Robot Wisdom WebLog for April 1998 (waning)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900, Joyce got his thankyou message from Ibsen, while sitting on a swing. In 1929, Giorgio made his singing debut.

Seen on misc.activism.progressive:

Only when the last tree has died
And the last river been poisoned
And the last fish caught
Will we realize that we cannot eat money.
- The Cree

Ascii-art caffeine by Ilmari Karonen:

            CH3
            |
      O=C---N
       /     \
  H3C-N       C=O
       \     /
        C===C
        |    \
        |     N-CH3
        |    /
        N===C
            |
            H

Ralph Nader savaged the IMF before Congress last week: [long, devastating] [Deja URL part1] [Deja URL part2]

The International Monetary Fund is an institution out of control. It is completely unresponsive to the U.S. Congress, which appropriates 18 percent of its monies. In combination with its allies in the Clinton administration, the IMF has misleadingly sought to take advantage of the Asian financial crisis -- for which it is partly to blame -- to extract billions of dollars more from the United States.

...has created a condition whereby 358 people collectively control as much wealth as 45 percent of the world's population.

Indeed, one way to interpret the IMF's proposed quota increase and funding for the New Arrangements to Borrow is that it hopes to routinize international financial crises -- to develop a standard operating procedure whereby it quickly intervenes to calm financial markets, bail out lenders and inflict harsh terms on borrowers.

This is the economists' "moral hazard" problem about which other witnesses will testify in more detail and which led George Schultz, William Simon and Walter Wriston to urge the denial of further funds to the IMF in a February 3, 1998 Wall Street Journal article.

Indeed, the Treasury Department has shown disdain for the reporting requirements of the Sanders-Frank Amendment, waiting three years to deliver a report required after one year, and using the report to discuss labor market reforms instead of labor rights.

In its dealings with borrower countries, the IMF imposes a single set of structural adjustment policy mandates, with little variation from country to country. The central feature of this cookie-cutter approach is that economies should be structured to promote exports. In addition to trade liberalization, other key features include privatization, deregulation and government downsizing.

Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist at the World Bank, criticized the rigid "Washington Consensus," his name for the structural adjustment policy package. "The Washington Consensus does not offer the most important answers for every question in development," he said. "Deluding ourselves into thinking it does can lead to misguided policies."

It is a back-door attempt to do what citizen opposition is blocking OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) negotiators from doing with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

The model throws countries into a perverse competition in which low wages and weak environmental standards are rewarded and only multinational corporations are winners.

Something they probably don't want you to know: [Deja URL]

Some years ago S. L. Morison, who was working for the US government at the time, improperly released a spy satellite photo of a Soviet aircraft carrier under construction. The picture was published in one of the JANE'S publications. You could find a copy of JANE'S DEFENCE WEEKLY or whatever the photo appeared in and see for yourself. BTW, Morison was convicted of a crime and went to prison.

Warmlist is a Unix utility that caches your favorite sites in a browsable and searchable format: http://donkey.CS.Arizona.EDU/~paul/warmlist/ [Stutz, alt.hypertext]

Websom doesn't work for me, but it's a fascinating experiment in navigating document-space via neural-net algorithms: [graphics required] http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root.html [Stutz]

There's been a great thread on comp.infosystems.search that inspired Carasso to hack Webcrawler, where he found this handy page with the last 100 search-patterns: (Hours of fun!) http://webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/SearchTicker

fake+money
wall fans, wall duct
homosessual
i need information about online services industry particularly online revenues
speek AND to AND u.s.a.
warez
ELECTRICITIES
hellfire
slap AND her AND down AND again AND paw
where can i find information about bus travel in canada
XUXA NUA
poop
how AND to AND fish
researches on word recognition skills elementary level
GROSS

Another story on inept safe-surf filters: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/ylio/0420/308616.html [YMMV]

CIA Inspector-General admits policy of looking the other way re coke-trafficking: [Deja URL]

The directive, known as a "Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU), did not exempt the agency's full-time, career employees, who are known as CIA "officials." However, the agency did not have to tell the Justice Department about the criminal activities of "agents" or "assets"- terms used interchangeably to refer to its paid and unpaid spies. Also exempt were CIA contractors, such as pilots, accountants and military trainers, who supplied the agency with specific goods and services rather than intelligence.

And recent investigations by Maxine Waters on the same topic: [Deja URL]

An internal CIA cable dated 1984 details that the CIA made contact with prosecutors in the Zavala/Frogman case in order to protect what the CIA believed was an operational equity. That cable is included on page 113, and makes for incredible reading. Evidently, the CIA feared that exposure of the CIA's connections to the drug case had "the potential for disaster", according to a cable described on page 115.

Well Mr. Chairman, if I have anything to do with it, that cable and the confirmed facts sifted from this confused Report will mean disaster for the CIA.

This Committee has a responsibility to look into the nefarious activities surrounding the massive Contra-cocaine drug network and to use its subpoena power to provide the American people with the truth that has been denied them for too long.

A claim on netnews: [Deja URL]

A listing of the number of unarmed civilians deliberately killed 
by the USA:


UNARMED          NUMBER 
CIVILIANS        KILLED	    YEARS     SOURCES (author and BOOK)
Indians        10,000,000+ pre-1910  Churchill's INDIANS ARE US
Filipinos       1,000,000  1899-1906 Schirmer's PHILIPPINES READER
Germans,Japanese  500,000  1942-45   Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY
Koreans         1,000,000  1945-53   Smith's NORTH KOREA IN THE NEW WORLD 
Indonesians     1,000,000  1965-66   Griswold's INDONESIA
Vietnamese      1,000,000  1965-73   Herman's ATROCITIES IN VIETNAM
Cambodians        500,000  1969-73   Chomsky's MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Iraqis          1,500,000  1991-97   UN's THE CHILDREN ARE DYING
Others          1,000,000+ 1946-97   Blum's KILLING HOPE
__________________________
TOTAL          17,500,000+	

Blizzard Software spied on its users' hard drives to detect piracy: http://www.mercurycenter.com/business/top/063683.htm [YMMV]

Family-member spies on Microsoft PR-execs to detect 'piracy': http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,21440,00.html [YMMV]

"I watched my mother create the Bill Gates myth in the early '80s, and I've watched her spin the Microsoft image ever since," Jennifer Edstrom said in a statement.

Does cheap information reduce productivity? [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/24feature.html

I think one has to understand how extraordinary mass production once was. It created an enormous amount of productivity with relatively little creative input. It did not need people. You needed people on the assembly line, but you didn't need much creative input.

According to this Deja article I can't translate fully: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=345858573

...this ought to be the Euro with Magritte on it, but I don't see any sign of him: http://euro.fgov.be/pb/pbb/enbb13.htm

(Does it mean this bill we be replaced with the Magritte style?)

SYSTRAN now charges for translations, but for $1.40 of my $20 free trial I get this:

And to pay your entree, perhaps you will use a ticket [billet] of 500 BEF representant Constantin Meunier. Next 15 December, its 28,6 million specimens will cease having course legal, replace by the new ticket, has the effigy of Rene Magritte. This ticket acheve renewal of the wallet [renouvellement du porte-feuille] of the BNB (National Bank of Belgium). With those which are astonished by this initiative has some encablures of Euro, the BNB puts forward, in addition to the esthetic harmony of this series consacree to the Belgian artists of XXe century, the necessite to introduce into the cut of 500 BEF the modern devices of safety. The arrivee of Euro however will not condemn the printing works of the BNB to unemployment. 330 million ticket will be print there from here A the entree in effective circulation of the species, into 2002. More information on this aspect of the introduction of Euro, and well of others still, on http://euro.fgov.be

Sig quote of the week:

"Better to toss a stone at random, than a word." -Porphyry

Norman Solomon's welcome debunking of the Katherine-Graham Pulitzer hype: [Deja URL]

It's no coincidence that Graham's book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara, George Shultz and other luminaries of various administrations who have remained her close friends.

A second pass thru the Salon archives yields this okay piece on Web-based personality tests: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/23feature.html

Obviously, simple accessibility is the primary reason Keirsey's and similar tests are so popular online. David Mark Keirsey cites, in particular, the Web's openness to "ideas not from the mainstream academic or commercial institutions"...

New Byte is mostly about Java, but Pournelle's column includes an interesting look at 'credentialism': http://byte.com/art/9805/sec14/art1.htm

If I were young, had never made it to college, and wanted to get ahead, I'd go for one of the MCSE [Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer] credentials; it's guaranteed employment at fairly decent wages.

New Progressive Review includes Susan McDougall and Bill Gates:

Save the Children estimates that it takes $240 to sponsor one child for a year. Gates could sponsor 211 million children.

The shape of things to come: Poison-manufacturer uses NAFTA to sue Canada: http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/corner/worldnews/other/other44.html

In early April, the Canadian Parliament acted to ban the import and interprovincial transport of an Ethyl product the gasoline additive MMT which Canada considers to be a dangerous toxin. Ethyl (the company that invented leaded gasoline) responded on April 14 by filing a lawsuit against the Canadian government under NAFTA. Ethyl claims that the Canadian ban on MMT violates various provisions of NAFTA and seeks restitution of $251 million to cover losses resulting from the "expropriation" of both its MMT production plant and its "good reputation."

Promising archive for the Guardian Weekly: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/archive.html

Including a clear look at Monsanto's 'soy bomb': http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/beans.html

The new products are so attractive to many farmers that the company has managed to get them to sign away their future rights to the seed they grow, and allow Monsanto to inspect their fields whenever it wants.

Last month, the WTO confirmed its ruling that the European Union can no longer exclude meat and milk from cattle treated with bovine growth hormone, despite the protests of farmers, retailers and consumers.

And this on supermarkets tracking purchases: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/loyaltycard.html

One United States chain discovered that Friday nights saw a peak in purchases of both nappies [diapers] and booze. They concluded that men were being sent out for emergency nappy supplies, and were taking the opportunity to stock up on six-packs. Their response was to move the nappies so that they were nearer to the booze.

