it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities

"Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary — first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster."

So . . . as I was saying, I took this VIA Signature Strengths test
and my top five signature strengths are:

(1). Gratitude from the Spirituality/Transcendence cluster
(2). Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, also from the Spirituality / Transcendence cluster
(3). Honesty, authenticity, and genuineness, from the Courage cluster
(4). Love of learning, from the Wisdom / Knowledge cluster
(5). Capacity to love and be loved, from the Love cluster.

Why do I want to cackle like an old, insane crone???? Heh-heh-heh . . .

eudaemonia

I happened on this site and once there, upon this article.

I haven't found a dictionary that tells me how to pronounce this Greek word, eudaemonia, but here's the meaning:

eudaemonia, n: a contented state of being happy and healthy and prosperous

From that same article I have copied this:

". . . the Greek term eudaemonia, which is translated as "happiness," does not mean what we normally associate with the English word. In Aristotle's terms, eudaemonia is "living well and faring well." This is quite different from the feeling of well-being that we think of as constituting happiness.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more — recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life. . .

. . . So just to review so far, there is the pleasant life — having as many of the pleasures as you can and the skills to amplify them — and the good life — knowing what your signature strengths are and recrafting everything you do to use them a much as possible. But there's a third form of life, and if you're a bridge player like me, or a stamp collector, you can have eudaemonia; that is, you can be in flow. But everyone finds that as they grow older and look in the mirror they worry that they're fidgeting until they die. That's because there's a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that's the pursuit of meaning. I'm not going to be sophomoric enough to try to tell Edge viewers the theory of meaning, but there is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The self is not a very good site for meaning, and the larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life. . .

. . . Aristotle said the two noblest professions are teaching and politics, and I believe that as well. Raising children, and projecting a positive human future through your children, is a meaningful form of life. Saving the whales is a meaningful form of life. Fighting in Iraq is a meaningful form of life. Being an Arab terrorist is a meaningful form of life.

Notice, this isn't a distinction between good and evil. That's not part of this. This isn't a theory of everything. This is a theory of meaning, and the theory says, joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning. One of the things people don't like about my theory is that suicide bombers and the firemen who saved lives and lost their lives both had meaningful lives. I would condemn one as evil and the other as good, but not on the grounds of meaning."

From there, I went to Authentic Happiness, a website dedicated to Martin Seligmann's theories of positive psychology.

I took one of the site's tests called the VIA Signature Strengths (I'm a sucker for tests that appear to have any intellectual or academic authenticity to them!). I scored . . . on second thought, next post . . .

from dear old Garrison

". . . Republicans might be heathens and out to destroy all that we hold dear, but that doesn't mean we need to take them seriously. Or be bitter or vituperative just because they are swine. I think one can still have friends who are Republicans . . ."
-- Garrison Keillor

The other half of the Elite Eight

No. 2 seed Oklahoma State beat No. 1 seed St. Joseph yesterday evening, 64-62, I believe. UConn (University of Connecticut) beat Alabama by a score of 87-71. That was actually a rather boring game.

Today, Duke and Xavier duke it out. I'm definitely rooting for Xavier. Duke has had more than their share of glory over the years. Spread the wealth around, guys!

And then the last two teams of the eight, Kansas and Georgia Tech, will match up later today. I'm going to root for Georgia Tech. My perception (accurate or not) is that G.T. may be the underdog on that one.

I DO enjoy college basketball and I LOVE March Madness!!!

Sunday morning post

Sunday mornings seem to be an opportune time for me to post. Quiet, available time and access to the computer, I guess.

Steph and I went over to Matt and Sarah's new house last night. They have been in a whirlwind of cleaning, painting, refurbishing, carpeting and finally moving in this past week. This is the energy that young(er) people bring to such a project: Matt and Sarah both worked all day Tuesday (?), and moved all their furniture and stuff from about 7 p.m. until about 3 in the morning. They slept for a couple of hours and then got up and went to work. Arrrgh! Makes me feel exhausted just thinking about it!

Their house is a simple ranch, probably about 800 sq. ft . You walk directly into the living room, with a eat-in kitchen behind that. From the living room, there is also a hallway leading to three bedrooms and a bath. From the kitchen there is a slider with steps leading down into an addition probably about 15' x 15'. This has a slate-looking ceramic tile floor, vaulted ceiling, windows around the entire perimeter and a nice big hot tub that came with the house. There is another slider from there that leads out to the back yard.

So, yesterday was a surprise birthday party for Matt as well as a quasi housewarming party. Matt turned 24.

Steph and I met Sarah's parents, Hope and Sean. They are from the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area. Sarah has a much younger brother, Cory, who is about eight, I think. Nice people and appear to be very supportive of Sarah and Matthew.

We drank beer, ate grilled burgers and hot dogs, and a bunch of us watched the St. Joe / Oklahoma State thriller that ended with Okey State winning. Yeah! Helps my brackets, which are covered with the red of corrected mis-pickings (if there is such a word?).

Taxes or beads, taxes or beads . . .??

This has been a long and arduous week for me.

In my mind, I had today penned in (not penciled!) for doing my tax returns. April 15th looms, only two-and-a-half weeks away.

