Robot Wisdom WebLog for May 1998 (waning)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1954, Giorgio (son, once-divorced) married Dr. Asta Jahnke-Osterwalder.

Careful counting turns up millions of new species: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/25/2832.html

"Add up the lions, the hyenas, everything that eats meat in the conventional sense: they are doing a fraction of the work done by army ants or driver ants. If you look after the insects everything else will look after itself. That's the simple take-home message. And that is what we are not doing."

A page of 'new and obscure' search engines: http://www.teleport.com/~lensman/roadless.htm (cis)

And a RankDex based on bookmark files: http://www.dmarks.com/ (cis)

The Microsoft prosecution is causing Dave Winer conniptions of denial: http://www.scripting.com//

YAY! a great new weblog yields zillions of pillageable links: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/ [via the shared-comments page above]

Trying to buy quantity one of a nifty $25 LCD: http://www.pacifier.com/~mcginty/chipglas.htm [HG]

Gauging dogs' geometry skills: [Messy URL] [HG]

The dogs tended to overestimate, by about six degrees, the amount of turning required at the end of the outward path to take the return direction: and they also tended to underestimate how far they needed to walk to get back to the start point.

Butterfly wings as mosaic tiles: http://www.artbridges.com/artbridges/features/jumalon/ [HG]

...their colors will probably fade faster than most oil paintings... but, as Jumalon points out, "Nothing lasts forever. Everything on earth will go ... I practice the art of slowly fading; but while you have it, you can be proud to display it, and it is enriching your life."

And nifty alife robot 'ants': http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/the-evolution-of-antware.html [HG]

After clustering comes Tag. Now the robots have to use a little strategy to avoid being tagged by the "it" robot.

And a righteous drugwar editorial in the SFGate: [Messy URL] [HG]

Even worse: All of these trends are happening in an atmosphere of misplaced piety and rampant hypocrisy. The usual counterbalances to abusive government power -- the press, the polemicists, the opposition parties -- have been largely silent on these issues. No one wants to be seen as pro-drug.

The cellular biology of natural silk production: [Messy URL] [HG]

Interestingly, the silk-secreting mechanism of the silkmoth caterpillar Bombyx mori has been found to get progressively more acid as the silk feedstock flows through it. And, perhaps even more interestingly, man-made fibres such as rayon are spun or extruded through an acid bath.

And a hopeful gush about biotech: http://www.sciencedaily.com/story.asp?filename=980518062340 [HG]

"The possibilities are immense - components of detergents, nylon, glue, paints, lubricants, plastics could all be produced from plants, rather than fossil materials. Plants could provide a renewable, biodegradable source of these high value speciality products."

UPN is showing the hilarious What's Up, Doc? this afternoon.

Eunice [Madeline Kahn]: And these men tried to molest me.
Judge Maxwell: [looks at Eunice] I find that... unbelievable.

New source: Excite NewsTracker is starting to turn up some useful links, not often directly related to my topic, though:

A surprisingly savvy long overview of Microsoft's competitive disadvantages: http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/980601/1micr.htm [NewsTracker-Scripting]

Windows CE, he says, is a shrunken-down version of Windows, and it's slow and cumbersome compared with the sleek operating system of the PalmPilot.

A detailed profile of Jane Siberry: http://www.digmagazine.com:80/inside/music/siberry.htm [NewsTracker-Kate]

The Walking, released in 1988, marked her debut on Reprise. A subsequent tour of Europe, Japan and Australia led to the accolades "heart stopping" and "spellbinding" from the press across both ponds.

MTV.com sux! http://www.herring.com:80/insider/1998/0521/cdnow.html [NewsTracker-Search]

MTV, the Viacom-owned music video channel, so far has unequivocably failed to transfer any of the popularity of its television brand to the online world. An earlier attempt to leverage MTV's popularity online -- an ill-fated scheme to charge Internet service providers to carry content from mtv.com -- ended with MTV getting all but laughed out of cyberspace.

Medical-marijuana sting backfires in Oakland: [Deja URL]

Jeff went to the room where the DEA agent was sitting and asked him to verify all the papers he had just submitted. Jeff then escorted the agent into another room and opened the door to a roomful of media. ...The terrified agent fled and tried to escape down the elevator. Someone shut off the power, trapping the DEA agent in the elevator. Jeff informed the press what was happening and invited them to use the stairs to get to the ground floor and meet the elevator, once Jeff turned the power back on.

New City Times promises a Jack-Parsons art gallery, and offers part one of a lucid, difficult history of the gold market by Orlin Grabbe: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.16/gold1.html

Then in November 1967, the British pound sterling was devalued from its par value of $2.80 to $2.40. Those holding sterling reserves took a 14.3 percent capital loss in dollar terms.... Therefore demand for gold rose and, as it did, gold pool sales in the private market to hold down the price were so large that month that the U.S. Air Force made an emergency airlift of gold from Fort Knox to London, and the floor of the weighing room at the Bank of England collapsed from the accumulated tonnage of gold bars.

And interviews a Colorado libertarian candidate who almost won: http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.16/neilsmith.html

My open, straightforward utopian candidacy won me fifteen percent, a record that stood for just about a decade, and I did it all on an actual expenditure of eight dollars.

Danny Yee reviews an anthropological study of atom-bomb labs: http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/h/Nuclear_Rites.html

The culture of the laboratories avoids consideration of the human, medical side of the effects of nuclear weapons; it encourages identification with machines rather than with bodies, with the technological rather than the biological. And nuclear tests played a key role in both the weapon development cycle and in the socialisation of scientists, where they constituted a kind of ritual.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904 in Ulysses (Whitmonday), Molly got her period and Poldy was stung by a bee. In 1906, Ibsen died.

Kibo on ark:

Match the lame comedian to the style of comedy:

              Bob Hope                jests
              Jerry Seinfeld          quips
              Paula Poundstone        japes
              Jeff Foxworthy          rib-ticklers
              Jeff Altman             one-liners
              Bill Cosby              jokes
              Elaine Boozler          a skewed look at life
                                      in our modern world

Sorry, this was a trick question. Bob Hope isn't a comedian, he's a priceless national treasure!

This computist's memoir recalls the moment when Microsoft turned evil: [Deja URL]

Then in 1991, it became clear that Microsoft had to do something to survive. This was the time of DR DOS (a replacement for MS-DOS with some add-ons that Microsoft should have thought of long ago), WordPerfect for DOS (perhaps the best word processor ever produced), and Lotus 123 for DOS. In other words, the office applications that put microcomputing on the map were happily running on top of DOS, and none of them came from Microsoft.

An impressive rave for Bulworth: [Deja URL]

WAG THE DOG dissects the showmanship aspect of Washington, while simultaneously firing a few shots at Hollywood. BULWORTH, on the other hand, is a full-frontal assault on the shallowness of the political campaign process. It has the audacity that PRIMARY COLORS should have displayed, but was afraid to. BULWORTH is willing to openly offend to get its point across. That's something that PRIMARY COLORS was nervous about doing.

