Chris Boese's Weblog

A computer from 658 BC?

Is this cool or what? An ancient astronomical computer. And we think we're so special.

Link: Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited.

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved

Mechanism hailed as more valuable than Mona Lisa
Device with gear wheels tracked sun and moon

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday  November  30, 2006
The Guardian


A reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.

The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artifacts from the site.

The machine first came to light when an archaeologist working on the recovered objects noticed that a lump of rock had a gear wheel embedded in it. Closer inspection of material brought up from the stricken ship subsequently revealed 80 pieces of gear wheels, dials, clock-like hands and a wooden and bronze casing bearing ancient Greek inscriptions.

Since its discovery, scientists have been trying to reconstruct the device, which is now known to be an astronomical calendar capable of tracking with remarkable precision the position of the sun, several heavenly bodies and the phases of the moon. Experts believe it to be the earliest-known device to use gear wheels and by far the most sophisticated object to be found from the ancient and medieval periods.

[...]

Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.

[...]

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years.

[...]

The research, which appears in the journal Nature today, was carried out with scientists at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens where the mechanism is held and the universities of Athens and Thessaloniki.

USATODAY.com is using Typepad for the "inner guts" of its blogs

[WARNING: this post reads a bit like a love letter to Typepad. Oh well, so be it. xox cb]

Here's one of the USATODAY blogs, but the others are also linked on a side menu.

Link: USATODAY.com - Small Business.

You'll notice that Typepad doesn't appear to be credited anywhere on it. I found out about it from a feature story on the Typepad home site.

A student of mine from Montana also was telling me that the L.A. Times, where he did his internship, is also using Typepad. Not for all their online blogs (at the time he was telling me about it), but for the ones that need to be updated the most frequently on the fly. They've got design teams and big interactive features, but the staff there LIKES using Typepad.

[It is pretty easy to play down the blog software "guts" on many big sites, like with Movable Type in About.com and Huffington Post. (I don't think About.com is still using Movable these days, but don't quote me.) I've also done several business/professional sites with Typepad where I've disguised the fact that I was using blog software.]

I feel pretty vindicated by this growing big media Typepad adoption, though. Yes, one of my reviews from 2003 is still quoted on the Typepad site, but there's something bigger going on here, and I feel the need to point it out.

Blogs grew out of a grassroots, non-business need. They had to EARN the communities they grew, and be like a magnet to keep folks coming back. Over-reliance on SEO and keyword rhetoric tricks wouldn't build a REAL audience that wants to be there, with no guilt or obligation (the new business-blogging trend tries standing on its head to focus-group-fake that achievement, but it's amazing how being REAL draws a better crowd).

Blogs had certain features, like reverse chronological dynamic content, permalinks, categories (tags before anyone cared about tagging), RSS feed pings, and MOST IMPORTANT for ordinary folks: EASE OF USE.

I tell friends, if you can fill out an online form and buy something, you can post to a blog. You just fill out a web form and click "Save" and it posts.

Nearly all blogs run on PHP and MySQL, systems that were often snubbed by businesses. Now, I suspect PHP/MySQL development is starting to overtake some of the more commonly-used business-only tools.

Business web services tended to be highly customized, linked to IT depts with turf to protect, big shot certifications in .ASP and so on. Coders want to code, and for business content providers (people with something to do besides sell widgets), most wanted their own content management systems, either a custom job or pricey out-of-the-box business template "solutions" (fill in that box in your Buzzword Bingo card).

So a funny thing happened on the way to moving HTML sites into XML-driven content management databases. It turns out, the grassroots and social media usability testing of the blog social movement created a product SUPERIOR to the highly-touted "business solutions," to the point now that big businesses are turning to blog software to provide the guts for some of the most simple web site content posting imaginable. Even for businesses that aren't in the content business, and only want to sell lots and lots of widgets.

Why? I mean, those IT depts are still busily protecting their turf, cranking code, making very fine custom things, or customizing out-of-the-box software developed strictly for business use.

So why would big businesses turn to blog software?

Here's my number one speculation: EASE OF USE.

