Writing the the New York Times, Ben Zimmer discusses the surprising emergence of “iterative” as the business buzzword of the moment.

Tinderbox users should grab Tinderbox 5.5.3 right away. It’s a small update, but we worth the download.

Twig, our new tool for information gardening, also gets a bump to 1.0.3 preview.

Scott Rettberg has posted his ELO plenary tribute to the swell parties of elit’s past.

ROB: It sounds like this was a spectacular period for the ELO.

SCOTT: It was.

ROB: I mean that you were really concerned with spectacle.

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Robert Harris continues his fictional life of Cicero, as told by his former slave and secretary Tiro, with this account of the Cataline conspiracy and its aftermath. How long, Catalina, will he abuse our patience? I’ve always thought Catalina a minor episode that modestly played to Cicero’s advantage, and though Harris does what he can, Cicero’s allies at this time are less interesting (and less well documented) than his rivals and, oddly, only Clodius emerges as truly frightening. I’m growing to like Harris’ reconstruction of Terentia, Cicero’s wife, as a level-headed and sensible woman who steps in and takes charge only when the boys are in a truly hopeless muddle, sets things right, and returns to her work.

Watch.

Les Orchard writes a fine tutorial about writing for the Web with Tinderbox.

Em Short discusses interactive fiction and the limitations of the parser. 

Fundamentally, however, we’ve got a bigger problem, which is that the command prompt is a lie. It tells the player “type something, and I’ll understand you.” Which it won’t.

Mark Bernstein: #eloai before we embrace the wisdom of crowd-sourced tagging, let's reflect on the tags that crowds would have sourced in 1934 Germany.

Dennis Jerz: @eastgate If Jews, Nazis and bystanders had all been tagging in public, on the global stage, for decades, might 1934 have been different?

Scott Rettberg: Deep thoughts with Mark Bernstein: folksonomical metadata developed by participatory community = nazism?

Diane Greco: @scottrettberg Um, yellow star? Tags simplify, so not value-neutral. Btw issue is antisemitism not "nazism." Labels again. #eloai

Links aren’t distracting.

Blue, underlined text is distracting. We’ve known this was a mistake since Mosaic started it. You can fix it on your site; just get rid of the underlines and choose a more subtle and natural link color.

Historical note: Linda and I coined the term “breadcrumb” in a 1986 paper on technical hypertext for the Society for Technical Communication. What we had in mind, in essence, was what we now call visited link colors.

I just read a new George Landow paper, not yet published, that makes an important point: writing with links is writing in the presence of other writers. Experienced writers do this anyway; they know they’re part of a conversation.

I still think it bears repeating: if you reading a hypertext or a Web page and you can’t concentrate, you find yourself constantly wanting to read something else or to do something else — well, maybe you don’t want to be reading this right now. And if reading the Web for a decade has made it harder for you to concentrate on books, maybe you should be reading better books.

Or, perhaps you don’t need to read. If you don’t have work to do, and you don’t want to influence anyone, and you don’t care much about ideas, then you don’t need to read.

Otherwise, sit up, pay attention, and get back to work.

Nick Carr thinks links are distracting and is encouraging publications to eschew them lest they damage our brains.

He calls this “delinkification”.

If you find links distracting, don’t display them. Turn them off while you read. Your Web browser can do it. Any decent web browser can do that, even MSIE. It's called a user style sheet. Anyone can do this. Do you? Does anyone you know?

If you are that easily distracted, maybe you are not doing what you ought to be doing. Plenty of people read books with bad typography. Plenty of people read handwritten manuscripts, and books written in strange languages, and even books with equations and stuff. We used to call these people, “educated”. We used to call these people, “folks with work that needs doing.”

Delinkification indeed.

Carr writes, "You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form."

He's mistaken. The "cognitive load" canard comes from a good review article that Jeff Conklin wrote in 1986. It was plausible at the time. There's no good evidence. The additional cognitive load that studies sometimes reveal comes (a) bad writing, and (b) additional information. That’s it. End of story. We’ve been a bit lax in letting people publish these "hypertext is hard to read" studies without really proving their case. Most of them, however, are either very early or appear in marginal journals.

My grill enjoyed Memorial Day with in someone else’s yard. I hope they had a good dinner!

