A follow-up on male genital mutilation

Following up on my earlier post about circumcision, I want to mention that my sister did not circumcise her son, who is named Dylan and is, as expected, even cuter than fifty animals driving.

A friend of the family who gave birth just a few days later, however, did circumcise her son, partly because men in her family have had problems with penile infections--one had to be circumcised as a teenager, not a pleasant experience.

I'd like to post one of the most informative comments I've read on the subject, an email I received a few days ago:

Hi Ben -

As a fellow Jew who was also uncircumcised (until mid-adulthood), I'd like to make a few points - maybe too late for your letter, but for you to keep in mind.

1) Jewish circumcision differs from hospital circumcision in technique and result.

Basically, Jewish circumcision preserves the sensitive inner lining of the foreskin. Only a portion of the outer layer of skin is removed (this is a lot easier to explain to a fellow uncut guy!) The pinkish inner layer of skin gathers in folds behind the head of the penis, and may cup it like an acorn cup. This skin accommodates erection and continues to fulfill its sensory function.

This is in sharp contrast to most hospital circumcisions, in which everything is removed. These are the guys with the same colored skin all the way down to the head. As some posters here have mentioned, often this leads to tightness, torsion, or friction.

So not all circumcisions are alike.

2) Israel has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Soviet emigres, and as a result tens of thousands of adults underwent (Jewish style) circumcision. Israeli doctors used this opportunity to ask the sexual pleasure question - they sent follow-up surveys to several thousand men who underwent circumcision.

The results split evenly into thirds:

1/3 said "now it's better"
1/3 said "now it's worse"
1/3 said "no significant change"

Immediately the pro- and anti- circ forces set out to prove their point using this study.

So the doctors went back and correlated between the response to this question and the reason given for circumcision.

The "now it's worse" group contained almost all the men who were circumcised for external reasons - pressure from peers or girlfriends.

The other 2 groups contained mostly men who were circumcised because they themselves wanted it.

So the nerves between the ears are at least as important as those between the legs...

Shalom and best wishes -

--Posted by Anonymous

I love me, too

On economist Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog, he posts his "symmetry thesis":

A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.

I find the symmetry thesis a surprisingly strong predictor of human behavior and inclination.

Do I want to know how much you like me? It is simple. I imagine how much I like you. (If you do the same, are we circular? Or does some kind of fixed point theorem apply?)

...

Unilateral crushes are possible and indeed common, although with repeated contact they usually collapse into symmetry, one way or the other.

I can imagine several (non-exclusive) mechanisms in support of the symmetry thesis. Perhaps "having a connection" -- which is mutual by nature -- is the key to true liking and attraction.

The idea is just meant to be provocative, and he urges doubtful readers to "keep it in the back of your mind, and see if it proves useful over the next few years."

I think the amount X feels she could love Y needs to be differentiated from the amount X does love Y. I imagine that each successful romantic relationship (that is, pair of people who get at least as far as dating happily) is preceded by several failed connections in which the desire was great but the reciprocity not. To move on, I think we tend to remember these as more even than they really were; I am always surprised to see the intensity of emotion in my old journals towards people and situations that now evoke only a glimmer of what they once made me feel.

One commentor writes:

I think a common theoretical arguement against the symmetry thesis is the "Groucho Marx Syndrome", made manifest in Woodie Allen's Annie Hall: 'I refuse to join any club that will have me as a member.'

This maps into the truism 'wanting is better than having,' which has moderate support from hedonic theory.

Of course, after Alfie rejects Annie, he regrets his decision and his love returns.

Different types of people, like Alfie and Annie, may have a tendency to love/like people who don't reciprocate evenly--who either show them more love or less.

Open calls for revolution

Wired copy chief Tony Long just posted a dead serious call for outright revolution in the United States:

So why aren't the streets clogged with angry Americans demanding to know why their president lied and deceived them so he could attack a country that had absolutely nothing to do with his so-called war on terror? ...

Why aren't we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? ...

Why aren't irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast...?

Why aren't enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings...?

Why aren't we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America...?

In short, where the hell is everybody? ...

Bread and circuses. The government and the corporations are giving us bread and circuses to keep us sufficiently distracted so the powers that be can pursue their agendas...

The real voices of dissent and engagement are found on the internet these days, but the internet is simply too diffuse to effectively galvanize a revolution.