A book review on the ur-Rambo 's 1880s in Africa: [Deja URL]

On the face of it, Rimbaud's African years as a coffee trader, photographer, adventurer, Arabist and gun-runner, sound like the stuff of myth, a return to primitive hardships - exotic, even. But biographers have often seen these years as "a long blank coda at the end of a brief and brilliant career", and the sources of information are, to quote Nicholl, "tantalisingly thin".

Where else can you find the Bible boiled down to 2000 words? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980523-32.html

At the top of Mount Sinai, Moses was taken into God's presence and saw, not His face, but his hind parts. As a result, Moses's face shone so brightly that he had to wear a veil to prevent the Israelites from being dazzled. This was one of the last occasions on which God made a direct appearance to a human. God revealed to Moses not only His 10 commandments - Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal etc etc - but also all the minute dietary requirements, the forbidden foods (no hare, prawns or lobster) and sexual and medical customs (no sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman).

And an interesting synopsis of the state of British theatre: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980523-33.html

Each night a different person - someone who meets the members of the company only half an hour or so before the show opens - is interviewed on stage about their life by one of the Improbables; other actors, in mufti, on a bare stage and with no specially-prepared props, alight on particular episodes and act them out.

And the dark side of the Disney ambition: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980523-15.html

Florida's lawmakers are similarly blinded, he says. Not only have they given Disney the authority to build its own international airport and nuclear power plant, they allow the company to run its own utilities, write its own building codes and levy taxes.

New The Nation special issue on the media, including strategies for fighting corporate media: http://www.thenation.com/issue/0608/0608LAND.HTM

Aids to citizens on filing complaints are nonexistent on the F.C.C.'s Web pages.

The action is symbolic, educational, inspirational, promotable -- and repeatable.

The F.C.C. requires that stations keep on file ongoing viewer complaints. Media-watchers can help fill those files, checking, for instance, on compliance with requirements for three hours a week of quality children's television.

And a longer piece on the broader issues: http://www.thenation.com/issue/0608/0608JACQ.HTM

And one on the Net as antidote: http://www.thenation.com/issue/0608/0608SHAP.HTM

New Science News includes a short note comparing monkeys and humans as parents: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_23_98/fob1.htm

In group-living monkeys such as macaques and mangabeys, neglect and abuse rarely occur together and may represent separate phenomena,

And archeological detective-work focuses on feasts: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_23_98/bob1.htm

The inventor of LISP expresses physics in LISP: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/facts.txt

This file was made for my own use, and I wasn't thinking of other people when I did it. Therefore, some of its feature may be obscure. It contains a lot of units conversions and also astronomical facts that I needed for some research on moving Mars to a more temperate location.

   ;;; River flows from statistical abstract, 1991 table 353 p.206
  
   (setq mississippi-flow (times 593e3 (/ (expt foot 3) sec)))
   ; comes to (/ mississippi-flow (/ acre-foot year))  ; =>4.298e+08
  
   (setq columbia-flow (times 265e3 (/ (expt foot 3) sec)))
   ; comes to (/ columbia-flow (/ acre-foot year))  ; =>1.921e+08

Kibo on ark:

> ...MY K-RAD ATARI 2600 VIDEO GAME SYSTEM.

I had one of those, but I couldn't afford the special television display device for it, so I just used it with an old teletype. I liked how that actually made the ball in Pong round. Although it always went slower when the other guy hit it back to me because of all the backspacing.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1890, James and Tom Furlong connived a pass to Clongowes's exhibitioners' feast (not mentioned in Portrait). In 1904, in Ulysses, Keogh beat Bennett, and the Alake of Abeokuta landed at Plymouth.

TV 2nite: Bjork on Leno.

The Guardian calculates the richest humans of all time: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/23/2694.html

1. Napoleon Bonaparte
2. Knights Templar
3. William Gates
4. Sultan of Brunei
5. Alexander the Great
6. Cleopatra
7. Henry VIII
8. Montezuma II
9. Sam Walton
10. Croesus

(Croesus must be steamed!)

Is "Computer Gaming World" defunct? No online changes for five weeks... (AllAboutGames looks good:)

A nice interview with Douglas Adams about Starship Titanic: http://www.allaboutgames.com/x/x/9092/objinfo/1874585416

"Inevitably people are going to be looking for the fastest way they can of solving the game, and there will be a lot of swapping of puzzle solutions, and even a lot of the testers' walk-thrus getting out into the public domain. If you take this route you will miss virtually everything that makes this game extraordinary. It's like watching a movie in Fast Forward mode."

"To be honest, I think that limitations are what fire you up and get you thinking creatively."

I really hope Starship Titanic finds its way onto many gamer's shelves. Even more, however, I hope it finds its way into the hands of game designers. It contains something rare and beautiful: ambition. It strives to expand the genre...

And an exceedingly brainy anlysis of joysticks vs mice, etc: http://www.allaboutgames.com/x/x/9092/objinfo/2020863413

CJR's "Factoid Watch" traces made-up statistics: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-05-06-factoid.html

According to Bennett, for example, 1,000 people die annually from trichinosis, a pork parasite. According to the CDC, only one trichinosis death has been recorded in the past ten years.

Ana Voog lyrics: (afav)

bloodshot shotgun gunfire firefly flytrap trapdoor doorbell bellboy boyfriend friendship shipload lodestar starfish fisheye eyeball ballpoint pointblank blankspace spacecraft kraftwerk...

Gore's Triana WholeEarthCam project has a cool animated weathergif on its homepage: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/mtpe/triana/

(A full-color 2048-by-2048 image every few minutes of the Earth from a million miles away sounds great to me.)

Mark your calendars for Motorola's Iridium satellite debut: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980522/13/satellite-teledesic

"It's clear in the investment community that if, on 23 September, they turn on the switch and it doesn't work, it would be bad for Celestri," he added.

One of Galileo's notebooks in a hugely detailed facsimile; http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Galileo_Prototype/HTML/F131_R/M131_R.HTM

Snoot is polling who's the biggest celeb wuss: http://www.snoot.com/cgi-bin/wuss.cgi

1 Leonardo DiCaprio
2 Bill Gates
3 Hanson
4 Steve Case
5 John Tesh
6 Michael Bolton
7 Michael Jackson
8 Regis Philbin
9 Richard Simmons
10 Rush Limbaugh

Another promising free news-clipping service is News Index: http://www.newsindex.com/about.html (cis)

YAY! An old Ana profile that quotes my fan page: http://www.citypages.com/thepaper/detail.asp?ArticlesID=3858

Celeb author-profiles: [Linus Torvalds] (Boring!)

Utne Reader offers their 'canon' of 150 alternative great works: http://www.utne.com/lens98/canon.html

Matt Groening: The Simpsons (1989-). An "anti-sitcom" that shishkabobs every shabby contemporary trend from infomercials to "safe" nuclear power without a whisper of political correctness.
Ernie Kovacs (1951-1962). This small-screen pioneer created a surreal world of sight and sound gags -- women disappear as they take off their clothes, hula hoops cut people in half, typewriters tap to music all by themselves -- that stretched and celebrated the new medium.

