[Next: Feb 1998 waxing]

Robot Wisdom WebLog for January 1998

From the Columbia Journalism Review, a survey of policies on hi-tech freebies: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-01-02-freebies.html

"Push-back" is industry jargon for the pointed refusal by a journalist to return a product, and it is on the rise, prompting some manufacturers to toughen their return policies.

CJR's "Darts and Laurels" column is often juicy (their archives go back to 1992): http://www.cjr.org/html/98-01-02-d_l.html

J.D. Mitsch on alt.showbiz.gossip:

I can only imagine that the Gore girls won't be spending a lot of time in the West Wing with Bill in the Oval Office.

A cluster of good stuff from the Voice Literary Supplement:

Alex Cockburn's great review of three biographies of Che Guevara: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/cockburn.shtml

"What really terrifies me is your lack of comprehension of all this and your advice about moderation, egoism, etc. . . . that is to say, all of the most execrable qualities an individual can have. Not only am I not moderate, I shall not try ever to be . . ."

Tom-Frank watch: The VLS loves him: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/bernhard.shtml

Danny Schechter's been trying to improve tv news: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/schechter.shtml

At the height of the anti-apartheid movement in the mid-'80s, when the rest of the left was focusing on a cultural boycott of South Africa, Schechter created South Africa Now - news from black anchors and stringers inside that country. They kept the show on the air for 156 weeks, despite the efforts of neocon organizations to kill it.

Tanya Allen

Extremely readable capsules of 1997's 25 best books (I want to read them all!): http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/153favorites.shtml

. . . the structure of Zeros + Ones is designed to reflect a core strand of Plant's polemic: the secret roots of computing lie in the denigrated woman's world of weaving and textiles.

A thoughtful rave for Broadway's new Ragtime: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/theater/5feingold.shtml

Their pace is unhurried without being laggard, sketching in much more of Doctorow's rich material than the movie version found room for, setting out the threads of story and then gradually weaving them together till we get the shape of what is, for a musical, an unusually complex pattern.

Some seriously dark humor about celebrated victims of plastic surgery: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/wils/1998/01/27wils.html

It Takes a Kibologist: E. Teflon Piano wonders if MonicaGate isn't a counter-sting aimed at Starr: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=319692088

The handy little list: http://www.prairienet.org/~scruffy/a.htm knows a reverse phone directory: http://www.databaseamerica.com/html/gpfind.htm

"Told ya so!" In a new Progressive Review, Sam Smith reviews the Clinton scandals the media ignored: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/

The White House lawyer's response: "If you can't look an FBI agent straight in the eye and [lie], you don't belong here."

Associated Press editorializes by frame-grab
(A body-language analyst says the bent head betrays shame.)

Some cute ASCII hippos: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=319429938
and mazes: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=319227423

Brian Chase on a.r.k:

. . . Don't worry about the fired thing though. Life could be a lot worse. I mean you could have a whole friggin' army of bog men stinkin' up your back garden, sleeping in the boot of your lorry, hiding behind newspapers in the lift at the sanitarium, and munching on crisps outside your window at night.

Coming soon? Solid-state refrigeration chips: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980124/features1.html

Cox says each chip should offer a cooling capacity of around 3 watts per square centimetre, and a typical domestic fridge would need a panel of 25 chips covering an area 5 centimetres square. [just 2" by 2"!]

Random ghost town

Matt McIrvin on alt.religion.kibology:

I am always more well than the birdbrains who dwell within the cages of my Elysian Birdbrain Zoo.

Chris Crawford's 1982 classic, "The Art of Computer Game Design" is online. Chapter eight is a revealing narrative of his development process for an Arthurian game, for Atari: [missing its end] http://vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter8.html

Chapter three is a taxonomy of game-types, with nostalgia-inducing illustrations from early arcade games: http://vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Chapter3.html

An old Salon look at Web meta-sites (cf weblogs): http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/media960426.html

So it was only a matter of time before we'd see something like CRAYON's Cool Cool Site of the Day of the Day.

A heroin survivor reviews "Trainspotting": http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/media960802.html

A new gender emerging: http://www.salonmagazine.com/weekly/fairies960729.html

"You see?" I cried, vindicated. "Straight fairies are the men of the next millennium!"

An intriguing preliminary attack at creating a purely abstract theory of user-interface patterns: http://www.mindspring.com/~coram/papers/experiences/Experiences.html

When building your control center, you may use a Menubar, or perhaps a Launchpad to provide navigation among your Garden of Windows, with a Toolbar or Palette to provide access to tools...

YAY! Carolyn Chute's Wicked Good Militia: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/08/features/maine.html

This shy, genial woman, dressed as usual in a frumpy skirt, mud boots and bandana, seems committed to reminding voters that the real divide in American politics isn't Left vs. Right -- it's Up vs. Down.

