Me?

A much-circulated map of major internet companies made to look like a map of Tokyo's enormous subway system shows only two newspapers (at least that I could find). The Post, at a junction of two lines and a much smaller Guardian at a stop. Of course a blog at the Guardian noticed it:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/07/25/web_trend_tube_map_looks_like_tokyo.html

Does being first count when you haven't read the kit first? I want to play by the rules..

I done said enough about weird life.

I like to think that we in the Boodle are an asset to the Post, but then again, I believe that we will one day go metric.

Although it is true we are heavily concentrated in the DC area, I am also amazed at the geographic extent of the boodlers. This is truly the beginning of a global community.

The other interesting phenomenon is how eclectic this group is - as if thought up by a slightly demented executive from central casting.

And although I occasionally surf to the WaPo website horizontally, I find it hurts my back.

I like the "Jump Right In" slogan.

Of course, if WaPo *insists* we all register, this might need to be changed to

"Jump Right In, But Remember. We Know Where You Live."

Kim - of course it counts. Everyone knows that anything to do with the Kit is entirely optional.

And as winner of this Kit's "I'm first" contest, you are now eligible for the random drawing!

Kim, I second RD's response. Think of the boodle as sort of a virtual game of Calvinball.

Long post got eaten. Summarizing. Author and science write Alan Weisman on second hour of Diane Rehm show yesterday talking about his just released book, "The World Without Us."

http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Us-Alan-Weisman/dp/0312347294/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3231523-5786038?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185892109&sr=8-1

Weisman took great exception, politely, to a portion of the review of his book in Sunday's Washington Post. It was a great hour of radio yesterday, without doubt thought-provoking. Should we be implementing China's One Child policy globally? What kind of stewardship of the planet should we be involved in--as NASA's David suggests? In a world without us, which of our cultural remnants would remain and for how long? What would last for millions of years? What would revert to nature? What is the population-carrying capacity of planet Earth?

And here's the actual map with the Post in a busy location:
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/ia-trendmap-2007v2

Umm, the News line on the map has The Post at the junction of News and Movies (Hanzomon and Shinjuku Lines, Sumiyoshi station), while the NY Times is merely on News lines. WSJ is at an intersection of News and Money. Other news line stations include Der Spiegel, BBC, and even USA Today. The incredibly busy Shinjuku Station is occupied by Google and Adsense. The circular Yamanote Japan Rail line that stops at Google represents the Main Sites, while the map makers have invented an inner circle line of "insiders" with Apple stationed at Akasaka, a junction of music, technology, knowhow, movies, and of course insiderness. Need I mention that the real station is near an old moat behind which is the enormous New Otani Hotel? Not to mention an overwhelming selection of restaurants and noodle shops. A number of choice real-Tokyo stations are unoccupied. Korakuen (the Tokyo Egg arena and a grand feudal lord's garden, and a junction of nearly everything) seems to be waiting for a Chinese music outfit.

Well, this is interesting on several fronts...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001881.html

bc

Loomis, the Economist's cover story this week is "How to deal with a falling population." http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=9545933

I've added to the kit a note about Curmudgeon's "rant." Baross is going to respond in detail, he promises.

what do the wapo online higher-ups think about the achen-boodlers?

that we're an odd bunch "as if thought up by a slightly demented executive from central casting"?

just curious

LALurker: I do sincerely hope that the big-wigs at Wapo value the content in these clicks, as compared, say, to the contentious clicks, nay, crabby-crazed clicks on the Balance/Mommy Wars blog.

Something about the Balance blog ethos bothers me way more than, say, the "spirited" threads on religion or politics.

The stealthy stiletto smackdown that LMS cannot or does not control is very scary.

And, who ARE they and where do they live? I don't meet the mommy-witches in my wide and varied rounds through schools, sports, neighbhorhood, work, etc.

Note to self (and RealEstateMogulTim) if they emerge as a Stepford neighborhood, let me know so we steer very clear of them.

I wonder how valuable my clicks here are to the business. I don't see ads when I refresh the boodle periodically through the day, although I know there are 3 links vaguely related to the content just below the window I'm typing in now. There's also an ad up at the top of the kit, but I only go there when there's a new kit.

My clicks on this site are quite worthless, I'm sure --- I have always considered the Google Ads to be placed there just for the amusement value of their one-liners. I have never clicked on one.

wait, what...There are ads???

I am a vertical user; WaPo is my homepage, as well as my primary source for national and international news. When I first went on the Web, I tried WaPo and NYT and found I liked WaPo much better, so I settled in. Of course, with the journalism background, I have always liked the dead tree WaPo so it wasn't a hard decision.

Now here's funny...My current Google ads:

This is Scary Accurate
Avoid this site if you're frightened easily

Luxury Cruise to Mars
Visit the Red Planet in style low gravity fun for everyone

Mars, the Stars & Planets
Did the Universe come from - God? Interpreting the latest results

Reposting my longwindedness from the previous "Weird Life" Boodle (edited a little further):

I don't think the weird life issue is silly and pointless. Yes, we are pretty good at a lot of sciences -- physics, chemistry, meteorology, all that stuff. Part of why we are so good at these things is because of work in my kind of science -- exploration of planetary atmospheres is our chance to find out whether we REALLY understand the chemical and physical processes that control atmospheres and so forth. Do we just have a bunch of "rules of thumb" that seem to work, but aren't really fundamental and don't apply to anywhere else?

Before the exploration of other planets, we already were doing similar limits-testing explorations here on Earth -- reacting chemicals under different environments, exploring physics with a wide range of variables, and so forth. We confirm and/or expand our knowledge by trying out our know-how in experiments unlike things we have done before.

The problem that the NAS committee is trying to grapple with is very difficult. They are trying to discern the limits on our awareness that are created by parochial experience. Biology faces a big problem in its fundamentals:
* As a society, we know a great deal about biology and how it works.
* We know a great deal about organic chemistry.
* We know a great deal about organic chemistry and how it works as the fundamental substrate of biology.
What we don't know is whether there are other chemical systems that could provide the same advantages of flexibility and complexity as carbon-based chemistry. Perhaps only carbon is good enough. Even so, limiting our search for life to include only organic (carbon-based) chemistry, we don't know if there are alternative biochemistries in which different amino acids, or non-amino acids, could serve as the basis for energy-production and information storage. We don't have a fundamental understanding of how to go from a supply of chemicals and energy and derive the biochemistry of a living system. Does this supply of chemicals always result in the same fundamental biochemistry? Or are there alternatives?

Life on Earth is extremely creative, so much so that there is a lot of reason to wonder about a "Second Genesis" on Earth: two Creations, instead of one creation with many off-shoots. All Earth life uses organic (therefore, carbon-based chemistry), and all Earth life depends on water as a solvent. Beyond that, there are many forms of bacterial metabolism. The kind of life that you and I can see without microscopes - both plants and animals - represents just one kind of metabolism, a system that depends on sunlight to create sugars and oxygen, which are consumed to recover energy and create wastes (some of which are used as structural elements in our bodies). The other 20 or so metabolisms used by terrestrial bacteria are off the radar of we dilettantes in the OOL enterprise. It is possible that there is a Second Genesis (or more than two) in that chaos. The trick is to discern which differences are the results of Darwinian evolution vs. differences that could only be in fundamentals, the sign of a Second Genesis: for example, one could find a species of life that employs a different set of amino acids, or a different number of nucleotides, or something like that. It could become an open-ended search, of course, which would be bad science ("I ain't found it yet - maybe this one?"). However, a reasonable sampling of different environments and metabolisms should be sufficient to identify a specific Second Genesis, or to establish that the search is a path unlikely to yield anything new.