I spent Sunday choosing a grill and a smoker, which suddenly I find I want quite unreasonably. I spent hours dithering between the good smoker, which costs too much, and the really good smoker, which costs even more and weighs a ton and was originally recommended by a venture capitalist, which probably tells you all you need to know.

But I probably can’t have either.

So, I got some local sausages and baked my own hot dog buns, using Ruhlman’s buttermilk dinner rolls as a starting point and making New England style top-split rolls which are still bizarrely exotic to me. Why does everyone in Boston split their hot dog buns the wrong way? Look — they’ve even got me doing it.

Memorial Day, it seems, is now international. The Hidden Kitchen people in Paris had the same idea. They made their own hot dog buns.

^ quote("Baking some hot-dog rolls for butter poached langoustine rolls for dinner tonight.")

Damn. Why didn’t I think of that?

It seems to me that, 40 years ago, we’d all be clustered around the television listening to Walter Cronkite explaining every intricacy and detail of the efforts to stop the leak. Want to know what that bendy thing in the live video is? Walter would find out and tell you.

Or maybe it would be David Brinkley, with Frank McGee on location. They’d have models and mockups and they’d be showing us live feeds from Mission Control and they’d analyze everything we could see in the video.

Just five years ago, we had Katrina and no one knew what was happening, but I could point you to five blogs that were piecing together the picture, blogs that knew as much about what was going on as anyone, anywhere – including people on the scene.

For some reason, even the scattering of science blogs covering the Big Leak are, let’s face it, lousy. They’re filled with acronyms and jargon, or they just generalize and speculate, or their horizons are limited to the writer’s specialty. They all seem to be wasting enormous amounts of time with commenters who have a Bright Idea (pump mercury into the pipe/nuke the well/fill it with metal kristals) or want to tout a conspiracy theory. Comments kill blogs; just turn them off.

Here’s an example from the best of the best — “Heading Out” at The Oll Drum. He’s an expert. He’s explaining why the top kill failed. Here goes:

Now, unfortunately that diagram left a significant part out, and that is that there are three sets of pipes leading down into the well. These are the well outer casing, which, surrounded by a layer of cement, holds the BOP in place. Then there is the production casing, which had just been set to the full depth of the well. And then there is the drill pipe that, at the time of the incident, extended down 8,367 ft from the platform, or roughly 3,367 ft below the BOP. That drill pipe (DP) had previously been used to locate the production casing at the bottom of the well, and itself now rode inside that production casing. In most normal operations it is closed at the bottom by a drill bit, but (and I’ll come back to this later), it had just finished the cementing of the production casing into position, and once it detached from that and was being pulled from the well, it was an open pipe all the way up to the rig floor. And in that condition, it could be used for other things. By pulling mud out of the DP and transferring it to the mud pits (or standoff vessel), the level in the riser would fall and be replaced by seawater flowing in at the top. Unfortunately this also lowered the weight of mud in the well, and that is what caused the oil and gas to flow into the well.

I can’t follow this. Some of it’s muddled, like that first sentence which seems to explain that the diagram he used in a previous post was wrong. (How come? Where was it wrong?) Some of it’s just awkward writing: why is DP preferable to “drill pipe”? At the heart or the matter, the writer is trying to establish some sort of causal chain, but after a dozen close readings I can’t quite figure out what the forces involved are. HO is doing terrific work — this is the best I’ve seen.

This is just not good enough.

I know nothing about oil drilling, but I have a Ph.D. in a physical science (from Harvard, forsooth) and I work in a technical profession and I have no idea what Heading Out is saying. And, damn it, this shouldn’t be that hard: we’ve got some pipes, some valves, a few fluids, and a reservoir under pressure. This is not rocket science, and it’s not quantum mechanics. Draw a diagram, show the flows, identify the forces.

By the way, is there a Mission Control? Where is it? Who is in charge? If something goes sour right now, who decides what button to push? Don’t you think that would interest people? More than today’s Globe front page, which featured a story about a kid who lied on his Harvard application and two stories about Cape Cod summer houses? The Big Leak was on page A8, which explained that the information in yesterday’s stories was wrong (again) and BP was confident that this time everything would probably be under control soon, much as they said yesterday. (Remember when lying to major newspapers had consequences?)

