Well, not really.

It's the 50th Anniversary of Strunk & White's seminal The Elements of Style. There are arguments in the blogosphere about what the book means or which rules really matter, etc.

My response to all of that:

Just get the word out.

Maybe that speaks to the kind of writer I am. I don't like writing for writing's sake. I couldn't pull an Emily Dickinson, and just write and write, and file it in a box. Writing, for me, has more to do with persuasion, conversation, user-experience, and selling ideas. I wouldn't belong at a writer's convention.

(dlog)

I wonder how often people have those moments when they're just in awe of simple existence. Like, when they say to themselves, "Oh man! I'm a living, breathing, thinking thing! I'm present now! Now NOW! Woah!" I'm sure we all have had those moments.

I wonder if some people have those moments all the time. And I wonder if some people only have those moments once a year. I have a moment like that once a week.

This reminds me of the Cynic, Diogenes:

The Cynics, so named because their life appeared dog-like to the average citizen, lived in the open air, carried everyting they owned, and begged for food. Diogenes' scorn for wealth and his rejection of pretense was legendary. Informed by Alexander the Great that he would grant him any request, Diogenes merely told the most powerful man in the world that he wished him to move a little to the right, for he was blocking the sun! (page 8 of Don't Worry, Be Stoic)

I don't know if that's enlightenment or anything like that. But there's something to be said about being free from the empty charades surrounding us.

I'll use this occasion to also re-link this most awesome article by John Horgan on Slate, Why I ditched Buddhism:

Even if you achieve a blissful acceptance of the illusory nature of your self, this perspective may not transform you into a saintly bodhisattva, brimming with love and compassion for all other creatures. Far from it--and this is where the distance between certain humanistic values and Buddhism becomes most apparent. To someone who sees himself and others as unreal, human suffering and death may appear laughably trivial. This may explain why some Buddhist masters have behaved more like nihilists than saints. Chogyam Trungpa, who helped introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the United States in the 1970s, was a promiscuous drunk and bully, and he died of alcohol-related illness in 1987. Zen lore celebrates the sadistic or masochistic behavior of sages such as Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat in meditation for so long that his legs became gangrenous.

(dlog)

So, I'm running with John Gruber's advice at SXSW '09:

Always explore secondary methods of monetization

And so, if you want to support Philosophistry, do your amazon.com shopping after clicking this link:

I get a small commission. If you need shopping ideas, check out the human relations and work & money bookstores.

Think about how often you shop at Amazon. You could easily kick back a few quarters (or dollars, depending on what you buy) by simply remembering to go through my site first. I've added a link to the right-hand side of my site, to the bottom of all RSS feeds, and at the bottom of all permalinks so you won't have to hunt for the link.

Thank you to everybody who's encouraged me and my work.

(dlog)

In the midst of change, it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it.

While that's a quote about technology, it applies to understanding my generation. I've commonly said, "the saddest thing about my generation is its apathy." But honestly that's a cheap shot. This crisis is making me realize the foolishness of preceding generations (Generation X and the Boomers).

When I think about it, I notice a lot of prudence in my peers. They're really into being debt-free and are very cautious about dipping into the stock market. And I think it's because we are the children of parents who've gone through booms and busts. We've sat around the dinner table hearing stories of how they wiped their 401(k)s in one day. We've seen them stress out about the fluctuations of the stock market or the housing market.

If there's anything positive about my generation, perhaps it's that. We don't have this drunken embrace of everything that our Boomer parents have had since the 60s. Just as we can be easily chided for our apathy, we can also be praised for our skepticism.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log.

It's not just these global movements that caused the financial crisis. It's also human psychology, which, when duplicated in millions of people, becomes a global movement of its own.

In This American Life's, "Giant Pools of Money" episode, Ira Glass comments:

It's easy to ignore your gut fear when you're making a fortune on commisions.

However, I don't think that captures it. He makes it seems like, "oops, some got a little greedy." I think our failings are deeper and more concrete. It's this part of human psychology:
It's very hard to leave money on the table.

