Here’s Andy Baio’s farewell to Upcoming, a service I’ve been involved with for a decade. In a March 2005 blog post I wrote about what I hoped Upcoming would become, in my town and elsewhere, and offered some suggestions to help it along. One was a request for an API which Upcoming then lacked. Andy soon responded with an API. It was one of the pillars of my Elm City project for a long while until, as Andy notes in his farewell post, it degraded and became useless.

Today I pulled the plug and decoupled Upcoming from all the Elm City hubs.

In 2009 Andy and I both spoke at a conference in London. Andy was there to announce a new project that would help people crowdsource funding for creative projects. I was there to announce a project that would help people crowdsource public calendars. Now, of course, Kickstarter is a thing. The Elm City project not so much. But I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track, I’m lucky to be in a position to keep pursuing the idea, and although it’s taking longer than I ever imagined I’m making progress. Success, if it comes, won’t look like Upcoming did in its heyday, but it will be a solution to the same problem that Upcoming addressed — a problem we’ve yet to solve.

That same March 2005 blog post resonates with me for another reason. That was the day I walked around my town photographing event flyers on shop windows and kiosks. When I give presentations about the Elm City project I still show a montage of those images. They’re beautiful, and they’re dense with information that isn’t otherwise accessible.

Event flyers outperform web calendars, to this day, because they empower groups and organizations to be the authoritative sources for information about their public events, and to bring those events to the attention of the public. The web doesn’t meet that need yet but it can, and I’m doing my best to see that it does.

Here’s the pitch from the workshop’s sponsor and host, the Daily Press:

The Community Calendar Project

It’s about time someone came up with a way to get all community events in one place so everyone, everywhere can find out what’s going on at any given time, on any given day.

It’s about time creators of those events – the people, agencies and organizations who work so hard to bring quality education, support and entertainment to the community – had a way to get their messages out there effortlessly.

It’s about time the public can find out about the happenings and events they really care about and never miss an important event again.

AND it’s “time” – or the lack of it – that makes this community initiative being spearheaded by the Daily Press so valuable to everyone. This community calendar will SAVE time – for the event creators, the event seekers and the websites and platforms that work to make this information available.

The Daily Press is partnering with Jon Udell of Microsoft to bring this project to Hampton Roads and make it among the first communities in the country to have an easily searchable, FREE database of events available to the public. And we want to get all of Hampton Roads involved. The only thing required to participate is to agree to use an iCalendar formatted calendar on your own websites or to create events through Facebook. That’s it. Participation guaranteed.

What is an iCalendar? Simply, iCalendar is a computer file format that allows Internet users to exchange calendars with other Internet users. iCalendar is used and supported by personal calendars such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar (formerly iCal), Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail, Lotus Notes, Yahoo! Calendar, and others, and by web content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others.

Many of you may already use one of these applications to publish your calendars online, and that is great! That means you can already participate in the calendar network we are bringing together. The rest of you can easily convert and get on board.We’ll tell you how.

On April 23 you are invited to a presentation of the Community Calendar Project. Jon will be on hand to tell you what it is, why it matters and how to get involved. The gathering will take place at 6 p.m. at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, 101 Museum Drive (across from The Mariners’ Museum) in Newport News.

Light refreshments will be served. Get your FREE tickets so we know how many are attending.

Hope to see you there.

If we had it to do over again things would be very different. We’d have brought him home much sooner, made him comfortable, helped him work through a life review, hung out with him, heard and said some things that needed to be heard and said.

As it was we only managed to bring him home for his last day. It was better than not bringing him home at all, but not much better, at least not for him. For us, though, it was transformative. Two generations of our family — my wife and I, our children — had never seen the kind of death that was normal until the modern era. We’d didn’t know why or how to shift gears from medical treatment to palliative care. Now we do and we’re deeply changed — Luann especially. She’s become a hospice volunteer who comforts the dying, supports their families, and counsels survivors.