Businesses have employees who have to get their jobs done. This is what my student told me about the L.A. Times as well. While tech heads can get up to speed on most business groupware because they have to, every level of complexity makes more work for the non-techie employee, and slows down the workflow. Sure, major online content providers can continue to use their own content management systems WITH blogs, but I bet a funny thing will happen there too. I'd bet one system would gradually become more used than the other on the work site, if they both did basically the same thing: got content up quickly on a web site.

Bloggers, particularly those with filter blogs that link heavily to other sites, have streamlined their workflow with quickpost bookmarks, the perfect thing for whipping out a quick blog post on your coffeebreak. Not a second is lost.

I still compare blog software to a coffee cup more often than anything else. While the blog movement is a distinct social phenomenon (as is a trip to a trendy coffeeshop), a COFFEE CUP can be used for anything: watering your plants, scooping soup into bowls, nuking some hot water in the microwave, etc.

In short, a coffee cup is a shell that can hold whatever you decide to put into it. That is the beauty of blog software, and I've said it since my very first days in Radio Userland in 2002. Forget what people SAY you have to use blog software for. Pour WHATEVER you want into that coffee cup.

Then there's the problem with so many business content management systems, as in, they're godawful. I don't just mean godawful from an employee usability standpoint, although, as I point out above, that is a big part of it.

Sad to say, too many major media content management systems are still deliberately obtuse in their public structures as well, lacking even rudimentary permalinks, a coin of the realm in a vast inter-linked Internet but Greek to content providers looking to be "sticky" and trap you in their walled gardens. Expiring links, stupid "registration" firewalls for public content, poor search capabilities, lack of author indexing, poor tagging, you name it, many of these "professional" business media solutions are so pathetic blogs leave them in the dust.

And for employees, given a choice between a fluid posting system and a hard-to-remember, arcane, used-only-at-work posting system, which one would people automatically gravitate to?

I don't fault employees one bit, and I even believe this is a big part of Typepad's success. I've trained many people in other blog tools, and used more powerful blog engines (Movable Type, Expression Engine... I never got on that WordPress bandwagon, and I'm still glad). They're fine for me to use, but if I have to train a new blogger or client/friend who is launching a new business site, which would I choose?

There's a reason I used Typepad for my blogging seminar at the University of Montana last year. I needed to keep the difficulty threshold as low as possible and get the kids up and running as quickly as possible. That ruled out both Blogger (free, but more difficult) and Movable Type (which I could have easily set up on the dept servers). The student newspaper is now using Expression Engine, as I am on some private projects, but I'm wondering if Typepad's new business tools and support might not make that unnecessary.

Is Typepad a category killer? The main thing that holds me back from recommending it further are the hosting issues. I get nervous being so dependent on Typepad's hosting, although it has certainly been robust enough for most of my uses, with good tech support and few outages. But for crucial business uses? I think there are security issues for businesses regarding sensitive information hosted off-site.

I'm using Typepad for quick prototyping of a company employee news intranet site right now, but my plan is to convert it to Movable Type once the demo gets approved, so we can make it secure behind the firewall. Can Typepad support uses deep behind firewalls, the really secure ones, for sites that MUST be accessible ONLY on company property? 

Movable has lagged behind Typepad in features and ease of use, and for an employee news intranet, that difficulty threshold (and even the feeling of welcome and fun with the Typepad interface) can mean the difference between a successful site and one that dies on the vine from lack of use.

If Typepad business services could support those two issues, hosting and firewalls (and maybe, better searching, so I'm not dependent on Google, which is disabled behind firewalls), I'd be TOTALLY cooking with gas.

I know this sounds like a big promo for Typepad, so here's a quick disclaimer. I was an early beta tester for Typepad before it went public, and I reviewed the product for CNN.com, but I am in no way working for Typepad, getting any compensation from Typepad, or in any kind of special communication with Six Apart (if I were, I'd probably know more about the details of their business solutions, and I bet I've got some erroneous assumptions above. If I've got something wrong, I'd be happy to be corrected).

I do, however, feel quite vindicated in my early assessment of Typepad. [grin] Doing the righteous dance...

UPDATE:

As I mulled over this post, it occurred to me that Santa Claus might be looking in here, so maybe I should make my own personal Christmas Wish List of features I'd like Typepad to give me so I'll be totally in hog heaven. OK, so here goes...

