I thought this weekend's article on trolls was pretty good, and that the author did a nice job balancing the need to treat his subjects respectfully against his obligation to point out that they're completely full of shit.

The associated Unfogged thread descended unfortunately quickly into an elucidation of who wasn't paying attention when their English class discussed Crime and Punishment. But prior to that everyone at least acknowledged that the activities described in the article aren't really what most people think of when they say "trolling". I think that's right for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, I suspect that trolling as it's understood in the blogosphere is probably a lot less prevalent than people tend to think. Deliberate bad-faith argumentation is much rarer than people who just strongly disagree or are otherwise unable to engage with the conversation in a way that others find interesting. Communities have a right to avoid having the same discussions over and over, and occasionally saying "don't feed the trolls" is one of the few ways to accomplish that, I guess. But it always strikes me as unfortunately dishonest.

Of course even if the prevalence of blog trolls is overstated, the existence of griefers can't be in doubt. Just log in to a game on Xbox Live and wait to be paired with someone who spends all his time shooting teammates in the back of the head. I think that's a better, less ambiguous description of what Fortuny and Weev and the rest of the people mentioned in the article really are. The only thing that sets them apart from a MMORPG PKer is their technical sophistication and their decision to ply their trade on the web.

What I found most interesting, though, was the ease with which these damaged individuals are able to damage others. Although I think Weev's Malthusian spiel is grandiose bullshit, I have my own similarly gloomy predictions. Specifically, I worry about the inevitable increase of personal power. Modern societies are fundamentally reliant on growth, and technology is no exception. But of course there are certain biological, physical and mental limits that will remain fairly static even as our ability to process information, wield energy and manipulate living systems expands. That means that over time every individual will be able to exert more power over others. Those potential victims will be similarly empowered to defend themselves, of course, but the advantage of surprise and the gulf in power between the average citizen and the expert will continue to grow.

I usually think of this in terms of weapons: we're already at the point where a disturbed and dedicated hobbyist is able to create a device or organism that can kill a lot of people. The difficulty of this task will continue to decrease and the associated potential devastation will continue to increase. The article on trolls made me realize that this effect will hold for psychological harm inflicted by a stranger just as well as it does for physical harm. And it made me feel much gloomier about our prospects for collectively ceasing to do damage for its own sake before the stakes get catastrophically high.

UPDATE: Go see what Megan has to say, too:

I doubt that the solution is, as the author suggests, just to learn to live with it. Rather, I'd expect that countertrolls will emerge--hackers who put as much energy into harassing these people as they put into harassing us. Evolutionary biologists call people like that "altruistic punishers", and they serve an invaluable purpose in any society.

I think she's probably right. I mentioned player killers above — I didn't mention player killer killers: in-game vigilantes targeting PKers that have emerged enough times and places to be recognized as a phenomenon in its own right.

Whether or not PKKers have ever had much of an effect on any of the online communities in which they operate, though, I couldn't say. Jason?

I'll be up front with you: it's nothing but exposition, the art is so-so, the display software is terrible and it ends with an irritating cliffhanger. Still! If the Sunday NYT article wasn't enough for you, go read HBO's True Blood comic. If nothing else it serves to quickly establish the ground rules for the upcoming series' world. Vampires, people! God, it takes so little to get me excited.

A lot of people seem to have issues with Dave Winer, but when it comes to emerging technologies it's tough to argue with his track record. He's been offering consistently insightful observations about Twitter, its users and their future together. Here's the latest — it's definitely worth a read, although if you haven't been following the discussions surrounding federated Twitter clones and identi.ca specifically, you might need to peruse his archives for it to make much sense.

Due to professional entanglements it would be inappropriate for me to comment on these allegations other than to say that I find them troubling, and that I have complete faith that the good people behind the Teen Choice Awards will continue to do everything in their power to uphold the finest traditions of our democracy.