Science advances by thinking outside the box (the box that is famous from hackneyed metaphor). The problem always has been to discern where are the walls of the box, and what kind of walls are they -- the hard walls of reality and actual physical limits, or the squishy walls of limited cleverness and knowledge? This is an exercise in wall-identification, trying to formulate the fundamental issues that can then be explored to determine what kind of walls we face.

More repetition:

It would be easy to find aliens if we were to see them wandering around with their deely-boppers bouncing and their little meep-meep voices, as they make ready to blast us with their laser-cannons and particle-beams. The problem is that we have already looked everywhere that it is easy to look by just, you know, looking at it, and we haven't seen them. So, we need to figure out how to look for something a lot less specific than individual organisms, and that means that we need to understand the side-effects of life. To do that, we need to understand biochemistry, and it would help to figure out what biochemistry has to be like, in comparison to the way that biochemistry merely happens to be, here on Earth, in the present day.

When we look back at our own planet, we really don't see life. What we see is the accumulation of millions of years of farts. The atmosphere is dominated by plant-farts: the disequilibrium chemical species (oxygen) that results from the dominant form of chlorophyll-based photosynthesis on Earth. A problem is that we already know that there are many different photosynthetic systems on Earth alone, with different waste chemicals. My trivial understanding of the subject suggests that the chlorophyll that we know may have been predestined to dominate on Earth, because it seems to be the only (presently surviving) photosynthetic process that results in a gaseous waste, something that can take over the ecosystem. Oxygen killed-off an entire active ecosystem on Earth, about 2 billion years AFTER the origins of life. Oxygen is not a sure-fire sign of life, because life did fine without it for 2 billion years or so.

We can't see ourselves or any other organism from space. We are too small. But we can see our farts. In the case of non-plants, we fart methane. Methane is very common in the universe but cannot persist on Earth, because of the oxygen (plant-farts). The fact that we see it, shows that there is life right now, replenishing the methane supply against the ravages of oxygen. Methane, however, doesn't really come from "us." It comes from the bacteria in the gut of animals, and it comes from free-living bacteria out in the environment. Our ability to detect life is limited, really, to our ability to detect bacteria-farts. Even widespread bacteria-poop (solid waste) is basically undetectable by remote-sensing methods.

We can see bacteria if we look at them with a microscope. Are we going to go out into the solar system and examine every object with electron microscopes? I don't think so. We need to sharply narrow our efforts to include only those environments in which a search with a microscope looks to be productive. That means looking for chemical environments in which life is possible, and looking for signs of life in the form of waste products that could only come from life, even if it's life that we don't understand yet.

All that having been said, searching for weird life in Titan still seems to me to be premature and over-reaching. I want to see what's inside Europa (and maybe Ganymede and Callisto), an environment in which water (which we understand) can be a liquid (we think), and where there can be salts and organic molecules (which we pretty much understand), and sources of volcanic energy (which we also pretty much understand) and therefore maybe life (which we fundamentally don't understand or we could create some from scratch). Let's pick the relatively low-hanging fruit and see if there's something there, first, before we go to the even-less-promising circumstances, about which we have even less prior understanding.

"Mexico has urged the US to alter its plans for expanded fences along their shared border, saying they would damage the environment and harm wildlife.

"The fences threaten unique ecosystems, Mexican environment officials warned.

"Mexico was ready to file a complaint with the International Court of Justice over the matter if the US did not respond, the environment minister said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6924475.stm

I have driven everyone away.

No no, SciTim. 'Tis siesta time... :-)

We are all out checking for weird life.

BTW, why is the e before the i? Is that not weird?

Jack - Respoding to a comment about your catin the last kit.

Please take your cat to the vet. It sounds very similar to what happened to my cat. He had FIV (Feline Immunodeficiency Virus).

Hopefully, it will be something else.

Hello Boodle!

Hello Moose! *midday Grover waves*

:-)

Oh if it were only that easy S'nuke. Dear Child is in desperate need of a nap (and I'm desperate for her to take one), but she's having none of it...too excited about a new bike.
I know there's a safe way to slip her a Mickey Finn (it's called benadryl), but I can't bring myself to do it.

ScienceTim, it's lunchtime here and when I usually take a few minutes to peruse the boodle. Enjoyed reading your views. ..."Mr. Scientist, find those walls!"... Makes perfect sense-start small.

bh, because it's said we-ird. Very simple.

SciTim, not possible. Very interesting posts. And I really needed something interesting and profound to help me wake my brain after this mornings meetings. (I am knitting - no missed stitches yet). That should tell you how exciting this meeting is. I am only involved in a prefifieral way.

I don't do a lot of meetings or seminars. Mostly I sit here and just input data, and output data, and screw stuff up. this is my job. My question to all you frequent meeting types, is how do you stand it?

Hi ScottyNuke!

SCC: "Responding...." and "...cat in..."

Ugh.

Didn't scare me away either, Tim. Just doing some actual work, that's all. Will be back shortly with some remarks.

Meanwhile, bc, I read that story about the nuclear power plant possible addition down at Calvert Cliffs, too, this morning. I thought the PAO guy they quoted handled himself pretty well. I mean, he11, it could have gone a lot worse for him--they might have duct-taped the poor guy up in his office and redecorated the place with chintz and lladro, or something.

Hello, Moose. How is Squirrel today?

bh, "weird" is from the Old English "wyrd" and then Middle English "werde" both meaning fate or controlling fate. I suspect the "i" got put into it at some point to reflect a slight pronunciation problem, to differentiate it from the sound of "werd" or "word" without the "i." The "ei" dipthong is necessary to put that little tweak in the sound.

Or heck, maybe it was just a Chaucerian typo. I told that guy a million times his spelling sucked. But would he listen? You ever read some of his stuff? Got strange letters popping out of common words all over the place. Harrumph.

LostInThought, benadryl was partially invented for small children on long road trips. Even my doctor recommended it way back when. Of course, in strict moderation.

I just looked at the comments in response to Richard Cohen's column about Fred Thompson. Some observations:

(1) Fred says that the atmosphere of Jupiter and of Mars is warming. Um, this is news to me, and I think I would know.

(2) The presentation of the comments to these articles is horrible: tiny type, the text overruns the margin on the right so that letters and sometimes words get cut off, it's on multiple pages so that you have to make a commitment to wasting time while each page reloads rather than skimming, and you have to log in to make a comment, which I find annoying enouch that I did not remotely consider stopping to make a comment (about the planetary atmospheres thing).

I believe Joel has mentioned that WaPo blogs might go to a similar system for managing comments, requiring us to log in and so forth. If so, I suggest that it will be the death of the Achenblog, because it will make tedium out of a pleasure. If I have to work at goofing off, then I won't do it at all.

Murdoch, Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones is the top story at NYT and WaPo this afternoon. Where did Murdoch get his toehold in American media? San Antonio.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/stories/MYSA2007.SAENhistory.part3.mysa.276d8d20.html

Already heading an empire of newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets in Australia, Rupert Murdoch decided to enter the U.S. market in December 1973 by purchasing the San Antonio Express and San Antonio Evening News from Harte-Hanks. E-N legend has it that the deal was consummated when Murdoch -- a graduate of London's Fleet Street school of tabloid journalism -- flew into the Alamo City just long enough to sign the sale agreement at the airport and leave orders to turn the E-N "into a screamer" before flying away again.

If Murdoch's first stop in the Alamo City indeed was that brief, perhaps it's because he was busy with another project. Soon after purchasing the Express-News, Murdoch launched a popular supermarket tabloid, the National Star -- later renamed simply the Star. ...

Although the Express retained its conservative, paper-of-record presentation, the News was redesigned to have a tabloid-style appearance that featured large, dramatic headlines. Its content was heavily weighted toward articles about local crimes and fires, and the stories were told with plenty of colorful adjectives. Every Monday through Friday in Murdoch's News -- particularly in the street editions -- if it bled, it led.

