is what i do

Today’s Hump Day issue of the Manhattan User’s Guide featured their monthly “spin around the web”. And that led me to the totally wacky Strindberg & Helium, a set of funny and well-produced Flash animations featuring the notoriously gloomy Swede and his irrepressibly cheerful sidekick Helium. All four episodes are wonderful; my favorite is “In the Park“.

MUG publishes a daily email letter, full of good stuff. It’s Manhattan-oriented, of course, but it always contains something of interest. Well, almost always, which isn’t bad for something that’s free and takes about 15 seconds to read through. As a bonus, each issue features a link to joe’s nyc—another of Joseph Holmes’ fantastic photos.

Chris Anderson is author of The Long Tail, one of the more revelatory analyses of the impact of new information technologies on our culture. The essential idea is that stuff that exists several standard deviations from the mean of any useful bell curve is forced out of existence by pre-Information Age dynamics. For example, stuff that’s much better than the average, but priced higher, is forced off of store shelves by standard bricks-and-morter distribution dynamics (as is stuff that’s pretty much rotten but cheap, as well as stuff that appeals to small segments of the overall marketplace.) But in an information age, when “clicks-and-morter” distribution channels evolve, those products can sell in numbers that are adequate to keep their suppliers solvent.

In his latest post on Long Tail dynamics, Chris addresses the common charge that “the Long Tail is full of crap.” Indeed it is, agrees Chris. But the long tail is a diamond mine, not a gravel pit, and the crap is just something we have to sift through. And the tools we have, e.g. information filters, properly applied, allow us to do just that.

Chris Anderson is always insightful and interesting. He’s a good writer, and this is a good post. When I first read about the Long Tail, I had a “yeah, yeah” response. But the more I consider the notion, and the more often I catch Chris’s posts, the more I realize that this concept is much more than marketing hype. Chris is onto something that has applicability to all sorts of essential human enterprises—politics, journalism, art and entertainment, religion, as well as marketing. It’s real, and it’s important, and understanding it has changed my perception of all sorts of things, from my Macintosh to the just-concluded deal to save the filibuster.

BTW, the new post also contains a few charts that are models of informational utility.

There is some exceptional science writing in the blogs. Over at Brent Rasmussen’s Unscrewing the Inscrutable, DarkSyd has posted Cosmology 101: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. With grace, style, rigor and admirable concision, and with some fine illustrations, Syd retells one of the classic tales of science:

The hero of the story, of course, is Edwin Hubble, and the story concerns his discovery of the fact that our entire universe is expanding, rapidly.

The only bone I have to pick with DarkSyd’s otherwise excellent article is in his first sentence, in which he dismisses the Pot of Gold Hypothesis as “only a legend of course”. As evidence otherwise, I present the following photograph, taken a couple of years ago from the deck of Fairview, the cabin we stay in at Hiram Blake Camp, on Penobscot Bay in Maine. It was an early morning double rainbow, and it was entirely contained within the small cove on the shore of which our cabin sits. One leg of the rainbow entered the water in front of the pine trees on the farther shore, and the other leg ended exactly at the stern of our little sailboat Anjana. And while a quick investigatory row out to the boat found no literal gold, still, Anjana is worth her weight in the stuff, and the rainbow, we like to think, was a confirmation of her true worth.

PostSecret encourages people to write their secrets down on home-made postcards and send them in. There’s a lot of pain visible on the site. It reminds me of Hearing Aid in John Brunner’s great prescient sci-fi novel The Shockwave Rider. Hearing Aid was based on a computer virus that had been inserted into the national grid (Brunner’s anticipation of the Internet; reading it today, it’s hard to believe that it was written in 1973). In the novel, it’s not called a “virus” but a “worm” or “phage”; its effect was to allow anyone to dial 999999999 from any phone and be connected to a real human being over a totally secure connection. The Hearing Aid listener would simply listen; no judgment was passed, no advice given, no penance assigned or absolution offered; just a human being available to receive a poured out secret.

