Robot Wisdom WebLog for June 1998 (waxing)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1880, Leo Wilkins ("Dillon") was born. In 1918, James suffered an eye attack. In 1920, he visited Ezra Pound in Italy.

TV 2nite: Nova does underwater Egyptology http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sunken/mapping.html

(Good show-- 75yo British scuba diver-ess with the palest of blue eyes.)

Salon explains soccer: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/wlust/feature/1998/06/cov_10feature.html

Major League Soccer, the 12-team U.S. pro league that arose in the wake of World Cup '94, is a weird, low-rent affair in many ways. It has made several lamentable rule changes in an effort to make the game more comprehensible to non-fans, and its team names (the Dallas Burn? the San Jose Clash?) seem lifted from some marketing student's MBA thesis.

How many CDs have you bought this year? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/6/10/5483.html

"Nobody's selling any records. If anybody's telling you different, they are liars. There is a worldwide recession in the music industry. They might be all smiley smiley at the Brits, but it's an industry in absolute crisis."

"There will be no record companies in five or 10 years' time. It will be sexier for bands to download their music on the Internet - cut out the middle man, the record company, and deliver straight to the fans for a cheaper price."

Fleshmeet in DC for Ana and Jenni: http://anacam.com/analogs/analogn.html

she gets 70 MILLION hits a day! i thought i had a lot by getting 1 million. damn! what a lot of work to keep her cam going!

Good Progressive Review compares Carter and Clinton:

Mr. Carter, members of his family and others associated with him responded fully to all subpoenas, made no motions to quash subpoenas, and raised no claims of privilege, spurious or legitimate. Mr. Clinton and his associates have litigated the validity of subpoenas and have invoked claims of executive privilege, attorney-client privilege and spousal privilege.

Nostalgia for Byte: http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=357856650 [SN]

The point of the original Byte, explains tech-magazine publisher Carl Helmers, one of Byte's founders, "was to be the Scientific American of computer science, with a vastly expanded amateur scientist section" - hardly a description of what the magazine turned into in its later years.

Naturally, Pournelle's tinkering rendered his friend's machine temporarily inoperable. One wonders if he even checked with Larry first before doing him this little favor.

Juicy new Village Voice includes an impressively unedited phonecall between Christina Ricci and her director/costar: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/24hoberman2a.shtml

C.R.: I do say nice things! All my friends know that you changed my life and it's my best movie and best performance.

And a prison-documentary review: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/film/24hoberman.shtml

But despite a strong suggestion that the guy might possibly have been sloppily tried and railroaded into prison, the parole board is totally unconvinced (and shockingly flippant as well). Angola creates its own sense of time. Prisoners spend years preparing for hearings that are offhandedly dismissed in a matter of minutes.

What "Burn Rate" doesn't tell you: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/cyber/24bunn.shtml

By the end of March 1997, the company was grinding to a halt, and Wolff had written himself a check for the remaining $70,000 in the company coffers and bolted to Italy.

The original Serpico on Giuliani's police state: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/24hentoff.shtml

In the current paperback reissue of Serpico by Peter Maas, Serpico has written a new afterword, which begins with an epigraph by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is."

Backing off from heroin chic: [xxx] http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/24goldstein.shtml

The trick now is to place the models in a tonier setting - "the same mood, but in the Plaza Hotel" -- and to be shrewd about one's market niche.

There's a Downtown version of this killer-kid pose that, for all its artifice, is a real expression of a new kind of cool. "Some sort of chaos is happening now," says Terry. "Under the surface, it's such a harsh time."

For reasons best known by the tenured classes, the wasted face has become an erogenous zone.

Sounds hip! http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/art/24owen.shtml

Banshee is an all-female, New York-based group of Irish writers and performers who have been tearing up downtown venues like Fez, Max Fish, and the Knitting Factory for the last year and a half with their deft melding of ancient and modern pop culture.

Pressed to explain the origins of Banshee, all that Mulkerns would say was "We knew a bunch of girls with a few talents," making them sound more like an escort service than a literary cooperative.

"When I was a kid, everything that was cool was either British or American," concurs Dublin-born Helena Mulkerns. "And everything that was corny and parochial was Irish."

"Consider us the thinking man's Spice Girls."

A disheartening gaze at lobbyists: [multipage/ giant table] http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/24ridgeway.shtml

Estimates vary, but in Washington there are probably upwards of 10,000 lobbyists - the folks who influence government policy on behalf of a client's interest. They make anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million in salaries and congregate around the K Street corridor - chockablock with law offices, PR companies, pollsters, media consultants, and the outposts of foundations.

What follows is a listing of some of Washington's better known, and more inspired, high-paid lobbyists.

To help refurbish Burger King's image, soiled by accusations of child-labor abuses, [Anne] Wexler proposed feel-good songs for workers at the fast-food chain, among them a rewrite of Sister Sledge's "We Are Family!": "We are Franchisees / We make Double Whoppers with Cheese," etc.

Quasi lyrics: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/24weisbard.shtml

Life is dull life is gray;
At its best it's just OK.
But I'm happy to report
Life is also short.

Orbiting pods, underwater domes
We fill our tanks with oxygen to step outside our homes.
Once it was hard, now it's just routine
And I can't tell the difference between people and machine.

Kraftwerk nostalgia: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/24walters.shtml

This is one of the advantages of computerized concerts: whether vintage newsreel footage or digital animation, the visuals matched the audio with the exactitude of cinema.

Deborah Jowitt is a killer dance critic: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/dance/24jowitt.shtml

As the Sabbath Queen (Echo Gustafson), a cleansing spirit, passes by, her long white veil detaches to transform them into a pale mound. The quiet, following the rare moment of disorder, drops like snow.

Rooting for the USA at the World Cup sound like silly fun: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/sports/24yeomans.shtml

A funny profile of Disney's new animal park: http://www.feedmag.com/html/feedline/98.06jenkins/98.06jenkins_master.html

It also contains the park's only thrill ride: a time-travel dino-adventure called Countdown to Extinction.

So penetrating is the suspicion generated by the slight-of-hand in the Kilimanjaro Safaris that I spend a good deal of time searching for whatever devices are releasing the good smell that permeates the Animal Kingdom before giving up and deciding it must be the flowers.

The park is too artificial for a zoo, too natural for a theme park, and its agenda is entertainment tarted up with educational info-bites. The result is a tension that is passed down to the guests themselves.

Exhaustive online star-map project: http://www.sdss.org/news/releases/19980608.fl.img6.html

Simply put, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the most ambitious astronomical survey project ever undertaken. The survey will map in detail one-quarter of the entire sky, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects.

Had to happen: Caffeine chewing gum: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/050657.htm

Sig quote of the hour: (alt.fan.kia-mennie)

"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday mornings...." --Bill Gates

My neighborhood has not yet discovered decorative flags: [Messy URL] [Met] (Try the 'fancy' ones first.)

A new degree of freedom in geology: http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980609081045

The Australian continent is flexing like a giant wobble board, moving hundreds of metres up and down in response to the vast churning of the earth's internal heat engine.

"The answer is that we are literally living on the scum of the earth," Dr Moresi explains.

(The Quicktime is huge but kinda cool.)

Weird laser breakthru: http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980609081605

The Yale and Bell scientists at first thought the light in their microlasers operated in a "whispering-gallery" mode instead of a bow-tie pattern, Stone explained.

A great online design zine includes a designer's view of Riven: http://www.metropolismag.com:80/new/content/tech/ju98ele.htm

"We tried to cultivate the impression that we didn't design any of this stuff -- the characters who live there did..."

Keywords: Riven, computer games, sense of place

And designing chairs for comfort: http://www.metropolismag.com:80/new/content/furn/ju98des.htm

Time after time, the simple act of lowering yourself into the chair yields a physical surprise: a sensually relenting resistance that feels better than it should. In fact, the seat feels like a lap -- taut but soft.

(Anyone who doubts the satisfaction derived from altering inanimate objects need only try out their latent desire on a self-testing battery. Press the two dots and watch the yellow line elongate. Yes, it is empowering.)