• Kriston makes his triumphant return. Woo! Just in time to make up for the lack of Yglesias, too, who turns out to have been responsible for about 40% of all the material on the internet's daily output.
• Jeff has returned to the east coast, where the weather — and lifestyle — is appropriately unpleasant, by god. Marie's arrival is... imminent? Simultaneous? A secret? Time will tell.
• Angela's CP cover story is a great read. Confronting the faceless jerks behind this city's dysfunction is a noble endeavor, and one that the City Paper has been doing in pretty entertaining ways lately.

Lord knows we need all the tolerable bars in DC we can get, but last night's experience is making me want to write off Townhouse Tavern. We ended up there with a larger-than-expected and somewhat unwieldy group, but arrived early and had secured chairs for everybody outside. After an hour or so one of our party went a few feet up the street to take a call. When the bartender came to clear empties he pushed the guy's chair a bit out of the way, making it look like it belonged to a different, unoccupied table.

Some new arrivals approached another table out front that had folks around it, and one of them grabbed the now-slightly-displaced chair. We tried to explain that it was spoken for, but the guy who had snagged it just ignored us. Emily politely tapped him on the shoulder and explained the situation again, but he continued to blow us off, not even bothering to make eye contact. One of his group found the whole thing funny, and asked us incredulously if we realized that the chair-taker owned the bar.

Well, hell, did he? My gullibility is well-established, but it actually seems pretty possible to me: the bartenders were hanging out with their table all night, and the guy certainly carried an attitude of entitlement sufficient to mark him as a proprietor. If so, man, what a lousy way to treat your customers. I left that place pretty pissed off, and am sorry to have had a chip placed on my shoulder about what is, like I said, one of the few endurable bars in DC.

I suppose when you buy a place like Townhouse a large part of your motivation is a desire to host your friends exactly how and when you want. I can understand that. But it's tough to want to put money in the pocket of someone who treats you like garbage, regardless of how nice his bartenders are. Hopefully somebody'll pipe up and tell me that no, there's no way that was the owner.

KRISTON TO THE RESCUE: Mr. Capps, a good friend to me and Townhouse both, writes with assurances that the TH owner is considerably taller, beardier and more Scottish than the thoroughly dude-like dude who behaved so poorly toward us. Sounds like it was just a bunch of regulars with delusions of grandeur. Good.

Y'know, the program that lets you skip through lines at airports? Well, the database of registered travelers' personal information has just been stolen. And no, of course it wasn't encrypted. What, you think a company empowered to decide who bypasses airport screening should know something about security? Sheesh.

Via al3x

It's that time of year again: the FishbowlDC Hottest Media Types contest is upon us. And frankly, I'm a bit disappointed: due to last year's... irregularities, Patrick Gavin promised new and improved technology. And I was ready! I checked Crowbar out of SVN and into a virtualized environment; I created a custom screen-scraper script for it, and got it working with XulRunner in such a way that it could be called by Ruby. I started looking into firing up a farm of Amazon EC2 instances to run the operation in parallel. I hit a snag when trying to find a decent RDF parsing gem for examining Crowbar's output, but then the poll went up and I saw it didn't matter.

It's the same goddamn PollDaddy crap as last year! And it's still just as vulnerable to a looped one-liner shell script. Fire up Firebug to grab the AJAX call's URL, then set curl to keep loading it. You don't even need to fake your user agent.

Ah well. We can still have some fun with this. Thanks to this handy GreaseMonkey script compiler I've put together a little Firefox extension that should help this year's voting arrive at the appropriate result: namely, one that puts Mr. Brian Beutler at the top.

For those who question the propriety of this enterprise or (gasp) Brian's hotness — well, there's probably no hope for you. But look, maybe an analogy will help: Fifty Cent got shot a bunch and it made people start acting like he can rap. Now he's a millionaire with access to unlimited supplies of Vitamin Water. A public acknowledgment of Brian's post-shooting beauty is a pittance in comparison. It's the very least we can do.

