Making Light

Frisian is, last I checked. Some.migjt argue it is a Dutch dialect, I guess From German to Dutch to Frisian to Scots to English is a great way to train your ear and language sense. The great golden era blog 'Making Light' would post old English of various ages. https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008591.html

I'm not very familiar with Ford's work, but I very strongly remember reading his poem about the September 11 attack: http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html It's amazing.

Sonnet against Entropy The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke. The universe winds down. That's how it's made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose. Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate. John M Ford (originally here: http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003789.html)

The main benefit I receive from publishers is filtering. Even the worst publisher printing unbelievable shlock is light years ahead of the garbage in the publishing anteroom, the slush pile. With that, the greatest blog post on publishing of all time, "Slushkiller": http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

It seems the same as with any "hit" driven environment. Getting a top-40 song, a top blog, the next NYT bestseller, or top iPhone app takes a lot of work and a little luck. There are those who are suited to it, persevere and get that big break. Then there are a few who just don't get lucky and thousands of wannabes who fail to execute, be it on minor flaws or epic levels. I think the best description of the process comes from an editor explaining why so many manuscripts fail: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641 It's harsh, but has given me insight into how the startup world, including iPhone app startups, works.

It's not quite what you asked, but Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written an excellent essay, "Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space", at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html#006036 Some of the ideas in that essay may be useful to you. Her point 11 is particularly worth pondering: "11. You can't automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot's ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings." Interestingly enough, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has made essentially the same comment. He went so far as to describe himself as "battling programmers" who want to automate various aspects of Wikipedia's community.

The author made a followup post here: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013103.html#563511 This is what it says: "Hey ho. Commenting here because I feel chased out of my own blog. I'm trying to figure out if I want to write a follow-up blog post, and if so, what I would write in it. More importantly, who would I be writing it for? There may be some catharsis for me in writing a response, but it would also involve me stewing in asshat soup for even longer while I composed it. The main thing I would want to clarify is that the technical problems are not actually the heart of the matter for me. Being responsible parents, we set Alex's email up in such a way that we get copies of all his incoming messages. We can probably reconstruct large chunks of his correspondence to date. I'm not even sure if Alex thinks of email as a long-term thing, though. He archives messages, but I don't know if he considers them anything other than ephemeral. Secondly, we can set him up with a new email account somewhere else. No problem. Offline, IMAP, webmail, whatever. That's easy. (Although I would very much prefer not to have to run my own email server, in the same way that I prefer not to fix the engine of my own car.) Alternatively, we can just do what everyone else does, and simply lie. It wouldn't be the first time, and it won't be the last. (#include relevant discussions of "legal" vs. "moral".) What really made me angry was the emotional harm. I don't like using that…

One drawback to the various forms of invisible bans is that they aren't visible to the rest of the community. The HN "showdead" feature allows the banned comments to be seen, but relatively few people (I assume) use that feature. One good way for community members to learn what is or isn't acceptable is by example. Approaches like disemvoweling (and like HN's graying of down-voted comments) have the advantage that the offending post is still available as an example to other members of the community, quite clearly saying "don't be like this". Another distinction is that disemvoweling is an action taken against comments, not users. Ideally, a user's first offensive post is disemvoweled, but they're allowed to come back and make a second attempt at civil conversation. Of course, you still need a way to deal with the persistent offenders who refuse to learn from their experiences. For them, banning of whatever flavor seems perfectly reasonable to me. On http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, where I've seen the most use of disemvoweling (and several discussions of it and other techniques for defending community and rational conversation), disemvoweling of a comment is often followed by a moderator's brief explanation to fellow community members what about the comment was objectionable. There's also often an invitation to the commenter to try alternative approaches to the discussion, or to join in other conversations on the site that might be easier to discuss politely.

Metaphors should come with safety warning labels so that drunkards don't wield them incorrectly. Yes, this poor woman is drunk. She's just discovered the existence of slush -- http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html -- and now she's convinced that the entire universe is made of tightly packed quantum units of idiocy. It's an understandable reaction. I believe that professional editors (see link, above) actually use the technical term "slush drunk". I hope she sobers up soon. Fortunately, a pile of poorly conceived websites will not "blow", no matter how large that pile is. There is no "critical mass". It just doesn't matter (except to the people who are bold enough to volunteer to review them individually) that the world contains 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 stupid websites. At worst, we all just ignore them. At best, they employ webhosts, and sysadmins, and programmers -- it's like complaining that the oceans are too dirty because there are too many bacteria and plankton everywhere. But one of the things the web does well is ensure that it's really easy to sit at your desk and make a list of 10,000 crappy businesses. It used to be fairly difficult to make a big list of crappy businesses -- they don't last long, by definition, and most of them don't have a high profile, by definition. Now you can find twenty of them before breakfast. Submissions like this one practically write themselves.

that seems to be titled "Against Entropy" here: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008033.html

Also sometimes titled De Vermis, which is the title of the blog post that Ford dropped the first comment on:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003789.html

Also sometimes a medicine's most important uses end up being off-label anyways. E.g. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007140.html

A real life example http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012652.html

Try Making Light. I can't stress this enough. Their comment sections are unthreaded, but lively. The hosts are science fiction editors in NYC, so that tends to shape the topics somewhat - but only somewhat. http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

Legal or not, it's what they're doing. And it's not just me: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012933.html

I just did a search for "football checkers acequia moon" (without the quotes). It says there are about 11,400 pages, but when I go through them it ends up with 221 pages. I assume the estimation is based on some statistical predictions using the individual search words. Here they are relatively common terms (well, except 'acequia') which rarely go together. I found http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008851.html say "I work for google these days, though not on search. The number of hits for phrases are estimates, based on overall word frequencies". The invalidity of the estimated results has been haphazard for a long time. See http://danfingerman.com/dtm/archives/000004.html from 2003.

With which constituency? Authors are, understandably very upset with what they see as a power grab by Amazon. You can get a sense of the sentiment in that community by looking through the comments here http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012148.html#012148 But in a larger sense, most readers understand that authors do need to get paid if the flow of new books are to continue. My take is that Amazon will come to regret this action.

"You should trust X's judgement because X is an expert in his field" and "You shouldn't trust Y's judgement because Y is acting like a crank" are both, given the right context, completely reasonable arguments to make. They have no place in a mathematics proof or another exercise in pure deductive reasoning, but very few real-world arguments involve pure deductive reasoning. More on this from an old classmate of mine: http://legalminds.lp.findlaw.com/list/cyberia-l/msg19080.html See also "Flamer Bingo": http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009186.html

You said it perfectly. Allow me to address the larger, hurt feelings behind this post, with a reminder of the difference between a cult and a religion: > If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy, trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about their denomination, it’s a church. > If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social disapproval, it’s a cult. [1] The phrase "Cult of growth" comes to mind. While I don't know if it actually exists ( ask PG? ), I do believe that the way communities censor humor can shine a light on their insecurities. As in, the community may be actively avoiding an uncomfortable truth by stamping out the slightest whiff of satire. Not always, of course. Sometimes, the community wishes to remove "kidding in the square" or other insidious sleight-of-mind tricks from their discourse. For me, restricting the band of humor is fine if it arises from a thoughtful & honest discussion, as opposed to knee-jerk emotion. The more the latter happens, the more insecure the community perhaps (and vica versa). In any case, I'm glad to know that most people here don't seem to be flipping out over a fun neologism. [1] http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006152.html#006152 (originally seen at http://www.fluff.info/blog/arch/00000127.htm)