Mickey Kaus complains that, since he moved his blog to Slate, the back button on the IE browser is broken if you go to his old address, and so it is. (Fine, don’t believe me. If you’re using Internet Explorer, click the first link in the previous sentence, then click the back button. Now, before clicking the second link, bookmark this site. Now click the second link and try the back button again. Now come back here and finish reading.) Web monkey to the rescue: I emailed Mickey the following:

I don’t know what kind of software your web server in Nevada is running, but if it’s Apache, then there’s a simple solution to your back button problem. Your trouble is, you (or they, I guess) are redirecting URLs when you should be rewriting them. Let me explain. A redirect is like a forwarding number. If I type in http://www.kausfiles.com, I actually go to that old address, where I’m told that the new address is such and such, and off I go again. Then when I try the back button, I get stuck in the endless kausfiles/slate loop because I’ve actually been sent to two addresses.

What you want is not a redirect but a rewrite. With a rewrite, I type the same address, but the server, instead of forwarding me anywhere, examines the address and changes it on the spot. I go one place, not two–giving me a nice bonus of a faster response time–and my back button still works.

I know how to do this with Apache. If the Nevada boys are running some other software like, God forbid, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, then all bets are off. But for Apache here’s one way to do this:

In the httpd.conf file, under the kausfiles hosts directive:

RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite all requests for the kausfiles main page to this new URL
RewriteRule /index.html http://slate.msn.com/default.aspx?id=2066854

That’s it! You can get a lot fancier if you want to, but even this simple setup beats hell out of what you have now.

This was three days ago, and it’s radio silence from the Mick. He cites several readers who point out that you can use the history arrow or hit the back button twice real fast, and one who says it’s no problem in Mozilla, but I offer an honest-to-God fix and…nada. Sheesh.

Chapter 1: The Foundations for a New Kind of Science. Hi. I’m Stephen Wolfram, the smartest man on earth. My discoveries will revolutionize mathematics, physics, biology, social sciences, computer science, philosophy, art, technology and a bunch of other stuff people haven’t thought up yet. The few fumbling attempts at my insights to date — in artificial intelligence, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, general systems theory, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical mechanics — are nowhere.

Chapter 2: The Crucial Experiment. You can apply a few simple rules to coloring squares on a sheet of graph paper and come up with random-looking patterns sometimes.

Chapter 3: The World of Simple Programs. You can make the rules a little more complicated but the patterns don’t get any more random.

Chapter 4: Systems Based On Numbers. You can get random pictures from numbers and functions too.

Further posts as I digest the implications of this revolutionary work.

When I read this book at 40 I realized that when I read it at 20 I didn’t understand Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond at all. It is tragic in the novel, if retrospective balm for the ego, that Isabel is taken in by them herself.

Osmond is indeed a monster, and James is very specific about how. He is a solipsist: everything in his tiny universe must be a reflection of himself. This is why he is prepared to marry off his daughter to a man who doesn’t love her, why he does nothing for Madame Merle, who devotes her life to helping him, and why, finally, he hates and tortures his wife: she is too independent, her ideas are her own rather than reflections of his. James says much, and his characters still more, about how clever Osmond is, but his ideas, for all the care he lavishes on them, are really quite dull. They boil down to an abiding respect for forms, customs, traditions. When his sister, the silly but shrewd Countess Gemini, explains to Isabel that Madame Merle never married Osmond because “she has never had, about him, she had never had, what you might call any illusions of intelligence,” we are surprised, but we feel, on reflection, the force of the judgment. Yvor Winters complains that Osmond, although a “thoroughly unpleasant neurotic aesthete,” is not adequate to inspire the sort of terror that Isabel, and later Pansy, feels. But what can be more terrifying than a clever, well-plotted attempt to stifle one’s ideas, one’s person, one’s very identity? That’s what Osmond does, and what he is.

A few words about Ralph Touchett, one of the most unforgettable of the substantial galaxy of Jamesian minor characters. Ralph, unlike God, must pay for his omniscience in impotence: he is ill, and must take his pleasure from the gallery. In the plot, however, is Ralph is very much a man of action. The two great turning points of the novel–Isabel’s inheritance, and her break with Osmond–are both precipitated by Ralph. He does a great deal more than watch.