July 2003

Good Luck Daron

Daron set out on the next leg of his journey today. We are each given chances in life to make extraordinary things happen. The once, daily, good-humor show in the midst of the office, the foil to joust ideas with, the joys and frustrations will now be shared in a different way. Congratulations, Daron, on taking this opportunity to follow your heart.

Good News for Pizza Lovers

The New York Times has an article citing a study in Italy that finds eating pizza may help reduce one's risk of cancer. Meanwhile another source suggests a tuna sandwich a day may reduce the risk of Alzhimers's disease.

Blogs as journalism

Discussions have been going on for some time about the status of blogs. Are they journalism? I believe that they can be in many ways. They can break stories. They can contain information that is factually correct. One of the biggest shortcomings, however, is the lack of the integrity of the publication. Not the kind of integrity shown to be recently lacking at the New York Times, but the kind of integrity that what I see today is what I will see tomorrow.

Scripting News was recently plagued by a robot that was rather annoying (to Scripting News). However, it brought to light one of my long-time frustrations - Blogs change. Not just by adding new postings but by removing or changing content. There is not the integrity of an issue of Time magazine - something that once held in my hands and read will remain the same. While it would be technically possible to print many common blogs this defeats the growth of knowledge created by the rapid recombination of data possible through blogging.

For example, some weeks ago, Dave Winer, publisher of Scripting News grew weary of the mud slinging and petty nature of personal attacks and turned off Scripting News. This is completely in his rights as a publisher. The problem is what happens when Scripting News does go away. For whatever reason. There is no comprehensive library that will preserve every issue ever published there (or here for that matter). How will scholars of the future tap the publications of today as they become increasingly temporary?

Crisis of one sort or another

On January 28, 2003 President George W. Bush said in the State of the Union address to Congress: "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."

It seems that we have a crisis. Possibly the claims were not as substantiated as they were stated to be, in which case we have a crisis of leadership. Perhaps we have a military and intelligence service that is incapable of finding hundreds of tons of hideous materials in which case we have a crisis of security. Finally the possiblity exists that our intelligence agencies are not up to the task and we have a crisis of intelligence gathering.

Three bad options.