And we desperately need a revolution.

Not an unusual sentiment, but it's a sign of the divide in political opinion in the US that Wired would publish this.

I finally saw V for Vendetta the other day. It's strange that Alan Moore, who wrote the original comic, took his name off the film, because it was an absolutely faithful adaptation. That was its problem. The book is an open call for violent revolution along the lines of Che Guevara's disastrous Bolivia campaign, or what critics to the left of Che call "focoism"--the idea that the hard work of building a popular revolution can be replaced with dramatic and violent acts of defiance. So is the movie.

I am amazed that a successful, major Hollywood film applauds the murders of stand-ins for Bill O'Reilly, George Bush, and John Ashcroft (the original book essentially called for the murder of Margaret Thatcher), and that and there is little controversy over this.

Getting teary with celebrity blogs

The internet was made for the military to be able to communicate after a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. But in another sense, the internet--and in particular, blogs--was made for stuff like Mark Cuban's blog post after the Dallas Mavericks' game seven, overtime, upset victory over the Spurs, and Kevin Smith's blog post about the response at Cannes to Clerks II.

Cuban:

I have never seen or felt anything like that in my entire life. It was like watching 7 heavyweight championship fights. You know that any second either combatant can throw a haymaker and end the entire thing.
...
Going into last night the mood in the locker room was surreal. No one was tense. It wasnt like the guys were even nervous.
...
When they hit that 3 pointer to go ahead. All I could think about is that I wasnt ready to go to the Lune , a local Dallas bar. I had seen us come back in this situation before. I trusted that we would get our shot. I couldnt hear what they called in the huddle, so i had no idea what was coming. I expected we would go for the quick 2. Then Dirk did his thing, and all of the sudden it was tied.

Like Deja Vu all over again, we just needed 1 stop. We got it.

Overtime the Legend of Ghana Diop was born. A broken nose trying to guard [Tim Duncan]. Watching him push gauze up his nose, Ghana didnt blink. He just went out and got a huge dunk, 2 of the biggest offensive rebounds in Mavericks history and a dunk. When Ghana got the pass and finished the dunk, all I could think of was Avery pre game saying “trust your teammates. Trust the system.”

That symbolized this Mavericks team.

Smith:

Last night, we debuted “Clerks II” at the Cannes Film Festival.
...
When the flick ended and the credits started rolling, a standing ovation began that lasted a full eight minutes. It was surreal and wonderful, and it just kept going and going. I looked to Harvey (Weinstein, our boss), that old Cannes war-horse, to see if the cast and I should start heading out of the theater: as it was two in the morning and the applause wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. But from two aisles back, he responded with a waving “No” finger at me, mouthing the words “Don’t move.” So we all stayed put.
...
The applause finally stopped after eight minutes. Harvey was over the moon about it. “In my thirty years of coming here, I’ve never seen a standing ovation last that long at a midnight show in Cannes,” he said. “Ever.”

En route to the theater, I prayed that the notoriously fickle Cannes’ audience wouldn’t boo the flick... After the screening, I started praying that I never forget that insanely special moment that I shared with Jeff, Brian, Rosario, Mos and Jen - when time seemed to stand still, and at the world’s most famous film festival, we all stared wide-eyed (and wider-smiled) at a room-full of cats staring back at us (with equally wide smiles and palms cooked red from non-stop applause) who really, really “got” what we were trying to communicate with “Clerks II”.

NY Times online: rush to publish leaves Heat burned

The NY Times' Liz Robbins, in an article posted late last night on Saturday's Pistons-Heat playoff game, error in bold:

[Guard Dwyane] Wade scored 10 of his game-high 35 points in the final quarter, lifting the Miami Heat past its only patch of trouble from the Pistons and on to a 98-83 victory in Game 3 of the N.B.A. Eastern Conference finals on Saturday night. Detroit leads the series, 2-1.

Miami leads, not Detroit. The error was fixed after a few hours.

Online articles tend to have more errors than their printed counterparts, but Nytimes.com is rife with them these days. They seem to rush certain articles to the website without a full copyedit to capture early readers, with the plan to revise them a few hours later.

This practice, by Nytimes.com and most other new sites, raises a few questions. I imagine that the correction to the article above won't be noted for the record, either online or in print. But what if the erroneous version shows up later in search engine caches? A formal correction sets the record straight, but if no recognition is given to an article's error, would a writer be correct in quoting the original text as normal Times reporting? What if the article's errors are fixed by the time it runs in print, but the mistake is left in the online version for months or years after it was published?

On a different note, the article also reports two new nicknames created by Shaquille O'Neal:

When O'Neal first arrived in Miami last season, he immediately gave Wade the nickname Flash, to complement a comic book nickname he gave himself, Superman.

I wonder if Al Pacino is miffed that Shaq's previous nickname for Wade has competition? From a recent New York Post article by Evan Grossman:

In the past, O'Neal played with three up-and-coming shooting guards, but never before has Shaq taken one under his wing quite like Wade. Shaq compared playing with a young Penny Hardaway in Orlando, a young Kobe Bryant with the Lakers and now a young Wade with the Heat.

"The difference between those three is the Godfather trilogy," O'Neal said in classic Shaq-speak. "One is Fredo, who was never ready for me to hand it over to him. One is Sonny, who will do whatever it takes to be the man, and one is Michael, who if you watch the trilogy, the Godfather hands it over to Michael. So I have no problem handing it over to Dwyane."

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize Shaq was comparing Kobe to the psychotic Sonny, and Penny with the weaker Fredo characters from that movie.
...
"I would love to see the ball in my hands, but I'm not the best player or the best shooter on this team," O'Neal said. "I don't mind handing it over to Michael Dwyane Corleone."

I wonder if the Times has received corrections from readers over Dwyane Wade's first name, which really is spelled that way, and must cause as much trouble as Andruw Jones and bell hooks put together.

Letter to Eliot Spitzer: stop enforcing bad LLC law

I sent this letter today to Eliot Spitzer's office:

Dear Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, and to whom it may concern,

I am writing because I am a member of a recently-formed Limited Liability Company in New York State. I have always been a supporter of Attorney General Spitzer, and I campaigned for him on election day, 1998. I have been dismayed, however, to read about how Attorney General Spitzer has fought to support the unfair LLC laws in New York State that require expensive "publication" in newspapers of the state's choice for six weeks--if the LLC does not comply, New York State Limited Liability Company Law § 206 removes the company's right to bring suits in court.

These obscure and essentially undistributed newspapers, everyone knows, exist solely because of an unholy alliance with Albany, and in 2001 one Manhattan LLC, Barklee Realty, whose owner had previously spent $1645 publishing a previous LLC's creation, refused to pay and brought the matter to the New York State Supreme Court, which ruled in 2001 that requiring such publication was a violation of the due process, equal protection, and acces to court clauses of the United States Consitution (Fifth and Fourteenth amendments) and the New York State Constitution (Article I § 11, Article X § 4). The Supreme Court called it "an obvious stretch to assume that any potential defendant to an action commenced by a limited liability company would be perusing the classifieds on a regular basis so as to note the organizing information provided by a newly formed LLC", and enjoined the enforcement of the law.

Though his Rebublican predecessor as Attorney General opposed the unfair publication requirement, Eliot Spitzer took great pains to support it, flouting the Supreme Court order and seeking to appeal the ruling by arguing, according to the financial appeals judge who took his side, that "the publication requirements as a condition to a limited liability company's access to the courts" does not need to "enhance the adjudication of justice" in order to be justified. Spitzer's appeal was successful, and the law stands, to the tune of millions of dollars per year in tax revenues lost because many businesses avoid forming in New York, and millions more handed to a special interest and--through campaign contributions that make "adjudication of justice" sometimes not seem to matter so much--shared by state politicians.

The LLC law might have been fair in an earlier time, of less access to public records, and it still might be fair today if it allowed publication in any journal of at least a given circulation and for a reasonable amount of time; this would provide the desired effect of allowing clear reference to the Articles of Organization and identities of the founders in case of disputes later. But the law as it stands is clearly the result of campaign funding by an antiquated corner of the newspaper industry, and not by genuine public interest.

Thanks to Attorney General Spitzer's continued refusal to accept the Supreme Court's fair ruling, my LLC, until it pays for six weeks of a Potemkin publication's state-granted monopoly on ad space, does not have the right to sue or countersue in court, no matter how just the cause.

