Jason D. dodges a bullet.

Whoo, is it bothersome to have blogrolling down. Good thing I was halfway through setting up a backup bookmarking system a while ago.

The (Not So Short) History of Paper Boats, by Ken Cupery.

“Over a hundred years ago a prosperous industry emerged in Troy, New York in the manufacture of rowing boats and canoes from paper. These ranged from simple single-person rowing shells to a 45 foot “pleasure barge” that could seat seventeen in addition to its six oarsmen. This business began in 1867 when Elisha Waters, a Troy NY paper box manufacturer, and his son George Waters, invented and then patented a method for constructing boat hulls from paper…”

I’ll see our cardmodels and raise you a full-size boat.

Stumbled across while looking for a better steamboat model than the one to be found here, which came about from looking for a version of Stagger Lee via chordie (There are at least two). In the course of looking I learned that St. Lous stemaboat magnate Jim Lee had the habit of naming his boats after his sons, and one was the Stacker Lee – which is apparently unrelated except by name to the original gunsel, Lee Sheldon, who ‘shot that boor boy so bad’ in St. Louis in 1898.

I will be helping a friend move from Mac OS 9, where she relied upon a flavor of Netscape as her email client of choice. So some info on getting that data out will be helpful, I imagine.

to Mozilla 1.0 from N4.x.

Exporting the addressbook from N4.x.

Export from N.x to Outlook/OE.

Export from Yahoo to Mozilla, re-export to Address Book.

OE to AdBk.

Or I might consider trying an Apple-provided import script that supports multiple formats, including Palm, OE, Eudora, and Claris Emailer. Hm… maybe I should finally try to merge my Palm contacts with my woolly, overgrown thornbush of a Eudora address book.

Hmph. It only picked up 24 contacts, out of several hundred. Must not have known where to look.

So here’s an ancillary question – can you get email archives out of Netscape?

Certain mummies may be chemically transformed into adipocere, or ‘grave wax’. (This links to a pretty comprehensive site on the subject which includes some very, very grisly photos, so buckle your seatbelt. Probably NSFW.)

When a body is subject to wet conditions for a period of time, it can transform into a kind of soap.

When I was a child, the Smithsonian Institution displayed, among countless other human bodies in the various display halls, the body of The Soap Man, the butter-colored corpse of a victim of a Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic from the late 1700s, William von Ellenbogen.

Sadly, in my opinion, the display of human corpses has become generally frowned upon in the context of institutions of higher learning, and with some exceptions, one by one the skulls and femurs have moved into storage.

The imeptus for this change was the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Unsurprisingly, the great majority of the human remains on display in museums across this great nation of ours were once inhabited by members of Native American culture.

The wide range of Indian remains on display at the Smithsonian and elsewhere reflected the interest in physical anthropology that dominated the developing discipline between 1875 and the beginning of the First World War. In a recent New Yorker piece on the great German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, this set of interests and the agenda – that of seeking to prove or disprove racial superiority and purity, frequently via braincase measurements – was detailed at length. The article in question is The Measure of America by Claudia Roth Pierpont, and appeared in the March 8, 2004 issue The New Yorker. For some reason, I found the article here, in what appears to be a stray Lexis-Nexis feed.

The approriate decision to remove the Amerindian remains appears to have prompted a reconsideration of the educational purpose of displaying soap mummies.

The accidental educational message of some of the displayed material is quite clear. Chicago’s human body slices (linked above) are visibly drawn from persons of African-American heritage, and the implication can’t have been lost on the generations of African-American teens that have poured through that city’s Museum of Science and Industry since the slices were first installed.

Yet the most important educational message that the soap man taught me as a child was that science could be spooky and entertaining and a source of mystery and thrills. The subtext to this message was a salutary hostility to superstition. The Soap Man was not an imperialist trophy or statement of racial inequity; he was a scientific curiosity, whose supposed educational message (fat becomes soap when leached with certain chemicals) was greatly overshadowed by his entertainment value and consequent demystification of death and corpses. I worry a bit, I guess, about the abandonment of the field to vernacular exhibitors and well-financed ghouls.