Keywords: responsive furniture, chair, massage, Barbara Flanagan, reciprocity

Housewares take a page from Tom Wolfe: [short] http://www.metropolismag.com:80/new/content/art/ju98life.htm

Intentional communities for grownups: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-06/07/123l-060798-idx.html [TN-PatternLanguage]

Ceiling heights vary in the homes of Vashon Co-Housing because [Christopher] Alexander said that a "building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable." And each house in Vashon Co-Housing has windows on at least two sides because "in rooms lit on one side, the glare which surrounds people's faces prevents people from understanding each other."

A feeble look at Rolling Stone's political past: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/06/09media.html

A page of interesting bits from Wired: http://www.wired.com:80/wired/6.05/newmedia.html

"In the mid-1980s I bought a Wang, which at the time was considered the Cadillac of wordprocessors. I clung to it until I became afraid it was too obsolete to repair." Now Updike has an IBM PS/1, but still no email.

Ninety-two percent of all PC software in use today is made by Microsoft (1997 Olsten Forum)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1894, James and Stannie skipped school and met the 'Captain of Fifty', fictionalised in An Encounter. In 1904, James sang at James Cousins' house. In 1908, the model farm at Kinnereth was founded (anachronised in Ulysses).

TV 2nite: Salon recommends "Everybody Loves Raymond" (CBS) and Spielberg's new toon (WB), and People's Century looks at the rise of Fascism (PBS): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/lostpeace/description.html

Mayan archeology meets satellite ecology: http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd05jun98_1.htm

"At first glance, the undeveloped areas of the Peten look untouched," said Sever, who has visited the area several times. "It's actually a regenerated rain forest, one that had recovered from human abuse a millennium ago. The tragedy is that now the story is about to repeat itself."

MS Excel has a flight simulator as an easter egg?!? http://register.cnet.com/Content/Features/Howto/Eggs/ss12.html

Great new issue plus site-redesign at Progressive Review:

Now John Crudele of the New York Post reports that economist John Williams has found a strange phenomenon: four times during the Clinton administration, revisions to new jobs data have been altered by exact multiples of 250,000. Says Williams, who also caught the Bush administration playing with figures, the chances of that happening at random are more than one in 60 million.

I finally won an eBay auction for Creatures (alife software), and got my CD okay, and it does include a Mac version too. The same outfit seems to offer ten copies every week: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=16679599

(I've been playing with my first norn, and I have to say I'm more frustrated and alienated than entertained or impressed. The Mac code is very poor-- buggy and unresponsive-- and the documentation is not much better. On top of which, it puts me in a continual state of anxiety that I'm not taking good enough care of my norn...)

In an excellent new "NY Review of Books", Frederick Crews wittily decimates the UFO industry: [multipage, grows less witty] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998062514R

"Beth Collings saw a naked man in an enormous white cowboy hat.... Karla Turner...mentions two people she knows who have seen aliens disguised as hillbillies. Katharina Wilson had an experience with an alien masquerading as Al Gore."

Their works at once provide templates for future dreams or nightmares, filter out or minimize anomalous material, and establish the author as an inspirational figure holding special insight into the extraterrestrials' plans.

Her solution is to "link" ideas free-associatively, citing as precedent the analogy of Website links that nonhierarchically connect everything with everything else. ... Here the gestural radicalism of Paris 1968 has reached its futilitarian nadir, where sheer disablement - the inability of traduced people to free their minds from haunting and debilitating images - is hailed as the nearest imaginable thing to freedom.

And a lucid inquiry into the current Wall Street bubble: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998062522F

...a dollar invested in a representative group of stocks in 1802 would have grown to $559,000 in 1997 after adjustment for inflation, which reduced the value of the dollar to seven cents over this period. By comparison, in the same period a dollar invested in long-term government bonds, short-term bills, or gold, would have grown, after inflation, only to $803, $275, and $0.84, respectively.

Ten thousand dollars invested with Buffett in 1956 would be worth about $200 million today.

...more easily measured assets such as plant and equipment have declined in importance, while less tangible assets such as brand names, technology, software, and the skills and commitment of the work force have become more important.

...between 1968 and 1990, portfolios of "value" stocks - defined simply as stocks whose prices are low relative to very rough measures of their worth such as book value, earnings, or cash flow - that were held for five years outperformed portfolios of "glamour" stocks by about eight to ten percent a year.

And a fascinating one about Tokyo's wino-district: [multipage, switches to ethics of prostitution] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998062509R

Japan, perhaps more than any other country, is designed for conformists. If you are not a Korean or a burakumin, and if you obey the rules, flatter your superiors, don't stick your neck out, and generally do as you are told, you will find a relatively safe track through life.

Keeping the lower tiers of the labor market insecure, and thus easy to exploit, appears to be a deliberate policy of Japanese officials.

Although the daughters of samurai were forbidden to work as prostitutes, it was common practice for poor peasants to sell their daughters to the brothels. ...The point is not that Japanese prostitution was unique, but that social and sexual morals, unlike in Christian societies, were not regarded as absolute. In Japan there was a time and place for everything.

LA Times inventories earlier versions of the Truman-Show plot: http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CNS_DAYS/980608/t000053358.html

McCarthy noted many other echoes in "The Truman Show," as well, "most obviously of the old Patrick McGoohan TV show 'The Prisoner.' That was actually the first thing I thought of when I saw that bland sunny town by the ocean; the resemblance is really quite striking."

And an insider's tips on submitting screenplays: http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CNS_DAYS/980608/t000053366.html

"No reputable talent agency looks at unsolicited scripts. It just doesn't work like that. The only way we'll take a look at you is if someone we already represent is willing to vouch for you."

And a camera designed just the way my Saturday blurb suggested: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/BUSINESS/t000053432.1.html

But shooting pictures isn't even half the fun. Various menus allow users to manipulate their pictures. For instance, I created Hugo the Dog Boy using the camera's ability to superimpose fangs and a wet nose on an otherwise ordinary mug shot.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, in Ulysses, a man drowned in Dublin Bay. In 1926, James finished FW's book three.

http://www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/~kunkel/ [HG]

Memory prices plummeting? (afc)

As I understand it, 16 mbit drams just went to 99 cents in Hong Kong. You can now build a 16M module for about TWELVE BUCKS, a 32M module for less than $20.

Witty contrarianism about free tuition, from Phil Greenspun: [mild nudity] http://photo.net/philg/school/tuition-free-mit.html

We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn't work.

If we are such great technologists, can we not come up with ways to distribute much of our knowledge to interested people worldwide? ... Anyway, that's my ideal world: a high school girl in Vietnam with a cable modem attending all the MIT classes that she wants.

Sig quote of the week (alt.ascii-art):

"If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good." - Dr Seuss

Joyce Maynard checks in with some nice stories: http://www.joycemaynard.com/wwwboard/

Two days ago my daughter Audrey emerged from her two and a half months in the wilderness. She's still in Santa Cruz -- an experience so jarring, she told me over the phone, that she is sleeping in a meadow at the moment.

Profile of an Internet detective: http://www.thiemeworks.com/write/culture/sleuth.htm

Franklin Information Group, Inc., her information recovery business, uses over 15,000 data bases in 123 countries to gather data -- legally and ethically -- on individuals and organizations.

Excellent-looking site of hardware tutorials: http://www.mkdata.dk/english/module0.htm

A big, clear jpg showing how to hack by telnet: http://www.antionline.com/SpecialReports/milworm/hack.jpg [SN]

Netsurfer Science is a science weblog that looks promising: [mostly site-based, not page-based] http://www.netsurf.com/nss/nss.01.02.html

Britannica on CD is only $79: [no Mac version!] http://detnews.com:80/1998/software/9806/06/03050084.htm

At about $79 (after a $20 publisher's rebate), the Britannica CD 98 provides all of the broad, deep content of the $1,500, 32-volume print edition, and more.

Celeb Deja profiles: [Arlo Guthrie] [Janis Ian]

Far-out random-access hypertext-design: http://currents.net:80/magazine/national/1611/covr1611.html [NT-Search]

A well-written update on fractal imaging: http://www2.nando.net:80/newsroom/ntn/info/060698/info14_2713_noframes.html

If a digital camera instead was made as a low-priced peripheral device that could be hooked to a personal computer to process and store its images, it would be affordable to many more people and the pictures would be better, Barnsley says.

