The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve noticed lately that increasingly irrelevant results are topping out Google searches. It’s frustrating to see the once vaunted PageRank technology start to fail in the face of determined spammers and quasi-spammers.

For example, I was looking for places to have brunch is Roslindale, where we’ll be moving in August. The top result in a search for “roslindale boston brunch” is this site, which seems to be nothing more than a list of keywords associated with Boston. Sometimes the top result in Google is nothing more than a page with a list of apparently random search terms, apparently attempting to draw you in to some commercial enterprise or pornography.

Is there anything we can do as netizens to fight back and help Google get back on track? I realize it’s not helping much for me to link to the abovementioned site, just further boosting its PageRank. But I wonder if the time has come to move beyond voting by linking, and create some sort of trust-based cooperative Google spam filter. That is, there could be a way to vote against a site and thus diminish its PageRank. Your negative vote, like your positive vote, would also be a function of your PageRank.

I expect the folks at Google are smarter than I and are working diligently to solve this problem. Probably the “negative vote” idea would eventually be attacked by the same evildoers who are screwing up the positive PageRank system. As a friend of mine once said, Google is good, but it’s just one person, and there are tens of thousands of people who are all aligned against it. Eventually it’s going to lose.

Ray Bradbury·, author of the acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451·, is demanding that Michael Moore· apologize and change the title of his new film·, Farenheit 9/11·, which starts playing this Friday·. Bradbury says he wants to avoid litigation, but it’s not clear he’ll back down unless the film’s title is changed, which strikes me as unlikely.

This is poor judgment on Bradbury’s part. I would be willing to put money on the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 helping sales of the book Fahrenheit 451. I’m not sure what sort of claim Bradbury would make, but I assume it would be under trademark law. I can’t imagine Bradbury demonstrating: (1) that there will be any likelihood of confusion at all as to the source or origin of Moore’s film or (2) damages. Or perhaps it would be a claim for copyright infringement. I’m not aware of any cases where a copyright holder has demonstrated infringement based on similarity of title alone, but I may be mistaken.

This reminds me of the ongoing battle over DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album·, in which the Beatles’ record label has shut down distribution of a remix of the White Album. In both cases, a younger generation who may not have been exposed to the earlier work is made aware of it, and is much more likely to purchase copies of the earlier work.

Fundamentally, though, it’s not about money, it’s about control. One of the points John Zorn makes repeatedly in the documentary A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky is that you can’t control a work of art you’ve created. It’s not really “yours” any more than a child you create is “yours.” You have all these ideas about what you want your child to be and what you want your child to do, but it takes on a life of its own and you just have to let it go. I’m sure, however, that many copyright holders do not entirely share Zorn’s philosophy.

Tonight I saw A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn· at the Coolidge Corner Theatre·’s summer jazz program·, an excellent documentary about one of my favorite non-categorizable musicians·.

In the film, Zorn rails against facile attempts by critics to pin him down into a packageable description (“Ornette Coleman meets Klezmer Music”). He talks about people judging with their eyes (“Oh, trumpet, sax, bass, and drums, I know what this is”) rather than their ears, complaining that our culture is far too visually-oriented even when it comes to music.

This film is as much about the filmmaker, Claudia Heuermann, as it is about its subject. Halfway through the making of the film, John Zorn apparently refused to answer the phone or return Heuermann’s calls, and she couldn’t even locate him. So she turned the camera back on herself. But of course this is the case with all documentaries to some degree, it’s just more transparent here. In this sense, A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky was reminiscent of My Architect· (IMDB link·), the story of the son of legendary architect Louis Kahn and his journey to figure out who his absent father really was. You never find out who Louis Kahn was, but the insight into the character of his filmmaker son Nathaniel is profound.

Zorn did see the final product and approved, although enigmatically. I believe he said something like, “Nothing is changed.”

I just tried ‘evil’, and to my dismay (but not surprise) my custom built kernel is vulnerable. My system locked before I could even see the results of having pressed ‘return’ after typing the ‘evil’ command.

If you’re in charge of a public Linux system, please get patches immediately—they’ve got one for 2.6.7-rc3 as well as 2.4.25 and 2.4.26.

I wonder if the mainstream press is going to pick up on this and say “Look, Linux is just as insecure as Windows!” It’s basically impossible to get the mass media to understand that even a major exploit like this one pales in comparison to any one of the dozens of trivial Outlook or IE cracks that are circulating.

