Chris Boese's Weblog

Told you they'd be playing Heart, Barracuda!

RNC rolls with the 80s tonight! LOL. Wonder if Sarah had input into the music? The string of songs playing as the balloons fell sounded like the soundtrack we played on high school basketball bus trips!

More disturbing, I think, is that McCain did something with that speech that I can't quite put my finger on, until I get the transcript, but I know one thing: he was not talking to the Republican base, and said plenty of things that should either make that base nervous, or angry.

One thing for certain, he took shots at standard operating procedure politics of KARL ROVE et. al., of DeLay, of K Street, of Abramoff. He sounded more like the man who is married to the bio that played in the film about his wife, who by most rights, should be a Democrat, but that she is extremely rich, and married to John McCain. Cindy McCain was definitely intriguing, but I didn't understand how she wasn't allowed to be interesting ALONE, but always had to link her back to her Daddy, like a woman can't be that interesting by herself, without invoking Daddy.

But McCain, who were you talking to tonight? Not the Dems, but who was your audience? And was it lip service? Will Rove and the puppetmasters still call the real policy shots behind the scenes? Are the power-brokers still in power, and using you as a front man?

That's the doubt that should keep Dems fighting for Obama, because while McCain is certainly interesting, we have NO CLEAR TRUST that the evil fascist authoritarian police-staters have been exorcised from the deep bowels of Washington, where they have taken root.

OK, so if not Hillary, I'll take Biden

Link: Obama Picks Biden, Adding Foreign Expertise to Ticket - NYTimes.com.

Link: Biden adds experience and signals tough line | Politics | Reuters.

Link: Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket - International Herald Tribune.

Link: Analysis: Biden fills attack role - Yahoo! News.

OK, so as I was rooting for Hillary to get VP, and had some SERIOUS doubts about some of the NO-NAMES that were being floated as supposedly viable alternatives to Senator Clinton, Obama managed to pick the ONE PERSON I really learned to admire more than before during this primary season (I already admired Hillary, and enjoyed watching her soar).

Joe Biden had some of THE best one-liners of the primary season, not just good lines, but HE SAID the things Kucinich should have been saying, and more succinctly and directly on target. Hell, I'd love him forever just for the memorable line that basically destroyed Rudi Giuliani as a candidate (paraphrasing: that Giuliani's every other statement included three words: a noun, a verb, and 9/11).

I was absolutely certain he would be Secretary of State on ANY ticket, and I'm a little worried that he won't be running the State Dept. I hate how (BEFORE CHENEY) there is a long tradition of sticking the VP in a closet, as happened with Al Gore.

But that's what you get when the VP is a re-purposed Primary Season rival, a potential threat, as was wonderfully illustrated in The West Wing TV program (by the guy who was in Animal House, no less!). I'm not entirely certain Biden would make another run for president, but he's unorthodox enough, I would not rule it out, nor begrudge it of him. 65 is not old, but this run gives him another option for his political sunset, as finishing your career as an elder statesman confers longer usefulness and higher stature than hanging on as the most senior senior in the Senate. Just ask Ted Stevens, since Strom Thurmond is no longer around to have controversial birthdays.

Biden's experience makes me relax a bit on this ticket as only Hillary could have, because he's been around and around the block on the Foreign Relations committee, and I've WATCHED him in that role, I actually paid attention to what he was up to for a lot of that time. The pity is, he was wasted there during the Bush Administration, just as surely as Colin Powell was wasted at the State Dept. I have no reservations about the quality of Biden's advice and work in that arena, and fully expect it to be smarter than Obama all around.

Wonder who will get the State Dept then, tho? Wish you could give it to the VP. But I also feel relaxed should he have to take over the presidency in a crisis as well, because of his foreign policy experience (as I would have with Hillary as well, it goes without saying, since I wanted her for president).

He was on Judiciary too, so he also will be well-armed to help overhaul the mess that is the Justice Dept. as well. That's a job he could be given as VP: to help a new Attorney General clean house.

I'd rather see him clean house at State first, and then Justice. State isn't in as bad of shape, but the Bush Administration foreign policy positions did the damage, not rampant corruption and cronyism, as at Justice (at the behest of the White House), which has now lost all credibility as an independent office.

But the thing I MOST look forward to is Biden's mouth, on the campaign trail, as official Attack Dog, as bad cop to Obama's way-too-cool-and-boring-Kumbayah-singing cop. Yeah, I want to see somebody REALLY mix it up with the GOP, all their army of attack poodles and slanderers and Lee Atwater plumber wannabees.

