Virgina Postrel writes,

The anti-photo policies of museums don't necessarily make sense, except as some kind of revenue enhancer. Prohibiting flash is one thing. And I don't blame the Louvre for blocking photos in the often-crowded Italian painting gallery. But prohibiting all photos in an uncrowded museum filled with works in the public domain is unnecessary—unless you think it will generate sales in the museum store.

I can understand that a museum might prohibit flash photography because it's annoying, but I think that gift-shop revenue is the real motivator. When it comes to old paintings, there's no copyright anymore, so museums have to find other ways to keep you from making copies.

Apparently, some museums imply that flash photography causes paintings to degrade more quickly, perhaps causing the pigments to fade or something. On first consideration, this seems plausible because at close range the flash can be brighter than the sun, and the sun can certainly fade paint.

It turns out, however, that flash photography is essentially harmless.

The key intuition is that it always takes the same amount of light striking a piece of film to expose it properly, and for that amount of light to reach the film, it first has to bounce off the painting. So every photograph of a painting involves hitting it with the same amount of light. It could be a high-speed flash fired in a 1000th of a second, or a 1-second long exposure in a dimly-lit museum gallery.

In other words—and this is the whole point—a flash picture is equivalent to leaving the museum lights on for one extra second.

(My 1-second figure is just a reasonable guess based on some photographic sources and a little playing around with my camera. The actual exposure will depend on the film speed and aperture, the actual museum lighting, and maybe the tones present in the painting. But once those are chosen, it's still the same amount of light for flash as for ambient light photography. The same principle also applies if you're shooting digital.)

So, if 300 people take pictures every day, that's equivalent to leaving the museum lights on for an extra 5 minutes each day.

Technically, a photographic flash usually emits more ultraviolet light than ordinary museum lighting, and paint pigments are known to suffer more damage from UV light. Also, certain types of chemical damage are disproportionately worse for high-intensity light. However, studies by professional conservators indicate that neither of these factors contributes to the aging that art works undergo while on display at a museum.

So, if you want a good picture of a painting but the museum won't let you take a flash photo, you can always take one in ambient light. Of course, it's hard to hold the camera steady for a full second in your hands, so you'd have to shoot with the camera mounted on a tripod.

And wouldn't you know it, most museums prohibit the use of tripods.

I guess you'll just have to buy a photo from the gift shop after all.

Further reading: Here's an article on the subject. Or there's this book: Effects of Light on Materials in Collections: Data on Photoflash and Related Sources, summarized briefly here.

Glenn Reynolds, while reporting that this is the sixtieth anniversary of the bikini, has decided this this is blog sweeps week. I figure I better do my part.

Here's an image of the infamous Reason magazine pillow girl in a nifty little cowgirl/bikini outfit.

Rush Limbaugh had another run-in with the drug police:

Rush Limbaugh was detained for more than three hours Monday at Palm Beach International Airport after authorities said they found a bottle of Viagra in his possession without a prescription.

It's a perfectly legal drug. Who really cares whether or not he has a prescription?

Assholes from U.S. Customs, that's who.

Someday I'll have to find out why it is that police need probable cause to search you except when you're crossing the border. Where is that exception in the Constitution?

I don't like Rush Limbaugh, and I never would have thought I'd feel sorry for him, but nobody deserves this kind of crap.

What's even sadder is that I don't think Rush is going to learn anything at all from his troubles.

(Hat tip: Drug WarRant)

Larger ImageJeff Fest

I stopped in at the Jeff Fest (a.k.a. The Jefferson Park Community Festival) on the northwest side today. It's one of the many festivals going on this summer in Chicago.

(My photos can also be seen as a slideshow without the commentary.)

Larger ImageGetting a Ride

Here's Chicago's most famous Elvis impersonator:

Larger ImageRick Saucedo

A few more sites around the fest:

Larger ImageCamera Girl

Larger ImageA Couple Enjoying the Show

Larger ImageTasty Goodness

Larger ImageGirls Posing for Me

Lots more photos after the jump...

This happened back in April, but it's worth telling, because you just can't make up this kind of stupidity.

At Los Angeles International Airport, employees of the Transportation Security Administration discovered that passenger Daniel Brown was on the no-fly list, so they grabbed him before he boarded his plane and interrogated him, despite the fact that he was a uniformed Marine.

He had his military identification and his travel orders, and he was traveling with 26 other Marines who could vouch for him.

Wait, it gets better.

