June 2003 Archives

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes is a riveting short history of the invasion of the Arab states by the crusaders from 1096 to 1291. The author's polished narrative is supplemented by liberal quotations from primary sources, and combines an eye for telling detail with a broad understanding of the conflicts among the Arabs, the Turks, the Byzantine Greeks, the Mongols, and the European invaders, for "Franj," who come across as crude barbarians notable only for their military prowess. The one clear hero of the book is Salah al-Din, or Saladin, who combines military genius with with unusual compassion toward the people and cities he conquers, in contrast to the usual pillaging. In addition, however, the book is a rich source of information about other historical themes as the rise and fall of the cult of the Assassins and the rise of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt.

Want Diversity? Think Fuzzy (washingtonpost.com)

"Finally, the court is confused if it thinks that a subjective judgment full of unquantifiable factors is obviously fairer than a straightforward formula. But confusion seems to be a purposeful strategy. The court's message to universities and other selective, government-financed institutions is: We have fudged this dangerous issue. You should do the same."

I thought the Court should have upheld the formula. But I have not read the opinions yet.

The Blogalization Conspiracy: Marginalia and Glossae

"Lexicool > Chess Pieces in 60 Languages.

"Lexicool is a directory of more than 2,000 multilingual and bilingual dictionaries online, with a handy interface. "

I thought it was a fascinating discovery to learn that in Arabic the Queen is the Vizier. Given the power of Queens and Viziers in society relative to the power of the piece on the board, it probably makes more sense to call the piece the Vizier. Queens have traditionally had to play second fiddle to Kings, but Viziers have often been more powerful than monarchs.

CNET's Charles Cooper celebrates SCO's lawsuit against IBM with ill-disguised glee. The lawsuit apparently alleges that IBM included SCO's proprietary Unix code in contributions to Linux. Cooper seems to feel that the suit is the beginning of open season on Linux and Open Source development. What is less clear is why he writes with such overt animus.

Yahoo! News - 370,000 Sign Up for Anti-Telemarketing List

"One thousand people per second signed up Friday to get on a free "do not call" list that will prevent telemarketers from bothering them at home, swamping telephone lines and a Web site set up to handle demand."

Lester Maddox, Segregationist and Georgia Governor, Dies at 87

Slight of stature, Mr. Maddox was direct and outspoken in the defense of his convictions, which he wrapped in a states' rights banner. These included the view that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, that integration was a Communist plot, that segregation was somewhere justified in Scripture and that a federal mandate to integrate schools was was "ungodly, un-Christian and un-American."

The Times reported that Martin Luther King, Jr. said he was ashamed to be from Georgia when Maddox was elected governor. Now that Maddox is dead, let us hope that the past which he represented can be laid to rest also.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Law Banning Sodomy

"The Supreme Court was widely criticized 17 years ago when it upheld an antisodomy law similar to Texas'. The ruling became a rallying point for gay activists.
Of the nine justices who ruled on the 1986 case, only three remain on the court. Rehnquist was in the majority in that case -- Bowers v. Hardwick -- as was O'Connor. Stevens dissented.
``Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today,'' Kennedy wrote for the majority Thursday."

The Supreme Court was long overdue in overruling Bowers v. Hardwick and invalidating the sodomy laws. I am both surprised and gratified by this ruling and the Court's finding that affirmative action is constitutional under some circumstances. If the Justices are not careful, people will start calling them liberals. (Not that anyone would ever make that mistake about the egregious Antonin Scalia.)

Big Media's Silence

"If allowed to stand, this surrender to media giantism would concentrate the power to decide what we read and see -- in both entertainment and news -- in the hands of an ever-shrinking establishment elite."

William Safire inveighs against the F.C.C.'s vote to allow greater concentration of the media by relaxing ownership limits. The result could well be that a few giant corporations end up owning most major media outlets to an even greater degree than they do today.

One of the interesting points that Safire, a conservative himself, makes is that much of the outcry has come from conservative organizations fearful of having their voices extinguished by a closely held "liberal" media. They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, and I find it odd to be making common cause with many of the organizations -- such as the N.R.A. -- that Safire cites. Then again, I find it interesting to see the Bush administration caught between liberal and conservative opinion on this issue. Let us hope that it has the desired effect and that the Congress rolls back this misguided decision by the F.C.C.

A Seer's Blind Spots (washingtonpost.com)

"Somewhere along the way, however, amid all of the hero worship, the real man -- the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism -- seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well."

It is always disappointing to read that one's idol has feet of clay, and it is dismaying to read that George Orwell was unfaithful to his wife and had an anti-Semitic streak. (The article does not offer much detail in support of either charge, however.)

If Auden is right, Orwell is pardoned for writing well. Moreover, history has shown that the fundamental common sense and decency that radiate from his essays and books will continue to resonate long after his personal sins are forgot.

Neverthless, Glenn Frankel has done us -- and history -- a real service by reminding us that Orwell was, after all, a man, not a plaster saint.

The Shifted Libarian has a pungent critique of the Supreme Court's decision allowing Congress to require filtering of Internet content as a condition of funding.

