Core Dump

SF publisher Jim Baen has died after suffering a massive stroke a couple of weeks ago. This is sad news for all SF fans, as Baen Books was one of the premiere publishers of science fiction. An inordinate number of the books on my shelf were published by them. Baen was notable, not only for the overall quality of his publishing line, but for pioneering the use of electronic texts without any form of copy protection. He believed that making the books freely accessible would increase sales and statistics proved him right.

David Drake has an appreciation and obituary here. Baen Books will continue under the direction of Baen's partner, Toni Weisskopf.

Just in time for the holiday weekend, here's an article with tips on how to photograph fireworks. The site this is from, Digital Photography School, looks like its worth bookmarking if you're into photography.

Scott Nesbitt, a techical writer and author who I worked with a few years back at Daleen, is in Bejing right now, visiting his wife who is studying there. He's managed to get Internet access and is posting about his trip on his blog. I'm looking forward to talking with him about the trip when he gets back.

I attended an Adobe webinar on structured FrameMaker today. Most of the webinar was devoted to showing the advantages of FrameMaker as a structured authoring tool and demonstrating some of the new features of version 7.2. Nothing new there, but they did drop one exciting piece of news -- there will soon be a plug-in for DITA.

The plug-in adds a DITA menu to structured FrameMaker. It will support maps, relationship tables, conrefs, and cross-references and will let you run an Ant build from within Frame. And that's about all the information that was provided. I'm sure there'll be quite a bit more about this in their next webinar on July 11, which is about FrameMaker and DITA.

Oh yeah -- it's free and should be available for download in a few weeks.

The outlook is even bleaker for that Florida beachfront property. According to this article in the LA Times, the Greenland ice sheet is melting even faster than prediced, twice as fast or more.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world's largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.

Given that the ice sheet in Greenland could raise the sea level by 21 feet if it melted completely, this has potentially serious implications for the world's coastlines.

Here's a great example of found poetry -- a poem composed from spam.

One of the good things about using XML as a data format is that it allows you to fairly easily separate content and format. Brian Jones has more about how this will work in the forthcoming Word 2007.

So you want to delete a shortcut in Windows Vista. Are you really sure you want to delete that shortcut? Really, really, sure. You better be, because you're going to have to confirm the deletion five times before Windows Vista lets you get rid of it.

One of the major enhancements that Adobe added in FrameMaker 7.2 was the ability to pre- and post-process XML files with XSLT. This is quite a powerful feature, but you need to understand XSLT, which is not trivial to learn. Adobe has recently provided a guide to using XSLT with FrameMaker, which explains how XSLT processing works in FrameMaker and provides some examples and tutorials.

It seems that Adobe is putting more effort into marketing FrameMaker, emphasizing it's XML features. This is a good thing and hopefully we'll see more enhancements in the future.

The latest release of Inkscape is out. Inkscape is an SVG (scalable vector grahics) format editor and drawing program.

nkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

If you're looking for an open-source alternative to Illustrator, this is probably what you want.

Confessions of an Aca/Fan is a blog by MIT professor Henry Jenkins. If you're interested in multimedia and culture, then this is the blog for you.

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His forthcoming books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

To give you an idea of what the blog is about, here's a bit about the forthcoming movie, Snakes on a Plane.

I am watching with great interest the growing hubbub about the new suspense/disaster film, Snakes on a Plane, scheduled for release later this summer and expected by many to yield some of the strongest opening weekend grosses of the season. In many ways, we can see the ever expanding cult following of this predictably awful movie as an example of the new power audiences are exerting over entertainment content.

Word's numbering often drives writers crazy - it's not stable and many writers (myself included) have suddenly found the numbering in all of the lists in their document breaking, usually just before a deadline. Experienced writers know that using SEQ fields is the only way of guaranteeing stable numbered lists. But SEQ fields are a bit tricky to use and more work.

Word MVP Greg Maxey has written an article on how to get started with SEQ fields. He's also thoughtfully provided an add-in for Word to make the task easier. If you constantly find yourself facing broken numbered lists in Word, you'll want to check this out.

Many years ago I remember looking at a text-to-speech reader at a library. It was the size of a small photocopier and cost about $50,000. Now inventor Ray Kurzweill, who built one of the first really practical text-to-speech readers, has developed a hand-held unit about the size of a digital camera. Cost is around $5,000. This will make the lives of blind people much easier-for example, it could read a restaurant bill.

Language Log is a blog by Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Geoff Pullum, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was recently profiled in the New York Times, which is where I found out about it. I wish I'd found this sooner - the posts are insightful, often funny, and always interesting.