(A rab-followup notices there's no science books except Rupert Sheldrake.)

Scanning the Utne archives, I find this on alternative media mergers: http://www.utne.com/lens98/media/archive/82mediaweeklies.html

In fact, Stern and New Times seemed to be locked in an expansion duel. "If New Times has been the 400-pound gorilla of the alternative press world," quips Williams, "then Stern is now the 600-pound gorrilla."

And an explicit piece on male hustling as a spiritual path: http://www.utne.com/lens98/spirit/archive/81spirithustling.html

...But these boys floated above desire, empty of need, promising to be anything I or anyone else could want. Something changes when you've had sex with hundreds of men.

And a page of interesting media blurbs: http://www.utne.com/lens98/newplanet/newplanet.html

Atlanta residents who find themselves in a bind can now dial 211 for help. It's the country's first three-digit phone number dedicated to community assistance...

Tip: If you create NewsTracker topics on 'My Excite', be sure to set the relevance rating to the minimum (20%) if you want articles older than 24 hours. But include at least one must-have term, as well.

Roger Douglas on ark:

     >The internet and the world wide web are not the same thing!
     >
     >Internet is the hardware and www is the software.

NO, NO, NO, you're completely wrong.

The Internet is the Information SuperExpressway, which is going to bring unimagineable benefits, such as home shopping and improved police surveillance to every family. The WWW on the other hand, is a festering cesspool of corruption that we must protect our children from at any cost.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, in Ulysses, Bloom took Conan Doyle's Stark-Munro Letters out of the Capel Street Library.

I never heard that Gates signs Linus's checks!?? [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/05/22feature.html

No wonder then, that a shock went through the Linux community when the news spread across the Net on April 1 that Microsoft had bought Transmeta.

(Whew, just a hoax...)

I like Fiona Apple (also Tori, Jewel, Alanis, etc)

A brilliant initiative to let communities calculate their own quality of life: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/22/2486.html

The borough of Sutton chose allotment area, noise complaints, length of bicycle routes and the number of shops stocking fair trade products. Lancashire county council looked at fear of crime, school leavers' literacy, house prices, working hours and access to day-care for under fives. Somerset measured road accidents, beaches and water quality. Others have included general happiness, the amount of organic food grown, areas of prosperity and deprivation, the variety of wildlife and how transport was used.

A profoundly humane meditation on interface design: [Deja URL]

...there are seven traits of traditional American small towns that make them wonderful places to live and visit, and which can be used creatively to design new operating-system concepts. They are: a strong center, familiar archetypes, human scale, visual diversity, incremental change, healthy growth, and a sense of place.

...A similar sense of familiarity and security may enhance their lives as well. Making the operating system genuinely pleasant to use, rather than merely tolerable, is a large step in that direction; making it highly reliable is another.

Given that Excite lets you register 20 queries that it will track thru its 300 news sources, I think I can overlook its general banality: http://my.excite.com/?change (My first 20 experimental categories:)

ASCII Activism Ana Bonobo CAQ Creatures Hoaxes JesusSeminar Joyce Kate Kibo Magritte Scripting Search TVNation Triana Unabomber Vanunu Waco XML

('My Yahoo' seems to be slightly behind, but very close.)

A 'pay-for-placement' search engine, GoTo: http://www.herring.com:80/mag/issue54/bait.html

"You get much better results because the site that is willing to pay the most to get your attention is probably the most serious site."

A huge collection of chatterbots of all types: http://www.toptown.com/hp/sjlaven/

Instead of laptops or NetPCs, is the future in web-apps like Hotmail, using payphone/ cybercafe access? http://www.builder.com/Business/Shafer/051898/?st.bl.fd.ts2.mbcol [SN]

The next application likely to fall under the pay-as- you-go spell is scheduling. I've seen several Web- based calendaring programs--you know, individual appointment scheduling, to-do lists, task scheduling, and so forth.

Software for tracking satellites: http://celestrak.com/columns/v03n06/index.html

Excite tracks a huge number of news sources! http://nt.excite.com/sources.html

(Some experiments don't show it to be current on Salon or the VVoice, though...?)

The LA Times compares his cell to the Unabomber's cabin: http://www.latimes.com:80/CNS_DAYS/980519/t000046973.html (afu)

TV:
Cell: yes, built-in 12" B&W
Cabin: none

Counseling:
Cell: available on the TV
Cabin: none

Daily Housing/Living Costs:
Cell: $60.66
Cabin: $1

BeOS web browser uses AI?: [probably a hoax, see their witty archives] http://www.bedope.com/

"Net Positive contains some AI code that is programmed to learn and adapt to an individual's usage pattern," explained Barta. "Net Positive builds a neural net of information by analyzing where surfers go and how long they spend there. The reports now coming in show Net Positive is beginning to pick up on the patterns of heavy users of the programs, and adapt its behavior to work more effectively."

How Indonesia's money woes are awakening political consciousness: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/mitchell.html

Irah, commenting on the now daily press recitation of the cronyism, corruption and collusion trinity, says: "Never before did I ever think about politics, never before. Now, I'm so embarrassed by what I hear." She is upset that Indonesia has been brought to a state of international ignominy by its leaders. Sastro, for the first time, has started to read the local and international news magazines to which his firm subscribes. He has even taken to photocopying and distributing articles to his workmates.

A great tribute for the tenth anniversary of the Summer of Rave: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/21/2237.html

Readers could follow in minute detail how acid house grew into rave, which split into garage and techno and hardcore, which mutated into speed garage and big beat and jungle, and an entire international ecology of other forms and movements.

"I'd get blokes on mobile phones called Big and Fatso saying, 'I've got a story for you.' They'd start off quite flip, quite cynical, then they'd say, 'It was the best time I've ever had'."

...he adds: "I'm up for doing things abroad. There's more of an atmosphere... I've heard Bosnia and South Africa are exactly like it was 10 years ago. There's an Ecstasy epidemic in China right now."

Amsterdam's cheap Internet pay-phones: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/orange.html

Slide a standard Dutch phonecard into the slot, and the screen - a little smaller than a standard home computer's - flickers into life in either English or Dutch. The two alternatives of the Web or e-mail are promptly available, and the check on your card's remaining guilders ticks away at a reassuring snail's pace.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1927, James suggested to Harriet Weaver that James Stephens might take over writing FW.

History thru emulation: arcade to Apple ][ to MS-DOS to Windows to Mac to Be: http://www.bedope.com/contests/contest1.html [SN]

YAY! How Netscape lays out HTML pages: [terse!] http://www.mozilla.org/docs/tplist/catCode/layodesc.htm

To simplify access to the middle of the list, there was also an array of lines. Each element in the line array pointed to the leftmost item on that line in the linked list.