From her I’ve learned a lot about hospice care. What happened to us, it turns out, is typical. Many people don’t realize how comfortable a dying person can often be at home with proper medication. As a result many delay until the bitter end, and miss out on the emotional and psychological richness that’s possible in a home hospice setting.

A big reason for the delay is the chasm that divides the culture of hospitals from the culture of hospice. Nobody in the hospital advised us to bring dad home a month before he died. A social worker mentioned it, but dad didn’t know what it could mean to make that choice, we didn’t know enough to advocate for it, and medical professionals speak with vastly more authority than do social workers in our current regime.

What hospitals don’t know about hospice is astonishing. Last night, while reading an anthology of science writing, I happened on an essay by Atul Gawande, a physician/writer who, like Oliver Sacks, Perri Klass, and Abraham Verghese, opens windows into the medical world. In 2010, the year after our experience with my dad, he wrote a New Yorker piece called Letting Go that included these revelations:

One Friday morning this spring, I went on patient rounds with Sarah Creed, a nurse with the hospice service that my hospital system operates. I didn’t know much about hospice. I knew that it specialized in providing “comfort care” for the terminally ill, sometimes in special facilities, though nowadays usually at home. I knew that, in order for a patient of mine to be eligible, I had to write a note certifying that he or she had a life expectancy of less than six months. And I knew few patients who had chosen it, except maybe in their very last few days, because they had to sign a form indicating that they understood their disease was incurable and that they were giving up on medical care to stop it. The picture I had of hospice was of a morphine drip. It was not of this brown-haired and blue-eyed former I.C.U. nurse with a stethoscope, knocking on Lee Cox’s door on a quiet street in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood

And:

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months.

These things once surprised me too. Now, thanks to our brief hospice experience with dad and Luann’s volunteer work since, I take them for granted. And while I’ve felt ashamed not to have arrived at this understanding sooner, in time to help dad, I guess I should cut myself some slack. Atul Gawande didn’t get there any sooner than me.

How could that be? How could a leading medical practitioner (and explainer) reach mid-career lacking such basic and useful knowledge? All too easily when we carve the world into fields of knowledge and then build walls around them.

My first blogging tool, back in 2001, was Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand. One of Dave’s mantras was: “Own your words.” As the blogosphere became a conversational medium, I saw what that could mean. Radio UserLand didn’t support comments. That turned out to be a good constraint to embrace. When conversation emerged, as it always will in any system of communication, it was a cross-blog affair. I’d quote something from your blog on mine, and discuss it. You’d notice, and perhaps write something on your blog referring back to mine.

This cross-blog conversational mode had an interesting property: You owned your words. Everything you wrote went into your own online space, was bound to your identity, became part of your permanent record. As a result, discourse tended to be more civil than what often transpired in Usenet newsgroups or web forums. In those kinds of online spaces, your sense of identity is attenuated. You may or may not be pseudonymous, but either way the things you say don’t stick to you in the same way they do if you say them in your own permanent online space.

Later blogs evolved forum-style comments which concentrated discussion but recreated the old problems: attenuation of identity, loss of ownership of data. Then came Twitter and Facebook and, so the story goes, “social killed the blogosphere.” It was easier to read and write in those online spaces, blogging declined, and Google’s recent decision to retire its RSS reader is being widely regarded as the nail in the blogosphere’s coffin.

Of course that’s wrong. One of the staples of tech punditry is the periodic declaration that something — Unix, the Web, Microsoft, Apple, the blogosphere — is dead.

Will Google Reader’s exit spell the end of the blogosphere or its rebirth? Nobody knows, and since I’m no longer in the pageview business I won’t even hazard a prediction. Instead I want to highlight something that’s bigger than blogs, bigger even than social media. Owning your words is a fundamental principle. It seemed new at the dawn of the blogosphere but its roots ran deeper. They were woven into the fabric of the Internet which, at its core, is a network of peers.

