technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.
Wow. I thought the Salon piece had peaked on Daypop when it hit #14, but I think it must have bounced up into the Top 10 sometime when I wasn’t looking. It’s at 11 now, with a little downward arrow.
BTW: Am I just an idiot, or is there no actual explanation or key to the graphics you see on DayPop? Somebody enlighten me, please: I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the symbols all mean…
Worried that the Catholic Church isn’t taking firm enough action to address the current pedophilia crisis?
Worry no more, at least if you are in the Diocese of Los Angeles. ‘Cause they’ve a high-priced public relations firm.
This is a bit of a fish, barrel, gun story in terms of the opportunity it presents for bashing on the Church. But I’m going to attempt to restrain myself and step back a bit. Is there a legitimate case to be made that the Church does actually need such advice?
I think the case could be made if you believe that the Church is doing the right things, and is simply getting pilloried in the press unfairly. Picture a scenario where the Church genuinely is doing all the right things, is helping people in all different ways, but is being attacked by the press, just because the press corps is a bunch of meanies. Would it make sense for them to get advice on how to improve their image then, so that they can regain their popularity and continue to help more people? Probably.
So I don’t think it is fair to dismiss totally out of hand this kind of a move — although I do view it with grave suspicion. It comes down to exactly how you view the actions that they are taking to address the crisis itself. If you feel they’re doing all the right things now and are still getting bashed by the media, then a step like this might make sense.
But if they really aren’t addressing the core issues and are taking this action instead of true reform: then, there’s just no excuse for it. And I’d say go ahead and pull the trigger on that little fishy in the barrel.
Footnote: I originally heard this story on NPR yesterday in the early evening. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find it on their website. If I do I’ll add a link; perhaps they just haven’t archived it yet.
The Blogsphere Ecosystem
Well, everybody else has a “blogroll”, a “recommended” list, or some other such assemblage of links which guide their fair readers to other interesting spots around the blogosphere. Now I’ve joined the fun, and have created my Blogosphere Ecosystem list. (It’s on the left nav bar if you hadn’t noticed. Scroll down a bit).
I concluded I didn’t want to just put folks up alphabetically, but I also didn’t want to deal with the headaches of keeping track of who’s said nice things about me lately (thereby guaranteeing high placement) and who’s been pissing me off (whoops, was that link broken? My bad).
Therefore, I decided to try to develop a way to measure, somewhat more objectively, where the most “interesting” spots in the blogosphere were. One measure of doing this would be to capture who is being linked to by other bloggers the most. Easier said than done — but not impossible, as it turns out.
So, after a few days of screwing around with lots of different tools, I found a way to do it. The methodology, in a nutshell, is this: I started with a fairly large list of about 175 blogs; mostly, I stole from Instapundit and Vodkapundit’s lists, since they are pretty comprehensive, especially when taken together. Then, I built a process to do the following:
– Download the front page of each blog to my local machine
– Scan through each page and extract every link (URL) found in the HTML of the page
– For each of the original list of blogs, scan through the total link list and count how many links go to that blog
– Sort the list of blogs in descending order of their number of inbound links, and include the number in parentheses next to the blog link
There’s a bunch of gadgets involved to do all this, and way too much manual effort (at the moment). When I finish Part II of this little project (which will be even cooler, if I get it to work right), I’ll elaborate more on the process and tools used.
But for now, there it is. To further clarify, here’s a FAQ list:
I assume the list is absolutely perfect and has no errors in it, right?
Wrong. I’m pretty confident it is reasonably close, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it. But I’m still working the bugs out, so some blogs might show up higher or lower than they would in a “perfect” list. If you see yours (or any other) looking way off, drop me a line and let me know. I’m officially classing this list / process as “beta” for the time being.
About this number of links thing. So are you like obsessed with finding out who is “the best” blogger ?
Nope. There’s tons of different ways to define “best” or “success” in the blogosphere. Some might say having lots of folks link to you is one of them, but there are plenty of others (and if you’re gauging your own blog’s success by any measure other than how much enjoyment it gives you, well, that way lies madness). I think it is interesting to measure links because it certainly shows what other people in the blogosphere think is interesting at a certain time, but I don’t think it necessarily tells us much about “best”.
Hey, I clicked on one of those links and it took me to the site’s home page, not the blog on that site. What gives?
That would be one of the little bugs that needs to get ironed out. Think of it as a feature for the moment. (The links work perfect for sites whose top-level page is the blog — i.e., anything hosted at blogspot, plus lots of others — but for the few blogs that are sitting on larger sites, you’ll get taken to the main page, not the blog).
So are you pounding the heck out of everybody’s blogs by spidering and screwing up their tracking statistics?