A peek behind the scenes, in CD-ROM retailing: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/16dec1995/features/media.html

We sell five different editions of the "Penthouse Interactive Virtual Photo Shoot" at $69.99. We don't need to charge that much, but that's what people are willing to pay.

OLD email: In 1985, Jerry Pournelle (the Byte columnist) was kicked off the Arpanet. Here's the story: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=318893666

I don't particularly want to force you into ritual disembowelment; rather, I'm interested -- and I'm not the only one -- in why you find it necessary to flaunt your use of the arpanet. The more attention you (and other people) draw to non-blow-em-up use of the arpanet the more likely some Proxmire type is to start inquiring into its operations.

NEW lingo: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=316624395

Prairie Dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

On this day in 1593, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.

The AI program "Aaron" has gotten really good at painting: http://www.scinetphotos.com/auction.html

A very different search engine: the highest rankings go to sites that are frequently linked from other sites, with the search pattern in the anchor text. (It works, I think!) http://rankdex.gari.com/

It's time: Americans for Cloning Elvis: http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/1673/

If you haven't explored Edward Tufte's books on statistical graphics, try this profile: http://www.salonmagazine.com/march97/tufte970310.html

He declares, for instance, that a ludicrously overwrought chart of 1970s college enrollment from American Education magazine "may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print," or that a bar-style listing [picture] in a small-aircraft flight guide is "perhaps the worst index ever designed, a rare perfect failure."

Robert Stone on Allen Ginsberg (among other topics): [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/april97/stone970414.html

He may not have been the greatest poet of his generation, but he was absolutely the real thing as a teacher and as a shaman. He didn't do anything for the publicity, or to advance himself.

An impressive rant against teachers' unions: http://www.salonmagazine.com/feb97/columnists/horowitz970217.html

Unlike the rest of us, teachers are tenured after two years and thus have lifetime job security, are guaranteed raises and are not accountable for their performance (or lack of it).

Susie Bright says sex is good: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/march97/interview970318.html

What turns you on may not match your artistic values, your romantic choices in real life, your political views, but it is just as much a part of you, just as real and substantial, as any other aspect.

Some funny bad-prose-bashing: http://www.salonmagazine.com/april97/columnists/bestsellers970404.html

A review of Peter Gabriel's interactive "Eve" and other music software: http://www.salonmagazine.com/april97/21st/interactive970403.html

A page of funny, dated newsbits from The Realist: http://www.primenet.com/~lippard/realist.html

A defining moment of this season's presidential campaign coverage occurred on ABC News, when anchor Peter Jennings asked correspondent Cokie Roberts, "What do you think the spin will be tomorrow?" It used to be the job of newscasters to tell you what happened. Now they predict how the propagandists will use the media to manipulate you.

Dvorak is everywhere (and he's still the best). Here's his Boardwatch archives (these ones come with recipes): http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/writers/dvorak.htm
HDTV: What were we thinking? http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/97/dec/bwm33.html

I was amused by the Nightline report that showed various Congressmen going on an on about how "we'll fall behind the rest of the world" if we don't do something now! I keep hearing this argument and think to myself, "Fall behind? In what? TV?"

What insiders are saying about MonicaGate: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/01/23media.html

In D.C. itself, everyone has their favorite story of Vernon Jordan's Martha's Vineyard lament -- that poor Bill complains it's hard for him to get a b___ j__ in a limousine these days. But these tales are not to be repeated before the profane masses.

Take three weeks off, and write your first novel (a decent one, too-- I read it!): http://www.joycemaynard.com/writers/week2.html

Only then, with the paper rolled into the machine, did I allow myself to ask the question "What will this novel be about?

Her prequel to this essay also makes me want to write: http://www.joycemaynard.com/writers/week1.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1915, "Nightpiece" was written:

Gaunt in gloom
The pale stars their torches
Enshrouded wave
Ghostfires from heaven's far verges faint illume
Arches on soaring arches,
Night's sindark nave

Seraphim
The pale stars awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses, muted, dim
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible

And long and loud
To night's nave upsoaring
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls

What a news day! The Unabomber pleads, Netscape signs on to GNU, Microsoft surrenders to Reno, Oprah, and Fidel...

I find presidential sex scandals a big yawn, but Camille Paglia makes some intriguing points (mostly blaming Hillary): http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/22news_pagl.html

To me it's not that he's a sex addict. It's that he's a liar!

From the Salon archives, two poisoned subcultures: They're young heroes, and casual rapists: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/aug97/mothers/guys970813.html

And Microsoft's poisoned-by-Bill value system: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sept97/21st/gates970925.html

"Would each of you like to have this product at home?" he asked and was quickly greeted by a positive chorus. And then the suave stinger: "Do you know what kind of credit cards your parents have?"

And a very fine appreciation of WebCams: http://www.salonmagazine.com/aug97/21st/cam970807.html

And a deep interview with Peter Greenaway: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/june97/greenaway970606.html

For me, the three big guys of the history of cinema would be Eisenstein, who virtually made the language, Orson Welles, who consolidated it, and then Godard, who threw it all away.

