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

Two feet of snow fell on New England this weekend and everything looks so different. Even branches against the sky are just white-on-gray.

A snowfall like this redraws lines between people too. Neighbors who never see each other share coffee after digging their cars out of the same snowplow lump. Later on, if one “steals” the parking space dug by the other….

But right now, we all get a chance to rebuild connections in a world that looks full of strange possibilities.

After one NH blizzard, my mom’s neighbors gathered like a posse to dig a path from the road to her front door. So, instead of being in the house worrying, she was in there baking a *lot* of banana bread.

My dog Marianne has always loved snow. (I imagine the West Highlands have a lot of it.) In a blizzard like this, I tuck her under my arm like a fuzzy football until we find someplace where she can stand up. She races and woofs and makes doggy snow angels. She’s no longer fourteen years old–she’s back in her puppyhood. And I brought her one of her very favorite toys, one she’s been missing.

In her doggy mind, I’m the one who made all this snow. And I did it for her, just because it would make her happy.

Incredible snow.

I was supposed to drive to VT Saturday to join Halley in visiting Dean HQ. No such luck. Halley, who drove up Friday, has been partying with Doc Searls and Britt Blaser and is still blizzarded in up there Sunday partying some more.

Thank goodness I had this description of Dean HQ from David Weinberger to make me feel almost as if I were there.

On the positive side, Scott Johnson of Feedster just revived his personal FuzzyBlog. I nostalgically kept the old FuzzyBlog in my blogroll for months after it stopped getting updated. Now it’s back!

Anyone who doubts Scott has enough great ideas to run two fine blogs–well, you just doesn’t know Scott.

• Item: His BloggerCon explanation of “the blogger’s condom.”
• Item: Should Feedster index Yahoo groups?
• Item: Shower context stupidity.
• Item:
  Betsy Devine: Hey, did you hear about this spam event at MIT?
  
  Betsy Devine: http://dev.r.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2003/12/1/7834.html
  
  Scott Johnson: nope but I went last year. I’ll go again.
  
  Betsy Devine: sounds like fun.
  
  Scott Johnson: signed up. thx.
  
  Scott Johnson: best comment from last year
  
  Scott Johnson: “Look at all the really smart people in this room.
  
  Scott Johnson: Then consider that your profession is blocking penis enlargement ads”
  
  Betsy Devine: Yes!
  
  Betsy Devine: OK if I blog you saying that?
  
  Scott Johnson: Yep
  
  Scott Johnson: that’s not exact, exact but damn ass close.

If the snow keeps falling, at least we’ll have both blogs to read.

Exciting news from the world of serious science! Biologists have linked a mysterious, underwater sound–“like a high-pitched raspberry” said one–to bubbles coming out of a herring’s anus.

Teenagers of both sexes are re-planning their careers as a result. Who wants to become a boring billionaire banker when a life in science means you get to talk about your research on “FRT”? (That’s what scientists are calling the sound. It’s an acronym for “Fast Repetitive Tick.” )

Tell your friends, and don’t forget to point them to where they can actually hear herring FRT-ing.

If you see a red herring? The chances are he’s blushing.

I found this important news item thanks to Wayne of “The Right Perspective”. I can’t improve on his final analysis:

Scientists speculate that the reason they do this, which is mainly at night, is to communicate with each other. The question begs to be asked, “What are they saying?”

A man in Topeka, Kansas, decided to write a book about churches around the world. He started by flying to San Francisco, and working east from there. Going to a very large church, he began taking photographs and making notes. He spotted a golden telephone on the vestibule wall and was intrigued with a sign which read ” $10,000 a minute.”

Seeking out the pastor he asked about the phone and the sign. The pastor said this golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to Heaven and if he pays he can talk directly to God. The man thanked the pastor and continued on his way.

As he continued to visit churches in Seattle, Virginia, Michigan, Chicago, Milwaukee, and all around the World, he found more phones, with the same sign, and the same answer from each pastor.

Finally, he arrived in Ireland. Upon entering a church in Dublin, behold, he saw the usual golden telephone. But THIS time, the sign read “Calls: 35 cents.”

Fascinated, he asked to talk to the pastor. “Father, I have been in cities all across the world and in each church I have found this golden telephone and have been told it is a direct line to Heaven and that I could talk to God, but, in the other churches the cost was $10,000 a minute. Your sign reads 35 cents a call. Why?

The pastor, smiling benignly, replied, “Son, you’re in Ireland now….it’s a local call.”

Can you guess that my wonderful brother Kevin just sent this? Others of his I’ve posted: Louisiana ghost story and virus warning.

Richard of JustAGwailo and Jay at MakeOutCity take issue with my claim that search engines make us smarter. The Internet, they point out, is full of false information that claims to be true.

I completely agree. So, if I don’t believe “the truth is out there,” how can I claim that search engines make us smarter?

One of the great insights of the nineteenth century was the power of numerical data–statistics–to answer questions that once were unanswerable. Statistical questions don’t require “perfect” or infallible data–so long as you can estimate what kinds of errors are likely to arise. Results you can count and numbers you can compare–search engines are great at finding just such answers.

Questions you can’t answer with search engine data: Why are we here? Who wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets? Can anonymous spammers make my package bigger?
Question you can answer with search engine data: Who gets more play in online news media–Dean or Kerry? (Last week–Kerry. Rick Heller found he was mentioned almost twice as often as Dean..)

Search engines can also make us smarter by introducing us to websites we wouldn’t otherwise find.

