One of my favorite books, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, is being turned into a three part NOVA special to be aired on PBS in late October & early November. Here's what I wrote about the book back in April 2001:

The Elegant Universe (paperback version) is easily the most accessible book on modern (and postmodern?) physics I have ever encountered. The examples, metaphors, and analogies Brian Greene uses to explain the concepts of general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are extremely complicated and difficult to understand (even for physicists), can be understood by anyone with a bit of curiosity and determination. Even when he attempts to explain superstring theory, which combines and greatly magnifies the complexity of relativity and quantum mechanics, he lays everything out for the reader, explaining, restating, and then restating again in plain English the most difficult concepts in physics. Highly recommended.

I'm quite looking forward to the PBS series.

Salam Pax, our man in Baghdad, has written a book called Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi and it's available for preorder on Amazon. One unusual thing I noticed is if you look at the current list of related books on the Amazon page, four out of the five authors listed have weblogs: Neal Pollack, Virginia Postrel, Charles Stross, and Tom Tomorrow.

If you're strapped for new music and flush with cash, you might want to check out You Forgot It In People by Broken Social Scene. I didn't think much of it at first, but after listening to it a few times, it's really grown on me and has become a regular in the rotation on my iPod. (via almostcool)

Last Thursday, I posted a remaindered link to an article on advocate.com about the "Montana Family [Coalition's] plans to launch a campaign against the new television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". The article included a quote by Julie Millam, executive director for the Coalition, about the show:

To me, that's not a reality show about gay people. A really good reality show for gay people would be five gay men dying of AIDS.

Most likely coming in from a Google search, Millam responded in the thread that her message hadn't been "accurately portray[ed]" in the article:

Montana Family Coalition has always held the position that the homosexual lifestyle should not be glamorized because it is plagued with many serious health threats to those who practice it. We feel the onslaught of television shows that promote and glamorize this destructive lifestyle are irresponsible and lead young impressionable children to wrong conclusions.

Studies show that practicing homosexuality drastically shortens the lifespan of males due to HIV/AIDS. This is the "reality" that we need to portray- that sex outside of marriage is dangerous for both heterosexuals and homosexuals.

Montana Family Coalition is dedicated to educating people about these risks, hopefully REDUCING the number of AIDS cases. Let me be clear-I would never ,ever imply that I, in any way, would enjoy seeing someone die from AIDS. That would be tragic-That would be the antithesis of our mission at MFC. Our goal is to offer hope, restoration and healing for the homosexual through EXODUS International and other ministries that help lead the way out.We love the sinner but hate the sin. Many people successfully leave this lifestyle every year.

Unfortunately the "reality" of homosexuality is grave with its sexual consequences is something that we must face and then warn our children about. Our point is that "reality" TV is not reality, because it glamorizes a lifestyle and fails to warn of the grave danger people face. Whether it is "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" or "Elimidate," "Temptation Island" or any other television program that degrades abstinence and/or traditional marriage - it is offensive. People are simply fed up with this type of programming and are calling for responsible change.

Did a bit of noodling around with the archives of the remaindered links. Not perfect yet. Soon, my pets, soon. And then we'll show them. More details about RemainderedLinksCon tomorrow! (Tired. Bed. Zzzz......

Update: Gah! Should have gone to bed. I accidentally deleted the sidebar thread about the stupid fireworks thing in Central Park, along with 10 comments. Dammit and sorry! Really going to bed now.

I wish I were Sofia Coppola. Then I could say, hey, Air, why don't you, like, record a song for the soundtrack of my new movie, Lost in Translation? And then they would and the song would be great and I would play it on my iPod again and again, so much so that it would become my #1 most played song in a single day. That would be cool. Fo shizzle.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with someone (probably Meg) who had overheard a conversation in which the two participants spoke in a fluid mixture of English and their native language. Today at lunch, I overheard a conversation between two Hispanic women who were unconsciously switching back and forth between Spanish and English. Much of their conversation was in Spanish, but there were English words sprinkled in and the occasional complete sentences in English.

