A perfectly rational approach to automating iTunes with AppleScript, if you’re obsessive-compulsive. Via 43 Folders, where the author comments that he hasn’t really implemented all of this. I’m still impressed that he thought it all through.

My buddy Phil Shapiro just posted an essay (and an accompanying soundtrack) about the decision of the Fairfax (VA) Public Libraries to buy audiobooks that are restricted to Windows Media Player — hence, no Macs, no Linux, and no iPods. As Phil points out, some affordable housing units in that region run Linux computer labs, so there’s a known community of library users being blacklisted here.

Molly Ivins on smoking (registration required or BugMeNot):

At Mind Hacks, an interesting summary of an unorthodox psychiatric case. The title of the paper covers it nicely: Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with Clopenthixol. What perhaps makes this out of the ordinary is that the “ghost” in question was seen by other people, and the authors themselves express uncertainty as to the medical nature of the problem. Although possession can be cured by a four milligram dose, apparently. Worth reading, worth following the links.

I’m arriving very late to this party, but this poker game with Dick Cheney is definitely a classic:

Bérubé:

A must-read blurb from Yglesias on the politics surrounding Bolton. What stands out to me is that our standing or effectiveness with other nations doesn’t seem to be on the agenda at all. Silly me, I sorta thought that was the point of diplomacy.

Stunning.

Via Matthew Yglesias. I can understand the Bush administration placing their own self-interests above disseminating this information; that’s politics and I wasn’t born yesterday. What I can’t understand is how people can see this and continue to believe that stopping terrorism is anywhere near the top of the Bush agenda.

I’ve been in ongoing discussions for a long time, with several friends who don’t drink the left-wing liberal Kool-Aid like I do, on the topic of the value of protest and whether it does any good. The usual result is that blood pressures get raised all around and we change the topic.

Honestly, I’m of several minds as to the actual value of waving a sign on national television. When it’s an organized event, like a Supreme Court decision or a planned rally on the Mall, you’re sure to find the counter-demonstrators lined up with their own signs and placards and bullhorns. If the media show up, which they’re unlikely to do unless you’re there with 100,000 of your closest friends, the betting money is on how they’re going to warp your message to fit into their allotted segment length and their preconceived notions. The Promise Keepers can trash the Mall all they like with their disposed John 3:16 flyers with nary a mention, but God help the liberal demonstrators who leave any detritus. Apparently we are hypocrites because we’re all presumed to be crunchy granola enviro types, and no one gives much consideration as to whether there were enough trashcans.

It’s not like I genuinely expect to change any minds by waving a sign, or adorning my jacket with a humorous button, or wearing a blue helmet. It would be far more effective to take everyone who disagrees with me and strap them into chairs while I deliver a two-hour speech of flowing oratory and stunning brilliance. But I’m not going to get that chance, so the sign will have to do.

Ultimately, though, I come down on the side of the validity of protesting purely because people have been taking to the streets for as long as there have been streets. Like prostitution and beer, it’s an ancient human cultural artifact, long predating newfangled notions like democracy and free speech. And as such, a nation that values the latter two should give some credence to this traditional form of expression.

For those who think we do, I have three words: “free speech zone.” What exactly does that mean for all areas outside of that zone? It would perhaps be more accurate to say that these are “disruptive people zones,” but the euphemism is required because the Constitution forbids the presumptive declaration of speech as disruptive. Hence the Orwellian phrasing, which was probably test-marketed and is now a standing aspect of political speech due to, er, lack of protest.

Recently the topic has shifted a bit to the intent of demonstrators, i.e. the intent to disrupt, break the law, inconvenience innocent onlookers, etc. There is a pernicious perception that if large numbers of people are getting arrested, the protesters must be “asking for it”, as it were. As Mark Kleiman sums up, this is not always the case. In fact, if my experience (anecdotal but with a very large sample size) is generalizable, it’s almost never the case.

Yes, there are people on the left who think that there’s little difference between waving a sign in front of McDonald’s and putting a brick through the front window. We call them “radicals”. There are even a few who extend that to putting a brick through a Starbucks employee or customer. We call them “lunatics”.

But for the rest of us — and I’m comfortable saying that this would be 99.999% or so — if we think getting arrested is key to making a political point, we’re going to do it nonviolently. So far I haven’t been, but it’s been a close thing a few times, and here I’m thinking of the FBI agent who was reaching for his handcuffs when I had the temerity to speak to him.