Single-copy sales were a major part of the News' circulation, and "rack cards" -- poster-size advertisements featuring huge headlines touting unusual articles in the paper -- were attached to the paper's vending machines.

The rack cards soon became part of the city's landscape. They drew customers with such headlines as: "MIDGET ROBS UNDERTAKER AT MIDNIGHT"; "DISSOLVE OLD MAN IN ACID!"; "GUNNED-DOWN PREGNANT CAT FIGHTS FOR LIFE"; "VAMPIRE KILLER STALKS CITY"; "SEWER BOY STILL MISSING"; and "ANIMAL AUSCHWITZ."

Thanks Mudge. I know nothing about the history of words and also can't spell. I guess that guy was inventing words before the rule *i before e, except after c*.

I try to follow that rule when writing and it jumps up and bites me every time. Seems all the words I try to use are exceptions.

Loomis, Was Sewer boy ever found?

SciTim,

You are obviously out to the loop. Fred Thompson declaring that "Mars is warming too" was included in a Richard Cohen WaPo column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001273.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Cohen was citing an article that was written by Fred Thompson for National Review.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTQzYWY1MGM5NTkyZTM2YWVlMDMzMDlhMzQwNThhNDU=

Fred's source seems to be the Paul Harvey radio show.

If Paul Harvey said it and Fred Thompson quoted and the National Review printed it, it must be true. I'm glad that silly global warming controversy if finally cleared up.

*Tim, you'd know better than darn near anyone about the values and limitations of spectroscopy, but to say that when we look back on Earth and don't see life, well, I'm not sure I agree.

Someone looking at Earth through an optical telescope from some of our neighboring planets (granted, this is a terribly terracentric assumption that an alien on another planet would see by similar wavelenghts that we do, but changes are we may be related...) would see large swaths of our planet become greener during the spring and summer, and turn brown during the fall and winter, wouldn't they? That might be attributable to life, would it not?

And then, there are those interestingly patterned lights that are visible on the Earth's land masses when they are on the night side of the planet. Those are clearly different from the lightning seen in Earth's, Jupiter's and even Venus's atmospheres, IIRC.

Just a thought...

bc

The only general-capability spacecraft (i.e., planetary-exploration spacecraft) that have made a serious look at Earth have taken only snapshots, so it is hard to tell what you could see from a lengthier examination. Spacecraft that are targeted to look at Earth are targeted to look at properties that we already know are important to Earth life. These features may not be true everywhere. You can see individual organisms from orbit, if you try really hard, but only from Low Earth Orbit so far -- around 250 miles away. Millions (nearby planets) or billions (distant planets) or trillions of miles away (nearby stars), that is an unreasonable level of detail to expect.

Our lights are definitely not so bright as the nifty "Earth at Night" posters suggest -- those pictures have been heavily enhanced. From outside the solar system, or outside Earth's orbit, you only get to see Earth's night side when looking in the general direction of the Sun, making it darned hard to see something dim. Incandescent lamps do not have a very distinctive spectrum. Fluorescent lamps and mercury vapor lamps, on the other hand, are distinctive. In order to detect such things, unless we expect that aliens will make the exact same engineering choices as ourselves, we need to deploy highly capable and flexible detection strategies. Flexibility and capability are equal to very, very, expensive.

I have observed from aircraft that the Earth is not so green as we imagine at close range -- looking straight down, we mostly see just the soil, it seems to me. There are astrobiology plans to look for green stuff as a clue to the presence of plant life. That supposes that plants always are green and use the chlorophyll with which we are familiar. That may not be/probably won't be the case for a planet orbiting a dim red dwarf. Globally-averaged estimates of chlorophyll's effect on our whole-disc spectrum yield a much weaker signature than you might imagine. Once you include realistic signal-to-noise and try to engineer a detection system, it turns out that you can sink a lot of money into trying to detect plants that may be very different on another planet. Thus, it pays to get a handle on the properties of "Weird Life."

Seasonal behavior is an encouraging strategy. Still, Mars exhibits seasonal behavior due to dust storms. Distinguishing seasonal meteorology from seasonal ecology is no easy thing. It means a very big telescope, or relatively close range -- for instance, aliens who have come for a visit. We do not have that capability, ourselves.

You may be surprised to learn that almost all of the work to decide what an extrasolar Earth would look like, spectroscopically, is pretty theoretical. The only general-exploration spacecraft that have looked at Earth and tried to detect life have been the Galileo spacecraft (detected ozone, methane, water, hydrocarbon pollutants in the UV and visible) and Mars Global Surveyor (detected carbon dioxide, ozone, and maybe water in the IR). Earth-orbiting spacecraft are highly targeted and get lots of signal-to-noise, and can choose observing strategies that are optimal for detecting molecules and properties of interest. Hardly a fair test for searching for extrasolar planets.

Until now. In December, the Deep Impact Fyby spacecraft will swing by the Earth. In January through April, it will turn and look at the Earth using its general-purpose multicolor visible camera system and near-infrared spectrometer. These are exploration systems that were designed for discovering new stuff, thus they are not targeted to terrestrial properties. The spacecraft will look at Earth for a few weeks from a variety of phase angles, seeing both day and night side of Earth. This will provide a much-needed ground truth for theoretical engineering studies of extrasolar Earth-detection.

This is a NASA Discovery Mission of Opportunity, re-using a healthy spacecraft remaining after the primary mission, called EPOXI. EPOXI is what you get when you mix together EPOCH (Extrasolar Planetary Observation and Characterization) and DIXI (Deep Impact Extended Investigation). You can find out more from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/epoxi.html

As you may suspect, I have a stake in this discussion. Thus, my excessive verbiage today is arguably in service to my job function. Just so you know I am not wasting my taxpayer-funded time.

I've been debating for a few hours dropping out of the weird life debate, like Padouk, because either I'm not explaining myself very well, or people just aren't getting it, I dunno. For one thing, I'm coming at all this from the point of view of an editor and someone who is used to constructing or dissecting argumentation, and I keep finding statements and sentences that, as an editor, I'd have to call the writer over to my desk and say, "Here, re-write this, or explain it better," or something like that. Perhaps it's just because this is a blog and people are writing quickly and just throwing stuff up there that they wouldn't ordinarily support if they went over it a few times. But take this statement from Paul Davies:

The question was essentially mine: if there was weird life out there [on earth], wouldn't we have found it already? And he replied, quoting fully and directly, "No, because nobody has looked."

Now, forget all the background context and the subject matter. We don't need it. Let's just examine that answer as given.

First, it assumes that the *only* way somebody [read: scientists, but could be anyone--explorer, traffic cop, bloodhound, whatever] ever finds anything is by deliberately going out and looking for it. It makes no allowances whatsoever for accidental discovery and serendipity. And if we know *anything* about science over the past couple thousand years, it is that people pretty much have discovered pretty much everything there is up until the 20th century pretty much by accident, or bumping into it. He11's bells, Columbus was looking for China, fer cryin' out loud, and look what he fording bumbed into. Fleming discovered effing penicillin on a crust of moldy bread. The invention of the telescope and the microscope greatly opened up our field of view both outward/upward and inward/downward, and allowed for multitudes more of accidental and serendipitous discoveries.

