In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school has dropped its football program midseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned 13 starters from last year's 0-11 team, still had the toughest part of the schedule to come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.
Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs
I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank. SportsFilter jumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins with www and one that doesn't -- for the same site.
Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at either mydd.com or www.mydd.com.
When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of "301 moved permanently," which indicates a permanent move, rather than "302 found," which may be temporary.
If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links to www.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links to mydd.com, giving it PR 6.
The site's hosted with Apache, so if mod_rewrite is installed, a two-line .htaccess file in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]
To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it at Buzzword and am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs on Technorati, only Dooce and Kottke.Org aren't giving up some rank.
Hysteria is Contagious
An article on the 50-year effort by scientists to revive the 1918 Spanish flu virus reads like a Michael Crichton novel:He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza.
The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918.
Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. At the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer believes it's more of a Steven King:
We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.
Though he cites New Scientist, Krauthammer omits a few facts from the magazine's flu coverage that are worth considering before completely freaking out, as do Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who call this flu's published genome a "recipe for disaster."
The laws of probability suggest that if Earth sticks around long enough, scientists will eventually stumble upon a discovery that wipes out humankind and gives the rest of the universe one less thing to worry about. That's why we must colonize other planets as soon as possible. Our genes need places to store backups.
But I'm not ready to hit the panic button about the return of the killer of 1918. Most people have been exposed to milder descendants of that flu or vaccinated against them, both of which provide natural protection. Existing antiviral drugs also are likely to offer resistance.
The more pressing concern is the next pandemic flu, which hasn't been filtered through survivors and weakened by the collective might of antibodies and evolution. Learning from the publication of the Spanish flu's genome also may enable researchers to devise an effective response to the next killer flu or biological terror attack.
Besides, if hiding information from bad, bad people is Earth's best hope, we might as well max out the credit cards and stock up on beer, medicinal marijuana, and fatty foods, because we're screwed. As technologists like Kurzweil and Joy must realize, security through obscurity never works.
A Target on My Back
I was publicly humiliated at the local Target store this afternoon by one of the employees, a young woman who yelled at my children from a distance of 25 feet for being improperly respectful of Spongebob Squarepants decorative microbead pillows.Unbeknownest to me, Target Team Member Emily had stalked us all the way from the toy section to housewares, enraged when we haphazardly reshelved Parasol Kids foam chairs.
If you're ever in Target and your demand for the manager is met by an employee's ominous walkie-talkie request for an "LOD," don't panic. You are not going to be dragged off for a full cavity search by Target Team Interrogator Günter. LOD stands for Leader on Duty, the person in charge of placating irate customers by feigning concern for their grievances until they go away.
There's a really boring story I could tell here, but I'll skip to the moral: My children are perfect angels, Emily's a delusional harridan, and it's not my fault her years of full flower are being spent patrolling endcaps in a red fitted Polo that's not slimming.
The best part of the disagreement was when a middle-aged customer stepped out of the crowd of shoppers-by, declared that her children never misbehaved in stores when they were young, and berated me for gross parental neglect until the manager arrived.
Outraged by my mistreatment, I'm now plotting all of the meaningless gestures I could undertake to teach a lesson to a 1,300-store chain with a $47 billion dollar market cap. Target Corporation will rue the day it kissed off a customer who spent $957 in calendar year 2005! Let's see how Emily feels when her dream of becoming a Price Accuracy Team Leader must overcome an incisive letter of grievance from a journalism school graduate!
I'd threaten to create an anti-Target web site, but that's already been done by a guy who swore revenge after the company wouldn't exchange a cordless phone.
Besides, after reading online postings by disgruntled employees on Target Sucks, I've come to realize that the best response is not to boycott the store or write a letter that will cause her to add secret sauce to my burger at her next job.
What I should have done, rather than slinking out of the store in shame, was turn the kids back around and spend another hour shopping for toys.
My Reign as the King of Pings
I've been running Weblogs.Com since June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it.Weblogs.Com ran on Frontier for six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year.
In a frenzied weekend, I recoded the site as an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server, writing all of the code from scratch except for XML-Simple, an XML parsing library I adapted from code by Jim Winstead. Hosting was provided by ServerMatrix, which charges around $80-$140/month for a dedicated server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 1,200-gigabyte monthly bandwidth limit.
On an average day, my application served 34.65 gigabytes of data, took 1.1 million pings and sent 11,000 downloads of changes.xml, a file larger than 1 megabyte. The LAMP platform is ideal for running a high-demand web application for as little money as possible.
When Dave rerouted Weblogs.Com to my new server and it instantly deluged the box with more than a dozen pings per second, I felt like Lucy Ricardo pulling chocolates off the conveyer belt.