Around 1995-1997, I remember hearing stories like this every day, "Oh, you know Jamie from Poway High School. He made $60,000 last week speculating on some cheap Internet stocks." Or, "Did you know Uncle Jimmy went from $100,000 to $500,000 last year trading options" I asked old, wise people, "Well, should we be cautious?" They would say, "Look, you'll never make money if you're negative all the time. If you saw money on a table, wouldn't you grab it?"

You know how parents used to chide their kids, "And if everybody jumped off the bridge, would you follow them too?" The thing is, that's precisely what people do. Nobody wants to be the only idiot who didn't jump off the bridge into the pot of gold.

If all your friends have manisons and you're still sitting in an apartment because you didn't have the guts to ride the wave, you're going to be very very disappointed. Look at the Madoff scam. The people who invested with him were making crazy returns for 17 years. This one couple decided against it, and year-after-year they would hear stories about their relatives going to higher and higher stratospheres of wealth. Fortunately for them, they lived long enough to see Madoff get put behind bars.

It's in situations like this that we need Warren Buffet and his primary device: principles.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log.

There's this game in the media about, "How can we best explain the financial crisis." This is my contribution to it. It's based on This American Life's Giant Pool of Money episode. The following mixes my wording plus wording from a transcript of that episode [pdf].

There's three main causes of the financial crisis. They are A, B, C in the following piece:

---

All the money the world is saving is about 70 trillion dollars. This is money that insurance companies are saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the central bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, and so on. And that money comes with an army of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money: investment managers. This army is nervous because they don't want to lose any of that money and they also want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in. And so they were aggressively buying up mortgages with fixed returns. (If an institution buys a mortgage, the homeowner's monthly payments goes to the institution). This was fine because housing prices were always increasing (A).

Also, the "global pool of money" number doubled since 2000 (B). In 2000 this was about 36 trillion dollars.

How did the world get twice as much money to invest? Lots of things happened, but the main headline is all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich making TVs and selling us oil: China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia. They made a lot of money and banked it. China, for example, has over a trillion dollars in its central bank, and there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses looking for a place to invest it.

At the same time, Alan Greenspan decided to keep the Fed Funds rate at the absurdly low level of one percent (C). This tells every investor in the world: you are not going to make any money at all on US treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else. We can't help you.

And so the global pool of money looked around for some low-risk, high-return investment. And among the many things they put their money into, there was one thing they fell in love with: mortgages.

---

When they keep comparing the current times to the Great Depression, it never makes sense to me. While our situation compared to the 90s may be like the Great Depression, in absolute terms we are still a hundred times better off than the 1930s. What's going on is a sad, natural consequence of this free market principle:

Faster-than-usual growth leads to speculative bubbles.
And speculative bubbles are based on another free market principle:

Nothing makes money like money.
I don't know if there's ever going to be a fix for this. My futuretracking persona says that we're just going to have more and more frequent boom-and-bust cycles for the next 20 years until we're in a completely different place. Or maybe the IMF or a charismatic leader will come up with an instrument that pierces bubbles before they start, Wall Street-be-damned.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log

What creates a tendency to be reactionary toward technological change? I think it might be this principle:

In the midst of change, it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it.
This is inspired by Clay Shirky's brilliant article about the "death" of the newspaper industry. Clay zeroes in on an important book by Elizabeth Eisenstein on Gutenberg's invention, the Printing Press. This is what Clay likes:

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is, "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

This is another winning quote:

Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log

Note to fans of Philosophistry: this is one of the best drunk logs.

It'll be interesting to see how the males of my generation respond to changing gender roles. These points have struck me the most:

First, I read somewhere that divorces are overwhelmingly (like 2-to-1) initiated by women.

Second, I read that men have historically rated "love" as a higher priority in determining who to marry, while as women have rated "security." This seems counter-intuitive since women seem to love Valentine's Day more than men. Or maybe it makes sense, because if your man loves you, then that really means he's here to stay.

