The Substantially Similar Weblog

Christopher Hitchens goes to war against religion–on a recent episode of Radio Open Source: “Religion does not say that there is a mystery. Religion says there is an answer to a mystery.” It’s an interesting observation, but, I think, wrong.

For a hyper-rationalist, Hitchens resorts to a lot of irrational attacks. If nothing else, his caustic approach is probably not winning many converts.

Although he refuses to admit it, I think his problem is really with fundamentalists, not with religion. By taking such a polemical approach, though, he is probably selling more books.

Check out his appearance on the show, as well as the follow-up on a later show (and comments).

Radio Open Source is a rare example of a successful melding of old and new media. Often traditional media efforts to create a web-based “community” around an existing show fall flat. Open Source was started as a multimedia show, though, and maybe that’s why it works.

Pete, an old high school friend and biology-project partner, recently discovered my email address and we reconnected. It occurred to me that the next generation may never experience reunion with long-lost friends: they’re all on Facebook and Myspace from middle school on up, so how will they ever lose touch in the first place?

Peter wrote to ask me the name of an Amiga game we used to play in the late 1980’s. I knew immediately which game he was asking about: Mind Walker. I remembered it as a fantastic surreal action/video game exploration of the human psyche. I think it was probably more Freudian than Jungian. Only a few games stuck with me at this level — another one was Weird Dreams. (The problem with Weird Dreams was that it was impossibly difficult to get past the level where you have to smack Dali-esque statues with flying fish. If anyone ever did, I’d like to know what happened next.)

This review gives a good summary of Mind Walker:

You are a physics professor gone mad. Your course of action? Delve into your Mind, to inspire “Ideas” by tracing “Paths of Coherent Thought”, with the help of your split ego. Then through opened-up Tubes, enter your Brain, to retrieve “Shards of Sanity”. Finally, put them back together in Subconscious.

I remember Mind Walker as having amazingly spooky and captivating graphics. Then I found this screenshot:

Oh well. I’m sure it actually was impressive at the time.

This discovery reminded of times when I’ve rediscovered a favorite food from childhood — for example, a certain type of cookie — only to find that it really isn’t very good at all. Just kind of sugary and low-quality chocolate. It’s also like going back to watch the original Jurassic Park again. The amazement is gone.

Actually, even though the Mind Walker graphics aren’t as impressive as I remember them, I’m sure it was still a great game.

Anyone have screenshots from Weird Dreams?

Esther turned two recently. She’s come a long way in language acquisition since January. Now she is a rich source of linguistics grammaticality problem sets:

Me: Do you want a hug?
Esther: Yes.

Me: Big hug or little hug?
Esther: None hug.

And, this morning:

Me: What’s better, music or rugula?
Esther: Rugula and music.

(Note that “rugula” is not actually the longest word in her vocabulary — that would probably be “arboretum.”)

Our household’s technology focus is also apparent: any small hook-like device is an “email.” For example, a bluetooth headset and a refrigerator hook magnet are both emails. Shorthand for “another book” is “i-book.”

Not to be missed: well-known enfant terrible James Grimmelmann is guest-blogging on PrawfsBlawg. His opening commentary on the relationship between law practice and computer science:

Practicing lawyers, like practicing programmers, are professional pragmatists. Both must make their cases (and case mods) out of the materials they have available; both starve or eat steak depending on whether their creations work. The day-to-day practice of law is unlikely ever to require much high theory. We can mourn that fact because it means that they look at us with suspicion, or celebrate it because it frees us to chase Truth and Beauty—and it will remain a fact either way.

Aside from the fact that I don’t eat steak, I think this is correct.

Via a commenter on James’ entry, I learned that the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is implementing a wiki (the entry page could surely use some more content). Surprisingly, it was not Posner but Easterbrook who spearheaded the effort. This is a very interesting development, but I expect it will be quite a while before any other circuit takes up the idea.

Finally, I have been meaning to write about this New York Times story describing Jonathan Coulton’s success as a musician breaking with the traditional distribution /promotional channels (via 43 folders, a productivity blog that is still on my “probation” list). Unfortunately, slashdot beat me to it. I first re-discovered Jonathan Coulton during his guest episode of the Show with Ze Frank. In any event, the article is well worth reading:

More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site…

Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140….