Second, as written, Davies' answer implies that one only finds what one looks for, i.e., that a stated goal or object seems to be necessary, and that absent such a goal [weird life, for example] we won't find anything. Now tell me, is this not utter nonsense, and intellectually indefensible? How many times in the course of history do you think somebody has said, "I wonder what will happen if..." and they go on to conduct some formal or informal experiment or other, having no clue or idea or expectation what might be the outcome? I would guess that in the experience of all mankind that has only happened about, oh, a gazillion times. Goal-setting is nice, but it ain't a requirement, boss. In fact, as SciTim implies in re: thinking outside the box, it's a d@mned hindrance. Burton went looking for the source of the Nile, having no clue where in blazes it might be, and basically not caring. So he found a whole second Nile River, several homking big lakes, and god only knowws what else nobody knew was there. Cook didn't make three voyages to the Pacific in hopes of finding Hawaii and being eaten by cannibals. He basically didn't know what the heck he was going to find. When hooked looked in the microscope he didn't know he was gonna find all those little germy things swimming around; he11, it took a couple hundred years just to figure out what the devil those things were. But he never said, "I think I'll build me a tool to find some white corpuscles."

So there I am, only one stinkin' sentence into Davies' reply, and I'm forced to think: this guy's a total maroon. He has no clue about how science tends to operate, and intellectually he's handcuffed himself into a narrow methodology that says you can only find something if you look for it. And I'm not even an effing scientist and I seem to know more about it than he does, and that's pretty pathetic.

So I'm basically left with no choice but to question and dissect every other thing the guy says. And I find crap like this:

"You can't tell what makes a microbe tick by looking at it. You have to study its innards." Well, maybe you can't tell "everything" about that microbe, but very often you can tell quite a lot, and you can certainly make many series of educated guesses about them. Long before microbiology ever existed, scientists over the course of maybe a hundred years were looking at microbe, discovering thousands upon thousands of different species of them, separating and classifying them into various and sundry categories, watching what they ate, watching how they reproduced/divided, figuring out which ones caused which particular disease, figuring out how to vaccinate people against some of them-- even how to make fording cheese and yogurt and bake bread on a predictable and scientific basis. So let's dispense with this elitist crap that *only* a trained microbiologist from effing Oxford is qualified to look and a d@mn bug and figure out what makes it tick.

"So by definition they will overlook life as we don't know it." More crap, for the reasons stated above. Maybe yes, maybe no. But it ain't a certainty, and he makes no allowances or qualifications for accidental discovery, serendipity, etc. Can't be done, he says. Any freaking editor worth his salt would have corrected that sentence to read: "So, in all probability, they will overlook life..." or "Most likely they wouldn't..." or he might even have given it a half-@ssed prediction such as "Nine times out of 10 they wouldn't find..." or even "Chances are one in ten-thousand they wouldn't find..." I don't care what the weasel wording is. He didn't use any. None. Zero. No elbow room.

"For example, shadow life with opposite chirality (mirror life) could be all around us. Only one experiment has been done to look for it." First, no one so far has been talking about chirality as an alternative form of biochemistry; virtually all of the discussion has been about using something other than carbon as the core replacement in what we understand as organic chemistry and biochemistry, and a fluid other than water: methane or ammonia, for example. Even if some form of chiral life existed, it wouldn't meet the definition of "weird life," at least in my book. {And I'm the editor of the book, so I get to say what goes in it.]

Second, he's either misleading at best, or perhaps even outright wrong. I have no idea about the one experiment, but I suspect it's irrelevant. Be that as it may, here goes: chirality is the "handedness" of a molecule or some other thing, i.e. right-handedness or lefthandness, or else counterclockwise rotation or clockwise rotation. It exists all over the bloomin' place in chemistry, math and physics. Many, many common drugs use "handedness," although you just don't know it. In the movie "Awakenings" starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, the miracle potion that snaps DeNiro awake from his sleeping sickness is L-Dopa, a variant of L-dopamine, inwhich the letter "L" signifies the left-handedness of the drug molecule. Many, many common enzymes that exist inside human and other living cells have chiral properties. The diet drugs fenphen and Redux, which we both recently removed from the market, had problematic side-effects caused by their "handedness." Penicillin is chiral, and only kills bacteria that have certain matching right-handed enzymes in them. And it goes back a long way: it was first observed by Biot in 1814 and Louis Pasteur determined it was a property of molecules in 1848.

So to say that nobody has "looked" for chirality is, in my view, seriously, seriously misleading. It exists in nature in standard organic chemistry and living matter all over the fording place. So what he means by thinking that an entire microbe could be chiral in its totality I don't know, not just in its constituent parts. But he didn't tell you that; I did--and I learned it from an effing Robin Williams movie. Once again, pretty effing pathetic when you can contradict an astrobiologist based on your fondness for Mork and Don Corleone. Read about chirality at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_%28chemistry%29 and see if you agree with me. Or not.

OK, gotta do some work now.

SCC: substitute "chances are" for "changes are."

*Tim, I didn't have the time to write the long version, which is why I didn't go into spectroscopy and the fact that gas absorption lines are a a lot more precise and easier to distinguish than trying to break down visible light, so I stuck to the visible phenomena that a human could recognize from within the Solar 'hood. The science of interstellar planetary observation is in it's infancy as you point out.

Also, aren't Mars' seasonal dust storms and polar ice cap changes visible from earth-based telescopes? Another big assumption I'm making here is that something on Mars would observe Earth with the same care that human astronomers observe Mars. [Caution: Pointy-Sciency Joke in Progress.] It seems possible to me that a Martian Schiaparelli or Lowell might be able to note the seasonal color changes and nighttime lights and theories to explain them...

LiT, maybe you could let Dear Child ride that new bike until she exhausts herself.
*Then* go for the benadryl and fix yourself a Bloody Mary.

Gotta run, I'll check in this evening...

bc

Oh God- Paul Harvey. I haven't thought about Paul Harvey in almost 40 years. When we were first married and Dr. Kurosawaguy was still working on the first of her degrees, for my sins I took a job working for Joan Crawford. That is to say that I drove a Peps Cola truck. Working for the company meant that you could have two free cases of product every week. Boy, did we get sick of Pepsi and Mountain Dew. As a newbie I got the crummy route delivering to small stores in the country surrounding Austin- Wimberley, Luchenbach, Dripping Springs, Johnson City, Hye, Round Mountain. I drove 700 miles a week through the Hill Country. This sounds like a great gig and it is, unless you like eating regularly. One stop in particular used to drive me crazy. It was a little ser-sta-gro in Wimberley. The guy that owned the place loved Paul Harvey, listened to PH every day, and refused to take any deliveries during the show. If you got there after the broadcast started, you could just wait til it was over. After the first time or two of sitting there waiting for the old gasbag to sign off "This is Paul Harvey- Good Day!" I learned to drive like a madman to get there early. Between cutting off about 8 or 9 inches of my hair to get the job and then the low pay and periodic episodes of enforced attention to the bombastic bloviator, I came rapidly to hate that job, hate the taste of Pepsi, hate (most of) the films of Joan Crawford, and hate Paul Harvey. Conversely, I loved the Hill Country more than ever.

The Weird Life discussion is so far above my head, it's in a galaxy far, far away.

This is related in some way (I think). It's from the NYT Science section, not Times Select, so the link should work.

The scientist, Michael Nowak, adds cooperation to evolution and mutation in an intriguing way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31prof.html?ref=science

Michaelangelo Antonioni is dead at 94. Who's next?

SCC: "its", not "it's," dang it.
I *hate* me when I do that.

bc

Luchenbach, Texas! Did you ever get to say "Hi" to Willie and Waylon and the boys?

I'm a vertical reader and proud of it.

Now I'll catch up with the boodle. Been out all day job-interviewing. What joy.

Slight tangent--On Balance went to requiring pre-post registration today.

Once the regulars got past "Thank God the trolls are gone" it turns out they aren't any nicer with names. They have met the trolls and it is them. I suspected that would happen.

Disclaimer: I lurk there sometimes. It's like slowing down to watch a terrible accident's aftermath or Jerry Springer's show.

