It's snowing this morning, fairly hard. In the time I spent on the Metro, it went from flurries to white sidewalks and rapidly graying streets. I can hardly keep my eyes off my window at work.

Yes, I suppose we now know the age-old question to how many firefighters does it take to put out a fire in DC. The answer appears to be close to a hundred, not counting EMTs and various ambulance/police personnel who just wanted a closer look.

More pix of the fire here. I captured them on my way to work yesterday.

This reminds me greatly of the time Brad and I were in line to get some chicken at Popeye's. We were in the drive through waiting to order and the line was moving slowly, or not at all. After ten minutes (the line was only three cars long) both of us discussed simply going inside to order. That's when we noticed the cops.

Two cars pulled up in front of the building and all the officers went inside. A few minutes later, another police car pulled up and five minutes after that an ambulance and a firetruck rumbled by. At first I thought that maybe someone inside had suffered a heart attack. By the time the firetruck arrived, I had no clue what was happening. All the customers inside seemed to be acting nonchalant. Eventually, two cops came out of the bathroom with a homeless man. Yeah, total civic presence required: 8 officers and firemen. All for one homeless guy. Just as I thought "I wonder if a building is burning down somewhere or if some guy is getting mugged nearby" I noticed that the homeless guy was gone, but that all the officers were staying to order food.

It took another ten minutes to finally be able to order and eat. It wasn't as if we'd have left after waiting all that time. Ever since then I've realized that there must be a wall somewhere with a complex formula for determining police/fire/rescue response:

1. Homeless Guy = 6 Police, 2 Rescue, 2 Firefighters
2. Burning House = 60 Firefighters, 30 Police, 10 Rescue
3. Guy Getting Mugged = 0 Police, 0 Rescue, 0 Firefighters
4. White Guy's Car Getting Bumped in G-Town: 15 Police, 0 Rescue, 1 Firefighter
5. (My all time-favorite) Fight in the 'Morg: 2 Police, 4 Secret Service, 0 Follow-up

I'll see if the fire-scarred house is still standing today...

werkz advice: a darkly funny drama-comedy. good on the big or small screen.

Wings was a funny series...but my favorite characters happened to be the two that haven't disappeared from pop-culture, namely, Thomas Haden Church and Tony Shalhoub. Church went on to be underappreciated in the hilarious show Ned and Stacey. Shalhoub went on to be appreciated in the hilarious show Monk.

Church's latest film, Sideways revolves around a wine-country road trip with Church and co-star Paul Giamatti. The two encounter a series of hilarious incidents, with Giamatti's fading life gradually becoming worse and worse. The film is mostly dark and brooding, but the funny moments are truly inspired.

When I went to see this film with Leto, I thought it was going to be darker than it was, but each time things seemed bleak, something happened to make me laugh. This isn't a guy-gets-horribly-embarrassed film in the Ben Stiller mold. Instead, it's a comedy that doesn't suspend disbelief. It's reality with a Hollywood twist, done well because Church basically plays himself. Well worth seeing from start to finish.

Chris Dodd is killing Condi. Wow. Must-see tv.

"I think you should talk to Senator McCain about this..."

I'm turning down the chance to see all of the prospective DNC chairs tonight, because of my previously mentioned engagement. That and, of course, I don't get to vote on the DNC member. And I'd back Dean, anyway, for reasons I'm not going to get into right now.

After spending most of yesterday finding, purchasing and assembling (courtesy my new patty-making-machine) a series of hamburgers, I realized it was too cold today to actually reify the Tuesday-hamburger-salon idea I had intended. The hours I spent weren't wasted, but the fruits of said labor now live solely in my fridge, anxiously awaiting a future Tuesday with warm enough temps to light the firepit and enjoy the garden.

Thus, a change of plans. We're moving indoors.

A free flow of ideas, spirits and milk-based-products should be the natural result. Interested? You should be.

