HERE’S VIDEO OF JOHN HINDERAKER on CNN’s Reliable Sources. This was one of their better shows in general, with Jeff Jarvis and Dave Barry, too.

A “LAST WARNING” FROM AL QAEDA: Should we be worried? Or should Bush just promise massive indiscriminate nuclear retaliation, a la Duncan Black, if the threat comes true?

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish comments: “Sounds to me like they just got last season’s 24 on DVD.”

IF THE WAR IS GOING SO BADLY, James Joyner wonders why the National Guard is doing so well by using recently returned soldiers as recruiters.

A RALLY TO SUPPORT DENMARK in Toronto. Follow the link for pictures and more.

LAST NIGHT’S POST on books about music produced some email. Reader Tom Spauding writes:

The Sound Reinforcement Handbook is great for /live/ sound engineers, but it’s tough to beat Bobby Owsinski’s “The Recording Engineer’s Handbook” and “The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook” for studio tips and techniques.

I’d also second Ed’s mention of Rikky Rooksby’s “How To Write Songs on Guitar”, and add that his “Songwriting Sourcebook” goes it one better.

BTW……I am John Fogerty’s guitar tech, and of course, I have a blog Caught Up In The Fable.

I asked him if he was the keeper of the legendary Kustom amp, and he responded:

No, that amp has been tucked (and rolled…heh) away for now. He did use it on previous tours, with the Rickenbacker, but these days he uses Cornford amps for Dirt and Solo sounds, and Mesa-Boogie for clean. I did hook him up with the new Kustom folks and he is getting a combo amp from them for his studio. Apparently, the tremolo circuit in the new amps does a great job of getting that classic Creedence swamp wobble.

Cool. (My brother gets a great tremolo out of a hotrodded Super Reverb and a Swedish Hagstrom Les Paul copy; I recorded one song where it was so luscious you just wanted to scoop it out and put it in an ice cream cone.) And good suggestions on recording books. (There’s also Owsinski’s Mastering Engineer’s Handbook, to complete the series). I would stress, though, that although the Sound Reinforcement Handbook is about live sound, most of its content is equally applicable to recording.

Meanwhile, reader Ron McCabe recommends this quick-and-dirty guide for musicians. And reader Scott Foster writes:

You might be geeky enough to find the following interesting.

The next big thing for little Davids doing home brew music production is small room acoustics. You just can’t have a critical listening environment without dealing with acoustic treatment [or a stellar home theater for that matter]. Folks are figuring this out and activity in the internet community on this topic is exploding.

Like so many others fields of interest this is a fundamental science that heretofore was simply not available for the purposes of the little guys – but because of the communication efficiencies of the net [particularly forums in case of acoustics] this field of interest is fast switching from being a resource for only the most sophisticated of enterprises to one attainable by everyman.

The old standard layman’s reference on small room acoustics / home studio building is still quit popular – it is called: “The Master Handbook of Acoustics” and is on its 4th edition.

But there is a new boy in town… Rod Gervais – well known acoustic construction expert – OK well known in the internet acoustics community anyway – he just built a re-make of Studio “A” [where the chairman of the board used to record] has got a new book out.

Sure to be a smash hit! Well us acoustics geeks are excited, anyway.

Yeah, the acoustics in my home studio are pretty good, but I’m working on a few small flutter echoes with some Auralex wedge patches. There’s also a lot of cool computerized room-analysis equipment out there that didn’t used to be available.

MARK STEYN: Banned in Britain?

UPDATE: Tim Worstall says that there’s less to this story than meets the eye. Apparently the real problem is that Steyn isn’t good enough at sucking up to the bosses. Can’t say I’m surprised. . . .

JEFF GOLDSTEIN looks at Larry Summers, “diversity,” and the trouble with the academy.

JACK KELLY is criticizing media coverage of the war.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Tim Blair.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick offers advice for editors, with an illustration.

MORE STUFF TO BE WORRIED ABOUT: The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s biological-weapons threat has caused a lot of people to relax on the question of biological weapons generally. But in fact there’s plenty to worry about. I’ve already linked to Paul Boutin’s “Biowar for Dummies” piece, but I just got off the phone with Jason Pontin, editor of Technology Review, regarding new discoveries about the old Soviet bioweapons program. They have a big article coming out tomorrow on this topic — I’ve seen an advance copy, and it’s quite scary — but there’s a larger lesson. Not only do we have to worry about the hangover from old Soviet programs, but they also serve as a warning.