Where the hell is our press – amateur or professional? Where did the blogosphere go?

Who told the bloggers they could go home? Yes, it’s a technical story with numbers and everything, and it’s inconvenient to cover and there are no cool pictures of naked ladies or stolen Apple products.

C’mon folks: we’re better than this. Do the work.

We had a dandy dinner to celebrate Linda’s terrific transcript at Bergamot, a new restaurant on the Cambridge/Somerville line. It was terrific.

We started with cocktails, mixed by Amy of JustAWaitress.com. Linda liked her Orchard a lot. I know nothing much about cocktails and Amy is certified, so I said “surprise me” and had a Lawn Party, which involves Knob Creek, Pimm's, mint syrup from one of the waiter’s personal wild mint plantation, and Yuzu. “Yuzu? you ask. I didn’t know, either. It’s a cross between the sour mandarin and a fruit that’s even more obscure.

The Orchard has Tequila, Peach & Pear Liqueur, Basil & Lime.

Then on to dinner, which involved fresh sardines (very tasty) and rainbow trout over asparagus and scapes and some very, very nice sauces. A nice Anjou with the fish, and a dandy half bottle of Chateuneuf-du-Pape with the trout and Linda’s lamb.

Seriously good food, and (if I’m follow their moves correctly) a remarkable wine list.

A nice visualization of of “A History of the World in 100 Objects", by Nate Matias using Tinderbox and Emberlight.

BP’s short-term PR damage control campaign seems remarkably effective, but I can’t see how this will help them in the long run.

First, we seem to have a classic case of celebrating tentative success each morning (in time for the morning news shows), with gradual doubt emerging and confessions of failure (and resolve) timed after the East coast evening news. And we’ve got classic information containment, keeping unescorted press from getting good photo opportunities while confusing everyone with contradictory (and slow-coming) information.

Who is doing a good job of science blogging the disaster? The Houston Chronicle is said to be on top of the story, but I find their coverage superficial and surprisingly non-technical. Everyone points to the live feed the government compelled BP to share, but what, exactly, are we seeing (on those occasions – rare in my experience – when the feed is actually working)?

Update: Suggestion: The Oil Drum (thanks Zon Owen) ☙ GulfBlog (thanks Doug Holschuh)

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Strange and fascinating stories about love among very young people. A middle school girl from England finds herself friendless and adrift in an American elementary school and learns why her Mum has no friends. A middle-school boy is invited by one of the Cool Kids to come along on a Mediterranean cruise along with his divorced dad and Dad’s new (and very young) girlfriend. A gin-drenched recluse who works for a term paper mill befriends the battered 14-year-old goth girl who lives downstairs until Goth Girl’s mother warns her off because she’s a bad influence on her daughter.

Kaleido, a spatial hypertext tool for programming the the Processing language. By Agnes Chang at MIT.

Now available: Tinderbox 5.5 for Macintosh. Simplenote syncing, better outlines, better maps, better text. You can easily add your own badges, too.

$90 upgrade from any previous version (and free if you've upgraded in the past year).

I made fresh pasta last night. It’s just flour and eggs. That’s it. Mix them up real well, and then roll them out. (My sister gave me a pasta roller decades ago, Linda found it in the basement, and it works fine)

I made a three-egg batch, and we had fresh fettucini last night and there’s a bag of fresh spaghetti in the freezer for later in the week.

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A spectacular novel that examines how lives fly off-course in even the most conservative and protected environments. I found this through Caitlin Flanagan’s superb and thoughtful essay in The Atlantic, which you may read without fear of spoilers. Avery Academy is a prep school in rural Vermont, populated by rich kids from the city and a few deserving sons and daughters of local farmers. The headmaster, who is a nice and thoughtful fellow, has just received a distressing videotape in which three boys from the school are having sex with a freshman, and he knows at once that nothing will ever be the same again. He is not wrong. Shreve does an exceptional job of capturing the sound of real people in a real school, and of making it all matter outside the gates. The story is told from every point of view, and though it centers on the headmaster, some of the most memorable chapters are told from such unexpected angles as the school cafeteria cook, the town real estate agent, and the freshman girl’s roommate.