And the special problems of Arabic search-engines: http://online.guardian.co.uk/computing/893243853-arabic.html

One distinctive feature of the language is that almost all words are built around a central three-letter concept. Thus "k-t-b" not only provides the verb "write" but also "book", "library", "office", and so on. Different words are obtained by adding bits before, after and between the root letters.

And the power of bicyclists in Denmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/Copenhagenbikes.html

A silly ascii-art cartoon that made me laugh: [Deja URL]

Some interesting experiments on web usability: http://world.std.com/~uieweb/surprise.htm [Netly]

When users made more jumps during a task, they felt better at the end of the task, and they had a higher perception of the quality of information at that site.

(I'd take this with a grain of salt.)

And http://world.std.com/~uieweb/online.htm

Waiter: Would you like soup with your meal?
Guest: What soups do you have today?
Waiter: I don't know. Let me go in the kitchen and check with the chef.
Guest: Never mind, I'll skip the soup.

(This is exactly what I hate most on the Web!)

A great Amazon interview with Larry Wall: [Messy URL] [SB]

Perl has always been pretty much the language of choice for text processing, but what's been happening in the last 10 years is that the definition of text has been changing out from under Perl.

It used to be, way back in the Dark Ages, that I just ran the whole thing. I was Mr. Perl -- judge, jury, and executioner. But these days the perl5-porters mailing list serves as the legislature.

...Windows itself has not really been a big problem that way. I mean, there are some cultural differences, sure. And one of the things I had to rule on lately was how we deal with line endings that appear not to be from our system. ...I decreed that, essentially, any Perl ought to accept any line ending consistently. It really ought to do the right thing, whatever the right thing is.

At the current time, a lot of people are trying to find models where the commercial and freeware communities can cooperate. That's why I hired on with O'Reilly two years ago...

The visual debugger that ActiveState has is actually based on the regular symbolic debugger, the line-oriented debugger, which is written in Perl. But what they've done is, instead of talking to the command line, they've just opened up a connection to some operating-system objects so you get these snazzy windows.

When Perl 2 was out there, it was just a text-processing language. It didn't handle binary data. And I said, you know, if I make Perl handle binary data, who knows where it's going to stop? Well, Perl version 3 handled all binary data, and who knows where it's going to stop? ...There are a lot of problems out there that are 95 percent text and 5 percent binary data.

A nice look at the lo-tech browser, Opera: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/reviews/1998/04/23review.html

If at the end of the day you are midway through a project and have 10 browser windows open, don't worry -- the next morning, Opera can pick up exactly where you left off.

An Asian woman's readable confession of obsession with white men: http://www.nervemag.com/DeLaCruz/whiteguy/

I grew up in the Philippines, a country at once embittered and enthralled by its colonial past. We love Americans the way SM slaves love their masters -- with a perverted need both to consume and be consumed by them.

New New Scientist looks at Win98 viruses and the science of nothing.

A pretty interesting tech doc on building Mac Mozilla 5: http://www.mozilla.org/docs/tplist/catBuild/macbuild.htm

For plain-text email/form composition, we used VText up through 4.0. For 5.0, we switched to WASTE because of its minimal impact on the PowerPlant hierarchy. VText caused us fits every time we wanted to upgrade to a newer version of PowerPlant because it wrapped its tentacles around every limb of PowerPlant.

Terrifying CIA site for kids: http://www.odci.gov/cia/ciakids/

We set out to collect the raw information that we need to do the job. We collect the information from many sources: newspapers, magazines, and foreign radio or TV broadcasts, which are overt or "open." Some sources are "covert" -- that is, other people's secrets. We persuade these people to tell us their secrets.

DON'T MISS: The hilarious Progressive Review scorecard for media coverage of the Clinton scandals:

Worst publication: Salon An e-zine that seems to serve as a receptacle for information dug up by Clinton's shamuses. Overblown by Salon and its media admirers, its stories tend to be pretty tepid stuff. Sorry, folks, but a few hundred rightwing bucks to David Hale after he's testified doesn't match a half million Clintonista bucks to Web Hubbell before he's told his story.

And if you don't like media with right-wing sponsors, how come you watch the Jim Lehrer News Hour?

A 500k expose on Scientology, its origins and its celebrities: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fishman/fable.htm

Melting Antarctica to unleash 20-ft flood within 20 years? [Deja URL]

It was reported in the Aug. 95 Scientific American that scientists in the Bahamas had discovered that the last ice age began 120,000 years ago with something they called the Madhouse Century. At that time sea level was the same as it is now, CO2 levels were not much different, and it was just a little colder. Something happened to trigger a catastrophic 20 foot sea level increase, immediately followed by a 50 foot decrease(!), all in just one hundred years!!!

'Your Mileage May Vary' has discovered a truly noxious Microsoft-run website for Idaho State University: http://www.ymmv.com/yesterdaily.html

This Day in Joyce History: In 1889, on Easter, James probably celebrated his first communion. In 1928, he wrote a poem, "Crossing to the Coast".

Ana should be visible rehearsing/taping Sinbad all day.