There is a risk there, unleashing Biden's mouth. On domestic stuff, sometimes he gets the foot-in-mouth problem, but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that he tends to say what he thinks too often, without putting that creepy politician editor widget between his brain and mouth.

Who can fault a person for that?

In the land of Xena: Warrior Princess, the sheer joy was watching the New Zealand folks, and especially Lucy Lawless, interacting with the press. The US audience was SO enculturated to the PR image consultant-driven, overly-careful stars who rarely said anything that wasn't bland and forgettable. Lucy Lawless showed up, accidentally flashed her boob while singing the national anthem at a hockey game, held her head up unashamed, and would say whatever the hell she felt like saying. Now carefully ensconced in the US, Lawless acts as careful and less raw as most US celebrities, and is about as interesting, unfortunately. Back in the beginning, tho, she was a breath of fresh air.

So Biden, after all these years (and that awful plagiarism thing, long behind him, I hope), still has part of his mouth directly connected to his brain, often bypassing the talk-like-a-careful-politician governor. That's a double-edged sword, but I didn't see the downside of the double edge during the primary season as often as I expected to.

Instead I saw a happy warrior, itchy to take on these know-nothing image massagers of the GOP, ready to rhetorically call out Karl Rove et. al. and give them what for. It was a sad day when he left the primaries, and until Hillary and Obama got their danders up and quit singing Kumbayah themselves, I worried all heat and light had gone out of the primaries. 

So Biden is back, and he's got some good targets to gun for! You won't need coffee to stay up for the debates! Let's get ready to rumble!

Go Joe!

Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket

The Associated Press

Saturday, August 23, 2008

WASHINGTON: Joe Biden has lived a life of second chances, a cycle that's been cruel and redemptive by turns. Now he's starting over once again.

Deeply private yet in-your-face, collegial yet ideological, the Delaware senator brings a wealth of foreign policy experience to Barack Obama's Democratic ticket, plus wisdom in the ways of Washington and an infectious enthusiasm for political donnybrooks.

He adds suspense, too, over the question of when — not if — he'll put his foot in his mouth. Biden's agile mind comes with a loose tongue that cannot always be properly restrained.

Back in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., Biden's Catholic schoolmates nicknamed him Dash because he stuttered so much his speech sounded like Morse Code. Biden overcame that rip at his confidence, smoothed his talk and doesn't seem to have quieted down since.

The strongest sign that Obama was seriously considering Biden for his running mate, despite some differences over national security, energy and more in their voting records, was Biden's odd absence from the public in recent days. Normally he's a sucker for a microphone.

And it was a sign of those Washington ways that when he told reporters, "I'm not the guy,' no one believed him, just as no one believed him when he said of the vice presidential slot last year, "I would not accept it if anyone offered it to me."

That's how people talk in politics — a different sort of telegraphing code. And after more than a third of a century in Washington, and two short-lived presidential campaigns of his own, Biden has it down pat.

He came to Washington as a wunderkind, elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29 — the earliest possible age — and just meeting the rule that one must be 30 when sworn in. The knock against him used to be that he was more sizzle than steak, articulate but perhaps not all that deep.

At age 65, as a party elder and veteran of titanic judicial nomination struggles, world crises and legislative dealmaking, that rap has faded.

His hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are historical soliloquies on the fly, complete with grace notes liberally dispensed to colleagues and witnesses of any political persuasion, humor often directed at himself and sharp-tongued fulmination over what he sees as the failures of the Bush administration.

His first presidential campaign, in 1987, was a "train wreck" by his own description, one of those times that forced him to pick up pieces and start anew.

He'd lifted lines from a British politician, exaggerated his academic achievements when boasting about his smarts to a voter who challenged him ("I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden recalls saying) and suffered horrendous headaches that turned out to be life-threatening brain aneurisms that kept him out of the Senate for seven months.

"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate," he writes in his memoirs. And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes — not even close.

[...]

Most Ironic Quotation of the Day

Uh, I think we should file this under "What NOT to say while you are a CEO being convicted of back-dating stock options."

Shall we all sing-along-with Cher, then? "If I could turn back time..."

Link: First Backdating Conviction Brings Prison Term and $15 Million Fine - New York Times.

First Backdating Conviction Brings Prison Term and $15 Million Fine

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Gregory L. Reyes Jr., the former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems, and his wife, Penny, on Wednesday.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: January 17, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  —  A former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems was sentenced Wednesday to 21 months in prison for orchestrating a plan to tamper with the company’s records of stock option grants.

The executive, Gregory L. Reyes Jr., who led Brocade from 1998 to 2005, was also ordered to pay a $15 million fine. Judge Charles R. Breyer of Federal District Court in San Francisco said Mr. Reyes had obstructed justice in preparing for trial, which led to a stiffer sentence.

