I’m for sale. Or rather this blog is.

I’m just testing a feature of the Amazon Associates program.

vs.

vs.
How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

My colleague Ben Elliss responded to my last travel posting by saying “I’m looking forward to reading your upcoming posts about beautiful Slough, Geoff”. So what should I say?
I’m staying at a hotel about a mile and a half from the office, and the weather’s been nice, so yesterday and today I left the car at the hotel and walked. The route takes me from a relatively leafy area, through slightly run-down suburbia, along a major artery, and then through a pedestrianised shopping district. My first impression was that I could have been anywhere in the south-east of England, from Windsor to Basildon, from Watford to Croydon. Lots of traffic, lots of construction activity in the shopping district ((just in time for consumer spending to take a nose-dive as people tighten their belts and unemployment jumps)), lots of young mothers with push chairs and preschool children. Fewer pubs than I expected – but apparently that’s another trend: lots of pubs are closing across the country.
The hotel is good, the restaurant is excellent, and all of the wait-staff have impenetrable Eastern European accents. A “glass of wine” is 250mL, which is huge – over half a (US) pint. (And that reminds me: I need to find an opportunity to enjoy a pint of bitter before I leave the country. Maybe this evening.)
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying my meetings with my colleagues here in Slough. (And no door desks….!)

Amazon Associates just released a blog widget that provides access to the samples for their inventory of MP3 music. I thought I’d use it to show you some of the music I’ve been adding to my collection. One track per album:

Click the play button to get things started; then you can browse the list of songs. Select a song to see the artist and album info.
I still buy the occasional physical CD, and there are a few things that I can only get at iTunes, but these days I’m buying most of my music from Amazon. It’s not just that I work for them (which I do), or that the prices are good (which they are). It’s mostly the convenience of browsing. The feature that lets you play all of the clips from an album is incredibly useful: that’s the main reason why I bought the first Chicago album, for example. Everybody knows the big hits – “Listen”, “I’m A Man” – even if you’ve only heard them at the start of a “Greatest Hits” collection. Anyway, I’d forgotten what an impressive album that first release was. I bought it when it first came out, along with the second Blood, Sweat & Tears album, and I was blown away by the aggressive fusion of jazz, rock, and blues.
Anyway, let’s see how this MP3 widget thing works. I might start using it for my “random 10” postings (which have fallen off recently – mea culpa).

Assuming no last-minute hitches, 31 hours from now I’ll be heading off around the world. It’s not quite the longest trip I’ve ever taken, but who’s counting? Seattle to Beijing (via San Francisco) on Sunday; then Beijing to Hyderabad (via Singapore) the following Friday; then a mere hop down to Bangalore on Tuesday 17th; then the really weird bit: Bangalore to London, via Frankfurt, leaving at 1:55am on Sunday 25th and arriving at 10:40am the same day; and finally London to Seattle via Chicago on May 27th.
The planning for this trip has been more than a little crazy. First, I was supposed to be going with a colleague; then he cancelled out. Next I had to obtain a replacement passport, and (obviously) I couldn’t get my visas for India and China until it arrived. Then there were some minor changes in visa processing. (Why do changes never reduce the processing time?) Then a Seattle meeting appeared on my calendar for May 28th, and I decided that I really, really needed to be there, so I shifted my return flight from Thursday to Tuesday. The final curve-ball was that yesterday I found that I needed to upgrade to Office 2008 to cope with a particular document I’m working on, and I finally got that taken care of later this afternoon.
Anyway, the upshot is that my passport (with visas) is supposed to arrive tomorrow, Saturday morning, less than 24 hours before I depart. I was chewing my fingernails (metaphorically, OK?); now I’m just checking the FedEx tracking page every few minutes.
Tomorrow I pack ((Actually, I’ll get my hair cut, pick up my dry cleaning, then pack, and if time permits I’ll go to the Sounders game. Maybe.)), and Sunday I fly. After the mad scramble to get ready, I’m actually quite confident that the trip will go smoothly. I’ve replaced the 1GB SD card in my camera with a 2GB, because I’m planning to take plenty of pictures, but I probably won’t upload them until get back. This might seem to be the perfect trip to exploit the weightlessness of my MacBook Air, but in fact I’m bringing “Black Beauty”, my Amazon-supplied MacBook (freshly upgraded with Leopard and Office 2008). I’ve had my shots, and I’m packing the necessary meds to cope with the unexpected.
Let’s see… my passport is currently in Oakland. Time to fly.
UPDATE: One bonus, one glitch (resolved). The bonus is that I was able to purchase an upgrade to Economy Plus for SFO-PEK, so rather than being stuck in a middle seat at the back of a 100% full Economy section, I’ll now have a decent window seat and some legroom. The glitch was that FedEx tried to deliver my passport too early this morning, and didn’t bother to call the number on the waybill. I checked in with customer service, twice; when I realized that they weren’t going to deliver the package until Monday, I went down to the FedEx office to collect it. Not what I wanted to be doing, but never mind.

2:45am alarm. 3:35am bus. 6:00am flight, SEA-SFO. And then a week in California: two days visiting Amazon operations, Saturday and Sunday seeing friends and family, and then four days at Stanford. And I’ve got a Kindle-full of free science fiction to read, and an iPhone full of Radiohead to listen to. What more could I want? (OK, I guess a later flight would be nice.)