Matt McIrvin on a.r.k:

This is why Kibo once explained, during the brief mid-Nineties fad for transparent food and drink (still going strong in the underarm deodorant sector), that all things should be clear so that we can see the other clear things behind them.

Oliver Sacks wrote about it in his funny, touching best-seller The Man Who Mistook A Wall For Another Wall.

Heavy tech: Gordon Moore himself says, wrt his 'law' about chips doubling every year or two, that there's a hidden reason it's held true for so long: chip-makers fear their competitors will beat them to that price-point, so they gear up their research appropriately. But push may finally be coming to shove, as innovation runs up against the limits of nature. In this interview he sketches some current technological sticking-points: http://www.sciam.com/interview/moore/092297moore3.html

And now for something completely different: A graphical feast for haute couture fans: [multipage] http://www.worldmedia.fr/fashion/catwalk/hc/98ep/whosshow/calendar.html

Yikes! Ana Voog says she's getting 700,000 hits a day, now! http://www.anacam.com/analogs/analog26g.html

Another good day for Salon:

The paradox that all the sex columnists for men are women: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/01/21media.html

A musical genre I managed to miss: math rock http://www.salonmagazine.com/music/sharps/1998/01/21sharps.html

Salon's first decent look at the Unabomber: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/21news.html

And the founder of Echo, on ISPs as communities: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1998/01/cov_21books.html

I'm surprised there aren't more of these places, too. The only reason I can think is that it's not a simple matter to start one up. It's not just a business -- it's like founding a town. And that's a tricky and subtle process.

The Village Voice also has a look at Echo: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/4bunn.shtml

Kibo himself, on alt.religion.kibology:

Rats! You have destroyed my whole theory by listening to it all the way through!

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900, James read his paper "Drama and Life" before the Literary and Historical Society of University College. (Simultaneously, Ruskin died!)

Salon is catching up after the long weekend:

Hooray for online universities: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/01/20feature.html

And a rare hooray for an interactive fiction of Blade Runner: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/01/19review.html

And a nice look at the Oprah suit: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/01/20news.html

And a nice blast at Cokie Roberts and her nauseating ilk: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/01/20media.html

Does David Brinkley all of a sudden have conflicts of interest he didn't have when the ADM influence-peddlers were merely paying for his show, rather than directly paying his salary? Why does eliminating the middleman suddenly make you a whore? What about the idea of five millionaires telling the rest of America what's good for the middle class every Sunday?

And a nice look at East Timor's hopes in the Asian crisis: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/hitc/1998/01/nc_19hitc2.html

It is now almost a quarter century since, with the frank encouragement of President Gerald Ford and his unspeakable valet, Henry Kissinger, the Indonesian military moved to annex East Timor, just after it received its independence from Portugal. They brought to the task the same fascistic ruthlessness with which, a decade earlier -- and with the help of the CIA -- they wiped out a million or so of their fellow countrymen unfortunate enough to be labeled communists.

Ana's hands.

There's a new issue of the Progressive Review: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/

Frank Rizzo understood the relationship between mobs and murders. As a police captain he approached the mob with a plan: you can have prostitution, drugs and numbers in my district, but no murder. It worked; Rizzo became a local hero and eventually mayor.

And several new long essays, including one on Washington's "culture of impunity": http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/impunity.htm

The federal government no longer effectively regulates corporate greed. Republicans no longer combat Democratic greed and vice versa. Liberals and centrist Republicans have become pathetically ineffective forces within their own parties. The local bar largely devotes itself to undermining decent government. The media has lost both its will and skill for keeping others honest. And, increasingly, law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies make their own rules.

The editor's long look back at his 1960s in DC isn't as winning as I expected, but it covers some important ground: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/30year.htm

Sometimes the meetings broke up in pandemonium. One was literally turned around after the chair declared it illegal. The vice chair, a minister and cab driver who wore a clerical collar around his neck and a coin holder on his belt, stood up in the back of the room and announced that the meeting would go on and requested everyone to turn their chairs around. Most did, leaving the chair speechless in what was now the rear.

The Voice has an interesting look at satellite radio: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/3vowell.shtml

People think that commercial radio is unimaginative because the computers generate the playlists. But have you listened to some all-computer-generated playlists? They're weird. They're fun. They segue Tone Loc into the Lemonheads in such a way that neither Tone Loc nor the Lemonheads ever sounded so strange or so good.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1914, Joyce's fortunes turned when Ezra Pound praised "Portrait".

There's a charming, low-key PBS series called Cinema featuring interviews and reviews by Graham Fuller (of Interview) and Jack Mathews, who brilliantly suggested tonight that instead of remaking (eg) Dr Doolittle, Hollywood should give "Bonfire of the Vanities" to a new director (say, one with a soul).