You might think, as I did, that this was one of those name mixups we keep hearing about where someone has the same name as a terrorist and the TSA is just too stupid to realize this. After all, these are the guys who detained Senator Ted Kennedy because some terrorist once used "T. Kennedy" as an alias.

But no, it wasn't a case of mistaken identity. USMC Staff Sergeant Daniel Brown really was on the no-fly list. The reason? On a previous trip, when Brown was returning from a tour in Iraq, the TSA found gunpowder on his shoes.

Imagine that. Gunpowder residue on the shoes of a U.S. Marine returning from a war zone.

The same article that reports this story also mentions a recent Government Accountability Office report leaked to NBC News concerning recent security tests. GAO security testers tried to bring bomb-making materials through the TSA security checkpoints. They tried this at 21 airports around the country, and succeed at every single airport. With these kinds of decision-making skills, that doesn't surprise me.

When the TSA folks finally kicked Daniel Brown loose, he caught another flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he found that all 26 of the Marines he had been traveling with were waiting for him, so they could take the bus home together.

That doesn't surprise me either.

(Hat tip, Reason's Daily Brickbat.)

One year ago today, the U.S. Supreme court ruled on the Kelo decision, confirming that governments could use their eminent domain powers to take private property and hand it over to private developers for private use. All that was needed was the thinnest of public use justifications, such as that the new owners would use the property in a way which generated greater tax revenue.

In just the past year, more than 5,700 properties nationwide have been threatened by or taken with eminent domain for private development--a figure that compares with more than 10,000 examples over a five-year period preceding the Kelo argument[.]

That's from an announcement about four new reports just issued by the Institute for Justice and the Castle Coalition.

I'm particularly interested in Opening the Floodgates: Eminent Domain Abuse in the Post-Kelo World which compiles information about a bunch of properties threatened by eminent domain for private use, including a few right here in Illinois. The first one, on page 36, discusses the International Plaza shopping center, which I blogged about last fall.

Best of all, it includes this picture of the mall:

Larger ImageInternational Plaza

I took that picture for my blog entry—I can even see where my car is parked—and an intern at the the Institute for Justice emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking me if they could use it.

That's just cool.

(Get all the reports from http://www.castlecoalition.org/kelo/index.html, but be warned that they are huge PDF files.)

Thoughts upon viewing the video for "Sex Over The Phone" by The Village People:

• I hope string ties never become trendy again. (Although, for all I know, they already are.)
• Production values for music videos have come a long way.
• Those guys have some serious mustaches.
• Did phone sex lines really have to take your credit card number and call you back? What was that all about? 900 numbers not invented yet? Slow credit card check? Phone system couldn't handle transfers to the women?
• Sometimes you can hear that the singer has a pretty good voice.
• The women don't look really happy to be in the video.
• The 80's were a weird decade.

Oh, just follow the link. It's really...something.

I'm not a fan of impeaching U.S. Presidents for unimportant crimes—or worse, imagined crimes—but if a Democratic Congress ever impeaches George Bush, I would be highly amused if they got him for flag desecration.

Public Defender Dude has more to say.

Alright, it's a bad idea...but there's a certain cosmic sense of justice to it.

Carnival of Liberty #50 is up at TuCents.

Previous carnivals:

• Carnival Of Liberty #49 at Liberty Corner

The World Naked Bike Ride plans to hit Chicago and at least 25 other cities around the world Saturday as a peaceful protest against international oil consumption, according Chicago ride organizer Aurora Danai.

"We don't expect everyone to be OK with this," said Danai, a 26-year-old Bucktown resident. "We're just trying to have a good time and raise awareness."

Now in its third year, World Naked Bike Ride is a way for communities to simultaneously protest oil use and promote positive self-images by ditching motor-powered vehicles and the body coverings society demands people wear, Danai said.

World Naked Bike Ride organizers expect people in at least 14 countries to participate in Saturday's ride. Locally, Danai expects about 300 people to bike, skate and even jog during the event.

The Chicago ride will take place at night, Danai said, out of respect for parents who do not want their children exposed to adult nudity.

On that note, welcome to the blogroll, Leslie.

Mike at Crime & Federalism wants reading suggestions. He prefers practical non-fiction and enjoys "books that are that are hybrids of insight and practicality."

Here are my suggestions:

Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. It's about thinking carefully about incentives and how people respond to them. Good for thinking about public policy, but I've also found this way of thinking useful in other ways, such as how to structure a business deal so both sides have an incentive to do the right thing.

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V. S. Ramachandran. A few glimpses of the modern way of thinking about thinking.