[...]

Mr. Reyes was the first executive to be tried over stock options backdating when his case went before a jury in San Francisco last June. He was convicted in August of 10 counts of securities fraud.

[...]

Mr. Reyes’s case was seen as a test of how seriously infractions of options-related securities laws would be punished. He cried while speaking to the judge before his sentencing.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Reyes said, between sips of water and long pauses to compose himself. “There is much that I regret, and if I could turn back the clock, I would.”

[...]

DUDE! You already DID turn back the clock! That's why you're going to jail, dimwit!

And apparently the apprehension of irony is absent among subscribers to the Associated Press, including the New York Times!

Turning the concept of "Push" on its ear

Well, what a can of worms this opens up! Seems to me like, in the world of search engine contextual ads, Google and other search engines would call this "click fraud." But this isn't the world of ad clicks. This artificially inflates measures of page-views, with Nielsen-Netratings.

Nielsen usually bugs me because I think its metrics have overly controlled old media content for too long. I find the research methods short-sighted and potentially shaping the data with limited POV (yeah yeah, I know, all qualitative researchers say this, but it is particularly acute in TV-land). Is this the sort of thing that should be embraced as the ultima thule of Net metrics?

But Nielsen folks caught this slight-of-hand (what search engines would call "fraud"), so kudos to them.

GREAT lead in the story below, btw.

Link: In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them - New York Times.

December 11, 2006

In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them

By PETER EDMONSTON

In late May, more than five million Web users vanished.

The disappearing act came when Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading company in measuring Internet traffic, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial Web site Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million.

Why the change? For millions of Web surfers, Entrepreneur.com visited them — and not the other way around, the measurement company said.

As computer users visited other sites, new browser windows popped up containing articles from Entrepreneur.com, according to Scott Ross, senior product manager for Nielsen/NetRatings.

Pop-up windows appear all over the Internet, including the Web site of The New York Times. But they are typically used as advertising to pitch a product or a service.

Entrepreneur.com’s pop-ups were unusual because they contained news content, like articles on how to start a small business, making them hard to distinguish from an intentional visit to Entrepreneur.com’s site. This hailstorm of pop-ups more than tripled Entrepreneur’s reported traffic before it was detected and factored out a month later.

The technique of using pop-ups to gain readers underscores just how important sheer numbers have become in the online media business. Advertisers are shifting their marketing dollars to the Internet, but the rates they pay are low compared with traditional media.

Consequently, publishers who have struggled for years to find a way to make money online are taking aggressive steps to get their Web pages in front of as many eyes as possible.

Entrepreneur.com, owned by Entrepreneur Media in Irvine, Calif., did not return calls seeking comment. But it is not the only online publisher to use pop-ups, according to Benjamin G. Edelman, a Harvard doctoral student who has compiled a large database by installing on his computer many kinds of software, known as adware, that generates pop-ups.

[...]

The concern over pop-up content goes beyond traffic numbers. Many advertisers pay premium prices to reach readers of certain Web sites. Through pop-ups, these advertisers may find their orders are being fulfilled with low-cost page views that users never requested and may never have seen.

This list of sites surprised Scott Symonds, vice president for media at Agency.com, who advises companies on where to spend their online advertising budgets. Pop-ups delivered by adware are usually seen as a “nuisance form of advertising,” and most mainstream publishers avoid them, he said.

[...]

There are legal issues as well. Many sellers of pop-up ads have been sued by regulators and consumers, who say the software to allow pop-ups is often installed without a users’ consent. The adware hitches a ride on another application, like a game or a screen saver, and the pop-up function can be buried in the fine print. Sometimes it is never disclosed.

“You can almost look at it like steroids,” Mr. Ross said of pop-up content, which his firm calls “non-user-requested” traffic. Others in the online media business call it “push traffic,” because Web pages are actively pushed to computer users who do not request them.

Used indiscriminately, push traffic is like printing extra copies of a magazine and tossing them onto doorsteps or, because pop-ups can be intentionally hidden behind other windows, simply dropping them in an alley.

[...]

 

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.

[...]

My favorite quotation today...

Link: Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Gee, and here I thought Jaron Lanier was a film director... [grin]

This is a fun link. Here's another teaser.

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

DIGITAL MAOISM:

The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

By Jaron Lanier

An Edge Original Essay

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

[...]

                                                           

Kevin Kelly: Scan This Book! - New York Times

Venerable Wired dude Kevin Kelly has a fun article that is near and dear to my heart in the New York Times, and I just can't pass up calling attention to it (although I think it is Most Emailed, so I'm hardly the only one).