And tonight's American Experience was a great illustration of historical research: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/midwife/about.html

The first two hours of "Surviving the Bottom Line" Sunday were also very welcome, drawing attention to ValuJet as (literal) Wall Street murder: http://www.pbs.org/bottomline/html/running.html

Dave Winer of Frontier offers a nice, somewhat technical overview of his strategy vis-a-vis Microsoft: http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/01/theTailAndTheDog.html

When will creative engineers stop selling their babies to the miserable petty agendas of small thinking corporate credit-takers? I want to zig where everyone else zags. I want to build a smart organization, grounded in product. I think that's the way to do a solid cashout for my shareholders, not one that disappoints.

I found another cache of Dvorak at: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd_p.htm. It's all worth reading, but highlights include a piece on "IP telephony": http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd980120.htm

And another on the complexity/quality crisis: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd971007.htm

In fact, we're in the midst of a quality crisis. It will be a matter of time before this finally gets to Intel and all the other semiconductor companies that struggle to compress more functionality into smaller packages. Their winning streak is excessive, especially compared with what we see from all the other sectors of society.

On this date in 1882, Walt Whitman kisses Oscar Wilde, after sharing Whitman's homemade elderberry wine.

A thoughtful meditation on good and evil, wrt a murder-suicide at Harvard: http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/feature/1997/10/13gaitskill.html

Desperately, she tried to school herself in ways to "make people like you," writing to herself in the third person with instructions like, "Do not show what you really think. Put on a mask," or listening to inspirational tapes. When these steps failed, she anguished about what she poetically called her "heart-failer thing"...

When interlaced GIFs go bad

From alt.religion.kibology, after Joseph Michael Bay:

"Many are cold, but few are frozen."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1903, after returning home for the holidays, James resumes his Paris adventure.

Oldish news, from Salon: "Robert Altman and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, who teamed up a decade ago on the groundbreaking HBO political satire/soap "Tanner '88", are working on a prime-time computer industry soap for ABC that will be titled either "Silicon Valley" or "Killer App"."

Joyce Maynard finally transplanted her family from New Hampshire to California a couple of years back ...and loves it: http://www.joycemaynard.com/articles/sfe.html

Hitchhiking home in Mill Valley one morning from the garage where my car was being repaired, I asked the man behind the wheel what sort of work he did. Guitar, he told me. He was in a band. Oh nice, I said. What do you call yourselves? Talking Heads.

And a lyrical meditation on motherhood vs art (ice-dancing): http://www.joycemaynard.com/articles/icedancing.html

The best game magazine is Computer Gaming World:

"Jedi Knight" adds a decent storyline to the Doom-genre: http://cgw.gamespot.com/column/2b4e.html

A survey of games with thoughtful sci-fi storylines: http://cgw.gamespot.com/column/302a.html

Forthcoming titles for X-Com fans: http://cgw.gamespot.com/column/22de.html

The collectible-card-game genre, spawned by "Magic: The Gathering", now offers themes like X-Files, Star Trek, Dune, and Lord of the Rings: http://cgw.gamespot.com/column/223e.html

Pranksters hacking newsprint! http://www.cjr.org/html/98-01-02-hackers.html

A Woody-Allen worshipper throws in the towel: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/1998/01/cov_16woody.html

Lupus Yonderboy, on alt.religion.kibology: "If I had neural nanonics, I'd just sit around and play Tetris in my brain. Of course, sometimes I do that anyway."

Do US gov't agencies run the illegal drug industry? There's a new video that collates the evidence: http://www.madcowprod.com/drugtimes/review.html

Possibly my second-favorite piece of writing on the net: Eric Raymond's analysis of the miraculous birth of Linux: [multipage] http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-paper.html

(See Jan 1 Archive, below, for my #1 favorite.)

This theoretical interview with the inventor of Perl includes many general insights: http://www.ddj.com/ddj/1998/1998_02/lead/lead.htm

I'm not one of these people who can sit down and design an entire system from scratch and figure out how everything relates to everything else, so I knew from the start that I had to take the bear-of-very-little-brain approach, and design the thing to evolve.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine campus, they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and built the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is that kind of a language.

I have a couple of teenagers, and the thing you notice about teenagers is that they're always plus or minus ten years from their real age. So if you've got a 15-year old, they're either acting 25 or they're acting 5. Sometimes simultaneously! And Perl is a little that way, but that's okay.

Two from Nerve magazine, for mature audiences only. Poppy Z. Brite's fantasia of Lennon and McCartney as revolutionary lovers: http://www.nervemag.com/Brite/would/

And Christopher Durang on a play he did with Sigourney Weaver called "Sex and Longing": http://www.nervemag.com/Durang/longing/

LULU: I am unmoored. I have lost my mooring. You know, a boat is moored to the dock, but if the rope breaks, it drifts and drifts. I have no idea how to live or how to behave. (calls out) Anyone want to sleep with me? I'm available!