If you want to know what we’re doing here at Amazon in the area of web services – and why! – check out this interview by Scoble with Jeff Barr:

Search Amazon.com for “19-0”, and you’ll see two books:

What do you do when a book comes out that attracts all sorts of bad reviews, and it sounds really bad, and the author comes across as an obnoxious jerk, and the last thing you want to do is to buy the book and help to turn it into a best-seller, but nevertheless you have this insatiable curiosity to actually read a bit of it, to see what everyone else is talking about, and you could always go to the library and hope that it’s in, so that you can browse it for a bit, but it’s not that important…
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s had this experience. But now there’s a way to scratch that itch. I’m talking about the Kindle, of course. One of the cool features is that you can download a free sample of most books, so that you can check them out for yourself. I’ve done this several times, and I have to (reluctantly) say that the “conversion rate” is pretty high. You start reading, get into the groove, turn the page, and there’s the seductive “Click here to buy this book”.
Click.
Anyway, the trashy book of the moment is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. Back around the time I took the 11-Plus exam, I remember coming across a book about literary devices with long Greek names, and I took great pleasure in using and abusing them in my schoolwork. Eventually my teacher pointed out that flashy tricks were no substitute for real argument, and that (contra Humpty Dumpty) my essays were not improved by redefining a key term as “just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.
Apparently, Jonah Goldberg missed that lesson, and it has led to a dubious honour. Here’s John Cole over at Balloon Juice:

First there was Godwin’s Law. Then we had the less noticeable Kevin’s Law and Cole’s Law. Now, after reading the Jonah Goldberg interview in Salon, our commentariat has come up with the “Goldberg Principle”:

You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words.

Read the Salon interview and tell me that isn’t a perfect description.

So I read the Salon interview, and I was appalled at how juvenile Goldberg sounded. The folks at Balloon Juice, Orcinus, and everywhere else have been quoting it to death, so I will restrict myself to one gem:

[Mussolini] says, for example, “Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right ‘, a Fascist century.
“Yeah, I’m perfectly willing to concede there’s a lot of stuff Mussolini says, but you’ve got to remember, by ‘32, socialism is starting to essentially mean Bolshevism. And if you get too caught up in the labels, rather than the policies, you get yourself into something of a pickle.

Ouch.
Eventually I decided that I really had to see this crap for myself ((Itch. Scratch.)), and a couple of clicks later a sample was installed on my Kindle. I read the first few pages, and my reaction surprised me.
I started to laugh.
If it were not for independent evidence to the contrary, I’d swear that we were dealing with a Colbert Report-style parody. (Not as good, but of the same genre.) As far as I can see, Goldberg seems to think that the following chain of “reasoning” will support his thesis:

1. Academics in the field of political science have difficulty in coming up with a single, concise definition of fascism. (Although, curiously, Goldberg doesn’t bother to consider the standard and broadly-accepted authorities on the subject.)
2. In popular usage, fascism has been used as a fairly broad-brush slur. (Hardly surprising, after WW2 and the Holocaust, but Goldberg doesn’t mention that obvious connection.)
3. As a result, serious writers (like George Orwell, with obligatory genuflection) say that the word “has no meaning”. (However, Goldberg mentions this before getting to post-war usage, thus implying that Orwell’s comment referred to the political science debate. Cute, that.)
4. “In short ‘fascist’ is a modern word for heretic.”
5. Having detached fascism from its original meaning, Goldberg can now return to the domain of political science and redefine it as the opposite of the consensus usage.

There’s an interesting parallel here with evolution. Creationists challenge the science by extracting the technical word “theory”, redefining it according to an unrelated popular usage, and then injecting this usage into the question of science.
Ultimately, however, I can’t sustain my laughter, because of the poison that Goldberg seeks to spread with this nonsense. He’s not as obviously silly as, say, Coulter, but that doesn’t mean that he’s harmless. Here’s an extended quote from Dave Neiwert’s review at the American Prospect:

The title alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: Of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn’t content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.
Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of “fascism” as meaning “something not desirable.” Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word’s meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it — he refers to Orwell’s critique as his “definition of fascism.”
And then Goldberg proceeds to define everything that he himself considers undesirable as “fascist.” This is just about everything even remotely and vaguely thought of as “liberal”: vegetarianism, Social Security, multiculturalism, the “war on poverty,” “the politics of meaning.” The figures he labels as fascist range from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg’s primary achievement is to rob the word of all meaning — Newspeak incarnate.

Fortunately I can purge my Kindle of Goldberg’s nonsense with a couple of clicks in Content Manager. I would almost wish that we could do the same thing in the world of print – but Goldberg would doubtless seize upon my sentiment as another example of “liberal fascism”.

From the review in American Scientist Online of Margaret A. Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science:

It is fortunate that Mind as Machine is highly readable, particularly because it contains 1,452 pages of text, divided into two very large volumes. Because the references and indices (which fill an additional 179 pages) are at the end of the second volume, readers will need to have it on hand as they make their way through the first. Given that together these tomes weigh more than 7 pounds, this is not light reading!

Pricing would be tricky, though. Amazon is asking $188, which is $62 off list price. What would be a reasonable charge for a volume (actually two!) which one could not lend out, or donate to a library…?