Robot Wisdom WebLog for September 1998 (waxing)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1891, in A Portrait, little Stevie caught a fever.

Two hours of digital memos for $185: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/np/tnwnp0159.html

Marley's holy ghost: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/6/25632.html

On native American reservations, they dance round totem poles in celebration of his spirit. Aborigines in the Australian outback and Maoris in rural New Zealand look to him as a prophet against oppression.

Authorities on reggae consider the 1967-72 period to be Marley's finest, and, until now, it has been available only in the most piecemeal form.

Would Dvorak's killer app have prevented the current economic collapse, by inspiring increased consumption??? http://www.bostonglobe.com/globe/search/stories/books/david_landes.htm [ALD]

The prime cause of the Great Depression, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, another Cantabridgian, was not lagging productivity but lagging consumption.

The Landes Principle of Economic Determinism is this: A people that works very hard, husbands wealth, avoids calcification of the scientific-technological and administrative arteries, keeps both elites and laborers from getting too grabby, invests in what we call research and development, and accommodates to market forces -- such a people will become rich and may, for a few generations, dominate the world.

How the OED looks in HTML: http://proto.oed.com/SAMPLES/oedrand.html [ALD]

A sociobiology of war: http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/scitech/docs/wars29.htm [ALD]

Mesquida said the "young male" explanation "brings a new way to look at conflict -- from the bottom up instead of top down." Better yet, it could enable scientists to predict violence-prone areas...

Yay! A rich academic weblog: http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/ [ProgRev]

Arts & Letters Daily is published Monday through Saturday. ... We will continue to pan and sift from among the most intellectually stimulating sites on the Internet, updating daily. ... New links are added at or near the tops of sections, with older ones sliding down the columns accordingly. Most items will continue to be available for three or more days.

Dvorak is tired of waiting for a new killer app: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

Maybe once we integrate what we have already, we can get back on the fast track.

Still a few bugs in speech recognition: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/speech98/sayagain.html

 What the testers said     What the programs heard 
  "Cupertino, California"     Have signed the Liberty Bell
  "How to Win Friends"        Ottawa and France

Foresight Exchange: I've been taking a terrible beating with my three big bets against Clinton, Yeltsin, and Castro. So I closed my accounts on the first two and bet it all on the Dow hitting 7000 before 11/30/99, which seems like the surest bet by a long shot: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx/main.html

Why organic milk costs twice as much: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/1019/6209122a.htm

...as "organic" cows, they eat a special diet including plenty of protein and antioxidant-rich sunflower and linseed meal. When they get sick, they're treated with alternative medicine -- hand-milking, massages and homeopathic teat treatments.

Lucid explanation of how Long-Term Capital leveraged its derivatives into the abyss: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1019/6209052a.htm

The fund got into this bet to capitalize on the tiny spread in yields between the two maturities. Tiny indeed. In June the difference was just five basis points -- a 29-year, $1,000 bond yielding 50 cents a year more than a 30-year bond.

(Sounds like 1929 to me...)

Not my thing: http://www.word.com/

A good morning for the Moonies at WashPost: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

To the dismay of her fellow Democrats, a candidate for the Florida state House claims her Republican opponent is an impostor who has assumed the identity of a dead man.

Nerve backed off their male-nude-of-the-day threat, and substituted a lush female series: http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/

Drudge had a busy weekend: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Another of my fave 60s singers, Daisy DeBolt of Fraser & DeBolt, has a website: http://www.inforamp.net/~dbprod/index.html

Last night I saw
the strangest thing
as I lay on
the forest floor
The sun was in the mountains
and the sun was in the sky

and on the other side, the clouds were blue
there was two rainbows, they said that you
were coming home

I think http://www.altavista.digital.com/ has stopped working, in favor of www.altavista.com (Nope, false alarm.)

Viola! http://www.newsweek.com/ (Zzzzzz....)

Millennial history reaches Crusades: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day48.html

The fashion of the day at William's court was undoubtedly effeminate: men wore trimmed beards and long, flowing hair. Women's gowns had exaggeratedly long sleeves which had to be knotted to prevent them trailing on the ground, while men's tunics were so tight that their wearers could not walk naturally.

New Consortium tallies NY Times' lies about the Dark Alliance scandal: http://www.consortiumnews.com/consor26.html

Mainstream publications later joined the fun. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch sniffed the mood when it mocked Kerry as a "randy conspiracy buff."

Satellite radio preview: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/100498a.htm

Satellite radio will initially require car users to purchase a small radio "card" that will fit in the cassette or CD slot on a conventional car radio, and a silver-dollar size satellite dish with an adhesive back to attach outside the car. The total cost of equipment is expected to be around $200.

