Going Green(er)

KATE AND I HAVE BEEN READING the NY Times Magazine Green Issue from several weeks back, and it's prompted us to make another wave of changes in our habits (the first wave came after we watched An Inconvenient Truth: CF lightbulbs, insulated water heater, and wind energy from our utility). What we're doing:

• A set of changes as part of the renovation we're doing to our house this summer: New energy-efficient windows, furnace, and water heater. During the demolition we've also learned our home was not insulated (!) other than by its siding, so we'll be adding fill insulation throughout.
• Buying groceries that are as close to local, organic, and seasonal as possible, with a preference on seasonal.
• To help with that, joining a local produce CSA.
• Using cloth bags at the grocery.
• Buying products with the least possible packaging.
• Leaving off the furnace and aircon as much as possible (helped greatly now that, due to the construction on our home, we have no aircon!).
• Line-drying much of our laundry.
• Leaving the lights off as much as possible.
• Using cruise control in the car as much as possible, and leaving the current MGP monitors on so we can better judge our consumption.

There are other changes we hope to make soon: Walking to any destination within a mile's distance is one. I've also been toying with getting a bike or scooter (90 mpg!) for local trips. Next summer we'll be planting a large garden in the yard, and will begin composting as much of our garbage as possible (probably now) in anticipation of the garden (with one of these).

The real problem is air travel, and my personal carbon footprint is enormous as a result (over 50,000 lbs of C02). I'm not certain how I'm going to crack that, save via carbon offsets. But there has to be a way ...

SOMETIMES, you find sports writing that borders on transcendent. Today in the NYT Op-Ed section we find one of those time. And in the event that the link is registration required or subscription sequestered or some such thing, I'm pasting the text in below. Alas, indeed.

Why We Mourn Barbaro

By JEFF NEUMAN

Published: February 1, 2007

 

HE never talked about himself in the third person.

He didn’t trash-talk, taunt or hang on the rim. Down the stretch of the Kentucky Derby, he didn’t turn and point at Bluegrass Cat, and he didn’t somersault over the finish line. After crossing the line, he didn’t pull out a Sharpie and autograph his saddle for his business manager.

He never referred to his handlers as “my supporting cast.”

He never tried to renegotiate his contract. He never turned down an eight-figure offer by saying, “I’ve got a family to feed, man.”

His only tattoo was discreetly hidden.

He did no commercials for cellphone plans, credit cards, fast food chains or time shares.

He never had his agent issue a statement in which he apologized “if anybody took my actions the wrong way.”

He never appeared before a Congressional committee and lied about his steroid use.

He never dated Paris Hilton.

He was never involved in an altercation with a belligerent fan outside a club at 4 in the morning. He was never arrested for drunken driving. He did not own an unregistered handgun.

He never claimed he’d been disrespected. He never left his competitors in the dust and then said, ”I didn’t have my A game.” He did not attribute his victories to the glory of his personal Savior.

Isiah Thomas never tried to trade for him.

He was never a presenter at the ESPYs.

He never claimed he was misquoted in his autobiography. He never confessed to a double murder in the subjunctive tense.

He trained, ate and slept. He ran his races, gave his best effort, accepted plaudits graciously, went back to his stall and prepared to do it again the next time out.

He never fathered multiple offspring out of wedlock. Alas.

      

"EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS." That's the lead in this New York Times Magazine article on nutrition, which frankly, is the clearest item I've read on the topic. The bottom line: If current wisdom on what and how to eat appears contradictory, confusing, and poorly researched, it's because it is. One of the best items from the article:

Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

That's #1 from a 10 point summary that wraps the piece. Well worth reading.

AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with Dean Karnazes, the man who ran 50 marathons in 50 days.

If you're a basket weaver, that's fine. Be the best darn basket weaver there is. Throw yourself wholeheartedly at your craft. Immerse yourself in what you love, and you'll find fulfillment.

Good advice.

A HOST OF GREAT STUFF recently at Chris Anderson's Long Tail. Just keep scrolling, but pay particular attention to No Visible Tech and In Praise of Radical Transparency. (And Economics of Abundance, too, which has scrolled off the page.)

The Desolate Wilderness and the Fair Land

EVERY YEAR SINCE 1961, on the day before Thanksgiving the Wall Street Journal has published two pieces on its opinion page: The Desolate Wilderness, And The Fair Land. Since 1995 or so it's been a tradition of mine to read both, and take them as cause for reflection on the great bounty of this land, the great bounty in my life, and the courage that forging into uncharted lands, be they as grand as a new continent or as personal as a new career, requires.

Sadly, and as you know if you tried to follow the links above, both articles are in the subscription-required portion of the Journal. And so, in keeping with the second part of my tradition, I publish them here for you. I've been a loyal customer of the journal for many years; I hope that in the spirit of giving thanks they won't mind.

Happy Thanksgiving.

******************

The Desolate Wilderness

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

And the Fair Land

Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.

This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.

And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.

So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.

For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.

His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.