For technical reasons I won’t explore here, it’s not possible (or, I should say, not believed possible) for our computers to be first-class peers on that network, as early Internet-connected computers were. But it is possible for various of our avatars — our websites, our blogs, our calendars — to represent us as first-class peers. That means:

- They use domain names that we own

- They converse with other peers in ways that we enable and can control

- They store data in systems that we authorize and can manage

Your Twitter and Facebook avatars are not first-class peers on the network in these ways. Which isn’t to say they aren’t useful. Second-class peers are incredibly useful, largely because they enable us to avoid the complexities that make it challenging to operate first-class peers.

Those challenges are real. But they’re not insurmountable unless we believe that they are. I don’t believe that. I hope you won’t. What some of us learned at the turn of the millenium — about how to use first-class peers called blogs, and how to converse with other first-class peers — gave us a set of understandings that remain critical to the effective and democratic colonization of the virtual realm. It’s unfinished business, and it may never be finished, but don’t let the tech pundits or anyone else convince you it doesn’t matter. It does.

You might assume that this is open data, available for anyone to use. Not so, as web developers interested in such data periodically discover. For example, from MetaFilter:

Q: We initially thought it would be as easy as pulling in an RSS feed from somewhere, but places like Yahoo or Google don’t offer RSS feeds for their showtimes. Doing a little research brought up large firms that provide news and data feeds and that serve up showtimes, but that seems like something that’s designed for high-level sites with national audiences.

So, is there any solution for someone who is just trying to display local showtimes?

A: This is more complicated than you might think. Some theatres maintain that their showtimes are copyrighted, and (try to) control the publication of them. Others have proprietary agreements with favored providers and don’t publish their showtimes elsewhere, to give their media partners a content edge.

What applies to RSS feeds applies to calendar feeds as well. It would be nice to have your local showtimes as an overlay on your personal calendar. But since most theaters don’t make the data openly available, you can’t.

Some indie theaters, however, do serve up the data. Here are some movies that don’t appear when you type “movies keene nh” into Google or Bing:

These are listings from the Putnam Theater at Keene State College. They syndicate to the Elm City hub for the Monadnock region of New Hampshire by way of the college calendar which recently, thanks to Ben Caulfield, added support for standard iCalendar feeds. They appear in the film category of that hub. And in fact they’re all that can appear there.

I’ve decided I’m OK with that. I used to forget about movies at the Putnam because they didn’t show up in standard searches. Now I sync them to my phone and I’m more aware of them. Would I want all the mainstream movies there too? I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. There are plenty of ways to find what’s playing at mainstream theaters. That doesn’t feel like an awareness problem that needs solving. The indie theaters, though, could use a boost. As I build out Elm City hubs in various cities, I’ve been able to highlight a few with open calendars:

- In Berkeley: UC Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA)

- In Toronto: Bloor Cinema

And here are some indies whose calendars could be open, but aren’t:

- In Portland: Academy Theater

- In Cambridge, The Brattle Theatre

If you’re an indie theater and would like your listings to be able to flow directly to personal calendars, and indirectly through hubs to community portals, check out how the Putman, BAM/PFA, and the Bloor Cinema are doing it.

It’s hard to read the chapters about the routine brutality of life during the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and — until more recently than we like to imagine — the modern era. An early example:

Far from being hidden in dungeons, torture-executions were forms of popular entertainment, attracting throngs of jubilant spectators who watched the victim struggle and scream. Bodies broken on wheels, hanging from gibbets, or decomposing in iron cages where the victim had been left to die of starvation and exposure were a familiar part of the landscape.

A modern example:

Consider this Life magazine ad from 1952:

Today this ad’s playful, eroticized treatment of domestic violence would put it beyond the pale of the printable. It was by no means unique.

A reader of that 1950s ad would be as horrified as we are today to imagine cheering a public execution in the 1350s. A lot changed in 600 years. But in the 60 years since more has changed. The ad that seemed OK to a 1950s reader would shock most of us here in the 2010s.

