Well, my webhost was out for most the day and all my sites were down. Fortunately, I am finally back up. There error messages were all saying that the disk on the host was full, and all database connections were consumed.
 
So I am left wondering it it was a problem with my code gone wild, if it was a simple hardware failure, or if another site on the web host having problems. My logs did not show unusual activity. There were several malformed bots on my sites today. Days like this make me wish I had access to the server.

Looks like Blogger now has a program to add comments to entries.
 
It's typical, about a month ago,  I finally sat down and wrote a program to track blogger comments. Oh well, I would rather use the blogger program.
 
Anyway, I just changed my profile, and erased the links to the small number of comments that were left on my site. I apologize to the two people who took time to respond to posts in the past.

I just made my first electronic quarterly tax payment with the IRS EFTPS tax payment system; So, I saved a stamp, saved Cliff Clavin the effort of sorting and delivering mail, and saved the effort involved in having an office federal letter-opener-person open an envelope.
 
Having done all that, I now need to make my complaint about how stupid it is that we pay taxes on estimated amounts. I haven't a clue about how much money I will make this year.  If people visit my get rich quick scheme, I might get rich quick. In all likelihood sanity will prevail and I will keep having to work temp jobs for food.
 
Personally, I think the best way to handle taxes would be to define a special tax account at a bank. Taxes would be assessed as money is withdrawn from the account. If the taxes were taxen out automatically as we did our day to day business, people could better manage their tax liabilities...rather than playing this silly estimating and tax return games that the IRS requires.

This is cool, the www.whois.sc service will show you the number of times a domain is listed in DMOZ. The format of the URL is www.whois.sc/domain.com. For example (http://www.whois.sc./dmoz/descmath.com shows that my little math site is in the directory. Oddly, this info is hard to find in DMOZ itself. Searching on a domain name does not always return a result. I suspect however that this is only accurate relevant after a directory crawl.

On 7/7 I added to the community directories sites for Glenwood Springs, Colorado and Colorado Springs. Glenwood Springs scored high on my list of place I would evacuate to if I left Salt Lake. Of course, I continue the process of spreading myself too thin. I added Colorado Springs because about every third link I find when looking for web sites in Colorado seem to come from Colorado Springs. Being a cad, I spent the last two days dropping in the ad layers for the sites. I will have to start adding content.

The project du jour was to write code for recycling the site of the day reviews. I've been thinking that perhaps the community sites had a little too much external focus...so I now link to the reviews from within the directory.

Foundational Theories and Science

Cracking open Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, I find myself thinking about unity of science. Oddly, I am now finding myself of the opinion that unification of science is really not the desirable of a goal that I once held as an ideal. Today, I think diversity of thought processeses is far more important than the establishment of a single school that has an answer to all problems.

Now, I admit, my current opinions are different from those a few years back. For many years, I lamented the hundreds of different sciences with fundamentally different belief systems and foundational theories. The world of science was clearly separating people into difference camps with different sets of jargon...completely incapable of communicating with each other.

Clearly, there is only one reality. The world I wonder around in is the same world as doctors, lawyers and physicists. Each person has a different point of view, but neither the structure of the universe, nor the real human history that built the status quo is different between us. There are fundamental differences between what I see and what others see...but there is not a difference between our shared reality. Our view points are different and we have different models for processing that data. Smart people realize this and know that listening attentively to others can expand their view point.

Time after time, I see a people, or groups of people take to one model...assume, somehow, that their model offered more than it did, then lose the ability to communicate with different people accepting different models.

The wise revel in the fact that different people see things differently and take advantage of diversity to expand their point of view. The Socrates we learned in school always one upped the person he questioned. A real Socrates would actually learn from questions...and not simply devastate his opponent.

Back to the question of foundational theories.

There is one reality. So there is a vain hope that there will be one foundational theory that can explain everything (like Set Theory ... which I dislike).

However, the very idea of a foundational theory is opposed to the true structure of human language and physical reality. Foundational theories, by their very nature, establish a single point of view for reality.

The fracturing that occurred in science is not because we lacked a unified theory of everything, but the sad historical fact that we have had so many people trying to build such foundational theories. The contention we see between sciences is the result of the friction between foundational theories.

The intellectual community is dominated by adherents clinging to foundational models without acknowledgement that there are many different perspectives, and that there are many different valid models that we can use to help navigate through our lives.

