Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

David Attenborough’s nature videos are amazing, especially the Life of Birds. I learned so much from that series, like about the hummingbirds in the Andes who actually hibernate during cold periods to conserve energy. I think about this every time I see hummingbirds. This clip is about the various species of bird of paradise in Papua New Guinea.

Other David Attenborough classics from YouTube: hermaphroditic Leopard slugs mating while suspended by a twisted rope of their own comingled slug mucus,  superb male Lyrebird audio mimicry (camera shutters, car alarms, chainsaws) in order to attract a female to admire his plumage, Capercaille mating display, brachiating Gibbons in the forests of Borneo, scary bat-hunting centipede, red Christmas Island crabs spawning by the millions.

Like many other bloggers, I switched to WorPress when the Moveable Type license changed. It used to be that you were free to use MT for personal use with no limitations. Then they came out and imposed a restriction where you were only allowed one author per installation for personal use. This was a bad move; one that pushed more people over to start using WordPress, which was still relatively new in 2004. People who had resisted switching due to loyalty and goodwill to Sixapart and MoveableType felt like they had been taken for granted as users and as contributors to the overall success of MT. When important members of the community started dropping out, the writing was on the wall. Several people who had contributed templates, plugins, and support on the MT forums took their skills and influence to other projects. The chief beneficiary being WordPress, which was attractive due to its growing community, active development, and open source license. Simply put, changing the license was a stupid business decision for a few reasons:

1. Bad timing. In 2004, WordPress was starting to attract a lot of attention even in an environment where MovableType and SixApart were well-loved and respected.
2. It split the community. Many early bloggers started with Blogger and moved to MoveableType. In a real sense, blogging and bloggers grew up with MoveableType. When SixApart changed the license, it was like they were cashing in on this group experiment to the detriment of the people who helped them reach that level of success.

Now, MT is free again for personal use with an unlimited number of authors. We have come full circle, but the environment has changed. WordPress is now more popular than MoveableType and the arena is crowded with competitors. On the low end, many entry-level bloggers are using free services like Blogger, MySpace or Livejournal instead of rolling their own blog using tools like WordPress or MT. On the high end, many enterprise-quality CMS projects like Expression Engine, Joomla and Plone have incorporated blogging or blog-like functionality.

I checked out MT again last week and it’s starting to look dated, although I had forgotten how much easier their templating scheme is compared to WordPress, although WordPress has some advantages due to being more dynamic as it’s structured using PHP. One change they need to make for MT is to reskin the administration panel so that it looks okay at higher resolutions. It was clearly designed for users with low resolution desktops.

I did a Google search using the following terms and their results:

1. wordpress (official spelling) – 207,000,000 hits
2. word press – 396,000,000 hits
3. movable type (official spelling) – 83,900,000 hits
4. moveable type – 86,900,000 hits
5. movabletype – 17,900,000 hits
6. wordpress plugins – 30,900,000
7. movable type plugins – 5,900,000

In a strict Movable Type vs. WordPress contest, WordPress seems like the obvious winner based on these results. It will be interesting to see what Sixapart does in the future with their products. Can they keep Movable Type relevant while they pioneer new Livejournal-style sites like Vox?

Interesting ideas from William Lind:

To most non-historians, World War I is a vague and distant memory, faded photographs of guys in tin hats standing around in mud-filled trenches. In fact, it was one of two cataclysmic disasters of Western civilization in the modern period (the other was the French Revolution). In 1914, the West put a gun to its collective head and blew its brains out. No, it wasn’t the fault of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom history has treated most unfairly. As Colonel House wrote to President Woodrow Wilson after meeting with the Kaiser in 1915, it is clear he neither expected nor wanted war. A World War became inevitable when Tsar Nicholas II, not Kaiser Wilhelm, very reluctantly yielded to the demands of his War and Foreign Ministers and declared general mobilization instead of mobilization against Austria alone.

Once war occurred, and the failure of the Schlieffen Plan guaranteed it would be a long war, a disaster for Western civilization was inevitable. Still, had the Central Powers won in the end, the destruction of civilization might not have been so complete. There would have been no Communism, nor a republic in Russia; a victorious Germany would have never tolerated it, and unlike the Western Allies, Germany was positioned geographically to do something about it. Hitler would have remained a non-entity. Prior to World War I, the best major European countries in which to be Jewish were Germany and Austria; Kaiser Wilhelm would never have allowed a Dreyfus Affair in Germany. The vast Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe would have held their traditional places in multi-nation-empires, instead of becoming aliens in new nation-states. It should not surprise us that in World War I, American Jews attempted to raise a regiment to fight for Germany.

Even more importantly, the Christian conservatism – more accurately, perhaps, traditionalism – represented by the Central Powers would have been greatly strengthened by their victory. Instead, the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchies let the poisons of the French Revolution loose unchecked upon the West and upon the world. The Marxist historian Arno Mayer is correct in arguing that in 1914, the United States represented (as a republic, with France) the international left, while by 1919 it was organizing the international right. America had not changed; the spectrum had shifted around it.

If you’re like me, you have an unsophisticated view of politics, especially in places like Syria and Lebanon where you may never set foot. You really need to have a good sense of the historical context as well as the current political environment in the region to even have an idea about what’s going on and why. And even if you do have the in-depth knowledge, it’s still difficult to take sides in what is clearly an escalation of conflict by both parties. This is truly an age without clear answers, but we can try to expand our understanding. Here a few good resources for learning about the politics of the region.

• SyriaComment:SyriaComment is a deep blog focused on analysis of the domestic and international politics of Syria. Updated daily by Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma.
• The Free Congress Commentary by William S. Lind at Defense and the National Interest: William Lind is an analyst on the subject of 4th Generation Warfare,the GWOT, and America’s role in Mideast politics. Bonus points for citations from historical actors ranging from Napoleon to the Greeks. Keep your encyclopedia handy.
• Wikipedia’s coverage of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. The Wikipedia community really shines during historical moments like this when they manage to pump out a fairly comprehensive guide to a situation such as the one in Lebanon. It is a true testament to the potential of citizen / community journalism. Review the discussion page to see the internal attempts to maintain NPOV (neutral point of view). One thing you can say about the Wikipedians is that they almost uniformly possess a strong desire to preserve the quality of the project.