Over time we’ve grown less willing and able to commit or condone violence, and our definition of what counts as violence has grown more inclusive. And yet this is deeply counter-intuitive. We tend to feel that the present is more violent and dangerous than the recent past. And our intuition tells us that the 20th century must have been more so than the distant past. That’s why Pinker has to marshal so much evidence. It’s like Darwin’s rhetorical strategy in The Origin of Species. You remind people of a lot of things that they already know in order to lead them to a conclusion they wouldn’t reach on their own.

Will the trend continue? Will aspects of life in the 2010s seem alien to people fifty years hence in the same way that the coffee ad seems alien to us now, and that torture-execution seemed to our parents? (And if so, which aspects?)

Pinker acknowledges that the civilizing trend may not continue. He doesn’t make predictions. Instead he explores, at very great length, the dynamics that have brought us to this point. I won’t try to summarize them here. If you don’t have time to read the book, though, you might want to carve out an hour to listen to his recent Long Now talk. You’ll get much more out of that than from reading reviews and summaries.

Either way, you may dispute some of the theories and mechanisms that Pinker proposes. But if you buy the premise — that all forms of violence have steadily declined throughout history — I think you’ll have to agree with him on one key point. We’re doing something right, and we ought to know more about why and how.

To reason about these questions I need to evaluate some data. One source of data about categories is the tag cloud. For any Elm City hub, you can form this URL:

elmcity.cloudapp.net/HUBNAME/tag_cloud

If HUBNAME is AnnArborChronicle, you get a JSON file that looks like this:

[
{ "aadl":348},
{ "aaps":9},
{ "abbot":18},
...
]

This is the data that drives the category picklist displayed in the default rendering of the Ann Arbor hub. A good starting point would be to dump this data into a spreadsheet, sort by most populous categories, and try some filtering.

I could add a feature that serves up this data in some spreadsheet-friendly format, like CSV (comma-separated variable). But I am (virtuously) lazy. I hate to violate the YAGNI (“You aren’t gonna need it”) principle. So I’m inclined to do something quick and dirty instead just to find out if it’ll even be useful to work with that data in a spreadsheet..

One quick-and-dirty approach entails looking for some existing (preferably online) utility that does the trick. In this case I searched for things with names like json2csv and json2xls, found a few candidates, but nothing that immediately did what I wanted.

So some text needs to be wrangled. One source of text to wrangle is the HTML page that contains the category picklist. If you capture its HTML source, you’ll find a sequence of lines like this:

<option value="aadl">aadl (348)</option>
<option value="aaps">aaps (9)</option>
<option value="abbot">abbot (18)</option>

It’s easy to imagine a transformation that gets you from there to here:

aadl	348
aaps	9
abbot	18

Although I’ve often written code to do that kind of transformation, if it’s a quick-and-dirty one-off I don’t even bother. I use the macro recorder in my text editor to define a sequence like:

• Start selecting at the beginning of a line
• Go to the first >
• Delete
• Go to whitespace
• Replace with tab
• Search for (
• Delete
• Search for )
• Delete to end of line
• Go to next line

This is a skill that’s second nature to me, and that I’ve often wished I could teach others. Many people spend crazy amounts of time doing mundane text reformatting; few take advantage of recordable macros.

But the reality is that recordable macros are the first step along the slippery slope of programming. Most people don’t want to go there, and I don’t blame them. So I’m delighted by a new feature in Excel 2013, called Flash Fill, that will empower everybody to do these kinds of routine text transformations.

Here’s a picture of a spreadsheet with HTML patterns in column A, an example of the name I want extracted in column B, and an example of the number I want in column C.

Given that setup, you invoke Flash Fill in the first empty B and C columns to follow the examples in B1 and C1. Here’s the resulting spreadsheet on SkyDrive. Wow! That’s going to make a difference to a lot of people!