I'm just so easy. All you have to do is mention Alexandria and I get all a-quiver. I have my own theories about grand libraries, which I'll probably mention below, but suffice it here to say that a Library of Everything is one massive part of the reason I jumped into cyberspace with both feet in 1990 and never looked back. And for the record, that was long before I read about Neal Stephenson's Librarian in "Snow Crash."

What would Borges say? What would Confucius say?

I think Confucius would say "It is written... "

But the bigger question, I think, is "Will this Tower of Babel reach to the heavens?"

Link: Scan This Book! - New York Times.

May 14, 2006

Scan This Book!

By KEVIN KELLY

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

[You know, if they were going to build such a great library in Alexandria with all that very precious stuff, why did they have to put it in such a precarious location?! I've been mad about this as long as I've known about it, and I'm still mad about it. I WANT to go to Alexandria and I'm pissed off that I can't, dammit!]

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

[And we an build this wonderful Tower that will reach to the Heavens! We will all speak the same language and nothing we plan to do will be impossible for us!

Until you look at the appropriate Tarot card, the Lightning-Struck Tower.

You say hey, it's a web, not a tower. Why are you going on and on about a tower? It's my theory, you see, a theory of the Web. In the Platonic sense, or Neoplatonic, if you will, this idea of a Library of Everything is technically an imitation, and perhaps a very pale imitation at that. The original "Library of Everything" supposedly exists as a great Ideal in the sky, in the Heavens, on some energy plane, or in Nirvana. It is called "The Akashic Records," or, to Hebrews, Muslims, I think, and Christians, it is called "The Book of Life."

It's the source of that "This Is Your Life" movie that St. Peter plays for you when you get to the Pearly Gates, before you get your harp and cloud and graduate to a New Yorker cartoon.

Edgar Cayce supposedly went to visit this library when he was asleep and found out all kinds of mysterious and secret stuff. I bet he's got a lot of overdue books by now, too. I usually think it is this library that Borges wrote of in his "Library of Babel" short story in the "Labyrinths" collection. His version is pretty twisted, though.

So what does this "Book of Life" have that our longed for Library of Everything doesn't have?

Some people imagine it as a Tapestry, with a thread for every life and a full record of each and all its intersections. This would be where the Three Fates of Greek mythology would hang out, the Three Norns of Norse mythology.

So the Akashic records would have not only every book, every image, an instantly searchable movie of every life, IT WOULD ALSO HAVE A FULL RECORD OF EVERY THOUGHT.

Stream of consciousness personal diary bloggers are working on uploading this part into the Web, but we're still stuck with a pale imitation of that panoptic record that Santa Claus clearly has access to as well, for checking to see if we've been naughty or nice. I bet the NSA is envious of HIM. Oddly enough, the Panoptic Eye appears to be just as much a part of the Neoplatonic imitation of the Akashic as it is in the "real" Akashic.

New Agers and others believe the Akashic Records are not confined to matter, but also include a record of all energy, which makes sense if matter and energy are conserved. Perhaps the Akashic is where all that dark matter goes that no one can account for. These people believe "Thoughts are Things" that send energy out in to the universe, whether in the form of prayers, wishes, curses (a panoptic and authoritarian god keeps track of sins of thought, word, and deed: God as Universal Accountant), lust in your heart, coveting, or the off-key internal singing of your soul.

So the Akashic Tapestry Record spreads out across the ethers like a giant web, just as our Internet weaves invisibly around our planet. You could make an argument that the Akashic Records are the Mind of God, and all of us (and our atoms and animating energy) make up that godhead at an atomic level as well, microcosm, macrocosm, as above, so below, or is that as below, so above? Ergo, the Akashic Records ARE GOD?

And what does that make our Platonic Imitation of an Imitation of the Akashic, the World Wide Web? The etchings of the Mind of Humanity? Humanity trying to make Itself God?

Interestingly, when you use a Kabala system of numerology (not the "Americanized" one), WWW=666. Those odd literalists, the fundamentalist Christian dispensational pre-millenialists, see three as the number of God, and six as the number of humanity, so they interpret this very famous and ominous symbol 666 (the movie previews are making such a big deal about an "Omen" remake coming out on 6/6/06, so maybe my ramble here is in honor of that) as three times six, or man trying to make himself god, repeated without question in pulpits across the U.S. I don't know if it is really an accurate interpretation, as some Hebrew sites also list six as a holy or "god" number, instead of seven, which I had always heard.

My Neoplatonic argument isn't really that compelling, if you look at the actual text that mentions it, because it is a WEB, not a man, unless the Web is the Mind of Man.

