On the day Shel Silverstein died, I commenced to scouring the Web for every scrap of writing he'd ever done. That was the night I discovered one of my three favorite poems of all time: "The Devil and Billy Markham, Part I."
Turns out old Shel, the much-loved icon of my youth, had quite a lengthy career in much more mature writing before a friend ever convinced him that children's poetry was his last chance to escape eternal poverty (and a hearty thank-you to that friend). I had the fortune that night of stumbling across a site that presented the
full catalog of Silverstein's adult work, mostly published in
Playboy.
Since that time, I've discovered that Silverstein is a bit more obscure than I thought. The usual response when I mention him is "Shel who?" which is just strange to me.
A Light in the Attic is right up there with
the Cat in the Hat for me, as far as children's literature goes.
So I was very happy to make another Silverstein discovery on the Web today:
a video reading of "Billy Markham" on YouTube.
Part of me wants to be outraged at this new trend to blame websites for the criminal activities of some of their users. Part of me realizes that this is not a new trend.
Joining MySpace, the poster boy for scapegoat websites, are
YouTube and
VampireFreaks.com, the latter of which is undoubtedly giddy at the attention spike. There's also a ridiculous bill working its way through Congress that would ban the access from school computers of any site allowing users to have profiles.
The problem with all of this if very simple: these sites have done nothing wrong. If someone posts a copyrighted video on YouTube, YouTube has not committed copyright infringement; the user who uploaded the video has committed copyright infringement.
Has YouTube provided a vehicle for the user to commit copyright infringement? Yes. And so have the group of people who got together back in the '60s to make a distributed computer network. And so has DARPA. And so have the people who created the hardware and software the person used to make the bootleg duplicate. And so on.
But each of these entities acted well within accordance of the law. The only law-breaker is the idiot user.
The VampireFreaks thing is even more ridiculous, and ZDNet ought to be ashamed for even running the story. The only "news" in this is that someone who went crazy and shot up a bunch of people happened to have a profile there. Oh! But so did some other couple (he was 23, she was 12) who shot up some people.
Of course the fact that the site's 624,307* other members have not shot anyone is deemed irrelevent.
It's the same argument — and the same flaw in the argument — brought against video games (those Columbine kids played
Grand Theft Auto, you see), Dungeons & Dragons,
comic books, and even
movies when they were the new thing. And, like YouTube and MySpace, it always comes back to the same thing: it's the idiots who committed the crimes that require punishment, not their hobbies.
What I don't get is why it's become so easy for us to shift blame from the people who commit the acts. Is it because there's money to be made in it? Are the lawyers to blame? Is it because modern psychology makes it easier to accept that we are not in control of our own actions? Or is it simply that we refuse to believe our friends and family could actually be capable of such things?
* Figure based on the site's reported member base on its homepage as of 5:29 pm, Sept. 16, 2006.
I keep a binder at work of articles that I reference frequently. It's called "Everything I Need to Know about Web Design I Learned on the Internet" (I know, it's a stupid title).
I have a markedly different approach to web development from that of my colleagues, and a lot of that comes from the articles in that binder, and their cousins that I haven't printed out.
And a lot of those articles come from
A List Apart.
Although the articles presented in their
ALA Primer will be slightly beyond most of my intended audience, they represent some of the best thinking around in standards-based web design and development. Many of the ones they mention are the ones in my binder.
So, if you're at all interested in learning web design and/or development, take a look through the primer. Make being able to understand and evaluate the articles presented there your first goal.
As a bonus, they're going to soon publish a part 2 of the list focusing on resources for beginners.
Some favorite articles highlighted in the primer:
I've stated before that there are certains situations in which I can see the point of censorship. None of these situations involve forcing one's own morality on others by denying the presentation of contrary views or ideas.
Admittedly, this doesn't leave much room, and I'm okay with that.
Google Books has just published
a list of 42 books that have been banned in the past or are somewhere threatened with banishment now. There are a number of books on there that I really like (
Brave New World,
Slaughterhouse Five,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.), and many more that I really want to read.
I've recently taken to wandering through random blogs. I rarely actually read anything, but one or two tend to catch my attention, at least for a little while.
There are many strange things on Blogger. For example:
In addition, there are some very strange general trends.
The majority of the blogs are in languages I do not understand. I don't know if this is actually a strange trend, or if I'm just a bit too insular.
There are many blogs for people who are traveling. Apparently there's a vast army of people quitting their jobs and packing off to Tibet. Who knew?
There are people who make blogs for their pets. Some of them are just about the pets — mostly posting pictures — but some actually masquerade as their pets. I don't get it. There are also people who do this with their infant children.
And I haven't even started on the sexual diarists yet.
There are, it seems, scientists currently engaged in the process of trying to
grow meat in vats, outside of the animals in which it'd normally be found. It's like cloning, except without all those pesky organs and such.