Here's a long and quite interesting article in the New York Times about how rising sea levels are affecting beaches in low lying places like Florida, and it's not good, especially if you own one of those expensive beachfront houses.

This rising water will be felt along the artificially maintained beaches of New Jersey, in the vanishing marshes of Louisiana, even on the ocean bluffs of California. According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more.

Abobe is holding a couple of web seminars about FrameMaker and DITA. The first, on June 27, is about migrating to XML, the second, on July 11, is about FrameMaker and DITA. This is notable, if for no other reason, than seeing Adobe actually marketing FrameMaker.

First you find a medium size asteroid, say 100 miles in diameter. Speed it up to about 30 miles per second. Then you put it on a collision course with Earth, stand back, and watch the fireworks.

This is a clip from a Japanese broadcast of Miracle planet. It's pretty spectacular and definitely something you don't want to see live.

The Bonnaroo Music Festival is going in this weekend in Tennessee and much of it is being webcast live. So far this weekend, I've seen a sizzling set from Elvis Costello and the Impostors with Allen Toussaint (with one of the best horn sections I've ever heard), Les Claypool (jaw dropping bass), and Moe (who I am seriously enjoying). Video quality is decent and the sound is first rate, though you'll need a broadband connection for best quality.

Coming up tonight, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, followed at 9:30 EST by Phil Lesh and Friends. I am really looking forward to that, especially since Phil isn't gracing Toronto with his presence on this tour.

And so is Paul McCartney - he turns 64 today. No other comment is necessary.\

WritersUA has an article about the future of RoboHelp and FrameMaker, including an interview with Michael Hu, Senior Product Marketing Manager for RoboHelp, FrameMaker, and Pagemaker. Yes, it does appear that RoboHelp has a future - there will be a new release next year. And Adobe is devoting more resources to FrameMaker.

Over the past seven years the Adobe focus has been on building out the Acrobat and Creative Suite franchises. Now we are reallocating resources to products like FrameMaker that have been under resourced. Also, the support for XML is a big feature of FrameMaker that was a bit ahead of its time. We waited for the XML market to mature and become popular. Technical publications is where the promise of XML will be greatly realized. We've increased resources on FrameMaker significantly.

However, by the time Adobe gets a new release of RoboHelp out the door, Madcap software will have two releases (at least) of Flare out, and probably a release of their new desktop publishing product, Blaze. Adobe is going to have to fight for the market this time.

It seems that strech limos and the hills of San Francisco may not be a good match. Hilarious.
Update: I fixed the link.

Here's a long article about a business consultant who installed Ubuntu on his office system and used it for a month and a half before his boss noticed.

I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) a couple of weeks ago and had a look at the Live CD. It looks good, and after I do a bit of maintenance on my main system, I'm going to install it and set it up to dual boot. I'll post more on that later.

Here's a collection of mostly unpublished pictures taken by a German officer during World War 1, mostly on the Eastern front.

Researchers have deciphered text on what may be the world's oldest computer, the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,000-year-old Greek artifact that may be an astronomical calculator.

Scooped out of a Roman shipwreck located in 1900 by sponge divers near the southern Greek island of Antikythera, and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the Mechanism contains over 30 bronze wheels and dials, and is covered in astronomical inscriptions.

Probably operated by crank, it survives in three main pieces and some smaller fragments.

"(The device) could calculate the position of certain stars, at least the Sun and Moon, and perhaps predict astronomical phenomena," said astrophysicist Xenophon Moussas of Athens University.

Somebody was way ahead of their time.

// posted by Keith, on (permanent link): 8:48 AM (1) comments

Webmonkey has published an excerpt from he new book, Prioritizing Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger. The chapter discusses eight common web usability problemsthat were prevalent back in the 1990s and still crop up in a lot of web sites. Not to keep you in suspense, the eight problems are:
* Links that don't change color when visited
* Breaking the back button
* Opening new browser windows
* Pop-up windows
* Design elements that look like advertisements
* Violating Web-wide conventions
* Vaporous content and empty hype
* Dense content and unscannable text

Here's a link to a poster titled "Don't sound stupid; stop saying like". Aparently it was posted on behalf of something called the Academy for Liguistic Awareness. I can't find a direct link to the post, so scroll down to Thursday's posts.

You'll probably need a broadband connection to play this, but it's worth it.

It looks like FrameMaker is finally going to get some competition in the
long document publishing marketplace.

Madcap Software, the makers of the help authoring tool (and RoboHelp
replacement) Flare, have announced Blaze.