(The AARON algorithms (24 Jan below) need to be applied to fractal tools.)

Analog Y2K: http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_107000/107296.stm [NT-Mystery]

Whoever did invent it apparently did not ever imagine it would still be in use almost four centuries later. They decided to finish the timeline at the year 2000. Museum staff are at a loss as there appears to be no way of altering the device and extending its lifespan.

Noteworthy page-design: [nice small touches] http://www.austin360.com:80/news/003world/06june/06/6train.htm

This search-engine app sounds like a genre-buster : [not for Mac yet ]: http://currents.net:80/magazine/national/1611/nets1611.html [NT-Search]

In essence, Mata Hari is a powerful database of search engine commands and capabilities, a single interface for scores of Internet search engines.

Mata Hari will pour the results into its proprietary database and index just about everything so you can then refine your search even further. One big time-saver is that Mata Hari will not return dead links. Before it lists results, it tests every URL to make sure it's still active. It also eliminates duplicate Web pages.

A very odd Gore Vidal interview: http://www.irish-times.com:80/irish-times/paper/1998/0606/fea4.html [NT-GV]

"[Ken] Starr, of course, I consider seriously unhinged in the Elmer Gantry snake-oil selling Jesus-quoting Southern way and I suppose when he finally cracks up on television and bites deep into Tom Brokaw's pretty jugular my jaded attention will finally be caught."

Yet another Virtual Valerie: http://www.abcnews.com:80/sections/tech/DailyNews/virtualgirl0603.html [NT-AI]

The Virtual Girl program uses over 200 video segments to illustrate Rachel's moods. While you can't actually talk to her, you can give her flowers, candy, drinks, even lingerie.

Radio Shack and Sam Adams beer sponsor a PBS series on rock history: [multipage] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/rocknroll/ (Not too shabby! Sorry I missed the first eight episodes.)

I'm famous! http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/special/bloomsday/ulysses/summary.html

AJR offers a fine long backgrounder on Salon: [multipage] http://www.newslink.org/ajrsalona98.html

"I'd describe Salon as a smart tabloid," Talbot says. "Tabloid in the sense that we want a popular readership, we want to engage and entertain and provoke them."

Bonobo stuns linguist: http://www.newsday.com/ap/rnmphs0l.htm

For example, Kanzi was asked: "Can you make the (toy) dog bite the (toy) snake?" Kanzi immediately placed the dog's mouth on the snake.

Local coverage of the Four-Corners manhunt: http://www.durangoherald.com/manhunt.htm (afu)

A nice little item on market psychology: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/086144.htm

A research paper on momentum investing strategies found that analysts are slow to revise their expectations for a company in the face of bad news -- just when you need them most.

YAY! The NSA can't crack Mitnick's codes: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/news/98_stories/ojrnews_mitnick3.htm

As it stands, government officials are holding the encrypted files and have no idea of their contents.

(Or is it just inter-agency unhelpfulness?)

The divine Susie Bright says Kip Kinkle didn't need tough love, he needed tender sex: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1998/06/nc_05brig2.html

Every racial minority in America looks at what happened in places like Springfield and says to themselves: "Those white people are crazy!" And they are: White people kept in segregated little ghettos of racism are a mess.

Also, Charles Taylor's big wet kiss for The Truman Show: http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/reviews/1998/06/cov_05review.html

...there's a hilarious flashback to young Truman announcing to his elementary school class that he wants to be an explorer, only to have his teacher respond, "I'm sorry, you're too late. There's nothing left to explore."

Newsgroup for Eschede train info: [Deja misc.transport.rail.europe]

Edward Gorey fans should check out the animated gifs at this PBS site: [JavaScript] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/

More Village Voice: okay piece on the acquisition of Wired: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/23ledbetter.shtml

Each issue was celebrated with a champagne reception: Rossetto would stand before his staff and hold the magazine over his head, like Moses with a tablet, while his followers applauded. Then Rossetto would go through his favorite aspects of the issue, "which always included at least one ad," recalls a former Wired worker. "He would say, `I love this ad. This ad shows that we are really making a difference.'"

NASA Watch keeps an avid, irreverent eye on NASA: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html [Feed]

...the two cosmonauts on Mir had been making computer repairs the other day and that they had not bothered to tell Thomas just what they were doing.

Veggieburgers take off: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/030562.htm

Meatless burger sales totaled $3.8 million for the week ending May 23, compared with $1.8 million during the same week of 1997.

Ana's using a cell-modem to transmit her trip to NYC

Work-in-progress: A 90k resorting of the IMDb keyword-index: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/finder/imdb.html

Animals: dog (183) / horses (155) / animals (129) / cat (40) / fox (27) / crow (28) / dinosaur (51) / ants (23) / apes (21) / bear (20) / cattle (22) / tarzan (61) / caveman (21) / wildlife (13) / turtle (13) / whale (14) / snake (18) / spider (16) / shark (12) / sheep (10) / monkey (14) / lassie (12) / lion (11) / insect (15) / gorilla (13) / falcon (18) / fish (12) / elephant (19) / cruelty-to-animals (10) / bulls (10) / birds (17) / animal-attack (10) / aardvark (17) / rin-tin-tin (26)

Norman Solomon calculates campaign spending per vote delivered: [Deja URL]

Bill Clinton's campaign spent $61.8 million of taxpayer money to win 45.6 million votes -- so his Dollars Per Vote total was $1.36.

Nader's DPV: $0.01.

In second place [in California-governor primary], former Northwest Airlines tycoon Checchi... His DPV was a whopping $58.61.

Nostalgia for the 1981-era Xerox Star: [Deja URL]

"Objects displayed on the Xerox 8010 screen are freely movable using the hand-held pointer, or 'mouse' ... this unique digital pointer ... will also initiate sequences for the relocation, copying, and deletion of material, and the retrieval and transmission of documents."

Mac-users with dial-up access still can't use Alexa: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-26.dir/26a02701.htm

In Building 116, the archive is stored in a digital-tape library that looks like a vending machine. The tapes currently have the capacity to hold 20 terabytes of data in all, about as much information as is in the Library of Congress.

How to outwit spysats: http://go2.guardian.co.uk:80/theweb/896882097-spy.html

An analysis of satellite orbits for last month shows that, in the five days before India detonated its nuclear devices, there were at least 10 periods of up to almost eight hours in which US intelligence was blind to what Indian technicians were doing at the Pokhran test site, close to the Pakistani border.

If you particularly wish to conceal your local weapons test programme, you'll need to visit another site (at ftp://kilroy.jpl.nasa.gov.pub/space/molczan ), which contains extensive catalogues of more than 40,000 space objects, which can be downloaded, including the satellites that the US doesn't like to talk about.

According to their intelligence chief (now defected), General Hussein al-Majeed, the real purpose of Iraq's notorious "supergun" was to fire glue bombs at US spy satellites as they passed overhead, leaving them engulfed in sticky slime.

Sid Meier's next game will be called Alpha Centauri: http://www.alphacentauri.com/faq.htm

Implement Your Vision of Utopia: Create or adopt new social and economic models to formulate the society of your dreams.

This Day in Joyce History: Feast of St. Kevin. In 1904, James wrote to Gogarty proposing to tour Ireland, playing a lute.

New Boardwatch missing feared lost? (Internet tech, recently bought by Mecklermedia)

New Progressive Review odds and ends:

Aldrich also took some flak for alleging that the WH Xmas tree was decorated one year with various Hillary-encouraged exotic hangings including 12 lords a'leaping with full erections, condoms, and a gingerbread man with various rings including one attached to his virtual genitals. Far from giving up on this story, the new edition of Unlimited Access includes a photo of the gingerbread stud and of the tree itself.

A great old Wired dialog on interactivity-theory: [starts slow] http://www.wired.com/wired/3.04/departments/electrosphere/backes.html [NT-JJ]

...They're still stealing ideas out of mid-1970 Xerox PARC. Show me some spectacular interface breakthrough that's been made in the '80s or '90s by anybody.