Suppose your data source were instead JSON, as shown above. Here’s another spreadsheet I made using Flash Fill. As will be typical, this took a bit of prep. Flash Fill needs to work on homogenous rows. So I started by dumping the JSON into JSONLint to produce text like this:

[
    {
        "aadl": 348
    },
    {
        "aaps": 9
    },
    {
        "abbot": 18
    },
...
]

I imported that text into Excel 2013 and sorted to isolate a set of rows with a column A like this:

"aadl": 348
"aaps": 9
"abbot": 18

At that point it was a piece of cake to get Flash Fill to carry the names over to column B and the numbers to column C.

Here’s a screencast by Michael Herman that does a nice job showing what Flash Fill can do. It also illustrates a fascinating thing about programming by example. At about 1:25 in the video you’ll see this:

Michael’s example in C1 was meant to tell Flash Fill to transform strings of 9 digits into the familiar nnn-nn-nnnn pattern. Here we see its first try at inferring that pattern. What should have been 306-60-4581 showed up as 306-215-4581. That’s wrong for two reasons. The middle group has three digits instead of two, and they’re the wrong digits. So Michael corrects it and tries again. At 1:55 we see Flash Fill’s next try. Here, given 375459809, it produces 375-65-9809. That’s closer, the grouping pattern looks good, but the middle digits aren’t 45 as we’d expect. He fixes that example and tries again. Now Flash Fill is clear about what’s wanted, and the rest of the column fills automatically and correctly.

But what was Flash Fill thinking when it produced those unintended transformations? And could it tell us what it was thinking?

From a Microsoft Research article about the new feature:

Gulwani and his team developed Flash Fill to learn by example, not demonstration. A user simply shows Flash Fill what he or she wants to do by filling in an Excel cell with the desired result, and Flash Fill quickly invokes an underlying program that can perform the task.

It’s the difference between teaching someone how to make a pizza step by step and simply showing them a picture of a pizza and minutes later eating a hot pie.

But that simplicity comes with a price.

“The biggest challenge,” Gulwani says, “is that learning by example is not always a precise description of the user’s intent — there is a lot of ambiguity involved.

“Take the example of Rick Rashid [Microsoft Research’s chief research officer]. Let’s say you want to convert Rick Rashid to Rashid, R. Where does that ‘R’ come from? Is it the ‘R’ of Rick or the ‘R’ of Rashid? It’s very hard for a program to understand.”

For each situation, Flash Fill synthesizes millions of small programs — 10-20 lines of code — that might accomplish the task. It sounds implausible, but Gulwani’s deep research background in synthesizing code makes it possible. Then, using machine-learning techniques, Flash Fill sorts through these programs to find the one best-suited for the job.

I suspect that while Flash Fill could tell you what it was thinking, you’d have a hard time understanding how it thinks. And for that reason I suspect that hard-core quants won’t rush to embrace it. But that’s OK. Hard-core quants can write code. Flash Fill is for everybody else. It will empower regular folks to do all sorts of useful transformations that otherwise entail ridiculous manual interventions that people shouldn’t waste time on. Be aware that you need to check results to ensure they’re what you expect. But if you find yourself hand-editing text in repetitive ways, get the Excel 2013 preview and give Flash Fill a try. It’s insanely useful.

From these he concludes:

Notice the correlation between high gun ownership and lower homicide rates.

…

As these maps show, “more guns, less crime” is true internationally as well as domestically.

The second map depicts homicides per 100,000 people. That’s the same yardstick used in Steven Pinker’s monumental new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. Pinker marshals massive amounts of data to show that over the long run, and at an accelerating pace, we are less inclined to harm one another. When you look at the data on a per capita basis, even the mass atrocities of the 20th century are local peaks along a steadily declining sawtooth trendline.