Here’s one of the less dramatic cards from the PostSecret site:

In the American Prospect, Chris Mooney does some calm and penetrating analysis of what’s going on in Kansas. In his article Creating a Controversy, Chris points out that it’s not just evolutionary theory that’s under attack there, but the whole foundation of science as a reality-based enterprise, one whose purpose is the pursuit of objective truth.

This is terrifying stuff, which will inevitably lead to a cloud of stupidity pouring out of the heartland to darken the country’s communications channels and classrooms. Once they’ve driven the wedge into science through the crack they perceive in evolutionary theory, they will go after the Big Bang, e.g. the current consensus on cosmology. They will attach every branch of science that is not easily susceptible to laboratory experimentation, because they can use the same appeal to ignorance:

1. It’s only a theory
2. theory == guess
3. guess == uncertainty
4. God == certainty

And we need to be certain about this, because we certainly don’t want our children led into error.

God help us.

In case you’ve been somewhere else for the past couple of months, you already know about Kenneth Tomlinson, the new Republican Chairman of PBS, who has been busily working to disembowel (as in remove what remains of the guts of) what may be our last bastion of solid investigative (as in question the powers that be) journalism. Working without the knowledge or consent of his own board, Tomlinson has hired Mary Catherine Andrews, the director of the White House Office of Global Communications, as a senior staff member, and he is pressing to replace the corporation’s president, whose contract was not renewed, with Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

Jesus’ General has a nice review of the new lineup of PBS shows under Tomlinson’s regime. Here’s a sample:

Another one of those funny-if-it-weren’t-so-tragic items; they’re coming fast and furious these days.

Pharyngula is a fascinating blog on evolution and paleontology—lots of original content, authoritative, well-written, and, most uncommonly for a weblog, extremely well and richly illustrated. In today’s post, PZ Myers tells a fascinating story about the Kansas geological formation known as the Niobraran Chalk. It’s one of the world’s richest sources for a wide range of fossils, ranging from minute single-celled organisms to huge marine dinosaurs. Niobrara was a particularly productive hunting ground for the great paleontologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the fossils excavated from the 600—foot—thick formation have contributed significantly to our understanding of the age of the Earth and the history of life here. Myers points out the irony implicit in the state’s recent kangaroo court “trial” of scientific evolutionary theory.

Let us hope that the current trial has the same effect that the Scopes monkey trial had, and that it exposes the idiocy of the willfully ignorant proponents of that great oxymoron, “scientific creationism”.

You know, when I was a kid, I was so looking forward to the twenty-first century….

Continuing with Faith Commons…. Bill asks the question, “Can the Message of Jesus be Multi-Religious?”

I’d like to tackle Bill’s question from a perspective that’s almost certainly different from that shared by most members of the Commons. From that perspective—rationalist, scientific, historical, anti-monotheist, heavily influenced by the Buddha’s teaching and by Taoism—I see several problems with presenting Bill’s “Good News” to other cultures as a message that they can accept without significant alteration in their cultural world view.
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Over at Faith Commons, Bill, in a discussion of Brian McLaren’s book A Generous Orthodoxy, quotes John R. Franke, quoting Yale theologian Hans Frei, “‘”Generosity without orthodoxy is nothing, but orthodoxy without generosity is worse than nothing.”‘” (I hope I got the nested quote levels right.) I think that’s a lot of hooey. I don’t believe that orthodoxy can ever be truly generous. Generosity requires at least the implicit admission that those who disagree with you might have a point. But orthodoxy requires that any deviation from the straight lines it draws must be corrected. The whole point of orthodoxy is that it defines what’s right, and what’s not right is just wrong.

Frei’s condescending dismissal of “generosity without orthodoxy” is typical orthodox thinking. My experience leads me to believe that generosity of any sort is always something. Really something! And some of the most heterodox people I’ve met have demonstrated the most unflinching and consistent generosity. Not only material generosity, but a generous acceptance of lifestyles different from theirs, and of opinions they could never reconcile with their own vision of things.

I thought it might be appropriate, in considering generosity and orthodoxy, to re-cycle my own distinctly heterodox appreciation of generosity as a god worth worshipping in her own right: