The Lexicographer's Rules

I was alerted to the existence of this incredibly wonky blog about writing style and errors in the Wall Street Journal by a New Yorker article about Rupert Murdoch's bid to purchase Dow Jones, which owns the newspaper.

Gillette man’s custom shifter knobs are sent to customers around the world. "A man from Idaho once sent Roosa a film canister containing then-live ticks that he had pulled off his dog along with several of his own wisdom teeth that a doctor had extracted. He wanted the teeth to be placed in the center of the knob with the ticks surrounding them on various levels—. Other items that Roosa has put in shifter knobs have varied—a squirrel skull, car brand logos and even some ballet slippers for his grown daughter who, as a child, loved to dance."

Thirteen-year-old Kunal Sah is a finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and working under hardships not of his own making.

He’s separated from his parents, who were sent back to a province in Bihar State, India, after being denied political asylum, while he lives in Utah with his aunt and uncle. They have all faced the struggle of being non-white non-Mormons, which has meant pressure to convert from Hinduism to Mormonism and out-and-out racism from locals and travelers alike. And they seem to have all been suffering from “motel wars”: the family owns a motel in a town roughly halfway between Las Vegas and Denver and the competition is fierce and, apparently, unkind, although the story provides few details.

German journalist Daniel Sturm conducted an engrossing interview with Gifford Doxsee, who was in Dresden with Kurt Vonnegut and is an Ohio University professor emeritus of history. They discuss Vonnegut, the war, death, bombing, corpse removal, and politics.

Anybody who has ever spent time observing the ad hoc warez or music download networks—be they FTP, Hotline, Napster, Gnutella, or anything similar—would not find the story that a sliver of a percent of people who visit user-driven web sites upload content to be a surprise. They already know most people are observers or takers.

It’s one of the reasons why BitTorrent works like it does: to participate, it forces everyone to upload. Don’t have anything to upload? Well, whatever you’re downloading quickly becomes an upload. It’s better than the “no leeches!” policies from the old days, in which you had to prove your l33tness by uploading a few files first, and then, maybe, if the admin wasn’t a worthless toe rag, you’d get some sort of limited access.

There are still remnants of misunderstanding in all the P2P apps, where users and penalized for having insufficient upload speeds or an insufficient number of files available for download. My take is that you have to let the poorly provisioned into the tent and let the well-provisioned carry the extra load. Same for content: let those who have the content deliver it, and don’t penalize anyone else. In fact, do like YouTube and reward those users who bring content, which should make less leech and more l33t as more users become producers instead of consumers.