Anatomy of Movement by Blandine C. Germain. How your muscles and skeleton work, with lots of diagrams. If this doesn't sound useful now, just wait until you get older

.

Anybody else have ideas?

White House press secretary Tony Snow had this to say when asked for the President's reaction to news that the U.S. military had suffered its 2500th death in Iraq:

"It's a number," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary.

"Every time there's one of these 500-benchmarks, people want something," Snow added at his near-daily press briefing at the White House. "The president would like the war to be over now. Everybody would like the war to be over now."

He's got a point. 2500 is a nice round number, but it's not terribly significant by itself, except to the news media. 2500 deaths is just an arbitrary number, worse than 2499 deaths but not as bad as 2501 deaths.

Then again, the So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog has a point too.

Want to commit non-violent crimes and not get prosecuted? According to an AP piece on Yahoo, it's not as hard as you might think:

Dan L'Allier said he witnessed 45 tons of the New York loot being unloaded in Minnesota at his company's headquarters. He and disaster specialist Chris Christopherson complained to a company executive, but were ordered to keep quiet. They persisted, going instead to the FBI.

The two whistleblowers eventually lost their jobs, received death threats and were blackballed in the disaster relief industry. But they remained convinced their sacrifice was worth seeing justice done.

They were wrong.

The key to escaping justice is apparently to commit the same kind of crime as a bunch of FBI agents and top federal employees:

A March 2002 entry in the FBI's "prosecutive status" report states the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota intended "to prosecute individuals who were alleged to be involved in the transportation of stolen goods from New York City after the terrorist attack." A followup entry from Sept. 6, 2002 lists the specific evidence supporting such a charge.

The lead investigators for the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency told AP that the plan to prosecute KEI for those thefts stopped as soon as it became clear in late summer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero.

That prompted a broader review that ultimately found 16 government employees, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon.

"How could you secure an indictment?" FEMA investigator Kirk Beauchamp asked. "It would be a conflict."

(As an aside, is anyone else worried that FEMA has investigators? Do you think they carry guns? I mean, FEMA employees with guns? Is that safe?)

It's a strange story with a lot of weird angles, including the sort of fumbling ass-covering that we've all come to expect whenever FEMA is involved.

You're Fiji!

As calm, relaxed, and removed from life as they come, you're just so chilled out, it hurts people to see you.  Everyone aspires to be where you are, but most of them just can't put their stress away.  Little do they know that even you sometimes have inner turmoil and struggles!  For the most part, though, it's sun and fun for you, and that's the way you like it.  It's just sort of hard to get things done with all that partying.

Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Sigh. If only that were true...

The wife and I are off at the Bead and Button Show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If I get any good photos from the show, I'll eventually post them. Meanwhile, for those of you living outside the area, here are a few sights typical of a journey into Wisconsin:

Larger ImageCheese

Larger ImageChoppers

Larger ImagePorn

Maybe it's too early to be checking, but I don't think the whole plan to Googlebomb Egypt is working very well. I can't find the Free Alla site in the top 500 responses for "Egypt" on Google. Heck, it's not even in the top 500 responses for "Free Alla".

And when I visit the site now, I get pop-up ads for credit cards and casinos. I'm beginning to wonder if I've been scammed into generating a lot of income for someone...

Anyone out there know what's going on?

On May 7, Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fatah (علاء أحمد سيف الإسلام عبدالفتاح) was arrested there during a protest. As part of the world-wide response, several other bloggers have have created the Free Alaa blog to chronicle his ongoing detention and legal troubles.

You may have noticed that I didn't link to the Free Alaa blog through its name. That's because I'm joining with a lot of other bloggers to try to Googlebomb Egypt. That is, we're all trying to game the Google search engine so that the Free Alaa blog appears as one of the top hits for the word "Egypt".

You can join in simply by linking to the Free Alaa blog using "Egypt" as the link text. I was doing it throughout the last couple of paragraphs, but you can also do a standalone link like this:

Egypt.

It's really easy.

Egypt.

Please join in if you are so inclined. It only takes one link from a page to help a lot.

Egypt.

Of course, if you want to make more than one link, that's okay too.

Egypt Egypt Egypt.

In fact, go wild.

Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt Egypt.

So there.

(Hat Tip: Google Blogoscoped)

Update: Marathon Pundit joins in and points out something else:

And for those people living in the Chicago area, or thinking of traveling here to see the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum, keep in mind, about half of the admission to the special exhibit goes straight to the Egyptian government--the same government, that locked up Alaa for participating in a peaceful protest.