But, last night, while watching a couple of the Sweet Sixteen games (Xavier beat Texas, yeahhhhh!), I pulled out my bead tins and made a nifty, eyeglass chain for my tortoiseshell reading glasses. It's full of warm gold, bronze, amber and dark brown beads, with some green, malachite-like funky beads thrown in for good measure. I am quite pleased with the results, which as I write, hang about my neck this morning, holding my reading glasses close at hand.

I had so much fun last night, that I'm thinking about making another eyeglass chain . . . just for the hell of it.

Hence, my dilemma: taxes or beads, taxes or beads??

kudos to Richard Clarke

I only caught snippets and bits of the government officials' testimony to the 9/11 Commission, but I did manage to hear more of Richard Clarke's testimony.

The Bush administration's strong reactions to Clarke's allegations lead me to believe there is more truth than falseness in what he said. You know the old saying, "Where there is smoke, there is fire."

And, while Clarke was criticized by many for his apology, I thought it was sincere, appropriate and long-overdue, to the families of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. My hat's off to you, Mr. Clarke, for your courage and empathy.

a gray spring morning

We crossed over into spring last weekend (Saturday, I do believe) and it barely registered on my "seasons" radar. I was in Milwaukee, along with my newly-transplanted Virginian sister, Ruth, visiting Yosh in his cool urban apartment and Lina from the Mad City.

The "official" reason we got together was to watch the opening rounds of the 2004 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament . . . but, who needs a reason to spend time with people you love and who make you feel good like these people do?

I had a relaxing, laugh-filled, three days there. We bought rich, oily coffee from Alterra (for me to bring home to my honey), bottles and bottles of red wine from Tom at Downers Wines and Spirits, and produce and cheese from Sendiks', across the road. We watched practically countless games of b-ball, read poetry to one another between the games, and I soaked my big toe a lot, which is ingrown (ewww!) and hurting. Is talking about an ingrown toenail too much disclosure? Oversharing??

We talked about everything under the sun and beyond. Ruth and I commiserated about our respective mates and the challenges of watching them struggle with jobs, careers and education. Neither of us have chosen those particular paths and seek to support our mates while getting our own needs met.

We talked quite a bit about family relationships and what it means to be a family. We even talked/speculated about gathering in Philly for the Fourth of July weekend as an extended family unit. We'll see how that all plays out.

As a former draughts-woman

As a medieval draughtswoman (or her timeline contemporary), who then became a male-run company draftsman, who then became a non-gendered drafter, who then became an AutoCAD-novitiate CAD operator, who then became an experienced CAD specialist, who then ...

Check out this unique little clock, which I find I can only watch for a little while. It exhausts my eyes and as a former "draftingperson," I want to erase those numbers thoroughtly and completely!

A post-car world

What if we got rid of cars and rode the subway instead?

Supposedly, these schematics are in scale to one another.

Cool, huh?

"I didn't get old on purpose."

Recently, the "60 Minutes" curmudgeon, Andy Rooney, called "The Passion of the Christ" filmmaker Mel Gibson a "wacko."

He got 30,000 pieces of mail and email in response. It's the biggest viewer response ever to a segment on the CBS newsmagazine, which has been on the air since 1968, a spokesman said.

He read some of the mail on the air, including one letter that called him an "asinine, bottom-dwelling, numb-skulled, low-life, slimy, sickening, gutless, spineless, ignorant, pot-licking, cowardly pathetic little weasel."

Rooney, 85, noted that many of his critics took shots at his age. Even Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly said he was too old.

"That wasn't nice, Bill," he said. "I didn't get old on purpose. It just happened. If you're lucky, it could happen to you."

On a personal note, I love Andy Rooney's eyebrows (wild and wooly!) and I love that retort about his age.

In the middle of the Big Ten Tournament

Well, Michigan State handily beat Northwestern last night, and now it will be Wisconsin's turn to pick up their marbles and go home. MSU plays Wisconsin this afternoon at 4:05 in the Big Ten Tourney semifinals, at Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

Go State! Beat the Badgers!

Reading all the different news stories this morning, I ran across a Big Ten blog, that on first examination, looks kind of interesting.

I also read an article in the Detroit News about Tom Izzo. I thought Bob Wojnowski did a good job of capturing Izzo's passion for college basketball. And while Coach Izzo will never read this, I am proud of the way he presents himself, the players and the basketball program at Michigan State. For me, he represents the very best of what college basketball is all about.

Remember when?

Yesterday, Yosh and Lina and I were having a fun, "remember-when?" conversation. The topic turned to them recalling the song, "Ghostbuster" from the movie of the same name. Caroline wrote:

"Yep, remember we had the little single of it? It was one of those smaller records."

And just hearing her describe it like that, amused, I wrote back:

"(laughing) . . . Uh, that would be a '45.' As in 45 rpm, as opposed to 33-1/3 rpm or the real old ones, 78 rpm.

We're talking about the technological Dark Ages here."

Which got me thinking . . . yes, those years of albums and 45s, all prior to CDs, mp3s and iPods, does seem like the Dark Ages. And we all thought we were so cool, so hip, so modern!

I wrote later in our volley of emails that I remember buying a 45 for 79 cents. I recall feeling so excited! I bought it for the side A song. I rarely cared about what was on side B. That was a freebie.

Heck, I remember helping my grandmother, Nana, clean her house and moving this pile of ancient, heavy records that she called 78s. Each was ensconsced in its own thick, manila-brown wrapper. And the 78s themselves were thick, too. Our 33-1/3 rpms were so much more sleek and lightweight and modern!