And it should be really easy, too. All you have to do is click the link below, say OK to whatever security warnings come up, and install the extension. I think it'll work in Firefox 2 and 3; I've only tested it in the latter, though. After it's installed and you've restarted Firefox, navigate over to the appropriate page. A message should pop up, then the robovoting will begin. You'll get feedback, too, and the total number of votes you've cast (and your associated rank) will be displayed as it proceeds (it should remember the total even if you stop and restart the process).

And if you really want to demonstrate your love for Brian, you can leave proof of your vote total here in comments by pasting the tiny hexadecimal garbage displayed under it (along with the vote total you're claiming) — each total has a unique code. No cheating!

Install the Beutlerator

This (via Ezra) is a pretty fun little toy — it uses this clever hack to figure out what sites you've recently visited, then compares it to demographic data from Quantcast to determine whether you're male or female. My results:

That's right: my overpowering masculinity extends far; yea, even unto the document object model.

Actually, though, I think I probably got this result in a nontypical way, as my browser history currently contains no links to ESPN. The most incriminating domains on my list include jeroenwijering.com, digikey.com and, um, washingtontimes.com (I don't read it for the articles! I swear!).

That, or maybe the script noticed that yesterday I read an article about Tucker Max. Based on that datum alone the script should not only be able to tell that I'm male but also that I'm an asshole.

The Post writeup of this summer's Goshen Scout Camp food poisoning incident brings back a lot of memories, as I'm sure it does for Mike and Ficke.

I've been to Goshen many times. My troop (and Mike's) was 647 — the fightin' 647th! — and every summer most of us would head to camp Bowman. Sitting on land originally donated by the Post family, Bowman is one of several camps surrounding Lake Merriweather on the Goshen reservation. And, if I may say so, it's the baddest-ass of them.

The point of all of the camps is to aid in rapid merit-badge accumulation. Earning these badges is a worthwhile pursuit since it lets you gain rank, which affords you the opportunity to boss around little kids. Normally the process involves performing some tedious task in isolation (a week's worth of pullups; wandering around a field with a compass) and then going to the home of a stranger you sort of know from church. He's all pissed off because you couldn't find his house and are late, and anyway he only signed up for this because he had to to help his own kid earn the badge. But eventually you have an awkward conversation about citizenship, he signs something, and a few weeks later your mom sews a new badge onto a sash that evokes dueling senses of embarrassment and pride.

The process for earning badges at Scout camp is very different. On the first day you go to each of the various stations: Orienteering! Pioneering! Aquatics! Archery! Riflery! Shotgun! Counterterrorism! Well, alright, not counterterrorism. But there are a number of awesome things that you can sign up for. And if at the end of the week you've managed not to shoot anybody or drown, you're rewarded with a pile of badges — that, and a disturbing eagerness for society's collapse, thanks to a newly-acquired suspicion that you'd excel in the state of nature (presumably on the strength of your ability to tie a proper bowline).

But this can be said of all the camps surrounding the lake. Bowman differentiates itself: its attendees are counted on to work together as patrols to prepare their own meals, maintain their campsites and generally do their best to forestall the descent into savagery that will inevitably have occurred by week's end.

A typical dinner involves picking up ingredients from the central commissary, laboriously preparing them over an open wood fire, then changing into a filthy uniform prior to sitting down to a half hour of picking specs of ash out of inedible mush. Sorrow-drowning is accomplished via powdered fruit punch mixed beyond the point of supersaturation, such that muddy pockets of crystalline sugar whirl around your mouth, barely noticeable under the burning tang of the, um, Tang. There are adult leaders present at these meals, but they typically abstain from scout-prepared food. Instead they subsist on staples purloined from the campsite's collective stores at the week's start ("Almond butter? No, you're right, campers, no one would want to eat that..."); and, in my experience, packets of Taco Bell hot sauce that they wisely smuggled in. The situation is about as dire as you'd expect.