In the New International Version Bible, Revelation 13:18 reads:

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

And here's a neat tidbit, care of Wikipedia: The fear of the number 666 is known as "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia". Say that three times fast.

Now about that Tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens, is the Web another instance of man trying to make himself like the gods, to reach into the heavens? The cautionary tale here is the lightning-struck tower, the blow to the head, a fall from a high place. The Tower is a nearly universal cultural symbol of hubris, of pride going before a fall.

Something to look forward to! Anyway, let's get back to Kevin... (grin)]

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

[Kevin! You of all people know we won't need that white cord into our heads, iPod reference not withstanding. The library of all libraries will of course either be transmitted wirelessly, or hell, it'll probably be implanted into our heads directly! Instantaneous interfacing, always on, ubiquitous. Neal Stephenson's Librarian, beamed directly to gargoyles everywhere.

Surely Plato has reincarnated around here somewhere at this time. He pre-dates Alexandria (Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, so I imagine Plato had been dead a while) but he actually wanted Greeks to keep things in their amazing big Greek memories. Plato had his toga in a twist because this new thing, WRITING, was creating cheat sheets, so to speak (cheat scrolls?). If you could write something down, your brain, your big-Greek-reciting-Homer memory didn't have to work so hard, and you started keeping fewer things INSIDE your head, storing them so much more effectively in written form, which could then be assembled into a library.

Just as most of our math skills have withered in this age of the calculator, poor Plato was watching the decline of Greek oratorical skills based on memory. Was the trade-off worth it, Plato? Could Alexandria be the consolation prize?

And now, if we can have a Library of Everything implanted in our heads, does that mean we're returning to the days when people will be able to recite Homer without a teleprompter or PowerPoint? Will we get those big Greek memories back, augmented and more complete with access to everything that was ever written? Would Plato reincarnated feel redeemed at long last, or would it be the final betrayal?]

[...]

But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

[Boggles your mind, doesn't it? All those texts, all those words, keyword-searchable, context-searchable. But still, not enough of those texts in the public domain.]

[...]

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

[Democratizing, yes, I suppose, if people are still reading these books. If they one day become inert material, like the quartz crystals New Agers think are embedded storage devices holding the wisdom and all the knowledge of Atlantis, about as useful to us as that funky vinyl record the post-apocalyptic kids spin on the end of a forked stick in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome." Gotta watch out for the Pocky Clips, or your giant Atlantis pyramid shaped quartz crystal Library of Everything gets as wrecked as Alexandria, and then where are you? Standing in front of a frame of branches and "telling the tell" through a memory of television?

I'm still chuckling at the idea of lesser university libraries getting to make huge leaps in how many "volumes" they supposedly have, simply by downloading a big old mess of these public domain texts from those famously massive major university libraries. Will they use the new numbers to adjust their budget requests? Will university administrators realize they don't have increased heating and lighting costs for all these new "volumes?"]

[...]

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

[Aha! Decontextualized Library of Congress notation, The Dewey Decimal System, arbitrary shelving, or even mis-shelving, a black hole that books sometimes disappear into in some libraries, even the venerable card catalog, will they all become irrelevant? Remember those dreary library classes where you were drilled in when to use the Author's name, when to use the Subject Index, when to try to find the Title? And even early databases used in libraries preserved this quaint eccentricity long after it was necessary, in some cases, is present still, although I have no idea why we need separate fields for Author, Subject, and Title, when Keyword ought to catch everything just fine.

I remember an argument I had with a librarian once, and I remember the exact year: 1990. I was bringing my research paper classes to the library for their regular library orientation sessions. After class, I questioned the librarian about the new InfoTrax database system for periodicals that she was happily touting. It was pretty neat, and I was ready to go to town with it, but as a usual dyslexic, I was frustrated when it couldn't find things I didn't type precisely, or in the correct Subject, Title, or Author field.

Why can't it all be keywords I asked her? Oh, that's coming soon, she said, and went on to explain what it would do. But no, I wanted keyword searching of ENTIRE TEXTS, just of magazine, journal, and periodical articles, which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn't it do that? I wanted to be able to run Boolean combinations through this jackpot, just to see what would turn up. The librarian's eyes went wide, and then she got angry. How dare I even expect such an impossible thing! The absurdity of it. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, she pronounced. Don't even think about it.

Meanwhile, I got to graduate school three years later and eventually encountered my future dissertation adviser, a hypertext theorist who imagined a world where EACH AND EVERY WORD is a hypertextual link to somewhere else. Even "a" "an" and "the." Ted Nelson's "docuverse" indeed!]