Another smart way I’d love to see Rick Heller using Feedster is for ongoing comparison of candidate weblogs. How much substantive policy talk, how much fundraising talk, how much negative chatter about opponents went on in each weblog this week? Wouldn’t this be a great way to promote a more positive campaign?

So, when I say search engines can make people smarter, I don’t mean that they can answer every question or turn the internet into a perfect place. I just mean that they can help us solve problems, some of them important, that would be very much harder to solve without them.

“Would Mr. Updike [who described a fictional someone as ‘a rich Jew’] describe someone as ‘a rich Catholic’ or ‘a rich Protestant’?”

New York Observer, Nov 26, 2003.

Rhetorical questions don’t really seek information. They assume that nobody can really give an answer–they strongly suggest that we know what the answer would be.

“Happily,” (to quote Timothy Noah’s Slate chatterbox column) “we live in an age when this sort of accusation can be subjected to empirical analysis.”

Noah used the appropriate search engine–in this case, Amazon’s new search-inside-the-book rather than Feedster–to answer the Observer’s no-longer-unanswerable question.

• Noah found no example of Updike’s using “rich Protestant” or “rich Catholic.”
• Noah found several places where Updike refered to characters as “rich” in paragraphs that gave their religious affiliation as “Catholic” (twice) and “Presbyterian” (once)
• Noah found many examples of other writers using the phrase “rich Jew” as if it had no antisemitic intent.

My point here is not that I like Updike’s wording myself. “Jew” makes me uncomfortable in a way that hearing “Catholic” or “Presbyterian” used as a noun would not–no matter who sticks what adjectives nearby. (My own background? NH-folksinging-Catholic.)

My point is that rhetorical questions get used to ratchet up conflict with nasty but thinly disguised accusations.*

I don’t like to see my opponents use dirty tricks–I like even less to see dirty tricks being used by folks on my side.

This is one more way search engines make all of us smarter.

* A second example from the Observer piece: “Is The New Yorker implicitly endorsing anti-Semitism in its pages?”

http://www.bopnews.com/

http://election.rhetorica.net/

http://election.rhetorica.net/docs/iraq2002.htm

A great post to read early on Thanksgiving morning (west coast time) – being in the midst of a huge kitchen remodel which is running months late, we’re not hosting Thanksgiving for the first time in like twenty years, instead doing it at my parents house. Reading your post made me smile and relax – thanks, and have a great holiday weekend!

I am so thankful Thanksgiving is finally here. In just a few hours, family and friends will be here–all of them people I’m longing to see.

Right now, I’m thankful that my ambitions for today have been squished by the pressure of time back to finite reality. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back to the grocery store for just-one-more thing. (How many times did I go back yesterday?) Do I have time to….

• …clean the whole house before everyone shows up? No.
• ….cut up raw vegetables. Yes, plenty of time for that, nothing to worry about.
• ….lose 10 lbs before everyone gets here? No.
• ….write a blog entry? No. But I’m doing it anyway.

All over the US, fervent prayers are rising from every kitchen. Oh, Lord, you know I don’t know how to cook this ugly bird. By your mighty power, keep the breast meat from drying out while ensuring that the rest of it gets cooked. In your infinite kindness, don’t send me more than two people this year who always, always, and only want a drumstick. And please, by your merciful aid, don’t let any parts of it burn and stink up my kitchen.

In my kitchen, prayers get even more complex. Of course I have turkey–what do I look like, a furriner? But it’s not the main event for most of the family.

Frank won’t eat meat, though he’s very fond of fish. Kevin hates fish–thank goodness he does like turkey. Mira won’t eat meat or fish, but she is looking forward to my big vegetable pot pie and the green olives stuffed with feta cheese she said she wanted and I found for her. Zoe is vegan–I’ve got lots of veggies and something beany, for her. I can’t serve anything with eggs in it, by the way–not unless I want to watch Father V taken away in an ambulance–he’s terribly, terribly allergic to eggs.

So I’m a bit hassled right now. (Stop blogging, Betsy!) But I’m also thankful. Thankful the day is here at last. Thankful my life includes people I love enough to fuss over like this. Thankful for the super-special people who show up way early to help.

And aren’t you thankful you don’t have my family to cook for?

Postscript: A couple of people left Thanksgiving morning comments–I don’t know why the software decided to hide them. Maybe the tech gods were running around their own kitchens? Anyway, I copied and pasted them here. Betsy

From Oren Sreebny: “A great post to read early on Thanksgiving morning (west coast time) – being in the midst of a huge kitchen remodel which is running months late, we’re not hosting Thanksgiving for the first time in like twenty years, instead doing it at my parents house. Reading your post made me smile and relax – thanks, and have a great holiday weekend!”

From marcum: “I did not have time to blog either. Lol.”

Rick Heller over at Blogging of the President used Feedster search to track the number of times each candidate got mentioned.*
In the comments on Rick’s post, arguments broke out. Supporters of different candidates swapped accusations. I was sad to see how each side’s conventional wisdom imagined the others in very negative ways.

I was thrilled to realize that Feedster (and other search engines) could kick down the walls that turn each “conventional wisdom” into an ugly echo chamber.

Good news! These are no longer unanswerable questions:

• What’s the ratio of positive-to-negative comments in each blog?
• Which candidate’s blog talks most about substantive issues?
• Which candidate’s supporters talk most about substantive issues?

Knowing such comparisons can be done should motivate all of us to campaign for our own guy in a positive way.

* I blogged about Rick’s research on Feedster’s Fuzzyblog, but I want to talk about some different stuff here.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. – Aldous Huxley