“That’s the essence of our story,” said Pontin. “That whatever the Soviet Union did at enormous difficulty and expense, in principle can be done cheaply and easily with modern technology.” What’s more, it’s technolgy that is “unregulated and not easy to regulate — these are the common tools of biotechnology” today.

I’ll have more on this in my TCS Daily column, and I’ll post links to the Technology Review story when it’s up. But this certainly seems like a reason to think harder about the sort of “Manhattan Project” for biodefense against threats both natural and artificial that Ray Kurzweil and Senator Bill Frist have been backing.

And to belabor a point, yes, this is a downside to the Army of Davids, and yes, I do talk about that in the book.

UPDATE: Noah Shachtman emails to note that there’s not just a threat of attack, but of accidents like this one, or this one, or this one.

MORE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON BLOGS AND PR: The folks at CNN send this highlight from the Reliable Sources transcript:

JEFF JARVIS, BUZZMACHINE.COM: I think “The Times” story was a sucker punch against a few bloggers who didn’t understand how to finesse this stuff. The story it really brought out is the relationship of the press to P.R..

Now, I advise bloggers in my blog that they should always reveal when a story comes from a P.R. agent, that they should reveal information that comes from P.R., and they should reveal any relationship, including lunches, that come from P.R. How many reporters do that? We don’t.

How many stories — we did an audit of a day’s TV news, locally or here on CNN, or your paper or any other paper, and see how many stories actually started with P.R., how much information came from P.R. So what “The Times” was asking the bloggers to do, the press doesn’t do. And that’s a double standard.

And in this age of transparency, I think the real lesson is that the bloggers know how to be transparent, they’ll push. A few didn’t know. OK. Now we’ll teach them how to do it better, and the press has to get better about transparency and its relationship with spin.

On “The New York Times” trying to hold bloggers to a higher standard
EDELMAN: Public relations has always been about telling the side of its client, but we only benefit when we’re telling the truth…”The New York Times” I think did in this story have a double standard.

On the “death of the gatekeepers”
JARVIS: All is fair in love and press…We’re seeing the death of the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers used to be those in power, then it was those in the press, and then — yes, now it’s P.R., who are gatekeepers to the powerful and the rich and the famous.

I did get the sense that the guy doing this story had a couple of axes to grind, involving Wal-Mart and the blogosphere. But the story itself didn’t really seem unfair; it was more the sense that he had somehow gotten hold of a big scoop when, well, he hadn’t.

UPDATE: The full Reliable Sources transcript has now been posted. Don’t miss the bits with John Hinderaker and Dave Barry, either.

JOHN SCALZI’S GHOST BRIGADES gets a favorable review in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “When you can make readers actually care about a just-hatched, made-from-scratch commando, not to mention an alien scientist who resembles a giant bug (I keep imagining Zorak from the Space Ghost cartoon), that’s good science-fiction writing. John Scalzi has pulled off that and a good deal more in this engaging novel.”

UPDATE: Here’s an audio interview with Scalzi.

And here’s our podcast interview with Scalzi, too.

THE GUARDIAN offers praise for the blogosphere.

HOW COVERT ARE COVERT CIA AGENTS? Not so much, apparently. Jeez.

UPDATE: A question from Slashdot:

What the hell happened to the spy agency? CIA Agents now chat away on unsecure cell phones, check into foreign hotels using GSAs (US gov’t issued credit cards), and leak every other intelligence briefing to the press. They might as well start a group on MySpace and issue bumper stickers and T shirts. The fact that Google can catch sensitive information means these guys have failed the test of keeping our government’s secrets secure.

Jeez. Indeed.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: This time, it’s at the American Psychological Association.

MILITARY RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION is going very well, and The Mudville Gazette takes an extended look at the figures, and the coverage thereof.

SOME GREAT VIRAL VIDEO PUBLICITY for American Apparel, a company I hadn’t heard of before. (I guess it works!)

Various companies are consulting PR agencies and marketing experts on how to get this kind of buzz. My advice: Treat all of your customers this well, and some of them will post video tributes to your great service, which other people will then link to.

