Climategate underscores the importance of projects like Clear Climate Code. They’re software engineers who are rewriting a key model (GISTEMP, which models Global Historical Climate Network data from the Goddard at NASA) so that the model is clear and understandable and verifiable. I tried to write a multiprocessing extension for a school project, but couldn’t verify the results due to equipment problems.

Science models & data are massaged all the time. A dirty fact, but common across many disciplines. The bottom line is, if the models in question have predicative power, anthropogenic climate change is real. If not, then climate change may still be real, but we must wait for better data and/or better models. Academic models of complex, schocastic systems are always ugly code in my experience. That doesn’t negate their validity.

That being said, scientists writing models aren’t often software engineers, and the data collection and collation is incredibly complex and messy with many possibilities for errors. Code and data should always open-sourced for verification, and keeping such things to yourself is inexcusable and a violation of how science should be done.

However, I highly doubt there’s a climate conspiracy cabal hiding a secret data db. All the data I’ve seen is open and freely available (and really messy!). Seeing those emails as suspicious appears as confirmation bias to me, no matter how much of a persecution complex the individuals in question appear to harbor.

“Snobs say they have the right kind of hat; prigs say they have the right kind of head.”
—G.K. Chesterton

A blogger on the Daily Kos blog wrote that “it’s unlikely to have been a Photoshop job,” while a blogger for Wonkette wrote that the photo “proves without doubt that Karl Rove is illegally running all the White House e-mail through a private company.”
—Chattanooga Times Free-Press

I smell right-wing conspiracy.

No actually, scratch n sniff that. I smell my friend Josiah Roe & his gang back in Chattanooga pulling an absolutely stunning April Fools joke via a cleverly-executed underground web campaign.

The abbreviated version: Copix punks Wonkette; Christians may have a sense of humor; popping noises heard up and down both coasts.

Josiah, the face behind the April Fools joke, is just a dude. I became friends with him at our undergraduate alma mater. Not even native to Chattanooga. But the ‘Nooga is a place where you can make friends, like Gid and Ron. It has the resources, infrastructure, talent, unpretentiousness, and pragmatism to be the birthplace of this type of tweaking of the establishment. These guys are not the establishment, they’re not part of anybody’s political machine. Josiah drinks bourbon, swears, and goes to church. He’s not a Mason or Shriner, but he does drive a silly scooter. He just got together with some friends who live in his neighborhood and conspired to cause mischief. The web enables local mischief to turn into global (okay, maybe just national) mischief. Amen.

Like Hugh from gapingvoid says, a well-executed blogging campaign is an act of love; it’s not about manipulation, but about what happens when real friends with real lives use the internet for something that they find meaningful. Tweaking politicians, and the people who rabidly froth at them, I fully endorse as meaningful.

For the those facing imminent world cup widowhood, my wife and I worked up another cheat sheet just for you.

World Cup background: ESPN & National Geographic

The International Herald Tribune, and in particular the best soccer writer on the planet, Rob Hughes . (feed) (exemplary article)

The Guardian spots up perhaps the best Anglo-centric analysis and opinion. (feed) (exemplary article)

American soccer coverage sucks. It’s getting better, but still. Thank goodness for bloggers who run down every single soccer story written or involving Americans. Well, okay, thank just one: du Nord. (feed) (exemplary post)

For your doses of snark and sniping, only one word suffices: Deadspin. (feed) (exemplary post)

Any peanut gallery commentator knows that the bite is best backed with stats. Climbing the Ladder obliges. (feed) (exemplary post)

First rule of telling a story? Keep it personal, like This is American Soccer. (feed) (exemplary post)

Keep track of what I find interesting with my soccer bookmarks.

As a final note, for those of you who hate on the American game, check out this highlight reel of goals from last week’s MLS fixtures. Nice. Still think it’s a keeper’s league and not a scorer’s league? Now keep in mind these are scored without the benefit of the baker’s dozen or so world-class players competing in the World Cup who normally also contribute to this action.

This is not it.

For the uninitiated: RSS readers let you pull all your favorite blogs and web sites that offer feeds into a single place that is updated when the sites are updated. It’s like a webmail account that gets a new message when a site you’ve subscribed to adds new content.

After my Onfolio beta expired last fall, I was faced with a choice: fork over $25 for a single-platform RSS reader, or jump into the tempting waters of platform-independent, web-based RSS readers. I did a cannonball, transferring ~150 feeds from Onfolio to my first choice, Rojo (thanks to both readers’ OPML export and import tools, the transfer was painless).

Once I got my feeds into Rojo, I started tagging them with a vocabulary of ~10 phrases, and they started sorting themselves automatically into the proper buckets. Now I just click on a tag, and all the recent stories from the feeds with that tag appear in a nice newspaper format, with ajaxy-liscious controls and a nice read/unread distinction. If I want to subdivide multiply-tag, explode, or consolidate my tags, it’s a simple matter of clicking an icon and typing.

Now I can check my feeds from anything with a internet connection and a browser. World, I will remain on informed and aware of your events, no matter who’s OS I use!

