Earlier this year, I wrote three parts of a four-part series on how to talk to aliens. Here comes the final part.

My main thesis has been that if we want to communicate with complex self-aware systems about which we cannot make any assumptions (AKA aliens), then we have to strip our message of all arbitrary cultural and historical attributes, leaving only fundamental mathematical notions, such as integers. In part one, I examined some of the unfounded assumptions we’ve implicitly made about extra-terrestials in our past attempts to communicate. In part two, I explained how using continued fractions as a form of notation allows us to depict any number as a series of integers, and I explain why this is a far less arbitrary method than relying on base 2 or base 10, or bases tout court.

Now that we have a universal method for sharing numbers with aliens, which numbers should we send them? I promised to propose two such numbers, but delivered only the first, Khinchin’s constant, in part three.

This post is brought to you by the fine structure constant, or the letter alpha. Unlike Khinchin’s constant, which emerges as a fundamental property of numbers and thus exists entirely within the realm of mathematics, alpha defines a fundamental property of our universe.

In the broadest sense, alpha is the ratio of the strength of the electromagnetic force to the strength of strong force — the two strongest forces of the four fundamental forces in the universe.I’ll gladly outsource the gory details: Here it is defined as “the ratio of the speed of the electron orbiting the nucleus of a hydrogen atom to the speed of light”. Wikipedia’s updated definition has it as the ratio between “(i) the energy needed to bring two electrons from infinity to a distance of s against their electrostatic repulsion, and (ii) the energy of a single photon of wavelength 2.pi.s.” Alpha was “discovered” by physicists in 1916, and can currently be measured to an accuracy of 10 decimal places, at .007297352568(24), or 1/137.0359991(5).

But why send alpha, instead of another well-known physical constant, like the speed of light, c? The constant c is measured in terms of distance over time, so the actual number depends on the units we use for distance and time. These units are arbitary. The number 299792458, for example, defines c in terms of meters per second. Sending that number to aliens (or 186282.397…, which is c in terms of miles per second) imparts no information, because aliens are not privy to our measurement conventions. We might as well send them a random number.

Alpha is different. It does not have units of measure, (The term of art is that it is dimensionless.) The constant is a pure number, like pi or e. Unlike pi or e, however, alpha has resisted derivation from mathematical first principles.Not surprisingly, many people have tried to derive alpha mathematically. The physicist Arthur Eddington thought he could prove alpha was exactly 1/136, later that it was exactly 1/137. The phycisist James Gilson got a more accurate result, though the latest empirical data places alpha over one standard deviation away, making it unlikely he is right. Naturally, alpha also inspires the odd religious nut. Alpha is to early 21st-century humans still a fact of nature to be measured empirically — a given, an exogenous value not predicted by theory; and that, to physicists, is like catnip. Richard Feynman called alpha “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.”

John Baez, a renowned mathematical physicist, has listed 26 exogenous dimensionless constants that define our specific universe. Of these the fine structure constant is the most famous. But fame doesn’t fly with aliens. Why not choose any of the others?

We certainly could, but there is something else about alpha that makes it useful for our purposes: There is tentative evidence that suggests the constant may in fact change over time and space. A paper in Physical Review Letters in 2001 suggested that the constant may have been just a little smaller six billion years ago, based on the spectroscopic analysis of quasars. The authors give an broader overview of the state of the research in a Scientific American article earlier this year. The article, definitely worth reading, points to a paper that argues the value of alpha may also change depending on whether you are safely within the gravitational tug of a galaxy or out in intergalactic space. Inside a galaxy, alpha may remain more stable, goes the theory. Alpha may change across the universe due to the universe’s inherent “lumpiness”.

For our purposes, here are the salient facts about alpha: 1) Our level of technological advancement determines the precision with which we know alpha, and 2) It’s possible that alpha changes over time and distance. This allows us to transmit two pieces of information if we send alpha to faraway aliens: 1) Our level of technological advancement, and 2) the value of alpha here and now, which may act as something of a location marker or a data point, especially if their local value turns out to be slightly different.