*faxin' Sara some Dr. Scholls cushioning pads and crossing my fingers for interview success*

:-)

The chlorophyll pigments of land plants happen to work nicely, but it seems thinkable that differently-colored pigments might have worked just as well. Earth is possibly greenish more out of chance than necessity (to borrow the title of Jaques Monod's distinguished book).

A decade ago, my neighbor the beer-truck driver won a company contest for successful beer-trucking, and came home with a lovely yellow Corvette. I think he liked beer. Not to mention that he moved to the Daytona Beach area, where I noticed the Chevy dealer's lot is stuffed with Corvettes. Must be the exhaust fumes in the air.

Hello Mudge.

I'm not THAT Moose. Haha.

I'm glad you are up and about again.

Wow, Maggie, first Bergman and then Antonioni back-to-back in two days? That's really weird.

Please, god, let the third one be Pauly Shore.

He's a director??? (Oh, why oh why don't we have italics?

My Pepsi story may seem non sequitur to you all, but I refuse to get sucked into the discussion of weird life because (1) This life is weird enough for me. (2) It has always been my policy not to discuss alien life on days when internationally famous film makers die. Now repeat after me: L' Avventura, Blowup, Zabriske Point, L' Avventura, Blowup, Zabriske Point, L' Avventura, Blowup, Zabriske Point. Just add mood enhancing substances and let simmer 4-5 hours.

Oh, I'll grant you that Earth seasonality is visible from Mars. I'm more concerned about seeing it from Alpha Centauri, a mere 4.6 (or so) light years away. It takes a heck of a telescope to be able to distinguish one end of the planet from the other, at that range. It can be done, definitely, I'll grant you. My argument is that before you spring a wad of cash for building such a telescope, you will want to spend some effort on determining the significance of a negative result. For instance, we have already stipulated that we want sensitivity to color. That means we must capture successive images with different colors, or divvy up the light within a single exposure. That means we are sacrificing detectability in service to information content. We need to decide how to do that well enough that we can both detect the thing, and learn something about it. If we cannot distinguish color well enough, or we cannot detect it sensitively enough, then we walk away with nothing: a falsely negative result. Our alien observers need to select the right colors, and they need to look with enough sensitivity, to see our seasons. It won't just happen by accident.

Mudge, I think you are right about the editing issue, but incorrect about the conclusion. When Davies says "we haven't looked" I think it needs to be read "we haven't looked in the right way." For instance, you mention penicillin: molds and fungi with antibacterial properties have been around for millions of years, but were only discerned within the past 100 years. Surely, the effect was seen before, but never interpreted in a way that yielded a general result, that we have been able to generalize into the wealth of antibiotics that exist today. We not only have to look; we have to see. Both chiralities are observed in many physiologically important molecules, I guess, but only one chirality is observed in DNA -- so far. Davies' argument about chirality is that some of the general class of Archaea and a few other samples need to be investigated to explore the chirality of the DNA as one possible clue to a second genesis. Of course, we don't actually know if there is some subtle effect that permits only one chirality of DNA to be effective. We only know that there is only one chirality represented within modern terrestrial organisms that we have examined. Failure to detect the opposite chirality is consistent with our hypothesis that there is only one genesis, but also is consistent with the hypothesis that only one chirality can support life, regardless of multiple genesis events (geneses?). Success constitutes a falsification of both hypotheses. I am sure that the statement "there is only one chirality in Earth life" has been tested in a number of phyla; I do not know whether it has been tested in a decent sample of all taxonomic classes of organism.

LOL, Mudge.

K-guy, we all had to start somewhere and endure at least one job from he11, didn't we? Mine was in library technical services, typing and filing card catalogue cards. Bored me silly and nearly blinded me.

Good luck, Sara! With your wit and perky personality, I think you will find something quickly.

Thanks, Scotty. I think it went well. Apparently I'm the only interviewee who actually has experience in Technical Writing so that is a good sign. Plus one for me. However, I'm also the only one who hasn't just graduated with an English degree. Minus one for me. She didn't seem put out by that fact, though. Perhaps because my father-in-law is the COO (he's trying to figure out how to add an "L" to the end of that title--pretty funny) and CTO of the company. I have an in. But I botched the "Find the prepositional phrase" question on the writing test. I haven't learned parts of speech since 7th grade English. The only thing I remember about 7th grade is that I broke my ankle when I fumbled the football and then tripped over my fumble. I'm so clumsy that I'm almost disabled. Which leads in the Dr. Scholl's pads comment. Might make walking easier.

I'm just passing over the weird life topic. I'm much too far behind to bother catching up.

Whatever happened to Pauly Shore anyway? Not that I want him to show back up. Just curious.

That's fine, SciTim, but that's my point: Davies didn't explain any of that; YOU did. (And I did.) In my book that makes Davies an unreliable maroon and "expert" if he can't fording explain himself properly.

Glad I made you laugh, slyness...although I didn't think my Davies rant was all that humorous. But hey, different strokes, etc.

Maggie, sorry about all my cussing (fording, et al.)--it's because I, too, am greatly hampered without italics and other forms of emphasis. I'll have to speak to that incompetent shop steward about this.

Oh, right...

Never mind.

"Please, god, let the third one be Pauly Shore." No no no, Bergman, Antonioni, Pauly Shore is not a sequence. Now, PeeWee Herman, David Spade, Pauly Shore- that's a sequence!

kguy, I hope you've heard Don & Mike's spliced-up parody of Paul Harvey, where he extolls the benefits of a certain smoking device.

:-)

What I'd like to know is how did Baross, an oceanographer, end up affiliated with NASA? How did he make the leap to astrobiology?

More on Baross's work with Pacific deep sea vents at the link I provided, below. According to this reporting, Baross has been on his "quest" for 20 years:

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?
articleid=28838

"There's been lots of evidence that point to high-temperature archaea as the first life on Earth but the question has been, 'So why can't we find archaea that fix nitrogen at high temperatures?'" says Baross, who's been on a 20-year quest to find just such a microbe.

SciTim writes:
When Davies says "we haven't looked" I think it needs to be read "we haven't looked in the right way."

So, what is the right way? Your earlier explanation(s)? At what projected cost? To what projected benefit?

Froomkin's column says that Darth Cheney is going to be Larry King's guest for an entire hour tonight. I am seriously hard-pressed to think of a show I'd less rather see, or, if made to watch under Abu Graib-like conditions, would induce in me such a blood pressure and umbrage rise that my survival would be in doubt. I'm certain, of course, that King will give Cheney the hardball questioning and take-no-prisoners interviewing style he's famous for. Yeah, right.

Any hypotheses on mechanisms that would promote "our" DNA over its chiral opposite, Tim? All I can do is mumble "maybe Cesium has something to do with it" when I pretty much think Cesium has not a danm thing to do with it at all...

Make that "cobalt" not cesium. Duh.

Re:Cheney.
Why did the heart surgery on VP Cheney take longer than usual? It was microsurgery. (Rimshot)
Why was the bill for Cheney's heart surgery higher than usual? They had to pay a finder's fee. (Second rimshot)
See Tom Toles today for more and better.

Do I count as a vertical user if I start with the boodle, work my way up to the kit, then to the front page?

Just because Sara asked:

Pauly Shore used fame to become a major pick-up artist. He has dated pr0n star Savannah, actress Tiffani Amber Thiessen and singer Kylie Minogue.

Its rumored that he would hang around the airport and show aspiring starlets the town. In 2003 he faked his own death and tricked various celebrities into giving eulogies. That movie was released as "Pauly Shore Is Dead", hence the confusion with Bergman and Antonioni.

Wow. If Darth Cheney is going to be on King, the whole country better take a double dose of its blood pressure meds before air time.

