Preoccupations

del.icio.us/TypePad: bookmark this

Six Apart weblog:

The del.icio.us team has just started a TypePad-powered blog talking about the popular service. One of the first tips, posted by Joshua Schachter, are some simple but powerful instructions for adding a "bookmark this" link to your post footers. This works on TypePad's advanced templates (available in the Pro level only) or in Movable Type.

Implemented here.

More on those Amazon stats

Hmm …  I don't know much about Fog, Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid indices, but something seems odd here. Amazon says:

• The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. A score between 7 and 8 is considered ideal, while a score above 12 is considered difficult to read.
• The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, while a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30.
• The Flesch-Kincaid Index is a refinement to the Flesch Index that tries to relate the score to a U.S. grade level. For example, text with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.1 would be considered suitable for someone with a 10th grade or higher reading level.
• The Text Stats feature calculates a variety of statistics for each book in the Search Inside the Book program. The Complexity calculations indicate the complexity of the words and sentence structure in the text of a book. A word is considered "complex" if it has three or more syllables.

I was a bit surprised, then, by the Ulysses "scores" (previous post), and what to make of those for Finnegan's Wake?

Swann's Way fares a bit more like I'd expect these "difficult" books to do:

Flickr-ed Amazon

via Plasticbag, my attention was drawn to Amazon's expereiment with new visualisations. Tom Coates cites the page for a Vintage International edition of Ulysses:

**********

Non!

Sitting here, thinking about our so-seemingly-long-gone election and the French referendum on the proposed EU constitution (with the Dutch voting today), I enjoyed John Naughton's post about Neil Kinnock's Today programme interview (live yesterday, Tuesday):

Talking about the French referendum result, he outlined a cogent case for regarding it as a wholly French-made shambles. He blamed Jacques Chirac for mismanaging the disastrous Nice summit which launched the thing on the world, and pointed out that instead of a simple document setting out the rules needed to make workable an EU of 25 countries, it had ballooned (under the tutelage of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a former French President) into a bloated half-assed attempt to do for Europe what the Founding Fathers once did for the United States. As for the interpretation that the Non vote was an expression of dissatisfaction with Chirac, Kinnock pointed out that it was the French Left who had put Chirac where he is today. Their failure to agree on, and support, a viable left-wing candidate in the last Presidential election led them in a panic to vote for Chirac in order to keep the fascist Jean Marie le Pen from winning. But on Sunday, those same leftists allied with fascists, racists, Europhobes and sundry discontents to ‘rebuke’ the guy they had installed in power. It was a truly great rant. If only Kinnock had been that sharp when he was Leader of the labour Party.

On Tuesday, the interview could be heard again here on the Today site.

What interested me about this is what Tom Coates and Dan Hill have drawn attention to in posting about the new BCC Download and Podcast trial: it is 'one of those areas where the BBC's traditional mission to explain, demystify and advocate new technology is entirely in line with the need to create useful, usable user experiences' (Dan Hill); 'the move towards "three ways of listening" really excited me and I love the fact that the XML button is clickable and you have a form input box where you can select and copy the URL without accidentally clicking on the XML link and getting a page full of mark-up' (Tom Coates).

The Hitchens

Simultaneously with 3 Quarks Daily getting there, I came across this Guardian Hay on Wye festival interview with the two brothers (Ian Katz, Guardian Features Editor i/c):

CH … It's a great credit to our father, who was very conservative, that he never attempted to inculcate any politics into either of us, there were no heretical positions in the family. The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I'm a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can't stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith. I mean, that to me is horrible repulsive thing.

IK Peter when did your belief kick in, when did this become an issue between you?

PH Oh, it's never been an issue. As an issue between us I think he overestimates it. He has several faiths. He has the faith I think of Darwinism, which is just like Christianity, an unprovable theory, which you can believe if you want because you prefer that arrangement of the universe. I happen to think the arrangement of the universe based on the belief in intelligent life is more tolerable than both morally and aesthetically, but he prefers another. I dislike only the attitude that his atheism is not a faith, because it is. I have absolutely no disgust or anger with anybody who disagrees with me about that. I'm much more worried about people who are indifferent. …

IK Are you two friends?

PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.

CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet.

IK One last question from the audience.

Audience member You've been casting furtive glances at each other throughout the whole event but you've never yet made eye contact. Would you for this final moment, look each other in the eye?

CH You don't know what we've just been through. We were asked by James Naughtie to do an on-radio handshake, [and] I thought it was a handshake made for radio.

Audience member So will you do it?

[CH and PH look briefly at each other]

PH They want everything to be all right.

CH They want a happy ending - that's their problem.