We can achieve this result by sending both the highest likely value and the lowest likely value for alpha that we currently feel confident of — 0.007297352544 and 0.007297352592 — converted into a continued fraction, of course. This helpful site turns those numbers into the corresponding integer series

[0, 137, 27, 1, 3, 1, 1, 35, 2] and [0, 137, 27, 1, 3, 1, 1, 11, 3].Do reread part two of this series if you want a primer on continued fractions.

Given that our aliens will have deciphered part three‘s Khinchin’s constant (which depends on continued fractions to be meaningful), they will not be able to mistake these two sequences for anything other than two numbers that are extremely close to alpha. The aliens may have derived alpha exactly, or have measured it far more precisely; they could be aware that it changes across space, or they could be terrible at precise measurements. In all situations, our integer sequences corresponding to the upper and lower bounds for alpha as we currently know them will come in handy. I’m sure of it.

That concludes this series. I’ve found that often, the popularity of my blog posts is inversely proportional to the fun I have writing them. I’m not sure if that’s a constant, though.

The lyrics to The Revolution Will Not Be TelevisedSo what excuse do I have this week for the sparse blogging? It just so happens that in the same week I got hold of a new Mac, Bredbandsbolaget upgraded my neighborhood to 100Mbps at no extra charge (bless them), and the upshot is that I’ve been sitting here agape watching live high-definition video streaming via Apple’s Quicktime.

I’m sure that the novelty will wear off over time and I will start demanding actual content rather than teasers, but for now, if your system can handle it, rush to Apple’s new HD page to marvel at what we’ll take for granted in a few years from now: On-demand streaming HD video content. It’s so good it’s ridiculous — for example, the 1080p stream of animal video from the Macaulay Library, at a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, is too expansive even for my 20-inch 1600×1050-pixel monitor.

The BBC has also gotten in on the act (they are good that way) with something called BBC Motion, a site where video producers can buy HD footage, among other things. Their teasers are gorgeous as well.

When not watching HD video or tweaking the new Mac (an important pursuit akin to gardening, or so I imagine) I’ve been engaging in that deadliest of all creativity killers, socializing with friends. At this rate, Stockholm 2006 will turn into New York 1999. I really must try harder to reconnect with my inner misanthrope. What will it take — moving to Africa?

Speaking of misanthropes, I think I shall go blog Åke Green now.

My new apartment will not contain a television. My TV viewing habits have dwindled to nearly nothing over the past few years as I find more and more active pursuits to add to a typical day. When I do watch TV, it’s been in response to a newsworthy event, such as last year’s tsunami. I regard watching movies as an active pursuit, but I do that via my computer, aided by a 20 inch LCD monitor that is every bit as a good as the latest generation television.

Lately, news video has been increasingly accessible online and on demand. CNN’s video is now free. BBC content is also increasingly accessible. Swedish news is especially easy to view. The reason I kept a television has thus been preëmpted by the onward march of broadband internet.

For many, an additional reason to keep a TV might be regular sitcom shows, some of which are rather quite good. But Apple is now leading the charge in making these available on demand as well, with yesterday’s launch of iTunes 6. Just as the internet has spelled the end of telephony as we know it, it will do the same to network television and how video is consumed in the home. Give it a few years more.

In Sweden and elsewhere, iTunes’ video offerings will have an additional, as yet unheralded effect: Swedish television buys America’s best TV shows, but broadcasts them with a delay of a season or more. This has meant that many Swedes already download pirated versions of shows in the current US season for viewing on their computer. Now these shows will be downloadable legally and affordably, en masse, by people for whom bit-torrents are one technological hurdle too far. The upshot is that these shows will either have to be shown simultaneously on Swedish and US networks, or not at all on Swedish TV, as otherwise too few people will bother to tune in to justify their price. The effect is similar to how DVD sales of US film releases have compressed the release schedule of US films in European cinemas — if a movie is released on DVD in the US before it hits European cinemas, market mechanics ensure that Europeans have slaked their desire to see it by the time it arrives in their local cinema.