Now, there are several obvious implications of this. If meat no longer requires animals*, the vegetarians can sit down and shut up. If in vitro meat turns out to be cheaper and easier to produce, and not dependent on arable land or other such resources, we have a viable means of feeding a lot of people who aren't currently fed.
But the Wikipedia article points out one I hadn't considered: without the need to actually feed or grow the animals in question, many more varieties of meat become viable culinary options. You can finally try lion steak. Or filet of humpback. Porpoise pie, maybe?
Being an avid carnivore, I find that a very interesting thought.
Of course, the article goes on to mention that another type of meat, freed from its source animal, might become acceptable as food: human. I'm not sure if long pigs in a blanket holds the same appeal for me.
* More accurately, I suppose: "If meat no longer requires
the death of animals..." Since you still need source animals for the stem cells from which the meat is grown, assuming that's the method that proves viable.
If the
record label's press release is to be believed, easy listening fans across the country are in danger of spontaneously losing the ability to regulate their drivings speeds.
This has caused thousands of speeding tickets. In at least eleven states.
Right...
Now, I'm the recipient of more speeding tickets than I care to admit. I hardly constitute a representative sample, but my own experience suggests that speeding is caused by one thing, and one thing alone: a conscious decision to drive faster than the speed limit.
If you're so suggestable that a simple guitar riff can send you hurtling down the road at NASCAR speeds, then I pray to whatever gods might be inclined to listen that you never discover
System of a Down.
Or eat a Big Mac. Because we all know the damage suffered by the unwitting victims of
cow crack.
Of course, the more astute members of the audience might've noticed something at the very beginning here: I said "press release," not "news story." Which means that this tale of traffic troubles was most likely created by the record label in question, possibly from one or two inciting incidents.
By the way, if you'd like to hear the demon riff, it's playing on their
oh-so-professional web page.
Oh, and those thousands of claims across eleven states? Here's the really funny part.
It states in the press release that the company will "pay for some of the fines as a courtesy." Not all fines will be paid, and no guidelines are set forth as to how this determination will be made.
So, if you get a ticket, claim you were listening to this song in the hopes of getting out of the fine while simultaneously boosting their silly PR stunt. And, if no one's watching too closely, they never have to pay
any fines, because they can just say that you didn't meet their criteria.
Bonus points, I suppose, for finding a way to recruit the masses of idiots nationwide into your army of willing marketing zombies.
Someone's working on
a containment facility for nuclear waste that will be clearly marked as dangerous waste, regardless of language or time period. The intention is that when our distant descendents dig it up, they'll know they shouldn't crack it open, even without the benefit of a dead languages scholar.
They'll use a variety of languages —
a lá the Rosetta Stone — and universal pictograms to convey the meaning. Which makes sense, really; but begs one very intriguing question...
What does a pictogram for "danger of horrible, blistering death" look like?
Wikis* seem to be the preferred 'Net experiment these days. The most recent colossal failure belongs to the British.
The British Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs decided to try a wiki to encourage discussion about environmental issues. After a couple of weeks, it was
crushed under the weight of vandalism. The L.A. Times
achieved a similar result last year, when they made a wiki of an article about the Iraq war. Wikipedia itself
has come under fire several times — most famously for a
malicious edit in the biography of John Seigenthaler — and its owners have been frequently forced to implement new ways to keep the wolves at bay.
Wired Online, though, managed to pull off
a more or less successful experiment with an article about — appropriately enough — wikis. And there has been at least one study published in
Nature defending Wikipedia's accuracy and placing it on par with the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
So they can work, if you can hit the very narrow channel between finding enough people to make use of the collective intelligence and avoiding attracting the attention of the terminally bored.
Or...
Did the DERFA and L.A. Times wikis actually fail? They didn't accomplish precisely what the creators intended, that's for sure. But if the vandals outweigh the legitimate contributors, is that failure or a commentary on the subject matter? Or presentation? Or implementation?
* A quick explanation: Wikis are websites that can be edited by the public. The idea is that the collective intelligence of the audience will outweigh, or at least provide a useful couterpoint to, the intelligence of one or two designated experts. Consensus is achieved through the interplay of conflicting viewpoints, and inaccuracy is weeded out by an army of invested editors.
I love a really unique puzzle game. The more it makes my brain hurt, the happier I am (not that you'd know it from the swearing, snarling, and hurling of nearby objects).
So I was very happy when Wired's
Table of Malcontents lead me over to
this thing.
Here's what I like about it:
- You have absolutely no idea what to do. The puzzle starts from the moment you load it, because there are no instructions and no obvious course of action. It just looks at you and says, "play!"
- I've never seen a game like it. The closest analogue is something like Contraption, but that's not quite it. It's a very original idea.
- It's well designed. Gameplay aside, it just looks nice. It's nothing really earth-shattering, but it's a fairly professional package. The sound is nice, although sparse.
I was kind of bummed to discover that it's just the one puzzle, so it's not more than a short distraction (I think it took me about half an hour), but it's really good for what it is.