Adding new feeds is easy. My home and work browsers have a nice javascriptlet that auto-discovers any RSS feeds for the page that I have pulled up in a tab and adds it to my feed list. Managing/tagging/deleting feeds is easy as well using the manage page to collapse, untag-retag, and delete feeds.

There are little touches all the way through Rojo that keep me happy. The url for your feeds is rojo.com/subject/tagname/recent. The feed auto-discover defaults to Atom feeds if more than one is available. You can’t accidentally delete a tagged feed. The Rojo team is continually adding features and refining the interface.

There is one big drawback, a related annoyance, and a smaller nitpick. The big drawback is that I’ve seen Rojo take up to 8 hours to pick up a new story from a feed. For feed junkies, this is a deal-killer. I like everything else so much that I don’t care, but please Rojo, give me my new stories ASAP! 8 hours is like getting an invitation to a party that just ended.

The related annoyance is that Rojo appears to mark things as read/unread based on the timestamp of the feed’s story, not on whether it was picked up by the reader when you clicked “Mark As Read”. This means that some new stories slip under my feed-radar because they get picked up 8 hours after they are published, and 6 hours after I clicked the Read button, retroactively marking them as read when in fact I haven’t even seen them!

The other nitpick: sometimes feeds that I’m not subscribed to show up. Then they leave. At the moment, I somehow am subscribed to Fark. My intelligence and happiness are suffering.

Josiah believes that radical Muslims lack a sense of irony. Mesh calls out the press’ indomitable fear in the face of unrest. Elissa parallels the Muslim response to the cartoons with the Christian response to Seurano. Jason thinks that the worldwide, decentralized Muslim response proves that Islam is not a peaceful religion.

With that link-pimping, my street cred should spike nicely.

For a prime example of the nerdy excellence that is Enplaned, try this riveting tail of how Sky West went double-or-nothing on a losing bet and walked away as the largest regional airline in the US. Or how ’bout a veritable composite/steel cage fight between the new Airbus A350 and the new Boeing 787M heavies, replete with an unplanned deviation into the fabled “second-mover advantage”.

Visually, the search is top left, a quick introduction to the site with greatest hits, followed by category buckets, and then the legalese. Next over is all my tentacles: the last five lovely, brilliant people who have commented on my posts, my flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm, and rojo. Then my blogroll. Everything else is the same. Hope you old friends and you new guests enjoy.

Also, I fixed a silly bug which had IE 6 crashing when trying to run a javascript document.getElementById('container').appendChild(ul) around

tags. Welcome back, that 49.15% of my audience that IE6/Win represents, with my apologies.

1. Sexy Twin Primes
2. My hair
3. Can We Please Deport Pat Robertson?
4. RE: Completed WO# 7718 – Monitor will not move
5. Writing Software As Digital Rhetoric
6. Big Red House 2004
7. How The NBA Got Its Soul Back
8. Seven Lessons Learned From Outlook/Mailsite Migration
9. Further Reflections on “Zombies in St. Elmo Redux”
10. For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic
11. Hellfire
12. “Peter Brinkerhoff Is a Sexy Beast”: Tall Tales of Digital Reputation
13. Why I Hate Comcast, and, By Proxy, The Entire Media/Communications Industry
14. Covenant Alumni Open Forum
15. What I Won’t Pay for Security

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Bravo, Mr. Costas, for not participating in the life-destroying emotional pornography that is cable news coverage. Don’t confuse it with the vapid, Romanesque-in-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-empire-sense nightly network news, which posses its own set of evil. There sadly seems to be enough of that to go around.

Reminds me of what I said in the beginning of this blog.

My hope for the future? The internet (eg blogging), might enable our scale and life to return to a more human size. Filtering and editing is an act of a wisdom that we lack at the moment.

…flowing with ll337 skill…

…Laughing/Grinning/Appreciating/Unsettling…

…Going back to the Chicken Shack…

…Just a few of my favorite things.

My good friend Ryan Starr is blogging this summer from South Africa, and it’s fascinating stuff. He’s a second-year divinity student at Duke, and he’s working with the Methodist church doing some pastoral work among the amazingly diverse people outside of Cape Town. So far he’s blogged about gangs, coaching cross-country running, AIDS, pillow fights, and racial reconciliation.

Also, I would be remiss to not mention that I’m eagerly anticipating the resumption of Matt Allison’s podcasts, blogging from the high mountains of Uganda.

If I could only get old Pete Brinkerhoff to start blogging. I’ll see what I can do…

This brings me to a related idea: Josiah, how ’bout a special missionaryblogs.com serving those overseas? Just a though.

For more, check the summary post of where these numbers came from.

Further, you want to know why CC is important? It is making law via code.

Finally, I know you want to write all kinds of little graffiti on court cases. Open Source law is the idea. Now is your chance with the Legal Wiki Project. Try Grokster v. RIAA!

Bonus: is there any work on a wiki using OneNote-ish scribbling? I’m not talking about adding graffiti to existing sites, but about wiki software which explicitly enables that sort of thing. I sign into a wiki, and I can scribble on the pages. Call it the Child’s Playroom wiki.