Apple’s new software offering, Front Row, coupled to the new Apple remote, together preëmpt the criticism that finding video via a computer is too active a pursuit for it to ever be attractive to a couch potato. Using one-click shopping in iTunes, you will soon be able to breeze through iTunes’ offerings from afar and choose and consume episodes (and later films) with a better user experience than current cable or satellite menus, on demand, with a copy saved to your hard drive, much like how Tivo does it.

I fully expect Sweden to be the early adopter par exellence when it comes to dumping broadcast-based TV viewing, though not just because Swedes tend to embrace new technology: In this particular case, a stupid and senseless tax on the ownership of television tuner mechanisms will nudge Swedes in the right direction, as the tax does not apply to computers. Soon, I and plenty of Swedes will be able to look a Radiotjänst taxman in the eye and say, in all honesty and with a badly concealed smirk, that there is no TV in the house.

In the middle of a long thread on abortion currently raging on MemeFirst, Jame asked:

I would be curious if there have been any studies done that compare abortion rates in the US with those in Europe, particularly in those countries (such as the Scandinavians) with a good record of supporting child care and motherhood. The implication being that other, less intrusive public policies may be effective at convincing wavering mothers to keep the baby.

I thought I might try to figure that out myself, or at least begin by tabulating the Swedish data, which exists in abundanceIt may not be socialism at its best, but Swedish socialized medicine does produce statistical data that are the envy of th world. Case in point: The unrivalled Swedish twin registry. .

Using birth statistics and abortion numbers broken down by week from the National Board of Health and Welfare, I was able to produce some very interesting graphs charting abortion trends in Sweden over the past 20 yearsHere is the data I collected, in an Excel spreadsheet..

This first chart shows cumulative figures for how pregnancies end in Sweden each year, in absolute terms. The second chart takes this data and normalises it, allowing us to make percentage comparisons across years. This makes the second chart more interesting for our purposes.

The number of stillborn is below 0.4% of total births. I’ve included them with live births to show total births in the graphs, because what we are trying to track here is a mother-to-be’s intentions.

The data presented thus shows that most pregnancies end in birth (green), but that a near-constant 25% end in abortion. This is Sweden’s “abortion ratio”. The ratio has been hovering near this level since 1975, when abortion was legalized.Abortion in Sweden is legal until the 18th week, after which it is only permitted “in cases of severe indications.” A synopsis in English (PDF, on page 8)

Two things are immediately obvious from looking a the data: First, there is a definite trend towards having abortions earlier. In 1985, less than 43% of abortions were performed by the end of the 8th week of pregnancy. In 2004, that figured had climbed to nearly 71%. The percentage of total abortions performed by the end of the 6th week climbed from 3.2% in 1985 to 24.5% in 2004.

Second, the proportion of abortions performed in the second and third trimester stayed near-constant between 1985-2004, at around 3.5%I suspect this is because the majority of these abortions are performed for medical reasons, and that figure tends to remain constant..

How does this stack up to the US? Data is a bit lacking (and lagging), but this document by The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) (PDF) from May 2005 (PDF) calculates the abortion ratio in the US at 24.3% in 2002, having dropped gradually from 29.7% in 1985. (1983 was the all-time high, at 30.4%). By comparison, Sweden’s was 25.7% in 2002.

Abortions in the US, 2001. figures by The Alan Guttmacher Institute

Elsewhere, AGI post a pie chart showing when abortions are performed. In 2001, 59.1% of abortions in the US were performed before the end of week 8, vs 66.7% in Sweden (in 2001, for comparison purposes). In the US, 11.9% of abortions were performed after the end of week 12; the equivalent number for Sweden was 4.8%.

The upshot? The US has recently dipped below Sweden in its abortion ratio, but Swedes have moved towards having their abortions much earlier. Stringent pro-lifers tend to focus on absolute numbers of abortions, and tend to discount when an abortion is performed. For those who are pro-choice to some extent, however, when an abortion is performed makes a significant ethical difference, and a trend towards earlier abortions in Sweden is definitely welcome.

I have not yet been able to find abortion figures for the US comparable to those for Sweden — broken down by week across the years. If they are available, an interesting comparison to make would be to calculate the weeks spent in the womb by aborted foetuses as a proportion of total foetus-weeks for all pregnancies. This would present a more nuanced view of progress towards reducing late abortions.