Indie movies from video: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981003S0002

"If you want to start a studio, you basically need a laptop and a video camera, and that's about it," said Simon Dixon... Many new software programs let filmmakers take video footage and make it look like film, Dixon said.

Dull WPost BookWorld: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/m-bookworld.html

Ain't-It-Cool seems to be offline: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/section.cgi?type=Coolnews

Censored Thirties animation: http://www.ottawacitizen.com:80/entertainment/981003/1910565.html

One of them, Spies, written by Theodore Geisel (aka Doctor Seuss) was "quite racy, but it was considered OK for the troops. These films would include nudity and sexual innuendo. In one of them, someone says, 'It was cold enough to freeze the nuts off a Jeep.'"

New approach to publishing the Bible: http://www.irish-times.com:80/irish-times/paper/1998/1003/fea7.html

...The Words of the Wise, a Pocket Canon of 12 books from the old and new testaments, eclectically introduced by writers from scientist Stephen Rose to novelists and critics A.S. Byatt, Will Self, Blake Morrison and Fay Weldon. The books are beautifully made, desirable as fetishes, covered with clean black-and-white images from photographic libraries such as Magnum.

TV 2nite: Sheryl Crow on SNL

Five clever timely cigar jokes: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Oct/clinton.html

The Iris Murdoch sisters

Another sweet Iris Murdoch eulogy: http://www.irish-times.com:80/irish-times/paper/1998/1003/fea2.html

Later, her overwhelming fear of trees means that they can never visit the bluebells in Wytham Wood again.

(I used PhilG's PhotoShop trick, yesterday below, to brighten up this jpeg, and I recommend it extremely-- but you can skip the Auto-Levels step:)

In Photoshop, start with the Levels command to see a histogram of the intensities in the image. Note that there is probably nothing at either the full white or full black ends of the spectrum. ...manually slide the white point a bit to the left and the black point a bit to the right.

Cool see-thru PalmPilot: http://home.t-online.de/home/PSPilot/pppccase.htm [Slashdot]

Ungenerous Joni profile: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article2.html [OSRR]

In discussing her autobiography in the works, she will explain that there is no way to fit her life into one volume. She needs to do it in four. (She already knows the first line: I was the only black man at the party; colleagues say she sometimes feels "like a black man in a white woman's body.")

"I'm not a pitiable creature," she says. "It's just that I suffer very eloquently."

"I'm responsible to the company, and the company wants me to tour. In the meantime I'm probably going to lose 20 songs, by being cooperative to the game."

From rec.arts.books: [Deja URL]

Chomsky's 3874 citations in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period and the eighth most cited source overall ... The top ten sources during the period were: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel, and Cicero.

It's a small Web after all: aboriginal web-babe Eve Andersson is one of PhilG's half-mil-a-year ArsDigita smarties: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~eveander/

OSRR links to these two summaries of new Monica tidbits: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/03/111l-100398-idx.html and http://www.nypostonline.com/news/6233.htm

Beyond the serious business of perjury and obstruction-of-justice allegations, the tapes sound like a bad David Mamet play, replete with everyday banalities: how Lewinsky made pumpkin soup, how she went for her favorite doughnuts, how she can't stand her diet anymore...

Continuing PhilG: [multipage] http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/user-tracking.html

We don't yet know his e-mail address, but only because he hasn't yet visited a guestbook page served by clickthrough.photo.net.

Secure in the knowledge that this chapter will seem laughable 10 years from now when cellular telephones come standard with 6 GB of RAM, I'd better note that computers in 1998 were generally only capable of addressing a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, which would cost about $20,000.

My favorite course to teach at MIT is 6.041, a probability class designed by Al Drake, one of the fully-human human beings that never seem to get past tenure committees these days.

Anne and her friends had, in one afternoon, completed virtually the entire annual research agenda of at least two MIT professors (neither in my department, I'm relieved to note). ... Joe doesn't want Anne's system recommending a bunch of sissy books about people helping each other when he could be reading about a perfect society where rich people rent rather than loan their cars to friends.

"...By combining these data, AT&T can go to a travel agency and say 'For $100 each, we can give you the names of people who drive by your office every day, who've called airline 800 numbers more than three times in the last month, who have not called any other travel agencies, and who have spent more than $10,000 on travel in the last year.'"

The Census Bureau and the Security APL stock quote folks did not intend for their pages to be machine-parsable. Yet I don't need a long program to pull the numbers that I want out of a page designed for reading by humans.

Note that I did my surfing some time after the bug had become common knowledge yet companies such as DIGITAL, Arthur Andersen, banks, etc. had not patched their servers.