Because the floating objects were in a separate list, the Find and Select commands do not operate correctly on them.

Tables are sized dynamically during multiple attempts. The cell is laid out several times at different sizes before all cells can be displayed at their final sizes.

And how frames screw up your history: http://www.mozilla.org/docs/tplist/catFlow/framhist.htm

An online book about overseas software development (Apple, India): [multipage, deceptive #-index] http://www.khosla.com/cityboiledbeans/1995jun26.htm [Feed]

Do not touch anyone's head, even a child's. The head is considered the seat of the soul, and the act of touching someone else's head implies an intimacy that you really never will have (unless you're married).

...This means that with my $20,000 a year tithing budget, I can send about 1600 children to school a year. It is indeed a poor country.

Today I saw a cartoon of a civil servant telling his politician boss, "Yes sahib, absolutely sahib, we must get to the 21st century sahib.. But one step at time sahib, first 19th, then 20th, then 21st."

Is GUILE the universal scripting language I've been dreaming of? http://www.red-bean.com/guile/docs/guile-tut/guile-tut.html

Israeli teen hacker pic: http://www.antionline.com/PentagonHacker/

A sort of 'x86script' assembler called terse: http://www.terse.com/howdoes.htm

    For example, the statements: 
 
        eax = ebx; bx + dog; cat - 14; cx & 0Fh; dx - 123?
 
    generate the following assembly code: 
 
        Mov     eax,ebx
        Add     bx,dog
        Sub     cat,14
        And     cx,0Fh
        Cmp     dx,123

The winner of the Mozilla animated-logo contest is #116: [multipage fun] http://mozilla-contest.hungry.com/cgi-bin/mozilla/review?page=29

I prefer #22: http://mozilla-contest.hungry.com/cgi-bin/mozilla/review?page=6

Mozilla's groupware-management strategy uses something called Tinderbox: http://www.mozilla.org/tinderbox.html

The tree is on fire, and it's not my fault, and I would like to get some work done. What do I do? One thing you can do is check your CVS tree by date: look backward in the Tinderbox log until you see green. Note the time at which the tree built correctly...

And their page of "blue sky" brainstorming looks great: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/ including this thinking-out-loud about searching email archives: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html

...show me a graph of people who are known to have directly exchanged mail with each other so that I can see the "clumping" of my correspondents.

And a great one about bookmark management, by Paul Phillips: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/ui/199805/bookmarks.html

Shouldn't a bookmark remember what frameset I was actually looking at and not just the URL that happens to be in the location field?

Can't I have other page specific preferences, like "don't autoload images on this lame page" or "no javascript here", or any number of other default overrides?

And one about an internal scripting language: http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/extension/199805/scriptability.html

(I'm also going back over old weblogs, checking for broken links.)

Odd coincidence: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (25 Dec below) is a film version of a novel called "Rhapsody", scheduled for release this December. Apple's Rhapsody is scheduled for "Q3 1998". Both are likely to slip!

The Sinatra Family website continues to astonish (29 Dec below): http://www.sinatrafamily.com/

Ralph McGeehee is unique among CIA-critics in that it's not their ethics he attacks, but their inefficient management. Here's his take on India: [Deja URL]

In my day the product from agents was passed from the Directorate of Operations to the Directorate of Intelligence after considerable massaging, time and obfuscation of the source and source access. Did the counterproliferation analysts possess the authority to generate instant agent requirements based on their satellite observations? Were the analysts able to determine the probability of reliability of any information based on the source access? Did the analysts have access to the search machines of the Internet?

Here's a profile of McGeehee: [multipage] http://www.parascope.com/articles/1197/mcgehee.htm

But my favorite McGeehee piece is this one on his data-analysis techniques in 1960s Thailand: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=265803907

When the police entered a village and began work, the translators and I stayed nearby and daily translated and carded all interrogation reports. We filed the information in file folders by village, with sub-categories for weapons, organizations, training, propaganda themes, danger signals, all-clear signals, and other breakdowns. We opened 3/5 inch cards on every individual by true name and alias -- these soon, due to their multiple entries, provided detailed information on communist leaders. I regularly prepared follow-up questions for the police team based on this collated data.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1894, the Araby Bazaar closed. In 1907, James wrote an article on Irish Home Rule for Trieste's Piccolo.

Genius! The art students (yesterday) engineered the whole scandal: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/20/2118.html

"The whole thing has been masterly," said Mr Hay, after final nervous checks against the chance of a triple bluff. "They have got everyone talking about the very things - the nature of art and its relationship with life - which lie at the heart of the course."

An intro to Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky, Teledesic: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/20/2093.html

And a UK fad for see-thru fashion: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/20/2106.html

A chilly feeling of exposure can ripple through women in a room like a Mexican wave on the entrance of an eye-poppingly underclad contemporary.

And a profile/rave for Wurtzel's "Bitch": http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/20/2071.html

Writing about Zeffirelli's Juliet, Olivia Hussey, she believes the young actress "simply disappeared, went away, left the time zone, went to a faraway place where the extraordinariness of her youthful beauty, the experience of having it photographed and captured at such a young age, could be lived out in peace."

A nightmarish update on copyright prosecutions against fan fare: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/05/20media.html

And after nearly 30 years of keeping hands off the "Star Trek" phenomenon, Paramount has just filed its first suit against a Trekker, charging author Sam Ramer with copyright infringement over "The Joy of Trek," which commits the apparently unpardonable sin of explaining the series for the nonfan. Even ASCAP got into the act for a while, demanding -- unsuccessfully -- that Girl Scouts pay royalties on the songs they sing around the campfire.

Evening art project: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/mosaic.html

A tourist's-eye view of student riots in Korea: http://www.salonmagazine.com/wlust/pm/1998/05/19post.html

I was later told not to take this personally; that the flaming American flag is merely a traditional motif at demonstrations, as innocuously lost to history as mistletoe at Christmastime.

A Win95 app for creating GIFs from vector descriptions, on-the-fly: http://download.proxy.ru/mike/shotgraph/futures.htm (I haven't actually tried it.)

A 200k, single-page topical index of websites offering good reading for students: http://k12.oit.umass.edu/rref.html

New Village Voice offers an affectionate critique of the new Sean Lennon album: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/21walters.shtml

Lennon and Honda's mix of aesthetic worldliness and emotional/technical awkwardness conveys the young-oddballs-in-luv theme convincingly, charmingly.

And the Russian mob: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/21friedman.shtml

Allegations of Mogilevich's devilish array of criminal activities are extensively detailed in the reports:The FBI and Israeli intelligence assert that he traffics in nuclear materials, drugs, prostitutes, precious gems, and stolen art. His contract hit squads operate in the U.S. and Europe. He controls everything that goes in and out of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, a ''smugglers' paradise,'' says Elson.

And pirate bungee-jumping off NYC landmarks: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/21spartos.shtml

Once up, he has three minutes. If he's still standing after that, sweating the plunge, he loses his place. "If you leave your slot I absolutely understand," O'Mahony says. "We're not going to call you a wuss for not jumping off the f___ing Manhattan Bridge in the middle of the night."