This was at a Planned Parenthood clinic, when a bunch of us had to ring the clinic on some significant anniversary, because apparently it’s the job of volunteer activists to enforce court orders against the people who think God wants them to attack the patients. Only then did the FBI and local police show up, because now there were two large, angry groups of people facing each other. They formed a ring around us for our “protection”, the sort of ring that would have made our presence unnecessary if they had only gotten there first. And the kind of “protection” where they don’t let you leave. After seeing a few people nearly getting hurt trying to sneak out by climbing a railing outside the police ring, I negotiated with an agent to let some of us go. Of course, there was no particular reason why we should have been detained in the first place, but the men with the guns and badges and handcuffs did so and that’s all there was to it.

I have no issue with enforcing the law against those who plan civil disorder and chaos. Disorder and chaos can be useful political actions; however, a justification does not make vandalism any more legal. If those people were sent to jail, it would probably make our planning meetings a lot simpler. It sure would be nice if fewer progressives had to undergo legal and self-defense training to protect themselves in the event they’re standing too close to a presumed vandal, or worse still (as the phrase is frequently being bandied about) a political terrorist. Come to Washington, and exercise your right to free speech — but first, be sure to take the seminar on what to do if you’re tear-gassed.

I know cops at these events have a tough job; it’s not easy to tell the difference between the guy who’s peaceful and the guy who’s peaceful now. But making those kinds of distinctions are what the police have to do all day long, and arguably the onus is on them even more so in the sphere of political speech. The folks getting arrested that I read about don’t sound like the radical kind of protesters. They sound like my kind of protesters. So when I hear about mass arrests in Washington and New York, or killings in Genoa, my first thought is whether heavy-handed use of force isn’t rather convenient for those who would prefer less protest. My second thought is that the powers that would suppress free speech are going to get away with it so long as no one out there in the mainstream seems to mind too much.

My third thought is that we’ve been here before. You’d think we’d have learned by now.

Kevin Drum connects a few dots concerning Tom DeLay’s activities during the Clinton administration and comes up with a drawing that’s surprisingly close to treason.

Making Light has a great post on using the Internet to disintermediate international custom tailors from their customers in the US (and elsewhere), and the political effects that might follow.

Via MAKE Blog, a very interesting headset for your cell phone.

Interesting report at Macintouch discusses someone who has accidentally managed to “share” another user’s GMail account. Not much information on how or why, but probably worth noting for active GMail users.

Another post to a Scalzi discussion, this one on the gripping topic of “who’s better, Superman or Batman?”

Superman’s politics: seeing as how Lex Luthor is president in the current story arcs, one might guess he’s anti-incumbent.

For a storyline that really gets to the core of what makes both Superman and Batman great, see Batman: Holy Terror, set in an alternate universe where America is a Christian theocracy. If you’re a DC continuity geek, there are some wonderful hidden nuggets and red herrings in the storyline.

Finally, my favorite one-panel description of the two comes in a recent JLA storyline. Batman has gone off to scout an enemy base. Superman is talking with the Martian Manhunter (a guy with most of Supe’s powers, plus a few more), scanning the horizon, and says, “He never ceases to amaze me. Can you even see him?” Manhunter: “No.”

Batman appears in the panel behind them and says, “Okay, let’s go.”

Another screencast from Jon Udell, accompanying an article where he follows up on Eric Raymond’s diatribe against the unusability of printing in Linux. Udell points out that it ain’t much better on Mac OS X:

This is something I’ve been telling my clients for years — it’s probably the worst interface feature on OS X. For one thing, the Gimp-Print drivers weren’t always part of the standard installation, and I can’t imagine that anyone would guess that something with that name would be useful. For another, there was an interregnum period where most printers didn’t have OS X drivers, which is thankfully over but which still might affect people who own printers made during the OS 9 era. Or anyone buying a printer that doesn’t ship with Mac drivers at all.

Such as my Epson Stylus Scan 2000. The Gimp-Print driver makes the thing run better, and with more features, than it ever did with its OS 9 Epson drivers. But anyone who didn’t know to experiment with Gimp-Print would have thrown the thing into the scrap heap.

Addendum, April 20, 2005 12:24 AM: Looks like this might get better in nine days.

Via John Battelle and a few intermediary steps I landed on Jon Udell’s screencast about the evolution of the history of the heavy metal umlaut. Worth viewing for several reasons:

1. What’s a screencast? Something I’m sure you’ve seen before — a narrated slideshow of screen captures. What’s new about this is that calling it a screencast highlights its mode as a presentation medium, and Jon demonstrates here that it’s an excellent way of documenting some topics. I also recommend his article on del.icio.us. (Note: both screencasts contain audio that begin playing immediately.
2. If you’ve never quite grokked how collaborative editing at Wikipedia works, Jon walks you through several trendlines in the umlaut article. Especially interesting is the note that vandalism attacks are corrected within minutes.
3. Finally, the article itself covers varied ground as it tracks the various approaches that people bring to it. Did you know there’s an umlaut-N in a Guatemalan language? Ever given much thought to how people would collectively display such a letter on a web page? And is there anything Hitleresque about using Gothic lettering in the name of a metal band?