Grizzled old hackers tell of going into insurance companies in the 1960s. The typical computer cost at least $500,000 and held data of great value. When Cromwell & Jeeves Insurance needed custom software, they didn't say, "Maybe we can save a few centimes by hiring a team of guys in India." They hired the best programmers they could find from MIT and didn't balk at paying $10,000 for a week of hard work. Back in those days, $10,000 was enough to hire a manager for a whole year, a fact not lost on managers who found it increasingly irksome.

She could reflect on the fact that the air traffic controllers up in the tower are still using software from the 1960s because the FAA can't get their new pile of C code to work -- billions of dollars, 15 years, and acres of cubicles stuffed with $50,000-per-year programmers wasn't good for much besides a lot of memory allocation bugs.

"As we enter the 21st century we find that rifle marksmanship has been largely lost in the military establishments of the world. The notion that technology can supplant incompetence is upon us in all sorts of endeavors, including that of shooting."

My personal theory is that the ascendance of C++ is responsible for the floundering of object databases. Anyone intelligent can quickly write a highly reliable program in Smalltalk or Common Lisp. But the world embraced C++, a language in which almost nobody has ever managed to write a reliable program.

At noon, an ugly mob of users assembles outside your office, angered by your introduction of frames and failure to include WIDTH and HEIGHT tags on IMGs....

No amount of marketing hype suffices to make a C program work as advertised. That goes for an RDBMS just as much as for a word processor.

How much can it cost you to be out of date? Amazon.com has a market capitalization of $5.75 billion (August 10, 1998). They built their site with compiled C CGI scripts connecting to a relational database. You could not pick a tool with a less convenient development cycle. You could not pick a tool with lower performance (forking CGI then opening a connection to the RDBMS). They worked around the slow development cycle by hiring very talented programmers. They worked around the inefficiencies of CGI by purchasing massive Unix boxes ten times larger than necessary. Wasteful? Sure...

Very badly engineered products, like DOS or Windows, have poorly defined abstraction barriers. That means that almost every useful application program written for DOS or Windows will depend intimately on the details of those operating systems. It means more work for Microsoft programmers because they can't clean up the guts of the system, but paradoxically a monopoly software supplier can make more money if their products are badly engineered in this way.

PhilG's e-commerce chapter: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ecommerce.html

Companies that are selling direct for the first time will immediately realize that they now have access to their dream data. They can figure out, down to the individual consumer, who is buying what and how often. About two days after the business folks realize this, they will turn to the nerds and say "build us a lifetime customer value management system."

David Difficult has ordered custom products 8 times before and returned them each time. He did not include the original packing material on 6 of those returns and damaged the product cosmetically 3 times. Give him a "server busy, please try again later" page.

Their accounting/ordering system was a turnkey software package for academic publishers. It was coded originally for the Data General Nova 16-bit minicomputer. As these computers were no longer manufactured, the software was running on a IBM PC emulating the old Nova instruction set. To someone raised in the Oracle/Unix tradition, this sounds kind of insane but in fact nearly all academic publishers run the same software. None of them do enough volume to justify developing a replacement package.

I explained that, of the four queries, the last one would take the longest. If we wanted to have a site that felt responsive, we'd absolutely have to avoid making the entire page an HTML table. The user shouldn't notice that the LIKE query was taking a second or two because he'd be reading the top part of the page. ... I went over to mitpress.mit.edu just now to make sure of exactly where in the page Ben had put in the split table. I found that the site has been redesigned a bit since that meeting. Each book page is a navigation header plus one big HTML table so that the user stares at a blank screen while Illustra grinds. Oh well...

One downside of this approach is that you'll be forced to maintain a highly secure Web server/database containing customer credit card numbers.

If the user hits reload five times, it looks to the merchant's database just the same as five actual orders.

To the extent that CyberCash is tricky, it is mostly because the credit card world is archaic and tricky.

The processor says "zip code matched but address did not" or "nothing matched". The merchant has to decide whether or not to take the risk of shipping the good.

Getting rich on the Internet isn't cheap. Here's what it cost us to get set up with BankBoston plus Cybercash:
- $375 to set up a merchant account with BankBoston
- $40/month to BankBoston or 4.8% of the total transactions, whichever is larger
- $595 setup fee to Cybercash
- $40/month to Cybercash plus 20 cents/authorization

Actually it turns out that are about 7,000 taxing jurisdictions in the United States and 17,000 different tax rates. ...the cost of building a sales tax compliance department may wipe out many years of profits from Internet sales.

The 11 cases in which both address and five-digit zip codes match looks pretty good until you look at our our source code and note that we neither solicit the card billing street address from the customer nor do we ever provide any street address to CyberCash.

