Back of the Envelope

I was wondering whether it might be worthwhile to register a domain name for my blog, so I checked to see whether www.backoftheenvelope.com was available. Kind of ironic, isn't it?

This may become a regular feature, especially on Sundays where there's not much to talk about and I feel pretty lazy anyway. In any case, here's a list of my posts which I don't regret writing:

Federal Marriage Amendment Alternative — My first post discussing an amendment aimed directly at judicial activism, which sparked my first interblog debate.

Conspiracy Theory — What if Syria really does have Iraq's WMDs? What if Bush already knows this?

A few questions for Mr. Kerry — Questions I'd like to ask Kerry about his 1971 Congressional testimony.

Christianity and the Nanny State — My thoughts on Joe Carter's thoughts on Matthew Yglesias's thoughts on a Christian libertarian's thoughts on... Christian libertarianism.

Why name your blog "Back of the Envelope," anyway? — What's in a name?

Do You Know Who I Am? — The post that started a Cornerlanche. Dave Barry on Kerry's elitism.

Bush's Immigration Plan — My thoughts on the matter. Hint: Ambivalent, but I don't think it's mercenary pandering.

Ideological Purity and the War on Terror — I have little patience for conservatives who feel that Bush's moderate politics are reason enough to stay home in November.

Why Iraq? — The reasons I think Iraq was not just a necessary step, but the necessary next step, in the war on terror.

Kerry minus thirty years — I rant and rave about Kerry's inability to discuss any part of his record which occurred after he returned from Vietnam.

Yes, yes, I promised no more posts about the blog itself, but I also promised that I would let you know when the Google search started working. Well, it's working now. It is not a lot of help, though. At least, not yet. Since all my posts are archived by week rather than individually, searching for a word or phrase will only take you to the correct week, then you have to search the page containing a week full of posts for what you're looking for. That might be useful once I have a sizable archive, but right now all my posts are on the front page, so you can do that with just your browser's search feature. Still, I'm glad it's working.

In other news, it looks like Blogrolling is now noticing when my page is updated without a need for me to manually ping it. That's good. I'd tell you all about the technical details of why it wasn't working, but (1) it's boring, (2) I'd only be guessing.

Update: Regarding the second part of the post: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And I still have no idea why. Blogrolling definitely noticed an update I did earlier tonight, when I was simply editing a post. It didn't catch when I added this post, however. I think it has to do with the fact that I can't get the blog to automatically notify Blogrolling, but it does notify Weblog.com, which Blogrolling keeps tabs on. I can imagine all sorts of confusion there. Heh, I guess I'll have to keep giving it an manual ping whenever I'm trying to get noticed.

It's official: I've been at this for over a hundred hours now. This blog has lasted longer than some ground wars (although perhaps not as long as the ground war should have lasted). Since I'm sure you're getting tired of reading these blogging reports, I'll probably quit doing them soon and focus on discussing actual substantive issues. Although I will let you know when that stupid Google search is working properly (it's gotten to the point where it can find the page now, just not anything on the page). Overall it was a good day for me, although a slow day for blogging. That's going to happen from time to time, as I have an actual day job. Hey, not all of us can be tenured professors.

I'd like to call your attention to Doc Rampage, who is the first blogger to link to me. His blog is less than a week older than mine. We've been engaged in a discussion of the merits of an alternative to the Federal Marriage Amendment, addressing the root problem of judicial activism and loose Constitutional interpretation. We both had a good day today, he getting a link from Donald Sensing on One Hand Clapping concerning his Constitutional amendment proposal, while I was linked to by Jonah Goldberg in The Corner for mentioning Dave Barry's Kerry DYKWIA story. (I know it's not technically a DYKWIA story, as Kerry never used the "Do You Know Who I Am?" phrase, but I'm referring to all stories which exhibit the attitude of demanded privilege as DYKWIA.) Since Dave's (Gudeman, of Doc Rampage, not Barry) post linked to me, I pointed to him in my post as well, although it was probably less effective since it was off-topic. Ultimately, I think we're both showing that new bloggers can still get attention if they work hard, come up with new ideas and new angles, and are not afraid to do some shameless self-promotion. ("Shameless self-promotion" is my middle name. Well, technically it's "Shane," so I guess I'm not really Shaneless. [bad pun mode off])