The menu was usually the same from year to year, so I know exactly what caused this food poisoning: the foil packets. These hamburger concoctions were popularly referred to as "Davey Crocketts" in what I can only assume is a grisly reference to the Alamo. Consisting of ground beef and vegetables wrapped in aluminum foil and buried in the fire, they were a highlight of the week. Not because they were particularly good — a lump of unseasoned beef and half-cooked potatoes is not a taste sensation — but because there was no tedious cleanup required (washing dishes without running water turns out to be a huge pain in the ass). I have very little trouble believing that a ton of campers got sick from eating these half-assed culinary creations. It's a wonder it doesn't happen more often, in fact.

I myself got very sick one year at Goshen. Not from food, though — I think it was from inhaling some lake water. But man, I was really sick. Sick enough, in fact, that I was relocated to Camp Post, the administrative facility. I spent the week in bed, but I don't remember much of it. I remember that my breath was sulfurous, which seemed like a bad sign. And I remember that there was a cooler from which patients could help themselves to as many Flintstones sherbet popsicles as they'd like — being afforded this kindness seemed like a very bad sign. I spent my waking hours reading yellowed Casper the Ghost and Richie Rich comics and being visited by my troop's adult leaders, who, with their knee socks and Smokey-the-Bear-hats in hand, looked almost as somber as they did ridiculous.

But at the end of the week my parents picked me up, took me to the beach and after a night spent on the bathroom floor I was fine. I hope the scouts who got sick this summer fare as well, or at least that the quality of the comics on offer has improved.

ALSO: The Nabob reminds me that he wrote a similar post almost exactly three years ago. Except as you might imagine his life-and-death BSA experiences had more to do with exploding shrapnel and flying axe heads than tiny, microscopic germs freemasons run the country!

Image by Flickr user jimstonjournal, used under a Creative Commons license

Jake's tweet captures something essential about geek seduction techniques, I think.

Last night's Samantha Brown episode about DC: actually pretty good. I suppose it ought to have been, since the Travel Channel is based in Chevy Chase. Still, it was kind of surprising to see someone do a not half-bad job representing the city. Brown herself is charming and funny, and I hear she killed Andrew Zimmern in personal combat in order to land her own show. Hell, I would've given her a show for any two of those three.

It's beautiful outside. I have the windows open, the better part of a pot of good coffee ahead of me, and I'm listening to music that's both aggressive and aggressively poppy at a pretty significant volume. As a plan of action for a Friday in August, I heartily endorse this one.

Yes, this is pretty dispiriting: an iPhone app that does nothing but cost $999 dollars managed to rack up eight purchases before Apple yanked it. Amusingly, those who've jailbroken the new 2.0 firmware have had access to a copycat app since yesterday. It makes me sort of wish Apple hadn't pulled the app — now the free app won't proliferate and those eight dopes will be able to continue to enjoy showcasing their elite levels of wealth/idiocy.

1. "This is the second most popular sport in the world after soccer."
2. "She is one of the most famous people in China."
3. "Michael Phelps is charismatic and his races are interesting to watch." (implied)
4. "Russian tanks are rolling into Georgia."

I'm on to you!

Not a deep thought by any means, but jesus is it embarrassing the extent to which two cups of coffee act to alter my mood. I don't just mean providing pep and vigor; I mean lifting the veil from my eyes, restoring my hope for the future and engagement with the present, and generally making me into what I flatter myself to say is at least a semi-tolerable human being.

Whatever handicaps an adolescence spent playing Starfox and going to debate tournaments may have saddled me with, the experience at least shielded me from some dangerously cool compounds, and for that I should probably be grateful. I don't think I've got the neurochemistry to handle anything more exotic than what can be found in the break room.

Ticket prices are dropping to face value. Anybody else planning to go on Thursday? I think I'm going to try my luck outside the show.

Around work I'm known as something of a Movable Type apologist. I can't help it — it's how I was raised. MT was the first thing I tried to install six years ago when I decided to check out the burgeoning blogging phenomenon, back when the media was merely interested in, rather than terrified of, the whole business.