I’ve been back from the honeymoon almost a week and too busy to blog thus far while I’m working part time and studying for the bar (it often surprises civilians that law school doesn’t give you any specific bar exam preparation). But here is a “taste” of our honeymoon for your enjoyment:

We stayed at Le Chat Botté, a wonderful little bed and breakfast in North Hatley, Quebec. Every morning the innkeeper cooked a wonderful three-course breakfast for us, three days of which are captured above (each row is one day). For the first four days, we were the only guests so we got especially individualized attention. All of the meals were vegetarian, and started out with a glass of frothy fresh-squeezed juice—a different juice each day. The garnishes always came from the innkeeper’s garden, right outside the dining room window. I was going to try to put captions to explain what the dishes were, but I don’t remember all the subtleties so I’ll just have to leave it to your imagination.

Okay, I lied. One more blog entry—but only because the honeymoon hasn’t started yet.

We’re currently driving down Route 89 in New Hampshire on the way to our wedding in Vermont, with our friends (Greg, Dylan, Ken, Nirmal, and Steve—all five GNU/Linux users) in the car behind us. When we stopped at the New Hampshire liquor store (famous for cheap, tax free alcohol), we decided to set up an ad hoc WiFi network between the cars with essid ‘wedding’. I had just copied my 60 gigabytes or so of music to my laptop for the trip, so now as we drive up Route 89 I’ve set up a server so they can listen to whatever interests them.

And this area doesn’t even get cell phone service, so the only way we can communicate between the cars is SMTP. Actually, it turns out it was more efficient to set up an ssh account for the other car on my laptop so we can use ytalk locally on my laptop.

I haven’t been blogging for the past couple of weeks, and won’t for the next couple of weeks either, so here’s a quick life update and explanation for the radio silence.

In the last week, I’ve gotten a post-graduation job at an intellectual property firm, Wolf, Greenfield, and Sacks; I graduate from Northeastern Law School tomorrow morning; I’m going to sign the papers to buy a house in Roslindale tonight and finish up the mortgage bureaucracy tomorrow morning (during my graduation, I guess); I’m getting married on Sunday, followed by a weeklong honeymoon (during which I have covenanted not to use the Internet!).

And those are just the life-changes that are publicly-disclosable. It’s been a busy time.

Here’s the latest salvo from the Christian Coalition. I was trying to think up some witty commentary on this, but I think it’s funny enough without any exegesis:

LEFT-WING FEDERAL JUDGE JOSEPH TAURO AFFIRMS 4 RENEGADE MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME COURT JUSTICES WHO ARE FORCING HOMOSEXUAL “MARRIAGES” ON AMERICA SET TO BEGIN ON MONDAY, MAY 17TH
On Thursday, a left-wing federal judge in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, declined to grant an emergency stay on homosexual “marriages” set to begin in Massachusetts on Monday, May 17th. Matthew Staver, who is one of the attorneys representing 11 Massachusetts lawmakers and a Catholic activist said regarding the federal judge’s decision: “We will appeal this case as far as necessary to ensure that the separation-of-powers principle is upheld in Massachusetts. The Republican form of government must be restored so the people can have a chance to define marriage”. Four Justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Court led by ultra-liberal Chief Justice Margaret Marshall in a 4-3 decision, tyrannically overstepped its authority as it unilaterally redefined marriage law to allow homosexual “marriages” in its November 18, 2003 Goodridge decision. Massachusetts Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw, leader of one of the most liberal Episcopal dioceses in the country, actually is banning his diocese clergy from solemnizing homosexual “marriages” stating that “…marriage in the Episcopal Church is between a man and a woman”. Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-225-3121 or you can go to http://www.cc.org/legis/contactcongress.html and urge your Congressman and two Senators to co-sponsor the Federal Marriage Amendment that will finally help stop the judicial tyranny in America.

Nice use of adjectives, at least.

Here is my Hackergotchi. I’ve never been too adept at The Gimp, but I think it’s not too bad, right? The real problem is that it’s hard to have a beard and a proper drop-shadow. Maybe if I lightened up my beard a bit so the shadow is more obvious… (probably won’t look quite right in Internet Explorer, which still can’t render transparent PNGs properly).

Having to pay $815 to take the Massachusetts Bar Exam is a little like having to pay Information Retrieval Charges:

“I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayers. People want value for money. That’s why we always insist on the principal of Information Retrieval charges. It’s absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval procedures used in their interrogations.”

(cf. Brazil)