A footnote for Seattle readers:

One of Boas’ most important collecting partners in his trips to the Northwest to build his collections for the NYC-based American Museum of Natural History was the store that today displays Sylvester and Sylvia, our own beloved Curiosity Shop. Boas also worked for Chicago’s Field Museum, to a lesser extent. The store helped with all of the US-based anthropological collecting expeditions to the Northwest at the turn of the century, and in effect, when you stand in that crowded little corner of the pier and look up into the welter of century-old curios hanging from the rafters, you’re looking through time into part of the world that Sylvester and Sylvia inhabited.

On March 3, 2003, Mr. Lope explored some of the parameters of comment spam. I refrain from crosslinking to his linked sites for obvious reasons.

And with that, Danelope Week draws to a close. Thanks a lot for coming and stay tuned for occasional updates.

The excercise proved fruitful in ways I was not wholly expecting. The idea of picking one person’s weblog and randomly mining it for synchronistic links echoing your own editorial topic for the day over a period of time is, as far as I can tell, original to Danelope Week. I think it would be fascinating to see others do this.

I beleive the full and appropriate name for this practice is obvious: I hereby dub it Seven Link Boots, after the famous boots of myth and legend.

TypeKey: Six Apart’s answer to comment spam. A centralized ID system for weblog commenting.

This should help to resolve comment spam. Will it be widely adopted? There are reasons to wonder.

Google/Blogger, for example, may already have some sort of commenting system under development that is resistant to comment spam. Furthermore, if TypeKey is wholly proprietary (and given the sound, business-oriented development decisions that have come out of Six Apart lately, I can’t think of why it would be open) Bloogle may actually have a reason to design against TypeKey.

You see, TypeKey has the potential to dramatically increase the market value of the company Six Apart. That value increase would rest upon two facts, inherent in any system such as TypeKey.

One: as in TypePad, the user-base for the application necessarily provides valuable personally identifiable information to Six Apart. That information, plus the direct relationship to the user it represents, is marketing gold, and translates directly into a higher valuation for the company.

Two: I believe that the long-term solution to the knot of regulatory and business problems surrounding ‘legitimate’ spam – commercial and marketing emails that you actually have given permission to receive – is to centralize the consumer information, and for the advertising entities to provide incentives to the user to create ever-more elaborate profiles. The user could then, in theory, set, edit, and change levels of permission to receive the spam in exchange for incentives – free magazine subscriptions, downloadable sotware (sic!), DVDs, that sort of thing. The system should also provide auditability of marketing campaigns directed at the user – a record of the user’s legitimate spam.

Managed correctly, the system would be deeply attractive to users. By this, I mean managed for the benefit of the user base rather than for the advertisers, something which will be no mean feat. A primary requirement will be keeping the UI free of advertising clutter; communicating that idea to the geniuses who came up with the flashing, blinking ad banner and the audio-enabled java display ad will cost some sad sack their sanity. Interestingly, both Glogger and Six Apart have clearly demonstrated that user focus is a core component of their business practice and software development discipline.

Because weblog commenters are likely to be a highly desirable slice of the online audience – ‘influencers’ in marketing parlance – TypeKey represents a nearly-ideal deployment environment for such a system.

I have no idea, of course, if that’s what’s being considered. But the pieces are in place. I think this development and the simple possibility that it could lead to places beyond the proximate driver of weblog commenting and comments spam is very intriguing.

So why do I say that Bloggle might wish to design against TypeKey? Well, since user-base numbers are a crucial metric in determining the relative success of an application, and because this extends Six Apart’s potential registered-user base beyond both TypePad and MT’s user base into a population that both includes and exceeds the total set of blog-using people in the world, Googer will be under pressure to respond. The typical American software company business response would be to circle the wagons and make life hard for the competitor. By now, though, I think we all know that Google is not a typical American software company.

The real question is, will they become one after the IPO?

On October 22, 2001, Mr. Lope, in his longer-entries section, posted an entry concerning his purchase of a digital camera. It was a day which started with no hint of the ghastly events to come.

“As I wandered through the path shooting photos at various light levels and distances, I noticed that three squirrels had apparently become fixated with the camera, so I stopped to see how tight of a shot I could get. As I leaned over, talking to one squirrel to coax it nearer, it leapt onto my face (complete with requisite teeth-gnashing and claw-swiping) and latched onto my glasses, pulling them from my face and attempting to run away with them. After spouting several choice expletives and retrieving my specs, I decided that I’d had my fill of nature.”