Movable Type's greatest strength is handling traffic, which of course is not something I've ever really needed it for. When you make a change to a site MT picks up all the data you've entered, passes it through your templates and generates a plain ol' HTML file, which it then plops in the appropriate directory. It also updates a few other files, like your site's main page. But these are similarly static (by "static" I mean a page that doesn't ask the server to do any computation as it's served). As you might imagine, serving static pages is a relatively easy task for a webserver — all the computational cost of composing a page is incurred once, when it's created, and the result is saved. The overhead for each subsequent page-serving is consequently as small as it can be. This is what makes MT good at dealing with traffic.

But the system that does this is built on unappealingly old, slow technology. And besides, there are good reasons for wanting dynamic functionality on a page. You can create a hybrid sort of site — this blog is an example, as it uses a lot of PHP in its MT templates — but it's a little awkward to build and maintain. You can extend the core MT system, too, but it's not always well-suited to the task. Over the past few years I've watched as the folks at Gothamist, with the help of Apperceptive, have done this time and again, cajoling MT into accomplishing things that it really has no interest in doing. Sometimes I've been frustrated by this process; other times I've been impressed. Either way, their efforts can be fairly described as heroic. But if they were using a different platform there wouldn't be a need for quite as much heroism. I suspect this wouldn't be a bad thing.

Now Ars, acting uncharacteristically like a press release proxy, brings word of MT 4.2 Pro. Despite the enthusiastic writeup, the announcement leaves me about ready to call it a day on MT. Not that I'll stop using it, mind you — porting this blog would be a pain — but it's clear that its time is done. Six Apart is already retreating from the stab at openness that they made with MT4. And the warmed-over social networking features that they're now offering feel just a bit desperate. There is nothing here that can't be easily accomplished with Wordpress MU or Drupal.

And that's alright. I'm glad to see those other (free) projects ascendant: Wordpress has managed to harness its community's enthusiasm for writing some of the world's worst PHP code and turned it into a successful, professional product that's actually well-engineered (if subject to more security bulletins than I'd like to see). With the caching technologies it has available, there's no longer a great reason for using MT.

And Drupal — well, I spend so much time with Drupal that my feelings are inevitably mixed. But I'd take it any day over Movable Type (and Wordpress, for that matter).

I'm glad to keep a hand in MT. It's a very different system than those other blogging platforms, and that's probably good for me. But it's no longer possible to make a great case on its behalf. The only thing it has going for it is the company behind it: if you buy a commercial license you can call up Six Apart and yell at them in a way that isn't possible with non-corporate projects. That's certainly enough to build a business on — ask Redhat. But in terms of total yelling period, I'm ready to concede defeat on behalf of MT proponents everywhere.

A comment left on a Raw Fisher post about the city's new bikesharing program:

But I am in possession of not one but six chances at winning an entire pig thanks to the good people at the Montgomery County Fair 4-H Raffle. If I seem overly excited, I apologize. But I feel this is the rare sort of thing that justifies using multiple forms of textual emphasis in a single sentence.

The thing is billed as coming "ready to go in the fridge" but I have to confess I don't know what that means. Am I entitled to hooves? The snout? What if I'm in need of sausage casing?

Well, the drawing's not until the 16th. I'll figure it out then, no doubt.

Interesting developments on the Logan Circle listserv! Apparently the new Shaw library has been going through a design process since January, at which time residents were shown this design:

They liked it! But now months have passed, and somehow the project has changed into this:

It certainly looks, um, more... frugal? Maybe those who know something about architecture will be able to defend it on the merits. I don't know anything about these matters, but I can see how some might think the earlier, prettier design is less interesting. Or maybe the second one really is the trainwreck it appears to be.

You've already seen this, but for the record: Brian has emerged victorious, as he inevitably must in a world that still clings to some shred of sanity — or, at the least, aspires to dignity.

Impressively, over 221,000 votes were cast for Brian. That's one out of every four District residents, and about a hundred thousand more than were cast in the city during the 2006 election! Truly, this represents a mandate. A mandate to continue being hot.

ALSO: An impressive showing by runner-up Jeff Young. One to watch for 2009! I think this kid's got a big upside.