Thank you to Raysmom for mentioning Newick's in the previous Boodle. OMG, I had forgotten all about that place, daughter #2 went to UNH and we spent many a fine hour at that wonderful restaurant. I suggested to "S" that we take a ride up that way this weekend. He was going to suggest it to me as he has an historic house in Portsmouth that he wants to visit. Great minds, etc...

I have been reading the online Washington Post for at least four years. I used to read the NY Times too until they decided to make you pay. I like the variety of columnists and reporters here, and the quality is better than my hometown paper. I do still subscribe to the Boston Globe but I get my national, international and political news from the Post.

Not that I ever watch Larry KIng, but I'll make a special effort not to watch him tonight. I can't afford to replace the TV right now.

frostbitten, of course that is vertical. (I read it that way, too.) And WaPo is my home page.

Actually, I read old boodle, new kit, new boodle, front page. This means that on some days the only "news" I see is from the boodle, until I get to the front page around four p.m.

You guys will discuss the end of the world if it happens in the morning, won't you?

nellie, I imagine that the end of the world would be a topic for the boodle, even if it made the front page, above the fold. I would bet the boodle would scoop WaPo on it, too.

Slyness... we would discuss the end of the world as long as Joel doesn't write a kit about it -- must maintain our off-topical reputations, y'know.

Even to the bitter end.

hehe... bitter end?

Yup.

And then I bitter front, too!

Peace and silliness...

[11]

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleid=28838

A link to Baross article that works, unlike the same link in my earlier post.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/space/31phoe.html

WASHINGTON, July 30 -- NASA is about to launch a scientific laboratory to Mars that will be the first spacecraft to land in the northern polar region of the planet and dig for evidence of water or other conditions that could support some form of life.

The spacecraft, Mars Phoenix Lander, is set to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a Delta II rocket during a three-week window that opens Friday. If the 770-pound lander touches down safely after its 10-month journey, it will spend three months or longer probing the ground and monitoring the weather above.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11078

21:19 31 January 2007
The Phoenix lander, due to launch to Mars in August, survived cancellation by NASA on Friday.

The lander had come under NASA's scrutiny because it did not have adequate funds in reserve to get through its intended lifetime of about 150 days.

NASA had capped the mission's cost at $386 million, but mission planners estimated they would exceed that limit by $31 million due to development problems and delays in selecting a landing site.

That forced NASA to conduct a 'termination review' to determine whether the mission should be allowed to proceed.

Yoki, I just e-mailed you that crabcake recipe (treatise, more like) you requested.

Ding Dong, the boodle's dead.

G'night, everybody! Sleep tight!

It's not dead, it's just resting.

bc

I see Fisher has joined the groundswell of support for better DC golf.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/?hpid=news-col-blogs

Yikes, one little mention of crabcakes and the Boodle goes belly up. Shirley you're not all watching Larry King pelt Mephistopheles with softballs.

Yanno, we all may have been doing Joel a serious injustice for the past couple of hours. Here he went and posted a three-part kit, the first part of which I found pretty interesting, all about the WaPo, blogs (read: us), and the future of news media, etc. And here we've all pretty much ignored the whole thang. I mean, I know we go off-topic routinely, but still: we could at least show Joel we do pay a minimal bit of attention to him, right? After all, the man probably has feelings, just like the rest of us (just because he has three daughters and he's therefore accustomed to being totally ignored in his own domicile doesn't mean he has to like that condition).

So here's the thing: one little interesting factoid leaked out of that Fortune story: the fact that WaPo.com has 8 million monthly users. WaPo has been notoriously tight-fisted with this kind of data, which makes it pretty difficult for us "participant" readers from commenting intelligently on things like readership. I've been hanging around newspapers for more than 40 years, and circulation figures are routinely batted about, and in fact are the first and foremost thing mentioned in any ad sales rep's rate sheet: circ. figures for various parts of the newspaper, so a potential buyer can figure out which section he wants to buy into. And internal readership studies are the bread-and-butter (though often dissed) of periodic editorial soul-searching. Every department editor has a pretty good handle on which parts of the paper are doing well, which not so well, which are tanking, etc. Usually this data isn't communicated with readers, though; I'm not quite sure why. But it isn't.

In the dot.com world, however, we have pretty much zero data, because they keep it a closely guarded secret. ABC circulation figures are required to be audited as well as published (for mailing reasons), but not so online counterparts. But doncha think it would be fascinating to know the clickship of the Achenblog? Froomkin's column? A Weingarten chat? We know from counts performed by omni and TBG that the Achenblog has roughly 40 to 50 "regular" Boodlers, plus something like another 100 identified occasional or lapsed Boodlers and lurkers. But that doesn't tell us squat about the Achenblog's general clickship. Hundreds? Thousands? I don't have the faintest clue.

Wouldn't it be cool to have an overview of that entire 8 million online readership/clickship? Wouldn't it be interesting to know the stats behind the vertical versus horizontal crowds? (Like many of you guys, I'm a vertical myself.)

Joel writes: "...but I'm pretty sure the crucial players won't be the editors or reporters or ad reps or printers or distributors, but the citizens of the community. They're not just potential readers; they're a huge talent pool. The Post and dot.com have come up with all kinds of new ways for readers to join the discussion, offer feedback, argue, kvetch, and boodle (which is both a noun and a verb)."

Which I'm cool with. But let me ask this: if we're so darn important, how can we intelligently join the discussion and offer feedback unless we're given some data to work with? Arguing and kvetching (perhaps a personal specialty of mine, I dunno) are better served when you've got information to analyze and think about. And basically WaPo gives us zilch. So Joel, ask the bosses to start giving us tadpoles in the talent pool some data.

Russell Baker presents some thoughts on journalism today and in the future in the latest NYR.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20471

Just came in from a bike ride... Mudge, your 04:11 is terrific.

I find myself arguing with a lot of writers when they start to look wobbly on their facts and reasoning, too.

Even the best do make stunning typos from time to time, but when you make flat statements without reasoning or evidence to back it up, you're begging for it, everytime.

As for organic chemistry Out There-- we do know it exists-- not just methane; we detected buckeyballs in outer space, diamond dust, and also sugar, and I remember seeing a paper discussing amino acids and such in meteorites and whether that was contamination or not.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031104064412.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/12/011221082306.htm

All this stirs up a two verse parody, which of course could be improved on...

"On the Big Rock Candy Asteroid, a planet fair and bright,
The stones grow on bushes and they creep out every night
Where the lifeforms all are chiral and the sun circles every day
On the nerds and the gneiss and the biochemistr-ee,
The glycerine springs where the jackhammers sting
On the Big Rock Candy 'Teroid
On the Big Rock Candy 'Teroid, all flies hop on boulder legs
And the wolf-rams all have tungsten teeth and the hens lay zinc-spiked eggs
The miner's trees are full of gneiss and the barns are full of clay
Oh I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall, the wind don't blow
On the Big Rock Candy 'Teroid..."

Bush administration: OK, Gonzales wasn't lyin,' just couldn't, at the time, cop to some more serious sh1t that, frankly, we can't talk about:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/31/congress.gonzales/index.html

Oh that's great Wilbrod. I needed a good laugh, thanks.

LTL- your 10:15 link depressed me in a big way.
It was very well written, but it didn't leave me with a warm fuzzy.

You're welcome. It's no sillier than the original, of course.

The beginning of August, for me, has a distinct resonance; as a kid, I knew that the new school year was not that far away. Time to squeeze the last out of the summer that you could. On the way home today I heard this R.E.M. song I haven't heard in ages. Expresses this feeling perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z8sr4oCS94

I love the movie "O'Brother where art Thou". That is the first place i heard the song. I also love the line "you two are dumber then a bag of hammers"

i like these grafs from the article on nsa surveillance and gonzales:

Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the new disclosures show that Gonzales and other administration officials have "repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public" about the extent of NSA surveillance efforts.