More DoD hackers: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/052100.htm

An extraordinary experiment covering Eno minimalism: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/17goldstein.shtml

"I play it night after night," Ziporyn says, "and there are moments when the cellist comes in with a note and I just want to burst into tears."

Supposedly Clinton's illegitimate son: http://www.globalserve.net/~fractal/danny.htm

New Village Voice has added related-article links at the end of each article (yay!), and brings the Kevin Mitnick story up to date, along with a bit about Web political ads: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/17bunn.shtml

Despite her efforts, the site's defense fund for Mitnick has only raised a little over $200.

[NY attorney general candidate Evan] Davis paid $2700 for a captive audience of a quarter million.

A Quicktime movie of Gates getting the Blue Screen of Death: [1mb] http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/20/gates.comdex/gates.30.160.mov [McOS]

Norman Solomon fumes about Dilbert-flavored ice cream (cf 18 Dec below): [Deja URL]

More details of the documentary on Israel's dark past (28 Mar below): [Deja URL]

20 things you should know before suing your employer: [Deja URL]

11) Look for and note inconsistencies with your attorney's handling of your case, i.e. does he forget to handle certain aspects of your case? Does he file papers late? Does he neglect to inform you of critical factors regarding your case? These things should not be ignored as they WILL come back to hurt you!

Aaron Gross on rec.arts.books: [Deja URL]

When the Panama Canal was completed, the U.S. Government sent a commission of artists to Panama to suggest ways of artistically enhancing and beautifying all the locks and machinery in the canal. They recommended leaving it exactly the way it was.

Live chat session with Koko the signing gorilla next Monday: http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/98/110841.html

Another step towards XML-based AI: http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/news/0420/20xml.html [SN]

To remedy this, an organization is being established to offer a Web "Library of Congress" of sorts that would manage an XML Dewey Decimal-type system.

Awards for some brave environmental activists you never read about: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/026101.htm

More Progressive Review includes this, re Starr:

If the media believes that poll results should guide the actions of prosecutors, exactly what level of popular support should a prosecutor have before proceeding to enforce the law?

A simple XML proposal for genealogy: [multipage] http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/gedml-example.html [SN]

Feed has a juicy capsule review of a history of sixties Hollywood: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feeddaily/98.04.20feeddaily_master.html

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, in their haze, somehow pull off Easy Rider. Coppola brings himself to the brink of ruin only to seize glory with The Godfather, a masterpiece he considered hack work.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals more Microsoft marketing schemes: [multipage] http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i33/microsoft.htm [SB]

Including acquiring content: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-33.dir/33a03301.htm

Jack H. Schuster, a professor of education and public policy at the Claremont Graduate University, is one of many who say it is only a matter of time before the giant "info-tainment" conglomerates, like Time Warner and the Walt Disney Company, along with Microsoft, start offering courses on their own, or in partnerships with leading universities.

As part of its distance-learning push, Microsoft has formed marketing alliances with companies that include ActiveClass, Convene, and Real Education. They sell on-line education services to colleges -- primarily sophisticated Web sites from which students can register for classes, buy books, and receive their course materials.

And a $10k/each Microsoft Scholars program: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-33.dir/33a02901.htm

And a peek at their humongous research division: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-33.dir/33a03101.htm

The Web Innovator Awards offer concise histories of RDF, NetObjects, Cold Fusion, the Link Exchange, etc: [multipage] http://builder.cnet.com/Business/Innovators97/?st.bl.fd.gifb.feat [SN]

New City Times includes another Jack Parsons episode and this on primate slave-labor in Thailand: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.12/Mkybusin.html

Monkey school includes teaching the animal to choose only fully ripe coconuts, and shun unripe green ones.

Ana's excellent adventure

TV Guide argues for making some exceptions during TV-Turnoff/Sweeps Week: http://www.tvgen.com/dish/0420d.htm (agc)

Pulling the plug from April 22-28 will mean missing out on a bunch of sweeps-week programs, including the Academy of Country Music Awards and a Dallas reunion on CBS; a two-hour Party of Five and the 200th episode of The Simpsons on Fox; ice skating and Apollo 13 on ABC; and Merlin, the NBA playoffs, the fourth-to-last Seinfeld episode and a new ER featuring Maria Bello's Dr. Anna Del Amico on NBC.

And Yale acknowledges Jerry Springer: http://www.tvgen.com/dish/0420b.htm (agc)

"For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility, whose nonconformity... discredits them and disenfranchises them, daytime TV talk shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation."

I offered this Alan Cooper essay on goal-directed design a couple of days back, but without this pullquote that stuck in my mind: http://www.cooper.com/articles/drdobbs_goal_directed_design.html

The agenda note now says "What should we charge for the Spam-O-2000?" and it is sent to the same list of people. If the responses range from "ten dollars" to "ten thousand dollars" you really do have a problem and must go ahead and call a meeting; You're back to square one. On the other hand, if everyone replies "a buck-fifty" or "whatever you want" or some other useful consensus, then you have just succeeded in avoiding a meeting! The software has directly helped you to achieve your goal.