In total, 41 percent of Coulton’s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 percent of his income is from CD sales; 18 percent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 percent comes from T-shirts, often bought online…

Speaking of funny embeddable videos, here’s another one that will appeal to at least some segment of my readers. I don’t know if this one has already made the rounds and I’m late for the memetrain. If so, I blame the fact that I’m getting on in years.

And here, via Tikirobot, is a not-funny video about Dasher, an amazing information-efficient typing system. Again, I suspect I’m late to the party on this one:

I’ve been reading The Onion since the late 90’s when I lived in Chicago and could pick up the paper version at any street corner. Recently I’ve wondered how long they can continue given the relatively small set of story structures they tend to use. Now they’re providing video, though, and my faith is restored. They even provide convenient HTML code for embedding (although I expect this won’t translate well into my RSS feed):

In The Know: Life Before The Segway

Dewar’s is staking out a significant presence in the web video universe. I first noticed them when they sponsored the permanent archives of the Zefrank Show — now they’re everywhere.

There must be an interesting legal issue or two just about to surface with advertising in this sort of syndicated embedded video content. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet, but watch out, it’s coming.

For anyone who doubts the arrival of Spring 2007:

Update: all of the below was fixed by disabling Privoxy! Who would have guessed?

Meanwhile, I can’t for the life of me get the gallery2/wordpress integration plugin (wpg2) to work. I decided it was time to get organized and stop storing/uploading photos in a totally ad hoc fashion. When I try to validate the wpg2 installation, however, I get this error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/adam/public_html/adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/wp-admin/admin-header.php:16) in /home/adam/public_html/adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1221

When I then click to confirm that I want to validate, I get an empty page back.

No errors in apache logs.

This problem appears to have come up several times, and the most I can gather is the Gallery people point the finger at the Gallery Plugin people; the Gallery Plugin people point their finger at the Gallery people; and sometimes everyone points their finger at the WordPress people. E.g.

Not the best way to spend a beautiful spring day.

Just recently, Rachele complained about a drop in quality at our neighborhood restaurant, Salute. No sooner did she complain than the restaurant changed name, ownership, and chef. Witness the power of the blogosphere!

Geoffrey’s (link, anyone?) just opened this week is the old Roslindale location of Salute, having taken a three year hiatus from its last location in the Back Bay, and the South End before that. Back when I worked in the South End in the late 1990’s, it was one of my favorite lunch/brunch places, so I was delighted to discover they’ve reopened in Roslindale.

We were the new restaurant’s first brunch customers ever.  They open at 8am, and with a natural alarm clock that wakes us up at 6am (our daughter), we were prompt for the opening.

The brunch was great. We shared a “DonutMuffin” as an appetizer. There was enough pleasure in that pastry to equal at least half a dozen commercial-grade donuts. I had a tomato, basil, and fancy-cheese-of-some-sort quiche with a side of fresh cantaloupe. It was a very generous serving with a thick tasty crust (no toast necessary!). I was particularly impressed with the volume of fresh basil, and the juiciness of the cantaloupe. Rachele has vegetarian eggs benedict (also delicious) and Esther had a side of heart-shaped waffles, which was just right for her. The coffee was definitely on the high end for restaurant coffee (which, somehow, seems to go on a different scale from coffee-shop coffee.) Next time I’ll try a cappuccino.

All this for only $35 (including tip). The meal was comparable to (but slightly cheaper and more filling than) our other favorite brunch place, Bon Savor in Jamaica Plain. The owner/chef explained that they had moved out of the South End when the rent tripled. He’s keeping prices in the 1997-range, since the rent he is paying in Roslindale is comparable to what he paid in the South End in that era. (Although actually I’m sure other costs have gone up significantly).

The Chowhound and Universal Hub folks are also pleased. Roslindale is certainly in need of a good brunch place — although I am fond of the Blue Star Diner conceptually, in practice the service has been poor and the food irregular. We will certainly be making fewer trips to JP for brunch now.

The dinner menu also looks excellent, with several good vegetarian options. The chef also assured me the couscous dish is vegan.

We were the only people in the restaurant in the opening hour. I predict in a month the place will be packed. If so, it will be proof of this blog’s influence!