I've written a little bit elsewhere in this book about how to make an Oracle installation that never loses committed transactions, even if a disk drive fails. Suffice it to say that you probably need at least 8 physical disk drives plus a full-time staff person...

In fact, it seems like that ecommerce will mostly add to the discontents of civilization ("we already killed Downtown; now let's go after the Mall").

Summary: Ecommerce is at once mind-numbingly boring and terrifyingly difficult. It turns out to be a miracle that most businesses operate successfully at all.

Catching up on Rat Sludge: (series started 6 Aug) http://www.ctoons.com/static/brenda/19980903.html

This Day in History: In 1879, Wallace Stevens was born:

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

Excellent long profile of Mr Selfish Gene: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/3/25080.html

"I was stunned by the stellar performance of someone so new on the scene, and relatively unknown. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. His topic? A relatively esoteric problem of how best to determine the colour a chick preferred." The highlight, Barlow recalls, was Dawkins' demonstration of a little box chicken he had built, which electronically duplicated the way the chick distributed pecks. "He brought the house down. I figured if he could make such an abstract and potentially deadly dull question so fascinating, he was certainly going to make his mark."

About Lalla Ward, his third wife, Dawkins talks very happily indeed. She is the pretty former Dr Who sidekick Romana... [Pic source]

New Science News looks good

If your attention-span hasn't glazed over, here's the new Starr horde: http://www.cnn.com/icreport/report2/

Greenspun recommends this showcase of clever banner ads: [multipage] http://www.eyescream.com/work/21.html

PhilIP Greenspun says the 2nd edition of his brilliant, hilarious online web-design book is 70% new: [multipage] http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ (Sabren, the Community chapter is all about user-database design.)

If you're interested in how people charge for these services, then the brand new ecommerce chapter will appeal to you. I learned things about credit card processing that I never wanted to know.

In an all-new chapter on community, this book describes a comprehensive technical and social approach to building community sites in which the database works harder so that the moderators can relax.

If you can anticipate user questions and make sure that your site answers them, then you will be a successful Web publisher. ... For a glimpse of what a corporate site looks like when a company thinks about existing customers, look at www.ge.com. They have advertisments, yes, but also owner's manuals and installation guides for every GE product.

What would make a great Laboratory for Computer Science site is a collaboratively produced, collaboratively taught history of computer science.

As soon as two users ask the same question, you should beef up your site to answer it unattended... Why not go the extra mile and hack the CGI scripts so that the search engine sends you e-mail when a query results in zero matches? Given information about which user queries are failing, you can add content or keywords as appropriate.

Taxonomic botany based on an oral culture or a computer system capable of showing multiple views would look completely different. ... Compared to the texture of the cocktail party, the New York Times article sounds like two rich old white guys saying more or less the same thing.

The Internet has reduced distribution cost to zero. So take every document that you've ever distributed to anyone and put it on your site.

The Media Lab, one of the last groups at MIT to put up a Web site, had no real Internet culture.

The Web and the idea of Web-based services is so powerful that a few days of work by a good programmer is sufficient to make something better than Microsoft has managed to produce in 10 years using the "herd of losers building desktop apps" approach. Furthermore, I can design the system in a sufficiently clean and perspicuous manner that I won't have to charge for it.

Traditional travel publishers don't even try to give consumers the most critical information, e.g., "How did the last 100 people who went there like it?"

In an efficient world, the management of Barnes & Noble and Borders would have surfed the amazon site early in 1995, had clone sites up on the Web by July 1995, and put Amazon out of business by December 1995. ...The saddest thing about the Barnes & Noble site was that they had swallowed whole a dollop of MIT Media Lab hype and bought the Firefly system...

Amazon referral stats:
Week Ending    Clickthrus   Sales    Referral Fee
Sept 28, 1996     2872        3         $5.76
May 3, 1997       1943       10        $32.57
July 25, 1998     1829       17        $82.56

Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, would have called computer science "pre-paradigmatic". Since we don't agree on enough fundamentals, it isn't possible to make progress with papers describing incremental discoveries. Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary books.

It looks as though every ArsDigita software developer who is willing to work full time will grow into a $500,000 a year job.

My personal metric for every project now is "If I give this idea away to 100,000 people on my Web site and they all run with it, is it still worth doing?"

A community is a group of people with varying degrees of expertise in which the experts attempt to help the novices improve their skills. ... If you still feel that physical communities must always be superior to electronically linked communities, let me ask you to ponder three words: junior high school.

In practice, nearly all commercial community site publishers are losing money because the cost per user to maintain the site is too high.