Thank you,
Benjamin Wheeler
Brooklyn, NY

Jane Austen in the barroom

Yesterday I was delighted to find an early unpublished Jane Austen story, "Jack and Alice." My brother's name is Jack, so I thought this would be the coolest thing to happen to the Boone siblings since my dad discovered that John Jacob Astor's children were named Jack and Alice. I made two copies of the story (from in the Minor Works volume of the collected Jane Austen) to send to my parents and went to 1020 to watch the Red Sox-Yankees game with my friend Brette. I showed her the story and then set it off to the side of our table so we wouldn't accidentally spill beer on it. After the Red Sox lost, the bartender came over and picked up the story and started to read it. I doubted that he was really interested in Jane Austen juvenilia.

Why all the backstory about taking young Jane Austen to a bar? Because "Jack and Alice" is about two drunk siblings! I've never felt so poorly served by a Jane Austen story, ever. Brette and I play the "which Jane Austen character are you?" game sometimes, and my answer tends to waver between Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot. Why can't I share a name with an honorable Jane Austen character? Alice Johnson is a walking disaster, and her brother Jack is a cad. He dies in the seventh chapter, leaving Alice a large estate that she'll no doubt drink away. It's not surprising that Alice and Jack don't have a place in Pemberley, the online estate of Janeites.

In the story, which is only ten pages long, Lady Williams tries to counsel Alice against her heavy drinking to no avail, but Lady Williams is also something of a gossip:

"When you are more intimately acquainted with my Alice you will not be surprised, Lucy, to see the dear Creature drink a little too much; for such things happen every day. She has many rare & charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them. The whole Family are indeed a sad drunken set. I am sorry to say too that I never knew three such thorough Gamesters as they are, more particularly Alice. But she is a charming girl. I fancy not one of the sweetest tempers in the world; to be sure I have seen her in such passions! However she is a sweet young Woman. I am sure you'll like her. I scarcely know any one so amiable.--Oh! that you could but have seen her the other Evening! How she raved! & on such a trifle too! She is indeed a most pleasing Girl. I shall always love her!"

The arrogant eligible bachelor of the story, Charles Adams, rejects Alice, telling her father:

"Your daugher sir, is neither sufficiently beautifull, sufficiently amiable, sufficiently witty, nor sufficiently rich for me,--I expect nothing more in my wife than my wife will find in me--Perfection."

Alice's reaction is typical: "She flew to her bottle & it was soon forgot."

The story ends with a murder, a hanging, and a cliffhanger about who Charles Adams will marry. So it's a satire, but an extremely minor one. My parents don't need to see their children's names sullied in such a way--although my dad loves to point out that the Astor children frittered away the estate, too.

I'll stick to Northanger Abbey.

Primitive pirate passions were a prelude to death!

As part of their salute to the pulp novel, Slate asked several book cover designers to create pulp covers for classic stories. The results are beautiful and hilarious.

I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury when I was a teenager and own multiple editions of his books. This illustrated biography of Bradbury features an amazing overviews of the cover art for his books and stories. The Grand Master editions were my favorites because they looked like sinister Lisa Frank. The Grand Master cover of the The Martian Chronicles looks like the West Mesa in Albuquerque, except without water or martians. As a wry (or pretentious) 14-year-old, I cracked myself for weeks when I displayed my copy of Agatha Christie's By the Pricking of My Thumbs with Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Wow, the cover art on the new edition of By the Pricking of My Thumbs is terrible. I think I had this edition, or one similar to this one.

Digital art, swiftly obsolete, is unexpectedly ephemeral

Wired commentator "Momus" has a disturbing article about the swift obsolescence of media and file formats, and what this means for digital art:

The other day I tried to watch a Flash media piece my friend Florian Perret and I made back in 2002 for the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art's Digital Gallery. It wouldn't play because, according to MoCA's error page, "Suffusia: A Beautiful Life requires the current Flash Player." Flash 8 wasn't good enough for the MoCA website; it wanted Flash 6 or nothing.