1.  Search. EE has an internal search feature that doesn't rely on Google. I need a search feature on Typepad that works (!) and works behind a firewall. (I think the Google sandbox is starting to corrupt my site-specific search results.)

2.  A way to use the Typepad portal and interface on an internally-hosted (and secure) company intranet site. I know, I know, I can use Movable for that, and I have. It is more than robust enough, but to get employee participation, I need it to have that FUN and EFFORTLESS feel of Typepad, to make ordinary people feel comfortable enough to post, even official administrator-types in different departments who HAVE to post their events and announcements. I've tried training non-techies in Movable, and it isn't pretty (and I cringe at the very thought of training them in Expression Engine). Plus, I want Typepad moblogs and photo albums and lists on my intranet too.

3.  Better sidebar display of feeds from other blogs. Right now that feature is limited to five, and it doesn't update reliably. I've cheated and found a work-around to that limit, but the other day the program spanked me for it.

4.  Internal Typepad support for Feedblitz-style email updates. Yes, I use the widgets right now. I have no problem with the whole widget/plug-in universe. But it seems to me that at the very least, subscribable email updates (full post and excerpt) ought to be built into the system the same as RSS currently is.

5.  Internal Typepad support for Feedburner-style feed management. This is more of a want-to-have than a must-have. I'm more than happy using Feedburner, and prefer using my own account instead of the widget, because the Feedburner widget makes ugly URLs. Typepad has decent feeds right now with the index.rdf file, so I can't complain. I just don't use them any more and administer all my feeds, feed promotions, and feed stats at Feedburner.

6. Subscribable categories. If Typepad wants to play with the big kids, give me RSS category feeds. Yeah, both email and RSS/Atom subscription options for individual categories. Radio Userland had that a long time ago, but that's really no comparison, because the code base of the Movable/Typepad universe is FAR superior to Userland/Manila. But I want my cake and eat it too. (Yes, I know, if I wanted it badly enough, I could burn category feeds in Feedburner, and set up individual forms for each. Call me lazy...)

7. Pie-in-the-sky: Post ratings/rankings. Yes, I'm being silly, but I still look at Scoop with lust in my heart. How about a little widget of five stars, like they have on Netflix, that anyone can just roll the mouse over and click? Maybe a way to automatically compile a "Most Popular" list based on the rankings? Would spammers go nuts over it? Maybe it would need a Typekey authentication option. Oh, I can dream...

And while I'm talking about Christmas, I should say "thank you" to Typepad for the Custom CSS feature, which makes my life easier and less stressful every time I don't have to completely convert to the Advanced Templates. I still probably convert over more than I need to, but the ease of use with Custom CSS feels so creative and fun, sometimes I think my head is going to explode because of it.

Custom CSS, and Notes Lists that you can paste HTML/javascript code into. Those are the two most brilliant ease-of-use interface innovations Typepad has introduced.

 

Everybody's got a favorite Altman film...

Link: Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81 - New York Times.

I didn't love them all, and I particularly didn't like "A Prairie Home Companion," even though I'm from the Midwest and probably grew up in Lake Woebegone.  But that film didn't take me there, even with the fun moments.

At one time, I thought M.A.S.H. was sheer brilliance, something nothing could ever top. It didn't age as well, however. But that is an art too, being so perfectly OF one's time. Years later, I bought M.A.S.H. on VHS, and it was sort of like watching "Laugh In" 20 years later. The jokes became rudely dated, and the hilarity lost its edge.

"Nashville," while also very much OF its time, ages better, I think. I came to that one late, and really only latched on to it long AFTER it was totally dated. But it still shines with Lily Tomlin and so many other wonderful quirky performances.

But for me, the essential Altman was "The Player." By then I'd studied enough screenwriting to get all the screenwriting "in-jokes," so I suppose that's cheating.

"The Player" is brilliant for that one long opening shot alone, but my greatest joy is watching it use reversals agressively, to set up expectations, set up an expectation of a reversal, and then do just what you originally expected it to do.

Really, "The Player" is one long excuse to do pitch parodies, and for that, I laugh out loud.