REVEREND DAVIDSON: Please, we're on C-Span.

Unabridged Ana! For $40, you can get 40,000 unabridged images of Ana Voog's life since last August, at two-minute intervals. This blows my mind: http://hardrock.simplenet.com/cdsales/

Salon's funny and righteous guide to getting your parents online: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/01/13feature.html

And Gore Vidal on various topics: http://www.salonmagazine.com/archives/to/books_feature.html

If you were president, what would be your first executive decision?

I would cut Pentagon procurement (around $250 billion) by two-thirds. Taxes for the middle class need never be raised again in the next 50 years. Then I would tax corporate profits, something hardly done nowadays. Then we could have national health and even an intelligent, accessible school system.

On rec.arts.books, Michael Wade offers this Politically Correct Irish Joke:

Paddy goes for a job on a building site. The pug-ugly English foreman says - "O I don't know about this - I've had enough of thick Micks. Are you intelligent enough for this job? I mean do even know the difference between a joist and a girder?" "Yessor. Joist wrote Ulysses, Girder wrote Faust."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1941, at 2:15am, in Zurich, James Joyce died of an undiagnosed duodenal ulcer.

Here's an interesting small site that offers the mysterious death-babble of gangster Dutch Schultz (Oct 24, 1935), along with some readable personal essays: http://www.bway.net/~abbot/gunshot.html

You didn't meet him; you didn't even meet me; the glove will fit what I say...Oh, kayiyi, kayiyi! Sure, who cares? When are you through! How do you know this?

The Village Voice site has a long, witty, favorable tv-review of "La Femme Nikita" (http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/tv/2carson.shtml) and an interesting peek at yuppies tripping on yage: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/2pinchbeck.shtml

If Ana Voog becomes as big a star as I think, her new CD single (released today in a limited edition) will be a good investment: http://www.anavoog.com

I hesitate to pass this one on because it's got light nudity (and has apparently been widely publicised elsewhere) but it's totally hilarious, and very well designed: a new tradition has emerged, of exhibitionism at Disneyland: http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/splashmt.htm

News junkies will find a handy page o' links to all the major sources via the infamous Drudge Report: http://www.drudgereport.com/

JD Salinger's semi-unpublished novella "Hapworth 16, 1924" can be previewed in full via: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=260770998

If you've read "Primary Colors", you'll recognise this as Clinton's way of gauging how the wind is blowing:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- At the urging of allies in Congress, President Clinton is considering seeking an increase in the minimum wage, a spokesman said today. "It's being looked at," press secretary Mike McCurry said. "I don't think there's been any decision at all one way or the other."

Lots of major movie scripts, online for the taking: http://www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml

Win95/NT users can download a free version of Altavista for searching their own local disk(s): http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/searchpx.htm

Chris Crawford's account of his pursuit of interactive art: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_6/Dragon_Speech.html

His technical account of outwitting crackers by the most devious and witty copy-protection schemes ever: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_6/Copy_Protection.html

You want to hide that file somewhere inside another file, preferably in a way that allows the cracker to examine it without realizing that it's not quite right. I hid my password file inside the sound file of an explosion.

The New Scientist reports that the GPS system can easily be jammed: http://www.newscientist.com/cgi-bin/pageserver.cgi?/ns/980110/ngps.html

I'm reading thru a ton of new material at Chris Crawford's site, mostly on game design. I hope to index all of this on my Crawford page. But here's a sample, reviewing the evolution of "Doom": http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_8/Evolutionary_Design.html

And another, reviewing Huizinga on play: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_8/Play_Mentation.html

In German, a child born out of wedlock is called a "Spielkind", literally, "play-child". The English word lechery is the only surviving remnant in English of the Old Germanic root leik, leikan, to play. Also striking is the fact that the Latin word for play, ludere, survives in English in lewd.

This day in Joyce History: In ?1894, the fictional Rudy Bloom dies. In 1963, Joyce's daughter-in-law Helen Fleischman Joyce died.

I just caught a mind-boggling piece of non-music on the radio, that turned out to be from 1964 by Tony Conrad. A websearch turned up a nice article about him called "This is not easy listening" which struck a chord because I used to say the music I like best is difficult music (Thelonius Monk, Kate Bush, Amy Denio): http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/chronicle/95/09/21/s04ThisIs.html

On alt.religion.kibology, Roger Douglas offers a short course in how to talk dirty in Australian: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=314154010

Salon reviews three gossipy books about Intel, Oracle, and Apple: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1997/12/cov_18books.html

Sometimes, Wilson reports, Oracle would respond to customers' frantic demands by deliberately shipping them blank or unreadable computer tapes to win a few more days' time.

And they argue convincingly that Tom Frank misunderstands the 60s: http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/feature/1997/12/cov_22feature.html

This day in Joyce History: In 1901, Joyce reprised his role as Geoffrey Fortescue in "Cupid's Confidante"

Charles Gillett on alt.religion.kibology: "I don't speak Esperanto because no matter what you say you're always quoting the people who invented it."