While doing some research for an article I am writing, I came across a phenomenon I had never heard about before, despite a lifetime’s interest in all things astronomical. Apparently, astronauts in orbit regularly experience light flashesThis link leads to a long but worthwhile article about these light flashes., most likely caused by cosmic rays decaying in a nuclear reaction as these rays enter the eyeball. In effect, astronaut eyes become human particle detectors. Or that, at least, is currently the leading theory.Another possibility is that the cosmic rays are interacting directly with the part of the brain responsible for vision.

This phenomenon was predicted as early as 1952, and was first experienced by the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Ever since, astronauts have reported seeing light flashes while in orbit. Now that a manned Mars mission is on the planning horizon, finding the precise cause of these flashes has become a priority. Currently, the longest period of time that humans have ventured outside the protective sheath of the Earth’s magnetosphere was the 10 days it took to get to the moon and back. A mission to Mars would put humans at the mercy of the vagaries of our Sun for around 3 years, before Mars can offer its protective shieldWe know this thanks to Swedish research..

Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) orbits lie well within the magnetosphere, but even these regularly cross this post’s second bizarre phenomenon, the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA). The SAA is a region over Brazil, Argentina and the South Atlantic where the magnetosphere is abnormally weak. This weakness is due to the fact that the center of the Earth’s magnetic field is not really aligned with the center of the Earth. The upshot is that cosmic rays tend to reach spacecraft in greater numbers as they fly over the SAA — not surprisingly, the number of light flashes experienced by astronauts increases over this region.

There is a Swedish angle to all this. Sweden’s only prospective astronaut, Christer Fuglesang, is involved in several projects that are trying to get to the bottom of these light flashes. Several particle detectors have been built that wrap around an astronaut’s head, so that if and when s/he sees a light flash, the particle detector tries to capture the precise path of the particle. One such detector has been on Mir since 2002. Another will travel to the International Space Station soon, quite possibly with Fuglesang on his maiden flight aboard STS-116 in 2006 — if Space Shuttle flights resume, that is.

At the moment it’s all content and no formI would have loved to make things spiffier, but what with the travels there is barely enough time to keep up-to-date on the content right now. Bad timing on Google’s part, obviously., but I’d like to introduce my new blog: Ogle Earth, “A microblog about the wonderful things being done with Google Earth.”

Google Earth is going to fundamentally redefine how we use the internet. That’s obvious to me after a few days of slack-jawed intensive use. Luckily, my work PC could handle the the graphical demands without protestA Mac version is in the works.. Luckily, Felix alerted me of its release in time so I could download a copy before — and this must be a first — Google was inundated and had to stop further downloads for now.Update 2005-07-04: Google Earth downloads are again available.

I’m being this enthusiastic because I found Google Earth to be a groundbreaking application on at least two mutually reinforcing fronts: As a viscerally beautiful experience, and as a revolution in how we will instinctively “place” information in our mind’s eye. The former is the eyecandy that will lead everyone to the latter, I think.

I love maps, and always have. I love nothing more than to be dropped off in a new city with a map and the day ahead of me. The love affair came early — my preschooler self demanded endless guided tours from parents through the household’s (to me, then) human-sized atlas. And it wasn’t just Earth: maps of the Moon, Mars and the night sky, diagrams of the solar system and the galaxy all seeded what grew to be a need for knowing, for lack of a less presumptuous phrase, my place in the universe.

When I lived in Australia as a teenager, I tried imagining exactly where my relatives in Europe stood as I spoke to them on the phone. If I looked straight down and a little to the North and West of me, near the edge of that Persian carpet, there they’d be, 12,000 km away on the other side of molten magma, feet pointing my way.

I’d also readily imagine myself gazing at Earth from space when trying to figure out how the seasons came about, or why sunsets are always quick and punctual at the equator. TV programs did this too, of course, but computers in the 80s and 90s were not nearly ready to do my bidding live in 3D.