Nope. Finding a method which would involve the absolute minimum possible load hitting folks’ pages was a key goal. Every blog on the list is hit exactly once each time the process is run, to download the front page to my local machine. All other processing then occurs on the local copy. (And if anyone truly objects to that, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll take your blog off the list).
Does the process count all links between weblogs?
No. It only counts links that appear on the front page; so links that are older and are on your archive pages (or on any other pages of your site) won’t be included.
My blog isn’t on the list, and it’s way cooler than the ones that are. How do I get added?
Send me an email. I make no promises as to how fast you’ll get added, but I’ll try to have a reasonably short turnaround. Figure I’ll probably do an update batch once a week.
Are you going to update the list periodically, or was this a one-shot deal?
I’d like to update it at least weekly, to take the “pulse of the blogosphere”, so to speak. But we shall see. I’ve automated much of the processing so that hopefully it won’t be too painful, but it’s still got some manual work involved each time I run it, and adding blogs to the list is purely manual.
Anyway, hope folks find it interesting / entertaining, so enjoy…
PS – And in case anybody plans on getting their knickers in a twist about being called a “lowly insect” or one of the other, shall we say, “lesser” categories — look close and check out where I am at….
Blogging likely to be light today. Working on a couple of projects; hopefully by eod today or Monday morning I’ll have some cool stuff posted as a result.
Obsessive Rankings Update Redux:
Up to #14 on DayPop ! Whoop!
A few days back, I wheeled out the Bear Assignment Desk and some homework to Prof. Reynolds, Ms. Lithwick, and Prof. Volokh . Notably: To explain in language a simple bear could understand just what the devil the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Federal government’s ability to bring action against states on behalf of individuals actually means in the real world.
Well, Ms. Lithwick’s off in Israel, Prof. Volokh begged off, and Prof. Reynolds is way too busy discussing teen nookie and the arcana of web site tracking metrics (although not, I should point out, simultaneously). So they all get incompletes.
Fear not, however, for we have a TTLB reader and a fellow blogger have both provided their analysis of the decision.
Mark Shawhan dropped me an email with an excellent summary of the decision, the key points of which I’ll share with you here. Mark caveats his analysis with the statement that he is “neither a law student nor a law professor”: so noted, but his analysis looks good to me.
Mark begins with the necessary background and summary of the case:
The 11th Amendment states that the federal “judicial power” does not extend to suits by private citizens against states not their own (in other words, states have immunity against such suits). At some point in the recent past, a company called South Carolina Maritime Services was denied berthing space and certain other services for their liners by the state of SC, because those liners were being used as floating casinos. They filed a complaint with the Federal Maritime Commission, asking the commission to enjoin SC from their denial of services to SCMS.
The FMC referred the complaint, as per usual practice, to an administrative law judge, who found that SC enjoyed sovereign immunity from such complaints under the 11th Amendment. the FMC disagreed, reversed the administrative law judge, and found for SCMS. Their reasoning was that the 11th Amendment dealt with judicial tribunals (hence “judicial power”), rather than proceedings of executive branch agencies like the FMC, so SC did not have immunity from the FMC. SC, obviously appealed, etc.
The Supreme Court, found that SC did indeed have immunity from the FMC. The majority opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, stated that while the 11th Amendment did not explicitly give states immunity from administrative proceedings (a literal textual reading says quite the opposite, in fact), the principle of sovereign immunity for the states, of which the 11th Amendment is an important pillar, requires immunity for SC from the FMC. Essentially, the argument is that the principle behind the 11th Amendment was that states should be immune from suit by private citizens. While administrative adjudication of complaints (ie, the FMC deciding the validity of the complaint of SCMS) did not exist at the time the 11th Amendment was ratified, the proceedings of administrative adjudication are closely similar to those of a court, and thus, while they are a function of the executive branch, should be treated as if they are also judicial proceedings. Thus, SC has immunity from the FMC.
OK, got it. So we’re dealing with the 11th Amendment, here, and since it’s only one sentence long, might as well reprint it so we’re all on the same page:
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
The majority decision is taking that sentence to mean, in a broad sense, that even though the action in question Federal Maritime Commission was technically executing “administrative proceeding” and not a lawsuit, the FMC isn’t fooling anybody. It had the same effect as a lawsuit, and therefore should be treated as such.
Mark continues, and lays out the future effects of the decision:
There are a couple of implications to the decision. First, this greatly expands the power of the states at the expense of the federal government. Heretofore, as I understand it, there have been substantial numbers of actions against state governments taken by executive agencies of the federal government pursuant to private complaints; these are no longer possible. These agencies may still pursue proceedings against state governments on their own, but I would think this becomes more difficult without a private complaint to spur on action. In other words, the court just closed off a substantial avenue for private citizens seeking remedies against state governments.