One of the most remarkable charts in the book ranks the 20 deadliest episodes in history. It’s adapted from Matthew White’s The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, and appears in a slightly different form in The New Scientist:

Ever heard of the An Lushan Revolt? Well, I hadn’t, but on a per capita basis it dwarfs the first World War.

Pinker says, in a nutshell, that we’re steadily becoming more civilized, and that data about our growing reluctance to kill or harm one another show that. The trend marches through history and spans the globe. There’s regional variation, of course. A couple of charts show the U.S. to be about 5x more violent than Canada and the U.K. But there isn’t one that ranks the U.S. in a world context. So A.W.R. Hawkins’ map of homicide rates got my attention.

The U.S. has the most guns, the first chart says. And it’s one of the safest countries, the second chart says. But that second map doesn’t tell us:

Where does the U.S. rank?

How many countries are in the red, pink, yellow, and green categories?

Which countries are in those categories?

How do countries rank within those categories?

Here’s another way to visualize the data:

There are a lot of countries mashed together in that green zone. And after Cuba we’re the most violent of them. Five homicides per 100,000 isn’t a number to boast about.

A story we’ve been told about Easter Island goes like this. The inhabitants cut down all the trees in order to roll the island’s iconic 70-ton statues to their resting places. The ecosystem crashed, and they died off. This story is told most notably by Jared Diamond in Collapse and (earlier) in this 1995 Discover Magazine article:

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism.

…

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter’s civilization, we ask ourselves, “Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

This is a cautionary tale of reckless ecocide. But according to recent work by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, Jared Diamond got the story completely wrong. A new and very different story emerged from their study of the archeological record. Here are some of the points of contrast:

Hunt and Lipo tell this new story in compelling Long Now talk. After the talk Stewart Brand asks how Jared Diamond has responded to their interpretation. Not well, apparently. Once we’re in the grip of a powerful narrative we don’t want to be released from it.

Hunt and Lipo didn’t go to Easter Island with a plan to overturn the old story. They went as scientists with open eyes and open minds, looked at all the evidence, realized it didn’t support the old story, and came up with a new one that better fits the facts. And it happens to be an uplifting one. These weren’t reckless destroyers of an ecosystem. They were careful stewards of limited resources whose artistic output reflects the ingenuity and collaboration that enabled them to survive as long as they did in that hard place.

We’re all invested in stories, and in the assumptions that flow from them. Check your assumptions. It’s a hard thing to do. But it can lead you to better stories.

Focus on understanding why the program is doing what it’s doing, rather than why it’s not doing what you wanted it to.

And here’s what I came up with:

Focus on understanding why your spouse or child or friend or political adversary is doing what he or she is doing, rather than why he or she is not doing what you wanted him or her to.

I’ve been working on that. It’s been a pleasant surprise to find that Facebook can be a useful sandbox in which to practice the technique. I keep channels of communication open to people who hold wildly different political views. It’s tempting to argue with, or suppress, some of them. Instead I listen and observe and try to understand the needs and desires that motivate utterances I find abhorrent.

My daughter, a newly-minted Master of Social Work, will soon be doing that for a living. She’s starting a new job as a dialogue facilitator. How do you nurture conversations that bridge cultures and ideologies? It’s important and fascinating work. And I suspect there are some other computational principles that can helpfully generalize to support it.

Here’s one: Encourage people to articulate and test their assumptions. In the software world, this technique was a revelation that’s led to a revolution in how we create and manage complex evolving systems. The tagline is test-driven development (TDD), and it works like this. You don’t just assume that a piece of code you wrote will do what you expect. You write corresponding tests that prove, for a range of conditions, that it does what you expect.

The technique is simple but profound. One of its early proponents, Kent Beck, has said of its genesis (I’m paraphrasing from a talk I heard but can’t find):

I was stumped, the system wasn’t working, I didn’t know what else to do, so I began writing tests for some of the most primitive methods in the system, things that were so simple and obvious that they couldn’t possible be wrong, and there couldn’t possibly be any reason to verify them with tests. But some of them were wrong, and those tests helped me get the system working again.