As a hopeless monolingual (I dream in Tetris when I play GameBoy too much and sometimes think in HTML markup, but I don't think that counts), I find bilingual conversations fascinating. A cursory search on Google turns up several mentions of research and inquiry about this practice (the technical term seems to be "bilingual codeswitching"). The results link mostly to academic books and papers, but I think the topic would make a great New Yorker piece. There are so many potential interesting questions around how bilingual codeswitchers choose words and languages during a conversation:

- Does the subject matter, um, matter? Are sports more "English" and politics more "Spanish"?

- How much of language switching is about brevity? Maybe people base word/phrase choice on how quickly they can speak a particular phrase in a particular language.

- Or is it expressiveness? The "perfect phrase" for what a speaker is trying to convey to their partner might exist in only one of the two languages.

- How do the grammars mix...if at all? Would a French speaker use English syntax when speaking French (or vice versa)?

- Does code switching happen in writing as well, or is it strictly verbal?

- How fluent does a speaker have to be in both languages in order to codeswitch fluidly?

- How much does a speaker's primary language determine language choice? Does their ability to codeswitch improve if they were bilingual from birth?

- Will a strong codeswitcher speak to his partner's stronger language?

- If one person finishes a remark in English, will her partner start her remark in English? What would prompt them to go back to the other language?

- Are some combinations of languages not amenable to codeswitching? Is Italian/Japanese codeswitching possible?

Not to mention all the questions about what changes in brain activity of a codeswitcher can tell us about the brain, speech, learning, etc. Like I said, I find this fascinating.

Does anyone know anything about codeswitching, either from researching it, personal observation, or otherwise hearing/reading about it? Any codeswitchers out there care to share their experiences?

According to news.com, Google is discontinuing Blogger Pro and folding the Pro features back into their free version of the software:

Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.

The creation of Blogger Pro, which cost subscribers a yearly fee of $35, came about as a result of financial necessity, Blogger co-founder Evan Williams wrote in an e-mail to subscribers. Now that Google owns the service, that need has passed.

It's a good move...Pro never offered significant improvement over the free version and the proliferation of Blogger's various options (Blogger, Blogger Pro, Blog*Spot, ad-free Blog*Spot, etc.) was confusing.

But as I mentioned back in May, it makes me nervous when a big company releases for free software for which other smaller companies are charging. Just as Microsoft buried Netscape with a free browser (resulting in stagnation in overall browser development), Google could give away blogging tools and services (to what end?), make it difficult for Six Apart, UserLand, etc. to sell their products & services, and in two years time, we've got a single dominant blogging platform and innovation in blogging software goes to zero. Fortunately, the general excellence and feature-richness of TypePad and Movable Type in particular and Blogger's continuing uptime and support problems will probably override any advantage Blogger has in price.

Physicist Edward Teller, who helped develop both the atomic & hydrogen bombs and alienated many of his friends in the process, died yesterday at 95:

Few, if any, physicists of this century have generated such heated debate as Edward Teller. Much of it centered on his decade-long effort to produce the hydrogen bomb, his ardent promotion of nuclear weapons in general, his deep suspicion of Soviet intentions and his opposition to curtailment of nuclear testing.

His frustrations in seeking to win support for development of the hydrogen bomb led to his testimony that helped deprive J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the development of the first atomic bomb, of his security clearance. The result in much of the scientific community was a backlash against Dr. Teller that clouded the rest of his life.

I just finished reading about Teller in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb; I had no idea he was still alive.

BTW, if you read to the end of the article, it says that Walter Sullivan, the author of the piece, who was "a science writer and editor for The New York Times, died in 1996." An obituary within an obituary.

The big record companies are (smartly) using statistics from file-sharing networks to get a TiVo-level look at what people are listening to, but are keeping it on the downlow because it weakens their legal case against those networks:

According to on-the-record statements by many major labels, the scene I witnessed in Fleischer's office couldn't possibly have happened. But Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says his firm is working with Maverick, Atlantic, Warner Bros., Interscope, DreamWorks, Elektra, and Disney's Hollywood label. The labels are reticent to admit their relationship with BigChampagne for public relations reasons, but there's a legal rationale, too. The record industry's lawsuits against file-sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance. "We would definitely consider gleaning marketing wisdom from these networks a non-infringing use," says Fred von Lohmann, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber liberties group that's helping to defend Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa.

