I've got a lot of big writing projects going on right now, and that is sapping my desire to post here.

But I did want to share one interesting link I found while working on one of them: Reflections on Relativity. It is a free, online book covering relativity (not just Einsteinian but also pre-Einstein conceptions), in a highly mathematical fashion that manages not to be so drenched in equations as to be incomprehensible without serious study, an extremely delicate balance.

Slashdot points to a CNN article that has been justly taken apart for falling prey to a biased sample fallacy; we are currently only capable of detecting planets in close solar systems such that the planets we can detect preclude the formation of planets conducive to life as we know it. (The gas giants we can detect are too close to their respective stars to even have a habitable moon, as I understand it.) Ergo, of all the solar systems we have detected planets in, 100% of them are unsuitable for life.

Just a quick note; if you want to compare bloggers to journalism fairly, you must measure the best of the bloggers against the best of formal journalism.

Because if you insist on defining blogging as "millions of people doodling in their journals, with rare people who sometimes make an interesting point", then I'm going to define journalism as "hundreds of thousands of parochial local rags designed to get as many local names as possible in print, and the rare international journalist that has something moderately interesting to say".

Hopefully you've heard about the genocide in Darfur by now.

I am considering this a yardstick to measure the sincerity and validity of all of those international organizations so quick to condemn the US and so slow to do, well, anything else.

So to the UN, and everybody else who wants to claim the moral high ground on the international stage, I have something to say, if you'll pardon the language:

I ought to be working but I have to amplify on Den Beste's latest on form vs. substance.

Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Unbelievable memories can be made up out of whole cloth. (False memory, memory, and repressed memory therapy from the Skeptic's Dictionary.) It is also extremely difficult to project a lack of knowledge back in time, as I discussed in my Learning to Expect the Unexpected post.

One of the differences between "form" and "substance" is that to the extent that form lives in our human minds, it is much easier to change than substance is. Changing the substance of history... well, that is objectively impossible. Changing the current perceptions, ah, thanks to the nature of the human brain, now that is easier.

Ever since I first started working with the web in 1996, I have tried to design an appealing personal site. Though my first web site did end up landing me a pretty cool job, it was ultimately a failure in the aesthetic sense.

The design you've seen if you've read my website at jerf.org (as opposed to solely through RSS) is the third, and while it has been the most flexible and least garish, it still hasn't been anything to be proud of.

Confused about [uni/bi/multi/][national/lateral/global][ism/ization/]? "Zany Paraclete" sets it all straight in a Slashdot Posting.

International standards are good, of course, provided that they're European, because then they're "multilateral" (which is good, I think, because "multilateral" means "involving any set of one or more nations which includes France"). If standards are not European, they're "unilateral", which is bad. "Unilateral" means "not including France" (or else "not excluding the US"), and it's very, very bad.

I sent this as an email to Dave Winer but I'm posting it here so he has somewhere to point:

This is just a shell of an idea hardly worth blogging, but if you're getting into the comment spam issue it is worth sharing. tcp.im could be used to IM a managing editor of a Manila site when something is posted so they can take swift action. For a relatively low-flow site, one could even require all comments to be approved, and not unduly hamper flow.... at least while a managing editor is online.

There are obvious issues but its an idea worth tossing around, I think.

... getting the identity of the propective customer correct.

And the error has already spread; in the same batch of mail I have an AT&T credit card offer for Douglas Bowers.

(One of my previous nom des plumes was "Jerome Bavers". Hmmmmm... nope.)

I wonder how long Douglas here will take to die?

Only with computers can you make millions of errors per second.

(This started as a comment on this post but it grew too large and I needed some HTML.)

I don't know how exactly this fits in, but...

I've actually lost most, if not all, respect for the "novel as philosophy" idea. What finally killed it for me was a science fiction book called "The World of Null-A", which is adequately, if a bit breathlessly, summarized and explained here.

What you can't tell from that summary is that the story is clearly subserviant to the philosophy being espoused. What annoyed me finally was the rosy depiction of "null-A" philosophy; it solves all problems, by, basically, dues ex machina.