Month: October 2007

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Hermenautic Circle

Hermenaut In the beginning, there was Hermenaut, an excellent ‘zine out of the Boston area from the mid-90s. Hermenaut hit it pretty big, as zines go, because it was packed with excellent writing and funky topics (issues had themes like “False Authenticity” and “Vertigo”). My old Liberace piece was originally written for Hermenaut’s “camp” issue. Fast forward a decade. Some of the original Hermenenaut authors, including Boston Globe writer Josh Glenn (who was one of Hermenaut’s founders) participate in a free-form (but closed) mailing list for around a hundred writers and gadflies.

Eventually, the “Hermeneutic Circle” realized that many of its subscribers maintained their own blogs, which gave rise to the idea of a “planet” web site that could be used to aggregate new posts from all of the individual blogs (without requiring writers to post in two places). Glenn signed up with Birdhouse Hosting, we registered hermenaut.org, and went looking for a solution.

The rub was that Glenn wanted more than simple RSS aggregation. He wanted posts from scattered blogs made into actual posts on the Hermeneutic Circle, so people could comment directly on the site. Somehow we needed to consume RSS feeds and produce new entries on the new blog, rather than just links. Eventually I stumbled on FeedWordPress – one of the coolest WordPress plugins I’ve tried in a while. Hand it a URL and it will discover all embedded feeds and ask you which one to subscribe. Each new author found in the feeds is made into a genuine author in the local WP system. Each category found in a feed becomes a genuine category in the local WP system. A nice API gives you a new set of template tags you can use to control whether commenting happens on the original author’s site or on the local site. And so on. Really nicely done (and yes, we tipped the plugin developer).

Hermenautic Circle went live today in starter mode; we’re off and running. And once again, I’m just amazed at the amount of work saved by the rich plugin landscape surrounding WordPress (I really thought I was going to have code this by hand).

Music: Angels Of Light :: Black River Song
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Land That Time Forgot

Redwoods-2 One of the J-School’s multimedia student teams is putting together a package on geocaching, and Miles and I got to take them out to Redwood Regional Park last weekend. Didn’t go as well as planned – the dense redwoods made getting a signal lock almost impossible for much of the day. But we did manage to find two caches.

At the bottom of the valley, the ferns and moss and fungus grow thick, and the ancient trees rise up impossibly to the sky, gorgeous.

The highlight of the trip, as usual, totally unanticipated: Came across a patch of low weeds about 30 feet long absolutely dripping with ladybugs — tens of thousands of them, clinging from every tiny branch, several bugs thick in places. You could hear them dropping to the forest floor as they lost their grip on each other; they sounded like quiet popcorn. We scooped them up in our hands and let them crawl over our skin. Many inevitably found their way into our shirtsleeves and pant legs, into our hair and ears. It was magical, and we lingered with them for a long time. So this is where bugs are born.

Didn’t take my camera, but the journalists did share a handful of shots with me and said I could post them on Flickr.

Music: Loop Guru :: Stone River Reckoning
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How Often Do You Shower?

I know that some people shower a lot, but was surprised by the results of this poll showing that 23% of people shower more than once a day, and that an additional 55% shower every day or almost every day. Several people in the comments on that page also mentioned wanting a clean towel for each shower! Even though I bike daily and hike on the weekends, and Amy works in the garden almost every day, we’re both light showerers – we average 2-3 showers/week each, and neither of us take showers lasting more than 10-15 minutes (how long does it take to lather up, shampoo, and shave anyway?) Miles gets one or two baths per week, depending on what he’s been up to. Neither of us have ever been accused of stinking, nor do we feel dirty. I can’t help but think that personal perceptions of cleanliness don’t correspond neatly to cultural standards of cleanliness (in other words, people don’t consider us “dirty” based on our appearance or smell, even if they think daily showering is necessary for cleanliness).

According to one person’s calculations, the average 10-minute shower costs $1.12 and uses 26 gallons of water – they don’t come free! If you’re using low-flow toilets, reducing your lawn watering, or taking other water-saving measures for environmental reasons, you could cancel out your efforts pretty quickly by taking long or frequent showers. YMMV.

Curious whether Birdhouse readers have similar showering habits to the population at large, so I’m reproducing the poll here. Votes are 100% anonymous.

How often do you shower?

View Results

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Sweet Sunny South

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

New Stuck writer Zoe Krylova on “freak folk” standard bearer Devendra Banhart: This is the Soft Voice of the Evening.

We’ve been gifted with a gorgeous, strong, shining cabinet of drawers to open and marvel at. It is made of recycled wood. It has been refinished. There is mother of pearl inlay. And each compartment holds some news.

Also: Roger Moore on guitar guru Henry Kaiser’s musical expedition to the South Pole: Henry Kaiser in the Sweet Sunny South. The video of Kaiser using the steel marker that is the exact south pole as a guitar slide is required viewing.