Transitioning from hearing Patsy Cline on the radio as our family traveled two-lane highways to the old homestead in Texas, to watching iPOD commercials advertising hundreds of songs on something you carry easily in one hand -- that's a lot of transition. It helps me realize that I have been around for quite a while! Which means that I am probably older on the outside than I feel on the inside!

I knew something didn't sound quite right . . .

In my previous post, I wrote,

"...four regional brackets (North, South, East, West)..."

I thought that sounded too much like the regional witches in the Wizard of Oz!

The North is actually the Midwest.

Finally I can set up MMWS

For the past four years, in mid-March, our extended family has a 'tournament' surrounding the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament. Somebody (me?) dubbed it "March Madness Wendish Spartans," a real mouthful, especially when you've had a beer or three.

Yahoo administers the site. We usually have about nine or ten people participate in it. Everybody picks kind of silly names or very Spartan names, just to contribute to the lightly competitive, fun atmosphere surrounding the tournament.

Some of my favorite names over the years have been, "Snazzy Pants," "shots_and_giggles," "The Old Man," and, of course, "His Main Squeeze." I rue the fact that I never seem to come up with a truly provocative or wildly zany name. For example, my name this year is "Spartan_Mamacita." Ho-hummmm.

Of course, it's not too late to change it. Maybe I'll have a creative dream tonight, wherein my subconscious will really cough one up. One can always hope.

This Yahoo site also has the ability for group members to write messages to the group as a whole. Some messages are conversational, some informational, some downright emphatic! I would guess that Lina and I, being the chatty ENFPs that we are, probably post the most messages. (It will be interesting to maintain our MMWS postings, as well as a blog, as well as our personal emails! Yikes, who's got time to work with all that writing and corresponding to do?)

The Big Ten tournament gets underway this Thursday, I believe. The championship game will be Sunday afternoon. And the NCAA Selection Committee will announce their picks, bubbles and all, Sunday night at 6 p.m.

At that point, Yahoo (or whatever computer fairy does this work?) will post all 64 teams in their appropriate line-up in the four regional brackets (North, South, East, West) and then each of a zillion, million participants gets to make their individual predictions on who will win, who will lose, who will advance and who's OUT!

Being a true, loyal and bleedin' green Spartan, I really want our guys, Izzo's guys to make a faithful showing at the tournament. We can only hope . . . and we will wait to see.

Another quotation . . . this time from Garrison Keillor

SINGING WITH THE LUTHERANS by Garrison Kiellor

I have made fun of Lutherans for years--who wouldn't if you lived in Minnesota? But I have also sung with Lutherans and that is one of the main joys of life, along with hot baths and fresh sweet corn.

We make fun of Lutherans for their blandness, their excessive calm, their fear of giving offense, their constant guilt that burns like a pilot light, their lack of speed and also for their secret fondness for macaroni and cheese. But nobody sings like them.

If you ask an audience in New York City, a relatively "Lutheran-less" place, to sing along on the chorus of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" they will look daggers at you as if you had asked them to strip to their underwear. But if you do this among Lutherans, they'll smile and row that boat ashore and up on the beach! And down the road! Lutherans are bred from childhood to sing in four-part harmony.

It's a talent that comes from sitting on the lap of someone singing alto or tenor or bass and hearing the harmonic intervals by putting your little head against that person's rib cage. It's natural for Lutherans to sing in harmony. We're too modest to be soloists, too worldly to sing in unison. When you're singing in the key of C and you slice into the A7th and D7th chords, all two hundred of you, it's an emotionally fulfilling moment.

I once sang the bass line of "Children of the Heavenly Father" in a room with about three thousand Lutherans in it, and when we finished we all had tears in our eyes, partly from the promise that God will not forsake us, partly from the proximity of all those lovely voices. By our joining in harmony, we somehow promise that we will not forsake each other. I do believe this, people, these Lutherans, who love to sing in four-part harmony, are the sort of people you could call up when you're in deep distress. If you're dying, they'll comfort you. If you're lonely, they'll talk to you. And, if you're hungry, they'll give you tuna salad!

(If you laughed while reading this you must be a Lutheran.)

Whew! Another post for today!

I'm going to add a link for the Long Now Foundation today.

Several years ago, I heard (or read?) a review of the book, The Clock of the Long Now. The author, Stewart Brand, talks about the qualities of time, how people perceive it and how our perceptions about it affect how we behave in responsible or irresponsible ways.

One concept that he talked about in the book, that I haven't forgotten, is the "Singularity." My recollection is that many elements in our world (including us) will go faster and faster until, at the point of the Singularity, there will be some sort of informational meltdown. I may not be recalling his ideas accurately, but that is what has stuck with me. (Count on fearful things to be the things we remember!)
_______________

Part III: In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.

Search For Tomorrow
We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page D01


( . . . continued from Part II . . . )


Semantic Discussions

To achieve common sense, the Web needs to go through the infantile process of self-discovery. The Web doesn't really understand itself. There's lots of information on the Web, but not much "information about information," also known as "metadata."

If you're a robotic search engine, you look for words in the text of a page, but ideally the page would have all manner of encoded labels that describe who wrote the material, and why, and when, and for what purpose, and in what context.