How can they turn from melancholy when at home they see young arrayed against old, black against white, neighbor against neighbor, so that they stand in peril of social discord. Or not despair when they see that the cities and countryside are in need of repair, yet find themselves threatened by scarcities of the resources that sustain their way of life. Or when, in the face of these challenges, they turn for leadership to men in high places -- only to find those men as frail as any others.

So sometimes the traveler is asked whence will come their succor. What is to preserve their abundance, or even their civility? How can they pass on to their children a nation as strong and free as the one they inherited from their forefathers? How is their country to endure these cruel storms that beset it from without and from within?

Of course the stranger cannot quiet their spirits. For it is true that everywhere men turn their eyes today much of the world has a truly wild and savage hue. No man, if he be truthful, can say that the specter of war is banished. Nor can he say that when men or communities are put upon their own resources they are sure of solace; nor be sure that men of diverse kinds and diverse views can live peaceably together in a time of troubles.

But we can all remind ourselves that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure. For that reminder is everywhere -- in the cities, towns, farms, roads, factories, homes, hospitals, schools that spread everywhere over that wilderness.

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.

AN INTERESTING NEW TOPIC at Tufte's site: Grand truths about human behavior. Worth tracking with an aggregator.

How to Write a Review Redux

Last winter I posted a review a friend of my brother had written about Tamarak ski resort. The title was "How to Write a Review," and it was a wonderful example, a

sprawling, wandering trail of witty commentary, keen observation, cultural asides, and ski-bum jargon.

The same gent recently reviewed the Rolling Stones show in Amsterdam, and it's another instant classic. Here it is for your pleasure:

Amsterdam Arena -- Home of the Ajax futball team.   

Late 1990's industro-suburban tight white greenhouse-effect glass  dome with tubular escalator exoskeleton.  Free-form tulip field seating  paint scheme.   I arrive by subway and a five minute walk.    The show is fully sold out at 55,000 -- at least half are on  the  pitch.  I have  stage-high, row 16; seat neighbors were from Brussels and Utrecht.   Mixed, mostly bathed crowd of all ages. Not a glowstick in sight.   All of the seats look good despite the size of the facility -- remember  these are the people who invented the steep staircase (and  insurance!)

Stage is traditional huge stones stage - long catwalks on either  side, a mid-stage bridge and a long catwalk straight into the field.   Giant box fans on either side of the stage used to blow Keith into  position.  Swooping silver-faced scaffolding straddles the stage  staggering up several stadia -- the 700-euro people climb in orderly Dutch  fashion into these SRO "on-stage" positions 15 minutes before  showtime.

Euros whistle rather than clap to signal "get on with it  already."    A weak wave makes a few rounds.     No one is seat hopping despite the lax seat-ushers (with  nice uniforms) who are later singing and dancing along with all of the rest of  the crowd.  Tall slender cups of Heineken and Grolsch are popular with  old people and teeagers alike -- Dutch nationalism in action.    Fast-moving concessions lines only take pre-loaded Arena cards  available self-serve along the corridors or from roving bluetooth-sporting  uniformed kiosk dammes.   But if these euros are so smart -- why no  ice?

MC: "From Kingston Jamacia, Toots and the  Maytals" 
Pressure Drop  -- Pressure gonna drop on you!   (Harder They Come Soundtrack)
La LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa La Reggae Music
Higher & Higher -- Toots is grooving
Come Come Mary
Scat Sing Along -- Euro scat rasta
Got Soul Its So
The Perfect Wonder (Harder They Come)
Heidi Hi Heidi Ho ("Heidi Heidi Heidi Hi, Heidi Heidi Heidi  Ho….") 
No Sign
Working Up 
Toots thanks the RS and makes a dedication:   Sing All the Songs
Do What I Say Son

It is still light out when the Stones take the stage.
Rolling Stones:  Mick Jagger purple sequins, Keith Richards  silver sequins, Ron Wood blue sequins, Charlie Watts orange (oranje!) golf  shirt.

Jumpin Jack Flash -- crowd instantly going nuts on the "It’s a  gas!" parts. 
Mick takes a refined bow.  "Hallo Holland!   Amsterdam you are always so nice to us!"  Then he says something in  Dutch and they all laugh.   I had forgotten that Mick Jagger is the  world's rock star -- he's lithe and energetic.  Prancing all over the  stage -- skipping at times.  He seems grateful and happy.  He says  something in Dutch after just about each song -- this is not memorized patter,  he is telling jokes and they are laughing.  I read in the paper the next  day that the Rolling Stones have been incorporated in The Netherlands since  1971 to take advantage of their low artist income tax rates -- in other words,  Mick has been to Amsterdam before….

Only Rock and Roll -- crowd on the "Like it, Like it, Yes I do!"  parts. 
Oh No Not You Again.
Bitch -- horn section featured.  "Love -- it’s a bitch, all  right."
Sway. 
As Tears Go By -- Ron and Keith acoustic guitars.   Wild Horses tease. 
I Walk the Streets of Love.  I speak  with two groups of people the next day who saw various members of the band  walking around Amsterdam that afternoon.  One man and his son say they  stopped dead in their tracks when they saw Mick walking through the lobby of  the Amstel Hotel.