And another Scalzi post:

Rich’s earlier comment that alcohol is safer than marijuana is fairly well falsified by research. Alcohol is *damned* dangerous and really wallops the human body. But it was easy for pretechnological cultures to produce, so it’s been around for a large chunk of recorded human history. I’ve read some anthropology that posits that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agrarian was largely driven by the need for a stable supply of ingredients for beer — a convenient way of delivering calories that won’t succumb to mold or most pests.

Meanwhile, John’s comment about recreational use sort of misses the point — the self-medicating crowd, by and large, thinks that they are recreational. It turns out that quite a lot of what we generally consider to be moral failings — a tendency to chemical addiction, for example — is actually more akin to undiagnosed disorders.

I was a heavy drinker in college, and then stopped the day I finished grad school. Wasn’t hard at all, I’m just not wired for alcoholism. But just as I don’t think I deserve credit for giving it up, I don’t necessarily think others deserve blame for it.

Likewise, the idea that you’re somehow a moral failure for being unproductive because you spend your life baked — well, that buys into the whole Protestant work ethic a lot more than I think is necessary. I figure anyone in ownership of a brain has the right to decide how that brain should function, with the usual libertarian line being drawn where it starts to hurt others.

For those of you coming from .mil and those special .gov addresses, John Scalzi is giving away copies of Old Man’s War, his recent (and very good) novel set in a future where retirees are retrofitted for interstellar combat. You’re eligible if you’re serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Details here.

Just posted the following to John Scalzi’s comments. Head over there to see the full context.

It always annoys me when Mac zealotry is confused with Mac bigotry. Yes, people who engage in OS wars are annoying as heck. But that doesn’t mean that those of us who understand principles of UI and usability should be required to keep silent when we see the other 97% of you going through needless hardship.

Case in point: was at a friend’s house this weekend and he asked for help fixing his home DSL and setting up his wireless network. No prob, I do that kind of thing for a living. So we banged our heads on a few brick walls for a while, while the Windows geek in attendance tried to detoxify the desktop computer that my friend didn’t know was broken. Six month old computer, occasionally exposed only to dial-up Internet, and the thing was completely hosed with spyware.

So I said, “You’re a casual computer user with no interest in being a hobbyist. You want a computer that just works. You’re the classic example of someone who should be using a Mac mini.” Cue derision from the Windows side of the room.

Yes, there are people who should be using Windows computers. (Windows programmers, day traders, gamers, and masochists.) The issue is that many people who really do not benefit from Microsoft are steered to it by default. When I don’t have my professional hat on, I’ll be glad to argue the emotional positives of the Mac. But as a pro, I’ll be doing a needs analysis and if I tell you to get a Mac, I’ve got good reason to. If you write me off, you’re just being stubbornly ignorant.

Other commentary:

Jim Winter: OS X is based on Next like Windows XP is based on DOS. Certain similarities continue to exist. But the code you’re using has been rewritten from the ground up. It’s more accurate to say that the Next programmers who were acquired by Apple ripped off their own best ideas. If you’ve ever used a Next box, you know that OS X is a heck of a lot more suitable for Mom and Pop.

Mythago: it’s been quite a few years since Macs were more expensive than Windows; true for a while under Gil Amelio, not since. What was true is that you could buy a crappy PC with fewer features, and you couldn’t buy a crappy Mac. But if you took a Mac and tried to build a PC with the same hardware, it’d run you nearly the same cost. With the release of the Mac mini and the availability of the $1,000 iBook, the only way you can still complain about cost is if you want your Mac to come in the bottom of your Crackerjack.

David McNellis: the key to those thought bubbles in iChat, which AFAIK Apple was the first to twig to, is that it’s much better for fluid conversation when the other party knows you’re typing. Another one of those UI features we keep going on about.

RooK: yes, there are many specialized apps that are only available on Windows. So long as everyone in those vertical markets keeps using Windows machines and doesn’t pressure developers for more options, this will continue.

Jill: apologies that you’ve been bored by people who talk Mac. But I work in the industry, there are sound reasons why Macs are better in some situations, and it’s best for my industry (and others who depend on it) that people know what’s good and understand why.

Dave Pollard quotes Bill Maher:

And goes on to say:

The whole essay is definitely worth a read. I don’t agree with his conclusions, but they’re worthwhile and thought-provoking.