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| Sunday, January 5, 2003 |
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Ends to means 
| | I'll use this post to catch up on some loose but worthy ends: |
| | Stealing Radio is a promo that shows creativity lives, sort of, in that brain-dead industry. Thanks to Dean for the link. |
| | One Minute Site Manifesto is an Italian derivative of the original. If the derivation had been more direct, the Manifesto wouldn't be available only as a .pdf. Thanks to RageBoy for the link. |
Split
| | Saw Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine last night. A lot of people told me this movie was different than Moore's usual fare, which comforts the afflicted by afflicting the comfortable, while insisting on causal relationships between both conditions. |
| | This movie, I was told, is more balanced, and more moving, than one might expect. But there was nothing new. Sure, we've got a fear-driven country here. Our TV news is toxic as well as silly and shallow. Our government is infatuated weapons of mass persuasion. But does that explain it all? |
| | The pro-gun case was carried by the senescent Charleston Heston (filmed not long before the old guy went public about his Alzheimer's), and to flakes like the Michigan Militia and Terry Nichols' brother James. |
| | I like Michael Moore, and I still miss TV Nation. He's the best reminder we have of the Left's real family values, which are nurturing, empathetic, fair, and more centered around joy than fear. I just wish Bowling for Columbine had been a little more fair with its subject. |
Stuff that matters
| | I just went to look up something about David Love, the great Wyoming geologist, and found that he died last Summer. There are reports here, here, here, here, and here . |
| | David Love was also a source for The West, a PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives. I Will Never Leave You is the story of his parents, John and Ethel Love. |
| | I take more than a passing interest in all this because I've been steeping myself for the last several years in the works of John McPhee, who does for geology what Shakespeare did for love -- except the virtues of geology are not so self-evident. To McPhee, no rock has a story too dull to tell, which he proves, page after page, book after book. McPhee's series of books on American geology were only slightly condensed last year into one fat work titled Annals of the Former World. It won the Pulitzer it deserved. My favorite McPhee book is Rising from the Plains, which weaves two tales into one: the story of Wyoming's deep past and of the geologist David Love, who has lived through the last 89 years of it. "A geological map is a textbook on one sheet of paper," McPhee writes. And David Love, who grew up on a hardscrabble ranch in the very center of the state, was the primary author of both the 1955 and 1985 editions of the Geological Survey's Wyoming maps. He researched them mostly on foot, and guesses he's spent a quarter of his life sleeping outside. |
| | What draws me to people like McPhee and Love is the sense of grounded perspective they give us on a topic that should become increasingly fundamental as both Linux and the computer industry mature. That topic is infrastructure. Or, to use a label I prefer, interstructure. I'm talking here about our base-level computing and communications environments. Linux is down there, sitting on top of the deeper and more universal environment we call the Internet. It's infrastructural stuff. Every piece of code we add or change lithifies into solid material we use to build the civilized world. |
| | In geology the term "competent" refers to rock that's dependable. You can build a house on it or with it, and you can trust that it won't break if you climb a steep surface of it. It also has nothing to hide about itself. The same goes for code. Infrastructural code is naturally competent. It is also open to both examination and improvement. The intellectual and creative processes by which we improve infrastructural code are no less natural than the geological forces that turn granite into gneiss, limestone into marble and peridotite into serpentine. |
| | Those processes involve pressure and intrusion. Peridotite is formed at depths greater than any other rock, directly from the Earth's liquid mantle. When sea water intrudes to those depths, it turns peridotite to serpentine, the California state rock. |
| | Somehow that seems relevant to what we're trying to do with the public code we use for infrastructure (I've given up on the 'innerstructure' label, which wasn't adhesive), and the protocols and standards whose ubiquitious use are equally infrastructural. |
| | Anyway, that's what I'm writing about today, for publication several months from now. After reading that David Love had died, I had to go write this sidebar. |
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