Tubling Dice -- Ron on lead.
The Night Time is the Right Time to Be with the One You  Love. 
Band Intros -- 2 sax, trombone, trumpet, 3 back up  singers, piano, bass, Ron, Charlie, Keith.    All of the Stones  are rock-star skinny.

Keith takes the mic and "says" something in Dutch and they pretend  to understand him.  He "says" a few sentences in Engligh including "I'll  leave the trees alone."  Mick costume change to pink sequin baseball  jacket.

Slipping Away on Me -- Keith on "lead."
Before They Make You Run -- Keith on "lead."
Miss You -- Mick keeps the "wo wo wo wo wo wo wo's" going long  after the song ends.
Stage breaks and front half travels out to middle-back of the  field. 
Rough Justice.
Mick makes a Paradisio reference to the intimate setting of the  back of the field (one degree of Phish separation -- I had earlier that day  confirmed the Phish Paradisio poster in the Grey Area pointed out to me by  Paul B.)

Get Off of My Cloud -- house lights up on the "Hey (hey)!  You  (you)'s!" 
Honky Tonk Woman.  Stage retreats; Mick  costume change to red sequined tuxedo and top hat.
Sympathy For The Devil.  "When after all, it was you and me…"   Kind of like Friend of the Devil in a blender, only with more dancing  and audience ""who who's!"  Mick's falsetto is perfect.  Give this  man a tony award.  He clearly carries the band.

Start Me Up -- He's skipping and prancing all over the place.     I really had never considered that Mick might be gay, but  then I remember that he's English!  Can You Hear Me Knocking  tease.

Brown Sugar.  Wrapped presents are passed through the crowd to  the security guys who put them on the stage. Crowd going wild on the "Ya! Ya!  Ya! Ya! Whoo's!"

More Dutch to close the show including "Bedankt!  Dank u  wel!" 

E: Mick costume change -- blue  sequins. 
You Cant Always Get What You Want -- house lights  on acapella sing along.
Mick costume change -- white shirt!
I  Cant Get No Satisfaction.   "Hey hey hey, that's what I say!"   All kinds of flowers being passed up that secutiry is gently placing on  the stage.

Fireworks.

Mick is certainly a sight to see -- even at sixty.  Consider  the "small" show they are doing in [location] on [date] -- tickets on sale [date].  See you there. 

The guy should really start posting to a blog ...

For The Curious

I've been thinking about getting my private pilot license recently. It's something I've wanted to do since I was a kid, and through the years I've had enough real and simulated cockpit time that I could manage if my US Airways crew ever happens to eat the fish and become incapacitated half way to Denver.

Anyway, today I came across the FAA's Aeronautical Information Manual, which is available online. Learn the basics from the comfort of your own home.

For what it's worth, I found the link while reading this post at Edward Tufte's site. An information designer doing pro bono work to reduce runway incursions. Cool. Reading the responses to Tufte's post, it's also an excellent example of how communities quickly form on the Web, very often with truly synergistic and beneficial outputs.

And before you give me a hard time about using a variant of "synergy," I'm using it in the true sense of it's original meaning, rather than the buzzword commonly applied to anything one hopes to be productive: The combined power of a group of things when they are working together which is greater than the total power achieved by each working separately. (Cambridge)

Howl

Today a colleague was sharing her holiday trip to San Francisco when Allen Ginsburg's Howl crossed my mind. I smiled; it's got one of the best opening set of stanzas in poetry:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving

  hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry

  fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the

  starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Full text (parts 1 and 2) here. There's also an excellent account of its first reading, by a (likely) drunken Ginsburg, here.
 

All Thumbed Out

Reading the newspaper -- a real one, printed on real paper -- is still a ritual in our house. One of the first articles I read over my morning coffee today was this piece by Adam Bryant. (Free registration required.) It's a letter to his BlackBerry, which he seems to have stopped carrying.

It's been a few weeks since we parted company. I'm sure you've forgotten me by now and are still hard at work for my former employer.

That's good. No hard feelings. I've decided I'm actually better off without you.

Why? Because even though you made me feel more productive, I'm realizing that in fact you made me less so.

...

Sure, I'm to blame, too. I made some mistakes. I liked your alarm feature, so I kept you bedside. I'd check you late at night. I'd check you first thing in the morning. Sometimes I'd even check you on Sundays, and often regretted it.

But you gave me something to do in idle moments, while I was standing in line or waiting for a train. With you, there was no dead time. It seemed great for a while.

Living without you, though, there's more time to think.

Daydreaming is an underappreciated pastime, and I've been doing more of it since we broke up, often to good effect. The idea percolator works better with fewer distractions.

I realize that not everyone can let go like I did. People who are on the road a lot, in particular, are still smitten.

But here's a thought. What if they cooled it just for a week? Wouldn't that leave more time to puzzle through what-ifs and how-abouts, the kind of questions that help us keep a step ahead of the competition?