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Brain Trick

Dancer Pretty amazing optical/brain trick: Is this dancer rotating clockwise, or counter-clockwise? “If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.” Apparently most people see her turning counter-clockwise, but Amy, Miles, and I all saw her turning clockwise. Unlike many optical illusions, this one hits you with absolute certainty – your senses don’t lie that profoundly, right? Amy: “Anyone who says she’s turning counter-clockwise is just wrong. Just wrong.” Then, 30 seconds later – “Wait! Now she’s turning counter-clockwise!” Took me a bit longer, but then suddenly she changed direction for me as well. I could not will her to change direction – she just seemed to reverse at random. But she stayed clockwise about 80% of the time, no matter how much I stared.

How this plays into left-brain / right-brain differences is a matter for psychologists – unfortunately there is no real article to accompany it.

Music: Frank Zappa :: Bolero
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Collins vs. Dawkins

Last month, my Wired subscription came bundled with an add-in magazine: Geekipedia, claiming to be a complete compendium of “people, places, ideas and trends you need to know.” Whatever. Corny premise, but it’s actually a pretty good read, covering topics from artificial intelligence to the Hadron collider to Zillow.

Coming to the “F” section over a plate of curry the other day, was surprised to find an entry titled “Faith Smackdown,” wherein ex-atheist Francis Collins (former head of the Human Genome Project) and biologist Richard Dawkins (“aka Darwin’s Rottweiler”) go head to head on a few key logic points.

Faith Smackdown

Round 2
Collins: “God is outside of nature, at least in part. Science is only really valid in investigating nature. So science is essentially forced to remain silent on the subject of whether God exists or not.”

Dawkins: “Here we have a beautiful explanation for how life comes about… and then Francis Collins and others want to smuggle God back in and say, ‘Oh, well, natural selection was God’s way of doing it.’ He chose the method that made him superfluous. Why bother to postulate him at all, in that case?”

The inclusion of this embarrassingly brief summary of theist/atheist arguments in the Geekipiedia seems to imply that the recent popularity of public conversation about atheism is somehow attached to geek culture – something I would not have guessed (I thought it was more a Salon thing). Wired has reduced the discussion even further by hooking up a hokey JavaScript voting mechanism that lets readers click the thinkers’ heads to vote on who won each round. Puh-leeze.

Interesting debate – but would love to see it extended to a few thousand words.

Music: Electrelane :: You Make Me Weak at the Knees
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One Ear Warm, One Ear Cold

Does it mean anything if one of your ears is warm while the other is cold? Even if you’ve been inside for hours and haven’t been wearing a hat and can’t think of anything you might have done that could have caused such a thing? Does this mean I’m going to die? Or just that my left brain is running hot for some reason? Ah well – I’m going to die eventually anyway.

William Shatner – “You’re Going to Die”

Music: Electrelane :: This Deed
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Wal-Mart Larger Than Manhattan

Excellent infographic from Good Magazine: The total floorspace of Wal-Mart (18,810 acres) is now larger than the square footage of Manhattan (15,000 acres).

Walmartmanhattan

When baald and I stepped into a Wal-Mart store last weekend, we both had the same realization: It was the first time either of us had ever set foot in one. Funny how something that has occupied so much of the popular imagination (what other store has as many movies, books, and blog posts written about it?) can be so far off the daily radar of millions of Americans.

via Kottke

Music: Wilco :: I’m A Wheel
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Darkwater

Been itchy for some reason to totally scrap the WordPress theme I’ve been using and start from scratch. Tweaking occasionally on versions of the previous theme (which I called “Cheap Thrills” but have never released) for about five years, came across this Darkwater template a few weeks ago and it’s been pecking away at my subconscious since. Made a few tweaks last night and put it up. Just a few more kinks to work out. I’m also going to gradually start using the tagging features built into the WP 2.3 core.

Funny, I’ve been wanting to simplify simplify simplify. Darkwater actually is less complicated visually than Cheap Thrills was, but isn’t exactly the stark white thing I thought I wanted. Ever since reading Joseph Campbell back in college I’ve thought of watery scenes as metaphor for the unconscious. Which is maybe why I found this one irresistible – kind of a dreamtime descent.

Let me know what you think – be honest.

Music: Miriam Makeba :: L’Enfant Et La Gazelle
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WP-mass-upgrade

I’ve released the simple shell script I use to batch-upgrade dozens of WordPress installations at once, both on the Birdhouse server and at the J-School. It requires that all WP installations you want to track be subversion checkouts. Probably not useful for very many people, but the topic came up on the uwebd list, so thought I’d put it out there.

Get it here.

Music: Stereolab :: Rainbo Conversation