Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Laura Moncur:

After my plane-sick stomach was full of beef barbeque, we took a twilight walk around the area. The air was full of a thousand bird calls. Every bird call you have heard was coming from the trees behind the Austin Convention Center. They were full of grackles. The flocks flew past us, singing their stolen songs. We didn’t dare stand under the trees.

I love the way Laura sandwiches poetic vision inside wholegrain slices of reality…

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• “The natural history of becoming rich” from Jared Diamond (yes, as in Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
• Mary Hodder got the best Halley-Suitt-pink-convertible photo of anyone.
• Lisa
  Stone liveblogged “We got naked, now what?”
• Laughing Squid is Flickring SXSW!
• Met Liz Henry, who blogged me as “funny ha-ha”–I’m going to read that blog now: “badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books”
• Getting ready to Oprah “Bloggers in Love” Lisa Williams blogs excellent advice to panelists, e.g. “The best panelists are the sharpest listeners.”

Off to be a good listener!

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In the hallway, right after Naked–Now What?… Do I have to tell you that Liz Lawley (MamaMusings) and Julie Leung are two bloggers I really look up to? More in my SXSW Flickr set…

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A couple of great quotes from this morning’s SXSW panel on tagging (Actual title: “Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma”)

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Liz Lawley

The best technology is created to solve a problem we already have. Flickr was invented because Caterina Fake and her friends had a problem with sharing photos. Del.icio.us was created because Joshua Schachter had a problem with managing bookmarks.

Building new software “because we can” and then looking for a use for it…

Mary Hodder

Get your stuff out there and test it with people who never heard of Flickr.

Bonus link: Mary Hodder’s ground-busting study of how people actually use tagging: Tagging by Bloggers.

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More in-depth panel coverage from Tony Walsh and Chat Clussman.

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What a great BlogHer party at Stubbs BBQ! I flickred some photos including of me with Mary Hodder and Renee Blodgett and Tish Grier.

For more of my SXSW photos, keep track of this set.

For more of everybody’s SXSW photos, watch this public photo pool.

For more about “gargantuan sea monster rampaging through the streets of downtown Tokyo, flame-throwing, bad-ass Aaron Hamre Band” see AaronHamre.com.

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So, I flew direct from Boston to Austin this morning, sitting next to a Linux/PHP guy from O’Reilly Books who’s also en route to SXSW.

And what’s playing on my TV screen? Is that MacGyver?

Could geek heaven get more heavenly?

So, join us! I’m Flickring SXSW–got some great photos of tonight’s BlogHer party…

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The New York Academy of Science is collecting book-recommendations from its members–I loved Frank’s wide-ranging list of twelve, with a short blurb about each. Vikram Seth and Dale Carnegie as well as Richard Feynman and Hermann Weyl–Power, Sex, Suicide (by Nick Lane) is one of his more recent finds.

Isn’t that on a shelf near Naked Conversations?

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Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon

Most science fiction gives us fictional worlds that are less fantastic, and much less interesting, than the real worlds science and history present us with. Starmaker is a grand exception. Mind-stretching!

Philosophy of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, Hermann Weyl

This book is a survey of the whole field of mathematics and science, as it stood in the mid-twentieth century, by one of the greatest and wisest mathematical physicists. Interesting both as intellectual history and as intellectual doctrine.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman

This short book is a unique, brilliant attempt to present a key component of our most advanced theories of physics in an honest way. Feynman presents the actual rules that govern elementary processes in quantum theory, and shows how to get from those weird rules to some familiar (and some not-so-familiar) physical phenomena.

Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang

Quantum mechanics is still a young theory. It opens up potentials for qualitatively new kinds of information processing, and perhaps eventually for qualitatively new kinds of minds. It is also strange, beautiful, and fascinating. This book is a good starting-point if you’d like to get into those aspects of the subject.

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, Donald MacKay

A great challenge of our time is to realize the potential of modern computing technologies for creative achievement. I feel we’ve only scratched the surface, and that giving machines the ability to learn is the key. This book presents many relevant insights, and is quite entertaining to boot.

Power, Sex, Suicide, Nick Lane

Lest you get the wrong impression, the subtitle of this recent book is “Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life”. It would be surprising if all the ideas discussed here are correct, but I found it an exhilarating visit to some frontiers of modern biology, by a writer who’s not afraid to thing big – and think hard.