Spot on. Of course, continuous partial attention is the fault of the user, not the technology. (As a quick aside, when I saw Edward Tufte speak last year he noted only two industries call their customers "users": tech and illicit drugs.) These things have an off button, and the wise person uses them frequently, turning a way for the world to reach them into a way for them to reach the world.

It's sort of like the note I wrote on silence a few days ago. "White space," I call it. Long stretches of uninterrupted time to think, stretching before you like a large, blank sheet of thick butcher paper. White space. Open for anything.

In 30 minutes or so I'm going to head to the Perkiomen Trail for my weekly Sunday long run. Today it's 10 miles, which will take me between an hour and 25 and an hour and 30 minutes to complete. It's sunny today, and not too hot, and the Perky is a lovely trail that follows a wide river, runs under a nave of arching trees, along fields and through a small town or two -- it's beautiful. I'll have my iPod on and listen to some good music along the way, but best of all I'll be alone to think, without interruption or conversation, the more distracting parts of the mind focused on the small task of left-foot right-foot, for an hour and a half.

This is the best part of my week (at least, the best part I don't spend with Katherine). Somewhere today, along the trail, I will see a beautiful thing. Somewhere along the trail, the music in my ear and the light in my eye and the endorphins in my brain will combine to form a thrill of soaring emotion in my heart. And best of all, somewhere along the trail I will have a great idea. Certainly one. Perhaps two. It's the white space that brings that idea along; the lack of interruption and low level focus of the run.

It's a wonderful thing, something I'd encourage you to have, too. Find your white space. Unroll the page. Give your brain a chance to draw.

The Forgotten War

Michael Yon:

Despite that there are firefights – big ones – occurring frequently, the soldiers are calling Afghanistan the Forgotten War.  I am calling it The About to Bite us War because like a shark this beast has many rows of teeth.

The money from the massive opium harvest in 2006 will buy weapons and influence that will be used against us in the spring of 2007. The heroin will create thousands of new addicts twitching with crime to feed their habits. Among the fast growing groups of heroin users on American streets, 8th graders are making their presence known.

Read it all, and more.

The Silent Places

Friend Todd K. forwards this Men's Health article: "Is Your Life Too Loud?" It is. What's more, it seems the noise can kill you.

Though we may not notice noise and may even willingly expose ourselves to it, our brains generally interpret loud sounds as a threat. "Any sound in the hazardous range increases the stress response in your body," says Robert Fifer, Ph.D., director of audiology at the University of Miami's Mailman Center for Child Development. Among the physiological responses to loud noise that studies have documented: increased heart and breathing rates, heightened blood pressure, greater levels of stress hormones in the bloodstream, and increased brain activity.

Now, on one hand, this sort of reaction is a good thing, since it's what makes us turn our heads when we hear a blaring car horn or wake up when we hear a loud noise in our houses at night. But putting ourselves on this kind of alert all the time—which can happen when we're constantly exposed to loud noise—has a debilitating effect on the body.

In 1998, for example, Cornell University environmental psychologist Gary Evans, Ph.D., published a study of third- and fourth-graders who lived near the newly opened airport in Munich, Germany. (Half of the children lived under flight patterns; the other half lived in quieter areas.) His findings: The children in the chronic-noise group experienced significant increases in blood pressure and levels of stress hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol) over two years, while the children in the quiet areas showed no significant changes. Four years later, Evans published a second study involving another group of kids near the same airport, this one finding that those routinely exposed to airplane noise had impaired reading ability and long-term memory. "Stress hormones can cause any individual—child or adult—to become fatigued much faster than normal," says Fifer. "When that happens, the person can't learn effectively."

For those scoring at home, increased cortisol levels can lead to heart disease, loss of sleep, and clinical depression. Speaking of depression:

"If you lived in a city in the late 19th century, the sounds you heard were mostly organic—people talking, animals making noise," she says. In contrast, by the 1920s, the sounds of the city had become mostly mechanical—factories groaning and grunting, cars putt-putting around the streets, even an occasional plane sputtering overhead. The racket was so loud—or perhaps so foreign to all those delicate, 19th-century-reared ears—that anti-noise groups actually sprang up in the 1920s, though in the end their solution was less about making things quieter than about finding ways to block out the noise through architecture and various other methods. "This was really when the study of acoustics took off," says Thompson, whose book, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, surveys these earliest attempts to muffle the country.

In the eight decades since, the world has become exponentially louder. Consider Gordon Hempton's findings: In 1984, he identified 21 places in his home state of Washington that were essentially quiet—that is, they experienced no manmade noise for at least 15 minutes a day. By 1989, thanks to more cars and more air traffic, that number had dropped to just three places.

I have always been drawn to quiet places -- it's why southern Utah is one of my favorite places on Earth. It's why during a night SCUBA dive I often turn off the flashlight and hover silently in the dark. I think it's a test of a person's character, how they deal with silence. Left to the noise of your own thoughts you're forced to hear them, and the nature of that discourse reflects the life you've led and the path you're on. I love the noise of silence because it's an aural gut check for my being on the right path.