I meant to post this important news earlier, but forgot. Now, shocked back into attention by an outpouring of public interest on Flickr (a comment was left), let me try to make up for lost time.

It has, according to Wikipedia, taken us almost a century to get here. But we have arrived at a solution: Carolina-style Utz chips. These are the chips, people.

I realize that regional pride might propel some of you toward Crab Chips. But you're better than that. Crab Chips are a mirthless joke, an exaggerated accent, a story they tell to tourists.

The Carolina-style chip is a precise equation, a tensegrity tower constructed from flavored powder: half barbecue, half salt & vinegar. Its elegance cannot be overstated, although that elegance may not be completely apparent if you cram them into your mouth with the same enthusiasm I do.

The early signs at last night's Hold Steady show were not good. A group of fans had shown up wearing "Unified Scene Drinking Team" softball shirts. And while I couldn't say exactly what Craig Finn had in mind when he invented the first half of that phrase, I was pretty sure it didn't involve flipcup.

The opening act compounded the problem. Homogenous pop/punk with a Bosstones scream — they weren't my thing, really, although a lot of the crowd liked them. Tuning out early gave me plenty of time to think about why the Hold Steady had given them an opening slot. I concluded that it wasn't the band, it was the idea of the band — they were joyful and enthusiastic. And visually, they covered all the bases: there were a couple of tattooed rap/rock fireplugs, an asymptotically skinny indie boy, a nerd-rock drummer peering through dirty hair and ludicrous glasses, and a little keyboard-playing white girl in a pretty Motown dress. My friend Chris summed it up well when he said they looked like a rock band from The Sims.

Which left me in an awkward position. As much as anything the Hold Steady have built themselves on a downright mythic idea of rock and roll and the people that listen to it. I can't say I've ever been a part of a scene like that, but it always sounded pretty good to me. Now I was standing there, staring at what I could only take to be a living shorthand for what they'd had in mind, and it was a cartoon. Suddenly I was in a crowd of fellow fucking tourists, wondering if I'd be wearing a softball jersey, too, if I'd been born into the wrong online neighborhood.

But then the band took to the stage and I realized what you probably already have: this is all ridiculous. Their stories are too good, the music's too good, to get tangled up in worry over authenticity. By the end of the first song Craig Finn had made us toast Joe Strummer, and I found I didn't even care if, for the people around me, the honoree wasn't any more real than Charlemagne or Holly. Their hands stayed up after the toast, and that turned out to be the important thing.

The show wasn't recorded, but the band did a set from this tour on World Cafe, and you can listen to or download it here. If the links wind up broken let me know and I'll repost 'em.

ONE FOR THE SKEPTICS: Here, listen to this:

Image by Flickr user hyku, used under a Creative Commons license

Yglesias links to Entertainment Weekly's chat with Zack Snyder, director of the upcoming Watchmen movie adaptation, and hatches a promising new conspiracy theory. I haven't got much to add, but I do want to point out this Q&A between Snyder and Wizard Magazine. I understand the reservations about Snyder — and I share them, to some extent — but he's certainly saying all the right things.

• You ever entitle a blog post according to the form "A, B and C... Oh My!"
• Your name is Peter Travers (I mean really)
• You make Jeff Foxworthy references

Otherwise, carry on.

Emily Gould, whose name I continue to be unable to read without thinking of evil alien parasites, has an article in Technology Review, of all places, in which she continues her new career as a professional haver of mixed feelings about the internet.

Specifically, she's talking about Clay Shirky's book, which she characterizes more or less fairly as a triumph of internet triumphalism — one that's impressive, of course, but which ignores (of course) the ineffable something or other that we're all losing in this topsy-turvy world.

Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that's set in her homeland, I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there, to contrast my memories with the authors' impressions and see how well they hold up. In Shirky's descriptions of the way new Web-based social tools are restructuring businesses, communities, and relationships, I recognize familiar scenery. He knows what he's talking about--he's lived there too. You get the sense, though, that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage.