I was just watching the HBO series "K Street" on DVD the other night. It's just amazing. I love it. It ends, which is sad, but I still just love it. And when Elliot Gould shows up, as with Ocean's 11, it's Gould doing pure Altman. I think the whole show is just a tribute to him anyway. The ending certainly is.

Until reading the article below, I'd forgotten about "Gosford Park," but I love period stuff, so that was all I needed for my "Manor House" fix. And Maggie Smith RULES.

The NY Times obit casts Altman as trickster anti-hero. That's cool.

Link: Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81 - New York Times.

November 21, 2006

Robert Altman, Iconoclastic Director, Dies at 81

By RICK LYMAN

Robert Altman, one of the most adventurous and influential American directors of the late 20th century, a filmmaker whose iconoclastic career spanned more than half a century but whose stamp was felt most forcefully in one decade, the 1970s, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 81. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed today by a friend, the singer Annie Ross. The cause was not announced. Mr. Altman had a heart transplant in the mid-1990s, a fact he publicly revealed for the first time last March while accepting an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony.

A risk-taker with a tendency toward mischief, Mr. Altman is perhaps best remembered for a run of masterly films — six in five years — that propelled him to the forefront of American directors and culminated in 1975 with what many regard as his greatest film, “Nashville,” a complex, character-filled drama told against the backdrop of a presidential primary.

They were free-wheeling, genre-bending films that captured the jaded disillusionment of the 70s. The best known was “MASH,” the 1970 comedy set in a field hospital during the Korean war but clearly aimed at antiwar sentiments engendered by Vietnam. Its success, both critically and at the box office, opened the way for Mr. Altman to pursue his ambitions.

[...]

Unlike most directors whose flames burned brightest in the early 1970s — and frequently flickered out — Mr. Altman did not come to Hollywood from critical journals and newfangled film schools. He had had a long career in industrial films and television. In an era that celebrated fresh voices steeped in film history — young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese — Mr. Altman was like their bohemian uncle, matching the young rebels in their skeptical disdain for the staid conventions of mainstream filmmaking and the establishment that supported it.

Most of his actors adored him and praised his improvisational style. But Mr. Altman was also famous in Hollywood for his battles with everyone from studio executives to his collaborators, leaving more burned bridges than the Luftwaffe. He also suffered through periods of bad reviews and empty seats

[...]

In his prime, Mr. Altman was celebrated for his ground-breaking use of multilayer soundtracks. An Altman film might offer a babble of voices competing for attention in crowded, smoky scenes. It was a kind of improvisation that offered a fresh verisimilitude to tired, stagey Hollywood genres.

He was often referred to as a cult director, and it rankled him. “What is a cult?” Mr. Altman said. “It just means not enough people to make a minority.”

[...]

Mr. Altman’s interest in film genres was candidly subversive. He wanted to explode them to expose what he saw as their phoniness. He decided to make “McCabe and Mr. Miller” for just that reason. “I got interested in the project because I don’t like Westerns,” Mr. Altman said. “So I pictured a story with every Western cliché in it.”

His intention, he said, was to drain the glamour from the West and show it as it really was — filthy, vermin-infested, whisky-soaked and ruled by thugs with guns. His hero, McCabe (Mr. Beatty), was a dim-witted dreamer who let his cockiness and his love for a drug-addicted prostitute (Ms. Christie) undo him.

[...]

“Nashville” interweaved the stories of 24 characters — country-western stars, housewives, boozers, political operators, oddball drifters — who move in and out of one another’s lives in the closing days of a fictional presidential primary. Mr. Altman returned to this panoramic, multicharacter approach several times (in “A Wedding,” “Health,” “Short Cuts,” “Prêt-à-Porter”  and “Kansas City”), but never again to such devastating effect.

“ ‘Nashville’ is a radical, evolutionary leap,” Ms. Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “Altman has already accustomed us to actors who don’t look as if they’re acting; he’s attuned us to the comic subtleties of a multiple-track sound system that makes the sound more live than it ever was before; and he’s evolved an organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot. Now he dissolves the frame, so that we feel the continuity between what’s on the screen and life off-camera.”