Idea from Dave and Divine Angst.
Cool because Josiah just did one, and Wired News mentioned it. Next up, I’ll annotate some of these for a memory map.

Updated last month with some deserving daily reads. Here’s the skinny.

Adam Bosworth, Google blogger.

Adam Smith, Esq., The bottom line for the business of law.

Anonymous Lawyer, Will make you think all lawyers are…

Bag and Baggage, Key blawger.

Cobb, Database maven, blogs while black. Reading is like being taken to school on the b-ball court by an ex-NBA player.

Dino Esposito, .NET, Italian-style.

Dennis Kennedy.blogThe pre-eminient blawger.

Don Box’s Sproutlet, Dude’s smart, architect of .NET (good), also of COM (bad).

Ernie the Attorney, ya blawger.

Free Iraq, I started reading for the middle-class Iraqi perspective, I now read for the amazing socio-political analysis and history. The Iraqi Freidman.

gapingvoid, How to be in the creative business.

Irresponsible Journalism, True to its name, in glorious fashion. Also an unexpected source of local community.

Jon’s Radio, Premier geek journalist & advocate.

Koranteng’s Toli, Societal critique and software insights, plus sweet music tastes, from an IBMer by way of Ghana.

Leave It Behind, And you thought your local megachurch was big…this guy heads up an entire church IT dept.

Schneier on Security, Security, straight from the guru.

Scoble, I love Scoble, sometimes I hate Scoble, I always read Scoble.

Sriram, Whip-smart .NET blogging, from India.

Subcurrents, voice of a new generation of Coastal Christianity

Wired Mesh, Snappy journalist, lovely writer, friend.

Finally, check out my linkblog for daily reads. Appears above the blogroll on the right.

I’m not mad because these are offensive comments per se. Moderating the conversations that occur on this blog is part of the game, and I enjoy or at least tolerate that admin duty.

What I am angry about is that certain parties are attempting to use my work, this blog, and my name for their own profit, without my permission, and further that their actions affect my reputation and cause me emotional, mental, finanical, etc., harm.

These spammers are hijacking my digital identity, swipping my google juice, and impinging my good name. See, I have spent a lot of time and effort constructing the reputation and character of this site, and by extension my person. These comment spammers are defaming me and libeling me by manipulating search engines to suggest that I am either involved in or engaged in uncommonly vile activities. My good name is violated by this.

If, as I believe, blogs are a way of participating in a conversations, and one of the conversations that this blog is a leader in is my name, and if comment spam can be demonstrated to be defaming, libelious, or something else bad, then don’t I have a civil case to make in court?

Can I sue comment spammers?

How does the copyright issue of blog comments affect me?

Are there other legal strategies that work towards the same goal?

Is this a matter that the Bloggers Legal Defense Fund would like to assist in? Seems up their alley. Blawggers, IANAL, but you are. Thoughts? Help?

Their point is taken, but the example given is that n log n applies to the union of two networks of equal size n. It seems in that case that lots of new connections may be formed, more so than if each network grew on its own. I can agree to n log n in that case, but a large union seems to create more opportunities, but only in cases where there are chances at intercommunication.

In their Thoreau example, Maine may not have anything to say to Texas. But a large union of two networks makes this example brittle. It’s as if Maine was suddenly moved next door to Texas. Then Maine has a lot more interest in what’s going on in Texas, and vice-versa. Not only that, they find out that there’s more in common between this Red state and Blue state than they thought. And then they form the MTFTA (Main-Texas Free Trade Agreement), and suddenly there’s even more connections, more so than if Maine had never left the cold Northeast.

Of course, a network of earthworms, no matter how large (well, within reason here…), will probably not have much to say to Texas, regardless. Merge those two networks, and not much happens. So I believe, on average, that networks do grow n log n, but there seems to be edge cases where growth is greater. Early internet, blogs, usenet, etc. Not just merging two networks, but moving networks closer to each other.

That’s hand-wavy discourse. To tighten things up a bit, I will say that networks grow faster if they share similar properties and the exposed/addressable surface area is increasing. Which explains my previously-stated cases of usenet, bbs, blogs, etc. New technology increased surface area of network that users/computers could address. Boom, n^2 growth for the network.

Sounds like arguments for open-ness and transparency too, then, huh?

Requirements aren’t much:
• *nix-based
• shell/ftp accounts
• web-based control panel for everything possible
• nice OSS things pre-installed (eg wordpress and phpnuke)
• blog-enabled
• unimpeachable uptime and support
• IMAP & POP mail w/ large numbers in front; mailing lists
• Bonuses for big disk and big bandwidth
• Whatever other crap they throw in for everybody else

If you want to share the name of a star in your stable, leave a comment below or fire me a pitch.

I have my eye on Dreamhost.

The trick this time is that the revision will undergo a revision a la Wikipedia; yours truly and others much more fully will revise, argue, battle, and agree their way to a wild working copy that Prof. Lessig will swoop down, snatch up in his legal talons, scrape away the obfuscations, and publish. Strange and neat, eh? Author, editor: meet your new maker: the Mobb.