News You Can Bruise for 2003 October 8

"That would be funny. But unconstitutional."

I'm branching out. Questions Dog Microsoft on Linux Studies should be "Dogs Question Microsoft On Linux Studies". Now that would be cool.

Degeneracy Part II: This Time It's Monetized! (from Sumana)

Let's say you had a thing produced by someone, and you needed to classify it according to some arbitrary system. Well, you could use the North American Industry Classification System, which reads like the largest RPG treasure table ever. Except you couldn't, because you'd get distracted and start looking at totally unrelated stuff, never find what you were looking for, and the Japanese would take over with their more concise Pacific Rim Industry Classification System, which divides industries into "Stuff" and "More stuff". A random sampling from the NAICS list on the US Census web site:

Canned vegetables, except hominy and mushrooms
Receipts for contract and commission work on women's, misses', juniors', and girls' raincoats and other waterproof outergarments
Hollowware (including toiletware, ecclesiastical ware, novelties, trophies, baby goods, and other platedware)
Urea
Other burial caskets and coffins and metal vaults [plastics, fiberglass, foam, masonite, cardboard, fiberboard, etc., and all children's]
Pattern publishing, including clothing patterns [exclude industrial patterns]

(Foam coffins? For when your beer goes flat? Are they real coffins or not?)

There must be a cool toy in here somewhere, but the only thing I can think of is a little simulation of an economy where people start companies dealing in producing and combining the products of various industries, and there'd be no room for you in that simulation. Those simulated people don't need your reductionist thinking about whether it's a good idea to turn letterpress printing inks and fiber optic cable into stamped and spun utensils, cooking and kitchen, aluminum.

Hey. I'm proud to announce the existence of two new weblogs hosted on crummy.com: A Day In The Life by my cousin Alyson Matkin of Texas travelogue fame; and Traffic by John Chadwick, Susanna's husband and my brother-in-law (man, that sounds weird). Both weblogs sort of look the same, because I am not the world's greatest web designer. Minimalism is a good trick, but by definition it only works once. If any of you good readers want to help them out (which seems a little unlikely, since nobody's bitten on the icon thing yet), I'm sure they'd love a nicer-looking front page than what I've made for them. It'll look better once I get their pictures.

Incidentally, if you are related to me and you want a weblog, I'll host it here.