To make her case she invokes Walter Benjamin's famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I probably should already be familiar with but in fact just read this morning.

Shirky even believes that technology is creating and enabling "love"; when he talks about the hundreds of thousands of people who are collaboratively building Wikipedia, he says they "love one another in its context." He fails to mention--or maybe he fails to notice--that the "love" and "freedom" he describes don't mean quite what they did back when our meat acquaintances outnumbered our Facebook "friends."

Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ("Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!"), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on--talking, being introduced to new people by friends--are threatened.

But Gould is simplifying what Benjamin actually says. His essay's most relevant portions concern the changing nature of art in the face of technology that can reproduce it. And yes, he says that something is lost:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.

[...]

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

This isn't just wistfulness, though. Sure, Benjamin notes with sadness the loss of opportunities for considering art on its own terms, rather than the mass-production-enabled use of it as grist for the culture's neverending cocktail party chatter. But he also notes aura's exclusivity and the elitism that's only possible through scarcity. He's not bemoaning the decline of aura, per se, just observing it. Dude's a Marxist — the democratization afforded by reproduction and the "emancipa[tion of] the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" is right up his alley.

So here's where Gould gets it wrong. Yes, there is something missing from online interactions. But that's not some privileged insight about the nature of our new, electronic world — it's the most basic one. Worse, it's a dead end. Noting the validity of holisticism is fine, but the only place you can go from there is mysticism, and that's no use to anybody.

Gould thinks Shirky is a callow idealist, but he's not. He's just noting the incredible bounty that technology can afford us while politely declining to complain about the places where it falls short.

Not only is Gould preoccupied with the latter, she's blind to the former. And hey, I can relate. Digital technology has its own Benjaminian aura, you know — excitement born of novelty, and exclusivity, and revolutionary rhetoric. Once that novelty wears off, though, things can start to look kind of drab. I mean, it's exciting that the world has collaboratively built an encyclopedia! But it is an encyclopedia. And the idea of an encyclopedia — a comprehensive reference document written without passion or position — is actually kind of boring. The same holds for social communication and our lofty rhetoric about the triumph of a world where information can flow freely. Once you're done patting yourself on the back you need to start paying attention to what people are actually saying. And that's hard. Sometimes it's even boring.

It's depressing when you realize how much of your excitement about a thing was tied up in its aura; to find out that superficial considerations formed the basis of your enthusiasm. I struggle with this myself: I'm overcome with contempt at every useless, vowel-less internet startup I see, its founders desperate to think of themselves as brilliant revolutionaries despite no one — least of all them — actually caring a whit about what they say they're trying to do. But that contempt is motivated in no small part by feeling the exact same ignoble impulse.

But this is my own failing, and, I suspect, Gould's. It doesn't make any less important those advances, the ones we thought we believed in. It just means that we overstated their importance in the first place, or exaggerated our level of interest in them as we fell in love with their aura. Either way it was self-flattery, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Alex Payne — former DC-area acquaintance, current Twitter API lead, and all-around pleasant human being — has a characteristically thoughtful set of answers to interview questions posed to him by Internet Evolution. If you're at all interested in Twitter and what the people working there think of it, you should go have a look.

Spencer's right: I shouldn't get myself tangled up in questions of potato chip birthrights. Perhaps my intemperate comments were motivated by jealousy. After all, it's not like you can buy Utz Chili Half Smoke Chips. The Crab Chip belongs to Baltimore; maybe I only think I don't want it because I know it can never truly be mine.

But the point of that post stands! On Friday night, thanks to Ficke and Becks' generous snack-procurement, I had some Crab Chips back to back with Carolina Style BBQ Chips. I may have underestimated the Crab Chip, but Carolina BBQ remains the superior snack food.

Ryan and I have been going back and forth in his comments about the likelihood of carsharing services going electric. I think it's unlikely because they'd have to spend too much time charging; he thinks they're a good candidate for early rollout of the charging infrastructure necessary for such a switch. Most recently he said:

In practice, this could be achieved incrementally. Tweak business models over a ten year period through which you slowly switch from gas engines to plug-in hybrids to all electric, over which period, presumably, battery technology slowly improves. Needn’t be done all at once.