Hendler explains the problem this way: If you type into Google the words "how many cows in Texas," Google will rummage through sites with the words "cow" and "many" and "Texas," and so forth, but you may have trouble finding out how many cows there are in Texas. The typical Web page involving cows and Texas doesn't have anything to do with the larger concept of bovine demographics. (The first Google result that comes up is an article titled "Mineral Supplementation of Beef Cows in Texas" by the unbelievably named Dennis Herd.)

Hendler, along with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is working on the Semantic Web , a project to implant the background tags, the metadata, on Web sites. The dream is to make it easier not only for humans, but also machines, to search the Web. Moreover, searches will go beyond text and look at music, films, and anything else that's digitized. "We're trying to make the Web a little smarter," Hendler says.

But Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, points out that the current keyword-driven searching system, clumsy though it may be and so heavily reliant on serendipity, still works well for most situations.

"Part of the problem is that keywords are so good," he says. "Most of the time the words do what you want them to do."

Billions of dollars are at stake in this race to invent the next mousetrap, and Google faces serious challenges. Yahoo! has long had a partnership with Google, using it to power many of its searches, but Yahoo! has since acquired two other search engine companies, and plans to drop Google in favor of its own Web crawlers. Microsoft, meanwhile, is sure to make search a fundamental element of the next version of its operating system , due in 2006 and code-named Longhorn.

Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?

"We spend most of our time worrying about ourselves and not our competition," says Google's Norvig.

Technology creates a horizon beyond which human destiny is unknowable, because we can't anticipate all the crazy stuff that brilliant people will invent. The author Michael Crichton has pointed out that a person in the year 1900 might have contemplated all the human beings who would be on the planet in the year 2000, and wondered how it would be possible to obtain enough horses for everyone.

And where would they put all the horse droppings?

Specific predictions are usually wrong. But a general trend has emerged over the course of centuries: Information escapes confinement. Information has been able to break free from monasteries, libraries, school-board-sanctioned textbooks, and corporate publishers. In the Middle Ages, books were kept chained to desks. Information is now completely unchained.

It has a life of its own -- and someday perhaps that won't be just a metaphor.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Part II: In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.

This is a continuation of an article I found in the Washington Post on Google, information and what the future may hold.
I thought it was an interesting enough article that I wanted to post it in its entirety in my blog.


Search For Tomorrow
We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page D01

( . . . continued from Part I . . . )

Advanced Search

In the early days of search engines, finding information was like fishing in a canal: You might hook something good, but you were just as likely to reel in an old tin can or a rubber boot. Now you often find exactly what you want.

One reason Google works so well today is that there's so much for its robotic crawlers to explore. Google initially searched about 20 million Web pages; the company's home page now boasts that it searches 3,307,998,701 pages.

"In 1996, if you tried to Google someone, if Google existed, it wouldn't have been a very satisfying experience," says Seth Godin, author of a number of best-selling e-books. "We hit a critical mass of really valuable stuff that was online, I think, about 2000."

The expansion of the information universe makes the navigational tool all the more valuable. And yet the search function at first seemed to be an unglamorous computer application. The pioneering search engine companies, including Yahoo!, Excite, AltaVista and Lycos, wanted to transform themselves into something snazzier, a "portal," the full gee-whiz Internet Century home page that would offer the user a link to everything between here and Neptune, plus plane tickets.

But the history of computer technology is full of companies that failed to see the potential glory right in front of them. In the early 1980s, IBM thought that the "operating system" within the computer wasn't nearly as important as the hardware, the box itself. And then Microsoft, which benefited from that oversight, became so focused on software programs that it was slow to capitalize on the Internet revolution, leaving Netscape to create the first commercial Web browser. And then almost everyone underestimated Search.

Not Google. When the company debuted in September 1998, it looked like a throwback. This wasn't a portal. The home page showed mostly white space, anchored by a little rectangle, a box, perfectly blank. Fill in blank and get results. This was plain ol' boring Search, without news headlines, plane tickets, e-mail or any other bells and whistles.

But what results! Google has farms of computers working in parallel. You can put in a couple of words and -- gzzzzt! -- get 600,000-plus results within some preposterously brief amount of time. (Google brags about it: "Search took 0.17 seconds." Showoffs!)

Google, the creation of Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is like many other search engines in its basic operation. It has powerful software programs that automatically "crawl" the Web, clicking on every possible link, scouting the terrain. What has made Google special is that, in assessing the quality of sites, it takes note of how many other pages link to any given page. This is an old idea from academia, called citation analysis. If many Web sites link to a particular page, the page rises in Google's vaunted "page rank" and is more likely to be on the first page of the search results.

"You're getting the advantage of the group mind," says Paul Saffo, a research director at the Institute for the Future.

This is a key concept: As the Web has grown, it has developed a kind of embedded wisdom. Obviously the Web isn't a conscious entity, but neither is it a completely random pile of stuff. The way one part links to another reflects the preferences of Web users -- and Google tapped into that. Google, in detecting patterns on the Web, harvested meaning from all that madness.

This points the way to one of the next big leaps for search engines: finding meaning in the way a single person searches the Web. In other words, the search engines will study the user's queries and Web habits and, over time, personalize all future searches. Right now, Google and the other search engines don't really know their users.