Over the weekend several items on the site were broken due to my webhost altering some configuration files. As soon as I noticed what had been changed, I ssh'd in and set everything right again. But it took a bit of coding, so if I missed something, please tell me.

Along those lines, a few bits of coding goodness to pass along. Or badness, as in this first case, namely that Technorati sucks. What, I suppose you ask, am I referring to? Well, namely to the new technorati tags that were introduced recently. What's wrong with them? Well...

1. Instead of being true meta-data, they are specific to technorati. If another service wanted to provide the same level of functionality, they'd either have to use the technorati tag format, or get the existing users to add/replace their current system.
2. Rather than just parsing existing data, the t.t. system requires users to alter the data itself. This means that in the future, all changes would need to be made to the data to ensure proper tagging. It also means all the data in the past would need to be altered. Imagine if google required every page that wished to be indexed to add a meta-tag saying "index me google" to them. Obviously, few would comply.
3. Along with #2, this system seems like a simple rehash of the meta-tag system, which was abused to death by many. The tag system could just as easily be a meta-tag system.
4. Anchor tags? Anchor tags? The use of anchor tags to introduce meta-data seems to be a bad reading of what meta-data is actually for. The rel attribute, for instance, is supposed to describe what an anchor link is linking to. This doesn't seem to be doing that.
5. The tags themselves seem to be yet another attempt to alter existing meta-data systems without any hard work.

The semantic web is not here today. But systems like technorati tags don't help matters, because they don't create machine readable data that is open and not tied to one source or enterprise. Instead, the tag system just helps people share data with technorati, not with each other. Grr.

On the other hand, a technology that will help build the semantic web has just been enhanced, namely, SPARQL. The new protocol details were released on the 14th.

SPARQL isn't tied to one group or body. It lets machines search rdf data. What could be better for the growth of the semantic web than that? For semantic web searching, everyone should go check out swoogle.

Obviously, not everyone agrees. Some people seem to think that ontologies that are definited by smaller bodies will "evolve" into a larger more useful ontology. These user-created "folksonomies" are therefore a stepping stone to a more useful ontology. I just think this is the wrong approach: we should be working on building information that can be evaluated independently of any particular author. If I write a web piece that I claim is about network technology but seems to be a bildungsroman in actuality, I would hope that

1. The human reading it would "get" it.
2. The machine reading it, if programmed properly, would also "get it".

We're not even at the first state, where humans can agree on what certain works "mean". So why don't we just skip to step #2 instead of doing more arguing about #1? Or, to put it another way, if the current search engine algorithms ignore the meta-tags I insert into my description field because they tend to be easily skewed (by nefarious porn providers, no doubt!), why should I keep inserting that information? Instead of requiring humans to constantly classify our words into different taxonomies, can't we just get a machine to automate it? The less humans in the equation of the semantic web, the better, in my mind.

So the blogosphere is awash today in recriminations following an odd post from Zephyr Teachout which led to an absurd news story in the Wall Street Journal which led to Markos defending himself and Jerome pointing out the absurdity of Z's claim.

Zephyr later clarified her position and I commented on her blog there. (Ugh. Blogger. Bad choice there, Z.)

The problem with what Zephyr did is that she managed to take a story about the excesses of Armstrong Willams and turn it into a critical piece about a bunch of lefty bloggers who were, in fact, innocent of the charges she hinted about.

Zephyr's larger points about a "culture of blogging" are equally misguided. Her desire to have "credentialed bloggers" promise not to write about the people who are funding them seems short-sighted: many excellent bloggers are good precisely because their area of expertise is their employer, or friend, or co-worker.

Ultimately, most bloggers get their news from accredited news organizations like the NYT or the WaPo. They blend opinions and fact. And they don't have a reliable revenue stream. All of these should help drive home the fact that bloggers are useful precisely because they have an odd symbiotic relationship with the organizations they pick apart.

What Zephyr and others need to focus on is transparency because that's the one thing that does affect how people view a blogger. I don't care if you work for Richard Mellon Scaife so long as you say so loud and proud on your blog. That way I won't bother reading it.