It’s better than doing things the other way around.

BILL ROGGIO notes growing Taliban efforts in Pakistan, which has become a less-dangerous place for them than Afghanistan.

AN ARMY OF DAVIDS is right behind Harry Potter. On Technorati, that is.

ED DRISCOLL lists some great how-to books on music.

I’d add a couple of others.

The Sound Reinforcement Handbook is the single best reference for audio engineers anywhere. Read this book and you’ll know more than 80% of the guys calling themselves “sound engineers” out there. If you can do math, 90%.

Blues Guitar Inside And Out: I gave this to my brother when he started playing blues guitar, and now he’s a great blues guitarist. The book obviously gets the credit. Plus, I managed to cite it in a constitutional law article once.

Donald Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business. Maybe not quite, but it’s a great start.

And though it’s not quite a how-to, Paul Theberge’s Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, an interesting history of electronic music. I cited it in the New Orleans rave case brief.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s not a book, but I might as well plug the techno/rave documentary Better Living Through Circuitry, which I think is just excellent.

VIRGINIA POSTREL posts a picture of a recovering Sally Satel and remarks on their successful kidney transplant: “The secret to our tissue compatibility is that our real blood type is Diet Coke.”

SO I WAS LISTENING TO THE BBC earlier today, and they were reporting on the people (Russians and Serbs, mostly) who were unhappy that Slobodan Milosevic died. Major John Tammes, who has bad memories of service in the Balkans, is not among their number.

I expect there will be dark rumors, as the BBC story suggested — Slobo murdered by the UN, Slobo murdered by Western nations (France? Russia?) who didn’t want him revealing the extent of their support, etc. But the Milosevic trial was yet another argument that the qualms about the Nuremberg approach to deposed dictators (qualms that many participants in the Nuremberg trials felt quite strongly) may have considerable force. Saddam’s trial is less of a circus than Milosevic’s, but that’s about all you can say.

So should we just hang ’em? Perhaps. These trials are pretty much a foregone conclusion, and their character is more political than judicial anyway. When critics call them “show trials” they have a point. Do they do more good than harm? That’s not at all clear. I’m not sure what I think, but it certainly seems that trials that last until the defendant dies of old age aren’t the solution. Nuremberg didn’t take as long as the Milosevic trial.

UPDATE: More non-mourning, from Jesse Walker.

GM ROPER has thoughts on conquering fear.

FRANK MOSS, head of MIT’s Media Lab, looks at mass innovation and disruptive change:

What role will startups play in the future?

I see tremendous economic growth from startups from 10 years ago. Entrepreneurs will go from the 1,000 startup ventures funded in the last 10 to 20 years to ideas coming from people working together in network-based environments, using computers to dream up innovations in a way they never did before. It could be people in developing countries with low-cost computers.

You talk about education and the bottom-up effect that millions more people will play in societal advances. How do you see this unfolding?

We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop, and bootstrap the way they learn outside of school. We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.

Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.

We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.

Read the whole thing. Naturally, I agree with the notion of widespread bottom-up efforts bringing about substantial change. And I’ve got a whole chapter on games and learning in An Army of Davids. People keep asking about my “next book,” and I’m beginning to think that the social impact of gaming — games are the “dark matter” of contemporary culture, getting far less attention than they deserve in terms of their impact — may be the way to go.

UPDATE: More here, from the BBC:

It is not an impact on the epic scale of an asteroid smashing into the Earth and killing off the dinosaurs, but the collision of technology and media is having profound effects on a more modern ecosystem.

Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production – used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games, mashups (I’ll describe each of those in more detail below) – are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive.

Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged. . . . The democratisation of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed (or cursed, depending on one’s viewpoint) with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.

Hey, somebody should write a book on this stuff!

And illustrating this phenomenon is some rather cool niche-market videoblogging at Geek Entertainment TV. I found it pretty entertaining, but, well, you’d expect that, wouldn’t you . . . .

LA SHAWN BARBER: “I’m looking for quotes from ‘ordinary people’ using their blogs or other online resources to make a difference.”

HELEN AND I WILL BE ON NORTHERN ALLIANCE RADIO at 1 p.m. Eastern time. You can listen online here.

UPDATE: It’s now up in downloadable form here.