Salon looks at JenniCam and AnaCam: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/01/cov_08feature.html

E! Online reports:

Ed Sullivan, dead since 1974, is hot, hot, hot. Seen last year pitching cars in a TV spot, Sullivan will next host a special for UPN. The New Ed Sullivan Show, featuring a computer-generated version of the deceased guy, is set to air in May.

I love it when artists I like turn out to value the same things I do. In this piece by Joyce Maynard about how childbirth changed her body, she notes the uniqueness of Isabella Rosselini's unsexy nude scenes in "Blue Velvet" (which I hadn't realised were due to her recent birthing): http://www.joycemaynard.com/parenting/baby_body.html

And this Maynard piece about telling kids the truth is worth reading just for the way she prepares them for the news she's sold her story "To Die For" (Nicole Kidman, et al) to Hollywood: http://www.joycemaynard.com/parenting/tell_truth.html

And a short, tender memoir of her father's love for painting: http://www.joycemaynard.com/articles/painter.html

He was a devastatingly handsome, dashing man with a cleft chin and a strong jaw and the irresistible ability to illustrate the light, romantic verse he wrote for women with drawings that must have melted their hearts.

Camille Paglia revels in the Kennedy soap-opera: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1998/01/nc_06pagl.html

There was "blood all over the snow," it has been reported, and family members kneeled around the prone Michael in the twilight to recite the Lord's Prayer. It's like an eerie fusion of the blood-drenched sand of the pagan Colosseum with a public-square Christmas creche.

and from her 1998 wish list on a linked page:

I wish that someone besides me would notice that Anne Heche looks exactly like Ellen DeGeneres' mother and that, as usual, lesbo love is All About Mom

New issue of the Progressive Review offers tons of shocking newsbits: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/

Those thousands of Americans doing time on minor pot possession charges will be pleased to read of the genteel manner the Washingtonian magazine handled Al Gore III's little problem at St. Alban's School in an article about recent turmoil at that pinstriped boot-camp.

"The most conspicuous absentees among the parents were Vice President Gore and his wife, Tipper. The previous semester their 13-year-old son, Albert Gore III, had been caught with some other boys from St. Alban's and some girls from National Cathedral School in possession of substances popular among teenagers but banned by the school's honor code."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, Joyce wrote a short autobiographical sketch he called "A Portrait of the Artist".

A different Joyce-- Joyce Maynard-- has been writing good stuff since 1972, and now has a friendly website with lots of text: http://www.joycemaynard.com/letter.html

Getting creative with pagers: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/019844.htm

From the Dvorak Archive, some funny Microsoft-bashing, wrt their Sidewalk City Guide to San Francisco: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd971020.htm

Exploring the Forbes Magazine site, I find a well-researched piece by one of my favorite authors, Tom Wolfe, about the extreme threat posed to the human self-image, by sociobiology and neuroscience: http://www.forbes.com/asap/120296/html/tom_wolfe.htm

Meantime, the notion of a self-- a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior-- a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds-- this old-fashioned notion (what's a boot strap, for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away... slipping away...

And a witty piece by Joe Queenan about the inhibiting effect of instantaneous feedback on the Net: http://www.forbes.com/asap/120296/html/joe_queenan.htm

Without the interactive element provided by the Net, I would certainly have pulled no punches on the rapacious Bosnian Serbs. But cowed as I was by the volume and ferocity of the email reaching me while I was writing the book, I took the easy way out.

And Bill Frezza argues that the biggest cultural impact of the Net will be via invisible commerce: http://www.forbes.com/asap/120296/html/bill_frezza.htm

For the first time, individuals will be free to commit acts of commerce unmolested by the prying eyes and grasping hands of sovereign powers.

Why are so many conservatives good prose stylists? George Gilder's online book "Telecosm" is a readable and wide-ranging exploration of the internet age (only slightly outdated for being three years old). It also has the unique advantage of chapter-by-chapter responses from the biggest names in the business: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/asap/gilder/

One especially controversial chapter paints Michael Milken as a hero-geek: http://www.forbes.com/asap/gilder/telecosm12a.htm

These arrays of small black monitors spread across the desk collectively functioned like a present-day Windows display. Most of the features of Milken's system are common today. But in 1980 they were novel.

and

Indeed, if the few Savings & Loans that held a substantial portfolio of junk had been permitted to keep it, they would have survived, prospered and paid millions of dollars of taxes rather than collapsed into the hands of the FDIC.

Gilder's emphasis on bandwidth is also intriguing: http://www.forbes.com/asap/gilder/telecosm10a.htm

Gates and Malone are signaling a fundamental shift in the industry. Ruling the new era will be bandwidth or communications power, measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers.