Thirdly, I read recently that 40% of births last year were out-of-wedlock.

Anecdotally, I realized that I've never heard anybody talk about marriage as way to make a strong commitment, and by doing so, create a solid foundation to start a family. I see marriage nowadays reduced to just another event in the long-line of give-and-take in any relationship. Someone just really wants it, and then someone finally caves in. Or as someone sarcastically put it, marriage is "the piece of paper that shows I care."

This points to men having a more tentative role, like simply providing the seed, maybe the alimony. A lot of the guys my age, who are peacocking with their hipster fashion, on some level just strike me as gigolos. Or maybe it points to a bigger emphasis on alpha males. We kind of already have a scientifically-moderated system for alpha males in the form of sperm donation. How does that fit into evolutionary psychology? I could go to a sperm bank today and duplicate my "going-to-the-sperm-bank" gene a thousand times over.

This isn't any one gender's fault really. After all, I imagine that deadbeat dads aren't a new phenomena, and there's a reason that 4 out of 5 times, the judge awards the children to the mother.

I'm of the philosophy that all patterns of gender conflict can boil down to women being able to produce a maximum of maybe 50 children, while as men can theoretically produce 3-9 children for every day of their life after puberty. Marriage, courtship, infidelity, and the notion of "fidelity" to begin with, all boil down to that.

But I still believe in love. Even if necessity is the mother of it.

While I do less watching TV these days, I still manage to catch great moments in television.

Today, I just saw Jay Leno's full interview Barack Obama. At the end of it, Jay Leno says, "Well Mr. President, I must say this has been one of the best nights of my life."

This morning, Barack Obama sent a holiday message to the Iranians.

The other day, Jon Stewart landed one of the most signature moments in this financial crisis by knocking Jim Cramer in the solar plexus.

And I love this kind of viewing. Pre-Internet, TV was this semi-constant stream of entertainment. Post-Internet, it's like week-after-week, something really amazing happens on TV, and now everybody gets to enjoy the full thing. No need to wait for the 6 o'clock news to recap a small snippet of something funny on TV. No need to say, "hey, did you see such-and-such" and be disappointed when they haven't—just send them a link.

I wonder what television will mean 10, 20 years from now.

Cross-posted on DLog

Would you prefer the red line or the blue line?

Psychologically, the blue line would make us happier because of less ups-and-downs. However, the red line has a larger surface area underneath it, and so that means an economy that's maybe 2 or 3 times as large.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, speaking at The Singularity Summit, said that booms and busts are symptoms of the approaching Singularity. Each boom is a new bet on the Singularity.

I'm not sure if this is exactly the case, as Tim Swanson cites that the booms and busts have had more to do with financial market bubbles.

However, there is something to be said about the Singularity just being a really good boom.

On a related note, this represents my view of history:

I believe that in the longview, things are getting better:

If you measure from our troughs—from the Depression to this one—things have gotten much much better.

Cross-posted on DLog

In The Right to Write, the overall theme is about giving yourself permission to write. Julia Cameron says that in order to write, we must first silence the internal censor. Stephen King, in On Writing, echos this theme, and mentions this principle: "Write the first draft with the 'door' closed, and the second draft with it open." In other words, let yourself go when creating your first draft, then let all the criticism and edits flow in later.

Does your writing tool give you that kind of permission? I'm writing on one right now. It's DLog (aka Drunk Log), which records your keystrokes as you type your post. Click here to see this post as I was conjuring it. The way the app is constructed, everything I type is recorded. Everything I write is committed somewhere. Even if I delete a fragment, it will exist in the replay. Psychogically, I feel that I'm writing for an audience, live. This makes the act feel more like a conversation, and less like engineering.

So much of writer's block is just fear, and I feel like DLog is forcing me, at every keystroke, to dip into the cold water.

Think of the alternative: a Word Document. At any moment, you could hit backspace, and your words will completely vanish. In fact, that's how I came to write this post. I was trying to craft some other idea in notepad, but then I noticed an unusual amount of backspacing over my own text. My internal editor/censor was killing my internal writer.

