Jonas Beckman

Aila’s sister Anne and her family (husband and two kids) were in town on their way home from Finland.

The kids had been to Moomin Valley and visited all the characters from Tove Jansson‘s books. Fantastic illustrated books – I read them all as a kid! They age well, in fact I like some of the tales better now.

Anne brought me fresh lingonberry, picked somewhere in a Finnish forest. She said that will cure my coated tongue – I believe it! And Matilda, three years old, brought a little blue alien just for me. I am touched. Thank you!

A recent post on Advogato thinks European software patents are in danger of becoming even worse than in the US. The article is strong on opinion, a bit weaker on facts – but it’s very easy to get upset by this.

Europe has an unusual tradition of many small software companies doing very creative work. Internet has accelerated this – current legislation could end up giving a few big players legal weapons to kill the business of independent software developers.

Several people are trying to do something. Background information to read, petitions to sign and people to contact can be found on savetheweb.org and petition.eurolinux.org.

I signed the petitions. Next week I’ll ask around – if any of the Swedish branch organizations are into this, I’ll post more about that.

Yes, I read that book a while ago! He is a very slick writer and covers the American gnostic fads of the 1800s particularly well. I have to admit I can’t remember what he wrote about the application of gnosticism to the technology field.

What was your reaction to the book?

Another “early-flip-day” – so this is just a quick post before I go to bed. I hope I’ll have time for more later.

Erik Davis has an article in Feed about TV ads for new anti-anxiety drugs. A scary but balanced article. BTW, has anyone read Davis book TechGnosis? Is it worth reading? Update: I have now read it – yes, it is! Also, thanks to Greg Franklin for some brief but interesting discussions.

The conversation about storytelling continues. Here is Martin’s latest post and mine.
And James Vornov just wrote about the Yin and Yang of weblogging. Yes, Hal, capital letters. James model is very simple – but it is a model.

And his notion of “peer coaching” is intriguing. Thinking about writing only in terms of readers, writers and distribution is far too simplistic. Good editors are veryvaluable.

David Rogers suggests that on-line text is processed by “an area in the brain that is related to entertainment processing”. Well, I certainly hope so!

I’ll add to the completely unsupported speculation: there is a theory that movies have much more emotional impact than television – maybe printed text is different from on-line text for the same reason?

The theory is very prosaic: since movie-screens show still pictures just fast enough to create the illusion of movement, the pictures can create instinctive emotional responses. Computer monitors, on the other hand, never show any still pictures: they continously build everything pixel by pixel. All this pixel-flashing is fast enough to be almost invisible on a good monitor – but not by much. So the brain can process the visual information, but it doesn’t happen in a way that feels real.

I have no idea if this is true or not. Does anyone know? Are there any good references?

Update: links via IseeISay about Diagrams about Thoughts about Thoughts about Diagrams and …human brain applies law of least effort.

I just got back from the pool. My body is getting used to swimming several times a week – but I am still taking it very easy. I already look forward to next time.
Something for divers: Phillip Greenspun has written an informative article about how he got decompression illness and how it can be avoided. Via QubeQuorner

Earlier today Jörg Kantel, Der Schockwellenreiter, linked to one of my favorite sites: Skeptic’s dictionary. He also mentioned one of my favorite writers: Martin Gardner.

Skeptic’s dictionary makes an interesting observation: almost everyone agrees with skepticism – except about things they personally believe in. “Oh yes, astrology is nonsense, of course. But Scientology is different.”
However, when I carefully investigated some of my own pet beliefs they really were different.

Later, SingBlueSilver thought skeptics were spoilsports, which made Jörg upset enough to defend skepticism passionately and at length (in German).

Summary: it can be very dangerous to believe in stupid things and it’s surprisingly hard not to. Thanks a lot Jörg!

And Andrea links to Skeptical Inquirer and has plenty of good links about Richard Feynman – who turns out to be a personal deity of Hal and Al’s ghostly advisor.
Hmmm… lots of people with good taste around here. They like the same things I do

Time’s shadow writes more about the Russian submarine today. He also tells us about some books that have helped him in his life. Dave Rogers is a Naval officer and a very thoughtful person. Thanks for sharing both expertise and personal experience!

For Manila insiders only.

Susan coined a new expression recently: a late flip day. So this is an “early flip day” – and I should probably go to bed now.

Update: Susan noted that she wasn’t the first to use this phrase.
Want to become a Manila insider? Then start here.

Happy birthday, Hal!

Martin Spernau wonders if posting his long story will confuse readers expecting technical stuff.
I don’t think so, for several reasons.

Before writing existed there was storytelling, before weblogging existed there was writing… maybe the social part of weblogging is an attempt to get something back?