In otherwords, the unification of knowledge really should be built on the acceptance of diverse view points...and not on the illusion that a Noam Chomsky, General Authority or other guru will create the school with with universals that unite all knowledge.

Perhaps the true unification of knowledge is simply an acceptance that complex systems tend to find ways to organized themselves...and all of the different, wonderful but disjoint, observations that people have is really just part of this overall process of the accumulation and distribution of knowledge. Acceptance of diversity is itself the unifying principle.

I spent several hours on Saturday reworking the navigational structure of ad pages on the various community sites. Several of these pages had over a hundred links. I also reworked the prev and next buttons so that point directly to the previous and next page, rather than using a redirect.

The main reason for doing this was that Google's warns people not to have more than 100 links off a given page. Also, I noticed several search engines were indexing the redirect code...rather than the real page.

It is strange, but search engines tend to do a better job indexing navigational structures than pure content (not that any of the pages in the ad section really have content). In some ways, that really is not bad. The point of a navigational structure in a web site is to get people to the content they desire. Getting a person into a good navigational structure is a good 50% of the battle.

It will be interesting to see how these navigational changes affect traffic through the community sites.

BTW, the sad truth is that I have no way to make money off the local traffic in a community. So I have a careful balance that I must strike between directing people to national web services so I can pay of the site and local resources.

Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that the victor's court that tries Saddam Hussein will stand as a beacon of rule by law nor is it likely to spearhead the establishment of a democracy in Iraq.

The problem with all expost facto laws is that they leave a legitimate claim that the case is an example of might makes right.

The best court for handling cases of attrocities committed by a government against its people is the ICC. By nature, the ICC is always politicized. I mean, the only way to try a king involves first overthrowing the government. Overthrowing governments takes a concerted effort. Those governments that do get deposed will still claim that they are victims of a victor's court...however a healthy ICC could at least establish the precedence of law in the trial itself.

Unfortunately, the ICC destroyed itself. Avocates of a world government had hoped that the seed of an ICC could grow into a court that stood above all courts. As such the ICC was playing games like changing the wording between the documents approved in the Rome Accord and the documents sent to ratification. A world court that answers to no authority will gradually expand its rulings into every aspect of life. An ICC limited to trying rulers of state would be welcome. One that stood over the Supreme Court in any matter with international effects is not.

Clinton was correct in not signing the accord, unfortunately Bush blew a historical opportunity to get the ICC back on the correct track. Instead, Bush played with absurdities like complete immunity from any law of any land in Guantanimo Bay and the various post 9/11 wars.

Reading several of the different web sites about the ICC, it appears that the US military is one of the biggest opponents of the ICC. With a belief that they are incapable of doing wrong, the military is freightened about the prospect of other agencies trying US soldiers. Quite frankly, I think they would be happy to have someone else try soldiers that go overboard and violate human rights.

Even if crimes by military personnel is a tiny fraction of crime that occurs on US streets, there will be a significant number of crimes needing to be tried after military actions that involves hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

We can only hope that someday we will have a US administration that truly pushes solutions to problems of rogue governments. As it stands now, we live in a world where it is okay for Sudan to slaughter citizens by the score. The only countries that might ever see retribution are those that threaten US economic interests.

Looks like the sun is setting on the Great American Empire.

In a rather clever move, the US handed over sovereignty to a provisional Iraqi government at 10:26 Iraqi time, spoiling plans for anti-democracy violence.

Of course, domestically things won't go easy for Bush. I seem to remember him clearly stating the transition in power will take place on the 30th. Kerry will be able to use this one as yet another case of Bush's lying to the American people.

Personally, I think the US did many things wrong in the occupation. IMHO generals make poor political leaders. During the fifteen months that American soldiers paraded around the country seems to have built up a great deal of animosity. I feel that we had lost an opportunity to really engage the country in a debate about its future and the nature of democracy and freedom.

I think there is merit in the Democracy in a Box concept. But such efforts would include things like a firm election date and a very strong bill of rights. The Coalition Provisional Authority has an interim Constitution, yet the few rights delineated seem such that it would be easy for a new sovereign government to overturn.

Regardless, about the time I wake up tomorrow morning the sun will be setting on the US empire in Iraq for the last time. Lets hope that the anti democratic forces of the world don't shower the poor country in bloodshed.