The images on the site aren't loading properly. Through in a bad router that kept me off the internet most of the day and you've got a recipe for an annoyed Edward. In the immortal words of Mr. Bat, "Grr."

It's all over the blogosphere, but first check out this list comparing Rathergate to the WMD Mess. Some of the best ones are in the comments, so be sure to read down. A few choice favorites:

CIA Agents outed in effort to prevent or punish disclosure:

RG:0 WMD:1

Percentage of Iraqi people who view the US as "occupiers" as a result

RG: no data available
WMD: 92%

The comment thread is also a great example of Godwin's Law.

Howie is not all good or all bad, but today he's on fire:

Courting advertisers may be the motivation, but the appearance is awful. After all, the practice is deemed unsavory enough to warrant a Page 1 piece in The Post Co.'s newspaper.

The company has business interests that are affected by administration policies. It owns a bunch of television stations that have FCC licenses, for example. It even owns Slate! So are we being asked to believe that the Bush administration will not notice that The Washington Post Co. was neighborly enough to cough up 100K for the inaugural bashes? We -- meaning journalists who work in the newsroom -- don't believe that other corporations and trade associations give such contributions without expecting anything in return. In fact, we write about this sort of thing all the time, including yesterday.

And our corporate parent is now playing the same game.

By the way, The Washington Post just got an interview with the president for publication this weekend.

(What? No! Of course there's no connection to the hundred thousand. We have to beg for these interviews like everyone else! But imagine, say, some blogger writing the lead: "The Washington Post, which recently donated $100,000 to President Bush's inaugural, was granted rare high-level access yesterday in the form of a coveted presidential interview. A spokesman insisted there was no connection, but one grizzled media observer, who requested anonymity so he could still submit op-eds to the paper, said: 'Let's face it, the whole thing reeks.'")

Well put, Mr. Kurtz.

You know that loud table? The one that's obnoxious and seemingly oblivious to the somewhat classy restaurant you find yourself in?

Yeah, we were that table. After escorting Dwight to the Bush girls' favorite Democratic hangout, I rolled over to one of Jenna's friend's apartments. A few hours later, our ragtag crew found ourselves down onion way, enjoying some southern hospitality served up by an eph, no less. Then we made it to our table, where we proceeded to redefine the term "outspoken". Review of said restaurant forthcoming.

Later highlights included being locked out of an apartment building, learning Dwight had punctured a tire and managing to successfully avoid the disaster-in-waiting up in the Morg. All in a night's work, I say.

Read this piece on the new CNN chief. Guess what?

He just gets it.

Mr. Klein continually described CNN’s new news concept as "powerful, emotional storytelling," the kind of firsthand reality TV in which anchors emoted and opined more and even the most eye-glazing subjects—Social Security, campaign-finance reform—became stirring conflicts between opposing human faces. If it sounded like old-fashioned newsmagazine fare, well, Mr. Klein said he didn’t like the word "newsmagazine." It was something new, but he didn’t have a word for it.

"It’s almost like what you’d see on the History Channel five years from now," he said. "We can do it today. We’re living history."

Mr. Klein explained that this sort of long-form "storytelling" would fill more cable hours, so they wouldn’t be dependent on incessant interviews with Scott Peterson’s former girlfriend, Amber Frey. Mr. Klein said they had resisted covering the aftermath of the Peterson trial, which Ms. Grace and Mr. King had flogged ruthlessly for the last few years.

"You know, we killed our Amber Frey interview," said Mr. Klein. "We didn’t pursue it. Everybody else did an Amber Frey interview this week, and they did decent numbers. But we didn’t do it. You know, it’s about living up to the brand promise."

Sure, he says "emotional" a little too much, but the basic concept is straightforward: report the news rather than on the news, which Fox is famous for. The other day I saw a Fox anchor interviewing Zell Miller...he asked him, "Hey, remember at the convention, when you said that John Kerry was throwing spitballs at the enemy? Where'd you come up with that?" By contrast, instead of discussing useless political inside-baseball-trivia, CNN was showing a reporter standing in front of tsunami devastation asking questions to locals. That's news.

