…most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Fighting off the urge to rant and rave yet again about the breadth of Wisconsin corporate/Republican idiocy, I’m declaring a truce to get the tape off the walls and air out the stench left by Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers. Yes, I know that Scotty Walker and the Fitzgerald Brothers sounds like the name of some wannabe motown white-boys seventies garage band from Mequon, and–in fact–it is. But that’s not what I’m on about here this morning.

This morning I’ll skip all that about teacher lay-offs, and school budgets capped by property tax limits, and why it’s good for corporations to turn the US into a third world economy; and, rather, I’ll simply share this information. I’ve lifted it from Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. Paul abstracted the list from a great paper titled Avoid News, Towards a Healthy News Diet by Rolf Dobelli:

Fifteen reasons why news is bad for you:

1. News misleads systematically
2. News is irrelevant
3. News limits understanding
4. News is toxic to your body
5. News massively increases cognitive errors
6. News inhibits thinking
7. News changes the structure of your brain
8. News is costly
9. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
10. News is produced by journalists
11. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
12. News is manipulative
13. News makes us passive
14. News gives us the illusion of caring
15. News kills creativity

Being behind a camera, in front of the camera, is my own little deconstructionist niche.

— Joshua Leonard

The first issue of Popular Linguistics, an online magazine, is now available for people who enjoy that sort of thing. For me, an unbridled malefactor in the realm of lay-lie-lay, an unapologetic apostrophe punter, and some would say a comatose abuser of commas, the welcome mat may not be out. But I expect Beth, with her memories of Edinburgh and Austin and her adoration of most things Language Log will spend some time enjoyably immersed in the pixels presented by editor and publisher Douglas S. Bigham. Bigham says he hopes to serve a general, educated, scientifically-inclined audience, the same type of readers who, for example, enjoy Scientific American or Discover. (Popular linguist and wearer of the Safire crown, Ben Zimmer welcomed the new linguistic populist at Language Log yesterday).

The pseudonymous “Language Hat” on his eponymous blog also welcomed the new arrival yesterday. Many of those who commented on that post share my discomfort with the white on black typography. Bigham promises a shift to something easier on the eyes in the February issue.

Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
— Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

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Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

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Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
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I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

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Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
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And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

• How Paul Krugman found Politics (The New Yorker)
• The quantified self (a narcissist’s dream come true!)
• ZOMG Science (I’ll never stop linking unless they stop thinking!)
• Quashie (The approachable negro is in!)
• Everything is falling apart (Confirming your worst nightmares)
• Documents that reference Blackwater from Wikileaks current release (no wonder everyone’s in a tizzie)
• …and more, oh so much more…

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!

Elmore Leonard published “Ten Rules of Writing” a few years ago. The book repackaged Leonard’s 2024 New York Times essay, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle”. Today, on the Word Count blog, Michael Lydon takes issue with Leonard’s rules. While admitting that eight out of the ten rules “are matters of personal taste or make some sloppy sense…” he demonstrates that Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Anthony Trollope, Leo Tolstoy, Raymond Chandler and (modestly enough) Michael Lydon himself ignore two of Elmore Leonard’s rules to the benefit of readers everywhere. The broken rules?

• 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
• 9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

I think I understand Lydon’s point. These rules are made to be broken. A few simple props, like a harpoon, or a parrot and an eye patch can make all the difference between Ahab and Long John Silver. Throw in a crocodile, a clock, and–well… a hook and you have a different sailor altogether. So I get it. We really do need a little detail about people, places and things. Except for that, Elmore Leonard’s rulz are dope. For example, number one,

Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

A few months ago Leonard’s rules served to introduce a lengthy feature in the Guardian, a compilation of lots of writers’ rules for writing. Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Annie Proulx are among the dozens of contributors. The aggregation of advice is overwhelming. Some rules ring true (“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.” — Zadie Smith); some are silly (“Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” — Roddy Doyle); and some are simply self-serving and tedious (“Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.” — Michael Morpurgo).

Ultimately, we can each only write we know. But what we know changes moment by moment. We can learn as we go along, researching scant minutes before putting crayon to paper. Or we can make stuff up. The penalties for making stuff up vary by genre, of course; so too do the rewards. But, whether we have a deep and certain knowledge informing our scribbles or we simply wing it, it’s nice to have rules. We could do worse than leaving out most of the adverbs and almost all of the hooptedoodle.