Now there is Google Earth. Sure, I have the screensaver that lets you play Superman with Earth, but Google’s offering is just stunningly better. Where to begin? A quick list: In some places in Sweden, the level of detail is such that you can see the shadows of individual people as you zoom in… You can add translucent roadmap overlays that shimmer into existence as you come in closer… You can turn height information into fully fledged 3D mountains… You can then look up at the horizon and fly through this landscape
The Hoover dam in 3D. Click for more.…

So where have I been recently? I revisited some 3D terrains I know well, like the Lake District in the UK, where the vantage points are remarkably accurate. I flew through the Hunza valley in Northern Pakistan. I found our old swimming pool in Sydney. I checked out Terra del Fuego and flew over the stunning West coast of Greenland. I also took to aiming for Earth from afar at random and then zooming in all the way — once I ended up near a tabletop mountain in the Southern Venezuelan Amazon basin that has a most beautiful hidden valley.Sorry not to be able to supply coordinates, which I now feel I should, but I don’t have access to Google Earth here at home where I blog.

That’s the eyecandy part of this impressive application. But Google’s cleverness lies in really just letting all this be a kind of backdrop, a lure to where the real revolution is going to happen. Here it is: Anyone can publish a layer for Google Earth linking places on the internet to places on Earth. The application comes preloaded with a sampling of such layers, such as volcanoes or recent earthquakes, or links to sites for coordinate confluences. But the possibilities are far broader than I can currently grasp. One blogger is tracing the Tour the France. Flickr photos that are “geotagged” with coordinates can already be made to appear automatically. I myself am mostly done converting a link-list of Swedish universities into such a layer — turning that information into a far far more compelling experience for foreign students considering studying in Sweden.

Where will all this lead? It seems evident to me that a physical location is less arbitrary than a URL, as most everything in cyberspace refers back to something in physical space, be it a news story’s dateline, a travel diary, an institution’s website, or a restaurant review. Blogs too are written from somewhere, with location often defining content. So why not turn blogrolls into a Google Earth layer? Why not have The BBC turn its datelines into pointers on Google Earth and update that layer in sync with its website? Why not turn my address book into a layer?

Google is hoping for that, I’m sure. Google Earth comes with a built-in browser (the Google browser!) to facilitate precisely this kind of interchange: On the top half of the screen, the Earth browser; on the bottom, if you want, the web browser. I imagine that soon, surfing from geotagged website to geotagged website will be accompanied with a moving zooming live Earth; a visit to www.who.org leads to a view of Geneva, for example, where my address book markers show me that my friend Eurof, who lives there, is currently online with Skype. I also notice there is an exhibit of pre-Columbian art on around the corner from him, courtesy of a marker sponsored by the Tribune de Genève, so I ask him if he’s been and if it’s worth the trouble.

Then, when I’m done procrastinating, I go back to the WHO site and click on the story about an outbreak of Marburg in the Uige province of Angola, and the Earth view automatically moves there. Perhaps I will be able to switch on an overlay of gridded population densities, or child mortality (provided by the WHO?), letting me further understand the context of the news. Perhaps somebody will have taken pictures from the region on a recent trip, and geotagged them. Maybe one of the doctors there is blogging it, and her blog shows up in the view. Perhaps Wikipedia will have geotagged its article on Uige by then.

The web is getting to be ridiculously good.

When redesigning the site last JanuaryAnd no, I’m still not done., I wanted to make sure that the marginalia to the left of the main narrative floated clear of one another. In the old design, that hadn’t been the case — each margin note was just a span of text anchored to the main text but pushed off to the left, and I had to be careful to leave plenty of room before inserting the next margin note, or they’d quite simply overwrite each other. The old design thus mashed up form and content, which I hated, but I loved the ability to add margin notes more.

I had found a clever little solution that provided exactly the intended effect — a wide left margin for the main container, and then a combination of negative margins, float:left, and clear:left applied to the marginalia — and it worked in every major browser except for my own favorite, Safari. Sure, it would render, but links went all funny and text was no longer selectable. In short, it was unworkable, and I had to surrender to the old status quo.

Until today. I was reading Roger Johansson’s Safari wishlist, where he encounters the same problem:

After a little bit of fiddling with the CSS I found that adding position:relative to the rules for any floated elements that also have negative margins fixes the problem. It shouldn’t be necessary though, right?