Free download: If you're on a Mac or Win95/NT, there's an under-one-meg standalone chat server called AtChat whose special selling point is the chatbot it works with-- their online demo is an impersonation of Mac columnist Don Crabb, which can answer simple questions about the Mac: http://www.abbottsys.com/atchat.html

The SJ Mercury News surveys what online magazines plan to charge for subscriptions: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/048745.htm

An extremely lucid snapshot of the recent technical evolution of Java: http://www.webtechniques.com/features/1997/12/note/note.shtml

In the USA, there'd be a line around the block:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A man sentenced by a court in Iran to be blinded for blinding another man may be spared because no doctor has agreed to help carry out the sentence, a newspaper said on Sunday.

Salon's look at women and families in 1997 includes a hilarious pairing of Ted Kaszynski and Martha Stewart, as well as a zillion other telling nuggets: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1997/12/cov_23feature.html

"I'm not leaving because my children need more of me; I'm leaving because I need more of them." -- Brenda Barnes, departing Pepsi exec.

And you can follow a link from there to the parallel essay on media family myths by Stephanie Coontz:

As long as the underlying issues are refracted and diffused through the lens of sensationalism, we will lurch from indignation to pity, praise to blame, with each new incident that pushes our buttons.

Freshly-minted brilliant, obscene surrealism on alt.religion.kibology from Lisa Rea (aka Elizabeth Higgins, aka Lisa Pea) whose homepage is at: http://www.tfs.net/~lhiggin and whose DejaNews Author Profile is worth browsing: http://search.dejanews.com/profile.xp?author=lisa%20rea

YAY! A whole list of other weblogs (all using Frontier) via Chris Gulker: http://ww2.gulker.com/news/. His own log is heavy on Wired, the NY Times, and alife, but he also does some beautiful photos of clouds: [80k] http://www.gulker.com/galleries/Coast_skies_1_4_98/page_02.html

Cribbed links:

NASA wants to use "belief-desire-intention AI" on future shuttles: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/6284.html

James Gleick offers a nice bunch of really good writing about technology: http://www.around.com/ including this rant about the built-in-inaccuracy snafu in the GPS Global Positioning System: http://www.around.com/sa.html

The Columbia Journalism Review sees Microsoft as a serious threat to all newspapers: http://www.cjr.org/html/97-11-12-gates.html

A tasteful page of links to Hubble Space Telescope pictures and news: http://www.popsci.com:80/content/science/features/hubble/

Two years of GREAT feature articles from Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/featarch.html including videoclips of dolphins blowing 'smoke' rings: http://www.sciam.com/0896issue/0896dolphins.html

And a superb one on the myth of computer productivity: http://www.sciam.com/0797issue/0797trends.html

What puzzles economists is that productivity growth measured in the seven richest nations has instead fallen precipitously in the past 30 years, from an average of 4.5 percent a year during the 1960s to a rate of 1.5 percent in recent years.

All told, SBT estimates, futzing costs American businesses on the order of $100 billion a year in lost productivity.

And two physics megabrains-- Penrose and Hawking-- discussing utterly mindboggling topics in cosmology: http://www.sciam.com/0796issue/0796hawking.html

Hawking: "I think [Penrose] has put his finger on an important difference between the two ends of time ...there are two possible complex solutions of the field equations. Obviously, one solution corresponds to one end of time and the other to the other...."

(Obviously!)

Ana Voog

Another subversive brainiac named J. Orlin Grabbe (http://www.aci.net/kalliste/) recommends this geopolitical forecast for 1998: http://www.stratfor.com/services/gintel/redalert/

In Asia and Russia, the events of the great reversals of 1997 will begin the long process of logical consequences. Asia will become increasingly xenophobic and insular. So will Russia. As a result, friction will increase and security will decline.

And he links to the "Laissez-faire City Times" which has a good issue on Internet privacy, with lots of lively links: [multipage] http://www.zolatimes.com/V1.7/PageOne.html

WTTW showed a really beautiful (and smart!) movie last night called "Truly, Madly, Deeply", about love and letting go. The Internet Movie Database let me easily trace its charming star, Juliet Stevenson, to "Drowning by Numbers" and "The Politician's Wife": http://us.imdb.com/search

The most useful browsing tip ever: Hold down the (right) mouse button over a link to pop up a menu that lets you open the link in a new window, so you can stack up dozens of pages simultaneously for offline reading, or go down a list of links and open them all before reading any, or read one page while another is slowly loading in the background.

Norman Solomon has announced the winners of his 1997 P.U.-litzer Prizes in a netnews post. But he misses the boat badly wrt Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's 'farewell address': http://www.afn.org/~govern/Riddance.html Even the Washington Post's Robert Novak admits AEP is "known for accuracy, industry and courage."

The San Jose Mercury offers this convenient page of breaking news: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/

Bishop Tutu's new year's blessing:

"May the best of '97 be the worst of '98."