I think this is a point that's worth making here and at some length: "presum[ing that] battery technology improves" is setting yourself up for failure.

In truth, there have only been a few noteworthy improvements in battery tech during Ryan and my lifetimes: longer-lived NiCd and NiMH batteries; some improvement in alkaline batteries; and the popularization of lithium batteries. But look closer and you'll realize that most of these aren't actually battery innovations, per se: they're benefits of the microprocessor revolution. Cheap, smart charging circuitry allowed us to avoid memory effects; to balance load across cells; and to monitor lithium cells' temperature and voltage as they charge so that they don't catch fire (well... usually), thereby finally making lithium a viable option for consumer electronics. Those are all important developments, but at this point we've wrung about as much as we can out of charging our batteries more cleverly.

None of this has done much to improve the fundamental energy storage densities of the underlying chemistries. These have been known for a long time now, and nothing is going to change them — nor are there any more promising elements like lithium waiting to be tamed (well, none that aren't radioactive, anyway). The glacial pace of improvement in battery technology really can't be overemphasized. The lead-acid battery was developed in 1859, for pete's sake. It's really heavy relative to the energy it stores, can produce explosive fumes if overcharged, and sometimes requires the addition of distilled water. Yet it's still the best battery technology we have for supplying the high current necessary to turn over an engine. A century and a half and we haven't come up with anything better!

It may seem like batteries have improved dramatically — consider the lifespan of an iPod Nano versus a portable cassette player. But this is misleading. In fact it's a byproduct of more energy-efficient technologies. Which isn't to dismiss energy effiency! But electric motors are already extremely efficient. And when it comes to vehicles, we're unfortunately dealing with hard physical limits related to how much energy it takes to move a car. So long as we're committed to EVs being able to perform like and drive safely near gasoline-powered cars, we will find ourselves with less room for improvement than people would like to think.

I don't mean to be a downer, but it's difficult to overstate what a serious problem this is, or for how long it's been one. Hydrocarbons are an unbelievably efficient way to store energy when compared to electrochemical cells, and I seriously doubt anything will change that. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong. But smart people have been working on the battery problem for decades and decades, propelled by the lure of the financial bonanza that a breakthrough would represent. And while they've made impressive improvements, none come anywhere close to competing with gasoline's energy density. We're still an order of magnitude away.

Now of course there are always fuel cells. And nanotech's vast surface areas may deliver unexpected breakthroughs. But a bet that counts on a better battery is still a very, very bad wager.

Curse them and their Olympic advertising:

• Does Visa really think this "only card accepted at the Olympics" business is a good idea? How many people hear that boast and think "Oh shit! Good thing I went with Visa — I'd hate to have to visit an ATM four years from now, maybe." My guess: fewer than the number that realize that Visa has taken their money and spent it on a) making other companies' customers' lives slightly less convenient and b) getting Morgan Freeman to relay that accomplishment to us.
• Kath and Kim. Maybe you'll be funny! You've got Selma Blair on your cast, and if someone's good enough for Hellboy she's good enough for me. But it's pathetically clear that you really, really want us to think you're like Arrested Development, sort of. And the shadow of Molly Shannon looms. I fear you, and for you.

Megan has an excellent suggestion for reducing drunk driving: put a note on convicted offenders' licenses that makes it illegal for bartenders to serve them. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than installing breathalyzers in steering columns. Cheaper, too.

Tim Wu makes the case for Olympic weightlifting. I'm convinced. But then, I already was — it's the only sport I've bothered to watch via NBC's Silverlight-powered online interface. Wu does a nice job of explaining to me why I find it so compelling, although he neglects to mention that one of the competitors is a member of the Latvian parliament, which is just awesome.

I believe that this just might work. And oh, what a glorious day it would be.

Get to know your new vice presidential candidate.

(This post's title shamelessly stolen from @lgibson)