I think a parallel could be writing a first draft in pen on paper. That could really get you to commit as you go along. One reason I don't do that, though, is that I don't like transcribing my notes, and so there's a risk I just let the paper sit somewhere, unread by somebody.

In digital form, my text is done, ready to be published now, and so I feel like I'm typing these letters into my readers' brains instantly. It's the same spontaneous feel you get when having a great conversation.

Purpose, purpose, purpose. This theme has been running in my mind ever since I started reading The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.

A thought ocurred to me about purpose and religion. There seems to be a strange double-think in religion about whether or not religion is good for you, and whether or not that should matter. Rick Warren pitches a closer relationship with God by stressing how great it will feel. He says, for example:

The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concertate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel.

Wow, I think to myself. That sounds very powerful, and appeals to my desire for success and productivity. If I have purpose, then my life will be organized! But I don't think Rick Warren would want to encourage that line of thinking. He would rather say that I do it because I want to serve God.

Why do people go to Church on Sundays?

There's two purposes: the stated purpose and the effective purpose. The effective purpose, in most cases, for attending Church on Sundays is inertia. You do it because you did it last week. The stated purpose could be all sorts of things, but I imagine it to be, "It's good for my family," or "It brings me closer to God," or "It helps me get in touch."

However, it seems that the only legitimate purposes for attending Church have to be something other than self-serving ones. Your stated purpose could be, "It makes me happy," but Rick Warren wouldn't approve of this as a reason to believe in Christ.

Now, back to the title of this post. There is a fundamental thought experiment in philosophy: Why shouldn't you spend all your time helping the kids in Africa?

One response I heard is, "Would you have rather have it that Socrates spent his time helping the slaves rather than creating his life's work?"

That's kind of an unfair argument because not all of us are going to be as important as Socrates.

But really, why shouldn't we all be doing more community service?

I decided once, "Hey, my life needs purpose" and I signed up for a bunch of community service. I found myself terribly bored, even depressed, like I was wasting my time. While I knew on one level that I was helping people, I could not ignore how sick it was making me. I eventually had to throw my hands up and quit.

Looking back now, I understand that this was a conflict of purpose. Because if I asked myself, "What is my primary motivation," I would have answered, "To make my life more meaningful." In other words, I was trying to use service as a way to get an emotional upper.

Now, I'm starting to think that you'll never get the emotional benefits of doing something meaningful if you don't actually care about what you're helping with. Your motivation can't be, "Well I need a kick." It's got to be, "I want to help these people."

So, long story short, I've come up with this principle:

Your primary motivation is your effective purpose.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log

Have the advancements of psychology in the last 150 years made us a "Nation of Whiners"? That is what Tony Soprano, in the first season of The Sopranos, bugs his therapist about.

I don't agree with him, but here's what I think is correct about it: Any bit of advantage you gain, inevitably raises the bar of the kind of advantage you expect. For example, if you take Advil whenever you feel sore from playing rugby, what happens is you'll play more rugby. Then you'll move onto newer problems, which is when you'll start to seem like a whiner.

So, in a way, becoming a Nation of Whiners means that our problems today are less significant than our problems of before. This is in some ways, a sign of progress.

I have a friend that refuses to take Advil, ever, for anything, even if he gets sick. That's a little unheard of nowadays. My understanding is that doing so would make him feel like a baby. I can say that I've wrestled with that issue before, but I came up with a principle to untie this issue:

Having a high fever really stresses your body, making you feel weak and full of pain, which can accelerate the fever further. So it's okay to take Advil or Tylenol just to reduce the symptoms.

By extension, and going back to Tony Soprano's complaint, deep levels of depression are very much a cause for further depression. And so I'll agree with the line of thinking that suggests taking anti-depressants to temporarily rehabilitate emotional levels. It helps you get unstuck, and from there you can move forward to fixing whatever caused your depression in the first place.