For example, Saffo isn't really interested in the stuff that most people look for when they do a Web search. He's one of the premier futurists of Silicon Valley and fondly recalls the days, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the pre-Web era, when the Internet was the reserve of the technological elite who posted their brilliant thoughts on electronic bulletin boards. Now, everyone from about third grade up has an e-mail address and loiters around the Web as though it's the corner 7-Eleven. The results of a Web search reflect the tastes of a broad swath of ordinary Americans who in some cases are still wearing short pants.

"The more people get on the Web, the more the Web becomes the vaster wasteland that is the successor to the vast wasteland of television. I don't care what the majority of people are looking at, because the majority of people are really boring," Saffo says.

He needs a better search engine. He needs one that knows that he's a big-brain tech guru and not an eighth-grader with a paper due.

"The field is called user modeling," says Dan Gruhl of IBM. "It's all about computers watching interactions with people to try to understand their interests and something about them."

Imagine a version of Google that's got a bit of TiVo in it: It doesn't require you to pose a query. It already knows! It's one step ahead of you. It has learned your habits and thought processes and interests. It's your secretary, your colleague, your counselor, your own graduate student doing research for which you'll get all the credit.

To put it in computer terminology, it is your intelligent agent.


Calling Agent 001101

No one knows how the intelligent agents of the future might really work, and once you venture more than a few months out you're already into some seriously fuzzy territory. But you might imagine that this intelligent agent could gradually take on so many characteristics of your mind that it becomes something of a digital doppelganger, your shadow self.

To borrow and slightly distort something from "Star Trek," it's like your personal digital Borg, having absorbed your thoughts and melded them with an existing software program.

Perhaps this digital self could become a commodity, something marketable. Imagine that you have to write a paper for a class about the future of search engines. You don't want to use your own lame, broken-down, distracted, gummed-up-with-stupid-stuff virtual secretary to do your research. You want to download Bill Gates's intelligent agent, or Paul Saffo's, or Sergey Brin's, to help you ask smarter questions and find the best answers.

There are primitive intelligent agents already. Amazon.com makes book recommendations based on your previous purchases and the judgments of others who have liked the same books you've liked. But this form of collaborative filtering is still fairly crude.

Microsoft senior researcher Eric Horvitz describes a variety of new and future technologies in which software is more active, more of an entity, no longer just some inert codes waiting for the user to issue a command. For example, there's a program he already uses called IQ, for "implicit query."

"As you're working, we continue to formulate queries in the background, that the user doesn't even know about. They're happening very quietly," Horvitz says.

But Horvitz is keenly aware that people don't want a program that's too pushy, that's constantly interrupting. Humans have limited powers of attention. Software, says Horvitz, "needs to be endowed with the kind of common courtesies we'd expect from a well-mannered colleague."

And lurking over the future of such programs is the dilemma of privacy. There's valuable information in the way people use the Web, but they may not want others, or even a machine, to pay close attention to every place they venture. How do you create an intelligent agent that knows when to look away? How do you avoid what Horvitz calls the "monster possibilities"?

What everyone wants is a reasonable, discreet intelligent agent, like an English butler. It should be one that can get things accomplished, to take the extra steps even without being prompted.

"I don't think anyone wants a search engine," says Seth Godin. "I think people want a find engine."

Find, and do. Solve problems. Make it so.

"I often use the analogy of Web agents being like travel agents," says James Hendler, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland. "When I go to my travel agent and say where I want to go, they don't usually just say, 'Yes, you can get there.' They give me some options of different ways to get there. They think about some things I might have forgotten. Do I need a car, do I need a hotel reservation? And then they go do it for me."

Computers as a general rule do only what they're told to do. They don't have artificial intelligence in the classic sense. They have no common sense. IBM's Gruhl, the chief architect of a new product called WebFountain, points out that no computer has ever learned what any 2-year-old human knows.

A computer, he says, can become easily confused by the sentence "Tommy hit a boy with a broken leg." The computer doesn't understand that a broken leg is not going to be an instrument used in an attack. "Common sense, how the world works, even something like irony, are very difficult for computers to understand," says Gruhl.

(continued)
© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Part I: In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.

Maybe it's not cool to post long articles in one's blog . . . but I'm going to do it.

I have looked at others' blogs with a dead link to some thing that really sounded interesting . . . until I got that "Page Not Found" message. I don't want to do that.

So . . . here's the article in its entirety.

Perhaps I'll bust it up to make it more readable.


Search For Tomorrow
We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page D01


In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.

We stumbled around in libraries. We lifted from the World Book Encyclopedia. We paged through the nearly microscopic listings in the heavy green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. We latched onto hearsay and rumor and the thinly sourced mutterings of people alleged to be experts. We guessed. We conjectured. And then we gave up, consigning ourselves to ignorance.

Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages. [my note: I love the new term 'pregooglian.' It sounds like a geologic age.]

There have been many fine Internet search engines over the years -- Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves and so on -- but Google is the first to become a utility, a basic piece of societal infrastructure like the power grid, sewer lines and the Internet itself.

People keep finding new ways to use Google. It is now routine for the romantically savvy to Google a prospective date. "Google hackers" use the infiltrative powers of Google to pilfer bank records and Social Security numbers. The vain Google themselves.

It was about three years ago that the transitive verb "to Google" entered the lexicon, but it was only last year that Google passed all rival search engines in the number of queries handled -- now upwards of 200 million a day. So phenomenal is its success that some industry watchers think an initial public offering of Google stock could raise $20 billion and trigger a second dot-com boom.