[...]

Mr. Altman said giving actors freedom could draw things out of them that they did not know were there. “I look for actors where there’s something going on there, behind that mask,” Mr. Altman said. “Tim Robbins fascinated me. This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there and I don’t know what it is.”

He never mellowed in his view of the movie business.

“The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been,” Mr. Altman said in a 1993 interview. “They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, ‘Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this?’ No visionaries.”

I'm thinking of another Altman film, if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't make mention in the story above, but didn't that Richard Gere, "Dr T and the Women" come from him? Yup. I never saw that when it came out, but happened upon it on TBS, late night cable movie surfing. Liked it so much (in that feel-good way) that I have to watch it all the way through every time it's on now.

Digging around on Internet Movie Database, I also see he did a TV adaptation of Marsha Norman's "The Laundromat." I did that piece in college. I've always loved it, although I never really saw Carol Burnett as Alberta.

This NPR piece on Vietnam moved me to tears

Not just tears. It broke me up.

Maybe it was just the day, or my mood, which seemed just fine before. I guess the fact that this story could move me so deeply is a good sign that I haven't lost a sense of empathy yet. But it is a Most Emailed story on the NPR site, so others must be having the same response too.

It's a Vietnamese diary found from the Vietnam War, and it's being compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. It's a bestseller in Vietnam, and should be coming out in the U.S. next year. Watch for it, called "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace."

Don't just read the link. Listen to it. The very last diary entry that ends the piece is where I just lost it.

Link: NPR : A Wartime Diary Touches Vietnamese.

A Wartime Diary Touches Vietnamese

by Michael Sullivan

Dang Thuy Tram, seen in an undated photo, began writing her diary shortly after arriving in Quang Ngai, fresh out of medical school, to care for wounded Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University

[...]

The Diary's U.S. Publication

The diary of Dang Thuy Tram is scheduled to be published in September 2007 under the title Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. It's being translated by Andrew Pham and Thong Van Pham, with an introduction by Frances Fitzgerald. The publisher is Harmony Books, a unit of Random House.

All Things Considered, November 15, 2006 · President Bush travels to Vietnam this week for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He's the second U.S. president to visit communist Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.

In Vietnam, the publication of a wartime diary written by an idealistic young doctor has captured the imagination of readers, and become a runaway best-seller. The diary of Dang Thuy Tram was rescued from destruction by an American soldier.

[...]

                                           

Sarah Palin in the Washington Post

I just had to make note of this, for the sake of posterity. It's just sort of a "local kid makes good" thing. Plus, it mentions basketball. Heh.

Link: Sarah Palin (R) - washingtonpost.com.

Alaska

Sarah Palin (R)

Thursday, November 9, 2006;  Page A42

Having clobbered unpopular incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a summer primary, Sarah Palin (R) won the Alaska governor's race by defeating the best-known Democratic politician in the state, former governor Tony Knowles.

Palin, 42, former mayor of the booming town of Wasilla, presented herself as an outsider Republican, challenging what she called a cozy relationship between the "old guard" of both political parties and Alaska's powerful energy industry.

A former point guard for Wasilla's championship high school basketball team, Palin was nicknamed "Sarah Barracuda" for aggressive and relentless play. In a state where Republicans dominate, the mother of four used those skills to carve out a distinctive niche as a face both fresh and fierce.

Sarah Palin is going to be Governor of Alaska

I was staying away from election blog posting, but I can't leave this one out, because it's personal. A 42-year-old woman has just been given the job of running one of the most energy-rich states in the nation.

And I knew her in high school. I posted about this earlier here, when she beat incumbent governor (and the former senator) Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary. That was a tough race, but she had to fight this one too, I bet. Democrat Tony Knowles is a very well-known state politician, former mayor of Anchorage, and a former governor too.

Sarah got 49 percent of the vote last time I checked, and Knowles got 41 percent. More votes may have been counted since then, tho. I'm linking to the Anchorage Daily News story about her win, and last week or so, I found a really neat long piece on Sarah, on Pajamas Media. Gotta go find that again. Nope. What a badly designed site. The article isn't in there, doesn't have a permalink. E-VILE!