[This is a followup to Cash For Kidneys, Part 1.]

One of the things that would bother me about donating a kidney is that I'm using it. Granted, living with one kidney isn't much of a hazard. You really only need one to do the job, and having a spare isn't all that useful since kidney diseases usually attack both of them at once. Still, I'd be more willing to donate a kidney if I was more likely to get a spare if my lone kidney started to have problems.

If other people feel that way, then there's positive feedback in the system: The easier it is to get replacements, the more people will be willing to donate their own, which will make it even easier to get replacements, which will make people even more willing to donate. People would be giving and getting kidneys all the time.

For that to work, we'd have to have an efficient system of distributing transplant organs. You'd think we already have one, but I'm not so sure. What we have right now is UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, a non-profit organization which has a federal contract to coordinate organ transplants.

An article in the Kansas City Star describes how the U.S. is divided into 11 transplant regions, and most people needing organs are listed with their regional center. Apparently, however, some people travel to other centers and get themselves listed there as well.

But the practice is expensive, requiring duplicative comprehensive medical examinations and frequent blood tests—for which Medicare pays most of the costs.

It also requires travel that not everyone can afford and the sophistication to navigate a particularly complex part of the American health-care system.

[...]

A medical evaluation—which must be done anew with each listing—costs an average of $12,300, according to a report by Milliman USA, a health-care actuarial firm. Monthly blood screenings for each listing are $250 each, according to UNOS. Medicare picks up much of those costs when private insurance does not.

From reading that, it seems that the obvious thing to do is to improve sharing of patient data between transplant centers so they don't have to duplicate the medical evaluation and testing costs for each center. That shouldn't be hard in the age of the internet.

A more long-term solution might be to eliminate the artificial barriers between transplant regions so that the organ network is truly a national resource. We're a wealthy nation. We can afford stuff like this.

But that's not how the people in the transplant business see it:

John Sadler, founder of the Independent Dialysis Foundation in Baltimore, called it "basically unfair to someone who isn't capable of going to several different places." It also leaves a bad impression, said Arthur Caplan, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania's department of medical ethics.

"Clearly, those who have more resources are going to have greater access to more than one center. ... People wouldn't do it unless it increases their chances of getting an organ that would go to somebody else," said Tarris Rosell, a bioethicist at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City.

[...]

UNOS concedes that multiple listing is unfair. In 1988 the UNOS board of directors recognized that the practice favored "the wealthy patient over a less well-to-do patient." In 2003 it said multiple listing continued to cause inequities.

[...]

UNOS several times has considered banning or limiting multiple listing. But each effort was quashed by a coalition of patient advocacy groups and large transplant centers, observers say. Since 2003, UNOS has required that all transplant patients be told of the possibility of multiple listing.

In other words, transplant patients are trying to work around the inefficiencies of the system, and the people running the system are trying to stop them.

The people opposing multiple listing aren't real clear about why they think it's unfair to poor people. I'm guessing the reason is that poor people on the waiting list in one region can find wealthy people from other regions getting in line ahead of them.

That does sound unfair at first, but I'm not convinced. Organ transplant priorities are based on medical urgency and the quality of the match between donor and recipient. An organ recipient coming in from other regions can only get ahead on the list if their need is greater or their chance of success is better. Isn't that how it should be?

In fact, isn't that how it should be for everyone? As far as I can tell, the most unfair thing about multiple listing is that they don't do it for everyone automatically.

Update: Part 3 is up.

Virginia Postrel, who recently donated a kidney to a friend, has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about the disincentives of becoming a donor:

My parents were appalled. My doctor told me, "You know you can change your mind." Many people couldn't understand why I didn't at least wait until my friend had been on dialysis for a while.

This pervasive attitude not only pressures donors to back out, it shapes policies that deter them. Some transplant centers require intrusive, demeaning psychological probes that scare people off. Some bioethicists suspect that donors suffer from a mental disorder, as opposed to being motivated by benevolence or religious conviction.

[...]

The most obvious way to increase the supply of any scarce commodity—paying more for it—is illegal. Federal law blocks transplant centers, patients and insurers from compensating donors in an above-board process, with full legal and medical protections. The growing and inevitable "transplant tourism" industry, and even shadier organ brokers, are the kidney equivalents of back-alley abortionists.

Speaking of back-alley abortionists, it's easy in today's world to think that physicians who secretly performed abortions were progressive-minded guys who believed in woman having control over their bodies. And maybe some of them were, but a lot of them were just plain criminals. They would routinely fake pregnancy tests, telling every woman she was pregnant and needed an abortion. And just like any other black-market product, there was organized crime involvement. I'm sure the same thing is happening with organ donations.