Another early proponent of TDD, Ward Cunningham, stresses the resilience of a system that’s well-supported by a suite of tests. In the era of cloud-based software services we don’t ship code on plastic discs once in a while, we continuously evolve the systems we’re building while they’re in use. That wouldn’t be safe or sane if we weren’t continuously testing the software to make sure it keeps doing what we expect even as we change and improve it.

Before you can test anything, though, you need to articulate the assumption that you’re testing. And that’s a valuable skill you can apply in many domains.

Code

Assumption: The URL points to a calendar.

Tests: Does the URL even work? If so, does it point to a valid calendar?

Interpersonal relationships

Assumption: You wouldn’t want to [watch that movie, go to that restaurant, take a walk].

Tests: I thought you wouldn’t want to [watch that movie, go to that restaurant, take a walk] but I shouldn’t assume, I should ask: Would you?

Tribal discourse

Assumption: They want to [take away our guns, proliferate guns].

Tests: ?

I’ll leave the last one as an exercise for the reader. If you feel strongly about that debate (or another) try asking yourself two questions. What do I assume about the opposing viewpoint? How might I test that assumption?

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with.

For many years, that meant writing notes on pieces of paper, coding the notes, organizing the notes into folders, retyping notes, cutting and rearranging with scissors and tape. Then came computers, a text editor called KEDIT, and a Princeton colleague named Howard Strauss who augmented KEDIT with a set of macros that supported the methods McPhee had been evolving for 25 years. In the article, McPhee describes two KEDIT extensions: Structur and Alpha.

Structur exploded my notes, It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin). It created and named as many new KEDIT files as there were codes, and, of course, it preserved the original set.

Alpha implodes the notes it works on. It doesn’t create anything new. It reads codes and then churns a file internally, organizing it in segments in the order in which they are meant to contribute to the writing.

Alpha is the principal, workhorse program I run with KEDIT. Used again and again on an ever-concentrating quantity of notes, it works like nesting utensils. It sorts the whole business at the outset, and then, as I go along, it sorts chapter material and subchapter material, and it not infrequently rearranges the components of a single paragraph.

KEDIT is the only writing tool John McPhee has ever used. And as he is careful to point out, it’s a text editor, not a word processor. No pagination, headers, fonts, WYSIWYG, none of that. Just words and sentences. I can relate to that. My own writing tool of choice is an EMACS clone called Epsilon. I first used it on DOS around 1986 and I’m using it in Windows today to write these words. If I were a writer of long works I might have evolved my use of Epsilon in ways similar to what John McPhee describes. But I’ve only written one book, that was a long time ago, and since then I’ve written at lengths that don’t require that kind of tool support.

Still, I would love to find out more about John McPhee’s toolchain. My interest is partly historical. Howard Strauss died in 2005, and KEDIT is nearing the end of its life. (From kedit.com: “…we are in the process of gradually winding down Mansfield Software Group.”) But I’m also looking forward. Not everyone needs to organize massive quantities of unstructured information. But those who do require excellent tool support, and there’s room for innovation on that front. Anyone who’d like to tackle that challenge would benefit from understanding what John McPhee’s methods are, and how his toolchain supports them.

I’m going to write to John McPhee to ask him if he’d be willing to work with me on a screencast to document his methods. (And also to thank him for countless hours of reading enjoyment.) It’ll be a cold call, because we’ve never communicated, so if any reader of this post happens to have a personal connection, I would greatly appreciate an introduction.

There’s even been speculation about turning home heating into a service. Here in New England, where the dominant product is heating oil and oil-burning equipment, that would be a wonderful thing. Because now, for the millions of homeowners who burn oil — and for the businesses who support that system — the incentives are all wrong. We’re collectively abetting the nation’s addiction to oil, and customers’ need to using less oil conflicts with suppliers’ need to sell more.