No, Roger, it shouldn’t. Thanks to you, however, I can now write my marginalia with abandon, secure in the knowledge that should it get too verbose, my earlier scribblings will accomodate these later intrusionsUpdate: June 2 / Well, clearly there is now a problem with IE, but it’s way too late to figure out what all that is about. Tomorrow..

Update: June 6 Okay, that took way more effort than is healthy, but now I’ve cobbled together some extra CSS markup just for IE that gives it the same functionality. As a test, here are three margin comments placed very close together: Margin comment 1, margin comment 2 and margin comment 3. See how they no longer overlap in IE? It took a display:block and some fancy margin adjustments to do the trick.

If you’re using Firefox or Safari, you’ll notice how hovering over a certain margin comment now highlights it and its context in the main narrative. Discrete but useful, is the idea. This particular feature doesn’t work with IE because that browser can’t recognized the :hover pseudo-class. None of this works for Netscape, BTW, but given my latest stats, nobody should be noticing any longer. (I’ve got a simplifed HTML/CSS example here, in case anyone is interested in taking this further.)

I’ve spent some time exploring how best to take advantage of OS X 10.4’s metadata goodness, familiarizing myself with the new ways in which Spotlight lets you organize files.

I’ve long looked forward to finally being able to use all file attributes to organize my files, rather than just the location attribute. Previously, both in Windows and Mac OS, you could do searches on a limited set of such attributes, like “date created” or “file size”In the Mac OS, there was even a highly rudimentary user-adjustable file attribute you could search with: the color label.. But you could never turn such searches into a permanent filtered window, dynamically showing all the files on your system whose attributes satisfy your criteria.

Mac OS X 10.4 lets you do precisely that, using “Smart Folders”. Now, a file can show up wherever and whenever it is relevant, as determined by its metadata. Apple has made it even better by greatly increasing the different kinds of attributes a file can possess, and also by indexing text-based files, in effect turning content into a (giant) attributeUntil now, I had to resort to BBEdit’s ability to search through the content of multiple files to do something remotely resembling this..

But alas, Spotlight has its limits. Two in particular are identified by John Sircusa in his scarily thorough and much linked-to Ars Technica review of OS X 10.4:

1) Just as I have encountered with the smart folders in iTunes and RSS readers, Spotlight’s user interface severely limits the kind of search query it lets you make. Specifically, all individual queries can only be strung together via logical ANDs. No nests, ORs, or NOTs.

2) Although the underlying BSD operating system now supports it, there is not yet any higher level support for creating your own arbitrary searchable attribute=value pairs, which is precisely what I had been hoping to do to my data — for example by marking up a file thus: “client=si, projectname=designåret, language=english, duedate=20050530, function=invoice”. I would then have been able to group together files in smart folders by client, as well as by projects that are due within a week, and by invoices for the year, come tax time. No longer would I have to choose only one of those methods of viewing my data. I could have it all. But just not yet, it would seem.

But there are workarounds.

Re 1): It turns out that while the Spotlight user interface doesn’t help you structure complex queries, it does give you a way to perform raw queries, just as you would at the command line. While these aren’t pretty, they certainly let you construct as complex a query as you care to make. Restiffbard explains how exactly. There is a picture at the end of the post making it all a bit clearer.

Re 2): Several blogs have noticed that there is a new attribute called “Spotlight Comments” that is visible if you “Get Info” (Command-I) on a file. This attribute provides a text field that is usable in Spotlight searches — for example, you can group together all files whose Spotlight comments contain the word “Polish”.

Spotlight comments has now been mooted by blogger Russell Beattie as a great way of attaching keywords, or “tags”, to files, perhaps because tags are all the rage on the internets right now.

I happen to think that tags are way too shoddy to trust. How would you know if “polish” refers to the people, the language, your shoes or the need for an edit? Smart folders are not so smart that they can tell the difference. This is why it is so important to have attribute=value pairs, making sure that names of attributes are unique.