Salon takes off the gloves against the Wall Street Journal: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/04/17newsd.html

How did a great national newspaper allow its editorial pages to be hijacked, for many years now, by far-right propagandists?

Kibo whimpers: [Deja URL]

I just wanted to use the phrase "flaming penny-loafers" in sci.astro ...is that so wrong?

This Day in Joyce History: In 1866, Repulse won the 1000 Guineas at Newmarket (U2.301).

Linda McCartney, R.I.P.: http://www.earthbase.org/home/people/m/mccartney_linda/

The Internet community's favorite movie of all time: The Shawshank Redemption!?? http://us.imdb.com/top_250_films

Here's 49 Eskimo words for snow: http://www.peaknet.org/rec/snowword.html

qaniit is snow in the air, falling ... nittaalaq is air thick with snow

Here's a thorough save-yourself-a-trip-to-the-doctor site: http://www.healthanswers.com/health_answers/search_get_answer/index.htm

Mini-project: Cleaned up my page on Joyce's ontology

Jakob Nielsen has a new Alertbox on internationalizing the Web, with some interesting insights: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980419.html

Imagine the day when Americans can use a single digital signature to file both Federal and state tax returns on the Internet, pay any overdue taxes electronically, and also use the same signature to renew their car registration on the Department of Motor Vehicles' website. I bet Denmark gets there first.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1887, The Times published Pigott's allegations against Parnell.

Phyllis Chamberlain on rec.arts.books on the NYRB article: [Deja URL]

Joan Didion thinks she's cute.
"I'm ever so astute," she smiles
To her mirror, touches a fingernail
Upon her lips, -- While maimed Gelernter cries
For an avenging angel with eyes of fire:
"Consume! Balance the scale!"
By an old
Hebraic code,
An Ahab in pursuit.

Dream: Dominique Sanda ("you know, the one with the lips") was showing an interest in an unpublished novel I'd written, called HyperFlatus.

Last month's SciAm had this piece on fertilizing the oceans: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0498issue/0498scicit5.html

"The oceans, for the most part, are a great barren wasteland: 60 percent of the plant life comes from just 2 percent of the surface," he says. "Fertilization is required to make the barren parts more productive."

(I think this is one where the payoff is worth the risk.)

New strategies in web search engines (with dubious ethics): http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/11683.html

...they seem to be positioning themselves as a competitive product and using our results without attribution. We'd like them to work with us. We're all reasonable people.

Controversy over how to gauge 'Internet Weather': http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,21223,00.html [YMMV]

Sig quote of the week:

"I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah'." - Eric Idle

New The Nation features Edward Said on Palestine: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980504/0504said.htm

For Bishara, as for an increasing number of Israelis (Professor Israel Shahak in the forefront), the real battle is for equality and the rights of citizenship, given that Israel is explicitly a state for Jews and not for all its citizens. The courage and intelligence of their stand is invigorating a new generation of Palestinians.

Alex Cockburn on how Citibank laundered drug money: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980504/0504cock.htm

Raul's private banking representative at Citibank was one of its vice presidents based in New York, a Cuban-American called Amy Elliott. She set up an elaborate web of accounts for Raul, including an offshore company in the Caymans that allowed him to move as much as $500,000 a week into private accounts across the globe, ultimately coming to roost in Switzerland.

And a short followup on prisons-for-profit (23 Dec below): http://www.thenation.com/issue/980504/0504bate.htm

By "picking jackets" -- guarding only the healthiest and most docile inmates -- prison firms keep costs down and dividends high. When a prisoner falls ill or proves troublesome, C.C.A. simply ships him back to a state-run prison, where the bill is picked up by taxpayers instead of company shareholders.

Essays on design by Alan Cooper include his instant-classic distinction of four UI postures (sovereign, transient, daemonic and parasitic): http://www.cooper.com/articles/vbpj_your_programs_posture.html

And a long, dead-on position-paper on goal-directed design: http://www.cooper.com/articles/drdobbs_goal_directed_design.html

And a simple strategy for software that learns: http://www.cooper.com/articles/vbpj_get_a_memory.html

And a thought experiment on freeform databases: http://www.cooper.com/articles/vbpj_digital_soup.html

And a proposal to do away with "Save": http://www.cooper.com/articles/vbpj_secondary_storage_dilemma.html

And his reading-list on design is heavily annotated: [multipage] http://www.cooper.com/biblio/biblio.html

On alt.conspiracy, Terry Hallinan identifies Paula Jones' three miracles: [Deja URL]

1- Christians have discovered that women have rights.
2- Democrats have started to worry about spending a few million dollars.
3- Feminists are demanding the right of employers to sexually abuse women at a place of business be upheld.

Bring me the head of Rene Magritte! I've heard the new Belgian currency includes Magritte images, but I haven't found a jpeg yet.

