mjh: No worries. It’s your job to reflexively attack and mine to reflexively defend. Keep holding up your end, and I’ll keep trying to hold up mine.
Fair and Balanced
mjh – It’s fallacious to pick a single day’s paper and try to say anything useful about fairness and balance, any more than I could pick a single rainy day and say that the drought’s over. Take a couple of weeks’ coverage, do an honest assessment of postive/negative Bush/Kerry coverage and then you might have something.
My personal experience as, to borrow Clandestino’s phrase, “one who works in a local newsroom,” is that readers with strong views on any polarized issue tend to view the newspaper as strongly biased against them and in favor of their opponents, no matter what we do. Rush Limbaugh and Amy Goodman have both made a cottage industry out of this truism – though Rush’s cottage seems quite a bit larger.
Forest Dieoff
Earlier in the week I mentioned drought at Mesa Verde. Now that we’re back and I’ve had time to collect my thoughts and do more research, there’s a bit more to say.
On the Road
Lissa and I slipped away for a lovely few days on the road, up in southern Colorado.
We camped at Mesa Verda, a favorite spot as much any more for the beautiful piñon-juniper woodlands as the ruins. It’s on top of a gently tilting mesa, rising up out of the San Juan Basin into the foot of the San Juans, the rugged southwestern corner of the Rocky Mountains. It’s been wracked by fire and drought over the last four or five years, but if anything that makes it more interesting. We’ve been going long enough that we can see and understand the change.
We spent some time hiking on the mesa, and also took a day to drive up from Durango over Coal Bank Pass to Silverton, some real-deal mountains (Coal Bank Pass is 10,640 feet.).
A bit of serendipity also landed us in Farmington, New Mexico, in time for the town’s parade celebrating the start of the 40th annual Connie Mack World Series. In addition to baseball players, there was a remarkable person in an inflatable smoothie costume:
All hail the Smoothie King.
Obscure Google Games
I pronounce my Google experiment a success. I am now the number one search result for “sufficiently obscure”.
Turnitin
A glance at Inkstain’s server logs this morning showed a big increase in traffic yesterday, which seems to have come from a bot at Turnitin.com. Apparently they offer services for educators who want to detect and deter plagiarism by students.
Pity the poor kid who plagiarizes from my blog – but for more reasons than just that.
Alex’s Path
The path of Hurricane Alex starts to look interesting for those of you in northern Europe.
Sufficiently Obscure
I was surprised to note that if one Googles more balloons, my blog entry of last week is the second hit. Given the possible permutations available in our language, it occurs to me that this is likely to happen with any two-word phrase that is sufficiently obscure.
The available evidence suggests there’s some validity to my hypothesis. Consider this a test.
Planetoids
More stuff on my planet: blogs from Hallski, Eric Baudais and Rosanna Yuen, and Pika’s RSS feed is fixed (which is to say that my boneheaded error is fixed, seems her feed was actually probably working the whole time). And I removed the hurricane warnings. They were truly a bit much.
Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and commentary will appear there in the future.
Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.
The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS
To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).
REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://pharyngula.org/
(2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: “Browsing the Web”
(3) I posted this experiment at URL: https://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
(4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04
(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 12:29:00
(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Albuquerque, NM, USA
OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
(7) My blog is hosted by: Southwest Cyberport
(8) My age is: 45
(9) My gender is: Male
(10) My occupation is: Journalist
(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software:
(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type
(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 19/03/2001
(14) My web browser is: Firebird
(15) My operating system is: Linux