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

[I just can't wait. Not only will the future be hyperlinked, but it will also spin out into recombinant document DNA, and we don't even need plagiarizing Harvard sophomore novelists to start us off on the right/wrong foot.

Imagine recombinant Faulker and parody Faulker, the novelistic version of "filksongs."

Interweave Emily Dickinson's 1,775 quatrain-driven poems with 1,000 "Centuries" of Nostradamus quatrains! Ooh oh! Hold me back, hold me back! Audio track them all over the midi-tune of Gilligan's Island.]

U.S Women Snowboarders ROCK!

FINALS:  American Hanna Teter (left) won the gold medal in halfpipe Monday, with fellow teammate Gretchen Bleiler earning the silver.  FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

I just had to blow that bit out in here, cuz I know from one of my students in Montana that the Flying Tomato guy (Shaun White) is totally amazing, but 'scuse me cuz I'm really just enjoying what these women can do. Totally fun to watch.

And I just can't figure out how Kelly Clark could just catch that much air. Sorry she didn't win, but what an amazing run.

Woo woo!

Link: Salt Lake Tribune - Torino 2006.

U.S. finishes 1-2 in women's halfpipe

By Kurt Kragthorpe
The Salt Lake Tribune

BARDONECCHIA, Italy - This will be the last time the U.S. Olympic team is mildly disappointed with a 1-2 finish in the 2006 Games - if there's even another one like it at all. Women's snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler earned gold and silver medals Monday in the halfpipe competition of aerial tricks and turns - matching Sunday's achievement of American men Shaun White and Danny Kass. [...]

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Gretchen Bleiler of United States competes in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Hannah Teter of the United States celebrates winning the gold medal in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

Link: US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe | csmonitor.com.

US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe

Both the men's and women's teams finish 1-2, as the sport becomes one of America's most certain medal hauls.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY– At the top of her final run down the halfpipe, her gold medal waiting in the most august competition in all of sport - the Olympics - Hannah Teter danced.

Maybe it was to the music in her headphones. Perhaps it was to the song that thumped over the loudspeakers below and spilled though this dramatic cleft in the Italian Alps like an auditory avalanche. More than likely, though, it was to that same outrageous inner soundtrack that, an hour later, told her it was completely normal to lean back and clunk her boots onto the table during the most important press conference of her life.

[...]

Doncha just love fiesty women at the top of their games? Now somebody puh-leaze tell me why they want to drop SOFTBALL from the Summer Olympics?!

Maybe they need to clunk their boots on the table too.

Monday introduced the world to snowboarding's Odd Couple. There was Gretchen Bleiler, who would win the vote for snowboarding prom queen in a landslide. At the podium, the microphone cupped regally in her right hand, she said winning an Olympic medal has always been a dream. Did the US want a medal sweep? Of course, she answered, but "everybody at the Olympics works so hard."

It is not rehearsed or forced, but familiar. These are the answers Olympians are supposed to give, and she happens to be wired that way.

Then there is Teter, who says that winning the gold medal will change her life. Now she can get a boat - to wakeboard.

She won the gold, she says, by the fortuitous combination of Vermont maple syrup, brotherly love, and yoga. "I lit the candles at night and zoned in," she told a press corps apparently not quite sure if the real Olympic champion was bound and gagged in a closet somewhere.

In truth, the two women champions might not be so different. At the top of her final run - the one that brought her silver - Bleiler paused for a moment to dial in the right song on her iPod. It was no concerto. It was Green Day's buzzsaw "Holiday."

And 30 minutes before their chance at international superstardom, Bleiler and Teter took the chairlift to the top of the hill, hopped under some out-of-bounds ropes, and sought out that greatest of snowboarding treasures: untracked powder.

But this is the Olympics. Weren't they afraid of getting injured? Bleiler corrected: "This is snowboarding."

[...]

[grin]

I did some skiing a few months ago, which did my soul good after so many years in the South. One of the funnest lift conversations I had was with this short, fiesty little point guard from just over the Idaho state line who was out snowboarding every weekend even tho her high school coach had forbidden anyone on the team from skiing/snowboarding lest they risk an injury.

Brought back some memories. I couldn't snowboard or do any of those things if my life depended on it, but I did my share of sneaking off to Mt Alyeska in Alaska even tho our coaches said "no skiing." Not to mention the trouble we used to get into, sneaking off on our own on basketball trips to pull all manner of stunts in the ice and snow.

It isn't easy being rich in America

This quotation from the article below jumped out at me to the degree that I wanted to bold it out here:

You could have banked $1 million a day every day for the last two years and still have far to go to make the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.