Three nights a week he takes eight people through about 350 years of history by taking them room to room through this house. Every time you go to another room, you jump 50 years. ...CD-ROMs are going to have to go a long way to catch this. My wife described it as Pirates in the Caribbean by Stanley Kubrick.

Eisenstein became this great theorist of film because he didn't have any film. For years, the Soviet Union didn't have any hard currency to buy any movie stock. So they sat around and asked, What if we had movie stock? What kind of movie would we make? And they developed an aesthetics of filmmaking.

Ninety-nine percent of so-called digital movies on CD-ROM have the visual grammar you'd find in an Edison One reel.

A great Onion interview with Penn-not-Teller: http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3321/avfeature3321.html [HG]

I'm sick of David Letterman being better than every act that's on. I want somebody who goes, "Ooh! This guy trains house cats! That's really hard to do."

...she was very conscientious to try and write no lines for the character that she had not heard me say in day-to-day life. Which was really funny, considering that I was playing Satan ...

I just have a crush on the president [of the ACLU]: I think Nadine Strossen is the hottest woman in the world...

Nadine herself [Pic source]

Sprint explores charging by the byte: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/phoneqa0603.htm [SN]

Under this plan, consumers' bills would rise or fall with the amount of information transmitted. For instance, three minutes spent watching an online music video would cost a customer considerably more than three minutes reading a simple text-based e-mail message.

(I think this might solve a lot of problems.)

New New Scientist suggests using old missiles for millennial fireworks: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980606/nfireworks.html

As the missiles returned to Earth, they would release their cargo of thousands of artificial meteors, each weighing between 10 and 100 grams. The meteors would burn up in the atmosphere, with different colours depending on the chemicals with which they had been doped -- sodium for yellow, strontium for red, and so on.

(I had no idea this NS-site had tons of stories not mentioned on the homepage!)

Fiendishly clever design for microchip med-lab: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980606/ndna.html

CIA's Casey okayed coke-traffic in 1982: [Deja URL]

With almost no notice in the national press, a 1982 letter was introduced into the Congressional Record revealing how CIA Director William J. Casey secretly engineered an exemption sparing the CIA from a legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by agency assets.

Though precise volume estimates are impossible, the contra-connected drug pipeline clearly pumped tons of cocaine into the United States during the early-to-mid 1980s.

Motto written on Woody Guthrie's guitar: (rec.music.folk)

"This machine kills fascists." (...he got it off a machine in a defense plant.)

Dan Strychalski on Euro keyboard layouts: [Deja URL]

Belgian and French           A Z E R T Y U I O P
                              Q S D F G H J K L M
                               W X C V B N
 
German and Swiss             Q W E R T Z U I O P
                              A S D F G H J K L
                               Y X C V B N M
 
Danish, Dutch, Italian,      Q W E R T Y U I O P
Norwegian, Portuguese,        A S D F G H J K L
Spanish, Swedish, UK, USA      Z X C V B N M

An anonymouse takes a bite out of Deepak Chopra: [Deja URL]

First, it is a matter of record that I do shamelessly pander to rich and witless whites.

Behind the scenes at a great mail-order bookstore: http://www.businessweek.com/1996/23/b347862.htm [TN-JJ]

Daedalus Books -- named for both the Greek myth and the James Joyce character -- is generating more than $12.5 million a year in sales, 54% to bookstores and the rest through its catalogs.

Daedalus' knack for ferreting out great books has won the company clout with wholesale customers.

Next year, James Joyce and Obi-Wan Kenobi will merge into one man: [IMDb URL] [TN] [Pic source]

Susan Lynch (next year's Nora) in "Roan Inish" [Pic source]

Congrats to the brilliant Mary Zimmerman for her well-deserved MacArthur grant! http://www.goodman-theatre.org/artbios/zimmermn.htm

Coming soon, Spielberg's "Local Fluff"? http://www.sciencedaily.com:80/story.asp?filename=980602080449 [NT-Ulysses]

Our immediate or local interstellar environment is chock-full of gas clusters known as the Local Fluff, Zank points out, and existing instruments aren't sensitive enough to detect extremely small clouds. Consequently, Zank says, "We won't know that our heliosphere is collapsing until we see highly elevated levels of neutral hydrogen and cosmic rays, and a hydrogen wall in the vicinity of the outer planets."

Indie film shot for $50k: http://www.expressnews.com:80/pantheon/salife-ent/movies/0301gjk4.shtml [NT-Mystery]

But this 75-minute movie -- written, produced, directed and edited by Kip Torres -- was shot entirely using a digital camera and edited on computer.

Book-printing on demand demo'd: [Messy URL] [NT-TomWolfe]

In less than an hour, an operator can cut out the pages of an aging out-of-print book, scan the pages, print them by laser on paper from another machine, cut and trim the pages and bring the laminated, full-color book cover (created simultaneously by another device ) into a final machine, the binder.

Watching Lightning Print in action is like seeing the future come up and whap you on the head...

TV 2nite: Frontline looks at chemical pollution: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/

Crew deserting Woody Allen's sinking ship? http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/6/3/4284.html

Stars like Demi Moore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Goldie Hawn, Melanie Griffith and Winona Ryder, who used to receive $10,000, will now earn about $5,000 a week.

YAY! Carrey-flick gives Ana a PR-boost

New Village Voice has a great piece on e-trading: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/23boal.shtml

"The market has made a lot of people think they are traders who are not," notes Cramer.

As business becomes a metaphor for cool, investing is being transformed into investainment. ...Imagine millions of people deeply engrossed in a form with the immediacy of television, the interactivity of a video game, the high-stakes tension of gambling, and all the gravity of growing wealthy.

And Christgau analyses trip-hop: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/23christgau.shtml

"...Sometimes a carefully controlled frown or even the faintest of supercilious smiles will work as much havoc as a scream or a shout."

And a skeptical look at web-profiling: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/23mclaren.shtml

In other words, privacy isn't necessarily the problem, the image of privacy is.

Considering that only 10 per cent of all Web users are said to ever change their browsers' default settings, this is no small hurdle.

When presented with online marketing surveys and questionnaires, LIE!

A GREAT article on the fate of content: [multipage] http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/digitalwatch/0622tec.html [SN]

Sighs Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic and now editor of Microsoft's online magazine Slate: "Content is not going to be the killer app on the Internet, at least not in the near future."

"We didn't want to cripple a young company [Yahoo] with the prejudices of people with significant media heritages."

"You ask them to do something, and they say, 'It's not trivial.' You think, Okay, it's not trivial. But 'not trivial' means it's impossible. It's never going to happen..."

Online, what counts is not text but tools and transactions. People go to the Web for services: They want to buy a used car; search movie listings; track their stock portfolio; learn how to clean their dog's teeth; buy plane tickets.

(Sounds like text to me!)

A mailinglist message about XML and AI: http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/mailing_lists/dist-obj/msg00960.html

Everyone seems to be saying that DTD's and XML can be intelligently designed to transmit the right information to my desktop and have the rest of it reside elsewhere on the network, but I fail to see who's going to do the work in many of these cases (I mean making the choices that are likely to be intelligent)...

Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language aims to build a Cyc-like ontology in XML: [wide pages, interesting use of multicolor text] http://wave.eecs.wsu.edu/WAVE/Ontologies/CKML/CKML-DTD.html

The history of the Internet Movie Database bears comparison to Linux: http://us.imdb.com/FAQ#history

Well, it all began back in 1989 when someone started a discussion in the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.movies about who were the most attractive looking actresses around...

This Day in Joyce History: In 1798, Edward Fitzgerald died in prison.

TV 2nite: Sarah McLachlan on Letterman.

The babe-o-licious Kia Mennie

An intriguing claim about AI in science: http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1998/may/prof_980511.html

"Whether or not this pans out, I think people are thinking in a new way about information. They're thinking of knowledge discovery rather than just information retrieval."

Scouting report on Satan: [note filename] http://espnet.sportszone.com/nhl/profiles/profile/0666.html (ark)

Satan is in a great spot in Buffalo because he doesn't have to beat out much to earn playing time as the number one left-winger.

