J. R. R. Tolkien helping the OED define ‘walrus’
The latest and in this case particularly heart–rending mass killing has re-ignited the gun control debate. Though I own a shotgun and enjoy target shooting and the occasional hunting trip, we have to do something about a situation in which any madman with a gun can load up with thousands of bullets. Yes, guns don’t kill people people kill people, but guns make it WAY easier, and huge magazines full of cheap bullets make it easier still.So, a simple proposition: a tax on bullets. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, but gun violence imposes extremely high costs on society. A stiff tax on bullets would make is harder to casually acquire enough bullets to kill 20 six year olds. A box of .223 rounds, the kind used to kill children at Sandy Hook, can be bought online for $9. Let’s quadruple that price.
Tumblr is a weird social network.Like Twitter its content is (very largely) public, and yet like Facebook it’s opaque to social analysis. Follower counts aren’t public or accessible. Ditto who’s following each blog (you can’t even really see all your own followers), and you don’t know who’s following anyone else either. Tumblr Analytics does exist, but not for ordinary users — instead you have to pay Tumblr partner Union Metrics $499 per month and what you get appears to be top-level and aggregate.
This leaves Tumblr a kind of “here be dragons” among social networks, which is unusual in an age so obsessed with them. That is, its social norms are not known; there isn’t any data about how its users behave and use the network (even for most Union Metrics subscribers there are no benchmarks). Rumours spread — Tumblr’s young, it’s photo-y and meme-driven, it’s full of weird tightly-interknit subcultures who reblog each other endlessly — but there is no data to support this, no way of discerning fact from — at best — intuition about one’s little own corner of the thing.
It’s telling that Dostoyevsky, himself a Christian, offered no direct theological rebuttal to his character’s speech. The counterpoint to Ivan in “The Brothers Karamazov” is supplied by other characters’ examples of Christian love transcending suffering, not by a rhetorical justification of God’s goodness.In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.
In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.
That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.
The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.
In the leafless hills of western Connecticut, this is the only Christmas spirit that could possibly matter now.
Hiding beneath all the CGI Sturm und Drang is a powerful story about what it means to have a home and, conversely, what it means to be lost. Bilbo, as he explains in the best scene in the film, loves and misses his books and his armchair and his garden back in the Shire; but in missing them he has learned their true value. And this has given him compassion for those who like the dwarves have had their home taken from them — and even for Gollum, whose most precious possession has been taken from him.
Coding Challenge!
Well, okay, not really a challenge, but a longstanding wish.
My friend Matt Frost and I periodically taunt one another with reminiscences of Stikkit, a web service that debuted about six years ago and died two years after that. Few traces of Stikkit’s existence remain online; perhaps the most extensive is John Gruber’s early review.
Stikkit was a text-entry box backed by a tremendously intelligent parser that could reliably figure out whether what you were typing was a phone number, address, email address, contact name, list, or bookmark. (Stikkit could relate all these things to one another too: recognizing email addresses in lists, etc.) The great, great thing about Stikkit was that it produced structured data from unstructured input. The user typed in plain text and got back something much more. As soon as I started using it I knew that my seemingly endless quest to find a usable, flexible, and powerful organizational system had come to a satisfying conclusion.
And then Stikkit’s inventor, Rael Dornfest, shut the company down and went to work for Twitter. Twitter bought all the intellectual property Dornfest had developed for Stikkit and, as far as I can tell, used absolutely none of it.
Nothing like Stikkit has appeared since 2008. That needs to change.
Here’s a thought: several years before Dornfest built Stikkit, Simson Garfinkel had created an alternative to Mac OS X’s Address Book called SBook, which had its own sophisticated parser. (I have sometimes wondered whether Dornfest picked up anything from Garfinkel’s earlier work.) He shut that down too, but open-sourced the code.
So how about this: Some talented programmer should start with Garfinkel’s old code and build a desktop app for the Mac that works like Stikkit. In fact, Notational Velocity is part of the way there, with its ability to recognize links and make them clickable in simple text files: maybe something could be borrowed from that, and added to. If the data can be stored in text files rather than in a database, that would make it easier to create a corresponding iOS app that could be reliably synced with the desktop version via Dropbox.
(Of course, another web service a la Stikkit would be possible too, but it’s so nice to have local copies of one’s data.)
So whaddya say, coders? Can someone make this for me?