Nobody told me: "NY Review of Books" is moving online: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/archives.html

Too bad they use 12 separate short pages for this fine look at the Unabomber, his nemesis Gelernter, and a mad mathematician named Nash, by Joan Didion: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998042317R [Feed]

And the standard wordiness of NYRB pieces makes this look at Wilde's trials almost unreadable in its multipage mode: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998030510F

Ditto this about nuclear terrorism: [long, multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998020515R

And this about Lyne's Lolita: [long, multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998032609R

And this about the TWA800 and electromagnetic interference: [long, multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998040959F

Feed Daily has an insightful short look at Newt Gingrich: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feeddaily/98.04.17feeddaily_master.html

The triumph of filler over content: http://www.theonion.com/onion3314/contentfiller.html [SB]

"Filler has grown to such epic proportions that, today, the infamous water-skiing squirrel that padded out programs such as Real People and Those Amazing Animals in the 1970s would practically constitute legitimate, substantive content in its own right," the report stated.

For years, federal legislators have sidestepped the issue of filler overproduction, fearful of invoking the wrath of the powerful filler lobby.

Turner went on to pad out his speech with inconsequential rhetoric for an additional eight minutes before concluding.

Tim Robbins's next project sounds great: [VERY messy Yahoo URL]

The film centers on events that occurred in the 1930s when the Marc Blitzstein musical "The Cradle Will Rock" was barred from opening at the WPA Theatre because D.C. bureaucrats judged it was an attack on capitalism. Blitzstein and a group of eccentric artists led by Orson Welles and John Houseman rallied to overcome enormous obstacles by staging the musical at a nearby theater, sans props, with Blitzstein playing the score on a piano.

We're geeks, and today we're proud: http://owi.com/geekpride/

Short Tori Amos interview: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/1897.htm

For example, when I get to a city, I'm like a sonic hunter; I just try to feel all the different voices of the people coming in [to the concert]. I really feel there's this force that exists that knows a lot more about what's needed that night than I do, and I have to try and figure out what it's saying to me.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1869, Jack Joyce acted in "The Mummy" in Cork. In 1900, Ibsen sent thanks to James via William Archer. In 1927, James hinted to Harriet Weaver about the title of FW.

Puzzling over asthma: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/16schoofs.shtml

It's almost as if, lacking the opponent it expected, the immune system ends up attacking harmless things, such as pollen or dust mites.

Kids exposed to lots of cockroaches are three times more likely to develop asthma than those who don't encounter the critters.

Terrible idea: An AI to grade essay exams: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/005051.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900, James took Jack to London for Easter, celebrating the sale of his Ibsen review. In 1904, Stephen Dedalus had his first payday with Deasy. In 1927, after revising Book One of FW, James spent 24 hours prostrate. In 1955, Stephen James Joyce (grandson) married Solange Raytchine.

Mixed indicators on micropayments: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/057942.htm

X-rated: This woman-run peepshow told the photographer she'd have to work there if she wanted to take these pictures. She stayed five years: http://www.nervemag.com/Langley/

A great short interview with Michael Moore: http://www.mrshowbiz.com:80/interviews/408_2.html

I wish somebody would invent a system that takes the best things of capitalism and socialism and puts them together. The things from capitalism that encourage individuality and creativity and ingenuity, and those things from socialism that say no one shall be left behind. Why can't we have that? Why do they have to be at odds?

I would love to write about the working-class theme that exists in all five [Oscar-] nominated Best Films. Each of those films was about the working class fighting the ruling class. Think about it: Titanic, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, As Good As It Gets -- [Helen Hunt] gets a huge applause in any theater when she says, "F__ the HMOs." I've seen it twice and the theater always erupts into applause.

One of my favorite films is A Clockwork Orange. And my favorite nonfiction film is Hearts and Minds. It's the best documentary about Vietnam. It won the Academy Award in 1975. Other favorite films are Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Spinal Tap, Life of Brian, Taxi Driver, Wild Strawberries.

New New Scientist has a special feature on T Rex: [multipage] http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/rexfiles/rexfiles.html

T. Rex has never been found outside this range

First successful 'quantum computers' in the lab: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980418/nquantumcomputer.html

Ritalin is like cocaine for kids: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980418/nfocus.html

Addressing abortion grief: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/04/15feature.html

The Jizo is a Japanese Buddhist deity -- a guardian of children from this world to the next. In the past, Jizos were used only for children who died shortly after birth and those who had been miscarried. But since World War II, the Japanese have had a huge increase in abortions and they have adapted this old tradition to accommodate their new needs.

Least-common-denominator leftism: the Org. to Liberate Society : http://www.lbbs.org/ZMag/articles/olsarticle.htm

(But I hate the name!)

An update on the Israeli teen hacker: [Deja URL]

Kibo reveals the ingredients of Keebler Bacon-Frosted Bacon:

INGREDIENTS: Water, Emulsifiers (Cellulose Gel, Guar Gum, Carageenan, Hydrogenated Methylcellulose, Wood Pulp, Sawdust, Trees Chunked & Formed), Textured Vegetable Protein (Bumpy Kelp, Squiggly Crabgrass, Tofu That Fell Onto A Shag Rug), Animal And/Or Vegetable Shortening (It's Always Lard), Natural Flavors (Uranium Hexafluoride, Strontium 90, Modified Asbestos), Natural Colors (Green 2000, Gray 8000, Cloudy 9000), Preservatives (Calcium Disodium MTBA, BHA & BUAF, Polysorbate 76), Other (Modified Rat), Bacon (Deposited By Electroplating.)