Honeyguide says this experiment on sex-chromosomes is important. I don't understand it, yet. http://www.newscientist.co.uk/ns/980530/nychromosome.html

To understand why the Y evolved this way, Rice genetically engineered fruit flies so that 99 per cent of their genes were passed to male offspring on the equivalent of a giant Y chromosome.

Too bad this great-looking daily biology weblog, HMS Beagle, requires such extensive registration: http://biomednet.com/hmsbeagle/ [Feed]

Einstein's loveletters to a Russian spy: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/6/2/4237.html

Almar was apparently a pet name the two had devised for each other, made up of their combined names: Albert and Margarita.

A review of John Dominic Crossan's new historical-Jesus book: [Messy URL] [TN-JesusSeminar]

Crossan is fascinating in offering the common meal as the ritual link between the earlier so-called Life Tradition, which focused on the sayings of Jesus and how he lived, and the later Death Tradition that subsumed it and focused on his passion and resurrection. Separating these strands is much of what this book is about.

"If you begin with Paul, you will interpret Jesus incorrectly," he writes. "If you begin with Jesus, you will interpret Paul differently."

I'm puzzled as to why, but for single searches "TotalNews" seems to kick Excite's butt every time: http://totalnews.com/_main.html (Their customization options don't compete, though.)

Before Hollywood, were movies like the Internet??? http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CNS_DAYS/980531/t000050598.html

Films were made dealing with prostitution, adultery, child abuse, sweatshops, abortion, revolution, capitalism, socialism, political corruption, worker exploitation, alcoholism, pederasty, racism and sexism; nothing was taboo. They were made by individuals, unions, corporations, political parties, government agencies and anyone else who could put together a camera and a few dollars.

The postwar period brought an end to all this. Movies became increasingly conservative in their take on class conflict and class relations. Ross gives four reasons (he likes things in fours): the growth of studios and the development of the studio system; a mounting Red scare after the birth of the Soviet Union (a rehearsal for what came 30 years later); political pressure on filmmakers by federal agencies and state censors; and a heightened and therefore equally scary labor militancy.

It would be unpatriotic to ask a studio beholden to Wall Street to tout socialism. ... Various state censors also ordered newsreel companies like Fox and Pathe and even Hearst to cut scenes of labor agitation because "they tend to incite riot and disorder."

An odd AlertBox about the real world: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980531.html

The increased need for physical distribution can be met by defining a set of standard shipping boxes of varying sizes that can easily be stacked and tracked. Tracking may be implemented by bar codes in a standard location, by a built-in micro-transmitter, or by some new, yet-to-be-invented technology.

Excite's "Jango" product-finder does a creditable job of searching the Web for reviews of specific products, and claims to also offer price-comparisons: http://www.jango.com/xsh/index.dcg [NT-Search]

How the LA Times analyses Godzilla-marketing: [longish] http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CNS_DAYS/980601/t000050962.html

Disney/Touchstone and Fox counter-programmed with "The Horse Whisperer" and "Bulworth," respectively, in an attempt to appeal to the adult audience.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, the Mirus bazaar opened.

Meta: I've felt a certain urgency about becoming web-literate, since upgrading from text-only browsing last fall. But now I'm finally starting to feel I've got a handle on what's out there, and less like there's vast resourcas still unsuspected. Eg, in lists of resources I should know about, I'm starting to know about most of them.

An archive of two dozen hacked websites: [multipage] http://www.focus-asia.com/home/hackedpages/index.htm

CRAYON (Create Your Own Newspaper) doesn't appear to do any keyword searches, but its huge menu of news sources (sorted, ranked, and linked) looks very handy: http://crayon.net/using/links.html (botspot)

A massive inventory of web-agents (or bots) of various kinds: http://www.botspot.com/newsletter/archives/v1n4.htm (cis?)

Academic Bots
Bot Design
Chatter Bots
Commerce Bots
Fun Bots
Government Bots
Knowledge Bots
Miscellaneous Bots
News Bots
Search Bots
Shopping Bots
Software Bots
Stock Bots
Update Bots

(Unfortunately, the descriptions don't always tell what platform, or if it's free, or exactly what it does.)

Aurora Borealis from space: http://www-pi.physics.uiowa.edu/www/vis/coastlines/

A bomb-diagram by the Unabomber, compared to one by the Zodiac killer: http://members.aol.com/Mignarda/bomb.htm (afu)

(Pretty similar handwriting!)

Fashion millionaire Douglas Tompkins creates a Chilean ecology-preserve: http://outside.starwave.com:80/magazine/0698/9806doug.html [NT-Tolstoy]

Starting in 1991, after he walked away from Esprit and moved to South America to devote his life to conservation, Tompkins has made dozens of separate land deals in Chile's Region X, where the southern wilderness begins. His aim has been to create the world's biggest private nature reserve, which he calls Pumalín Park.

The Chilean military was bothered that Tompkins's holdings, which run from Argentina to the sea at the narrowest point in this long, thin country, effectively cut Chile in two.

Here, in Tompkins's study, above an unadorned wooden table, are works by Oswald Spengler, the German theorist of cultural decline; by Lewis Mumford, chronicler of urbanization; by Clifford Stoll, a critic of computer culture; by Tompkins's friend and adviser Jerry Mander, Californian author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; and Edward Goldsmith, founding editor of The Ecologist and brother of the late Sir James.

A rather good poem by Brian Henry: http://www-polisci.mit.edu:80/bostonreview/BR23.1/Henry.html [NT-WallaceStevens]

...with the recipe for happiness, you announce
your decision to pursue a new course,
something neither simple nor expensive...

Art-joke in Philadelphia: http://www.phillynews.com:80/inquirer/98/May/29/city/PLAS29.htm [NT-Prank]

There was a spoon taped to a tree. And a little farther, a spoon taped to a curvy wrought-iron banister. And more spoons poking out of a window box planted with purple flowers and ivy.

An interesting book review profiling WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon: [multipage] http://www.scotsman.com:80/bookreviews/bk01sass980530.1.html [NewsTracker-Graves]

His verse, though, had moved from Rupert Brooke-like celebration of heroism to bitter satirical reporting of the actual conditions in which men were being herded to their deaths by "screaming scarlet majors" who took care to keep well back from the firing line. Sassoon had become a realist and a truth-teller. He was therefore dangerous. Had his friend Robert Graves not persuaded an army medical board to send him to Craiglockhart for treatment there is no doubt that he would have been court-martialled and imprisoned.

"The Daffodil Murderer" ... started out as a parody of Masefield but under the bracing influence of Masefield's plain style picked up power in its curious narrative of a man who murdered his friend.

...You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

Airport expansion shatters communities: [Deja URL]

Congressional noise laws and regulations are being TOTALLY ignored by EPA and the Clinton Administration which have given the airline industry free rein to destroy the health, quality of life of communities near airports.

Five short, respectable poems read by Jewel: [RealPlayer, multipage] http://www.canoe.ca:80/JamBooks/may21_jewel.html

But she credits her mother, Nedra Carroll, with passing on the skill of poetry reading to her. "She had tremendous timing and an incredibly soothing tone of voice that hypnotizes you and takes you into what she's reading," says Jewel, "so I grew up with the idea that reading should be musical."

My paean to Excite NewsTracker: [Deja URL]

A difficult comparison of Iris-Murdoch-the-novelist with IM-the-philosopher: http://www-polisci.mit.edu:80/bostonreview/BR23.1/Millgram.html [NewsTracker-IM]

Murdoch's central insight is that the hard part of figuring out what to do is coming by the right description of your situation.... So practical reasoning is a matter of substituting better descriptions for worse.

...great art is a model and an instance of this moral task performed well, because great art shows things as they really are.

And fourth, as we move to better descriptions, we see connections among apparently disparate values.

So it is important that Murdoch's novels are bought largely as escape literature...

A great collection of newsbriefs from Covert Action Quarterly: http://caq.com:80/CAQ/caq63/caq63briefs.html

White House speech writers have been told to limit use of the term "fast-track." The replacement phrase is "renewal of traditional trading authority." The label, "Nafta expansion" is to be avoided completely.