My favorite day in Internet banner advertising was September 20, 1998. CNN's NetGravity server delivered a banner ad depicting a new BMW zooming through a blurred landscape. The article underneath was indeed automobile-related: "Duchess of York's mother dies in car crash."

The most useful and innovative services of all are often algorithms specified by users that run on the publisher's server, e.g., "send me mail every Monday and Thursday nights if there are any new articles by my friend Judy".

... (note that nobody ever points out the absurdity of putative Internet experts physically flying their bodies around the globe rather than using some kind of db-backed Web site and video conferencing to support collaboration) ...

An XML document is like one record in a database management system. XML is therefore useful if you want to ship a record from one database to another, but it doesn't really help you build the entire database.

After you've tarted up your site with frames, graphics, and color, check the server log to see how much traffic has fallen. Then ask yourself whether you shouldn't have thought about user interface stability.

Before you spend money on animation, Java, or authoring content for a plug-in, think about whether you couldn't buy the on-line rights to an interesting book on your Web site's subject.

As noted in the "Making Money" chapter, my personal site costs close to $1 million a year to operate.

Everything important about Web design is on pages 146 to 149 of Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997; Graphics Press).

- Learn to program XML in 21 years by periodically checking W3C and ArborText to see if anyone has done anything useful with the language.

Most Web publishers never take advantage of the monitor's ability to represent a wide range of tones. Rather than starting with the original slide or negative, they slap a photo down on a flatbed scanner.

In Photoshop, start with the Levels command to see a histogram of the intensities in the image. Note that there is probably nothing at either the full white or full black ends of the spectrum. Try pushing the Auto Levels button. If the results are too radical, undo it and manually slide the white point a bit to the left and the black point a bit to the right.

How much does advertising cost? Web publishers seem to be able to charge between one and ten cents per impression (showing the banner ad to a user) and over a dollar per click-through (when a user actually clicks on the banner).

Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles:
- Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work.
- Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
- PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.

If you're on your own T1 line, you'll find that 2 million hits/day for 7 KB files (typical size for a small JPEG image) will just fill it up.

My personal IP-over-cable experience has been with MediaOne in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I get 1.5 Mbps down and 300 Kbps up for $40/month, unlimited access.

Yay! I'm having a radar-maintenance day-- moving stuff to Mind-It and updating my local start page, looking around for ignored monthlies.

Kennebec on ark: [Deja URL]

I recently worked in the classroom with an autistic seven year old whose entire vocabulary consisted of the words "Scooby Doo". He has a beautiful slightly skewed view of the world ... This child took an interest last week in the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly. A breakthrough! Communication! Since his vocabulary was so limited I passed him a box of markers and urged him to draw. He quickly sketched a huge Scooby Doo face, but he replaced the mutt's ears with the orange and black wingspan of the Monarch butterfly.

Space-anomaly explanation proposed: http://www.spaceviews.com/1998/10/01d.html [NASA Watch]

This energy is radiated into space evenly in all directions, so it imparts no net force on the spacecraft. However, some of the infrared radiation is reflected off the back of the high-gain antenna of each spacecraft, imparting a small net force in the opposite direction.

TV 2nite: PBS Mystery looks promising: (Awesome!) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/programs/evil/

New The Nation includes Greider on the economic crisis

FOIA paydirt: http://www.seattleweekly.com/goings_on/books/crowley1001/index.html [OSRR]

Four years later, and two years after my book came out, a package with the heft of a telephone directory arrived...

(There's a good book I read recently by Timothy Garton Ash, a Brit who got his East German file, called "The File".)

Disappointing interview with Martin Amis: [Messy URL]

"...A long time after he told us about the birds and the bees, Kingsley said to my brother and me, when we were 16, 17, that the experience of sex was hugely magnified by love. After that my brother and I were dying to fall in love for the sex, for the better sex."

A child, says Amis, is heaven and hell wrapped in a nappy...

This Day in Joyce History: In 1906, James first proposed Ulysses as a short story.

TV 2nite: Liz Phair on Leno; Billy Bragg on Conan

The first half of this 30-min RealAudio is a good Michael Parenti talk on capitalism: http://www.igc.apc.org/MakingContact/

September Harper's Index is surprisingly lame: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Percentage change since 1996 in the income of North Dakota farmers : -98

New New Scientist

A nice satellite weather URL: http://weather.yahoo.com/graphics/satellite/US.html [via NASA Watch]

NASA Watch calls this a senator INaction figure: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9809/29/glenn.toy.ap/

Mattel says the scale model goes on sale in mid- to late October. The miniature senator is wearing a navy suit and red tie.