Eventually I was able to reach the file by another route. But it made me think about just how quickly formats die these days. I remembered how, back in 2000, blown away by Mumbleboy's Flash work, I speculated that, had this program been around when I was 20, I'd have dedicated my life to making Flash files instead of pop records. After all, we tend to fall in love with media, programs, idioms or formats even before we have anything to say in them.
...
But nobody at this point knows whether the Flash medium itself is just a flash-in-the-pan. Who's going to think of something like that as a vocation? Who's going to try to be "the Tolstoy of Flash" when we don't know whether Flash will even be around in 10 years, let alone a hundred?

Ten years ago I taught myself to use Macromedia Director (it was release 4.0 at the time) and made a CD-ROM called This Must Stop! I put as much effort into it as I put into my records, but just 10 years later This Must Stop! ... is accessible only to cranks and connoisseurs, members of the "dead formats society" who've invested in the dead tech required to play it.

Momus goes on to talk about Jacques Derrida's idea that "archiving represents both attempting to preserve something to be remembered and leaving out something to be forgotten."

When I interned at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford, the staff was painfully aware that every esoteric detail about King's activities that we catalogued meant that we were not cataloguing an equal amount of information on the broader black liberation movement, which has received surprisingly little basic research attention considering its huge impact on American society.

Unfortunately, big money donors give for research on King far more than they do for research on the movement's poorly-catalogued rank-and-file organizers and marchers. Even in death, King's iconic national image was blunting the movement's effectiveness, something he was widely criticized for within the ranks during the late 50s and early 60s.

Mescalanza, formerly rose, still sweet

An excellent Salon article (you gotta watch an ad to read it) by Ruth Shalit describes companies that specialize in naming other companies. Some create consistently bland names like "Altria" or "Aquent", but others--like those from firm A Hundred Monkeys--have a bit more character:

We got so much more than a name," says Robin Bahr of 98point6 [a health care site formerly called "MedicaLogic"]. "I mean, I got a name for my daughter. One of our senior executives identified strongly with 'Mescalanza.' No one calls him Jim anymore. His name is Mescalanza." Meanwhile, she says, "our senior manager for Internet development just fell in love with the name 'Jamcracker.' And so today, the Harvey meeting is known as the Jamcracker meeting. There are 300 people at this company who identify Jamcracker with Harvey."

...

What's more, at A Hundred Monkeys, $65,000 will buy you an entire word. Some rival firms charge more than that for a mere suffix.

Consider Luxon Cara's $70,000 "identity program" for US Air. The airline "wanted to be repositioned and perceived as a major U.S. airline," says John Hudson, Luxon Cara's president. "And so we researched this. We checked it out globally. We basically lived with them for nine months to a year. It was one of the most exciting things we ever did."

What was the new name? I asked. And when would it be unveiled? I was guessing Skystar, Glident, Proficienta. "Oh, it's already been unveiled," Lagow explains. I was perplexed. "But isn't US Air still US Air?" I asked. "I was just in an airport the other day, and I could have sworn ..."

"No, no," Lagow says. "It's been changed to US Airways."

I definitely bought the US Airways rebranding hook, line, etc. Even the envelope the tickets came in seemed somehow more efficient and helpful.

I've been developing a todo list program in my spare time for a year or so, and trying to find a good name. (If you have a suggestion, please let me know.) When I look at the names of other todo list programs, the one that stands out to me is the one with a very A Hundred Monkeys-style name:

• Bla Bla List
• Ta-da List
• Tudu List
• Remember The Milk
• Voo2Do

No question, I'd try Remember The Milk first. (Don't bother, you'd have to by a Harvard Symbology department chair to figure it out. Try Ta-da List.)

Blazing instant ray of death from outer space

The AP reports that the US military has considered developing weapons to send "directed-energy" pulses, also known to sci-fi fans as "phasers" or "death-ray guns":

"Directed-energy'' pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on "Star Trek'' could be set to kill or merely stun.

Such weapons are now nearing fruition. But logistical issues have delayed their battlefield debut -- even as soldiers in Iraq encounter tense urban situations in which the nonlethal capabilities of directed energy could be put to the test.

...

The hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target -- whether a human or a mechanical object -- has no chance to avoid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls.

...

"When you're dealing with people whose full intent is to die, you can't give people a choice of whether to comply," said George Gibbs, a systems engineer for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad Program who oversees directed-energy projects. "What I'm looking for is a way to shoot everybody, and they're all OK."

I do appreciate the humane spin on this impending invention, but it does still hasten the day that anyone, anywhere, can put anyone else in their coordinates and kill them instantly at whim.