• International Association of Time Travelers—
  11/15/2104
  At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
  Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

  At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
  Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

• Five Reasons Obama Should Take Over BP–Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, “If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.”
• Welcome to the Culture of News–I think Karoli buried the lede in her post titled “News, bloggers and oil spill coverage: You get what you pay for”. This is a story about the nuance and complexity of reporting a story like the slowly unfolding drama in the Gulf of Mexico, a meta-narrative. Hooking the “who” on sad-sack Mark Bernstein and his expressed desire for simplistic coverage takes the punch out of the central idea that Mr. Bernstein’s problem isn’t science bloggers; rather, it’s the Culture of News.
• Hamas
• FutureWeb—
  “Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project delivers a keynote on the Future of the Web and answers audience questions. Rainie’s initiative is a “fact tank” known around the world for its assessment of the influence of Internet evolution on every aspect of global life. He and his team release new reports nearly weekly, detailing our use of the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.”
• Using Social Media to Increase Civic Engagement in US Federal Agencies–Yasmin Fodil and Anna York share insights on public policy development at Yasmin’s blog about Government 2.0, “We the Goverati”.
• Wisconsin: Whistling Past the Graveyard, by George Lightbourn
• Burn Canvas–“A simple test of local pixel-based modifications of an HTML5 canvas drawing area,” from Chrome Experiments dot com.
• HTML5 and Web Standards–This is a demonstration that, according to Apple, shows “…how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support,” the Apple PR machine continues, “but soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.” The irony here, the giggle, is that this “web standards” showcase can only be accessed using Apple products. Other products such as the Google Chrome browser, a product already able to “take advantage of these same web standards,” are excluded. That Steve Jobs! What a kidder!
• America Speaks–National “town meeting” on the budget and the economy.
• arXiv vs. snarXiv–an addictive little game. Try to guess which title in the pair of titles offered is from a real paper published in a scientific journal.
• Visual Thesaurus
• “The Shallows”–NPR reporting on Nicholas Karr’s take on what the Internet is doing to our minds.
• Does the Internet Make You Smarter? by Clay Shirky–the opposing perspective to Nicholas Karr’s concern about the great dumbing down.
• Griper News, the bearer of bad tidings–blogging the way blogs should be blogged, by Terry Canaan.
• Slate–it ain’t Griper news, but it pays better.
• Aldiko–“…an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.”
• arstechnica Week in Apple: pre-WWDC edition–the Apple World Wide developers Conference is just around the corner. The WWDC is a gathering of those who write code for the six percent of information appliance owners who have tied themselves to the closed Apple architecture. That’s six percent of a gazillion users though, no small number.
• Hulu: Life–a TV series about a cop who was framed and went to prison for a long time. When he is exonerated and released and given a $50 million settlement he returns to the LA police force, bringing a fresh if somewhat demented perspective to his police work.

Andrew Grose, an eighth grader making his second appearance and the local favorite in Madison, advanced to the semifinals. We’ll be cheering him on today.

Semifinals start 10am EDT (broadcast live on ESPN), finals at 7pm EDT (live on ABC).

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[For more on the youngest contestant and her family, read Ben Paynter’s, Why Are Indian Kids So Good at Spelling, a look at the roots of Indian-American dominance in the Bee, in Slate this week.]