You just gotta pause and let that sink in for a second. Wow. What does this mean, as Martin Luther might say?

So if you're NOT banking well over a million a day, even with that wonderful math of compounding interest that is waved around in front of all of us to get us to start saving early for retirement so we can retire millionaires, that means, you could never even approach the shores of this new class-based American upper crust, this new Gilded Age.

Retirement savings started at age 25 could make you a cool million to retire on, but even if you made it there, the super-rich would be so far out in front of you, that million to retire on would be the equivalent of what, $20,000 in the 1950s? (remember, that's how much you get in the Game of Life, per kid in your little car, when you reach the Day of Reckoning)

OK, so there's no chance in hell any of the folks reading this will ever hit that Forbes mark, just because of the RATE with which the millions must accumulate. I'll set the morality of even striving for such ultra-wealth as others suffer aside, still trying to wrap my dyslexic mind around this math. There are issues of scale that the article below raises as well.

We've become accustomed to the articles that describe how many millions fall into Bill Gates's lap every time he sneezes. That's what I mean by RATE. But what this article does is also try to compare the rate people's incomes are falling as well, as if these two kinds of numbers can be offset against each other. But I'm starting to think these numbers are so desparate, they can't be compared at all. But they must! What to do?

76 more people have joined the U.S. "billionaire club," while FIVE MILLION MORE PEOPLE have newly fallen into the U.S. "poverty club."

To make the billionare club, you must amass money at a rate of millions a day. To make the poverty club, you must only lose about $20K or so from the lower middle class annual income, you know, one little pink or blue stick person from your Game of Life car at the Day of Reckoning.

Five million people times $20K is $100,000,000,000, one hundred billion, right? (my math is extremely questionable, so somebody count my zeroes).

76 more people each amassed one billion (76 billion), while five million all together must have lost about one hundred billion, roughly speaking.

So hypothetically we could take those 76 people and another 24 already in the billionaires club and lift five million out of poverty, eh? Imagine you are a god floating up on a cloud somewhere. In the palm of your godly right hand are the teeming masses of five million people (that's just in the U.S., dunno if other countries get to have gods that weigh things in right and left hands), while in your godly left hand are 100 billionaires.

I don't need to ask what's wrong with this picture. For many people in the U.S. everything is the way it should be in this picture. The needs of one hundred billionaires of course should be worth so much more than the needs of those five million. They're contemplating giving those billionaires even more tax cuts.

SCALE tho, I keep coming back to scale. Yes, I know the scale is unbalanced. That's obvious. It is the level of the unbalance that my visualizing non-math brain keeps coming back to, thinking there's some further insight to be gleaned from a ratio of five million to one hundred. Like a broken filling on a cavity, my tongue just keeps circling around and around this one. I don't know what I expect to find, but I gotta keep worrying at this broken filling.

Five million to one hundred. 50,000 to one. I'm no utilitarian, but this just seems like the strangest logic I've encountered.

Link: Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US .

Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US

By Holly Sklar

10/03/05 -- -- Guess which country the CIA World Factbook describes when it says, "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households."

If you guessed the United States, you're right.

The United States has rising levels of poverty and inequality not found in other rich democracies. It also has less mobility out of poverty.

Since 2000, America's billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people.

Poverty and inequality take a daily toll seldom seen on television. "The infant mortality rate in the United States compares with that in Malaysia -- a country with a quarter the income." says the 2005 Human Development Report. "Infant death rates are higher for [black] children in Washington, D.C., than for children in Kerala, India."

Income and wealth in America are increasingly concentrated at the very top -- the realm of the Forbes 400.

You could have banked $1 million a day every day for the last two years and still have far to go to make the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.

It took a minimum of $900 million to get on the Forbes 400 this year. That's up $150 million from 2004.

"Surging real estate and oil prices drove up several fortunes and helped pave the way for 33 new members," Forbes notes.

Middle-class households, meanwhile, are a medical crisis or outsourced job away from bankruptcy.

With 374 billionaires, the Forbes 400 will soon be billionaires only.

Bill Gates remains No. 1 on the Forbes 400 with $51 billion. Low-paid Wal-Mart workers can find Walton family heirs in five of the top 10 spots; another Wal-Mart heir ranks No. 116.

Former Bechtel president Stephen Bechtel Jr. and his son, CEO Riley Bechtel, tie for No. 109 on the Forbes 400 with $2.4 billion apiece. The politically powerful Bechtel has gotten a no-bid contract for hurricane reconstruction despite a pattern of cost overruns and shoddy work from Iraq to Boston's leaky "Big Dig" tunnel/highway project.