As a result of Jonah's patronage, I received over 700 visits in one day, over ten times what I had seen previously. Like all good things, the Cornerlanche will eventually die off, but if I'm lucky a few of you enjoyed what you saw and will come back to visit. Heck, if you managed to read all the way to the end of this narcissistic post, I know I have you hooked.

It's been approximately 76 hours since my first post, so I thought I'd give a quick report of the blog's status. First of all, there was a formatting problem that showed up in Internet Explorer but not Netscape 7.1 which scrambled the Sidebar badly (having to do with the "(today)" link next to the webcomics). That's been mostly fixed, although it still looks better in Netscape (where the "(today)" link is on the same line as the Webcomic name, rather than below, as it is in IE). I didn't notice it at first since I use Netscape. Why, you ask, do I use Netscape when the whole world uses IE? The main reason is that you can turn off pop-ups in Netscape, while you need external utilities to do it in IE. Now I've been given another reason, since it displays my blog better. Of course, I hardly needed that reason, since I'm always eager to thumb my nose at the evil empire.

I've signed up on Blogrolling, which gives me an easy way to manage my blogroll links, and even order them from most recent to least recent update. It also lets other blogs who use Blogrolling find out when I last updated, which is good for bringing in readers (especially since Blogs for Bush orders their blogroll from most recent to least recent, and this way I cycle through the top every time I post).

Unfortunately, the Google search still doesn't work. I've looked through the Google help pages, and they assure me that they'll index my page eventually, but it could take a while. I've submitted my page in hopes of speeding things up, but they haven't found me yet.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner linked to my post of Dave Barry's DYKWIA encounter with Kerry. Unfortunately, the link is broken, but you can find the post here.

Update: The link's fixed now. Thanks, Jonah! And thanks for the Cornerlanche!

I'm something of a stickler for navigation, so I've implemented a scheme that makes it easier to find a series of posts. If a post is a continuation or clarification of an earlier post, I will start it off with a line marked Old Post where I link to the previous post. If there's a new post that continues or clarifies an earlier post, I'll edit the original to add the line New Post at the end, along with a pointer to the newer post. I had already been doing the latter, and I've edited my archives to implement the former. For the most part, this meant just adding a new line at the beginning, and I mentioned in an update if I had to re-word the post in order for it to make sense.

No one's asked this question yet, but I thought I might as well get a jump on it. The expression is common enough, but if you're not familiar with it, a back of the envelope calculation is a quick, simple calculation done as an estimate. It's called "back of the envelope" because it can be written out on a small sheet of paper. I've used the backs of envelopes, the fronts of envelopes, scraps of paper, even pencil-friendly tabletops. Generally these calculations include all sorts of estimates and outright guesses at the unknown variables as well as equations simplified to the point of unrecognizability, and the result is not considered reliable, just close enough to work with.

When I first applied for this address on blogspot, the idea was to name the blog after myself. My last name is Crankshaw, so possibilities included Crankshaw's Thoughts, Crankshaw's Meanderings, The Book of Crankshawian Philosophy, etc. The blog has superseded the homepage as the ultimate vanity project. Nothing really felt right, though, so I started thinking of other names, a name appropriate for an engineer writing about things he was distinctly unqualified to discuss. It took surprisingly little time to come up with "Back of the Envelope."