"You build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door," Stewart Brand, computer guru and president of the Long Now Foundation [my note: check out the Long Now Foundation], says of Google. "A wider path, I think, has never been beaten in the history of the world. It's an astonishing mousetrap story."

In the dot-com world, nothing stays the same for long, and it's not clear that Google will forever maintain its dominance over such ferocious rivals as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But the business story of Google is less interesting than the technological one: If information is power, then Google has helped change the world. Knowledge is measurably easier to obtain. Google works. Google knows.

The world used to be transformed by voyages of discovery, religious movements, epidemic globe-circling diseases, the whims of kings and the depredations of armies. But over the centuries, technology has emerged as the primary change agent, the thing that can shrink a planet, undermine dictators and turn 14-year-olds into publishers.

The question is, who's going to build the next mousetrap? What will it do? The laboratories of Internet companies are furiously trying to come up with the next generation of search engine. Whatever it is and whatever it's called, it will likely make the current Google searches seem as antiquated as cranking car engines by hand.


Mom, What's a Library?

The transition into the Google Era has not occurred without some anguish. The stacks of a university library can be a rather lonely place these days. Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at major universities in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular. For most students, Google is where all research begins (and, for the frat boys, ends).

A generation ago, reference librarians -- flesh-and-blood creatures -- were the most powerful search engines on the planet. But the rise of robotic search engines in the mid-1990s has removed the human mediators between researchers and information. Librarians are not so sure they approve. Much of the material on the World Wide Web is wrong, or crazy, or of questionable provenance, or simply out of date (odd to say this about a new technology, but the Web is full of stale information).

"How do you authenticate what you're looking at? How do you know this isn't some kind of fly-by-night operation that's put up this Web site?" asks librarian Patricia Wand of American University.

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price.

And yet Berkeley professor Peter Lyman points out that traditional sources of information, such as textbooks, are heavily filtered by committees, and are full of "compromised information." He's not so sure that the robotic Web crawlers give results any worse than those from more traditional sources.

"There's been a culture war between librarians and computer scientists," Lyman says.

And the war is over, he adds.

"Google won."

[my note: Wow! No wonder the last time I went into a library (a new one for me, just this last week), it looked indeed like it had lost the battle, if not the war. I felt very depressed seeing that place. ]

(continued)

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Yosh taught me this . . .

My son, nicknamed Yosh, is an enthusiastic chef. He's also quite exacting about chopping, measuring and the use of good knives (Wusthof to be exact). He taught me the following culinary term:

‘Mire poix,’ a French term, means ‘a thousand pieces’. It is a mixture of very finely chopped vegetables, usually onion, leek, carrot and celery, that are sautéed in butter to form a base for many soups and stews.

I created a mirepoix this last weekend, in the process of making a vegetable beef stew.

My son is a good teacher.

Sunday and church

When I was growing up, and even long into adulthood, I was a church-goer. Not just a sit-in-the-pews church-goer, but a very involved member of several Lutheran churches I attended over the years.

For reasons I will skip over for now, I have pretty much stopped going to church. I may attend on Christmas Eve or when my parents are visiting, out of respect for their wishes. But I find that attending church does not fill my spiritual well as it did in the past.

I tend to obsess on the male-focused language (Father, Son, Lord, Prince, King, etc.) and how excluding it is for a woman like myself. I don't like war or warrior language in hymns ("Onward, Christian Soldiers"). I also have a lot of difficulty with descriptions of people as "poor sinners," or "a wretch like me."

When religion needs to denigrate people, it feels like it becomes an immense marketing scheme. That is, let's knock the average Jane or Joe down until they feel "wretched" about themselves, and then, we righteous churches can step in and offer them the product we're selling (and they obviously need): the promise of being "saved" from their sinful selves through Jesus, Bible-worship and the you're-one-of-us-now-club, otherwise known as organized religion.

Sorry, I didn't mean to let so much of my caustic cynicism spill out onto the blog. Ouch!. . . it makes even me take a step back. Let me try again.

Bible readings and most sermons don't speak to me and touch me in the ways they did earlier in my life. What does still have the ability to touch me is the music -- hymns and beautifully written liturgy. Again, that is, if the language isn't too male-oriented and doesn't knock people down.

Let me give an example of language that I do like. It's an Offertory (from the Lutheran 'green' hymnal, the Lutheran Book of Worship) sung as the "gifts" are offered:

"Let the vineyards be fruitful, Lord, and fill to the brim our cup of blessing.
Gather a harvest from the seeds that were sown, that we may be fed with the bread of life.
Gather the hopes and dreams of all; unite them with the prayers we offer.
Grace our table with your presence, and give us a foretaste of the feast to come."

(Speaking of "gifts," though, I will pass on comments about money and church, at least for now.)

Here's another example of non-sexist language. This is taken from the 16th-century chorale, "O Jesulein Sweet, o Jesulein mild:"

O Little One sweet! O Little One mild!
In You, love's beauties are all distilled;
Light in us love's ardent flame,
That we may give You back the same.
O Little One sweet! O Little One mild!

So . . . as I was saying, the music still touches my soul. But, that is about it.

What I do find that also touches me are words, phrases, articles that emphasize how we are all connected. Not how we are different or how one group of us is better than another, but how we are all connected. Where I end and you begin is a matter of physics and faith.