(For the sake of personal disclosure, I wrestle with deciding whether to take stuff like kava kava, valerian, and St. John's Wort because of these issues).

Cross-posted on drunk-log, which has the keystrokes that made this post.

There's two things I want to touch on with regard to this Hudson River plane crash. The first is about generalizing my media consumption experience to the rest of society. And the second is simply a link to a stunning video.

So, on that first point, I want to mention I don't have TV. I'm not an anti-TV snob (StuffWhitePeopleLike highlighted "Not Having a TV"), but more that my Internet media consumption has crowded out TV. Initially, after I canceled my Time Warner subscription, I had random fits of regret. Since then, I've started to appreciate the newfound increase in TV-watching parties among my friends.

This behavior matches the current trend. This study that came out last month said young people watch less TV but spend more hours consuming media.

One consequence, I find, is the reduction of the congregation effect of TV. In the early 90s, I felt we could count on everybody having seen the same important happenings on TV. "Auntie Jane, did you see such-and-such on TV." "Yup, sure did."

The Hudson River crash, in my opinion, occupies a gray area of almost being noteworthy enough for me to watch video commentary. It's almost interesting enough for me to wish I knew all the names and details. But somehow, I've unconsciously chosen to not pay attention.

Having said that, it hasn't been absent from any of my media consumption routine. Digg, Slate, Drudge Report, and The Huffington Post have all given the story top billing. And yet, in spite of all the opportunities, I've consistently danced around the links and headlines.

And then, a little bit later, I got snagged. My favorite blogger, Jason Kottke, went to town on the whole thing, posting all sorts of random bits, some directly related to the story, others two or three degrees away from it.

I got really enamored by one shard, this video of a plane landing in water.

The way the plane swoops in and comes in real close is very eerie. It seems like something that could only be concocted in a dream.

That video peaked for me. And I'm not really sure what I'm saying by using the word "peak." But I saw that video maybe ten, fifteen times, and then I dared myself to search YouTube for more airplane videos. I then became mesmerized, in the way that people usually get mesmerized by a captivating news story on television.

All-in-all, I think I collectively spent about five minutes on the actual Hudson River plane crash story, and about an hour on indirectly-related media-hunting. It's the kind of trickle-down media experience that wouldn't have happened in the 90s or 80s. If it was the early-90s, I would have probably spent 30 minutes hovering on the CNN commentary in the middle of channel-surfing. Just like almost everybody else would have.

(Also cross-posted on Dlog where you can see the keystrokes that made this post)

Update: It appears, based on the YouTube comments, that this amazing video I posted is fake. It won't take you long, though, to find some real ones.

Here's a condensed version for those already up-to-date on the Rick Warren controversies.

Since then, Rick Warren has chosen silence. From a PR perspective, I think this is nearly the optimal move. While liberals are still pissed about Obama's decision, the fire has quieted down.

But I think an even better move would involve both PR and a bit of self-development on Rick Warren's part. First, he has to recognize the slippery slope fallacy. He needs to realize that while as only a slight majority of Americans disapprove of gay marriage, the vast majority of Americans probably do not equate homosexuality with incest, bestiality, or polygamy. (This would make a good Gallup poll, if anybody's listening.)

Once he realizes that, he should say this on air:

"There is a tendency, as a pastor, to be steadfast in your positions. If I am fallible, the reasoning goes, how will I gain the trust of my followers? But while as God's word is infallible, pastors are most certainly fallible. God also says, [insert Biblical passage urging us to take breaks, clear our heads, and re-think our ways]. And so over my Winter break, I reflected deeply, and prayed for guidance. What I discovered is that I made a mistake. I need to apologize to the gay community, America, and the world. I do not believe that gay marriage should ever be compared to incest, polygamy, or bestiality. I realize the hurt I have caused by making that comparison. I want to let the gay community know that they will always have a friend in me, and that we will treat them, as we treat everybody, with respect and kindness"

Click "Continue reading..." to read the backgrounder.

Continue reading...

