness for them. That would come through the incarnation of Himself as Jesus Christ at the proper time.
It’s good also to remember that righteousness basically means holiness, a condition fit for fellowship with a holy God. For that we need an intermediary to cover our sin in the presence of God, and that intemediary is Jesus Christ. -sdg-
Productivity and e-mail
September 25, 2005
From the Kiplinger Letter this week:
Here’s an easy productivity booster: Make e-mails clearer.
Employees lose up to an hour a day deciphering confusing messages from bosses and colleagues. Encourage employees, especially managers, to be as careful writing e-mails as they would be writing formal memos.
Dashing off an e-mail is just too easy. Unless you are one of those few who can mentally compose and organize your communications without editing, e-mails often look like they have been written by uneducated idiots.
Which many of us are, come to think of it, but I won’t go there.
I recently finished reading the World War II memoirs of Winston S. Churchill, Great Britain’s head of state during that war. He didn’t have much truck with telephone communication, and he dictated voluminous minutes (memos) to convey his thoughts to others. I don’t know whether they ever were edited before being sent, but they are masterpieces - clear and concise expositions of Churchill’s thinking on many issues.
I’m no Churchill, and I suspect that neither are you, but I will argue that we should spend a little extra time editing what we write. I think Kiplinger’s thoughts on e-mails and productivity are pretty valid.
Dave, still stumbling over his words
Global warming
September 24, 2005
The Guardian Watchblog weighs in with some thoughts on global warming from the conservative viewpoint.
Goodby to Anthropogenic Global Warming
Science — not junk science based on hysteria and ideology, but real science based on data and reason — suggests that global warming is driven more by the sun than anything humans have done. A recent study by Swiss and German scientists indicates that the sun is burning hotter than it has at anytime in the past thousand years. “The Sun is in a changed state,” stated Dr. Sami Solanki, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. “It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently — in the last 100 to 150 years.” Does that time frame sound vaguely familiar? It’s about the same time the Little Ice Age began to end — the same time that Liberals claim humans began to cause global warming. Isn’t it clear that the sun is the real cause? Shouldn’t we at least examine this before ruining our economy for nothing?
Far be it from me to dive into the global warming wars, because I really don’t have a clue, but the last line of the quote seems to me quite reasonable. I believe it impossible to know with absolute certainty, a) whether there is in fact enough global warning to be worrisome, and b) to what degree human activity is responsible.
Dave, happy he won’t be here for the next ice age
It’s an armadillo’s life
September 23, 2005
I hadn’t thought much about the lowly Armadillo since my army days in central Texas, where it seemed primarily a species of road-kill and a messy one at that. On the off-chance that you, dear reader, haven’t been thinking about armadillos as much as you should, I offer the following stolen text.
New World armored mammal of the order Edentata, a group that also includes the sloth and the anteater, characterized by peglike teeth without roots or enamel. Armadillos are found from Argentina to Panama, with one species reaching the southern United States. The head and body of an armadillo are almost completely covered by an armor of plates made of bone and horny material; the plates are separated by soft skin which bears a few hairs. The body armor, or carapace, hangs down on either side of the animal’s body and is divided into flexible bands across the back. Members of some armadillo species can roll into a ball for protection. Armadillos are omnivorous, although insects form the bulk of their diet. Most are nocturnal, resting during the day in burrows that they excavate with their strong front feet and enormous claws; they can dig into the ground with amazing speed when threatened.
Sounds like a repulsive little critter, it does, and an even more repulsive road-kill. I recently spent a couple of days at the home of a brother living in the wilds of southern Missouri. When I remarked on what looked like miniature strip mines around his yard and shrubs, he replied, “Armadillos!” followed by a few unprintable observations. I gathered that he doesn’t like them.
It turns out that the creatures are slowly moving north, and we had better hope that they are not Rebels in disguise, unwilling to admit that the Civil War ended some years ago.
Dave, looking for a pet sloth