I was wondering when this issue would arise. There's just too much information available about people's music-listening habits on file-sharing networks for the labels to ignore, even if it means that those networks would be legally allowed to exist. The labels and the RIAA must have some inkling of this because their tactics have changed in recent months; they're now going after individuals in addition to the networks. Might they are willing to concede a distinction between legal and illegal use of file-sharing systems? (via bb)

I'm off to Raleigh, NC this weekend to visit some friends. I don't think I've ever been to Raleigh...well, except for the airport. I think everyone who's ever flown in an airplane has been to the Raleigh-Durham airport at some time or another. Anyway, no posts this weekend probably.

Reading some mailing list messages just now, I came across a post titled "PHP to enter NULL into MySQL". Sounds like a headline from the world's dorkiest newspaper.

Meg's issue of Vogue arrived today and I about got a hernia carrying it up the stairs. The damn thing is more than an inch think and weighs about 5 pounds. Luckily I had the cover photo of Nicole Kidman to keep me company as I waited for the ambulance. (BTW, have you ever heard Kidman say "Baz Luhrmann" before? I saw a TV interview with her where she repeated his name about 4 times. It's just about the sexiest thing I've ever heard.)

Following up on my last post (Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct), here's some further discussion on the issue:

This Validates!
On Standards and Semantics
Semantics and Bad Code
Semantic Markup

And Dan Cederholm takes a tentative first step toward the creation of a Am I the Semantic Web or Not? site with his first SimpleQuiz, the objective of which is to "ask some questions about markup and generate some discussion about preferred methods".

Since the push toward good HTML/CSS/XHTML standards started a few years ago, browsers have gotten better at rendering standards-compliant code correctly and web designers have gotten better at writing standards-compliant code. Safari and Mozilla in particular have made great gains in rendering code correctly and folks like Todd Dominey, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Doug Bowman (the four Ds?) have built great-looking and usable sites with standards-compliant code and then told us how they did it all.

But what I feel like is being implied in the effort to get more people to embrace standards compliancy is that coding a page in valid XHTML with valid CSS involves improving the semantic meaning of the content...which is just not true. Take the following from an informative site on Standards-compliant XHTML:

Removing presentation from (X)HTML documents and using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control visual design is a revolutionary approach for many. Designers will find good reason to separate style from content and abandon use of <table>, <font> and <center> tags to control visual design. For example, a single CSS document can control the visual design for thousands of (X)HTML pages. Updating a site with redundant, non-standard <table> and <font> tag hacks is a chore. With CSS, a few simple changes to the style sheet can refresh an entire site comprised of thousands of documents.

And from the XHTML basics page on the same site:

Tables: for data only
Back in the glory days of the Web, designers exploited the <table> tag to create grid-based designs. This was out of necessity because browsers simply couldn’t understand Cascading Style Sheets. Fast forward to the present; almost every current browser understands most of the first CSS specification and some of the second. Use tables for data only (think spreadsheets). Should you come in contact with someone using tables for presentation, firmly reprimand them and point them to this guide.

The trusty font tag
Absolutely, under no circumstances, should you ever use the <font> tag. It is antiquated, unsupported by the W3C, and makes for very unsexy (X)HTML. Condemn anyone using this tag and immediately contact the authorities.

Last time I checked (about two minutes ago...to see if I was actually correct), both the <table> and <font> tags are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional tags and the <table> tag is a valid XHTML 1.1 tag. Documents with <table> and <font> tags are standards-compliant. And yet, we're advised not to use them. Rightly so, but not because they aren't standards compliant, but because using alternative methods (defining styles with CSS, making sure tags are semantically relevent to the text they enclose, etc.) is preferable for the reasons outlined above (among others).

Coding web documents in valid XHTML doesn't make them semantically useful nor does coding semantically correct documents mean the documents are standards-compliant; they are two distinct things but a powerful combination. As web designers, we need to be aware of what we're getting with standards compliancy and semantically rich documents and that one does not necessarily lead to the other. More importantly, we need evangelize effectively to clients and budding XHTML coders & web designers, telling them *precisely* what's so great about making sites standards-compliant and semantically useful and therefore worth spending money to redesign a site or time to learn valid XHTML/CSS.

