dsandler.org/wp

Amazon has a new Comics and Graphic Novels sub-store.
(Via madprof.)
Now I’ll go to bed, I swear.

Angi says that sushi makes
everything better. I’m inclined to agree. Tomorrow I will try my
hand at ??????を??????る (sushi-wo-nigiru, pron. “sushi oh
nigir’”, lit. “handling sushi”). Last time I made nigiri, and
demonstrated that while I can get the rice pretty darn sticky, my
fish-cutting skills need work—so this time it will be veggies only.

I’ll also time each step of the process, so I can make some sort of
claim about how long it would take me to prepare for Erin and myself
during a work week.

dpeck contributes to the ongoing weblog lit-crit
thread: Write well,
blog good.”

Hand-drawn icons from the Owlnet Lab
Report, circa
1998.
Row 1: Mac II, Mac PPC. Row 2: SGI Iris, Indy, and O2. Row
3: Sun SparcStation, Sparc Ultra.

Hey, another one of my Rice projects found its way onto a public network. The
Owlnet Lab Report, which I
built in 1997 or 1998, is being proxied to the wider Web at this location.

The Lab Report used rwho and finger data, combined with schematic layouts of
the Unix computer facilities (“Owlnet”) on the Rice campus, to generate
diagrams of machine availability in those facilities. Absolutely crucial when
you’re an undergrad hunting for a free Sparc station on which to do your
homework, especially back in the days before everyone and his sister was
running Linux in the dorms. The Lab Report was (internally) called
mach5, since it was about the fifth time I had reimplemented my
ad-hoc machine-availability shell scripts. When I graduated, the Rice IS
group offered to move the tool out of my personal directory and maintain the
service as the labs on campus evolved. (Since it’s been owned by IS, however,
it’s been restricted to on-campus users, which is why the public mirror is
news.)

Grant writes:

I just read the entry on your blog about the quality of writing on the
web. I know squat about good writing, and I do not and have never
aspired to be a writer. But Mark Pilgrim’s words, and yours, made me
instantly think of an article in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology called “Unskilled and
Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence
Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

It’s almost one of those psych studies that ends up sounding like common
sense, because in a nutshell, the authors are saying: if you are bad at
[writing], you will think you are better at it than you actually are.
They tease out a bit more detail, though. In some domains, a person’s
skill level is directly tied to how well that person evaluates the skill
of others in that domain. The authors give many examples, including
grammar, spelling, and chess. Good writing in general probably falls in
that category, too.

So, yeah, a web full of people reading and writing for each other. Not
being good writers, they lack the “metacognitive ability” to evaluate
each other and themselves. If they cannot self-evaluate, how can they
hope to improve? It’s not surprising (to those of us with 20-20
hindsight) that most of them do not become better writers.

So what is the magic secret ingredient X? I think Mark hit on it when
he said: “the mind-boggling lack of self-knowledge required to write
every day and not realize that you write badly.” X is LEARN WHAT GOOD
WRITING IS. I realize that’s as helpful as saying LEARN HOW TO PLAY
CHESS BETTER, but I guess I’m saying there is no magic secret. It’s
just the age-old process of learning. Take a class, study the masters,
learn to evaluate others and yourself. LEARN HOW TO LEARN.

I think a lot of the responses Mark quotes are saying basically the same
thing about self-evaluation. And your take is very similar, too, which
is probably why it made me instantly think of that article. But I have,
you know, science on my side, so I win.

Much, er, better written than my
attempt earlier. I think Grant is getting at the root cause of what
I only crudely grasped with my “we only read crappy writing” thesis;
viz., “by only reading crappy writing, we don’t recognize good
writing when we see it—or fail to see it—in our own
output.”

More on Richard Clarke (mentioned Sunday
in advance of his 60′ interview): A Salon
interview, and Slate on why we should believe him. From
that article:

There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired
both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled
(and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a
calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise
his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around
all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’s lying about being a squeaky wheel
about Al-Qaeda before 9/11.