A kibologist creates the first (?) troll-page: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4236/hero.html

This site is where we celebrate the life and acting career of that total babe and cinema goddess, Drew Barymore. From her role as Darla, a disillusioned waitress ... in THE CROW, to her performance as the prostitute whose disfiguration initiates the plot of Clint Eastwood's acclaimed UNFORGIVEN...

The near-miss-URL biz: [Messy URL] [NewsTracker-Search]

His company, he says, owns more than 200 near-miss addresses, including Yyahoo.com, americanairline.com and indb.com... "We have a million visits per month over all."

When netnews threads go bad (asg)

I always assumed that "Broadcast News" was about Tom Brokaw. Harry Shearer's satellite-feeds site seems to confirm this: [RealPlayer] http://www.timecast.com/channels/comedy/shearer/found/index.html [NTK]

More Blasts from the Past:

• Dan Rather, in Soweto, frets about his hair
• Geraldo Rivera calls O.J. Simpson a "motherf___er"
• UPN predicts mind control via new logo
• ET's Mary Hart gets all hot and bothered
• Peter Jennings gets a clue on Constitutional Law

Ivan Stang predicts: (Hour of Slack)

As a backlash against animal-rights activists, Cruelty Plus products will be introduced.

Wall Street thinks the average Yahoo visitor is worth $150? http://www.internetnews.com:80/stocks/

"AOL's an $18 billion market cap company. That's more than CBS TV Network sold for and about what Disney paid for ABC/CapCities."

(Given what companies will pay for a random banner-ad, how much more they ought to pay for a sincere blurb-link! Hint, hint...)

New Science News debunks glass-flow, and looks at food-germs, cowbirds, and aluminum-based biology

Atractive page-design for a silly art-performance story: http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/hi/english/uk/newsid_101000/101294.stm [NewsTracker-Hoaxes?]

A forthcoming norn-ripoff, BioPunX: http://www.next-generation.com:80/jsmid/news/3299.html [NewsTracker-Creatures]

Watching the BioPunX sit around, eat, sleep, play basketball, go to the bathroom, or watch television is almost like watching a home full of teenagers. Sometimes they're adorable, other times insufferable. If their personality tends toward the nasty -- or if you bring them up wrong -- they might make faces at you or not flush the toilet.

New Fast Company is a bore (cf. 6 April below) http://www.fastcompany.com/online/15/index.html
But there's an okay profile of Douglas Adams: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/15/hitchhiker.html

"I got seriously broke and took a job as a bodyguard for an Arab royal family." He sat outside the family's hotel room. The elevator cars came and went all night long: "At night, when they're not in regular use, it's bad for them just to stop, so they're programmed to go up and down at random. Every two or three minutes, an elevator would arrive, open its doors, spit out some Muzak, and go away. My job was to stay sane. This is why there is a lot in h2g2 about elevators."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904 there was a full moon, and in Ulysses Boylan probably made his first pass at Molly. In 1932, Lucia was diagnosed hebephrenic.

The economics of neurosis-therapy: http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=356c49160 [SN]

With virtually negative unemployment in Silicon Valley, it's easier to repair a damaged software developer than to find a replacement. Hence it's boom time for Dr. Stress.

To that end, Hollands has placed dollar amounts on a range of disruptive behaviors: a temper tantrum by a midlevel manager, for example, is worth $3,000; chronic weekly outbursts, on the other hand, can cost companies $250,000 in lost productivity and business over the course of a year.

Dr. Stress estimates that the human body can endure a chronic state of tension for six months to a year:

And a quick peek at motion-tracking-bodysuit animation: http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=352930830

Bill Gates's 1977 mugshots (for speeding): http://www.nationalenquirer.com/mod03/mod03-story-1314.html (agc)

(Why does the Enquirer's frontpage turn me on, despite breaking all my rules of web design?) http://www.nationalenquirer.com/index-fst.html

Economist Paul Krugman summarizes my doubts about Wall Street: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980525/fir.html

Any broker can tell you that in recent months the market has been rising, despite mediocre earnings news, because of fresh purchases by people desperate to get in on the action. But sooner or later the supply of such people will run out; then what?

And analyses seven fallacies of the big fund managers: http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1997/971229/fir.html

1. Think short term.
2. Be greedy.
3. Believe in the greater fool.
4. Run with the herd.
5. Overgeneralize.
6. Be trendy.
7. Play with other people's money.

[#6] ...That doctrine is basically nonsense, of course -- but anyway I quickly determined that it is, as they say in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "so five minutes ago." All the rules have changed again...

And tallies Hermann Kahn's futurological scorecard: [short] http://www.herring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html

He predicted [in 1967], for example, that most people would have computers at home and that they would be able to use them both to search databases and to communicate. He also predicted pocket phones, VCRs, and home satellite dishes.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1779, Thomas Moore was born. In 1898, James parodied Belvedere's rector in "Vice Versa". In 1929, Lucia (daughter) danced publicly for the last time, at the Bal Bullier competition.

A stupendous fan-site for Lynda J. Barry: [slow loading] http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/7221/

Sea piracy makes a comeback: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/29/3565.html

And a long look at director Terrence Malick: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/29/3491.html

Salon offers a long review of Lyne's Lolita: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/movies/reviews/1998/05/cov_29review.html

Lyne uses the late '40s setting for a series of immaculate period reproductions: suburban lawns and downtowns seen through a creamy nostalgic haze. It's entirely wrong for "Lolita," which, in keeping with Nabokov's portrait of pop America, needs to have the shiny, hard-candy colors of a new car. ...This sober approach to what Nabokov called the exhilaration of "philistine vulgarity" means that this "Lolita" isn't a comedy.

How to explain that in America, the very notion of "Lolita" seems more daring than it did 40 years ago?

Is this the real Phil Hartman story? [Deja URL]

Notwithstanding all the "golly gosh" sound bites from "good" friends like the career-less Steve Guttenberg, all who apparently don't have a clue, the inside scoop from Tinseltown is that the off-screen Hartman was not a very nice guy.

TV 2nite: American Masters: Lou Reed was great.

CJR takes a long, level look at Rupert Murdoch's dangerously interlocking media empire: [multipage] http://www.cjr.org/html/98-05-06-murdoch.html

Meanwhile, it emerged that the recently retired East Asia editor of The Times, Jonathan Mirsky, had told a January Freedom Forum gathering that the paper "has simply decided, because of Murdoch's interests, not to cover China in a serious way."

His U.S. properties include Twentieth Century Fox, HarperCollins, TV Guide, the New York Post, Fox Broadcasting, Fox News Channel, Fox Sports Net, The Weekly Standard, and television stations in New York (WNYW), Washington (WTTG), Los Angeles (KTTV), Philadelphia (WTXF), Chicago (WFLD), Atlanta (WAGA), Boston (WFXT), Phoenix (KSAZ), and fourteen other cities.

Says Post reporter Gersh Kuntzman of Murdoch: "In the newsroom, everyone loves him. He's really charismatic, a very intelligent person. Not just a figurehead."

Another factor is that many employees enjoy working at Murdoch's freewheeling tabloid properties, both for the sheer Front Page exuberance and for a general sense that the company takes care of its employees.

In New York City politics, Murdoch's power is legendary. "Murdoch created Ed Koch as mayor..."

Any negative stories about the administration tend to be about bureaucracy stepping on the little guy. The mayor is usually a bystander, as outraged as anyone.

During the interregnum, when Murdoch did not own the Post, that paper's tendency to inflame racial passions in New York diminished remarkably.

...plugs for Fox TV specials, which are variously described as "jaw-dropping," "megasuccessful," and "highly anticipated," while shows from other networks earn less-effusive wordplay.

Last year TV Guide named Fox's King of the Hill the best show on television. Few critics would agree.

A nice Norman Solomon rant imagines Bulworth as a news anchor: [Deja URL]

"Back in 1995 ... state governments made history by collectively spending more to build prisons than colleges. Prison construction went up by $926 million, to $2.6 billion, while university construction fell by $954 million, to $2.5 billion. How's that for planning a future for our kids?"