I liked that article because it talked about how her competitiveness as a high school basketball player brought her on this path. As somebody who often had the job of guarding Sarah Heath, point guard to point guard, I can vouch for that.

Truth is, Sarah was a better basketball player than I was. I think I even played against her in junior high too, and I think you're allowed to be just a so-so player in junior high, so we were probably more on par then, esp. since she was a year younger. The year after I graduated, she went with Wasilla High to the state basketball tournament, went up against the favored big Anchorage teams, and little old Wasilla won state, 1982. (I still feel whiney because the Wasilla team would all go as a group to summer basketball camp in Hawaii, and our school, Palmer High, never had the money or the leadership to do anything that cool). 

I like how she's run as an outsider and a reformer on the GOP ticket. I got an Alaska buddy I may get blogging soon, and he might take a different tack, but he went to school with her too, at Wasilla High.

Does she know enough about politics, what they went after her on during the campaign? I don't know. Career-groomed politicians scare me. Citizen politicians, like citizen journalists, public intellectuals, that's far more interesting to me. And her dad was a high school teacher. I used to see him around school too, back in the day.

Link: adn.com | Governor Race : It's Governor Palin.

It's Governor Palin

Candidate of change resonated with voters

By KYLE HOPKINS, TOM KIZZIA and BRANDON LOOMIS
Anchorage Daily News

Published: November  7, 2006
Last Modified: November  8, 2006 at 05:38 PM

Voters chose change over experience Tuesday night, making Republican Sarah Palin Alaska’s next governor and the first woman to hold the job.

On a night of political upheaval across the country, Democrat Tony Knowles couldn’t stop the wave of anti-­establishment momentum that carried Palin from her small town roots in Wasilla, past incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the primary and into Alaska government’s top job.

With 98 percent of the precincts counted this morning, Palin had clinched the race with 48.7 percent of the vote to Knowles' 40.5 percent. Independent Andrew Halcro had 9.6 percent.

Palin, 42, claimed victory late Tuesday.

[...]

Palin won with lukewarm support from her own party establishment. But by promising new energy and a fresh face, she whupped a well-known, longtime Alaska politician for the second time in a row.

Earlier, Palin told supporters at the Captain Cook hotel that the campaign had drawn on all political persuasions, regions and walks of life. “I think this is unlike anything Alaska has seen before.” She added in an interview: “If it holds, it truly is a mandate for change. No more politics as usual. We started this campaign talking about trust and transparency. And that’s where we’re ending it.”

[...]

One of the Palin faithful, Kevin Peterson, who wore a pro-Palin sandwich board while running Mount Marathon last summer, offered this on the growing political power of the Mat-Su valleys: “People always thought of Wasilla as a small bedroom community, hicks. We’re not hicks. There are a lot of smart people out there, and Sarah’s one. Real, true Alaskan.”

[...]

[I like seeing the Mat-Su Valley empowered, but I'm not saying I find all of Sarah's positions palatable. Alaska tends to elect Republicans with a Libertarian streak. Tony Knowles I remember as a lukewarm governor. I don't know if Sarah will do better, because Juneau has been corrupt for so long, and that's gotta be tough to go against. If Sarah had come through as a young Democrat instead of a Republican, would she be electable in Alaska?  I don't think she'd even land a spot on the ballot.

It looks like the Democrat (Knowles) outspent the Republican (Palin), in this race. That says a lot, both in how the big money folks wanted Knowles in, and also how lukewarm the support was for Sarah in her own party. But she won.

Strategically, she took the best route, but here's the bit I don't like:]

Unlike Palin, Knowles and Halcro both support abortion rights, stem cell research, benefits for same-sex couples and a rural preference for subsistence hunting and fishing rights, for example.

[...]

Here's a bit from a different Anchorage Daily News article on how people react to her:

Link: adn.com | Palin's win finds favor even with former unbelievers.

[...]

Palin's opponents may have scoffed at her as a political lightweight who spoke in vague generalities. But voters didn't buy those barbs. They elected Alaska's youngest governor -- and the first female in the state to hold the office.

