onfocus

There's a nice introduction to the Hacks Series in the latest issue of Wired: Google & Co. to Hackers: Come On In!

I recently read a great book called Moral Politics by George Lakoff that I've been hearing about for a while. I finally picked it up after reading this interview with him about framing political issues. Lakoff isn't a pundit—he's a professor of Linguistics—so it's not a typical political book. He blames the American political divide on competing metaphors for family. He explains that many of our "common sense" beliefs stem subconsciously from the way we categorize the world. Conservatives, he argues, have a "Strict Father" model of the family that they map onto the government and how it should act. Liberals have a "Nurturant Parent" model that they map onto the government. He lays out these two major metaphors (and variants) in detail, and shows how those metaphors can explain all of the positions held by prototypical liberals and conservatives. It's ambitious, and it made perfect sense to me as he described his theory in detail—then applied it to current events (well, current as of 1996 but still very relevant). This isn't a book for other linguistics professors—and there isn't much linguistics theory here. It's written with a general audience in mind, after Lakoff did the research. (In fact, I wish he would have described linguistic theory and his research in more detail.)

Liberals and conservatives are buying up books by Michael Moore or Ann Coulter that reinforce their beliefs. I've read the latest Al Franken book, and there's something cathartic about it. But these books don't explain why we have polarized political views in America, and Moral Politics has a very interesting "unified theory of American politics" that attempts to answer that question. I think understanding the competing metaphors and morals involved with politics will help people fight more effectively for what they believe.

The last time I was in CA I went to the Charles Schultz museum in Santa Rosa. They had a quote of his on the wall—"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing, day after day, without repeating himself."

Today is the fifth anniversary of onfocus.com! I registered this domain on November 20th, 1998 when I was still going to school in Nebraska. The next day I moved my weblog to this domain (or most likely I pointed the domain at the server it was on). The weblog is still here in 2003, and it has lived on many different servers along the way. If you've been reading the site for a while, thanks for tuning in. This site sure has come a long way from its humble beginnings of me simply posting whatever is on my mind—along with pictures I take—in a reverse-chronological format.

yep, a long way.

Fort Ross birds

Fort Ross bell