The other significant element to this decision was the way in which it was reached. The 5-member majority found that the 11th Amendment’s sovereign immunity extended to administrative proceedings, even though such an interpretation was not in the literal text. Basically, the court said that the 11th Amendment should be construed as to include proceedings substantially similar to the already-enumerated ones, because those proceedings did not exist at the time of the writing of the amendment.
Supporters of this decision would argue that they are looking to the intent of the writers of the amendment (to give states immunity from suit); opponents would say that this is precisely the broad construction of the Constitution going beyond the original text (or even opposite the original text) which members of the majority have in the past criticized as judicial activism. To summarize: in the past, this particular 5-justice majority has struck down federal legislation because justification for that legislation could not be found in the strict text of the Constitution; this decision limits federal powers because those powers were not constitutional, under a broad reading of the constitution. That’s an important change (and shows an increased willingness to limit federal power vis a vis. the states).
So in the future, it’s going to be a lot harder for the federal government to bring any kind of action against state governments. In particular, it seems, regulatory agencies (such as the FMC, EPA, FCC, FAA, and others) are the ones that have lost some power here. Whereas before they could hide behind a fig leaf that their actions were administrative, and not lawsuits, now the Supreme Court has taken away that defense.
Mark is also politely pointing out, I believe, that the majority seems to be switching sides of the strict/loose constructionist debate according to what happens to be convenient at the time; an observation I’ve heard echoed elsewhere.
Still not enough analysis for you? Then check out Howard Bashman’s post at How Appealing, which he was kind enough to refer me to. Howard brings up the interesting point that this decision, given that it was 5-4, may be a factor in future Supreme Court nominations:
The Court’s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence is unusual in that the four more liberal Justices find themselves in the role of strict constructionists while the five-member majority expounds upon a theme that the majority freely admits transcends the Constitution’s text. The four dissenters have gone on record in earlier dissents as ready to overrule the foundation of the Court’s jurisprudence in this area should a fifth vote to do so ever become available. These cases thus involve a subject matter where a change in the Court’s personnel could make a big difference.
My thanks to both Mark & Howard for their cogent explanations, and hopefully they will each point out any inaccuracies or distortions that I may have inadvertently introduced into
the discussion here.
I am a bummed bear with respect to my plea for a spiffy new logo. So far a grand total of zero (0, none, zip, zilch, nothing, nada, bupkiss) submissions have shown up in my inbox.
I mean, has got one. VodkaGuy has got one . This has got something to do with anti-bear discrimination, doesn’t it? Admit it.
(If you’re confused, look at the top-left of the page and follow the “Click here if you’re interested in designing the new TTLB logo” link.)
But anyway, it’s only been a few days, so I’m sure the lack of response is because all you graphically-inclined type folks have been slaving away feverishly since then, and are simply waiting until your designs are absolutely perfect before sending them to me.
Right?
The Christian Science Monitor is that India’s military has detailed plans for a limited war against Pakistan. The level of detail obtained by the CSM’s reporters (and leaked by the Indian military) is remarkable:
Within the first 48 hours, India is expected to attack the Neelam Valley Road across the Kupwara sector in Indian-held Kashmir, says an Indian Air Force officer involved in the planning. The Indian Air Force will try to destroy an important bridge over the Jhelum River which connects Pakistan with Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. But “Indian action will attract heavy Pakistani punishment,” says General Mehta (an Indian military analyst).
What, no timetable? Well, actually, there is:
Indian military sources say India has secretly told the US and Britain that it will wait two weeks to see if international diplomatic pressure halts infiltration of Islamic militants into Indian territory. “This could be easily verified by monitoring [radio and telephone] intercepts,” says Ret. Major Gen. Ashok Mehta, an Indian military analyst. If infiltration does not significantly drop, a senior Army official says India plans a 10-day assault in Kashmir. “It will be like Kargil [the 1999 war between India and Pakistan],” says Mr. Mehta. “The military action will be predominantly infantry led and intensively supported by the Air Force.”
The running theory as to why the Indian government is letting this stuff leak is that they are trying to threaten Pakistan into clamping down on cross-border terrorism. Stephen Cohen of the Brookings institution is quoted in the CSM piece: “They are threatening to use force to compel another country to alter its behavior. In this case, their target is both Pakistan and the US, and they are compelling the US to put pressure on Musharraf to rein in cross-border terrorism.”
This makes sense as an analysis of the Indian military’s motivations. Does the policy itself make sense though? I’m more than a bit skeptical. Sounds a lot like a game of chicken where neither side is going to blink…
PS – I first learned of the CSM article on KCRW radio’s To the Point yesterday. Click here if you want to listen to RealAudio of an interview with one of the CSM’s reporters about the piece.
clerics in Egypt have teamed up with the Business Software Association and issued a fatwa against copyright piracy. (Found on Slashdot).
“Piracy is the worst type of theft and is prohibited by Islam,” (Sheikh Ibrahim) Atta Allah declared.