I'm glad Klein gets it. This is exactly what I've been clamoring for:

The question of whether viewers want straight reporting in America—the kind that CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN had the resources to provide and often have—remains an open one. Walter Isaacson, former CNN president, biographer, Time managing editor and chief executive of the Aspen Institute, suspected they do. "As the world of journalism fractures into more and more niche opinionated markets, there will become more of a demand among a lot of people for straightforward reporting," he said. "Somebody has to actually go to the scene and report the facts. And people are going to want it."

GIve us straight reporting! Now!

Whew.

HFS is dead.

Wow. That was sudden. I still listened to HFS fairly regularly...what a loss.

I'd like to bow to our new El Zol overlords.

I don't often link to stories on dailykos because I assume most people will have seen stuff there. But this story is important to reiterate.

How keeping NH as first-in-the-nation meets any of his criteria for reform is beyond me, since the "little guy" who came out of their primary was John Kerry -- the establishment choice himself. And how fair was it? Not fair to the 48 other states which had no say in the matter.

Fact is, support for keeping IA and NH at the vanguard of the primaries is simply a selfish excercise (sic), borne of pure self-interest.

If Michigan and DC had held the first two primaries in the nation, I feel strongly things would've gone much differently. And now, having been to Iowa, I can honestly claim that people there are no smarter than the people here in DC or in Michigan. It's actually a nice segue to the ongoing debate in Slate between the authors of Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds.

Viewed through a time-slice prism, many Democrats indicated that Dean was their "gut choice" but that after some thought, Kerry seemed better. (Of course I'm talking about the post-pundit spin covering Iowa but before New Hampshire. Everything post-Iowa was dominated by Kerry's win and Dean's rally speech, so it was skewed). So how does this apply to the Surowiecki/Gladwell debate?

Put simply, the Iowa caucuses are an exercise in how not to conduct democracy, or a judgment system. Gladwell's argument that people make snap judgments with more accuracy than they do deliberative ones means that the typical Iowan, upon surveying the group, would choose the proper one to be the winner. Of course, with all the focus on Iowa and the candidates, you could say that this occurred months in advance of the actual vote. Everything after that point would be deliberative, and thus, muddy the issue. Surowiecki, on the other hand, might say that the actual Iowa caucus, where the crowd got to vote on a candidate, would be the moment at which the best candidate would emerge. Looking closer though, Surowiecki's thesis is based on an idea of error-correction: that with a large enough sample of people, the cumulative errors contradict one another and the truth is discerned. In a primary, where everyone votes for a candidate (especially if we use IRV, as I'd prefer), this would work. But in a caucus, voters talk to one another. Instead of having error correction, the person who seems the "most assured" or the "most knowledgeable" may convince others to join him. If this person is a self-confessed expert, then the entire point of Surowiecki's thesis, namely, that crowds can do better than experts in certain systems, invalidates the caucus as a crowd-method. Sure enough, the people who were best at convincing their neighbors and friends to vote for Kerry or Edwards managed to do so. The "wisdom" therefore was removed.

So on both levels, the caucuses undermine the tenets of both Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds. Instead the system rewards experts who have deliberated for months about their choice!

I'm not sure that much can be done to reduce the deliberation period for primaries. The media coverage saturation makes it difficult for most people to make a snap judgment. But the media often reflect an internal set of values not revealed to the public at large. If we could get the media to make a snap judgment about our candidate (that he/she's smart, hard-working and the best for the job) that was positive, we'd be set. So far as the primary process is supposed to generate the best possible candidate, adding states like DC and Michigan into the mix can only help to further that goal. Want to see if your candidate is principled and can stand up to the Iowa bullies? Ask him about DC voting rights! Want to see if your candidate can come up with solutions to America's problems? Ask him about urban issues like infrastructure decay and education!