Many moons later, Mr. Lope posted a photo of the ‘accursed rodent’ moments before the wild attack began.

Space 1999 Command Center. [via the Cartoonist].

Ah, that’s the stuff.

I forgot to mention – when we were in Snoqualmie last weekend, we stepped into a funky little antique joint by the trains – over the counter hung a wide selection of variously battered SF toys, including an awesome, nearly three-foot long Eagle toy that I recall as so impressive when I was little kid. I never owned one, by a playmate did, and the hugeness of the piece amazed me.

loaf is an email filtering verification system from Maciej and a partner, in early days yet. For the record, I love the ‘cantbedone.org’ URL.

I nearly did not blog this until I realized the underlying concept bothered me, and that I could explain why, in non-technical terms. It also fits broadly into my theme for the day: identity is the face we choose to show others, and privacy is the area of concerns that arise when that identity is challenged for one reason or another. Frustratingly, I’m in a hurry, and so I’m going to have to cover this very broadly and I hope I don’t misrepresent anything or mis-state a fact. If I do, I’ll clean it up as soon as I am aware of it.

The way that Loaf is described as working: an encrypted (or disguised, or hashed, at any rate it’s not human readable) copy of your whole email address book is appended to each one of your outbound email messages. When it’s recieved and parsed by another Loaf-using email system, the sender (you) is rated based, essentially, on your degree of familiarity to the recipient (or really, of course, to Loaf). The more familiar you are, the likelier it is that your message will get through.

It’s a pretty neat idea, and I can’t think of any reason, functionally, why this would be problematic.

However, I think there is a very good reason to mistrust the concept. It’s based on both legal approaches to privacy and ethical concerns underlying them. Forgive me a moment of digression.

Generally speaking, in the US, legal guidelines for organizations that gather and manage personally identifiable information (PII) are required to follow a specific set of practices with regard to how that information is gathered, stored, and made accessible for correction or deletion to the initial source of that data, generally the consumer. An example of that is COPPA, which is a law that effectively requires online data gatherers to either collect no PII from children under 13 or to ensure that parental permission has been granted for that data to be gathered.

It’s my opinion that the PII is the property of the consumer and that there is an ethical obligation to the consumer to permit some level of error-correction feedback mechanism. Additionally, there is an obligation on the part of the data maintainer to follow a ‘best-practices’ level of security with regards to the data, and practices which allow the data to move to a different organization with different privacy practices, while legal, are frowned upon. Of course, such data transfers happen all the time, notably in corporate acquisitions.

In practice, the response of most commercial organizations has been based on a desire to minimize the ancillary data-management costs of PII while making every effort to allow that data to be utilized within the business. It’s effectively a business asset, and as such is percieved as adding value to the organization. Thus your level of access to the data may be limited to writing a letter to the company to request that your record be deleted.

This is unsatisfactory for any number of reasons; adding to the problems with the current approach are the rumblings we hear about the possibility that data collections and methodologies may become available for proprietary protection under U.S. intellectual property law. This may mean, for example, that if in the context of a discussion of privacy management methodology I cited a sample record – or the structure of a specific PII database – I might be in violation of a proprietary concept or data object. But I’ll leave that bone for the EFF to worry at the moment, as vexing as it is.

Returning to Loaf: the concept relies on individual email users exposing their email address books to anyone they send email to. That information may or may not be unpackable to reconstitute the specific PII it contains in a way which is maliciously or unethically useful. From the lack of absolute language on the descriptive page I link to above, I’d be very surprised if it was impossible to do so.

Moreover, by deliberately placing the PII into a sharing-oriented environment, the strategy violates the legal and ethical guidelines I just sketched (however fuzzy my sketch might be), primarily by sharing a specifc element of that PII (your correspondent’s email address).

Therefore, it will be very difficult to deploy any solution based on this approach into commercial organizations that have been working to ensure compliance with the guidelines and regulations.

I am by no means an expert either in the sort of programming that Maciej (a good guy, by all accounts, and a hell of an online writer to boot) does, or, honestly, in online privacy. I do think that I have raised some valid points for discussion. I hope that Maciej or his partner can take the time to address them.

Signal + Noise: Save Those Chicken Bones points us to a book which includes instructions on how to build an Apatosaurus from your KFC ossuary. [via Monkeyfilter.]