Thursday, December 04, 2003

This could be a very good basketball season in Chapel Hill. Raymond Felton is on his way to stardom, and he drives the bus. Sean May is the kind of mobile big man that has traditionally shredded Carolina's big stiffs. Jawad Williams has a George Lynch-like toughness about him. Scott and Manuel have their roles. I think McCants is the x-factor. If he really wants to be great, he can be great. And that would make the difference for this team. Roy Williams may be the guy to get that greatness from him. Meanwhile, Duke showed last night its traditional ability to simply destroy an opponent. I've never seen a basketball team do that, year in and year out, the way K's Duke teams do it. 6:06:32 PM    comment []

The ability to subscribe to blogs and other websites via simple syndication software is a very big deal, writes Scott Rosenberg (worth clicking thru the ad): "Along with blogs, RSS fulfills the Internet visionaries' prediction that we'd all find a set of 'human filters' to help us navigate the new information seas." My blog software, Radio, has a built-in aggregator. It gets more useful almost every day, as more sites push their content out via RSS. But Rosenberg says syndication needs a better name. Just as "HTML" is not as alluring or explanatory as "the Web," RSS demands a slick moniker. There are actually two things that could be named here -- the pool of cherry-picked information made available by syndication (analogous to "the Web") and the act of dipping into this pool (analogous to "surfing the Web.") Mining for gold? Skimming the cream? Distilling the essence? Hmm. This is going to take some thought. 5:58:52 PM    comment []

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." 5:14:29 PM    comment []

First North Carolina Rep. Cass Ballenger blamed the stress of living near an Arab advocacy group for breaking up his 50-year marriage. Now the group is suing Ballenger for defamation. Ballenger announced this week that he is retiring from the House. 5:01:27 PM    comment []

Something interesting is going on when Josh Marshall says Paul Wolfowitz deserves "great credit" for anything. Marshall is giving Wolfowitz props for taking the Geneva Accords seriously. Could this open source diplomacy really help bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians? The peace plan is advancing not via government, but despite government. Centralized power has failed to bring peace; now people are taking it upon themselves to route around the problem. Last month it was Georgia's turn to continue the velvet revolution that ended the Cold War. Next year in Jerusalem? 4:38:07 PM    comment []

Apparently it's hard enough to tell your parents that you are a wiccan that the process has its own name: coming out of the broom closet. 4:12:55 PM    comment []