I had some Johnny Walker Blue Label whisky last night. Here's a short page describing the different label colors. Look at the price of the Blue Label. My friend Mark got it as a graduation gift a while ago, and opened it last night because his cousin was over visiting and is being shipped off to Afghanistan soon.
I had no clue whisky could be that good. It was amazing.
One of the reasons I haven't created a linkblog yet is because, as I usually do, I do lots of deep thinking before I act. I've had to do lots of deep thinking in the past about the convergence possibilities between a wiki and a weblog, until I found the "disunifying principle" between them that implies that they should be separate.
For wikis and weblogs, it's that weblog entries are fundamentally timely, and dated, while wiki entries should always be current. That implies that weblog entres should have dates in their URLs, while wiki pages should only have a name.
However, given the different styles of blogging I've identified before, what's the best way to organize different styles within the context of one weblog?
Yesterday I had three different "bunch of links" posts. Given the reverse-chronological format of a weblog, it seems a little odd to update a post -- to add new content -- if it isn't at the top of the page anymore. So when I was ready to post another batch, I created a new post.
Two options of weblog organization I'm considering now are to have a "stream" style section that would always appear at the top of every day beside the normal flow of weblog entries, and to have an option, when editing a post, to have it "bump" to the top of the day if a significant edit has been made. For the first option, while there's always a question of what belongs in the stream and what belongs in its own post, it's mostly a simple judgement call, which I can live with in the absence of a better heuristic. The second is a violation of expected weblog behavior, though it's a much better way to call attention to an important edit than just letting it sit there buried by older content in posts that were created after it.
Maybe it's not really a violation of expected weblog behavior, if expected weblog behavior is "the most current content should be at the top". Given this second option, having a separate "stream" alongside the rest of the weblog would be unnecessary, as the stream would just be a normal weblog post.
I already have a "precedence" field in my weblog table I put in there a long time ago for a similar purpose. Posts with the same precedence are ordered by their creation date, while posts with a higher precedence get displayed first. I used to manually set the precedence number through a simple form in a hacked place in my old weblog software, but I now don't even have an interface for it without going to phpMyAdmin. I could simply add a "bump" option to my weblog editing screen that would make my software automatically increment the precedence for a post that's being updated (not created). I wouldn't always "bump", but only when there was a significant edit, such as adding new links or comments to a stream-style post.
What do you think about significantly updated posts being bumped to the top of that day's entries? Only downside I can really see is that someone might visit the weblog and not think anything had changed because an "old" post was still at the top, while there'd be new posts under it that go unnoticed.
Lawrence Solum links to what sounds like an interesting book: The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction.
I've long had the belief that the nature of our country changed significantly because of the civil war, but I have yet to hold an adequate understanding of how. The main impression I have was that there was a profound shift from a strong federalism to a more centralized view of government. The author seems to argue that there was a large change in our understanding of the constitution after the civil war because of the 14th amendment, and I'd be interested to read how his argument dovetails with my own thoughts on the issue.
Via Lawrence Solum, Brian Weatherson: Consequentialisms: "I’m in the odd position that my favourite ethical theory is one I regard as having been decisively refuted." - good, I thought I was going to have to argue against it.
Well, here's pieces of some passages from it that Solum picks out:
It’s a form of consequentialism, so in general it says the better actions are those that make for better worlds. ... We would prefer to live in a world where a doctor doesn’t kill a patient to harvest her organs, even if that means we’re at risk of being one of the people who are not saved. ... But I think our intuition that the doctor’s action is wrong is only as strong as our preference for not being in that world.
There you go. To take a Wittgensteinian tack, why not just say you prefer that doctors not kill patients to harvest their organs? An extra level of indirection is set up for no reason. But, if your theory of ethics simply boils down to your preferences then that's not much of a theory of ethics.
Oops, there I went and argued against it.
(This is in the Christianity/Religion category, but like I've said in the past somewhere, I really consider that category to be Philosophy/Christianity/Religion. I'll have to change the name of that category one of these days. Unfortunately, that's kind of a long name for a category, which is why I've left it.)
I wish I knew where Mark came up with the word slugs, but for me, the most useful reason to have cruft-free URLs is that it's much easier to see what was linked to when you check your referrers. I think that rationale would appeal even to people who couldn't give a damn about "information architecture", ontologies, url structure, or what have you.
Martin links to software meant to help you learn how to do lucid dreaming. I may have to try it out. The only thing I've wondered about lucid dreaming is whether, by taking control of your dream, you're hijacking your brain's own bookkeeping it needs to do.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
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