A plausible definition of 'nerd' demonstrates Microsoft is no nerd: http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/notnerds.html [YMMV]

3. The nerd was always the one who got beat up, remember? He didn't have a squad of goons out looking for somebody else's term paper, and he didn't make declarations of war on smaller people.

The same site offers an overwhelming catalog of MS's acquisitions: [multipage] http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog1.html

And analyses seven of their tricks for market domination: [multipage] http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/cookbook.html

Licensing with Destructive Intent
The Leveraging Ploy
The Hidden Specifications Trick
Dumping by Any Other Name Would Still Smell as Rancid
A Tyranny of "Standards"
The Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Gambit
The Very Model of a Major Mediocrity

Congress wants to outlaw reverse-engineering?!? http://www.sjmercury.com/columnists/gillmor/docs/dg041298.htm [YMMV]

...imagine a law that prohibited anyone except Ford employees from dismantling the Ford car.

The mystery-conspiracy story I recommended on March 22 (below) has already reached chapter five, still enjoyable in a Robert-Anton-Wilson, Crying-of-Lot-49 way, but more rambling than ever: [multipage] http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.7/jpar1.html

After one rocket misfired inside the Aeronautics Laboratory, the group was moved outside to a concrete platform attached to the corner of the building. Another explosion buried a piece of gauge deep into the wall, and Cal Tech students started calling the group the Suicide Club.

John Dee introduced cryptography into the spy network run by Sir Francis Walsingham, and signed his own occult communications 007, the number later adopted by Ian Fleming in his James Bond novels. Ian Fleming served as assistant to the director of British naval intelligence during World War II, and knew that Dee was one of the founding fathers of his own organization. It was Ian Fleming, incidentally, who in 1943 conceived of the plan to have Aleister Crowley question Rudolf Hess, when Hess made his famous flight from Germany to England. Fleming thought Crowley was just the right person to gather information on the occult activities of the Nazis.

He just looks like the archetypical chronic victim. He wears his body like a provocative sign: 'Please don't mug me.' People see this guy coming from a block away, and get the instant urge to beat the hell out of him.

New Village Voice has many okay pieces and a great pun on 'Brecht', but the best piece is this on TWA800: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/16davey.shtml

Late addition: James Ridgeway fingers the top three mega-conglomerates in seven different sectors, in a series of hi-info tables: [multipage] http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/16ridgewaytable6.html

When Joyce Maynard visits NYC, she hangs with Buck Henry, Erica Jong, and Joseph McElroy: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/

Ana will be filming Vibe with Sinbad live on AnaCam Thursday!

In a deep review, Matt Neuburg admits he loves Word98 for Mac, mostly: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-425.html#lnk3

Also, for a good laugh, test the AutoSummarize feature (in the Tools menu); I call it AutoTravesty.

The new Document Map lets you navigate by means of an outline of headings in the left pane of the window; it's brilliant.

Now, you just open an HTML document in Word and it's displayed much as in a browser - except that it's a Word document...

The running spelling-and-grammar checker is a blast.

...the internal scripting language is now Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), as clever and elegant a programming language as the old scripting language, WordBasic, was clumsy and obscure.

That's schadenfreude! Dvorak on Gates: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd980413.htm

This public-relations fiasco is beyond a botch for Microsoft. It's the biggest mistake I've ever seen the company make.

During the OS/2-versus-Windows era, Microsoft was accused of having "munchkins" inundate BBSs and forums with anti-OS/2 propaganda.

How the Soup Nazi scammed Home Shopping Network customers: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/1168.htm (agc)

Rumor: MacOS soon to be running on Intel: http://www.macosrumors.com/

Harper's offers two recent Indexes online: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Annual federal spending on promotional activities for U.S. arms dealers : $477,300,000
Portion of the world's population whose countries are under U.S. economic sanctions : 1/2
Ratio of NBC's budget for the next season of ER to the annual budget of New York's Bellevue Hospital : 1:1
Percentage of Americans who believe they are more likely to cheat at cards than Bill Clinton or Al Gore : 8
Percentage change in the size of Russia's economy since the country began following the I.M.F.'s advice in 1992 : -25

New Scientific American includes a chatty, lucid Shannon Lucid on her Mir experience: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0598issue/0598lucid.html

For breakfast I liked to have a bag of Russian soup-- usually borscht or vegetable-- and a bag of fruit juice. For lunch or supper I liked the Russian meat-and-potato casseroles. The Russians loved the packets of American mayonnaise, which they added to nearly everything they ate.

To keep my mind occupied, I listened to my Walkman while running, but soon I realized I'd made a huge preflight mistake. I had packed very few tapes with a fast beat.

But here's a long Deja post that gives a much scarier insider's view of Mir: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=271130713

Marketing web-customization for dummies: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/users041498.htm

Microsoft isn't talking about its widely rumored Start.com personalization service, but the buzz among competitors is that it's expected by June at the latest.