The Forbes 400 is a group so small they could have watched this year's Sugar Bowl from the private boxes of the Superdome.

[...]

The number of Americans in poverty is a group so large it would take the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, plus Arkansas to match it. That's according to the Census Bureau's latest count of 37 million people below the poverty line.

[...]

America is becoming a downwardly mobile society instead of an upwardly mobile society. Median household income fell for the fifth year in a row to $44,389 in 2004 -- down from $46,129 in 1999, adjusting for inflation. vThe Bush administration is using hurricane "recovery" to camouflage policies that will deepen inequality and poverty. They are bringing windfall profits to companies like Bechtel while suspending regulations that shore up wages for workers.

[...]

Holly Sklar is co-author of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us" (www.raisethefloor.org ). She can be reached at [email protected]

"Flatland" vs. the "Zoned Zone"?

Paul Krugman says the housing bubble is springing a big leak. Wouldn't you know it, just about the time I was rebalancing my retirement portfolio to lean toward real estate because the returns were so ridiculously high I was feeling stupid not to be more in there.

Oh well, trust dollar cost averaging and a balanced fund, and I still got a decent mix of things going on. Dan Gillmor talks about the bubble all the time too. I have no desire for a mortgage, and I'm sort of too transient to partake anyway. And McMansion white flight social segregation makes me break out in hives.

I enjoy the turn of the phrase though, Flatland and the Zoned Zone. I think it appeals because lately I've been entertaining the idea that the "Zoned Zone" and the avenues of the mega-rich in the U.S. actually constitute a separate economy of scale from where most people live, an economy of scale (neo-Gilded Age?) fully as divided as the difference of scale between the dollar and the peso.

I mean, why else would Winona Ryder shoplift $80 socks?!

That's the only way I can explain in my own mind WHY anyone would buy the insanely inflated housing in California and on the Northeast coast. If you don't think in those terms,  you have to imagine folks (many of my good friends live there, so I don't like to imagine this) with the word "sucker" written across their foreheads. Isn't that the definition of sucker? To pay a ridiculously inflated price for something that has far less "real" value? A quarter-million for a one-bedroom glorified closet? Swamp land in Florida?

Maybe it isn't a neo-Gilded Age after all. Maybe those of us striving to be present in the new nation of the mega-rich (as opposed to the neo-Third World growing in U.S. Flatland) are merely the fawning courtier class to a new feudal aristocracy taking root in the Zoned Zone. That's the impression I get on those mindless days when I'm accidently exposed to that exercise in extended nausea that is "Entertainment Tonight."

Here are a few pithy bits from Krugman.

Link: That Hissing Sound - New York Times.

Op-Ed Columnist

That Hissing Sound

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 8, 2005

This is the way the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with a hiss.

Housing prices move much more slowly than stock prices. There are no Black Mondays, when prices fall 23 percent in a day. In fact, prices often keep rising for a while even after a housing boom goes bust.

[...]

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

[...]

In the nation as a whole, housing prices rose about 50 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2005. But that average blends results from Flatland metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta, where prices rose 26 and 29 percent respectively, with results from Zoned Zone areas like New York, Miami and San Diego, where prices rose 77, 96 and 118 percent.

Nobody would pay San Diego prices without believing that prices will continue to rise. Rents rose much more slowly than prices: the Bureau of Labor Statistics index of "owners' equivalent rent" rose only 27 percent from late 1999 to late 2004. Business Week reports that by 2004 the cost of renting a house in San Diego was only 40 percent of the cost of owning a similar house - even taking into account low interest rates on mortgages. So it makes sense to buy in San Diego only if you believe that prices will keep rising rapidly, generating big capital gains. That's pretty much the definition of a bubble.

Bubbles end when people stop believing that big capital gains are a sure thing. That's what happened in San Diego at the end of its last housing bubble: after a rapid rise, house prices peaked in 1990. Soon there was a glut of houses on the market, and prices began falling. By 1996, they had declined about 25 percent after adjusting for inflation. And that's what's happening in San Diego right now, after a rise in house prices that dwarfs the boom of the 1980's. The number of single-family houses and condos on the market has doubled over the past year. "Homes that a year or two ago sold virtually overnight - in many cases triggering bidding wars - are on the market for weeks," reports The Los Angeles Times. The same thing is happening in other formerly hot markets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has become deeply dependent on the housing bubble. The economic recovery since 2001 has been disappointing in many ways, but it wouldn't have happened at all without soaring spending on residential construction, plus a surge in consumer spending largely based on mortgage refinancing. Did I mention that the personal savings rate has fallen to zero?

[...]