First they make you depressed, then they make you stupid! http://www.examiner.com/980929/0929computers.shtml [OSRR]

The research noted a 20 percent drop in test scores for fourth-grade students who used classroom computers more frequently. Frequent use of home computers resulted in a 26 percent reduction.

I've concluded XML is a non-starter for doing AI on the Web: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/structure.html

Trendwatch: the Mediaeval Baebes: http://www.canoe.ca:80/JamMusic/sep27_baebes.html

The reason for all this nervous controversy is because the Baebes have committed the grievous sin of singing music from the swinging '60s - the 1360s - and happening to be 12 sexy young women while doing it.

Yay! NewsTracker is un-wedged

TV 2nite: Monica Lewinsky on Leno?!; Frontline on the Somalia fiasco [no webpage yet, but here are future-show previews] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/

Obscure Store transcribes Broder speaking out on Salon: http://www.obscurestore.com/

"Unlike other Members of Congress who have been very outspoken in their moralizing about Clinton's behavior, Henry Hyde maintained a very gentlemanly silence, he did not talk about this ... so there was no hypocrisy."

More Drudge bombshells: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

President Clinton's former political consultant Dick Morris told the grand jury that "the White House maintains an operation to intimidate women who have had affairs with the president."

Here's that Proust-comic story, finally: [Messy URL]

"The world would be a better place if everyone had read Proust. There would be more kindness, and extremism ... would no longer be possible."

Besides insomnia, Proust suffered from asthma, constipation, sensitive skin, a runny nose, altitude sickness (at Versailles, which is 83 meters above Paris) and many other ailments, and he liked his underpants done up very tight at night, De Botton recounts.

Nashville paper uncovers nuclear nightmare: http://www.tennessean.com/sii/longterm/oakridge/part3/stories/nukmain.shtml [Drudge]

He is one of 410 people in 11 states interviewed by The Tennessean who are experiencing a pattern of unexplained immune, respiratory and neurological problems attacking their bodies and minds.

Don't miss: Excellent Joni Mitchell interview: [I'd quote the whole thing!] [multipage] http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/lmds367.htm (agc)

"When record companies went public, the records became poker chips. Once the stock market is involved, you're pandering to the lowest common denominator, and there are fewer people at the label to champion a good song. Look back at the Grammy song-of-the-year winners of the last 10 years. It's tragic."

Night after night, Mitchell called him from her yard and anxiously waited. The song's delicate sounds mimic what she heard: the rustling of leaves, bird songs, the drone from a distant freeway.

Like stealing candy from a liberal: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=131

For the first three years, Larson didn't steal a cent. Which isn't to say he didn't think about it. "It's always a temptation when you can write checks and you can sign them," Larson admits. But he managed to keep the temptation at bay until August 1995, when he got wrapped up in the idea of putting out a publication of his own -- one "centered on radio programming," sort of a TV Guide for listeners. He planned to call it "RadioActive Chicago."

(It's better than the "Scotch Boutique"...!)

UPI:

A new study released yesterday by the Military Toxics Project says traces of uranium are still showing up in urine samples of Persian Gulf veterans -- eight years after the war ended.

South Korea's pain: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_182000/182463.stm

Each week, around 10,000 people lose their job, about 90 businesses fail, and in the first three months of the year around 2,300 people committed suicide.

Another long detailed messy piece on music via the Net: [Messy URL]

On Web sites like MusicMaker.com, a visitor can page through more than 100,000 legally licensed tracks by a wide range of artists, pick out favorites and have the Internet company create a made-to-order CD.

A great essay on porting Linux to the 68k Macs: http://roadrunner.swansea.uk.linux.org/macpaper.html [via Slashdot]

Certain folks have speculated that embarrasment is the main reason for Apple Computer releasing so little documentation. The Macintosh platforms in general have positively stone age design features. For example the interrupt controllers on a Macintosh II are a pair of 6522 VIA chips, intended for use with the 8bit 6502 processor. Stupid hardware makes for poor performance unless carefully handled.

I learned several things in the process notably that the Macintosh screen memory isn't located where the hardware claims until you set up the MMU. I also made the amazing discovery that the rounded corners on the Macintosh display are drawn in software.

Making a free software port work seems to be about having a small number of people willing to take the project the first 50% of the way. Once you hit this point the project gathers momentum of its own accord. Even when it's something is pointless as Linux on a Macintosh II.

No Thanks:
Steve Jobs - For refusing to let anyone else pass on Mac 68K documentation
Steve Jobs - For refusing to let anyone else pass on NeXT cube documentation
Steve Jobs - For refusing to provide any documentation about the Newton to the Linux ARM project

Excite confirms (by email) that NewsTracker is wedged, at the moment.