Dear New Yorker, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and others**,

Please stop using the term "web log" to refer to a chronologically-ordered frequently-updated website. The correct term is "weblog". Furthermore, "blog" is not short for "web log", it is short for "weblog".

When dealing with words generated by the Internet, where people stick bits of different words together with reckless abandon, I can understand the need for high-quality newspapers and magazines to use the proper grammatical approach in dealing with compound words, hyphens, etc. At first blush, "weblog" appears to be a shortened version of "web log" which is in turn a shortened version of "World Wide Web log", in which case the usage the media has adopted would be more or less correct ("Web log" would probably be more correct). But the evidence doesn't support this:

1. The original spelling of the term is "WebLog" as seen on Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom WebLog page from December 1997. It was never "web log". In subsequent correspondence (like this Usenet post from June 1998), Barger himself referred to his site as a "weblog" and sites like his as "weblogs".

2. After Barger's coining of "weblog", a few early bloggers preferred to use "web log" as an alternative (see Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log from June 1998) but the majority use was and is "weblog" and the use of "web log" has waned (except for its misuse by the media, of course). A search for "weblog" on Google yields 4,620,000 results. A Google search for "web log" yields 383,000 results. The use of "weblog" is in the majority by an order of magnitude. The impact in the search results for "web log" due to its incorrect usage in the media is unknown.

3. Most of the citations for "weblog" and "blog" in the Oxford English Dictionary Online use "weblog", not "web log". The primary exception is the 1999-08-30 issue of TBTF, which appears to be an inadvertant misquotation by TBTF proprietor Keith Dawson. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, the original citation on Peter Merholz's site reads:

I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee'- blog. Or "blog" for short.

The use of "Web log" in TBTF is clearly wrong:

Seems [Merholz] decided one fine day that "Web log" ought to be pronounced "wee-blog."

While the "web log" spelling is an acceptable alternative to "weblog", it's clear from the available evidence that "web log" was derived from "weblog" (rather than the other way around) and its usage is comparatively minor, both of which naturally point to "weblog" as the primary usage in any newspaper, periodical or dictionary that values accuracy.

** Here are a few recent news articles that have used "web log" instead of "weblog":

Finding Comfort in Strangers With an Online Diet Journal (NY Times)
Huffington's prior punditry influences her campaign's tone (SF Chronicle)
Names & Faces (Washington Post)
Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs (news.com)
Google News search for "web log"

I have hauled in three bluefish from off the coast of Massachusetts. I have sat nervously in a powerless airport terminal for three hours with no food, water, or restroom and luckily getting on what was probably the last plane to Boston (apparently) because my arms are a little longer than the guy next to me. I have gotten gum on my shirt from the seal belt in the airplane. I have spent 7 consecutive days at the beach. I have finished half of a heavy nonfiction book and started another which I am now about halfway through. I have tasted a donut so hot and delicious that I burned my fingers eating it but did not stop to put it down. I have eaten foie gras creme brulee and heard tale of a foie gras donut. I have chuckled at conservative white men in pink shorts. I have flown co-pilot in a 10-seat Cessna. I have cheered for a Little League team from Saugus, Mass. I have browned nicely. I have seen more stars in one night's sky than in the last 7 years of living in large cities. I have not used a computer in over 9 days. I have consumed far less root beer floats than I would have liked. I have boogie boarded briefly.

Is this enough? At the time, it didn't seem like enough.

(With apologies to David Foster Wallace)

I'm back in NYC after being on vacation since last Friday and I feel like I've been in a time warp. Even though I experienced the blackout (power came back on about a half-hour before we left for the airport on Friday), I know nothing about what happened because I didn't read any newspapers or watch any TV while I was gone. I feel so uninformed about something I experienced. There's probably something to be said here about how dependent we are (or maybe it's just me, but I suspect not) on the media for contextulizing absolutely everything for us, even things we've experienced for ourselves, but I'm still in vacation mode so you'll have to fill in your own blanks. Nyah nyah.