HTML crosses the fine line between art and madness: http://members.tripod.com/~amline/ssgame.html

Random surreal Korean frame-grab experiment:

(Computer graphics are like stained glass!)

If you hate your job, you'll probably enjoy the extensive archives of Disgruntled magazine. Here's their interview with the publisher of a related zine called "Temp Slave": http://www.disgruntled.com/kelly1297.html

Joseph Michael Bay on newsgroup alt.religion.kibology

Men are from Mars, Women are from The Mad Spaces Between The Stars Where Man Was Not Meant To Seek.

and

Actually, Santa Helper is mostly noodles and spices, which allows you to "make a great meal" from a bowlful of jelly in no time!

A Reuters article suggests mobile phone owners in Switzerland are routinely continually tracked: http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=6657013-987

Some 3,000 base stations across the country track the location of mobile phones as soon as they are switched on, not just when customers are having conversations, it said.

The Dead Media Project: A fanclub for the forgotten experiments of media past: [multipage] http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html

It puts machines into a category where machines probably properly belong -- colorful, buzzing, cuddly things with the lifespan of hamsters.

Ana's artbath:

A net.biz knowitall named Dana Blankenhorn offers a wise list of the most clued-in net businesses of 1997: http://www.tbass.com/clue/clued-in.htm
...but he's not sufficiently clued to include a link back to his home page: http://www.tbass.com/clue/ (where you can find his parallel wise list of the most clueless).
Also: it helps to read these lists chronologically, from the bottom up... and I guess MS Office isto blamefor thespacing problems???

Broadcast networks needed a 30 share, because there were only 7 choices in big markets. Cable nets live on a 2 share, in a world of maybe 70 channels. The business models of satellite systems assume a .5 share, given a world of 400 channels. And the Web, when mature, will have 1 million channels.

This is not publishing, this is not broadcasting, this is the Web! What matters is you, not y'all. It's not a mass medium -- it's 260 million individual media choices. Anyone who tries to treat Web users as a mass audience will fail! (Hear that, Mr. Gates?)

Sinister or savvy? Blankenhorn likes GroupLens, used by some commercial sites to compare your interests with other past visitors', and make suggestions about what you might like. (Remember the telescreens in "1984" that kept an eye on their viewers? They're here...) http://www.netperceptions.com/product_frame.html

He likes Feed magazine, which offers this nice look at the pay-per-view digital video format Divx: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feedline/97.12steadman/97.12steadman_main.html

I've been snoozing thru most of the local PBS station's marathon of "Sessions at West 54th", but the Squirrel Nut Zippers made me sit up and dance. They're so unselfconsciously old-fashioned, they're newer than new. The sound can be called 'Hot Jazz' and has an honorable, forgotten history: [multipage] http://www.towerrecords.com/pulse/97/sept/squirrel_feature.html

My favorite piece of writing on the Web is Phil Greenspun's long, hilarious, behind-the-scenes account of trying to publish a computer book. He explains perfectly why computer books are so garish and vacuous: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/wtr/dead-trees/story.html

Nostalgia: On newsgroup alt.folklore.computers Daniel P. B. Smith writes:

As I walked around my office and lab yesterday, turning on my computers so that they could be undergoing their lengthy boot process while I got my coffee, I caught myself thinking: Gotta warm up the computers. What a sense of deja vu! As those born in the fifties and earlier are aware, what was not yet called consumer electronics in the fifties (radios, television sets, phonographs), as well as lab equipment such as oscillators, VTVM's etc. were based on vacuum tubes. After turning the power on, there was a period of time on the order of a couple of minutes-- very similar in duration to PC boot times-- before the equipment was functional.

One of the first hippie communes, Morning Star, is memorialised in a fine online book called "Home Free Home". (Chapter 14, about massive acid overdosing, is so intense I got flashbacks!): [multipage] http://www.intrepid.net/~friartuc/

"There will be no more Morning Stars." --California governor Ronald Reagan in 1968

The virtues of the hippie movement are proved best in the health of their children. An especially good startingpoint on Morning Star is Pam Read's memoir: http://www.intrepid.net/~friartuc/morncalf.htm

I have no memory images of Siddhartha in tears during those days. He was always happy--always climbing around on trees and fences (my little Capricorn) and he got mega feedback from everybody. People talked to him and showed him stuff and tried to make him laugh--which wasn't hard..

Common sense from the founder of Morning Star, Lou Gottlieb:

I found the following divinely simple treatment on page 172 of the Third Edition of the Macintosh Bible, in a paragraph written by Arthur Naiman: What is it? A Wrong Place Box -- a big cardboard box in a central location. If an object has no assigned place, I now put it in the Wrong Place Box. If I can't find something where I left it, I look first in the Wrong Place Box.

Susan Faludi (the feminist) wants to interview men about the Waco holocaust as a broken American promise: http://www.waco93.com/interview.htm
You can read a background interview with her at: http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/10096.htm