Snarkout, one of the finest blogs on the web, has got some profound musings on technology, permanence, extinction, and language, all things that have been weighing on my mind lately. I'd like to point you to Kevin Kelly's thoughts, which form the jumping-off point for Steve's post and were wonderfully articulated, but the Times does not want that information to be archived forever. I am not sure if that's irony. But hey, there's audio. Those audio formats never become obsolete.

Hey, wait, permanence? Archiving of digital formats? Openness? You might have missed Mark Pilgrim's post, which pretends at first to be about Apple and data loss (he's right about those parts) but then veers into preparing for future archaeology. I think Mark's got his priorities wrong on some of this stuff, but I appreciate having a zealot on the side of good.

You need to have someone hold an extreme position to get even moderate change. The hard part about being an advocate for the extreme position is that people like to make fun. My feeling is that it's a pretty good sign if you stand for something strongly enough that people can mock you for it. Take a look at the guy sitting next to you -- do you know what he stands for?

I know what Mike stands for, cynicism with a soft, sweet heart. Mike takes a bold pro-sports stance, refuting the "all geeks hate sports" myth with a combination of righteous indignation and a little bit of history.

Oh hey, speaking of myths and facts, Steven Johnson seeks out the facts with an intellectual honesty that Lou Dobbs wouldn't recognize if it stole his job. I'm just proud of my valuable contribution to the discourse. I told you we boys like to leave comments.

And then, best for last, Bad Acts. I spend a lot of time doing public speaking; So far I've managed to create a PowerPoint presentation featuring Dr. Phil, a pair of handcuffs, an American flag, cliché kitty, the Enron logo, the phrase "OMG WTF" in 72-point font, a line graph in which both the X and Y axes are completely unlabeled, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus. It should be pretty easy to work in a game of Assassin. I love my job. And I wish everybody on the web wrote as well as Skot does.