I had 25 unread items in my Google Reader, and I was about to click "Mark All As Read," when I noticed myself zooming in on one item. It was a post on Brand New, a blog that does before-and-after analysis of logos. Noticing my behavior made me realize that Brand New is one of the blogosphere's best kept secrets.

One of their best articles is their Best & Worst of 2008 roundup.

It's really cool to see how logos evolve. I think it's the same feeling I get when I see the evolution of Homer Simpson:

Often companies keep their logo design changes quiet, so as not to disrupt their brand value. Brand New, therefore, sort of has a constant "gotcha moment" for style. It's like how we never really imagine current fashion as on-the-way-to-retro. For example, wearing bell bottoms in the 70s and 80s just looked "good" at the time, while as now it's associated with a certain attitude, like blaxploitation funk. Likewise, 10 years from now our logosphere will be substantially different, and yet we won't have noticed the change.

Someone once said that architecture is the most important art form, because we experience it everyday. But I wonder if nowadays, it's logos. I wonder if the average person knows more logos than words. (Here's a fun link to a guess-that-logo game).

(Cross-posted on Drunk Log, where you can see keystrokes it took to make this post)

Part of the allure of Web 2.0 principles is that they suggest counter-intuitive responses to business decisions. One of the 2.0 principles is about enabling shareability, even at a cost. YouTube, for example, made a move that was bold at the time. What YouTube did was let anybody embed their videos anywhere. And YouTube went further than simply permitting this. They encouraged it! They provided the HTML code to embed videos on every YouTube page. At the time, this idea would have been a tough sell. The argument is that you don't want users leeching your service without giving anything back. But by doing this, though, YouTube became the primary way that MySpace kiddies started sharing videos with each other. And through the power of viral marketing, YouTube's traffic exploded.

The way I perceive products, I always look for clues into the mindset of the creators. Part of the enjoyment from using Apple's products is imagining how hard-of-a-sell some of their unique features would be anywhere else. For example, if you were an idealistic product manager at almost any other software company, and you wanted to really perfect the user experience, you'd have a mutiny among your developers and the producers would be breathing down your neck.

Likewise, Google is a fascinating company to watch. You can see so many places where every other company would have bowed to compromise or inappropriate pressure from the wrong departments. When I was working at Google, for example, I overheard that one person has the role of defending the simplicity of the home page. Her job is to resist pressure to turn Google into a Yahoo!-style portal. I'm sure that every day, someone begs her, "come on, this will get us more exposure for our products & services, which means more money, which means you'll get a raise!" And she just has to say, a thousand times a year, "No."

There's a technical feature about Google's search results that is an imperfect application of 2.0 principles. There are three methods to providing links in search results:

Just share the link

In this case, you provide search results as follows:

<a href="http://www.searchresult.com/">search result</a>

This is probably how you would first make a search engine. This is nice for users, because if instead of visiting the link, they want to share the link, they can just right-click on the it, choose "Copy Link Location," and then paste it in an e-mail or an instant message. This is what Google does if you're not signed in. This, to me, would be the most pure application of Web 2.0 principles.

Wrap the link with tracking URLs

In this method, you embed the actual link into a link to an intermediary service that tracks what users are clicking on. So for example, this is what Google links to if you're signed in:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Freader&ei=s-dsScLBB4is8gTNtZCkDA&usg=AFQjCNHkwXX7q8y0uRXShFxrBJdJ5oJt3Q&sig2=5KBTga4hto8b4cZyfvuJhw

By tracking what people click, you can improve search results. Oddly enough, this isn't exactly what Google does, because they want to keep their search results untainted by fake clicks. The putative reasoning, I've heard, is that if you're signed in, Google will customize search results for you. But I've never noticed or heard of this actually happening. Which makes me wonder if Google simply tracks this data because they might want to do something with it. Which also, then, suggests a meeting at Google where someone simply pushed hard, "this information is so valuable to us, blah blah, we're using it for stealth project x, we can't get rid of the feature, people hardly complain about it."