Massive multiplayer online lending

Salon has an article (that you might have to watch an ad to read) about a fascinating new trend in money lending -- what it calls "P2P lending". Sites like Prosper and Zopa allow borrowers to post appeals to potential lenders, who group together with individual loans of $100 or so if they trust the borrower to make good. This way, lenders get excellent interest rates and distribute the impact of defaults, which are (so far) surprisingly few.

One thing the article discusses is how Prosper encourages users to form official borrowing groups whose members vouch for each other. Groups compete with catchy names and themes, from volunteer firefighters to Columbia University graduates. The groups do actually improve the economics of the lending system, by pre-screening members and developing reputations based on members' default rates, but I bet their real function is to create mild social networking seems to draw in users and make the site feel like a community where a significant number of other users is always present.

From the article:

Many of the lenders on Prosper, for instance, know almost nothing about BusyLady52, not even her name (which she asked me not to publish). What they do know about her (a middling credit score, a couple of current delinquencies) is the sort of thing that would render her ineligible for a traditional loan. Yet lenders saw in her story some spark of genuine responsibility, a possibility that she'd do well if given a chance. More than 50 people got together to give her a total of $5,000 at a 16 percent rate. She now says she's determined to set her money straight again, if only to prove herself to those who invested in her.
...
Often, though, borrowers will argue that these numbers don't tell the whole story. Sometimes, they have a point. If I told you about Person X, who had a credit rating of H.R. -- "high risk," the lowest rating -- a string of recent delinquencies, and a 20 percent debt-to-income ratio, you'd probably conclude that she was heading straight to bankruptcy. Lending this person money would be about as profitable as throwing it into a fountain and waiting for your wish to come true. But what if I also told you that this person, Suzy, had accumulated her debt while she was studying at Harvard Law School? And what if I mentioned that she had just graduated with honors, and had accepted a job at a Manhattan firm with a starting salary of $140,000 a year? She only needs a loan to tide her over until she starts work. Now I tell you that she's willing to pay a 20 percent interest rate on your money. Would you take a risk on her now?

To turn heads, heads should be soulless

According to a recent NY Times article, the increasing use of search engines and news aggregators like Google News to find news articles is changing the way their headlines and section titles are written:

About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."

Some news sites offer two headlines. One headline, often on the first Web page, is clever, meant to attract human readers. Then, one click to a second Web page, a more quotidian, factual headline appears with the article itself. The popular BBC News Web site does this routinely on longer articles.

Nic Newman, head of product development and technology at BBC News Interactive, pointed to a few examples from last Wednesday. The first headline a human reader sees: "Unsafe sex: Has Jacob Zuma's rape trial hit South Africa's war on AIDS?" One click down: "Zuma testimony sparks HIV fear." Another headline meant to lure the human reader: "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." One click down: "Obituary: Gene Pitney."

...

In the print version of The New York Times, an article last Tuesday on Florida beating U.C.L.A. for the men's college basketball championship carried a longish headline, with allusions to sports history: "It's Chemistry Over Pedigree as Gators Roll to First Title." On the Times Web site, whose staff has undergone some search-engine optimization training, the headline of the article was, "Gators Cap Run With First Title."

I found this article through a recent post on the Collision Detection blog which discusses the phenomenon, along with some advice:

One of the biggest areas of change is headline-writing. Normally, a headline writer tries to use some witty wordplay to attract readers: A literary or cinematic allusion, perhaps, or maybe a pun. But such nuances are totally lost on machines. A bot is trying to quickly figure out the content of an article, and wordplay just gets in the way. Though the article doesn't discuss it in this depth, this dilemma is known, in A.I. circles, as "the problem of synonymity": A machine doesn't know that when a copywriter pens the line "A horse of a different color", she's not talking about horses. The bot might accidentally slot that story into the sports section, even if the piece is actually about politics.

...

Here's a further thought. When I interviewed Cory Doctorow -- cofounder of Boing Boing -- for my recent New York magazine feature on blogging, he pointed out an interesting aspect of Boing Boing's success: Simple, straightforward headlines. Many bloggers tend to write clever, wry, allusive heads to their blog posts. This is a big mistake, Cory said, because so many people use RSS readers to scan their favorite blogs. Many RSS