The Longest Now

Ethan, one of my favorite sparring partners in discussions about
most anything under the sun, carved out an hour the other week to
discuss language issues and equitable representation of the world’s
multitude of perspectives. We had an excellent discussion of the
subject, which became heated for a moment when it seemed we were
veering off into philosophy rather than a practical discussion of how
to improve the world’s current defaults.

He wrote a lovely blog post about the discussion here, and followed up with a quick evaluation of a metric we had discussed. (How can one not admire
a person who dashes off two new metrics before breakfast?)  But there are a few points where I would like to differ.

(editor’s note : where’d the rest of this post go? –2/2008)