And pink-slip scandals at Covert Action Quarterly (along with India's nukes, SeinOff megahype, etc): http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/21ledbetter.shtml

And a hilarious mega-rave for Fear and Loathing: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/21hoberman.shtml

But nothing equals the jabbering gesticulations of Depp and Del Toro's stoned minuet. The scene in which they dose themselves with ether and surrender all motor skills to enter Circus Circus is a grunt-and-lurch ballet choreographed for Jovian gravity.

And a triple-barrelled execution-with-extreme-prejudice of Beatty's Bulworth: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/21dauphin.shtml

And a short, sad tale of random NYC police violence: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/21hentoff.shtml

Other sig quote of the week: [OS]

In a world without walls or fences, what use do we have for windows or gates?

On the bright side: (agc)

Simpson's life hasn't been easy, since "the incident", as he refers to the murder. But what hasn't suffered is his golf handicap. "Pre-Nicole, I was probably playing mostly around a 10, 11, 12. Now, I'm about a 7, 8. Once again, I don't have all those other distractions," he says.

The Irish Times has a gentle FAQ about the euro changeover: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/special/euro/

Irish notes and coins will stay in our pockets up to 2002, and then they will circulate alongside euros for at most six months, probably less, before finally disappearing.

And the longest Scorsese interview in recorded history: [multipage] http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/special/marty/marty1.html

For example in Raging Bull the sequence where Sugar Ray Robinson gives Jake La Motta that beating and Jake is hanging onto the ropes, I designed it, I drew shot by shot according to the Psycho Shower Scene. Each shot of the glove was corresponding to a shot of the knife and Janet Lee and etc.

It was a profane paradise that they lost, cast out of paradise like Milton, like Milton's Paradise Lost. Only this paradise was evil, this paradise was greed and they all up there on the screen saying "gee, it's too bad we got thrown out, it was a great place". So play St Matthew Passion. But it's dangerous, it could be very pretentious. Some people felt it was, I thought it was very funny. Some guy turns his car on, it blows up, he goes flying in the air and St Matthew's Passion comes in (laughter). That's the kind of movie it's going to be, it's going to be three hours long so you might as well, you know, leave now (Laughter)

Harper's adds the figures for its April Index: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Ratio of the average amount a U.S. family spent on food, clothing, and shelter last year to what it spent on taxes : 3:4
Ratio of the net worth of the richest 1 percent of U.S. households to the size of the national debt : 2:1
Percentage of Americans who believe that Jesus Christ sinned during his lifetime : 42
Percentage who believe that senators have "very high ethical standards" : 2
Percentage of Americans who say they would not want their 21-year-old daughter to intern in the Clinton White House : 44
Percentage of crimes reported in Mexico City since 1993 that have been solved : 3.7
Pairs of jeans that Frank Sinatra ever owned in his life: 0

New TidBits gives the clearest picture yet of the MacOS-X strategy (and it sounds like a mess to me): http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-430.html#lnk4

Extensions as we know them won't exist under Mac OS X - although they apparently can load under the Blue Box and thus only be available to Blue Box applications, which could lead to a confusing user experience. It's not clear what sort of mechanism Apple will provide under Mac OS X to replace extensions.

Kibo on ark:

I think this new crossing-over of network and agribusiness brands can only be a good thing for consumers. I am enjoying my new NBC Bacon and History Channel Yogurt.

Sig quote of the week: http://www.olin.wustl.edu/~bogart/

"Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy." -- Aristotle

This Day in Joyce History: In 1897, Wilde was released from Reading Gaol. In 1915, Grant Richards rejected Portrait. In 1920, James finished Oxen of the Sun. In 1922, James met Marcel Proust.

(8 Jan below)

UK art students strain the definition of art: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/19/2000.html

"I've been taken for a mug," said Myles Dutton yesterday. An art shop owner, he had given the group £50 sponsorship. "I'm considering calling in the police. As far as I'm concerned this is fraud."

Paglia on Sinatra has some original things to say: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/19/1884.html

The only woman who broke Sinatra's heart, however, was the Southern spitfire Ava Gardner, who shared his taste for indefatigable, boozing nightlife. Their scandalous affair (beginning in 1949) and short, turbulent marriage rocketed from euphoric highs to despairing lows, during which there may have been a suicide attempt, staged or not, on Sinatra's part.

Yahoo drops AltaVista for Inktomi: http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/98/112115.html

Redmond gets the bomb: http://www.macosrumors.com/microsoft_nuke.html [McOS]

"Microsoft is going to defend its right to market its products by any and all necessary means," said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. "Not that I'm anti-government" he continued, "but there would be few tears shed in the computer industry if Washington were engulfed in a bath of nuclear fire."

Cheap Creatures at eBay, ten copies at $6, ends tonight, includes Mac/Win95/Win3 versions: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=ViewItem&item=13843370

Dvorak loves Sony's 3-lb notebook: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd980518.htm

The lightweight notebook -- which actually has a usable keyboard -- is less than an inch thick and has a 200-MHz Pentium MMX chip, 32MB of RAM, a 10.4-inch TFT screen, a 2.1GB hard disk, a built-in 56K modem, and one PC Card slot. It comes with an attachable floppy disk drive and a port replicator, all for $1,999.

An amazing restoration of 1930s TV: http://www.dfm.dircon.co.uk/Disc98_2.HTM

This Day in Joyce History: In 1900, James attended a Gaelic League meeting, to get closer to Mary Cleary.

Salon tracks the leaked plot of the Star Wars prequel: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/05/18feature.html

A German magazine published pictures they took while floating in a hot air balloon over the sets in Tunisia (Lucasfilm was furious, of course). One picture was labeled 'junkyard.' But when I looked for the 30th time at the tiny picture, trying to figure out what those blurry dark shapes could be [in the photo], it suddenly hit me! I enlarged and enhanced the picture...

And some interesting thoughts on reactionary sex roles: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/05/cov_18feature.html

But men don't seem to have the same love/hate relationship with Bond that women have with supermodels. They can walk out of the latest 007 (or Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger) movie, well-entertained and with a bounce in their step -- not muttering bitterly about "unrealistic standards."

Norman Solomon on Clinton's nuclear hypocrisy: [Deja URL]

A few months ago, Clinton oversaw a major overhaul of nuclear weapons policies and issued a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to plan for the use of U.S. atomic weapons against non-nuclear states. (Clinton's order violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- the same pact, ironically, that the president cited in reverential tones May 13 when he announced sanctions against India.)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, James sang in the Feis Ceoil contest, but was disqualified for refusing to sightread. In 1904 in Ulysses, Stephen had his second payday with Deasy.

New Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.74.html

What norn-fans talk about: [Deja URL]

I downloaded 2 norns from that tortured norn website. Slave and TickleMe. Sadly, Slave died in a matter of seconds, after picking up food, whining, and dropping it, but not TickleMe. I injected her with medicine and then, to my surprise, she picked up one of the bottles from the potions and lotions COB. After that she kept eating and eating. Her life force has jumped from 36% to 67%. She isn't sick anymore (she had a fever) and she's living a normal life, except for one thing. Her owner taught her that tickling was equal to hitting and that yes was bad. I can't seem to unteach her that.

And a reply:

Actually, NOBODY can unteach that. He screwed with her genetics (I must admit, though I can't stand him, he's really good at genetic editing, even if he doesn't use it the way he should.)

"Tendentious rag" scoops everybody: [Deja URL]

Preparations for an Indian nuclear test has been further confirmed by our sources in India (who so far have never been wrong having millions of pairs of eyes and ears fixed to the ground) who report all kinds of feverish nighttime activities in the vicinity of Pokharan in Rajasthan state 60 miles from the Pakistan border.

A great new AlertBox on web design offers two screenshots with unreadable text, and asks you to identify the following content-elements: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980517.html

- Main content selections for this page
- Page title
- Person responsible for this page
- Intranet-wide navigation (e.g., intranet home, search)
- Last updated date
- Intranet identifier/logo
- Site navigation (e.g, major sections of this section of the intranet)
- Confidentiality/security (e.g, Public, Confidential, etc.)
- Site news items

(This goes on my best-reads list!)

Speculation: Since Frontier won that Windows award, I think we can expect 5.0.2 to be the last free release.

Michael Parenti (27 Dec, below) says:

Foreign aid is when the poor people in a rich country give money to the rich people in a poor country,

Here's a cool article by Parenti, about mass-media class-propaganda: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~tsawyer/DRBR/parenti.html

After much treatment by her psychiatrist, she is cured of these schizoid personalities and emerges with a healthy third one, the real Eve, a poised, self-possessed, pleasant woman. What is intriguing is that she now speaks with a cultivated, affluent, Smith College accent, free of any low-income regionalism or ruralism, much like Joanne Woodward herself. This transformation in class style and speech is used to indicate mental health without any awareness of the class bias thusly expressed.

A rare website review, of abcnews.com by CJR: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-05-06-abcnews.com.html

CJR is also tracking the transition of paper magazines to the Web: http://www.cjr.org/database/mags.asp

(You have to choose a category to browse, but you can leave the other fields blank. It looks very thorough, but a lot of links are just to 'fake fronts', alas.)

From the land that dreamed up Tamagotchis, a matchmaking beeper called a Lovegety: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/12342.html [YMMV]

Priced at 2,900 yen -- around US$25 -- some 350,000 have been sold since they hit the stores in February. Men have bought more than half, said Takafuji, because "Japanese men are very shy." [Pic source]

This Day in Joyce History: In 1859, James's mother (Mary Jane "May" Murray) was born. In 1930, James underwent yet another eye surgery.

New Science News seems a bit dull to me

New MicroTimes looks interesting, including Dvorak on his 1991 wishlist: http://www.microtimes.com/179/dvorak.html

...things that you wish would go away because they are dumb usually DO go away because the public doesn't buy dumb products.

And a promising looking CD-ROM on San Francisco: http://www.microtimes.com/179/mm101.html

Given Carlsson's interests, it's probably not surprising that Shaping San Francisco concentrates on the history of San Francisco that the Chamber of Commerce and other practitioners of the official romantification of San Francisco legend tend to ignore: radical and working-class struggles for unions; gay rights; the revolt against the freeways; the wholesale destruction of immigrant and bohemian communities by downtown interests; the assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone; Food Not Bombs; jazz in the 1940s; the punk scene in the late 1970s...

And a new generation of walkie-talkies: http://www.microtimes.com/179/infoappliance.html

At about one-half mile I could still get crystal clear reception and even at a mile I was getting some reception, although it was intermittently a bit garbled.

What is this Frenchwoman trying to say? [Deja URL]

Hello. I'm a student in cognitive psychology. My subject of research concerns the representation of problems in the domain of accidentology. I've made an experience in classification of solutions with the operators. The operators had to make "pakets" with 20 solutions. I've got a lot of data: the classifications of the operators, the verbalisations post-experience, and for each class they had to give me all informations pertinents of the class.

(Chemists analysing complex solutions?)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1883, Joe Brady of the Invincibles was hung. In 1904, James sang-- poorly, he felt-- at a concert for Lady Fingall.

In a new The Nation, Alex Cockburn finds six reasons to cheer India's atom bombs: http://www.thenation.com/issue/980601/0601COCK.HTM

1. A poke in the eye for the C.I.A....

The Progressive Review takes a righteous stand for proportional representation, along with their regular tidbits:

Percent of young people who volunteered their time in 1997: 37%.
Percent who partipated in some form of politics: 3%.

I've been adding early Joycean drafts to my Ulysses and Finnegans Wake pages

If you don't mind having ads added to every message, you can start a free mailing list here: http://www.onelist.com/home.html

Kibo explains ark lingo: http://www.kibo.com/exegesis.html

"Apparently, Pepsico owns the patent for something called Animal 57s. They keep these things in the back of Taco Bells and KFCs. It's where they get their meat. These things are just big chunks of meat floating around in tanks of water. If you tap on the side or stare at them, they'll come toward you. Apparently a living organism that's used for nothing but its meat (because that's all it is)."

The alt.folklore.urban FAQ was one of the greatest incarnations of the FAQ ideal. Here's its current HTML incarnation, on the topic of the Dvorak keyboard: http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/dvorak.html

And here's a clever news posting about how to outdo Dvorak's layout: [Deja URL]

...Or just create a genetic algorithm that mutates until it finds the "best" combination of keys and layouts?

The Progressive Review keeps on slugging:

...here are a few of the actual allegations that Burton's committee would like to look into: ...That Chinese gun merchants, Cuban drug smugglers, and Russian mob figures were being invited to intimate White House events with the President in exchange for large contributions.

An extremely well-informed look at non-standardised search-engine syntax: [Deja URL]

...Altavista using host:, Infoseek using site:, Hotbot using a whole set of separate fields, Lycos using a different search engine (Lycos Pro) and Excite having no domain limiting functionality at all. You'd think that Altavista and Infoseek would have programmed their interfaces to accept either site: or host: by now; after all, they both support url:.

[A note about Deja URLs: if you get an error message, just give it another 24 hours to get indexed there.]

New New Scientist features the physics of Star Trek, plus a look at the possibility of using quantum split-beam weirdness to do remote imaging: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980516/nqobjects.html

According to Kwiat, that would open the way to a radically new form of imaging, in which sensitive targets -- such as living cells -- could be examined using virtually no photons at all.

And this update on the weird-Precambrian-fossils controversy desperately needs illustrations: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980516/features.html

"Either Mark's statement is correct," says [Lynn] Margulis, "or there's a lineage that goes from blastual to Ediacaran body form of which every trace is gone in all living and fossil organisms."