"They have repeatedly tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was narrow and justified," Martin said. "Why did it take accusations of perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other, presumably broader and more questionable, surveillance?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073102137.html

my theory about why the administration is fighting to keep gonzales - because there are some serious skeletons in the doj closet.

From Tim - "I don't think the weird life issue is silly and pointless."

Well, yeah, it is pointless, if the "issue" is to endlessly debate theoretical interpretations of hints of possible bits of evidence that might help support vaguely-constructed hypotheses which are not intended to buttress anything resembling a coherent theory.

It's a little creepy to me that there exists in the world a bunch o' folks who think that they can explain everything that I can't explain, but who won't bother to learn (or create) the explanations for the complex-but-explainable phenomena all around them.

"Weird life" is an amusing technical term, but only amusing to those who understand the joke. I'm thinking that it's pretty analogous to the term, "non-Euclidean geometry"; paradigm-shift and all, it's still not non-Euclidean, and it's probably not really using any tools of which Euclid wouldn't have approved wholeheartedly.

(reading my last post)

Wow!! I constructed that pretty badly. I hope I matched up the negative sub-clauses with the secondary explicatives, and the....

Uh, you just described theoretical physicists to a T.

There's nothing wrong with theoretical biology and biochemistry. The hypotheses might be slim, but hopefully testable with some study.

I'm confused by the comparsion to Non-Eulicidan geometry. That refers to non-plane geometry (spherical or hyperbolic), which can be done only by
actually altering/replacing Euclid's particular axiom describing parallel lines. So yes, that's non-Euclidan, even if it uses the other axioms.

To say otherwise would be like saying Bill Gate's bank account is my bank account, because our bank accounts are otherwise set up exactly the same-- except for the tweaks labelling the bank account as belonging to him or me.

Actually I think such an investigation might yield more understanding in our own biochemistry. Chlorophyll and hemoglobin differ only in the metal used (magnesium versus iron), and utilize the metal properties (iron binds to oxygen, magnesium replaces carbon in carbon dioxide to produce magnesium dioxide. The rest of the molecule (and the apparatus) simply helps break 02 off from the magnesium ion so the magnesium ion can be re-used again and again for the reactions.

Enjoy this video of magnesium reacting with CO2.
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CCA/CCA3/MAIN/MAGCO2/PAGE1.HTM

If we can understand better how those reactions are controlled by studying the "inorganic" part of the equation and how to embed that, say, in an silicion or cermanic setting, we could probably develop smarter antipollution technology and also probably develop reusable chemical/biochemical testing chips.

Also, we might be able to better predict the toxic properties of metallic compounds.

Leastaways that's how I see it.

*drowsy Grover waves*

Joel, New Man, someone... Bit of blogspam at 7:31. Thank you.

Sorry, not coherent enough for a real comment yet.

:-)

I googled "if you don't get it, you don't get it" and found this blog by a guy I never heard of who says he was a "co-founder" of washingtonpost.com--Mark Potts.

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/03/if_you_dont_get.html

Here's a little excerpt: "...And finally, the great Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal got off a glib but unfortunate one-liner today [March 29, 2007], likening citizen journalism to 'citizen surgery.'"

Potts has a good vantage point to observe the coming (ongoing?) revolution in journalism.

Good morning, friends. I am running so late, can't stay long. Just wanted to check in.

Loomis, I did not see that show, but thanks for the information about Robin Roberts. I hope she will be okay. Just goes to show can't trust that mammogram. Now I will worry about mine.

Thanks for the information Scotty and Ivansmom. Aren't the children beautiful? We went to the program yesterday, and the Lemonseed sisters did a fantastic act of "Little Red Robin Hood". The children enjoyed it, and so did I. And Ivansmom, please thank the boy for sending us his books, and we're his friends too.

Got to go. Will try to check in later and read the comments.

Why is the Senate giving Gonzo a chance to straighten up his lie? Have these folks lost their minds? When do we start giving liars a chance to lie again? I feel like I'm living in a wierd world already.

God loves us so much more than we can imagine through Him that died for all, Jesus Christ.

Jumping right in! The Sketch headlines is about a certain Gonazales' possible impeachment. It's getting pretty close phonetically to gonadzales.

Cassandra, you made me laugh with your comment about Gonzo being given a chance to lie again. You are so right. More proof we live in a wierd world is this headline from MSNBC this morning, "Hilton to Star in Organ-Harvesting Movie Musical."

SCC: 'WEird' - thinking 'we' typing 'wi' - more coffee needed.

Today's quiz -- weather extremes:

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/education_1/?page=quiz211&Quizid=211

8/10

:-)

Skimming back through comments from last night: Loomis asks, "So, what is the right way? Your earlier explanation(s)? At what projected cost? To what projected benefit?"

These questions are in the "-biology" part of astrobiology, and thus mostly out of my expertise. The main benefit is to try to get a handle on the notion of whether life is likely to pop up all over the place. A failure to detect a "Second Genesis" is discouraging, but has no strong predictive power -- that's the way it goes when you confirm the default hypothesis. A successful detection disproves the hypothesis of "just one origin of life" and establishes that life is not vanishingly improbable. One can use that piece of information to bolster efforts to search for extraterrestrial life. Discovery of extraterrestrial life, in turn, is mainly of existential value until you find some life that we can physically reach (say, on another planet of our solar system) or life with which we can communicate and share technology and science.

Jumper asks "Any hypotheses on mechanisms that would promote "our" DNA over its chiral opposite, Tim?"

I got nothing. In this, I believe I am in good company, but my "nothing" is based on minimal knowledge, whereas there are experts whose "nothing" is based on far more subtle and deep appreciation of insufficient knowledge and understanding. This is similar to the question of "Why is the universe made of matter and not an even distribution of both matter and anti-matter?"

TBG may have missed the Liberace Museum, but Zippy The Pinhead made it there today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/comics/king.htm?name=Zippy_the_Pinhead&date=20070801

I've been meaning to talk to Joel about the mega-kits and the need to pace himself. His three-parter yesterday might have set a new record for length in a non-column kit. That could easily have been three kits posted at 8 am, 1 pm, and 5 pm. But then we wouldn't have had the joy of ignoring it all at once.

I went to see a Police concert last week and as a symptom of my obsession, I spent the whole show figuring out how I was going to blog about it. I ended up milking three posts over an entire week. These journalists are too caught up in getting it out NOW before they get scooped or made irrelevant.

yellojkt, it's possible New Man has imposed a pay-per-word system on the Kits...

:-)

Good morning, all. Reading all of the posts regarding wierd life has been enlightening. The boodle's tendancy to attract a significant proportion of people well versed in science, IMHO, could easily justify placement of the blog in the science section on days like these when the discussion revolves around science. I'm one of the vertical types Joel alluded to in the kit. Thus, as I peruse the sections, the blogs and the links provided therin it provides input that bring me back to the blog to post something, hopefully on topic. Thus, the reader driven content and an opportunity to observe the collective talent in this corner of the world. Thanks to all wishing our cat well. We've been to the vet three times in an attempt to diagnose the cat's malady. The vet seems to be of the opinion that the problem is in the CNS: his pupils contract and dilate differentially, reflex actions in the limbs are delayed along his entire right side and he has so little control over ins hind limbs that he can't walk. I had a cat that succumbed to FIV a few years ago and toward the end there were indications of kidney failure and other nasty indicators best discussed in a venues other than this. In that case the vet, with whom I will not do business with anymore, didn't let us in on the fact that stress (in this case a spay procedure) could cause enough physiological change to allow the FIV to break out. Looks as if this humpday is going to be tougher than usual.