"Blaze is the latest product under development from MadCap Software.
Scheduled for release early 2007, Blaze will be the ideal solution for
easily producing very long documents for print-such as books, manuals and
illustrated guides-using the latest technological advances available. For
years, authors have had to choose between ease of use (e.g., Microsoft®
Word™) or the power to handle very large documents (e.g., Adobe®
FrameMaker®). Now, with MadCap Blaze, authors have a complete package:
ease of use, power to create long documents, flexibility, and an eye
toward the future. "

Following that is a long list of really neat sounding features.

Initial reports on Flare have been generally positive, so it's likely they
can deliver something that is decent. This is one I'm going to be watching
closely - I've already signed up for the test program.

I've seen variants of this cartoon about how projects really work before (most notably used by Rational as part of their requirements training), but this version is the most detailed. The documentation and support panels are, sadly, quite accurate for most projects.

NASA astronomers have recorded a video of a meteor hitting the moon, creating an explosion equivalent to 4 tons of TNT. The flash of the explosion was recorded as part of a study to determine whether meteorites hitting the moon are a threat to Lunar astronauts.

One of the things thats been stressed in many articles on structured authoring is that you have to prune your writing down to its essentials. This isn't easy to do, especially if you've been writing in a book-based mode for a long time. Mary Anne Howell has put together some tips on minimalist writing, based on attending one of Joanne Hackos' seminars. They're quite useful, and she includes a sheet of references if you want to dig deeper.

The rest of her tips page is worth looking at too, with information on structured FrameMaker, Adobe's certfication program, and designing a web application with Dreamweaver and PHP.

"Stop writing junk" is the tagline for LousyWriter.com, a "free online resource to improve your writing skills". The site's divided into several sections that cover the basics like grammar and punctuation, parts of speech, and tips on improving your writing. The How to Write Better section is divided up into topic areas by subject, for example, ad copy, business letters, resumes, and even love letters. There's a lot of good advice and reference material here. It's a good site to bookmark for co-workers or friends who come to you looking for advice. (Thanks to Scott Nesbitt for pointing this one out).

Michael Priestly, one of the architects of DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) has posted recordings of his DITA workshops. If you're interested in learning more about DITA, you can get the information straight from the source, so to speak.

Day 1 is an introduction to DITA, followed by authoring and information architecture best practices and demos.

Day 2 is an introduction to specialization, followed by a series of practical demonstrations.

These are not professional-quality recordings: there is futzing around with phone lines and lots of questions and answers. If someone feels like doing an edit to split it into smaller and more usable chunks, I think that would be awesome - just add the edited versions to the existing resources post. I realize the current files are huge and cluttered with procedural flotsam. But in the meantime there is a lot of information packed in there, and the good news is you have a fast-forward button, which realtime attendees would have probably traded their laptops for.

Every once in a while, I get a document to edit that has embedded images that need to be modified and the original graphics are no longer available. Editing a bitmap that was originally created in Visio, for example, can be a real bother and results in a less than optimal image. There is a better solution - use Potrace to convert it to a vector format like EPS or SVG. I haven't tried this application, but if the sample conversions are accurate, it should be a useful tool. Potrace is freeware and available for several different platforms.

Intel's new Core 2 Duo chips (codenamed Conroe) will be fast, according to a benchmark test run by HotHardware.com. In the tests, the new Intel chips running at 2.6 GHz, were roughly 20 percent faster than the new AMD chips overclocked to 2.8 GHz. Time for a motherboard upgrade in the fall, maybe?

All the business columnists on the radio today were exclaiming about the current employment statistics -- job creation is way up, at least in Canada, and much of that is happening in Alberta. I hate to throw a damp rag on the parade, but maybe they should take a look at this article.

Schindler said Alberta should be limiting the number of industries and residents allowed to move there.

"Continued development [in Alberta] has caused rapid immigration from other parts of Canada and abroad, and even more rapid increases in freshwater use," the study said.

Schindler warned that the drought in the 1930s was relatively mild when looked at in its historical context. In fact, the 20th century was the wettest century in the past 2,000 years, the researchers found.

According to Jerry Pournelle, whose columns are the main reason to read it, Byte Magazine is now free. I've been reading Byte since the early 1980s and bought a subscription to the online version when CMP killed off the dead tree version. Pournelle's columns are always worth reading and there are other good columns and articles as well.

BBC News has a debate about copyright issues between John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and Dan Glickman, president of the MPAA. It makes for some interesting reading.

JPB: I've got good news and bad news and good news. And the good news is that you guys have managed to buy every major legislative body on the planet, and the courts are even with you. So you've done a great job there and you should congratulate yourself.