There are downsides, though. First of all, it discourages sharing the links because it word-wraps in an e-mail and takes up too much space in an instant message. It also just looks bad. Second, there may be invasion-of-privacy issues. And third, it does slow down visiting the site. It takes two hops, instead of one, to get to your destination. Google may argue that they have nearly 100% uptime, and that the forwarding service is nearly instant, but the experience is still imperfect.

Those last two problems aren't necessarily related to accepted 2.0 principles, but they do violate the spirit of Web 2.0: err on the side of helping users out. It's a very "Don't be evil" approach.

Wrap with a tracking URL, but fool the user

This method, which Google doesn't use, makes users believe that the link they're clicking on goes directly to the next site. With JavaScript, shady search engines will make it appear, in your status bar, that you are getting a full URL:

<a onMouseOver="window.status='fakeURL'">realURL</a>

This would violate the spirit of Web 2.0 by not being transparent enough.

Now, when I initially wrote this article, I didn't survey any other search engines. I honestly expected that going to live.com, Microsoft's search engine, would show them tricking users. But even if you're signed in, Microsoft will use the first method. Which sort of makes sense, since I heard that the live.com group is supposed to be one of Microsoft's A-teams.

(Cross-posted on Drunk Log, which plays back the keystrokes that wrote this article)

Last night, I read "Day 4: Made to Last Forever," in the Purpose-Driven Life, and it felt like I was taking Xanax (an anti-anxiety pill).

BTW, I'm an atheist, which makes this all the more interesting.

Before that, in the afternoon, I found myself really anxious about my work options, and I could see my whole evening already laid out: me lying on my bed, analyzing myself to death. I tried everything from "thinking positive" to "bearing the pain" to "working through the anxiety" etc., but nothing seemed to work. I then took a sort of random, maybe from-left-field course of action: continue through The Purpose-Driven Life.

The question at the end of "Day 4" is "Since I was made to last forever, what is the one thing I should stop doing and the one thing I should start doing today?" And so I opened up Notepad and typed in my response to that question. Go ahead, try it. It takes 5 minutes. Here, I'll make it easy for you:

After going through the process of imagining me in an afterlife for eternity, and then speculating about what that might mean, I felt this wave of muscle-relaxation come over my body. The gist of what I wrote down was that I would stop trying so hard. There's maybe three major areas of my life where I feel like I'm just treading water. I find myself really stubborn about aspects of my life. "My life has to be this way!" "Letting go of this would be unacceptable!" But cast in the light of eternity, I asked myself, "What if it's not unacceptable?" "Why don't you cut yourself some slack?" The attitude I felt was that, if I knew I was going to live forever after death, then really I should just be focused on "getting through" my life on earth, rather than trying to make a big deal about so much trivial crap. It seems like the kind of attitude that would also be useful if you were stuck in jail: "Just get through this."

I just really like the idea that five pages of rhetoric can cause the same physical impact that a Xanax would.

(cross-posted on Drunk Log)

I really like the concept of Dlog (aka Drunk Log). It's a friend-of-mine's web app that records your keystrokes while you type them out, and allows you to play back the unfolding of your thoughts.

I didn't use it when writing out the post "heart ding," but going through the revisions has a similar effect. What that post currently says is:

When I hear the ding of an incoming text message, the sound makes my heart flutter a little. Is it you?

What it said originally, when I was drafting it is:

When I get a text message, there's a ding sound that makes me heart flutter a little. Even though the majority of my texts are brute transactions, every now and then it's related to flirty, lovey dovey things, which is enough to create an association.

As you can see, my initial intent was to make a little observation about minutiae. But then I felt that it was better to make a jump from non-fiction to fiction. Firstly, to compress it. Second, to couch it in such a way that is less off-putting.

And, to boot, go to this link and you can see the keystrokes I used to write this post.

I wonder if a popular author could release the equivalent of "Director's Cuts" for their books. I'm sure that'd be interesting to big fans of that author, especially if there were major differences between drafts.