So, a new guideline: More silence in 2006.

A Most Excellent Hoax

When fantasy and reality co-exist, courtesy the Internet. Just keep clicking the links. I have to say the responsible parties have set a new standard in Interhoaxdom.

The Power We Keep

I keep a list of quotes as a memo in my PDA / email software and add quotes I like as I find them. A friend and client recently forwarded this quote by Daniel Webster, which I've added to the list:

"If all my talents and powers were to be taken from me by Providence, and I had my choice of keeping but one, I would unhesitantly ask to be allowed to keep the Power of Speaking, for through it, I would quickly recover all the rest."

As a guy who makes his hay in communication, I couldn't agree more.

Rebecca's Right

REBECCA BLOOD: Right again.

Tags: rebecca blood

Dave Weinberger's Fact-Based Ethics for Bloggers

DAVID WEINBERGER OFFERS a "fact-based" ethics for bloggers:

Coming up with a "code of ethics" for bloggers makes about as much sense as coming up with a code of ethics for people who say things. The diversity of blogs makes a code of ethics not even a pipe dream but a pipe nightmare ...

... There are some facts about blogs that pertain pretty generally, and those facts — features of the landscape, if you prefer — give rise to what I think are some reasonable ethical expectations.

"Reasonable expectations" is an excellent way to put it. Another might be "General Principles," which I take as an answer to the question: "You have free reign to do whatever you choose so long as ..." [1]. David's ethics as a response to that question: "A a blogger you have free reign to do whatever you choose so long as ..."

• You "correct errors because erroneous posts may be around for many years."
• "When you change a post, indicate that you have done so to prevent posts linked to it from becoming incomprehensible."
• "Unless there is some reason not to, [you] provide some contextual information about who you are, or who your pseudonym is."
• You are "transparent about relationships that may influence you, perhaps by providing a persistent link to a disclosure statement of some sort."
• You "respond in a way that tries to find the common ground rather than assuming there is none."

Works for me. Read it all.

1. A picked up the "free reign" structure for identifying principles in David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Tags: david weinberger, blogger ethics

* Scheduled post, written earlier.
 

Irving's Reflections On Blogging (And A Few Of My Own)

IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER, Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, has posted a very nice reflection of his first year blogging.

In my very first entry, which was posted less than eight months ago on May 16, I said that I anticipated an exciting journey.  It has been that and then some.  For years I had resisted starting a blog because I thought that it would have been primarily an exercise in narcissism.  But in the last year, I was frankly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging, and by the number of people I knew and respected who had started personal blogs. So, when colleagues at IBM encouraged me to start one myself earlier this year (when we launched the IBM blogging initiative), I finally took the plunge.

After a while, I developed a point of view on what blogging was about for me.  At heart, blogging is very personal, intensely so.  After all, this is all about writing: deciding what you want to write about, organizing your thoughts on the chosen subject, and finally, finding the needed "quality time" to put your thoughts down on "paper."  I did not anticipate how much effort writing this blog would take.  I also did not anticipate how much I would enjoy doing it.

The sentiment resonates. I started blogging in 2002, shortly after we began using blogs at CRA as the heart of our intranet (and began recommending them as an internal communication channel to clients). I, too, worried about narcissism -- mine -- and at one point even published a completely anonymous blog with no traffic counter just to reassure myself that my primary motivation wasn't the attention of others. I found that it's not (although the attention is nice); for me it's a combination of a desire to share information and the creative outlet the writing and site coding afford.

He's also right that it's intensly personal. Not just in putting a bit of yourself out there for the world to see (or criticise), but also in that regular posting makes you significantly more accessible to the world courtesy Google's (and others') indexing of your site. I first realized this when Command Post started to generate press inquries, and it was reaffirmed when I was contacted by Renita Clark -- a woman I'd never met, but about whose deceased son I had written a post. As I wrote then:

The intersection of blogs and powerful search engines reduced Renita and me to one degree of separation … two independent events—a journal-style post and a web search—immediately linked two strangers in an unmediated exchange. It’s an extremely powerful thought: as we post, we are indexed. As we are indexed, we are made searchable. As we are made searchable, we become accessible to the full universe of users.

As we blog, we become prone to the world … we are no longer participants in the electronic network, we become part of the global SOCIAL network. Blog regularly and the nodes and degrees surely diminish, one by one, until the entire world is just outside the room, only one click away from walking through your virtual door.

Similarly (but more eloquently), Irving writes:

Blogging should also be considered as part of a broader and very important shift in the world – the rise of social networks.  Many view this trend as part of the evolution of the Web, generally referred to as Web 2.0.  I prefer collaborative innovation – but whatever you call this phenomenon, it represents a major change in how people and institutions function and interrelate.  The Internet has now emerged as a platform for people to find and communicate with each other, share knowledge on a wide variety of topics, and self-organize themselves into productive communities to work on and solve problems.