But even talking about incentives is taboo to some self-styled patient advocates. On Monday, the American Enterprise Institute will hold a conference in Washington on incentive-based transplant reforms. (It's organized by my kidney recipient, a physician and health-policy scholar at the institute.) When the National Kidney Foundation heard about the conference, its chief executive, John Davis, complained to the institute's president, "We don't see how an AEI forum would contribute substantively to debate on this issue."

Davis' group adamantly opposes donor compensation, lobbying against even experimental programs and small tax credits. It's as though the National Parkinson Foundation opposed stem cell research, or thought researchers should work for free.

That's the thing that gets me. Everyone else, from the doctors and nurses who do the work to the staff at the transplant center, gets paid. Only the person providing the kidney is expected to work for free.

[Part 2 is now up.]

Radley Balko has been researching police shootings of innocent citizens during SWAT-style drug raids. It's surprising how often this happens and how little press it receives.

Recently, Balko was researching a raid back in March that scared the hell out an elderly couple when he came across a letter to the editor from a man whose neice had been killed during a drug raid.

After receiving an anonymous tip, police in Lexington, Tennessee forced entry to the home of Stacy Renae Walker.

Once inside, Deputy Tim Crowe, who had been on the police force for only a week, saw Renae rise from the couch with a child in her arms, and discharged his gun. The bullet struck Renae in the back of the head and exited through her mouth, killing her. Police would later say Crowe's gun fired and scored a direct hit because he "tripped."

Police found no drugs or weapons in the home. They later conceded that the entire raid was "a terrible mistake."

Got all that? Based on a tip from someone who the police cannot identify or prove actually exists, police conducted a SWAT-style raid of a home and found nothing illegal, but a deputy tripped and accidentally shot someone square in the head.

Then, while researching that shooting, he stumbled across two more shootings that happened in Salem, Oregon within a year of each other, one of which was another raid at the wrong location.

If you're interested, you can read the whole story at Balko's Blog, where he mentions that so far he's found 42 cases of innocent bystanders killed in SWAT-style forced-entry raids, another 15 cops killed during the raids, and another 20 people killed whose crimes were non-violent, such as pot smokers and illegal gamblers.

Now here's something to think about. A few days ago there was a story about two New-York cops convicted of doing contract killings for the Mafia.

Thankfully, cops that crooked are pretty rare, but if the Mafia can buy off a few cops, so can a drug gang. And if Deputy Crowe can shoot an unarmed woman in the back of the head without facing any charges, don't you think a corrupt drug task-force cop can shoot few known drug dealers during raids without attracting much attention, especially if he's able to plant some evidence? Don't you think it's already happened?

A friend of mine was concerned a few days ago that the anti-gay-marriage amendment might actually pass, which would cause her some personal heartache. I told her I thought it was just a stunt, and not worth worrying about.

Other people seem to think so too. For example, the D.C. Examiner supports a ban on same-sex marriage, but thinks trying to pass an amendment is a waste of time, saying "expending any effort on behalf of the proposal now is literally a fool's errand".

An ABC News poll indicates that even though most Americans oppose same-sex marriage, they also oppose a constitutional amendment to ban it. From what I've seen, a lot of folks on the right don't want same-sex marriage, but they also don't want the federal government defining marriage.

As I was writing this, another group of people spoke up: The United States Senate has rejected the amendment, giving it only 49 of the 60 votes needed to move to the next stage of voting.

I'm no expert at politics, but I think part of the reason the amendment is unlikely to pass is that a lot of people on the right regard it as a cynical attempt to earn their support. One of the reasons Bush's popularity is so low these days is that he has betrayed a lot of his supporters. He hasn't trimmed the size of government or launched a school vouchers program or reduced taxes or made progress on any of the other conservative issues. He's not getting a lot of cooperation these days.

Some folks at Reason magazine agree with this and add another reason the amendment is probably doomed: Marriage is traditionally defined by the states. In states where a large group of people are upset about same-sex marriage they have been able to get it banned, at which point they lose interest in the issue.

I'm not optimistic for the prospects of widespread same-sex marriage in this country, but I don't think a total constitutional ban is ever going to happen.

You're the principal of a high school on graduation day. Students are supposed to arrive at 5pm for the 6pm ceremony, and the rules say nobody will be admitted after 5:55. The senior class vice president shows up late and is turned away by the guards at the door. Somehow, she manages to get inside anyway to catch the end of the ceremony, although her parents are still stuck outside. What, if anything do you do about it?