Well alrighty then. Mohammed wasn’t big on swappin’ warez and rippin’ MP3s, I take it?
Clarification: The fatwa was from the clerics, not the BSA. As far as I know they do injunctions, not fatwas, which I guess are arguably far more dangerous…
Amish Tech Support outdoes himself with a moving letter to Adam Pearl. Go check it out.
Linking to InstaPundit referenced articles is often pointless, but one’s worth it… and it’s best if you go through his link rather than directly. I strongly urge you to spend a minute considering the geopolitics involved and the possible common enemy of which Glenn speaks before proceeding on… see if you get it right…
Defeats France in World Cup Opener
As Nelson would say:
ha-HA!
This is especially delicious since apparently the entire starting line up of Senegal’s team actually play professionally on French league teams. Which, I would assume, makes them — let’s say it together boys and girls — immigrants.
(Hey, I’ve refrained from the obligatory blogospheric French-bashing up until now; a guy’s allowed to have a little fun now and then.)
Glenn Reynolds has challenged my masculinity!
This will not stand! He may think he can run forensic rings around certain fools who shall not be named, but we shall see how he stacks up against a Real Bear! Have at you!
Actually, I think he was just polite and not making assumptions. And good for him. Or, er, should that be “good for it”?
In my case, regardless, it’s “he” Glenn, honest. Ask my fianc
Happy Fun Pundit his razor-sharp analytical skills on the Bill of Rights.
(it’s been linked to elsewhere, but it actually made me laugh out loud, so that’s pretty much a gotta-link-to in my book).
On a lighter note:
Patio Pundit his finger on what’s been bugging me about the new Slate-supercharged Kausfiles:
“…is it me or does it suck now? Not the kausfiles content, that’s smoking. But it doesn’t feel right. There’s no archives, no link list. I understand that there are some tradeoffs “working for the man.” But they don’t even give Mickey that day tab thingamajiggy.”
Yeah. Mickey’s still cruisin’, but he needs to smack those Microsoft weenies slinging the HTML upside the head. The layout is killin’ us.
Is this where we’re supposed to start a petition or something?
“Free Mickey’s Prose! “
“What do we want?”
“PERMALINKS!”
“When do we want ’em?”
“NOW!”
SAM Missile Update: If you read nothing else, read this.
Well, had my moment in the sun, now back to work. And unpleasant work it is this morning.
The Washington Times (found via Corner) has a report today that goes beyond yesterday’s CNN piece indicating that al Qaeda might have surface-to-air missiles that could be used against U.S. airliners and says that “new intelligence indicates that Islamic terrorists have smuggled shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles into the United States.” (emphasis mine).
The CNN report, which I mentioned here, contained no indication that these weapons might already be in the country.
This is very, very not good. I’m going to keep thinking long and hard about what I would do, if I were Bush or Ashcroft or Ridge right now, to stop what I fear is going to be another terrible loss of life. I will confess to you that right now, I just don’t have an answer. But please, if you’ve got an idea — send it to me. This is not an idle intellectual exercise: this is for real, and as intelligent, informed citizens of this country we damn well better be doing our part to think creatively about how to stop these monsters — because our diversity of mind and thought is our greatest strength. Let’s not squander it.
Update: VodkaGuy has a more reasoned assessment of the threat over at his place. He points out that modern airliners are pretty stable craft, and as such, might be able to withstand losing an engine to a SAM strike.
I’d like to believe that, but I question whether a SA-7 (which apparently is the type of missile most likely to be used) would outright destroy the wing of the plane, as well as the engine. Anybody with a better military background than VP and myself care to chime in here?
Update Again: VodkaGuy got back to me in email near instantaneously, and indicates that a SA-7 warhead is much too small to wreck the wing. This is good news.
I’m pleased and a little baffled to have an announcement of sorts to make.
My piece “Back in the Day”, which was previously posted here as a weblog entry, has been accepted for publication by You can now find it here, in all its actually-published-by-a-real-magazine glory. This is my first professional sale, and I have to admit to being a bit dazed by the whole thing. (I’m not doing a very job of acting all blas
Remember when folks were that the FBI needs to be blogging to improve their communications (search on ‘FBI needs a blog’ — I still haven’t figured out if Mickey doesn’t do permalinks now that he’s hit the bigtime or if I’m just clueless.)?
Well, looks like the military end of the war on terror already is:
“…the Tactical Web Page, (is) a secret, secure Web site being used in combat for the first time, through which American commanders at Bagram air base and in the United States can direct the fight in Afghanistan.
The system collects all information and communication in one place. Commanders confer in chat rooms and pass on orders; messages scroll across the screen, alerting developments from the field; maps show friendly and enemy positions. “
Cool. Not quite blogging, but close enough…