The “folksonomies” of tags that are used by Technorati and Flickr don’t escape this problem. They too suffer from contextual confusion, especially of the linguistic kind — for example, Swedes will tag pictures of children with “barn”, leaving it to Americans to wonder why their searches for images of a pictoresque barn brings up blond children. The idea is that folksonomies are good enough, and perhaps on the web they are, trading accuracy for spontaneity, but for my own files I need not make such compromises.

Therefore, I think we should go one better than tags and use Spotlight comments as an adhoc repository for our own arbitrary attribute=value pairs. To minimize the potential for contextual confusion, mine are going to look like this:

:client=si: :projectname=designåret:

:language=english: :duedate=20050530:

:function=invoice:

It is far easier to add such metadata than it might look, thanks to the new Automator workflows, which can batch-process files. It’s a trivial matter to create a workflow [.zip] that appends text to the Spotlight comments of selected files and folders (and even nested files and folders [.zip]), as several blogs have done. Just open these workflows in Automator, then save them as Finder plug-ins. To use, select files and/or folders, right-click, and select your workflow of choice. A dialogue then prompts you for the text to append.

It goes without saying that this is a rather rudimentary workaround. For starters, there is no trivial way to batch-change or batch-delete arbitrary text from Spotlight comments (that I have seen — Automator certainly doesn’t provide it), for example by peforming a search and replace on the Spotlight comments of a selection of files. It should be fairly easy to do this in AppleScript, though, given sufficient motivation. It’s a problem that those who plan to use tags face as well.

Eventually, either Apple or a third party will implement OS X 10.4’s built-in support for user-defined attributes, making this ad hoc solution thoroughly obsolete. But when this does happen, it should be trivial to switch to the new and proper menthod, because all you will need to do is select all the items in a smart folder, which already match your predefined criteria, and batch-process them to generate the proper attribute=value pairs.

In the meantime, there is an opportunity here for the right company to create the Conflict Catcher of OS XContext for recent switchers: Conflict Catcher was an indispensable utility for OS 9.. Right now, I wish I were a proper programmer.

Because it’s the run-up to Bloggforum 2.0, I once again feel at liberty to indulge in shameless metablogging. Consider this some early personal notes for the panel discussion, “Blogging, what’s the point?”A good friend complained last week, “You used to write funny stories about Swedes. Now your blog is just about numbers,” the implication being, I’m guessing here, that Swedes are more interesting than numbers.

It’s true that Swedes are funnier, but they’re no longer new. From September 2002, when I first arrived in Stockholm, until about September 2004, Sweden was an exotic place — beautiful and efficient on the surface, though with a full complement of quirks and perplexities that were a pleasure to root out and drape across my blog.

Expat blogging was possible for as long as Swedes were them and I was me. But now these identities have begun to blur. Not so much in the abstract, nationalist sense (I’m a dedicated post-nationalist), but on the level of daily personal interactions. Speaking everyday Swedish is now semi-automatic; and paying Swedish taxes has led to a steady erosion of my traditional ironic detachment when contemplating local political shenanigans and judicial cock-ups. If I’m paying for my stake in Swedish society, and I can’t vote here, then I’ll damn well blog here, goes the thinking.

So the cutesy expat phase of this blog is definitely overI’m afraid we’ll never know what it was that I hated most about Stockholm., replaced by a more haranguing tone when blogging Sweden (usually because it tends to concern group think, civil liberties, and freedom of speech). But that’s not the first time my interests have shifted. There was a phase in 2002 when I wrote often about about Israel and Palestine. Ditto about the Iraq war in 2003. And yes, now, number theory.

I have an admiration for one-issue bloggers who have the convictions to harp on about the same theme day-in day-out, but I find myself visiting such blogs less frequently after a while, because variations on a theme inevitably prove less attractive than whole new themes. I myself blog to learn, as a means of thinking through and then articulating a coalescing world view that I try to make as consistent as possible before it solidifies. But then I need to move on, otherwise I get repetitious, bored and hence boring.

In the end, it boils down to this: I don’t want to blog from a position of authority; I want to blog from a position of discovery. I think that is the secret of the relative longevity of this particular blog — it is driven by my inconstant interests. Fortunately, these interests on occasion intersect with those of readers.