Juicy new Village Voice includes a great piece on surveillance cams: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/40aboal.shtml

Quark specializes in souping up stuffed animals for use in monitoring nannies. A favorite hiding place is Barney's foot.

And just as images of Bill Clinton leading a young woman into his private alcove ended up on Fox News, so can your most private moments if they are deemed newsworthy -- as one Santa Monica woman learned to her horror when footage of her lying pinned inside a crashed car, begging to know if her children had died, ended up as infotainment.

Daddy was a sitar god: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/columns/40agoldstein.shtml

But Ravi's star pupil is his daughter, who has been learning the sitar from him since she was seven or eight. Tutoring his own child was a new experience for the master -- "like molding soft wax instead of hard rock."

He might put it more gingerly, but he has never tired of reminding journalists that dope and raga don't mix: "If you get high, you will hear the wrong things."

Sneak of Demme's "Beloved" (with Oprah): http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2216

Now Thandie Newton is most certainly on my "TO DO" list, but seeing her with insects covering her and crawling in and out of her mouth made me rethink that....naw, I'd still do her even with the bugs...

The new Boardwatch table of contents: [multipage!?!?!?] http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/sep/fable.html

(Geez, guys, why not go all the way and have a separate ToC-page for each article? Think of all the extra ads you can cram!) >:^(

The new Fast Company table of contents: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/18/index.html

Fool me twice: I switched to Netscape 4.5b2 (Mac)... and it seems to draw tables in some new way that freezes multitasking cold. Yuk!

Meta: If you just started using the Nude-of-the-Day link, above, they've been having problems the last few days... and they say they're switching to male nudes for the next few weeks.

Yay! A search engine for world-press editorials: http://www.opinion-pages.org/ [CopperSky]

(It's hard to tell what paper they're from, unless the URL is obvious.)

Been there, done that, didn't get caught! (ca 1977): http://enquirer.com/editions/1998/09/28/loc_zoo28.html [OSRR]

Five University of Cincinnati students were charged with trespassing Sunday after they allegedly entered the Cincinnati Zoo and attempted to help themselves to some free camel rides -- at 3 in the morning.

(I wonder if it's the same camel?)

Daddy was a billionaire: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1012/6208132a.htm

"I've never spoken about this, so I have to be careful," says Howard Buffett, taking a long, deep breath.

When the Buffett family dines at a restaurant, Howard's sister always takes the bill and adds the tip -- Dad can't be trusted to tip generously enough.

Satellite-twinkle visible with naked eye: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/092898/health1_26533_noframes.html

When sunlight hits at a certain angle, an Iridium casts a brilliant reflection up to 30 times brighter than Venus, reaching a patch on Earth of about 20 square miles. ...The brightest flares can even be seen through clouds, in daylight or from the inner city.

Search-nightmares: My.Excite's headlines included a great Reuters piece on the new Proust comic (6 Sept below) but I suspected the URL would expire quickly so I went looking for a stabler copy... but neither NewsTracker nor NewsBot (nor NewsHub) had registered it yet, and TotalNews only had an untrustworthy LA Times copy. Then I went to AltaVista and HotBot looking for a publisher's page that might include a sample image... but almost the only page that turned up was my weblog! I expect it just means that My.Excite updates their headlines much quicker than their search index... so I'll be able to deliver a URL shortly.

Uh-oh: NewsTracker is still stalled!?!

Salon shoots its star(r) reporter: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1998-09/29/071r-092998-idx.html [Drudge]

Salon Editor David Talbot, the story's author, demanded his resignation after Jonathan Broder responded to a call from The Washington Post by saying: "I objected to it on journalistic grounds, on grounds of fairness and because of the way Salon would be perceived."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1934, Lucia was transferred to Jung's clinic.

TV 2nite: Peter Jennings looks at VR-training for heart surgeons on the 5:30 news; Elvis Costello on Letterman, with Bacharach; PBS reruns a good American Experience on the 1918 flu epidemic

An autistic poet: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/29/24366.html

Big, strong, white belted cows, I adore looking at you, to put my arm across your bold girth.

Working across a wide field together, chewing grass simultaneously like rain, on a sunny day with the blue of the sky.

They look at you slowly and calmly.

Their tongues would caress you as they come near if you sit with them, lying down in the heat of the day, eyes looking at you in curiosity all together knowingly belong.