• Hack the Planet, wait for the announcement that only a small tactical nuke will close earth’s gushing wound a mile below the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. There will be a bright side to all that oil spreading out over the surface of the Atlantic between now and September when they get around to dropping a nuke down the pipe. Bright side is: flattened surface yields increased reflectivity equals lowered Albedo equals slowed global warming.
• Aspiring writer questions value of English degree, this one is in the running for the monthly “No shit, Sherlock!” award.
• Not for Profit, a brief interview with Martha Nussbaum, answering the question of what Hindu extremists have in common with Texas school boards.
• The Net Worth of American Presidents, a nice historical review. I recommend you follow the cycle of boom and bust and ask just how much speculation we as a society should permit the greed-balls on Wall Street.
• PRchitecture… a neologism Kat Herding thought she had invented until she googled it.
• Putting the Future Back in the Room, by Alex Steffen. I was shocked to learn that Al and Tipper, after celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of their marriage and of earth day, have decided to call it quits. What that has to do with Steffen’s essay, I don’t know. Al and tipper is a look back to 1970. Steffen suggests we focus on 2024.
• ElasticVapor and Enomaly, Reuven Cohen’s blog and business web sites. Cohen is a leader in the world of cloud computing, a technology that has matured over the last six or eight years and is finally ready for prime time here in the USA, now that we’ve begun to catch up with much of the rest of the world in affordable broadband connectivity.
• Sticks and stones may break our bones so we brought guns.
• Why converse with your customers when you can spam the living daylights out of them?
• More than a recipe for potato leek soup. (May be dangerous to open this one if freedom of speech is compromised in your country).

Finally, a few pointers to what’s next… Web 3.0. Can I say “Web 3.0″ or has O’Reilly already registered it as a trademark?

• web 3.0 by kate ray
• Visual Thesaurus, by Thinkmap.
• Semanticweb.org

The OMLN serves “online publishers and creators of digital media who innovate, create, and inform.”

[As an aside, I think there’s something interesting in the nouns that emerge from the action verbs innovate, create, and inform. You got your basic innovation and creation. Creations and innovations are products spun up by creators and innovators. Information seems more abstract. An innovation or a creation can be described. The description itself is information attendant upon some thing‘s existence, real or imagined. Information seems more abstract and intangible than creations and innovations. It reflects a different state of being. The information conveys or at least portrays knowledge about the thing. But that’s all higher order thinking that we can leave to David Weinberger, Clay Shirky and others with a philosophical bent, or bent philosophy perhaps, depending on your perspective.]

In 2024 Robert Cox and others formed the Media Bloggers Association to provide legal support services to bloggers facing legal threats. The group seems to have gone dormant, but the ideas behind it have been refreshed, formalized, professionalized and expanded by the OMLN/NFOIC alliance. Here’s more, well… information from the press release:

OMLN, which launched in November 2024 with funding from the Knight Foundation, is a referral network for lawyers and law school clinics that wish to offer legal assistance to online journalists and other digital media creators. Lawyers participating in OMLN provide qualifying clients with free and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

The slackers at the Oxford University Press USA, they who prepare the superfluous New Oxford American Dictionary have chosen “unfriend,” a louche locution from the world of social media, as the word of the year. I had occasion to unfriend a Quaker this year. Unfriending a Quaker is unfriending a Friend who may or may not be a friend, if you get the distinction. The Quaker in question was harassing me for my lack of libertarian, Ayn Randian principles. He was behaving in a lowercase “f” unfriendly way. (I’d suggest that his effort to harsh my mellow was also unFriendly, or unquakerly as some would have it, but nobody’s perfect). “Fuck this guy, ” I thought and I clicked the button that dissolved our Facebook relationship. Can’t say that I’ve missed him, nor I suspect does he miss me. Don’t really know why we friended each other in the first place, except that we’re both Friends who share a common bond of web tech.

Here’s what the American Oxonians have to say about their dismal choice of WOTY:

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

That bit about a verb sense of “[to] friend” that is really not used is dead wrong. Friending and unfriending of course are both used in the limited context of electronic network social media; a context likely to morph to something unrecognizable in the next few years (which would be 14 dog years and decades of internet time). The potential longevity of the verb “to unfriend” is tied to the predictably limited life of the walled garden that is Facebook. Meanwhile, the one-fortiers are all atwitter that a social media term beat out “teabagger” and “birther” for the prize.

I’ll wait for the verdict at Language Log, should they bother to comment. Meanwhile, Arnold Zwicky remarks on the rise of “douche” (which would have been my nominee for adjectival WOTY, particularly as it modifies “bag”).

Of local interest:

• el guante will be slamming for the St. Paul team,
• Madison has a team, and
• Milwaukee will be there too.

Follow @NPS2009 on twitter and look for tweets that have been tagged #NPS200. Last and least, for those who tweak on that Facebook crack, yes–there is a group.