I've joined the blogroll at Blogs for Bush. Since I have, I think it's appropriate that I explain why. [Aside from the free publicity?--Ed.] [Yes, aside from that.--DSC] Yes, I do support Bush for re-election in 2004. I am, as my description says, an Evangelical Republican, so you might think it's obvious that I would. However, I did not vote for him in 2000, or vote for anyone at all. Part of the reason was that I was living in Massachusetts but my residency was in Louisiana, and I didn't want to go through the absentee ballot mess, but the main reason was that I wasn't excited about either candidate. Both Bush and Gore were running as moderates, and I didn't think it would make much difference who won. Since that time, however, Bush has shown himself to be a strong wartime President, capable of making tough decisions and, most importantly, following through when the going gets tough. Gore has transformed himself into a shrill, angry far-Left liberal. Looking back, I am glad that the election turned out the way it did, and I'm sorry that I didn't do my part.

I still think Bush is too moderate. While he's a social conservative, he only pushes on those issues when forced to. He doesn't even pretend to be a fiscal conservative. However, the most important issue right now is the War on Terror, and I think Bush's "forward strategy of freedom" is exactly right, even if forty years ago it would sound more like a Democrat's foreign policy than a Republican's. On the big issues where conservatives depart from Bush, immigration reform and the Medicare drug benefit, I'm nowhere near as bothered as some other conservatives. (I may touch on them in some later post.) I don't consider either a betrayal or pandering, as they are consistent with his 2000 campaign and with his general attitude. While I don't agree with him on everything, I like Bush personally, and I am impressed by his faith and integrity.

The Democrats have based their entire campaign on hatred of Bush, on representing him as dishonest and partisan. I think he's been honest and open to compromise (sometimes a little too open), and I'll do my best to point that out in the year ahead.


New Post: I finally talk about the immigration plan above.

After 28 hours, I think I'm off to a pretty good start. I'm still learning the system, changing color schemes and layouts to my liking, working out the kinks in the HTML code. You'll note that I now have a counter, courtesy of Sitemeter, and a search engine, courtesy of Google. The counter works, the search engine doesn't. I think it may just be that Google hasn't indexed this website yet, so hopefully it will start working on its own in a day or two. If not, I'll have to fix it.

As for the counter, it seems okay so far. Looking at the visit statistics, I'm responsible for a plurality of the visits and the vast majority of page views (if it says rr.com, it's probably me). That's not too surprising as I've been bouncing off the website quite often as I edit and tweak it.

All in all, the blog is shaping into something I can work with, with all the tools and utilities I need to run it. In another week or two, it'll either be running smoothly or I will have abandoned the whole project. Right now, I'm thinking the former is more likely.

I've just started this blog and already I have two substantive posts. Cool. Of course, both posts were things I had been thinking about for a while, and part of the reason I started the blog was so I'd have somewhere to put them.

Of course, I have other things I'd like to post: questions I'd like to ask Kerry about his testimony before Congress 30 years ago, the ability of the US to apply military force to other trouble spots (e.g., North Korea, Syria, and Iran) while still engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush National Guard controversy. Alas, I'll need to do some research before commenting on those. And then I have yet to discuss anything related to theology or quantum computation, the latter being the only thing I'm professionally qualified to discuss (assuming that a doctoral degree really makes me qualified). Between these items, I probably have enough material to have a fairly productive first week. I have no idea what I'll write after that, but I'll try to post something every day.

Well, so far I've only edited each of my posts five or six times. I need to set up a policy for corrections. Generally speaking, grammatical errors will be corrected as soon as I notice, with little or no notification. Substantive and/or factual errors will be corrected in updates to the original post.

Update: Like so. This applies to any correction made more than a few minutes after the original posting. If I notice a mistake right after it goes up, I may just fix the mistake without indicating it--but only if this happens right away. Updates to the original post will only be made on the same day as that post. After that, corrections will get a new post.

After wasting hours and hours reading blogs and wishing I was doing something productive, I decided to start my own. That way I can waste hours not only reading, but also posting, which means that I am producing something, so that, by definition, I am being productive, even if what I am producing is pure drivel.