Dave's Whiteboard

Well, technically, it’s not a blog. And technically, the author is Eric Blair, though George Orwell is the best known of his pen names.

The Orwell Prize (“Britain’s pre-eminient prize for political writing,” if they do say so themselves) is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog.

They began a few weeks ago and will post his entries in real time, 70 years to the day after each was written. He began the diaries on August 9th, 1938 and kept them till October, 1942. So we’ve got a just-started blog that’s guaranteed to last for the next four years. Get your feeder ready.

A splendid joining of technology (blog software) with one of the most observant writers of the twentieth century. As a partner for The Elements of Style, it’s hard to argue with Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (1946) — and I’m not talking just about politics.

More than one blogger (including me) could take on board advice like this:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

A while back, I read the four-volume George Orwell: Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell (George’s widow). Different content from his diaries, but just as widely ranging, from book criticism to short notes to friends to a letter suggesting four possible pen names to use on Animal Farm. (He seems to have left the choice up to his agent and his publisher. )

This blog includes a tool to display a quote at random from a database I’ve created. When I checked the blog after posting PC, XT, and me, this was the quotation I saw alongside:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter.

It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.

That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

– Stewart Brand

“Information wants to be free” is a meme of long standing, as Roger Clarke points out. The expensive part doesn’t appear as often.

How you define “expensive” makes a difference — is it simply price? That kind of value can emerge in a marketplace (in which case I’m not sure I’d bid all that high for the right to broadcast the next Olympics). There’s also expense related to the transformation that information can bring.

While in general we tend to think that free — as in, openly accessed — information is a good thing, I for one get uneasy about the access other people might have to information I’d rather keep private. (For a grocery-store discount card, without which the “sale” price doesn’t exist, I signed up as Eric Blair.)

It’s not really the information that does the wanting, of course. Like two-by-fours or bags of concrete mix, information is an artifact, an artifice, an arrangement performed by human beings. So of course some want it to be highly expensive, so as to profit from it; others want it to be free, so others can profit from it.

Wikipedia’s main page today among the “today in history” events the introduction of the IBM personal computer on August 12, 1981. It wasn’t the first, and it probably wasn’t the best, but its open architecture and rapid adoption by business changed the way people thought about harnessing technology.

I specially like that this photo, from a PC World article, shows the ubiquitous manuals in their tidy slipcases.

I never used the original PC (which, as you can see from the picture, didn’t come with a hard disk — only two floppy drives). In late 1983, though, as I started a new job, I received a then-new IBM PC XT.

This technological powerhouse had:

• A monochrome screen incapable of displaying graphics (other than the ASCII character set).
• 256 kilobytes of memory (which my boss and I upgraded to 640 thanks to the AST Six Pack.
• A 10 megabyte hard drive (upgraded after a few years to a whopping 30 megabytes).
• An external 1200 baud Hayes modem.
• One of the ubiquous Okidate dot-matrix printers.

All that for something like $3,500, which would be close to $8,000 (using the Consumer Price Index to calculate the effect of inflation).  You’d be hard-pressed to spend eight grand on a computer today; for that kind of money the Three Bears could each get a MacBook Pro — and if they didn’t go for top of the line, the could probably afford a MacBook Air for Goldilocks.

At the risk of sounding like my great-uncle Rory, talking about hauling wood for railroad ties at a salary of 25 cents per day, it’s astonishing to consider the scale of changes since then.

I’m writing this post on a laptop I bought new for around $1,200. It’s got 2 gigabytes of memory, or 8,000 times the memory of the XT. (Heck, the cache in my processor has more capacity than the XT did, and I’m ignoring the power of the processor.) And the 120 gigabyte hard drive is 12,000 times larger.

Granted, today’s applications need a lot more memory and a lot more storage. But today’s applications offer a lot more potential than Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar did, back then at the dawn of time.

My current project involves working with statutes and with case law. One of my project partners has built a learning assignment around a court case. Eric Turkewitz has the details (as do many others, including the Boston Globe), but this is the quick summary:

Dr. Robert Lindeman was defending against a malpractice suit in 2007. While Lindeman was on the stand, the plaintiff’s attorney asked if he had a medical blog. He said he did. She asked if he was Flea (posting on the now-vanished drfleablog). He said yes.

The case was settled the following day.

Flea, it turns out, had been blogging before the trial began. He discussed meeting with “an expert on juries” for advice on how to behave on the stand. He also blogged during the trial, commenting on the judge, the sleepy jurors and the appearance of the plaintiff’s attorney.

Ironically, in a PDF that claims to have been made of Flea’s site before it was taken down, Flea reports his lawyer suggesting that the opposing side “may pull articles from Flea’s ‘legitimate’ web site to use against him.”

This apparently did not cause Lindeman to tell his attorney, “You know, I have a blog, too.”

I don’t know anything about the merits of the court case. I do know that a client needs to help his attorney anticipate potential difficulties. And that blogging, while free, can have costs.

Stethoscope photo by happysnappr / Adrian Clark.
Megaphone photo by LarimdaME / Gene Han.

P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula wonders, “Where is science blogging going?” His post is a musing about how blogs fit into the overall world of science — one in theory more rigorous than the training / learning / performance arenas I tend to frequent.

He notes that there isn’t much accountability in science blogging.

This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn’t the something that a planner would design, and they often won’t easily do something else that you think they ought to do.

He also suggests that it’s hard to design what’s going to be the next stage. Design, he says, is “a terrible paradigm for adding unexpected newness and potential (which any evolutionary biologist would tell you).”

A lot of interesting points of view in the comments on his post, as well, like this one from Blake Stacey:

I think it’s important to remember that the nature of the blogosphere is not carved in marble. A few years ago, it didn’t exist. It just is the way it ended up being. When we want something different, it’ll change. Right now, doing anything other than what we normally do might be like hammering nails with a screwdriver, but when every other tool in your toolbox is broken and getting rustier by the day, you start to wonder how you could modify that screwdriver.

It was this lengthy (and rambly) post on “What Science Blogs Can’t Do” by Stacey at Science after Sunclipse that triggered Myers’ post.