Many of us who believe in Web 2.0 (the concept, not the buzzword) have come to accept the wisdom of crowds like an article of faith. The Frontal Cortex describes a Columbia University sociology experiment that might undermine our dogma (apparently I missed it in Science):

In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

I don’t accept this one study as proof that the entire user-centric content rating system is a failure (or random), but it does highlight some of the perils of a “winner takes most” mode of cultural evolution.

There are a lot of pages out there explaining how to convert your mail from mbox to maildir. I’m going to add one more, resurrecting the “tips” section of my blog. (All the tips from my blosxom days are grouped together on one page — someday I’ll get around to breaking those up properly.)

If nothing else, I’ll never have to write these instructions in an email to someone again, instead I’ll just send them the link to this entry. I hope these steps are specific enough so anyone savvy enough to even have this problem in the first place will be able to follow them.

One thing I find consistently concerns people when converting to maildir is how to make sure no mail is lost in the transition. The steps below address that concern. It’s really not hard at all once you understand how maildir works.

First, I’m assuming you have mb2md installed and procmail support. Also, if you plan to access your mail through IMAP, your IMAP server needs to know to use ~/Maildir if ~/Mail does not exist. This is often default behavior (at least it is for Dovecot).

Finally, I assume that your inbox is in /var/mail/username, and your other mail folders are in ~/mail.

So, here goes:

1. Edit your .procmailrc. The first two lines should read:
   MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/
   This will cause all new mail to be delivered (after you save your .procmailrc) to be stored in maildir format under ~/Maildir. The key for procmail to know to use the maildir format is the trailing slash in the “DEFAULT” line. Note that under the new system, your inbox and all your folders are kept in ~/Maildir, rather than having an inbox in /var/mail and your folders under your home directory. (This is nice because it makes it easier to back up all your mail together, among other things).
2. If you have any specific procmail rules in your .procmailrc, you’ll also need to change the target folders for that. For example, if you have a spam filtering rule like this:
   :0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
spam
It needs to be changed to this:
   
:0 H
* ^X-Spam-Level: *****
.spam/
   The trailing slash, again, tells procmail to use maildir rather mbox format for delivery. The leading dot will make the folder appear properly for your IMAP client (there’s a trick I suggest below for making “dot” folders easy to access with a command line client like mutt).

   If you have mail being delivered to a nested mail folder, an additional change is needed because maildir has a flat hierarchy. So if your mail was being delivered to “misc/other/spam” the new target should be “.misc.other.spam/”.

3. Save your .procmailrc. From this point forward, all mail will be delivered to your maildir folders. You can now import all your old mail to the new folders without concern. Since maildir stores each individual message as a separate unique file, you don’t need to worry about any overwriting issues while you are making the transition. New mail will be delivered to newly named files; old mail will be imported to other, unique, newly named files.
4. Import your mail folders:
   mb2md -s ~/mail -R
   The -R just means to import recursively through all your folders; if your mail folder is Mail rather than mail, use that instead. No destination is needed because mb2md uses ~/Maildir by default.
5. Import your inbox:
   mb2md -m
6. Move your old inbox out of the way. Most people won’t actually be able to move or delete files in /var/mail (since they don’t have directory write privileges), so the easiest thing is probably to just open the inbox in your IMAP client or with mutt and save or delete all the messages.
7. Move your old mail folder out of the way:mv ~/mail{,.bak}Once you’ve confirmed that everything is okay, you should be able to delete ~/mail.bak (or compress it and move it elsewhere.) If you saved your inbox to mail folder in step 6, that will get moved out of the way here as well.
8. That’s it, you’re done.
9. Okay, so you’re not quite done if you access your mail with mutt rather than an IMAP client. (You could just point your mutt at your local IMAP server, of course). I’ve found the most convenient way to access the “dot” folders with mutt is to create a parallel symlinked folder structure without the dots. Here’s a hacked-together shell script that will do that. This could obviously be rewritten to be much more elegant (probably in perl). But we all have our messy scripts, right?
   
   #!/bin/bash

   cd ~/Maildir

   for x in .*
   do
   y=${x##.}
   if ( echo $y | grep -q '.' )
   then
   mkdir -p ~/mymail/${y%.*}
   fi
   ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail/`echo $y | sed "s/.///g"`
   done

   for x in *
do
ln -s ~/Maildir/$x ~/mymail
done
   Then, just add these lines to your .muttrc file:
   set folder="~/mymail"
set spoolfile="~/mymail"

Any questions?