My parents raised me to believe in a loving God, a forgiving God and a God that is connected or "in relation" with each and every one of us. And I think that connection between God and me is a model for my connections with others. My challenge in this life is to love others like I believe God loves me. Love universally, love unconditionally, love timelessly.

(as an expression of my faith . . . ) I will die trying.

A late-night finish . . . along with Boobs

Cisco and I just got back from our usual late-night walk around the neighborhood. It's a beautiful night; cool and crisp with a succulent, full moon. Our familiar route was bright with moon-shine this evening .

I lost Cisco a couple of times. I was there, pep-stepping along. She was gone, heaven knows where? I whistled for her and could hear the tags on her collar clinking in the distance. I had just about given up on her, figuring she had headed home without me, when here she came, racing down the hill, her toenails clicking on the pavement in gallop mode.

We were on the home stretch, only a two blocks from home, when suddenly I heard a storm door hit its frame and then a woman call, "Heee-ere, Boobs. Heee-ere, Boobs!" I thought, "Good grief, what a terrible name for a dog. And so sexist!"

Once more, I heard the woman call, "Here, Boobs! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!"

Cisco loves to chase cats and I could just hear myself yelling at Cisco, "Leave it, Cisco. Leave Boobs alone!"

Thankfully, we finished our walk uneventfully, never running into poor Boobs.

An oh-so-quiet Saturday morning

Quietness, light snowflakes outside and a sleeping beast nearby make for a meditative atmosphere this morning.

I like how this stillness feels. I didn't do anything to create it, but I also haven't done anything to destroy it.

How many other opportunities for stillness have I short-sightedly avoided, not realizing, perhaps that is what I need?

I must confess, I tend to avoid stillness. Goes against the grain, you know? Part of that Germanic (even though I'm more Wendish/Sorbian than German), Lutheran, you-must-be-busy-at-all-times-to-earn-your-salt upbringing. I originally wrote, "you-must-be-busy-at-all-times-to-justify-your-existence;" a harsh thought that horrifies me, yet is probably closer to my internal truth.

I have spent many years slowly pecking away at harsh, internalized messages; here's another one for the heap.

I now return to the stillness, which is far more gentle to my spirit.

Nana's Lamp

Whoo-hooo -- it's Friday!

And to make it even better, I got a phone call this morning from the lamp repair place; Nana's lamp is rewired and ready to go.

Nana was my mother's mother. A real character. She was the kind of person who, just being herself, engendered stories. Many, many stories . . . but that's another posting.

Anyway, Nana had a lamp that always sat in her living room. It's a table lamp with a lovely turned mahogany base (alleged to have come out of Galveston Bay as a piece of "driftwood" -- who knew that chunks of mahogany drifted?) and an old-timey, worn, but-still-lovely silk drum lampshade. It stands about 32 inches tall, a rather stately-looking lamp. It actually has sockets for two light bulbs, which you turn on by little chains. Nana obviously thought the chains were rather anemic, so she attached longer link chains to them. Now, they hang there blowing in the breeze, waiting to be pulled. Oh yes, to top if off, the lamp has a big ol', clear marble (like you play games with) finial!

The lamp evokes Nana and the three different residences in which I knew her. I can look at that lamp and feel Nana when I was a child, a teenager and an adult. She gave us all strict instructions to never part with any of her furniture. "This is a nice lamp; don't ever get rid of it!" she would save.

Well, Nana, I have your lamp, it's newly rewired and ready to light up a room.

It's Thursdishday!

I am lucky enough to have several special people in my life who love to make up words. Words like heathenite and blagging and Wendishday!

Wendishday is a playful derivation of Wednesday and our rather mysterious heritage from medieval Wends. Wendishday, like any other play-crafted word, is slowly moving into greater and greater use amongst the wild and wacky Wends in our circle.

Hardly a Wednesday goes by that Lina and I don't exchange a 'Happy Wendishday" email.

So, being true to my habits, I sent her an email commenting on today's special status and she wrote back:

Mom, it's not Wendishday anymore...it's Thursdishday!

Ah ... yes, but of course; it's Thursdishday!

a new link

People say that I focus on death too much. Just to add fuel to the fire, I added a new category, "Intriguing," and a new link, "Blog of Death."

The following is one obituary that I found there.

Helen Gustafson

A champion of fine teas, Helen Gustafson spent 20 years developing the exquisite tea service for Chez Panisse. The trendy restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., features a selection of organically grown teas that are meticulously prepared using the guidelines she created.

Known as Lady Teas-dale, Gustafson would gasp at the mere mention of tea bags. To her, they were an abomination that prevented tea leaves from releasing their full flavor. She taught the art of the afternoon tea by giving parties that required its participants to wear gloves and hats, and served as a consultant on tea services to several hotels and restaurants.

Gustafson graduated from Syracuse University and earned a master's degree in drama from the University of Minnesota. She first became interested in tea as a child, taking afternoon tea with her mother and grandmother in the family's sunroom. This ritual would later inspire her to write the books, "The Agony of the Leaves: The Ecstasy of My Life With Tea" and "The Green Tea User's Manual."

Gustafson died on Dec. 14 from cancer. She was 74.

Call me morbid or my interest macabre, but I find this blog fascinating.