"Fondle Me Bubba" doll: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/2946.htm

"I'll bomb Baghdad, I'll bomb France, if you'll remove my underpants."

Multimedia overkill: Larry Wall and Tim Bray discuss XML and Perl in a ten-minute RealPlayer 5.0 discussion with synchronized slideshow ...and it's boring and hard to follow: http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/av/av.html [SN]

Cool art for LucasArts' Grim Fandango: [multipage] http://www.e3news.com/pc/grimfand/screen.html?3

A color-ascii-art-in-html experiment by teigan (private email)

Wired looks at Hollywood's websites: http://my.excite.com/news/r/980527/14/column-livewire

"We average 100,000 visits a day to 1.7 million a day, and when we run a live event we can be one of the biggest sites on the Net for a few days," said Riesman, just back from Webcasting this year's Cannes festival.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1899, Stannie (brother) was elected to the Belvedere Sodality. In 1929, Exagmination was published.

TV 2nite: Henry Rollins on Politically Incorrect.

New The Nation looks at the X-Files, and the Communist Manifesto

Evening project: Clearing out 30Mb of accumulated jpegs.
Secret weapon: PictTrasher from INFO-MAC

Joe Bay does a great Poe parody on ark: [Deja URL] [longish]

My plan to receive perfect grades had failed, but I would not allow myself to be consigned to a damned gaol for the rest of my days. So it was with great revulsion that I searched once more through the closets, finally finding a hacksaw...

Apropos of nothing: My email box is stacking up with messages that need replies. so if you've written to me and I haven't responded, I hope you'll try again, or be patient.

Excellent new New Scientist includes a me-too look at XML: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/xml.html

"XML will make it easier for business to spam search engines..."

Bartlett at ArborText has no doubts about what's going on."XML," he says, "will prove to be one of the top ten technological innovations of the first century of computing."

And a possible thrilling breakthru on the Gaia hypothesis: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/features.html

By explaining why microbes produce clouds he has also formulated the first biologically credible mechanism for Gaia -- the theory that Earth acts like a superorganism, with all its biological and physical systems cooperating to keep it healthy.

Idle speculation rapidly led to the formation of a theory that beautifully explains why algae produce DMS. "Seldom have I had a run of reading where so many papers were relevant or connected and nothing contradicted my ideas," says Hamilton. "I felt certain that there was something interesting here."

The benefits of successfully colonising a new area are so great, they concluded, that organisms will evolve to send their progeny away from home even if they never end up in a better place.

"Large cumulus clouds often have several new towers, rising behind the main bulk of the cloud, as if something inside them is generating new sources of latent heat. It's like an explosion." Is this because microbes within the clouds are actively creating them, and in the process, driving themselves around the globe?

An anti-hacker program that fights fire with fire: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/nhackback.html

According to Wood, the military version is designed to wage information warfare by launching virus-type attacks against a hacker in an attempt to destroy data on the intruder's computer.

Bugs in the radioactive zone: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980530/nnuclear.html

Microorganisms that corrode metal have been discovered in the ponds where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored. Safety experts fear that the bacteria could cause leaks in the metal cladding around the fuel rods.

Where did you automatically go today? SJMerc compares the portals: http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/041519.htm

The start page competition has turned red hot in recent weeks, as Excite, Lycos and Snap! have unveiled improved versions of their Web portals, giving users even more customization features and information.

... 65 percent go to the default home page.

Infoseek's Killer feature: The quick link to "Dilbert."

A nicely maintained newspage about search-engines and research: http://www.coppersky.com/ongir/news/index.html

"Talkway ( http://www.talkway.com ) offers a Yahoo-like structure for browsing and finding Usenet newsgroups of interest. You can also read (and post) to newsgroups online. There are no archives; this is not a DejaNews replacement. I played with the non-Java version a little bit and decided that this is a good idea that needs some tweaking..."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904 in Ulysses, Bloom lent three shillings to Hynes. In 1905, Jack (father) sold their house in Cabra.

Erotic archeology breakthru: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/27/3226.html

Among the rich pickings were a clay dildo, several erotic figurines and a red pitcher with a phallic spout. Innumerable offerings to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, were dug up.

A hip CJR editor offers five witty models of news-devaluation: http://www.cjr.org/html/98-05-06-hoyt.html

1. If You Build It...
2. More Wine, Louder Wallpaper.
3. Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
4. May the Force...
5. Dress Rehearsal.

Ana restores her old (320-by-240) cam-size

A rec.arts.books reader confirms the Rambo/Rimbaud connection (23 May below): [Deja URL]

New Byte smears Win98: [screwy site-navigation] http://byte.com/art/9806/sec5/sec5.htm

Win 98 is a six-story building sitting on DOS's log-cabin foundation. The Leaning Tower of Redmond can't take much more expansion.

And explains what merchants can do with cookies: http://byte.com/art/9806/sec7/art5.htm

Thanks to the Rule Manager, the Web server can do things like present a special offer only to "premier" members within the U.S., a different offer to "premier" members outside the U.S., and still another offer to nonpremier members.

About time: CNN wises up about excessive graphics: http://www.cnn.com/why/index.html [SN]

Their customization options are miles beyond the others I've tried, but they demand a lot of registration info after you customize everything, and they don't seem to search other sites for your topics:

unexplained phenomena [check those you wish to track]:

     [ ] ghosts 
     [ ] land or sea monsters 
     [ ] paranormal 
     [ ] UFOs
     [ ] witches
 

cultural icons:

     [ ] elvis presley        [100 Elvis Index] 
     [ ] madonna              [96, includes BVM] 
     [ ] oprah winfrey        [54] 
     [ ] michael jackson      [21.6] 
     [ ] royal family         [princess diana 21] 
     [ ] pamela anderson      [18.5] 
     [ ] frank sinatra        [13.9] 
     [ ] o.j. simpson         [13.8] 
     [ ] cindy crawford       [11.25] 
     [ ] elizabeth taylor     [4.8] 
     [ ] jerry seinfeld       [2, last fall] 
     [ ] john travolta        [overlooked] 

(Hi-Elvis celebs they overlooked: Rush Limbaugh, David Letterman, Beatles, Howard Stern, Alanis Morissette, Spice Girls, Demi Moore, Andy Warhol, Stephen King, Bjork, Woody Allen, Jay Leno, Noam Chomsky, Quentin Tarantino.)

New "NY Review of Books" includes this great long piece on how school textbooks try to please pressure groups: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998061115R

"We were told to try to avoid using the word 'imagine' because the people in Texas felt it was too close to the word 'magic' and therefore might be considered anti-Christian. Instead of saying 'Imagine you were sailing across the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus,' we were encouraged to write 'Suppose you were...'"

"Before, we used to send the books out to scholars," a senior editor explained. "Now we also send them to one reader for the Islamic point of view, to a feminist, an African-American, an Asian-American, a Native American, and a Christian fundamentalist so that they are carefully screened."

While virtually all the other textbooks are written by committees in as neutral a tone as possible, and do little more than present a series of events, dates, and people, Hakim tried to make story-telling central to her work. Her books have a distinctive personal voice and are enjoyable to read.

Three pairs of writers - composition instructors, linguists, and Time-Life journalists - were all asked to rewrite the same passages from a widely used history textbook. The texts by the education specialists produced no improvement in students' comprehension, while students retained 40 percent more from the passages written by the two professional journalists.

In the late 1980s, some twenty publishers were producing social studies textbooks; last year there were only five competing for the latest Texas adoption.

As one might expect from such examples, textbooks are now routinely scanned by computer programs, which measure sentence and paragraph length and also hunt down exotic words that are thought to be too difficult for the average ten- or eleven-year-old. The widely used Dale-Chall "readability" tests exclude words such as "treatment," "protection," "preparation," and "sharpen"...Texts originally for the middle grades began to be certified as being appropriate for high school students, and what used to be a high school text appeared as a college text. The entire educational process was watered down, level by level.

...Hakim's book threatens the entire textbook industry. Publishing companies invest several million dollars in a textbook, employing dozens of writers, consultants, and art directors; that a grandmother from Virginia could do something superior at a fraction of the cost calls into question their entire system. ...Hakim often receives fan letters from student-readers - something that is almost inconceivable for a standard textbook author.