In From oil to wood pellets: New England’s home heating future I documented my first foray into heating with biomass. In Central heating with a wood gasification boiler I presented the solution that’s actually working for us. Biomass is a viable alternative. But I’m still the owner, operator, and maintainer of the equipment, and the manager of the fuel supply (i.e. buying, stacking, loading). What would it be like to outsource those functions?

For single-family homes, biomass heating as a service is still just a dream. But for commercial buildings it’s a reality, and there’s a great example right in my own backyard. Well, almost. The Monadnock Waldorf School, right around the corner from my house, recently converted to a wood pellet boiler installed by Xylogen, a new company whose tagline is:

We do not sell heating systems. We do not sell fuel. We sell secure, local, renewable heat.

Xylogen’s blog tells the story of the project. Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

From What’s happening at MWS?:

We’re pleased to report that the oil boilers have used a total of 7 gallons of oil from day 1, the bulk consumed during initial tune-up and system testing. The remainder of the usage actually occurred during times when the pellet boiler could have kept up with the building’s requirement for heat. In other words, this operation was a mistake that has now been corrected in the control algorithms.

From We see the big picture too:

Today, an opening to an old ventilation shaft was discovered and promptly covered over. Heated air was escaping the buildng through the grating at such a clip that a small student might have gotten sucked in and trapped on it!

Also, there was an assembly today in the assembly room (makes sense!), so we decided to turn down the heat in advance to try to avoid overheating and waste. It turns out the audience itself raised the temperature at least 6F. Good thing we didn’t start out toasty.

Small, very simple steps can have a big impact. We’re looking at the high tech, the low tech, and everything in between to make a difference.

From True service:

The beauty of automatic real-time monitoring is that it’s possible to identify a problem with the equipment and rectify it before the customer even notices. That is service.

Xylogen is a collaboration between Mark Froling and Henry Spindler. I wish them well and look forward to reading more about their work.

PS: Thanks to Andrew Dey (whom I met last night at a talk by Sustainserv’s Matthew Gardner) for pointing out that Xylogen isn’t just about alternative fuel, but more importantly about an alternative business model.

There are lots of author events at bookstores. Recently LibraryThing’s Tim Spalding tweeted:

Upcoming bookish events on @LibraryThing Local now over 10,000! http://www.librarything.com/local/helpers

It’s great that LibraryThing “helpers” (individuals, libraries, bookstores) are adding all those events to LibraryThing’s database. But I’d really like to see bookstores help themselves by publishing standard calendar feeds. That way, LibraryThing could ingest those calendars automatically, instead of relying on dedicated helpers to input events one at a time. And the feeds would be available in other contexts as well, syndicating both to our personal calendars (desktop-, phone-, and cloud-based) and to community calendars.

When I saw Tim’s tweet I took a look at how bookstore events are feeding into various elmcity hubs. Here’s a snapshot of what I found:

There are three buckets:

Bright Lights: These are stores whose web calendars are accompanied by standard iCalendar feeds. Events from these stores appear automatically in the Monadnock, Boston, Ann Arbor, and Portland hubs. These stores’ calendars could also be ingested automatically into LibraryThing, and you could subscribe to them directly.

Dim Lights: These are stores whose web calendars are hosted on Facebook. There isn’t a standard iCalendar feed for Facebook calendars, but the elmcity service can synthesize one using the Facebook API. So I say that these stores have “indirect” iCalendar feeds.

Dark Matter: These are stores whose web calendars are available only in HTML format. Some of these calendars are handcrafted web pages, others are served up by content management systems that produce calendar widgets for display but fail to provide corresponding feeds.

There are a few Bright Lights and some Dim Lights, but most bookstore calendars, like most web calendars of all kinds, are Dark Matter. If you’re a bookstore I urge you to become a Bright Light. Making your calendar available to the web of data is as easy as using Google Calendar or Hotmail Calendar. It’s a best practice that bookstores disregard at their peril.