Wealth

"My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants." - J. Brotherton

It's a crying shame . . .

Well, it's the morning after the Big Game and the world looks dismal and dreary after MSU lost to Wisconsin, 68-64 in overtime.

Reflecting on the game, they had lots of opportunities to put it away, and they didn't. In the second half, Wisconsin didn't score for over four-and-a-half minutes. Why was the game so close? Paul Davis was having an outstanding game until his legs cramped up, with about two-and-a-half minutes to go in the game. I thought the juniors (Alan Anderson, Chris Hill and Kelvin Torbert) were doing an okay job of handling the ball and the game after Paul was out. Chris's missing that last layup and two free throws was absolutely painful to watch.

I feel bad for Chris, Paul Davis and the whole team. They did a commendable job coming back from a tough non-conference start. I just wish they could have beat the Badgers and won the Big Ten championship outright.

Tough finish.

End of the day and it's almost SPARTAN Time!

I would be a totally irresponsible and reprehensible Spartan if I didn't comment on the BIG game tonight: MSU hosts the bucking-bad Badgers at Breslin Center in East Lansing for the Big Ten championship!!!!

Here's a quote from Alan Anderson in the Lansing State Journal, today:

"MSU used to be known as that team," MSU junior guard Alan Anderson said. "That team that everyone wanted to beat and had to beat. Now (Wisconsin's) program has gotten bigger; they've won two straight (titles) and they're that team. So now we've got to beat them to get back on top. That's why this is so perfect.

"But it's easier said than done. We haven't been able to beat them yet."

And here's Izzo's take on the game:

"It is perfect," Izzo said of tonight's clash. "We're the teams that have won (six straight) Big Ten titles. They broke our home winning streak (in 2002). We broke their hearts at the Final Four (in 2000). It doesn't get much better than this."

We'll be at Rosie O'Gradys, seven o'clock, beer in hand, to watch the BIG game!

Go State, beat the bad Badgers!!!

another new term for me: Duppies

Working as a contract worker, here in Michigan, when I hear about layoffs and offshoring, it is no abstract, anybody-but-me scenario anymore. I am sincerely aware that it could happen to me, as I have watched and heard of people I used to work with being laid off.

I heard of two more today, within two departments that comprise probably about eighty to eighty-five people, mostly developers and trainers. Significantly two contract people were let go, and surprise, surprise, two "displaced" direct people have suddenly popped up on the departments' organization charts.

It is truly a discouraging feeling to realize that upper management sees all of us as interchangeable pawns on this big corporate chessboard. We are not unique individuals with strenghts and particular skills. We are replaceable with people whose best credentials are 1) that they have been with the company twenty to twenty-five years, and 2) that their current jobs have gone or are going away (like to India).

I read this article after hearing about these layoffs . . . and surprisingly, it made me feel a bit less anxious and a bit more hopeful. Oh, yes . . . and this is where I heard the new (for me) term, "Duppie." A Duppie is a Depressed Urban Professional who has lost his/her job in the recession.

There is life after a layoff. And, as my encouraging children would remind me, you can always come to the other side of the lake!

But . . . just to tie these two blog "threads' for today together . . . I would FAR rather be a blagger than a Duppie!

Queen Blag for Today

". . . So, NOW who's lagging on the blogging? :)

I think we should make the official term for that, "blagging."

This little bit of gentle chastisement is from my daughter who,
just the other day, I chided for neglecting her fun-to-read blog.

So . . . we have a new term: "blag" for a blog lagger or someone
who is lagging behind in posting their blog.

Hence, I have dubbed myself "Queen Blag for Today."

It's sliding towards the evening

I emerged from my windowless cubicle to see that it is raining outside. How wonderful that it is precipitating drops instead of flakes. I hear we may even have a thunderstorm yet, tonight. Even more wonderful! Thunder-dunder away!

I worked very hard today, evaluating several UG NX files for their applicability to a course that I am developing. The first one was the worst; after that, they got easier.

I'm feeling oddly at peace right now. I love the thought of going home to our little house on Hyland. Even though, right now, it's just me, our house is quiet, uncluttered, almost serene. I love the prospect that I may hear thunder, as well as the pattering of raindrops. I am happy that what I did today, here at work, felt purposeful for a change, a welcome change.

Perhaps I will even do some watercolors tonight? Wouldn't that be lovely?

look out . . . now I'm dangerous

Lina was kind enough to point me to an online tutorial on HTML and CSS.

Since I'm such a color nut, I'm having fun just playing around with the hex codes for a bunch of different colors. I also will have to experiment with the fonts and their different sizes.


an example of code by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)



As I'm on my lunchhour, I guess I have to get back to work. Waaaaahhh!

an HTML stretch

okay . . . this isn't exactly what I want, but I have to learn how to manipulate this bit of HTML code


.....C-a-l-y-p-s-o.....G-r-e-e-n.....



Lina, how do I modify the font size and style?

Welcome to March Madness and Daffy-ness!

I'm still so new at this that I get excited checking my blog to see if anyone's written! Silly! I have to keep reminding myself that I'm the only one who can do that!

But I will congratulate you, Lina, on posting in your blog . . . finally! And I love how you highlighted Daffodils!

And talking with my dear sister last night, I floated the idea out to her of having a group blog, a family blog; it could be an addendum, so to speak, to our March Madness Wendish Spartans dialog!