Scripting News in Manila

'Eric Kidd, a 27-year-old programmer, writes about The Missing Future in software. "What if I have a great idea, and I want to change the world?" he asks.'

Halley Suitt considers Emerson to be the Ur-Blogger, and quotes his essay "Self Reliance" in its entirety in support of her argument. By quoting Emerson, Suitt argues that the Blogger's voice should be strong, independent, and original.

Unbillable Hours makes the case for originality in a slightly different way. He describes his Blog as a way to preserve his stories: a place apart from the rest of his daily life. Emerson celebrates the impact of the original voice in the world; Unbillable Hours celebrates its ability to take us out of the world.

Halley's Comment

"Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes."Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Forbes: The Trojan Document. Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen says his firm can gross $5 billion a year, but to do so he has to stop selling software in batches of 50 to designers and start selling to governments and corporations at 1,000 seats per clip. That means coming up with a product used by every department in a company, familiar to interns, executives and all in between."

Palm Licenses IBM's Java J2ME Runtime
A Java virtual machine on handhelds that actually works would open up fascinating possibilities. It's one area where the so-far-unfulfilled promise of write once/run anywhere might actually come to fruition, whether one owned a PDA running Palm OS, Windows CE, or even Linux. Perhaps there is life in Java yet.

"One of the reasons for the flowering of Andalus may have been the mixture of peoples, languages and cultures. At least five languages were used there. Two were colloquial, the distinctive Andalusian Arabic and the Romance dialect which was later to develop into Spanish; both of these were used in varying degrees by Muslims, Christians and Jews. There were also three written languages: classical Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew; Muslims used Arabic, Christians Latin, Jews both Arabic and Hebrew. Jews who wrote on philosophy or science used mainly Arabic, but poets used Hebrew in a new way. For almost the first time, poetry in Hebrew was used for other than liturgical purposes; under the patronage of wealthy and powerful Jews who played an important part in the life of courts and cities, poets adopted forms of Arabic poetry such as the qasida and muwashshah, and used them for secular as well as liturgical purposes." History of the Arab Peoples at 194.

I just received a gift of 10,000 "fantasy" shares in http://www.minorthird.com on the BlogShares exhange. It's worth taking a look at Minor Third, whose motto is "slightly dissonant, yet pleasing."

Blogshares seems to have succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. For the moment, I can't say the same for the Blogshares Movable Type plugin, which allows one to display BlogShares information on one's site. So far, I have not been able to make the tags for my share price or my p/e ratio work properly.

TCS: Tech - The Good, The Bad, and the Blogly

"(There's only one hard-and-fast rule: get rid of the typos. No blog that's full of typos looks good.)"

Courtesy of Ernie the Attorney, a link to a thoughtful essay by Glenn Reynolds on things that make for Good Blog: immediacy, linking to sources, honesty, and personal feeling. As the Attorney notes, the story quotes James Lileks -- my wife's favorite blogger -- on the importance of links, and cites a half dozen examples of very different but equally successful Blogs.

RAV AntiVirus Website - Reliable AntiVirus Solutions, Antivirus Research, Statistics

GeCAD Software has announced a definitive agreement with Microsoft Corp., of Redmond, Wash., USA, by which Microsoft will acquire GeCAD’s antivirus technology. Microsoft has stated its intention to integrate GeCAD’s technology into products and services that will help secure customers.

This announcement is significant because GeCAD is the only company I know of that produces antivirus software for Linux. While viruses are perhaps not a huge threat to Linux at the moment, I thought the software was worthwhile. Now that Redmond is acquiring the company, I expect its Linux support to wither.

I woke up this morning crashed out on the sofa with my infant daughter; I ended the day crashed out on the bed with my infant daughter. It's a wonderful life.

I do not usually think of myself as particularly handy, so successfully replacing a defective switch with a new GCFI switch in the bathroom today was something of an accomplishment.

I look at my change in weblog software as a new approach. Radio UserLand is radically centered on the desktop: all its functions took place on my home computer -- weblog composition, news aggregation, content management. As a result, if my home computer was off, I was temporarily unable to access them. Moreover, since I am not willing to pay for a static IP address (with its attendant security risks), I was not able to access my weblog software remotely. Using Movable Type and News Is Free puts these tasks back on the web. The result is that I sacrifice some control for the sake of more freedom. I can blog when my own computer is off. I can blog from any machine. I can draw on resources greater than my own machine. This is what the Internet is supposed to be about: interconnectedness. Whether it will really work remains to be seen.

I have almost reached the end of Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples. Not only is the separate history of Morocco fascinating, but also the ruthless colonization of the Maghreb as a whole by the European powers. The situation in Algeria today is much easier to comprehend once one understands the extent to which the French colonizers completely subjugated the Algerian people, reserving land, wealth, education and power to themselves. My friend Rachid once said to me in Morocco: "Nous somme les indiens." At the time, I did not really see the parallel to the American frontier, but the parallel is a little clearer after reading Hourani's account of the colonization of Algeria and its cataclysmic war of independence.