Torrie Ruhle of Anchorage was among the early converts, although she would have been OK with Knowles, too, had he won, she said. But she's glad her official vote paid off. She likes the fact that Palin is a mother, like herself. And she's looking forward to having a leader with "more feminine touches."

Most of all, she believes Palin is willing to work with everyone, regardless of their political leanings.

[...]

Palin's win called up some mixed feelings in Dave Klein, a biology professor emeritus with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Klein, who voted for Knowles, said he worries that Palin doesn't have enough governmental experience. Also nagging at him are her fundamentalist beliefs and anti-abortion views.

But Palin stood up to Republican heavies, including Gov. Frank Murkowski, whipping him in the GOP primary. She repeated the same feat with seasoned pros like Knowles and independent Andrew Halcro, a former Republican state legislator.

"She was obviously able to pull off an amazing win for a woman who had relatively little governmental experience," Klein said. "She's a very intelligent woman, and she certainly demonstrated she was someone who would not go along with Gov. Murkowski, and that demonstrates something."

Susan Steele lives in Wasilla, Palin country. Even though she admires Palin and everything "she stands for," Steele voted for Knowles. She thought Palin might be too naive to deal with Alaska's big players. She wasn't sure she could hold her own in negotiations with oil companies over a proposed natural gas pipeline from the North Slope.

"But again, she beat Murkowski, she beat Knowles, so maybe this is a wonderful thing," Steele said.

[...]

The "God of God-Games" Speaks

Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.

Great couple of paragraphs in this new longer story in the New Yorker, about Will Wright, the ground-breaking creator of the immersion game Sims. I couldn't help myself. I had to pull out excerpts.

It's a typically long New Yorker piece, so go read the whole thing, some time when you're eating dinner by yourself. I love those good long reads.

Speaking of gods and god-games... right now I'm plowing through the wonderful Harper's "Soldiers of Christ," on the Colorado Springs megachurch and Pastor Ted Haggard's leadership of it (and his connection to the Bush administration). I'm feeling awfully pleased with myself that I'd read it when it first came out in May 2005. Gives the recent Ted Haggard stories much more context (you think it's because his last name is a slant rhyme with Jimmy Swaggart? Do you suppose Jimmy used to swagger? Is Ted feeling a bit haggard these days?)

If you've been living under a rock the last two days (or are reading this from deep in the archives):

Link: Just a massage, pastor says: Ted Haggard, who led a national evangelical group, says he also bought meth from the gay prostitute. - Los Angeles Times.

My favorite bits about game designer Will Wright in the article below are in bold.

Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.

GAME MASTER

Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?

by JOHN SEABROOK

Issue of 2006-11-06
Posted 2006-10-30

[...]

Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. (You can help them or torture them as you wish, although your actions have consequences in the game.) Another important God-game designer, Sid Meier, has based his Civilization series, which began to appear in 1991, on historical processes, such as scientific discovery, war, and diplomacy. But the master of the genre—the god of God games—is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be. “It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations,” he has said. “Why shouldn’t games be?” To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life.

For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls “possibility space.” “Will has a reality-distortion field around him,” his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. “He comes up with the craziest idea you’ve ever heard, and when he’s finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy—he’s the only sane person in it.”

[...]

Spore isn’t a multiplayer game, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft, which runs on “massively parallel” computers (a distributed system employing many networked machines); it’s what Wright jokingly calls a massively parallel single-player game. If you enable an Internet feature, Spore servers will “pollinate” your copy of the game with content created by other players. In order to create the best content for your style of play—“the right kind of ecosystem for your creature,” as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players’ content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you. In other words, while you are playing the game, the game is playing you.

[...]

Wright had been working on a Power-Point presentation of a talk he had been asked to give about Spore. “It’s supposed to be about how I came up with the game, but what I really want to talk about is the history of astrobiology, so I’m doing both,” he said. He moved over to the two computers in his office and clicked through some images, while describing the basic structure of Spore. At first, I was baffled. Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise—at a glance, it looks like a “cartoony bug game,” as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don’t have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; they look more like the architecture in Dr. Seuss books. Wright has also introduced weapons and conquest. The violence isn’t gratuitous—in some cases, you have to kill to survive—but it isn’t sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them.

[...]