More Village Voice: a detailed piece on teen AOL-hackers: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/20bastone.shtml

Gilson said he was shocked when agent Walsh showed him a detailed paper trail of his illegal exploits on AOL. "It was sick," he said. "It was like they'd been stalking me."

And a film-historian's view of the Godzilla phenomenon: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/20fsdauphin.shtml

Cities have been destroyed this century and probably will be again, but, between Independence Day and Godzilla, Devlin has to realize that the real "Big One" would be the destruction of New York. The city isn't just a magnet for movies and immigrants of all stripes but for nutcases and human monsters too, a place that probably tumbles nightly in the minds of terrorists and madmen from Boise to Baghdad.

And another on virus-plague-contagion flicks; http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/20fslim.shtml

The virus causes its victims to go violently insane, and Romero generates frisson by finessing the Body Snatchers quandary, refusing to distinguish between the madness caused by infection and the mass hysteria brought on by the declaration of martial law and the arrival of the military who, in desperation, resort to shoot-to-kill measures.

A fairly clear summary of Apple's "Carbon" strategy: http://www.macintouch.com/m10jorg.html [SB]

A fun site with lots of favorites-polls: [bandwidth hog] http://www.worldcharts.com/

Most Popular PC Game: Starcraft
Most Popular Video Game: Tekken 3
Most Popular Website: Games Domain
Most Popular Homepage: Slashdot
Most Popular Single: Madonna - Frozen
Most Popular Album: Madonna - Ray Of Light
Most Popular Movie: Titanic
Most Popular TV Program: The X-Files
Most Popular Female Star: Mariah Carey
Most Popular Male Star: Leonardo DiCaprio

Kibo on ark:

     MOH'S SCALE OF ROUGHNESS


    10   Triscuits
     9   Triscuit Brittle
     8   Shredded Wheat
     7   Chex
     6   Lucky Charms cereal bits
     5   Lucky Charms marshmallow bits
     4   gummi candy
     3   real marshmallows
     2   cotton candy
     1   Communion wafers

Lisa Rea returns to ark, with a vengeance: [Deja profile]

Last night, I stepped on something when I was TURNING OFF THE LIGHTS AND LOCKING THE DOORS BECAUSE SOMEONE FORGOT TO, but I was tired, so I just slept with it there.

So, this morning, I sat down on the bathroom floor and spent about half an hour working it out, when finally I got it in the tweezers, and I only saw it for a fraction of a second. IT WAS A LITTLE MONKEY! It wasn't a real monkey, but a robot monkey, and it ran away really fast under the sink!

(Someone send this to Chris Carter... :^)

Ana finally tells her Sinbad (and since) stories: http://anacam.com/analogs/analogn.html

...went on vibe. did not make any huge mistakes( like passing out, throwing up, or tripping over anything). sinbad was very nice..he is just as nice as you'd think he'd be. everyone that worked for that show was VERY nice and helpful. of course, i was nervous which is why i turned into a giggling thing during the interview. it wasn't so much that i was nervous during the interview as i was just SO HAPPY that i made it through that song without any mistakes!

Ana says her favorite cam is IsabellaCam [mild nudity, many images] http://useeme.com/isa/past.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, in Ulysses, Bloom weighed himself at 158 lbs (U17.91; height: 5' 9"). In 1927, James first pondered having someone else finish Finnegans Wake (L1-252).

Rupert Murdoch as J Edgar Hoover? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/13/971.html

Now at this point some might think I enter the wilder shores of Murdoch conspiracy theory, but I think not. The News of the World has a Stasi-like operation rooting around for the misdeeds of politicians and prominent people. It does not always publish them. Sometimes it sits on them for ever.

High stakes financial magic: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/13/1032.html

Since Mr Soros placed his $6-$8 billion bet against sterling rising any further it has tumbled 7 per cent on the foreign exchanges, with much of the fall coming after the May Day weekend when the decision on the euro was taken by the European Union countries.

Here's the technical details of how norns' neural-nets work: http://www.cyberlife.co.uk/cyberlife_paper1.html

If the Strength falls to zero, the dendrite disconnects and follows the appropriate rule about how to find a new connection. These migration rules were chosen in order to fulfil the requirements for the initial brain model. It was hoped that a more general scheme could be invented, but this was not possible in the time available. An extra migration function, involving a survival- of-the-fittest competition between cells for the right to represent a particular input pattern, was implemented as part of the model's generalisation system, but has caused problems and so is currently left disconnected.

The bulk of the remaining neurones and connections make up three lobes: a 'perception' lobe, which combines several groups of sensory inputs into one place; a large region known as Concept Space, in which event memories are laid down and evoked; and a small but massively dendritic lobe called the Decision Layer, where relationship memories are stored and action decisions get taken. The overall model is behaviourist and based on reinforcement by drive reduction.

...However, it serves its purpose by providing a learned logic for how a creature chooses its actions, and doesn't suffer from too many non-life-like side effects: its in-built generalisation mechanism reduces arbitrariness in the face of novelty, and the dynamical structure, albeit damped and close to equilibrium, produces a satisfactorily complex and believable sequence of behaviours, surprisingly free from limit cycles or irretrievable collapse into an attractor.

As the creatures are responsible for co-ordinating perception and action for extended periods of time, and for maintaining sufficient internal energy to survive and mature to the point where they are capable of sexual reproduction, it could plausibly be argued that they are instances of "strong" artificial life, i.e. that they exhibit the necessary and sufficient conditions to be described as an instance of life.

(It's totally amazing to contrast this tech-talk with the resulting fan-chat on alt.games.creatures.)

A great issue of the Village Voice includes an excellent piece on microbroadcasting, aka pirate radio: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/20ferguson.shtml

Cheap technology is another key element fuelling the spread of micropower. You can now order a complete transmitter package for as little as $600. STR built its own antenna with plumbing parts. The movement is also gathering steam over the Internet, which allows pirates to share info and download audio files from around the country.

And various shoddy-journalism scandals, including Gina Kolata again (28 Apr below): http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/20ledbetter.shtml

In his letter to the Times, Watson said that "at a dinner party six weeks ago" he said to Kolata that the two drugs would be in clinical trials in a year, and that after another year, the scientific community would know whether or not they were effective. That's a far cry from saying "Judah is going to cure cancer in two years," which is how Kolata rendered his remark.

And the depths of sweeps-week exposes on restroom sex: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/20goldstein.shtml

But in Charlotte, North Carolina, the response was very different. WSOC anchor Michele Harvey says the vice squad was eager to view the station's tapes of rest room sex. "They are very happy with what we have done because it caused them to do an investigation, and they have arrested at least 11 men."

And an incendiary piece on Israel: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/20solomon.shtml

In their place, the new books document how Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, their villages destroyed, and their land appropriated; how Jewish immigrants from North African and Arab countries faced unyielding state discrimination; how a golden age of socialism and egalitarianism never existed; how Israel neglected opportunities to negotiate with its Arab neighbors; and even, in Segev's best-selling controversial book The Seventh Million, how early Zionist leaders manipulated world reaction to the Holocaust to fuel their nationalist aims while doing little to rescue European Jewry.