It's a big part of the experience, and an even larger part of the consequences of blogs as a medium. I won't belabor the hows and whys -- for that, read Cluetrain -- but the simple electronic "ping" of someone finding you via Google is the sound of the earth moving beneath our feet.

Tags: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, blogging, new media

JoHo: Wikipedia

DAVID WEINBERGER offers an excellent deconstruction of the Seigenthaler / Wikipedia affair in his latest JoHo; very worth reading. My favorite passage:

The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions  — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance: If you claim to know X, then you've also been claiming that you're right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline ... those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.

Technorati tags: JoHo, Seigenthaler, Wikipedia.

* Scheduled post, written earlier.

How To Write A Review

MY BROTHER IS SKI PATROL in Spokane when he's not being a sharp country lawyer. He also associates with a crowd of similar esquire-skier types, one of whom recently sent around an email review of a new resort in Idaho: Tamarack. It's a great review -- a sprawling, wandering trail of witty commentary, keen observation, cultural asides, and ski-bum jargon. I wish all product and service reviews were like this, and I post it here for your pleasure.

Skied this new resort yesterday.  Big time spud money being thrown around.  At this point the place is all yurts and quads so they have their priorities in order. 

Location is 15 miles south of McCall across Cascade Lake from formerly-authentic Donnelly Idaho.  4:45 drive time door to door.  Tamarack is a long ridge type of place, with all the runs coming down off the top ridge and a nice straight fall line.  Reminded me of a slice of Vail without the zoomanity.  1800 vertical quad to midway and another 1200 vertical quad to the top, so its no Whistler, but it is a Snowbird (vert wise Johnny, don’t elevate.)   Easy place to everest before lunch.  A third quad on the right has not enough cover at the bottom yet to open.   Three more HSDQ's are dashed lines on the trail map and I was told these will materialize for next season.   Lots of rollercoasters like Panorama or Warm Springs with many opportunities for unintentional gelandesprings.   Many whooping gulleys like Big White.  Natural mid-Idaho glades.  Not too much johnnycountry or peligro precipicio, but the opposite west facing side of the ridge looks promising for you kids with all sorts of "This is your Decision Point" warning signs.  Zero (I mean zero) wait lines.  They are capacity-controlled, but even with the Idaho Rail Jam going on (bring your own straw) you never even had to stop to load the quads.

This is a "have a fresh baked cookie," Jack Johnson playing, magnet ticket in your pocket, synchronized robotic snowmakers, parking attendants carrying your stuff, bulldozer-built/grass planted runs sort of place.  Does not seem poised for complete condodisneyfication like the Canyons or Snowmass, but there is no doubt in the 21st century that skier revenue is superfluous to a ski resort.  This one is not skimping on the lift infrastructure presumably paid for by real estate -- but not crowding the runs with the pre-divorce private lodges at this time anyway.  Even the rich people in Boise cant afford Sun Valley anymore, so this must be their new cash dumping ground.  McCall already has the jetport and the old cabin priest lake type of feel.  Brundage Ski Resort has joined in the excess and put in its own quad for its 1800 vertical feet -- you drive right by it north of McCall at about 4:00 hours from Spokane. 

So, put these places on your list.  They have quad fever and that of course is quite healthy.

History of the Apple Key

IF YOU'VE WONDERED where the interesting icon for the "Apple key" came from, here's your answer (via TAB). (Those of you who are Windows-only are probably wondering what this post is about. My advice ... give yourself the chance to learn ...)
* This is a scheduled post written earlier. I'm likely on the phone at the moment ...

The Future of Book Publishing

BOOK PUBLISHING CEO Michael Hyatt looks into the future and describes the perfect device for reading books in digital format and considers its consequences for the publishing industry ...

But don’t get hung up on the particulars. I’m not a hardware engineer, and I’m sure the details could be picked apart. I’m simply trying to provide a vision for what could happen. The point I’m trying to make is that some type of device is coming. It may be five years away or it could be next year. For all I know, it is in development now. Regardless, when it arrives, the publishing world as you and I know it will change dramatically.

I think he's right. That said, the "high touch" nature of books will always keep them in demand, for it's part of what makes a book a book. Michael draws some comparisons to what iPods have done to music, but prior to the iPod the delivery mechanism wasn't part of the passion: nobody equated their Beatles music with the turntable on which it played. (If anything, the iPod has reversed the field: now the iPod, with it's wonderful tactile qualities, is part of the thing to which people are loyal, and the high touch nature of the thing has brought balance to the high tech qualities of digital music.)

There are many other high touch, tactile qualities of books that people love: How they look on a shelf; the ability to look at a set of books and make a casual choice to pick one over another, thumb through it, and replace it; the ease with which you may pass the book on to another person; and not least of all, the ability to shove them in bags, pockets, briefcases ... nearly anywhere without much concern for their well-being. (John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame is here I first read about high tech / high touch; there's a nice interview with him about the topic here. A great example: we've been able to have digital readouts in cars for years, but most still have analog dials. Why? We love the high touch experience of watching them sweep as we accelerate.)