(That's also when Win98 is due, so expect it to be their startup page.)

Salon has a really splendid interview with Eric Raymond: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_14feature.html

This is 180 degrees removed from any ideology about whether intellectual property rights are good or not. I don't care about that. I'm not interested in having that argument anymore. If your source is open, you get peer review, you get reliability. If your source is not open, you don't get peer review and you don't get reliability, end of story.

...at that some point during the last five years the payoff curves crossed over -- there came a point when the gain from peer review exceeded the gain from holding the software captive and having it be a trade secret.

As long as the software industry continues to misperceive itself as a manufacturing industry, instead of a service industry, reliability is going to be awful.

And a funny bit on working at home: http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/04/14feature.html

This is why it's particularly useful to name your children things like DuPont, Rockefeller or Mitsubishi instead of Fuchsia and Boomer.

And a dead-on parody of gizmo-porn: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/04/14media.html

Night-vision contact lenses? Sign us up. Power-assisted inline skates? We're there. We don't just play with our toys. We are our toys.

Roger Douglas posted a hilarious Gothic spoof to a.r.k, but you sort of have to know that the Lisa quotes are her last posting quoted verbatim: [Deja URL]

This Day in Joyce History: In 1896, John Kelly ('John Casey' in A Portrait) died. In 1906, Samuel Beckett was born.

A lovely enthusiastic position-paper by Jenifer Tidwell on user-interface pattern-languages: http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/ui_patterns_essay.html

One of the great paradoxes of design is that one's creativity is often improved by imposing constraints on what one may create.

That was a condition of acceptance into this language: if a pattern is invariant across such different forms as paper, hardware, video games, and desktop GUIs, there must be truth in it.

Her extensive auxilliary pattern-language reference includes this fine summary on the design of forms: http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/language/form.html

Provide reasonable default values wherever possible, to lessen the amount of work that the user has to do (Good Defaults). If the user provides information that makes some parts of the form irrelevant, disable them (Disabled Irrelevant Things).

Her employer makes an ambitious workflow product, InConcert, reviewed in detail by Seybold here: http://www.inconcert.com/seybold.htm

Unlike most competitors in the high-end workflow market, InConcert is based on a philosophy that most work is not as routine and predictable as most managers, technologists, and workflow vendors appear to believe.

Teacher shortage looming: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/085314.htm

But to many educators, the impending shortage has brought opportunity along with dread -- a chance to reexamine how teachers are recruited, trained, paid and nurtured.

Is PGML a reasonable approach to the liquid page? http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/980413/ca_adobe_p_1.html [SN]

The submission, known as the Precision Graphics Markup Language (PGML), is a 2D graphics language that provides precise control of layout, fonts, color and printing, which will result in Web pages with compelling text, images and graphics, as well as dynamic events and animation.

"One of the things I like best about PGML is its ability to contain searchable text; something no other graphic file format to date contains."

...PGML is based on the same imaging model as Adobe(R) PostScript(R) language and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)...

Rumor: Employees of Apple, Netscape, and Sun are trying to get them to join forces: http://www.macosrumors.com/

(This is why Gates's investment in Apple was so sinister!)

Hackers crack digital cellphone code: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/080144.htm

Marc Briceno of the Smartcard Developers Association provided the digital phone's algorithm after two months of tinkering with the phone's chip on nights and weekends, he said, with only "a home-built smart card reader and a laptop."

It's a paradigm-shift! http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/980413/ca_netscap_1.html [SN]

The proposed SWAP protocol will be used by leading workflow products to manage, monitor, initiate and control the execution of workflow processes in a standard way, both between workflow systems and over the Internet. The more than 20 companies plan to submit SWAP to an appropriate standards body to allow for open participation in development of this protocol.

Technical specs for SWAP: http://people.netscape.com/kswenson/http_workflow.html [SN]

Though the use of this protocol is not limited to workflow, the effort surrounding the subject of workflow still represents the single largest body of investigation into ways of coordinating human and automated work and as such the association with workflow brings to bear a lot of experience.

Chris Hitchens sees fascist deceptions in Israel: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/hitc/1998/04/nc_13hitc2.html

...the Israeli Defense Ministry had begun covertly recognizing certain "unauthorized" settlements in Samaria, and connecting them surreptitiously to the Israeli-controlled electric and water grids.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1915, James stood as best man at his sister Eileen's wedding to Frank Schaurek. In 1930, HCE was published in book form.

Evening project: a complete guided tour of this site: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/map.html

(I'd be grateful for more feedback via the Greenspun link above!)

I've been trying to use Salon's frontpage instead of the archive page, because it's updated much earlier in the day, but it's so messy I miss things like this rave for the new Wings-of-Desire remake: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/1998/04/10city.html

And a frivolous look at the controversial evidence for Jesus's sexuality: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/feature/1998/04/cov_10feature.html

Call her green: Joni Mitchell found her adopted daughter last year: http://www.jmdl.com/articles/reunion.htm

The most detailed piece on gramma Joni: http://www.jonimitchell.com/Reunion97.html