Completing the "matter vs. anti-matter" thought: Nobody knows why just one flavor of matter is favored. However, there are those who simply know nothing about it (like me); and those whose uncertainty is deep and rich and nuanced. I aspire to some day know nothing in such subtle fashion.

Good morning all. 9/10 on the quiz with 2 lucky guesses.

Question for the boodle-Mr. F's organization is attempting to design an internal Wiki or some form of crowd sourcing to quickly transmit and refine information. Questions abound about the confidence level in the accuracy of the information, whether or not to allow anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, and how to draw in users and contributors who haven't already been drawn to blogs or Wikis in their out of work lives. Suggestions? Features to include or avoid?

Just advise Mr. F. to avoid parenting issues a la on balance.

Oh Jack, I'm so sorry to read of your cat's illness. Good thoughts going out to the furry one.

yellojkt, I decided a while back to do multi-part kits rather than separate posts. The reason is simple: The boodle. I think the strength of this blog is the comment community (as Jack noted). If I post separate items, in effect I disrupt the conversation. The downside is that it probably hurts my page views, significantly, but the tradeoff is that I think it's easier for people to sustain something more or less like a conversation over the course of th day. Is this wrong? Because I'm going to post another multi-part kit in an hour or so...

I'll get out the zapper on that blogspam...

Jack-Your 9:34 was probably even funnier than you intended, caused some painful nose snorting in addition to the coffee spew.

Thanks, Frosty. Gotta run.

So JA, to push Mudge's question-how many page views are we talking about?

*Tim, I wanted to say for the record that I think you've done a great job addressing the discussion we've been having in here over the past few days, with humor and grace even when at times it may have been somewhat uncomfortable for you.

I appreciate it.

bc

PS That, and you put up with my silliness.

Only 7/10 on the weather quiz and shame on me for missing a Star Wars trivia question.

Another advantage of a multi-topic kit is that it allows the boodle to pick and choose those topics that we wish to discuss. This, again, helps keep the boodle engaged.

Believe it or not, I don't know exactly how many page views we get. I don't have access to the numbers. From what I've heard, it's not a huge number but it's respectable. This is something I'm going to discuss actually with dot.com editors later today.

Aye, but they're the *right* kind of page views.

8/10 on the weather quiz, amazingly including getting the Star Wars question right. I guessed on at least half the questions.

With the fracturing of al-Maliki's provisional government, as evidenced in this latest reporting from AP about a Sunni group withdrawing from our puppet al-Maliki, it appears that any political solution to Iraq's growing problems is now in its death throes. And David Petraeus will probably come up with a plan for a ongoing military solution in the next month or so--surge-level of troops staying at least through the 2008 elections, if not longer, and Americans continuing to arm Sunnis to fight small groups of al Qaeda.

What did I read yesterday, that all the Pentagon candidates to replace outgoing Peter Pace think that the Iraq war is winnable? What do these medal-chested warriors mean by winnable?

Prime Minister Gordon Brown had it right in his interview with Brian Williams last night when he identified the real front in the true war on terrorism as Afghanistan. (Texas, specifically Fort Hood, just lost a 37-year-old commander there--prominent news here.) And Condi is overseas with Gates offering the Saudi ruling robed-sheikdom millions of dollars in sophisticated, high-tech weapons as appeasement? Brokering a big arms deal is diplomacy?

Perhaps partitioning Iraq should now be seriously back on the table, as well s a reasonable timetable for troop withdrawal?

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post was at a book signing last night in Dallas for the new paperback version of his bestselling book, "Fiasco." Wish I had been there, but it's a too far a drive, although I would have loved to have been able to pick his brain. He was interviewed by NPR Dallas yesterday afternoon, so hopefully his comments will be rebroadcast by our local NPR affiliate.

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraq's largest Sunni Arab political bloc announced its withdrawal from the government Wednesday, undermining efforts to seek reconciliation among the country's rival factions, and two bombing attacks in Baghdad killed at least 67 people. ...

Rafaa al-Issawi, a leading member of the Front, said at a news conference that the bloc's six Cabinet ministers would submit their resignations later in the day.

Al-Issawi said the decision to pull out from the government followed what he called Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's failure to respond to the Accordance Front. It gave him seven days to meet its demands, and the ultimatum expired Wednesday.

Among the demands: a pardon for security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues.

''The government is continuing with its arrogance, refusing to change its stand and has slammed shut the door to any meaningful reforms necessary for saving Iraq,'' al-Issawi said.

''We had hoped that the government would respond to these demands or at least acknowledge the failure of its policies, which led Iraq to a level of misery it had not seen in modern history. But its stand did not surprise us at all,'' he said, reading from a prepared statement.

The Accordance Front has 44 of parliament's 275 seats. Its withdrawal from the 14-month-old government is the second such action by a faction of al-Maliki's ''national unity'' coalition.

Uncomfortable? Not at all. The only problem is that I'm so engaged, it's making it hard for me to work on the paper I'm supposed to be doing on Jupiter (a pretty minor contribution, which makes it even harder to zip something out -- you feel like you have to make it significant). This is the way scientific discussions, go. Point, counterpoint. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegelian Dialectic and all that rot.

I think page-views is a poor indicator for the importance of the Achenblog or any of the blogs at WaPo. What matters is how the blog contributes to the overall quality of the site and hence the Washington Post "brand."

Froomkin also follows the mega-post model. Has anyone notice that the vast majority of his column is cut and pasted in? His value-added is context and organization.

Over at GawkerMedia (Wonkette, Valleywag, Defamer, and the rest), the bloggers have a contractual minimum number of posts per day. They also have tightly enforced on-topic comments and commenting privileges are invitation-only. It's just an entirely different model. To expect Joel as a semi-pro blogger to post more than once a day is unrealistic, but he does seem to have a lot to say lately.

I'm not sure multi-posts would disrupt the boodling that much since that stays pretty stream of consciousness anyway. I think long kits with an enormous comment counts discourage casual lurkers. Us determined boodlers will follow Joel wherever he goes.

Just my $.02 as part of the meta-discussion.

Regarding stats for the Achenblog, here's Joel's Kit for the second Anniversary of the Boodle, which also roughly coincided with the 100,000th comment:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2007/04/two_years_100000_comments_and.html

Now to that question of how many people hit WaPo.com and the Achenblog; since Internet access to web sites do not involve capital or expense in the way that paper and ink and physical distribution mechanisms do, ABC and other accounting standards to measure circulation don't apply, obviously.

Of course those web site usage numbers are closely held, since they're key to generating revenue, and could be used by competitors to gain advantages. Also, that lack of precise knowledge can be used by unscrupulous people or companies to manipulate perceptions in their favor (sounds like the newspaper business about 100 years ago, doesn't it?).

I think it's unlikely that we'll ever see ABC-style viewership/readership standards for the Internet and Web Sites. If the US Government mandated that compaines did so, the large ones could avoid having to answer to the Govt. by moving their server facilites or even their .com unit HQs offshore, as many of the Internet gambling and p0rn sites have done over the past few years. Oh, and perhaps like Haliburton setting up a new HQ in Dubai for their CEO, with what some may regard as an interesting coincidence of timing in reference to the 2008 General Elections.

bc

**We interupt this boodle for a Doggy Update**

My wife just called to tell me that the specialist feels that our dog has only a very small tear in her leg ligament. He thinks surgery would be premature at this point given the dog's small size. He feels pretty confident that keeping her leashed and on good drugs for a few months will do the trick. Of course, if not, then surgery will still be available.

Thanks again for all those who provided insights. It really helped.

**Now back to the regular programming in progress**

*Tim, re your 10:02: As long as you see things that way, then that's good.

There's more I could say about it, but I'm going to wait to see what Joel posts in the new Kit first.

bc