(The way these textbooks are devalued is almost identical to the process Phil Greenspun described for computer books: see my best-reads link above.)

Questions we never thought to ask: (chf)

Does anybody know a good way of measuring dark vergence without using a laser speckle or laser optometer?

New Village Voice looks at sitcom segregation: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/tv/22carson.shtml

The problem was that, as usual, nonwhite New Yorkers were drafted as the Munchkins (or flying monkeys?) to Jerry et al.'s complacent Dorothys.

Frasier's true house specialty, as every fan recognized subliminally or gleefully long ago, is to con homophobic America into adoring a gay couple by the simple expedient of calling them brothers and outfitting them with heterosexual fig leaves.

And a three-fer of media scandals: Ireland's Bloody Sunday, TNR's Stephen Glass, and NYT's Gina Kolata: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/22ledbetter.shtml

Alex Suter on ark:

YO MAMA'S SO FAT that by the time she puts on BVDs they spell boulevard!
YO MAMA'S SO FAT it takes her two trips to haul ass!
YO MAMA'S SO FAT she's at high risk for adult onset diabetes and heart problems!

Parental big-brother software: http://www.latimes.com:80/CNS_DAYS/980525/t000048935.html [NewsTracker-Search]

...designed to give parents an alternative to popular but restrictive "blocking" software such as CyberPatrol and NetNanny. Unlike those products, which prevent users from accessing sites deemed offensive, Prudence merely keeps a log of the Web sites visited from any computer on which the software is installed.

...the product is designed so that it can be used surreptitiously

New TidBits offers tips on searching for images, and also recommends checking out IE4.0.1 (Mac): http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-431.html (Boy, does Microsoft's download-site suck! They're evil! )

Meta: I'd really like to change this page's text-color every day, as a way of learning about color... but I think that's probably a lot to ask of readers. So maybe I'll just do it when the whim strikes me. If a color-scheme is unbearable to you, please let me know.

Quote of the day: (rec.arts.books)

"A man who thinks he is a king is mad. But a king who thinks he is a king is also mad." - Jacques Lacan

Seen on comp.infosystems.search:

The average life expectancy of a web document is 75 days.

"Parrots, tortoises and redwoods
Live a longer life than men do,
Men a longer life than dogs do,
Dogs a longer life than love does."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay (Love, a longer life than web docs!)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for indecent acts. In 1902, James let the clock run out without making his Easter duty. In 1918, Exiles was published. In 1927, James was attacked by a dog on Scheveningen beach (L1-255).

Re the bgcolors: I'm working my way thru the 206 browser-safe colors, vaguely in order of brightness. I don't know how long I'll keep up this strategy, because they're getting pretty pukey...

I'm also experimenting with spacing between blurbs ...which is unimaginably random.

Before AnaCam, there was AnnBCam! [Messy BBS URL]

Salon follows the evolution of web-designers, StarWave: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/05/26feature.html

The formula was simple: Get a great license with the authority in a sports field, build a powerful technology backbone that can grab and post up-to-the-minute sports scores and statistics and fill it in with news generated by your own staff of reporters.

The Amish find the Net tempting!?! http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/26/3059.html

They were unable personally to explain their acceptance of the Internet because of their refusal to use telephones.

And a free-bikes scheme using smartcards: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/5/26/3073.html

The Princess-Di conspiracy theorists have come up with a supposed document: [Deja URL]

"Such an affair is racially and morally repugnant and no son of a bedouin camel trader is fit for the mother of a future king," [GIF]

A nice parable by Raphael Carter: http://www.chaparraltree.com/oneshots/parable.shtml [HG]

Meanwhile, a man in one of the sideways seats at the front of the bus had taken out his cellular phone. "I'd like to speak to a supervisor," he said...

And a lovely short review of a radical style-manual: http://www.chaparraltree.com/chapbooks/writing.shtml

Maybe I can't save your inner child from being lectured for splitting infinitives, but when you get back from the principal's office, I'll hand you a stack of old dittos and tell you a secret. Language is not a minefield to be tiptoed through, holding your breath. It is a Meccano set with a real working motor, a box of 256 crayons, a doll with a bottomless wardrobe.

New Progressive Review includes this:

In Salt Like City, two college students were set upon by a gang of 20 puritan hoodlums as they walked down the street smoking cigarettes. The Staight Edgers, as they call themselves, attacked the students with chains, bricks, a baseball bat and pepper spray.

Righteous! The straight-edge-punk FAQ: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cultures/straight-edge-faq/index.html

True Christianity is about truth and not blind faith so your belief has to be backed up by historical fact and reason. It's sort of like the hardcore scene - there are all these kids who haven't got a clue but just smoke, drink and f___ themselves into oblivion. These kids give hardcore a bad name. Then there are the few kids who are straight-edge, who take life seriously and do something positive. Even within sXe there are the militant and hardline elements that distort the rest of the movement.

"Just wanted to talk about the good old glory days when the HARDCORE scene was REAL and there was no kickboxing, baggy clothes or attitudes. Yeah Yeah, all you "new school" kids are probably sick of hearing about the past, but it is brought up so often because of how great it was (at least compared to now). Everybody had something to say and used their energy positively and did something productive with it. Whether they started a band, did a zine or promoted a show, they were benefiting Hardcore and making "our" subculture a better one..."

"The difference between us and nerds is that we [abstain from drugs] as a way of rebelling against society, not because society tells us not to."

In a 1995 interview with the Thicker fanzine, Ian MacKaye denounced the stringent attitude prevalent in the culture he is widely credited with founding. "The whole straight-edge thing for me was never about this kind of puritan lifestyle, where I was supposed to be leading the masses towards a better tomorrow," he said.

"I grew up and hung out in Louisivlle, KY for years during the 1980s, and the shows there were incredibly diverse and non-specific. Beercore nuts would go see straight edge bands, and straight edge kids would go see devil metal bands. Usually, everyone got along and had fun because at the time, it was all there was. Maybe it's different now that things are so much bigger and glitzier, or maybe Louisville has just always been a lucky city."

Another quiet week on LakeWobegone.net: http://www.sptimes.com:80/Pasco/51998/Punishment_for_chicke.html [NewsTracker-'Mistake']

Chris Wolff admits his guilt: He snagged a partly eaten chicken patty in the Hudson Middle School cafeteria last week and put it on top of another student's backpack.

A surprisingly lively-looking webzine called "Federal Computer Week" advocates CIA PhotoShop pranking: http://www.fcw.com:80/pubs/fcw/1998/0525/fcw-frontrspies-5-25-1998.html [NewsTracker test]

Advanced software tools can manipulate photographs and videos to create images based on events and situations that never occurred, which can, in turn, be broadcast to foreign countries via the Internet. For example, intelligence agencies may wish to convince a world leader that a massive invasion is imminent by broadcasting manipulated video news clips depicting the presence of a large military force -- much larger than actually exists.

And spells out how the govt connects to the Internet by satellite: http://www.fcw.com:80/pubs/fcw/1998/0525/fcw-frontremote-5-25-1998.html

The 2.8-meter dishes provide USIA and embassy personnel with 128 kilobits/sec of dedicated access to the Internet, desktop videoconferencing, diplomatic cables, online databases and agency records.

And offers specs on crime-fighting systems: http://www.fcw.com:80/pubs/fcw/1998/anniversary/frame.htm

The database of 17 files has more than 10 million individual records, plus 27 million criminal histories in the Interstate Identification Index.

     Interstate ID Index      27.2 million records
     Stolen securities         2.5 million
     Stolen guns               2.3 million
     Stolen articles           2.0 million
     Stolen vehicles           1.5 million
     Stolen license plates       791,000
     Wanted persons              458,000
     Missing Persons              98,700
     Stolen boats                 34,000
     Gang and Terrorist            6,300
     Unidentified Persons          3,700

French "Photo" offers animated Cannes pix: [multipage, mild nudity] http://www.photo.fr/cannes98/index.html (if you only have time for one, try this:) http://www.photo.fr/cannes98/24h/16mai98/6.html