Well, if you're Principal Dwayne E. Evans of Thornton Fractional North High School in Calumet City, Illinois, you naturally have her arrested and hauled off in a police car.

[Update: Arg. I can't believe I screwed up principle/principal. I've known that rule for over 20 years. Fixed it now.]

I continue to sort through my old photographs.

Larger ImageFlowers

Larger ImageLeaves

Ken Lammers has posted a somewhat long history of one of his trials. Well, that's what he titles it, "History of a Trial", but most of it seems to be about Ken trying to visit his client somewhere in the Virginia Department of Corrections.

That turns out to be a frustrating experience, because nobody in charge seems to have thought it would be a good idea to keep inmates awaiting trial in a jail that's near the courthouse where their trial will happen. Ken spends a lot of time driving to and from jails. As you read Ken's article, keep in mind that if you order an $8 book from Amazon, UPS can track it in real time on their web site any time of day or night.

I've had the same basic layout on this blog for about a year now, and I'm getting a little tired of it. So I decided to make some changes. By the time you read this, the first layer of changes will be in place, so if you want to see the design I'm tired of, you should look at this screenshot. (If it's hard to read, you need to tell your browser to display it full size. If it looks ugly, you're seeing it correctly.)

I needed some help, so I emailed Philipp Lenssen, the proprietor of Google Blogoscoped, for a little advice.

I'm thinking that I'd like to try to build up my blog into a little more of a web presence, and I'm wondering if you would mind taking a look at it with an eye toward increasing traffic to my site. Sort of like an informal SEO advisor...

I have two goals in mind:
1. Attracting attention to myself.
2. Making money.

What I'm looking for is kind of a close-reading of the structural elements of the blog, links, google stuff, things like that, as well as advice on posting and marketing practices.

Philipp knows a lot about search engines, and he's working at becoming a professional blogger, so I figured he'd be a good source of advice. I also like his approach to improving search-engine results for a site, which I would characterize as post great content, make a name for yourself, let other people link to you.

It was some article of Philipp's that convinced me to create an About page with my picture on it and put up a best-of section in the sidebar. The best-of list helps first-time visitors get a better sense of me and the bio and photo make it easier to get to know me, and therefore to rememeber my blog.

Of course, I had some limits:

I'm not planning any major content changes. I know I could get more traffic as a single-issue blogger, but that's just not going to happen. I'm probably not willing to avoid the puns and allusions in my article titles either :)

The next day, Philipp sent me a list of suggestions, most of which were pretty good, and some of which I was willing to do. He also included a mock-up design for my the new Windypundit.

That design is a little too extreme for me, and some of his suggestions don't fit my blog's purpose, but most of what he had to say was dead-on. Based on his suggestions, I've already make a number of changes:

• I removed the repeating "skyscraper windows" background image and just left the background almost pure white.
• I got rid of the borders around my photographs, but I left them in place on all the other images (downloaded from othe blogs, promotional images, stuff like that).
• I grouped the main body and left-hand columns together, and added borders that help suggest it's a separate piece of paper.
• I added more whitespace between the left and center columns.
• As in Philipp's example, I left the right column "lying" on the background.
• The left sidebar now has a pure white background. (So does the center, but it always did.)
• Philipp suggested I switch to a sans-serif font, but fonts without serifs often look awkward to me in large blocks of text. On the other hand, not even the New York Times uses the Times Roman font on their web page like I did. My solution was to use the Georgia font. It still has serifs, but it's a more open and inviting font than Times Roman. Also, it's the font the New York Times is now using on their website.
• I separated the banner at the top from the rest of the blog with some whitespace and a heavy border.
• I lightened up the banner image to go with the generally lighter look of the whole page.
• I removed the dark and ugly ad boxes that appear on the individual archive pages.

Nearly all of these changes were accomplished through changes to the CSS style sheet. I didn't have to change any HTML generated by the blogging software, except to remove the ad blocks. (They just had to go.)

I'm still planning a few more changes, but some of these will be more work to do:

• Generally brighten up the colors of the blog.
• Replace the NASA shot of the Chicago beachfront with some other photograph of my own to fit the newer color scheme.
• Get rid of the purple color used for visited links. I'm not sure why that's there, it's not one of my design colors.
• Re-arrange the navigation features, icons, and badges of the blog, so they don't contribute to making this blog look exactly like all the others.
• Either use a smaller banner image and move it down into the "page" with the main text—allowing the right hand column to rise to the top of the window—or move a bunch of navigation features up into the banner area so it functions like a control panel for the blog.
• Maybe quit some of the TTLB communities and remove their links from my blogroll.
• Make the Windypundit logo a bit larger.