The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Smullyan

You don’t have to know much about chess to have fun with these strange puzzles, which ask you not to predict the best moves, but rather to reconstruct what happened in the past. The framing stories are also quite amusing. This is definitely one of the cleverest books I’ve ever encountered.

They Made America, Harold Evans

Often inspiring, always fascinating stories of inventors and entrepreneurs whose work changed the way we live.

The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

Two painful lessons: denying reality won’t change it; cleverness is not the same as wisdom. A sad and infuriating, but necessary, book for anyone with responsibility for public issues.

Lincoln at Gettysburg, Gary Wills

This short, beautifully written book is a close reading of a very brief speech that just might be the greatest poem ever written (or maybe that’s the Second Inaugural). It contains depths within depths.

How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

The basic message: put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. A short, sweet book that is interesting on several levels. We could all benefit from taking it to heart.

Golden Gate, Vikram Seth

This novel is written in the form of a series of sonnets in verse. It is an amazing feat, delightful to witness. Now we need a modern Lucretius, who’ll put our best (scientific) concept of the world to verse.

If everyone else listed their things-to-do at SXSW, would you do it too?

Er, no, not really. But if Lisa Williams did it….

Friday, March 10th

• 9:00 pm • The BlogHer party!

Saturday, March 11th

• 10:00 am • Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma
• 11:30 am • We Got Naked, Now What?
• 5:00 pm • How to Create Passionate Users

Sunday, March 12th

• 10:00 am • Respect Your ElderBloggers
• 11:30 am • Tagging 2.0
• 2:00 pm • Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
• 3:30 pm • Bloggers in Love: Intimacy, Technology and Mask-Making
• 4:30 pm •  Jimmy Wales gets interviewed in Studio SX

Monday, March 13th

• 10:00 am • Cluetrain: Seven Years Later
• 11:30 am • The Scobleizer is signing Naked Conversations
• 12:30 pm • The Bloggies! (Adobe Day Stage Cafe)
• 2:00 pm • Craig Newmark Keynote Interview
• 3:00 pm • Interviews with Danah Boyd, John Lebkowsky, Bruce Sterling, and Jory DesJardins (in Studio SX)
• 5:00 pm • What People Are Really Doing on the Web

Tuesday, March 14th

• 10:00 am • How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards
• 5:00 pm • Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World

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I’m not sure I’ll make it to half these sessions, because one of my other goals for SXSW is to interview lots of bloggers, especially (on the one hand) people who can tell me stories about going on book tours and (on the other hand) people who don’t live on either coast of the US. And of course I’m also bringing some work to catch up on….

I’ll be the woman with bright red shoes and ever-growing circles under my eyes…See you there!

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“Absent the government’s recommendation that the defendent be given consideration for his cooperation,” NH phone-jammer Allen Raymond would have been sentence to 6 months in prison plus a fine of more than $30,000. Instead, the time in prison was reduced, first to five months, then finally to three.

Here’s a small excerpt from the February 9 written statement by US District Judge Joseph DiClerico, Jr, at the conclusion of United States of American v. Allen Raymond (Criminal No. 04-141-01-JD):

The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights that we have as American citizens and any scheme or plan that interferes with that right is despicable and strikes at the very heart of our American democratic processes…

the offense conduct in this case was serious and a sentence of incarceration is necessary to promote respect for the law, to provide just punishment for the offense, and to afford adequate deterrence to the criminal conduct of others who might consider any scheme to interfere with the right of citizens to get to the polls so that they can exercise their right to vote.

Judge DiClerico accepted, with a reluctance obvious in his four-page statement, the government’s request to lower Raymond’s sentence and fine. But he added 200 hours of community service, writing:

The victims of the offense were the organizations and their workers who were working hard to get people to the polls so they could exercise their right to vote; the voters who may have been seeking help in getting to the polls; voters in general; and the democratic process in general. The conduct in this case violated the integrity of our voting system. The defendant’s actions hurt the community as a whole, and it is therefore appropriate that he spend some time repaying the community, if in only some small way, for what he has done.
SO ORDERED.

This isn’t a Republican-versus-Democrat issue. Judge DiClerico was nominated to the Federal bench by US President George Herbert Walker Bush. This is a dirty-tricks-versus-honest-people issue.

The defendant’s cooperation with the USA bought him some consideration in this sentencing document. Legalistic quibbles about the meaning of “harass” or the different ways to block other people’s phone lines didn’t bring any benefit at all.

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