A generous (and wry) preview of the art-films (etc) of summer: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/20atkinson.shtml

It's a drama about a man (Samuel Jackson) who's been falsely accused of murder and theft and decides to take hostages to prove his innocence. That usually works.

Plus a close-up on a French one: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/20hoberman.shtml

In its representation of lives revolving around motorcycle excursions, finch singing contests, and (in Freddy and Marie's case) sex, Life of Jesus seems steeped in what Karl Marx once termed the "idiocy of rural life."

A massive rave for Massive Attack: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/20hunter.shtml

A gorgeously straight-singing Liz Fraser, casting off the Appalachian- Bulgarian affectations of her former Cocteau Twins affiliation, voices "Teardrop". The song, with a midtempo groove reminiscent of poor television reception elaborately twisted, is about emotional responses you can see -- like, as Fraser sings, teardrops falling on fire and feathers held afloat by breath.

And a slam of Yoko's latest gallery show: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/art/20greene.shtml

Ono's expensive-looking installation mirrors the evolution of a certain segment of her creative generation -- call them the comfortable nonconformists. Once upon a time, their ankle-deep alternatives to buttoned-down thinking were labeled Punk; now they're called New Age.

From the lots-of-short-separate-pages part of the new Scientific American:

Virulent new potato-blight threatens: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698scicit4.html

The science behind the Canadian NAFTA gas-additive suit: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698techbus2.html

An old ASCII-hacker suggests using the eighth bit to fix Y2K: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698techbus3.html

Because Vertex 2000 is supposed to do much of this conversion inconspicuously and automatically, Bemer asserts that his method will be at least 10 times faster than other solutions, at less than half the cost.

Al Gore's WholeEarthCam: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698techbus5.html

Although pictures might be worth a thousand words, some Republicans in Congress -- as well as some scientists -- are wondering whether Triana is worth as much as the $50 million NASA has budgeted for it. Weather satellites and other orbiters already provide much higher resolution images, and these could (if anybody wanted to) be patched together now to form a monochrome composite of most of the globe. But such a patchwork could be refreshed only every few hours. The more frequent updates will "open up avenues in dynamic meteorology," Asrar suggests hopefully.

A clear basic intro to XML: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698cyber.html

A heroic activist against trace pollutants: http://www.sciam.com/1998/0698issue/0698profile.html

"The culture of physics is much more adventurous than the culture of medicine, where you don't want to kill patients," Schwartz says. "In physics, the faster you get out flaky ideas, the faster you find out which ones are right and which ones are wrong."

On his own, Schwartz then undertook an analysis that revealed that the $100 million or so savings to industry would be more than offset by health costs that could total more than $1 billion annually.

In 1991 Schwartz's work on lead and particles resulted in his becoming a MacArthur Fellow. Schwartz was the first federal career employee to receive the so-called genius award--an event that prompted EPA administrator William Reilly to remark: "Every time you fill up your car with gasoline, you can think of Joel Schwartz."

James Gleick reads the fine print: http://www.around.com/agree.html [YMMV]

Meanwhile, the agreement that comes with Microsoft Agent, software that lets people create cute interactive animated figures, holds that you may not use the characters "to disparage Microsoft, its products or services."

Michael Moore's big win:

CEO Phil Knight will present Nike's new initiatives to improve working conditions worldwide. The announcement will be made to the National Press Club in Washington, DC: listen to the live broadcast on the Nike web site: http://www.nikebiz.com on Tuesday, May 12, at 1:00 pm (EST).

I love this cometwater theory controversy: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/007390.htm

Frank said the space ice adds up to an inch of water to the planet every 20,000 years and that it may be the source of water for the Earth's oceans.

"The only thing that changes some scientists' opinion is death," he said.

TV 2nite: Tori on Leno. And PBS has Ken Burns on Jefferson: http://www.pbs.org/whatson/1998/05/descriptions/TSJN.html

Oops, WTTW substituted a heroic profile of 1880s 'stunt journalist' Nellie Bly: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/world/about.html

On a dare from the editor of Pulitzer's New York World, Bly, masquerading as a madwoman, spent ten terrifying days in the most notorious mental asylum in New York City -- the women's asylum on Blackwell's Island. Her expose of the cruel and even life-threatening treatment she and other patients endured shook the city to its foundation and was reprinted nationwide.

...She returned in triumph, a celebrity. A hotel, a train, and a racehorse were named after her. Just twenty-five years old, Bly was the most famous woman on earth.

Salon contrasts French and American sex-ed-for-toddlers: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/05/12feature.html

The book is distributed with no design modifications in roughly 10 countries, including South Korea and Taiwan, which makes America the only country in the world except for Islamic nations such as Iran (which banned the French 100-franc bill because it features Delacroix's bare-breasted Liberty) to censor material of this kind.

Armpit aphrodisiacs: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/papers/19980511-23.html

More than 70 per cent of the men who were secretly given the product reported that they managed to attract increased romantic interest from women during the trial.

Freedom Press has a promising archive page: http://www.tao.ca/~freedom/topic.html

Including this belated account of the 1968 Paris student riots: http://www.tao.ca/~freedom/1968/riot.html

The crowd enter street-fighting with bravery and intelligence. All of them do not flee before the grenades. Two thin lines of determined people stream past the sides of the Pantheon, opening up two more fronts of confrontation, to split up the police forces.

Way interactive! MozillaCam allows feedback via a wallmounted news ticker: http://people.netscape.com/mtoy/sign/ [SN]

Comparing Frontier, AppleScript, and Perl: http://www.scripting.com/appleScript/alanBaer.html [SN]

     FRONTIER:
     set(genericBox[color.name=="Green"].color,"Red")


     APPLESCRIPT: set every generic box whose name of
     color equals "Green" to "Red"

Dvorak suggests some sneaky uses for unlinked URLs: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd980511.htm

Why should I explain over and over and over, for a lifetime, how to get to my house, when a Web page can do it for me? You keep the page's URL unlinked to anything else on the site and just give it out to people who need instructions.

More on Corel's Linux strategy: http://www.wired.com:80/news/news/business/story/12187.html [OS]

Designed around Digital's StrongARM microprocesser, the NCs are very fast but require extremely little voltage. Corel spokesman Oliver Bendzsa reported that hardware hackers who demonstrated the unit got it running with only a 9-volt battery.

Progressive Review reports Microsoft is swinging to the right:

During the most recent election period, MS has given only a third of its money to Democrats compared to 79% back in 1992.

New NY Review of Books looks at SJ Gould on the Millennium, etc

New Scientific American looks at depression, and quantum computers

John McCarthy (father of LISP) on alt.fan.unabomber: [Deja URL]

About half of American families have computers now, and I believe that these computers are capable of human level intelligence, if only we knew how to program them.