Author: John

Revolutions and Resolutions and Revolutions

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I was reading once, I think it was in an article that Douglas Hofstadter (“Doug” to us intimates) wrote, in the New Yorker of all places, about the art of translating literature from one natural language to another. At least, I think it was Douglas Hoftstadter, but maybe that’s just my fixation shining through. Maybe the article was by Dan Hofstadter, or by somebody else altogether. Puns, of course, present a great challenge to translators, and I remember the clever instance sited therein: in a translation of Alice in Wonderland, a pun on “axes”, as in, the earth spins on its axes–speaking of axes, off with her head– was turned into a pun on revolutions: each day the earth makes a revolution– speaking of revolutions, off with her head. Now that I check my Project Gutenberg, however, I can find no such instance, so maybe, like Alice, I was dreaming.

But that’s got nothing to do with Wetmachine’s being a finalist in the 2008 Weblog Awards!
The 2008 Weblog Awards

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Dogbark wisdom

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Two cute woof-woofs from dear old Atrios, at Eschaton. ( I will link to him even though he refuses to acknowledge my existence (I hate that).)

In the most recent bark, he ironically says, Damn those unions for destroying Citigroup!!!. In the immediately prior arf-arf, he says,

I guess the Very Serious People are incapable of seeing how absurd this all is.

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

Read THE PAINS or I will shoot you in the face

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The Pains is now available for you to read, for free, online. It’s under the Creative Commons license, about which more in a moment. It’s also available for you to pre-order printed copies. I would advise your buying several copies: it’s the surest way to avoid extraordinary rendition to an undisclosed location and being subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.

UPDATE

I’ve updated this entry with some more info about Creative Commons.

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Wah! Why Can't *I* be Michael Pollan??

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The other day I was listening to Terri Gross on Freh-share, and her guest was Michael Pollan of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” (and Martha’s Vineyard hippie) fame. They were talking about his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, which was essentially about marrying agricultural policy to national health and community-wellbeing policy.

Below the fold: Ag Ec Rock Star!

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Ah, Capitalism, er, Socialism, er, Paulsonism?

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Boy, that sure was some crisis

Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout
Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

Imagine if we had not had the bailout bill! The Wall Street types who shit the worldwide bed might have missed their outlandish compensation! One shudders to think.

But we’re safe now; at least until their bonuses come due next year, when we’ll have to have another emergency to make sure they get paid.

Building Software the 21st Century Way!

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Over on CIO.com, my friend Adam Kolawa, founder of software-tools company Parasoft, has an article called “How Better Software Can Save the World. It’s a reader’s digest condensed version of his new book The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology, for which I wrote the afterword.

Kolawa’s main point is that software is still made using artisan/guild/craftsman techniques, and the whole process can be vastly improved by automation and by using the Total Quality Management techniques (from Demming et al) that have been widely used in manufacturing for fifty years or more.

Anyway, if you’re into software process geekery, you should check it out. I think it makes sense, myself. Actually, you should probably check it out even if you’re not into software process geekery. Given the way things are going lately, anything that offers any hope at all of saving the world needs to be carefully checked out.