But you know the problem is - the bad news is that you're up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you're dead. You're 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they're just smarter than you. So you're gonna lose that one.

But the good news is that you guys are mean sons of bitches and you've been figuring out ways of ripping off audiences and artists for centuries.....

OK, here's the logical extension of AJAX web services - an AJAX-basd operating system that loads completey from JavaScript inside your browser. I'm not sure what you could do with this, but it does look cool. I'll be very surprised if Google doesn't buy this guy out.

Special forces will use a new "batwing", a small set of wings made from carbon fibre, that will let them glide as far as 120 miles. This is seriously cool - I'd love to try this.

So, you think you have a hard time understanding kids' slang -- try 200-year-old slang. The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is a dictionary of slang, as it existed almost 200 years ago. It's absolutely fascinating to see how the language has changed since then. Here's a bit of the preface:

The merit of Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has
been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was
confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he
was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men
of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished
for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate;
and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his
work the few examples of fashionable slang that might occur to
his observation.

But our Jehus of rank have a phraseology not less peculiar to
themselves, than the disciples of Barrington: for the uninitiated
to understand their modes of expression, is as impossible as for
a Buxton to construe the Greek Testament. To sport an Upper
Benjamin, and to swear with a good grace, are qualifications
easily attainable by their cockney imitators; but without the aid
of our additional definitions, neither the cits of Fish-street,
nor the boors of Brentford would be able to attain the language
of whippism. We trust, therefore, that the whole tribe of second-
rate Bang Ups, will feel grateful for our endeavour to render
this part of the work as complete as possible. By an occasional
reference to our pages, they may be initiated into all the
peculiarities of language by which the man of spirit is
distinguished from the man of worth. They may now talk bawdy
before their papas, without the fear of detection, and abuse
their less spirited companions, who prefer a good dinner at home
to a glorious UP-SHOT in the highway, without the hazard of a
cudgelling.

A truly fascinating read that will provide many hours of amusement and education.

Cornell University has put together a fascinating gallery of fantastic art, broken down into categories like angels and demons, weird science, and fantastic space.

Sponsored by Cornell University's Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines.

In order to take maximum advantage of the materials in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to adhere to a strict definition of either the Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as these have emerged in literary criticism and theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note some general markers which have informed the choices implicit in these pages. In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.

Note: Some of the images may not be work safe.

Google has announced yet another online product, this one is a spreadsheet. It's not available for wide use yet, but you can view a demo and sign up for a test program. They recently bought Writely, an online word processor, so it seems that they really are going after Microsoft's Office product. Google Spreadsheet won't appeal to sophisticated spreadsheet jockey's, but it may be good enough for just about everyone else.

Visual Complexity displays visualizations of complex networks.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

The graphics are quite beautiful and striking. Each visualization includes information about the researcher and an explanation of how to interpret it.

I wouldn't have thought that Bloomberg would be the place to look for an interview with Leonard Cohen, but hey, here it is.

Schatz: Tell us about your new book. It's taken you a long time to put it together.

Cohen: A friend of mine called it the ``Book of Prolonging.'' I never thought there was much urgency in the whole enterprise, or anything else I do for that matter. I really did follow the advice of Horace, the Roman poet. He said you should leave your poems in your drawer for at least nine years. And I tend to do that.

I tend to let them sit for a while, work at them over the years, and when the whole work seems to suggest a kind of coherent sequence and the poems have matured -- both by being left alone and by being scrutinized intermittently -- there's a moment when they're ready, when a book is ready.

SF fan Nicholas Whyte has written a mega-review of all the 2006 Hugo nominees for the best science fiction of 2005, both novels and short fiction. The reviews are extensively linked, both to the stories themselves, where they're online, and other reviews. And for the record, I agree completely with his pick for best novel - Robert Charles Wilson's Spin.

I've been working with PCs now for more than 20 years - my first PC was an original IBM PC with two floppy drives that I bought in 1983. Since then, I've bought almost a dozen more for myself or my family, and I've lost track of the number that I've worked on. So I'm pretty comfortable with both hardware and software -- changing expansion cards, adding RAM, adding or removing drives, installing operating systems. I don't think I'd want to build a PC from scratch, but if I had to, I probably could.

Still, there's a lot I don't know, especially about newer hardware. None of my PCs are state-of-the-art, and when it comes to upgrading them, what do I do? Will one of the new 300 MB SATA drives fit in my wife's PC? Will my five-year-old PC take a recent-vintage ATI AGP card? Can I upgrade my kid's PC from a Celeron to a full Pentium processor? That's where Repairing and Upgrading Your PC, by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbar Fritchman Thompson is a life saver.