Update: Here's what I did in phase 2 of the blog makeover:

• I couldn't find any photos in my own collection that would work well in the header, so I bought a Chicago lakefront photo by Matt Dula from iStockphoto for $3.
• I decided that muted colors work better for the type of content I'm publishing, so I won't be adding brighter colors. However, since the new photo doesn't have large patches of brownish-yellow like the old photo did, I got rid of the brownish-yellow accents in the headlines and sidebar links and replaced them with a light blue.
• I got rid of the purple links, although some of the blue ones are looking a bit purple-ish.
• I made the banner image smaller, and moved it down into the smaller "page" within my main page—allowing the right-hand column to rise to the top of the window.
• I put the Best-Of section and Department list into pop-up menus on the right-hand side to remove some clutter from the left margin.
• I built my own vector version of the Windypundit logo in Photoshop, which gives me a lot more control, so I made it bigger and I made it blue instead of white.
• One of my design points is that every clickable part of the page should have a rollover response to emphasize that you've found something you can interact with. Since I have my own version of my logo, I made a white version which I use for the rollover. Some of the link icons to other sites are still static, but I think everything I provide now has a rollover response.
• Philipp wanted me to move the Google ads out of the left-hand column, but my ad revenue more than doubled when I moved the ads from the right-hand column to their current position. I'm scared to move them somewhere else. As a compromise, I've slid the left-hand column down the page a bit so the reader's eyes will read the headline first.

There are still a few things left to do:

• Continue re-arranging the navigation features of the blog so it looks a little cleaner.
• Replace my rickety home-grown menus with a bulletproof menuing system off of some JavaScript web site.
• I'm still thinking about quitting some of the TTLB communities.
• Maybe add a few colored accents.

People are sometimes puzzled when they ask me about my politics and I tell them I am something of a libertarian. That's not a familiar word to them. So for their benefit, from a comment in the Hit & Run blog, here's one of the best descriptions ever:

When Duke was running for president in the Doonesbury strip as a Libertarian he explained:

Democrats are for pot and promiscuity.

Republicans are for guns and tobacco.

Libertarians are for all four plus pornography.

Philipp Lenssen has finally released his book 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google which he describes as "A cabinet of search engine curiosities, riddles, games, and a little bit of usefulness."

Philipp is the author of the Google Blogoscoped blog, which is consistently one of the most interesting technical sites on the web. It's more than just news about Google services and Google the company—although there's plenty of that—it's also about interesting things to do with Google.

If you're interested in search engines and what you can do with them, Philipp's blog is worth checking out, as is his book. Philipp Lenssen has an inquisitive mind, and he spends a lot of time finding interesting ways to use Google and similar technologies. Then he tells us about them. He's kind of a Mr. Wizard for the search-engine set.

Disclaimer: Philipp sent me an advanced copy of this book a couple of months ago and at his request I suggested a few changes, so I have a small ego investment in this book, and I hope he sells a lot of copies.

Schwarzenegger to Order Troops to Border

I am popular with the ladies this week. First there was 17-year old Sammi who likes my photography but thinks I'm creepy. Then, late last night I got some email from a young lady:

Hello!

Yes, this is strange, I've never emailed a random blogger before.

Let me just interrupt and say that I get a lot of messages (especially on my MySpace account) from young ladies that start with an "I've never done this before" declaration. All of them say I seem like a really cool person in my profile and maybe we should get to know each other better so why don't I check out their webcam? Oh, and by the way, they're using their friend's account and I should email them back at a different email address. (That last bit means they've stolen the account they're sending from or spoofed the email system.) All it takes to get into that business is some pictures of a hot babe and some spam generating software...I almost deleted it without reading any further.

But I digress...

Hello!

Yes, this is strange, I've never emailed a random blogger before. But I wonder...maybe I could ask your thoughts. By your blog I gathered that you are very politically conscious.

Well, I'm in a bit of a pickle. For my Political Science class my big assignment is to write a proposal on a current issue. I have been researching all the main issues, from the immigration bill, to the phone tap issue, and it's all been so tedious. While I find all the issues I've researched gripping, I just can't decide on which one. I also don't want to write on the "hottest" topic that probably a lot of my classmates will be writing on. Anyway, I feel like I've been hitting my head against the wall for two weeks now. So, I'm asking you...what is the one or two topic(s) that makes your blood boil? I might just base my paper around your viewpoint...or the opposing one...if your argument is convincing, or intriguing enough. That is, if you wouldn't mind. :) Thank you.

