If someone wants to spring for a birthday present…

…they could do worse than a framed print of this New Yorker cartoon for me:

(Thanks to Tin Man for the link to the searchable database of New Yorker cartoons.) I remember bringing that cartoon up in my History of the English Language class when it first came out—but I think the date in the database is wrong, since I was taking that class in the spring of 1993. I still maintain that it’s the best illustration of the difference between signifier and thing itself that I’ve seen, though cookies, e-commerce sites, and other modern invasions of privacy have pretty much eroded the core message, which was very much true in 1993.

(Yes, it’s my birthday today. I’m 32.)

Suspicious Holidays

It’s always fun to check in with my colleagues in the Suspicious Cheese Lords, the male a cappella ensemble (specializing in Renaissance music) of which I was a member. I just received a postcard advertising Gaudete, their second annual Christmas concert, at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington DC this Saturday at 7:30 pm. If you’re in the greater DC area, you should definitely check out the show.

This month will also see the release of the Cheeselords’ second CD, Missa L’homme armé: Sacred Music of Ludwig Senfl. I’ll update this post with a link as soon as the disc becomes available. Their previous recording, the sublime Maestro di Capella: Music of Elzear Genet, is available used from Amazon or on back order from CD Baby, and should be at their gig as well.

I+S 2004: I’ll be there

In addition to the Scripting News Christmas Party, I’ll also be at the Berkman Center’s Internet & Society conference next week. This year’s theme is “Online Politics: Is the Web Just for Liberals?,” and should be just the thing to get me out of political blogging. With any luck there will be some startup type folks there as well, judging from the panelist and facilitator list (which includes Joi Ito, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, and Craig Newmark of CraigsList. Plus the usual gang—Dave Winer, Dave Weinberger, John Palfrey, Esther Dyson, Dan Gillmor… Oh, and it looks like Andrew Orlowski from the Register will be on a panel. This should be fun. 🙂

Happy Belated Birthday, Manila

house of warwick: Manila: Five Years Old. Steve points to Dave’s post on the fifth anniversary of Manila, the content management system cum blogging system that runs this site, as well as the blogs of more than a few Net luminaries. Unfortunately, it remains the Rodney Dangerfield of blogging platforms. I still have to explain Manila, and Userland, and Dave, and the whole history of blogging every time someone asks me what my site runs.

Manila officially launched on November 29, 1999. I got my first Manila site, the direct ancestor of this one, on March 14, 2000.

You can tell it’s a no-news day…

RSS in Government: Blog — Dictionary Word of the Year. Merriam Webster reports that, once you strip out profanity and perennial words like “effect/affect”, blog was the most-searched word this year on Dictionary.com. You can tell it’s a no-news week when I found reference to this fact on three sites I read daily. (I’m pointing to the article at RSS in Government because the original story, a Yahoo! News item, will disappear within the month, and I hate linkrot. At least this way there will be some context in my archives later.)

And how long is it before the anti-blog backlash starts? Surely the Register’s venom and new NBC anchor Brian Williams’s snide comment about bloggers in the bathroom are only the opening shots across the bow…

Brush with destiny

In other Virginia Football related news, I just realized (thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences alumni newsletter) that I am, as they say, one degree removed from the oracles who decide the Bowl Championship Series rankings. Wes Colley, UVA Physics 1993, runs the Colley Matrix, a simple iterative calculation that starts with a team’s win-loss record and then factors in the win-loss records of its opponents, and on and on until the records converge.

Interestingly, Wes’s story is also the story of how college football, in the form of the BCS, doesn’t understand blogging. He formerly kept a journal of games he attended on his site, but was asked to remove it by the BCS, who feared that the journal would lend the appearance of bias toward east coast teams. Never mind that the math is entirely objective and thoroughly documented…

My one degree of removal is due to my taking a statistical physics course (with John Ruvalds) in which Wes was also enrolled; I remember him being much better with the math than I was. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention we were classmates in a grad level math course until I dropped it, crushed by the weight of my perplexity and overly heavy course load. I fortunately was able to come back two semesters later and complete the course, but I still think about certain Fourier transforms with a shudder.)

Oddly, I’m also one (or two) degrees removed from the concept of “one degree removed”; the Oracle of Bacon is a project at UVA.

Boston (and Cambridge) in fall

modernity in Boston's business district

It’s been a while since I posted photos, but the cameras haven’t been idle. I’ve been keeping in practice both with the Nikon and the phonecam (since I don’t always remember to keep the Nikon handy). Check out this highlights series, featuring my voting booth photo, the first snow, a cold afternoon at Downtown Crossing and Government Center, an extremely windy stroll around the Common and Beacon Hill, and a skip around the Harvard campus and in the Fogg Museum.

The phonecam photos here are attempts to adhere to my new phonecam rules, which I made up over the last week. Phonecams are, I believe, good for the following three kinds of shots:

  1. Large blocks of color. This example, like my winning phonecam shot, is mostly interesting because of the intense color saturation of the shot.
  2. Extreme close-ups. (In this shot and others, I like finding out what statues in museums are looking at.)
  3. Capturing events where no other camera can go. So far, this polling booth shot is my only example in this genre, but it’s probably the most intriguing possibility of the three.

I am obviously still exploring the technology and having fun playing around with it, so I’m sure I’ll find other kinds of images.

This posting is a two-fer; the photo to the right is also my LensDay entry for the “modernity” challenge.

I was going to write about the Virginia Tech game…

…but fellow Hooblogger Jeff Hawkins does it better for me:

First, ABC broadcasts Virginia-Virginia Tech nationwide, and we repay the favor by having a score of 0-0 at half. Switch to the second half where we take a nice lead and the refs see their way to switching momentum with the worst called non-interference play I’ve ever seen televised. Now, sure, perhaps that’s some bitter hyperbole, but nonetheless, a god awful call. My mom, who knows nothing about football was on the phone at the time and asked why they threw the flag.

Then we rejected the Tangerine Bowl (now the Champs Sports Bowl) because of exams. So it’s either Boise or Shreeveport [sic]. Yeah, I’m sure fans will want to spend their hard earned money travelling to the wondrous splendors of Boise. Shreeveport I went to in 1994. I think the President declared it a disaster area before any hurricanes.

P.S. the new marching cheesed*ck band looks like clowns. Nothing like wool in a rainstorm. I’m still miffed that the Pep Band is disbanned. I fully blame our 3 blowout losses to a marching band versus a scramble band

(I’m reminded of all the games George Welsh blamed on the Pep Band for firing up the opposition’s fans)

So after a really promising season it’s back to the Independence Bowl. I’m amused to see that the school turned down the former Tangerine Bowl (now Champs Sports Bowl) because it was on the last day of exams. Go go student athletes!

Update: Prompted by a reader’s mail, I should note that I don’t share Jeff’s acerbic views about Shreveport or Boise, having never been either place myself. I think we should all give Jeff a little comic license on that paragraph…