The book, as you might expect, is organized by categories of hardware: motherboards, processors, memory, hard drives, optical drives, video cards and monitors and so on. The first three chapters cover basic PC topics (cleaning, routine maintenance (both hardware and software) and troubleshooting problems. They're worth the price of the book -- even if you're not planning on upgrading your PC, sooner or later you're going to run up against something that this book covers, like I did a couple of weeks ago when my power supply started to fail, causing random reboots and hangs, and the book helped me figure out what was going on and what I needed to do.

The hardware chapters are well organized and laid out, with lots of tips and sidebars for information tangential to the main topic. There's lots of detail-for example, the chapter on video adapters explains the differences between the various types of AGP slots, something I needed to find out about so I could upgrade my video card on my 5-year-old PC. And there are lots of photographs and illustrations, many of them in colour.

This is unquestionably the best PC hardware book that I've seen. It's logically organized, complete, well laid out, cleanly written, and manages to satisfy the needs of both novice and expert users.

Ubuntu 6.0.6, aka Dapper Drake, was released earlier this week and has been getting a pretty favourable buzz. I downloaded the Live CD and had a look at it yesterday. It has a nice clean interface and comes with a good selection of software, including OpenOffice.org 2, Mozilla Firefox, and Evolution for email. There's a long review of it up on Linuxforums.org.

When I had my PC upgraded (new power supply and hard drive) recently, the process of Ghosting the old hard drive to the new one wiped out the boot loader for my Xandros partition. I'll probably install Ubuntu in place of Xandros - on first glance it looks just as easy to use and had a wider base of support.

Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead's last keyboard player has died, apparently by his own hand. He joined the Dead in 1990, after the death of the previous keyboard player, Brent Mydland. There were quite a few fans who didn't like style, but I wasn't one of them. He also added a lot to the bands harmonies and he had good taste in picking covers - the Dead's version of Baba O'Reilly was his pick.

After Jerry Garcia's death and the Grateful Dead's breakup, it seems he was pretty much cut off from the rest of the Dead's extended family, including the reunion tours in 2003 and 2004. There's a long and angry posting in rec.music.gdead about this, written by the webmaster for VinceWelnick.com.

If you want a good example of Vince's keyboard skills, listen to the Grateful Dead show from December 28, 1991. It's one of my favourite Dead shows form the 1990s and it's largely due to Vince's playing.

Rockets and Space Technology is one of the better space-related sites that I've seen.

This Web page can trace its roots to the author's project to write a computer program simulating the launch of a rocket to orbit. As I performed my research it became apparent that most information on the subject tended toward one of two extremes: it was either too simplistic to be very helpful, or it was advanced texts written for engineers. I could find little information suitable for the space enthusiast who wanted to progress beyond the beginner level but who lacked the advanced math and science skills needed to understand the more complex dissertations.

After spending months digging through books and Internet sites I finally found the information needed to complete my project. Not wanting others to go through the same frustrating search, I decided to organize all the information into a single resource. Thus, in 1996 this Web page was created.

There's an especially good section on refuting those twits who think the moon landing was a hoax.

I posted here recently about the 25 worst software products of all time. Now here's a list from Wired of the 10 worst engineering mistakes of all time. It's a bit of an idiosyncratic list but certainly the Kansas City Hyatt and the DC-10 deserve to make the list.

The largely Republican religous right in the US was a big factor in the re-election of George Bush in 2004. But there may be a more socially progressive religous movement in growing in the US.

Chapter 1 of the new social gospel is a rebuke of the moral meltdown among purportedly God-fearing politicians -- people like Ralph Reed, Tom DeLay and even George Bush. They're enveloped in controversies involving deception, hypocrisy and other less-than-holy behaviors.

Chapter 2 of the new gospel records the discomfort among some believers that the narrow interests of politically motivated preachers -- primarily opposing abortion and gay rights -- aren't all there is to religion. Why, the gospel asks, aren't more evangelical leaders sermonizing on the core of Jesus' teachings: peace, compassion and poverty?

Chapter 3 introduces new religious leaders and a growing number of rigorously religious folks who are bucking the Republican agenda. Many of them hold "conservative" religious social values. Others form smaller but recently energized contingents of moderate and liberal religious Americans. Their leaders are often evangelical preachers, such as the Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners movement. Some, including Rabbi Michael Lerner of the liberal Tikkun movement, hail from other religious backgrounds.