Digital books are going to happen, but I think they'll be more focused as a Google-able research base. For every-day reading, most of us will still favor paper.

* This is a scheduled post, written a day or two ago.

Red On Blue

WHILE CHECKING OUT THE LATEST at Ask E.T. I surfed to this interesting collection of maps and cartograms[1] of the 2004 presidential election. Guess what: we're purple.

1. Cartogram: A map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.

Carville Steals My Line

I THINK James Carville is sounding smarter all the time.

Great Stuff By IWB @ IBM

IBM VP OF TECHNICAL STRATEGY AND INNOVATION Irving Wladawsky-Berger has so many interesting posts up that you should just start at the top and read down. His transparency post alone is a worth a visit ...

I really think that building a culture of trust should be top of mind for any business that wants to be a leader in today's environment.  In the summer of 2003, IBM employees around the world engaged in an online "ValuesJam" - a sort of internet-based town meeting -- to shape and define the values that should guide the company and its people in the years ahead.  Several thousand comments were analyzed and follow-up interviews were conducted to distill the essence of what jam participants had said into three principal values to inform everything we do.  "Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships." was one of the three chosen values, along with "Dedication to every client's success" and "Innovation that matters - for our company and for the world." 

IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano talked about the practical importance of values and trust in a note to employees: "Clearly, leading by values is very different from some kinds of leadership demonstrated in the past by business. It is empowering, and I think that's much healthier. Rather than burden our people with excessive controls, we are trusting them to make decisions and to act based on values - values they themselves shaped. To me, it's also just common sense. In today's world, where everyone is so interconnected and interdependent, it is simply essential that we work for each other's success." 

Good advice, that.

I also had an opportunity recently to hear John Buchholz from IBM's internal communication team describe the ValuesJam. It sounds like a great process, not only for it's innovative use of new communication technology, but also for the credibility IBMers appear to have lent to the jam. (Often these types of activities turn into "leadership's in a vacuum" boondoggles; not so, it seems, at IBM.)

Read details here (note: PDF file), and see the results integrated into IBM's strategic message hierarchy here.

Lewis On NOLA

MICHAEL LEWIS OFFERS HIS ACCOUNT OF KATRINA, and he was there. He's one of my favorite contemporary non-fiction writers. What's more, if there is one voice in journalism today I would trust to give the straight story, it's Lewis'. Consider this:

Over the next few days, I checked hundreds of houses and found that none had been broken into. The story about the Children's Hospital turned out to be just that, a story. The glass door to the Rite Aid on St. Charles near Broadway - where my paternal grandfather collapsed and died in 1979 - was shattered, but the only section disturbed was the shelf stocking the Wild Turkey. The Ace Hardware store on Oak Street was supposed to have had its front wall pulled off by a forklift, but it appeared to be, like most stores and all houses, perfectly intact. Of all the stores in town, none looked so well preserved as the bookshops. No one loots literature.

Oddly, the only rumor that contained even a grain of truth was the looting of Perlis. The window of the Uptown clothing store was shattered. But the alligator belts hung from their carousel, and the shirts with miniature crawfish emblazoned on their breasts lay stacked as neatly as they had been before Katrina churned up the gulf. On the floor was a ripped brown paper sack with two pairs of jeans inside: the thief lacked both ambition and conviction.

The old houses were also safe. There wasn't a house in the Garden District, or Uptown, that could not have been easily entered; there wasn't a house in either area that didn't have food and water to keep a family of five alive for a week; and there was hardly a house in either place that had been violated in any way. And the grocery stores! I spent some time inside a Whole Foods choosing from the selection of PowerBars. The door was open, the shelves groaned with untouched bottles of water and food. Downtown, 25,000 people spent the previous four days without food and water when a few miles away - and it's a lovely stroll - entire grocery stores, doors ajar, were untouched. From the moment the crisis downtown began, there had been a clear path, requiring maybe an hour's walk, to food, water and shelter. And no one, not a single person, it seemed, took it.

This N.Y. Times Magazine piece is a must read.  (Found via the always interesting Virginia Postrel.)

Gladwell & The Ivy League

MALCOLM GLADWELL cites research suggesting that when it comes to long-term advantages, the Ivy League doesn't matter:

[W]hen you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.

“As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.”

Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school.

I'm a public-schooler myself (Utah, '92). I find Krueger's research confirming not because I didn't make Ivy (for some reason my day-it's-due, hand-scribbled, loose-leaf paper application to Brown didn't seem to impress), but because it validates what my eyes have been telling me for years. In walking the halls of top-notch companies alongside very talented professionals, I've simply never noticed an Ivy Advantage (the exception being certain investment banks on The Street, where everyone seems to have attended Princeton).

What I have noticed, time and again, is people who are serious, intelligent, and most of all, very hardworking.

This week the very serious, intelligent, and hardworking (and Princeton alum) Virginia Postrel has been vetting fact from fiction on Supreme Court appointee Harriet Miers. Among her many posts, Virginia writes:

The anti-snobbery defense of Miers is an understandable but wrong-headed one--doubly so when it comes from graduates of large, research-oriented public universities that attract great students with low tuitions. My father, a math and physics major at Davidson (a far more academically oriented school then and now than SMU), always had that same southern chip on his shoulder about the Ivy League. Then I went to Princeton, and he discovered that they really do teach you more there.