Respectfully yours,

Deserae

I Googled around a bit to make sure this wasn't some new kind of spam I hadn't seen before. It turns out Deserae is a 27-year old just-starting-out music promoter in Salt Lake City. [Insert lame joke about Utah club scene here] She also has a blog where she posts as FreeSpiritGal on which she mentions her PoliSci assignment. As a blogger, she's the anti-me. I'm irreverent and swear a lot, she's religious and pleasant. I'm angry and analytical, she's hopeful and writes half her posts as prose poems.

But the important thing is that after years of ranting about all these important issues to my friends and my family and anybody who reads this blog, someone has finally come up to me and said "Mark, what's going on in the world that pisses you off?"

Well, let me tell you...

Deserae is in college, so she might want to explore the impact of the Higher Education Act's provision that permanently takes away financial aid from any college student convicted of possessing drugs. Wealthy students don't need financial aid, and students whose grades suffer because they abuse drugs will lose their financial aid anyway, and students who lie on their financial aid application won't get caught, so this law mostly just affects poor students with good grades who answer honestly. By the way, student shoplifters, robbers, and rapists are still able to get financial aid as soon as they get out of prison.

Or maybe Deserae should mine her music background for topics. How about the way law enforcement agencies are conducting military-style raids on concerts because some people there are using drugs? People use drugs at football games too, but you don't see swarms of cops raiding the stadium and stopping the game so they can search everybody. Decades ago, they used to raid rock concerts, and before that it was jazz clubs. Nowadays it's raves and electronica. It's not about the drugs, it's about a music and a culture that they don't like and don't understand. (By the way, the incident I linked to happened in Deserae's home state of Utah.)

Continuing the Drug War theme, what about the recent law enforcement crackdown on pain medication? The most famous example is radio host Rush Limbaugh, who was caught illegally buying hydrocodone and oxycodone without a prescription. He has by now admitted his addiction and sought treatment for it, and it looks like he's not going to be prosecuted.

No such luck for Richard Paey, who has multiple sclerosis and a serious back injury and requires a wheelchair. When he moved to Florida, he couldn't find a new doctor that would prescribe enough painkillers for him, so rather than spending his days in unbearable pain, he created fake prescriptions for his meds. He got caught and was prosecuted and is now serving a 25-year prison term.

They're going after doctors too. Pennsylvania prosecuted Doctor Paul Heberle for over-prescribing painkillers after one of his patients overdosed on fentanyl. A jury acquitted him of all charges last week. But while his practice was disrupted during the prosecution, six of his patients tried to kill themselves (one succeeded).

These are people in so much pain that some of them are on the brink of suicide, and rather than trying to help them, the government is investigating them to see if they're abusing drugs. I'm ashamed that these prosecutors are my fellow countrymen.

How about Zero Tolerance Zealotry in our schools? There's the 12-year old boy who was charged with a drug felony for pretending to have cocaine. Or the 17-year old arrested for conspiracy to start a food fight? Or all the students facing disciplinary action for things they wrote on their blog.

At a time when oil companies are being accused of colluding to artificially tighten the oil supply to increase profits, how about looking into the way many businesses have gotten local governments to tighten supplies for them? In Utah, for example, you need a license to be a Cosmetologist/Barber (which requires both a practical exam and an examination on Cosmetology/Barber theory), a nail technician, or an Esthetician (defined by statute as someone who does skin care procedures on the "head, face, neck, torso, abdomen, back, arms, hands, legs, feet, eyebrows, or eyelashes for cosmetic purposes and not for the treatment of medical, physical, or mental ailments" such as "cleansing, stimulating, manipulating, exercising, applying oils, antiseptics, clays, or masks, extraction, depilatories, waxes, tweezing, natural nail manicures or pedicures, or callous removal by buffing or filing," in case you wanted to know). Actually, Utah is pretty good compared to Louisiana, which requires licensing to sell flowers. (Follow that link and check out the map of "States that License Florists.")

Well, that's more than the two issues Deserae requested. Anybody who knows me knows there are lots of other things that make my blood boil, but these are some of the ones that I thought might make for an interesting classroom topic.

How's that, Deserae? I hope it helps. Now it's your turn: Anything you think I should blog about that people would be interested in reading? Anything you think I'm wrong about? Would you rather just see more pictures of cats? Let me know.