There was an excellent article about intellectual property in yesterday’s Motley Fool. From the summary:

Copyright as it now stands has outlived its original purpose, and is no longer clearly beneficial to society as a whole.

and a little bit further down:

Authors still perform a valuable service by creating intellectual property. Publishers perform an increasingly useless service, copying information that individuals who own computers connected by the Internet can copy on their own.

Link via Scripting News.

I missed one thing in the Motley Fool article: editors. In terms of pure distribution readers and writers may seem enough – but quality writing is rarely produced in a vacuum.

Stanley Schmidt, who is an excellent editor, asked this question in 1988: What if anyone could publish?

Schmidt was ahead of his time. Compare with these Millenial notes on getting published in America, from the current issue of Spark-online.

I found these and lots of other links I liked at ~fletk. Thanks a lot, Ken!

Here is an old favorite of mine: The Neural Surfer. This rather excentric professor of philosophy has videos of bodysurfing, online books about gurus-gone-bad and some far out discussion boards.

I met my friend Amit the other day. He is writing in Swedish – but there are plenty of nice pictures on his site.

Last week Microsoft announced Microsoft Reader – an online reader for electronic books. Here is the official FAQ.

If the file-format of MS Reader was open and published this could be great news. But instead it seems to follow an old and depressing Microsoft tradition: first release obscure file-formats to prevent competition, then provide free tools to read and convert them. MS Word is perhaps the most blatant example of this.

Microsoft Reader files are basically HTML expressed as XML that has been converted to a proprietary binary format by proprietary tools. In plain English: it’s one-way. Once you use this format, MS decides what you are allowed to do with it.

“HTML expressed as XML” sounds like XHTML – but it’s not. Nowadays, Microsoft always say they intend to follow some open standard, and in this case it’s OEB (Open eBook Specification). And this key quote from the MS Reader markup guide sounds awfully familiar:

This book describes all the various tags, attributes and style properties included in the Open eBook (OEB) specification and their behavior. It also describes the non-OEB HTML and CSS elements supported by the Microsoft Reader.

Microsoft has also dusted off another old trick: pretending that copy protection is a user feature. The new twist is that Microsoft Passport will be obligatory for anyone who wants to buy e-books – remember Joel Spolsky’s warning?

The font-display technology (ClearType) is designed for LCD screens and doesn’t make much difference on ordinary monitors. Yet Jakob Nielsen somehow became frightened enough to say:

If ClearType is made available for Microsoft applications and not integrated fully into the operating system, then that is the final kiss of death for any independent software developers. Nobody wants to spend 10% more time reading…

So what’s next? Personally I’ll investigate the file-format – and also think hard about possible Open Source alternatives.

I will never use Microsoft Passport. But I did go to this archive of old and free books and downloaded “Desperate”, by Ivan Turgenev. It’s a fine book, and it was surprisingly easy to read on my screen – but why not look for the real thing in a good second-hand bookshop?

prozac, when used to create a situation where the patient is more receptive to therapy, is a great idea. prozac and other ssri’s prescribed as ‘magic bullets’ is just awful. brings up a lot of complicated issues that were just hitting the streets when i left manhattan … some salespeople were getting prescriptions from their medical doctors, rather than psychiatrists, in order to ‘brighten’ their moods, and make themselves artificially more ‘positive’. it seemed to work. there’s a term being bandied about here in the states: ‘prozac pez’ (named after the popular pez candy). it seems to have become as popular as the ‘mother’s little helper’ (valium) of the 50′s and 60′s … only for both sexes now.

a great read, if you’re interested: james hillman and michael ventura … “we’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy … and the world’s getting worse.”

Garret links to a story about the death of Freud and the rebirth of psychiatry.

Oldfashioned psychoanalysis is more or less discredited – but relying on nothing-but-prozac is very unsatisfactory, too. I become suspicious whenever anyone says there are easy answers to this dilemma.

It really is a very slow sunday. Fall is coming, I think.

I am indulging in hardware sites again. And the occasional gaming site. Sometimes I feel unprofessional because I don’t play any games – but to me, the subculture (and market!) is usually much more interesting than the games themselves.

I know I wanted a quiet PC (and now I have one). So I have absolutely nothing in common with insane overclockers with fans that sound like helicopters and custom-built cooling systems for room-mates.
Except some unnecessary (and perhaps dangerous) low level tweaks to beef up my WinBench and 3DMark 2000 scores… optimized NT settings… well-tuned dual-boot harddisk partitions… never mind.

With some help from Der Shockwellenreiter Netscape users can now see my pictures. Thanks Jörg! The trick? Don’t use the line-height attribute in your stylesheets.