They may teach you more, but if you believe the data, it doesn't mean you learn any more, or that you make any more of what you learn. Important distinction, that.

Read the Gladwell article. It offers some fascinating history of the Ivy admissions process. (I did not know, for example, that in the 1920s Harvard dramatically changed its admission process in an effort to admit fewer Jews. Equally interesting is Gladwell's argument that the Ivy admissions offices now serve as brand managers more than anything else.)

The article also highlights our tendency to equate success with fame, fortune, or power -- a very subjective if culturally reflective framing of the topic.

When I was in high school, one of the smartest kids I knew -- and a kid with whom I had an unspoken but mutually understood rivalry -- went on to Brown (to which I had also sent my much less reasoned and poorly crafted application), while I went on to Utah.

After college, he returned to Salt Lake City and invested his Ivy League education in becoming a teacher at a local public high school. It's a school, I might add, with lots of poor and English-as-second language kids, a school with an academic focus far below the high school from which he graduated years before.

I, on the other hand, invested my Utah education in a move East, to the Big City and a small consulting firm where I could get in on the ground level. For a time, as my career and client list grew, I made favorable comparisons between our paths.

Some years ago I realized there was no comparison because we had both succeeded. Indeed, if the measure of success is the difference you make in the world, he'll likely die more successful than most of us (and most of his classmates from Brown).

It's a trite sentiment, but that doesn't mean it's untrue. Going to Harvard, or pushing your kid to go there, only guarantees that they move to Cambridge for a few years. What they make of college, and what they contribute to the world, is the stuff of the person, not the school.

LEE LEFEVER HAS SOME ADVICE on integrating business ops with an online community:

Here are three major ingredients that can enable community mobilization to work:

1. A connected group of dedicated customers interacting on a company's web site
   
2. An organizational commitment to be involved in the online community and act on the community's input
   
3. Incentives -- a way to recognize and reward those members that contribute meaningfully to the goal.

His post presents more of a model, really, but it strikes me as parsimonious (and as such, a good one). Worth reading.

A Treasure Trove

The full archive of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters, 1977-2004. Adobe Acrobat viewer (free) required.

A Logarithmic Expansion

David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, is writing a series of posts on the state of the blogoshpere. Excellent and well-crafted stuff. Start here and proceed forward. Something to note: at the end of July Technorati was tracking over 14 million blogs. Something more incredible: the number of blogs is doubling every 5 months.

That's a logarithmic expansion, folks. Soon everything in the connected world will be blogged, logged, and Googleable. Everything.

It also lends creedance to Ray Kurzweil's law of acellerating returns ...

Positioning

More from Cluetrain, this time with Doc Searls on "positioning":

Positioning is not only lucrative for its practitioners, it’s also fun, since it’s usually done on a blank piece of paper. "Who do we want to be?" asks the positioning expert. "Are we the maker of the world’s finest timepieces? No, maybe we’re the people who keep business on time. Ooh, maybe we’re the company that’s making punctuality into a fashion accessory!" Undoubtedly, someone will trump these suggestions by saying, "We’re not really about watches at all," and then, in a solemn voice: "We’re the Time Company."

Often, "positioning exercises" become expensive sojourns into corporate psychology. The consultant gets to spend time with one group leader after another, performing the role of corporate shrink. The resulting data is impossible to connect, but that doesn’t matter, because the goal is only to come up with a "statement." And all that statement has to be is marginally different from every other company’s faked-up statement. Never mind that nobody in the marketplace gives a damn about any company’s positioning statement. It only matters that this statement will "drive the strategy," which will be yet another advertising and PR bombing campaign.

Don't know if that resonated with you, but it did with me. Not that companies shouldn't have a clear understanding of their mission, vision, values, and strategy -- they must, and they must also be able to communicate those parts of the big picture with clarity. But the messages have to be authentic, and they have to enacted--in behavior and in policy--or they're just corporate spin waiting to turn into threats to corporate reputation and leadership credibility.

The Cracking Wall Of Disagreeable Fear

I've been reviewing Cluetrain recently, and along the way was struck by this passage (written by David Weinberger):

A couple of months later, we hired a Chief Operating Officer to manage our growth. On purpose he was a counter-cultural figure in the company: a hard-bitten, ultra-realistic guy with a relentlessly positive attitude applied as a fresco to mask a cracking wall of disagreeable fear.

"A hard-bitten, ultra-realistic guy with a relentlessly positive attitude applied as a fresco to mask a cracking wall of disagreeable fear." That's gotta be one of the best personality descriptions written.

That passage comes from a section David pens about deadlines, and how they do and don't motivate people in the Internet economy. It's worth reading, too (scroll about a third of the way down the page, or just do a "find" for "cracking wall").

Know Your Rights

The Electronic Frontier Found