Lashes: Deuteronomy 24 states that when a crime deserves flogging, the maximum number of lashes to be received is 40 (otherwise the criminal would be degraded. Oh). In order to avoid mistakenly exceeding that count, the Sanhedrin would not administer more than 39 (gee, thanks).

What would you do? (thanks, Rebecca)

Stu Savory responds to my tag: swimming Lake Constance and crashing a hang glider – not what I might have expected from an “overeducated, grumpy multilingual ex-pat Scot”, but mighty interesting. And his Vogon poem left my arms quite intact.

Vaspers’ 15 risks of blogging. But who gets anywhere without risk?

Kathy Sierra draws distinctions between “Collective Intelligence” and the “Dumbness of Crowds”. So which is Wikipedia? A lot of both, I’d say. I’ll take my Frankendog with sauerkraut and Tabasco, please.

Tara Hunt’s crystal ball: “Chaos (yay), interoperability (yay), unrest (yay), co-opetition (yay) and exploitative jerks (boo).”

Why you just can’t convert priorities into absolutes.

Baroquen syntax: misshapen Perl.

What to do within the confines of the echo chamber? Set up boxing matches!

Extraterrestrial inspiration : according to a comment from Matt Linderman, the name for 37Signals was inspired by a NOVA documentary on SETI, in which it was stated that of all the signals they had received from space, 37 could not be explained using known astronomy.

RFC 3514: The IPv4 evil bit (thanks, Assaf).

Kiltak embeds a Johnnie Walker commercial that goes way beyond whiskey. I guess it’s related: I’ve often pondered the meaning of life after several shots. Or later, when praying to the porcelain god.

Too much looking into the abyss: Steve Riley wants to eliminate null (thanks, Assaf).

Doug Karr finds out that no matter how angelically people act in the blogosphere, they can still be dickheads in meatspace. UPDATE: looks like Doug is working it out.

No hard feelings, Grandma — it’s business, baby (thanks, Rebecca).

Thank you for excusing my bifocals, Mr. Godin. I was giving you the Chin all the way down to that note.

Vaspers the Grate answers the “what are blogs?” question: “… the silent majority leaping forward as the smart-mouthed neo-authority!” plus much more.

Les mêmes à vous, Axel. And thanks for using my tag cloud widget!

Thank you, too, Pramudita!

Matt wants to know why blog comments bring out the worst in people.

It’s true that you can’t see non-verbal signals, but I believe the bigger reason is anonymity. The more of a composite identity that you represent (so readers “know” you), the better you’ll behave. Even if that identity departs somewhat from your meatspace persona, you have an investment in its social survival. How often have you seen the most caustic comments from someone who uses an obvious alias and leaves no URL?

You see this in online games as well. When completely anonymous, players can throw comment fits and even just walk away from the game, forcing the other player to have to resign instead just to end it. When players have an identity, even if it’s just a semi-permanent screen name that they’ll be known by in the future, they think twice.

That’s why, for my own integrity, I always post and comment using my real name. It forces me to be more real, because Google is watching us.

The fact that removing the “web as parent” causes us to degenerate into Lord of the Flies does not speak well for human nature.