The server ran well, crashing only a few times over four months because of a spammer sending thousands of junk pings per minute. Every few days, I used the iptables firewall to block requests from the IP addresses of the worst abusers.
Business reporter Tom Foremski and others have suggested that the Weblogs.Com sale might reveal a lack of faith in blogging as a business.
I think the sale was motivated by the realization that the demands of running Weblogs.Com had become much too large for Dave's one-man company. He could either hire people and start pursuing revenue opportunities or sell the service.
VeriSign got a good deal acquiring it for a reported $2 million. The company's now at the center of the blogosphere, a giant web application and information network with more than 15 million users, and ought to be able to leverage those pings into new services built on XML, XML-RPC and RSS.
One thing I'd like to see is a real-time search engine built only on the last several hours of pings, which could be a terrific current news service if compiled intelligently. While I was running Weblogs.Com, I wanted to use my brief moment as the king of pings to extend the API, which VeriSign appears to be considering, but Dave didn't want to mess with things while companies were loading a truck with money and asking for directions to his house.
I want to pursue these ideas, either independently or in concert with VeriSign and Yahoo Blo.gs. No knock intended, but big companies tend to sit on purchases like this rather than implementing new features. Blogger still lacks category support two years after being purchased by Google, an omission so basic you have to wonder whether it's serious about fending off competition from Six Apart, UserLand, and WordPress.
And the Booker Goes To ...
There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of the Booker Prize for Fiction is one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows upon Survivor finales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.The Booker's such a big deal there's a tell-all book coming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:
There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.
When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.
This year's Booker, announced live last night on British TV, went to Irish novelist John Banville for The Sea, a novel of a grieving man returning to a vacation spot where something very bad happened in his youth. (The title The Prince of Tides was already taken.)
Banville put some work into this victory. He shredded a critically acclaimed book, Saturday by former Booker winner Ian McEwan, and may have contributed to the "dismayingly bad book" being left off the list of finalists for 2005.
The review's on a for-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidson blogged the good parts:
It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
Something of the kind seems to have happened here. Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.
Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.
Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth Bomb
A letter to National Review columnist David Frum:I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system.
I'm considering abandoning them after watching how such advocacy often turns into a negative blotch on an attorney's resume and a disqualifier for any high level judiciary or executive service ...
Since the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the most fascinating political site on the web has been Confirm Them, a weblog created by Republican activists to support the confirmation of President Bush's judicial appointments.
Miers has made a mockery of the site's name, splitting conservative contributors into angry pro- and anti-Miers camps. They were gearing up for a fight to get an openly conservative jurist with an established track record past the Senate, but instead have been handed another stealth nominee whose judicial philosophy must be taken on faith.
No conservative had the White House counsel on their short list of prospective choices, according to George Will in one of the greatest insults in the history of punditry:
... there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.
Snap! You go, George!
Stealth nominees have a strategic short-term advantage that makes it difficult to keep them off the court, so it's likely that Miers will be confirmed unless President Bush withdraws the nomination, which ranks in probability somewhere between "no chance in hell" and "never in a million years." The president's so stubborn that were he captain of the Titanic, he would have run the ship into a second iceberg to prove he meant to hit the first one.
There's a long-term price for filling the Supreme Court in secrecy, as this clerk's letter illustrates. Conservatives have built an intellectual foundation for their interpretation of constitutional law over a quarter century, as embodied by the Federalist Society and the embrace of originalism.
Neither Bush appointment has publicly nurtured this movement during their careers. In some instances, they've even distanced themselves from it. When asked her most admired Supreme Court justice, Miers did not choose Justices Scalia or Thomas. When John Roberts showed up in a Federalist Society membership directory, the White House issued a quick denial, stating that he "has no recollection of being a member."
Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute vice president and society member, was stunned to see Roberts run away from the association as if Joseph McCarthy was after him. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?"
If you're a 25-year-old conservative who graduated Harvard Law first in your class and clerks for Chief Justice Roberts, do you spend the next 20 years contributing to law journals, actively participating in the Federalist Society and seeking a judgeship from which you can foster conservative jurisprudence?
Clearly, if you have supreme ambitions, the answer is no. By choosing Roberts and Miers, Bush has publicly affirmed the notion that judicial conservatives believe in an ideology that dare not speak its name. Friends of Clarence are the new Friends of Dorothy, forced to develop furtive code phrases to seek each other out -- just like how President Bush namedrops Dred Scott as a double-secret shout out to anti-abortion activists.
"I couldn't help but overhear what you said about Griswold v. Connecticut at the bar, friend. Want to take this someplace more private so we can disrespect stare decisis away from all of these living constitutionalists?"
Harriet Miers is the best thing to happen to liberals since the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. I hope she has a sister.
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