Drudge previews an incriminating Tripp-tape: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Mind-It is telling me there's a new Boardwatch and a new Fast Company

Nerve's forum seems to have crashed and burnt: http://www.nervemag.com/voicebox/puberty/

Cheap LCDs for hardware hackers: http://www.eio.com/lcdprodt.htm [Slashdot]

Inventory of European tree-rings: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/historyrings980928.html

The samples have included a piece of an ancient Turkish coffin lid, boxwood from a first-century-B.C. Roman boat, and scorched timbers from a carpenter's workshop -- smothered by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

It's this process that Kuniholm hopes to push all the way back to 7500 B.C. Even now, he says he can date wood from 2660 B.C to 627 B.C., if he's right in asserting that a volcano erupted on the Aegean island of Thera in 1627 B.C. and that a particularly thick ring in his samples corresponds to that event.

How stuff works: (animated gifs) http://www.howstuffworks.com/

How a GPS Receiver Works - GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers tell you where you are anywhere on the planet. Click here to learn what they do and how they work!

Doug Adams's Mac-development woes: http://www2.starshiptitanic.com/game/mac.html [OS]

If you want to understand exactly what Apple has squandered over the years, how they have almost systematically set about alienating their developers, their distributors and their users through a mixture of arrogance, greed and incompetence, then you could do a lot worse than read Jim Carlton's book, which those people I know who work for Apple (or used to work for Apple - everybody I know bar one has resigned or been fired) say is devastatingly accurate.

Alt.folklore.computers discusses IBM culture, and their employee country clubs: [Deja URL]

Back in the early seventies, IBM would offer live entertainment at bargain prices, bringing acts like Kenny Rogers and Ferrante and Teischer into an intimate auditorium that sat perhaps 300 people.

Yo, Raphael: I miss your poetry links!

A much better report on the new Shakespeare (yesterday below): http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/28/24209.html

Strikingly, a line from Edward III -- Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds -- is echoed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 94. Mr Sams said that when he saw a production of the play by Theatr Clywd in 1987 the audience gasped and finished the line for the actor.

Grady Ward did a great series of free NLP utilties called the Moby Lexicons (Moby Words, Moby Pronunciator, Moby Part-of-Speech, Moby Thesaurus, Moby Shakespeare, etc): http://www.amcity.com/sanjose/stories/092898/story6.html [OSRR]

And on Sept. 15, the church announced that online critic Grady Ward, a software developer from Arcata, had lost a suit filed by Scientology in Federal District Court in San Jose. In the settlement, Mr. Ward agreed to pay Scientology $200 a month for the rest of his life, for posting copyrighted teachings of the church online.

He's still posting on ars: [Deja pattern, zillions of messages] In fact, still fighting: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=394080884

So you admit that 52 such suits would wipe out the yearly income from Clearwater. OK. Remember, we haven't finished playing the litigation game, yet.

Here's his homepage, with links to the Moby stuff: http://www.Geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/2868/GradyWard/

Current Project: Resisting Scientology's Attack on the Internet

More free mailinglist sites: http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/advi_092798.html [CopperSky]

For example, Reference.com and eScribe offer list owners a searchable Web interface for archives of mailing lists. And eGroups offers both archiving and hosting of lists, free.

Somalia-vs-the-UN as a libertarian success story?!? http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.31/somalia.html

But now, for the first time in our century, a whole nation has reclaimed its sovereignty. Rather than defecting from its central government, it dismantled it! For eight years now, the Somalis have successfully resisted the huge pressure of the United Nations to re-establish a central government in their midst.

Mailer on Clinton: http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.31/mailer_lewin.html

Asked if the Starr report is too much freedom of speech, Mailer replied, "No, no, no, no. I thought it was rather an interesting document. I thought, 'There's a guy who is afraid of his wife.' It made him human to me."

My-Excite NewsTracker has seemed stalled for the last few days

Zippy is back after a week off: http://www.sfgate.com/sf/zippy/

This Day in Joyce History: In 1898, James wrote a first-year essay "Force" demonstrating his Jesuitical skill at making a topic "easy to survey and to judge":

...After these subjugations of the elements, we come to the subjugation of animals. ... The next important subjugation is that of race over race. Among human families the white man is the predestined conqueror. ...has brought about the enduring rule foretold, of kindness over all the good, for ever, in a new subjugation.

New Shakespeare play identified [Messy URL for article, via Explorator] and it's already online [Messy URL for play]

Robert of Artoys banisht though thou be,
From Fraunce thy natiue Country, yet with vs,
Thou shalt retayne as great a Seigniorie:
For we create thee Earle of Richmond heere,
And now goe forwards with our pedegree,
Who next succeeded Phillip of Bew...

A silly compilation of suggestions for casting the movie version of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series: http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/sag.html

Charles Mitchell's Martin Scorsese Dream Team

Jack - Robert Di Niro
Stephen - Sean Penn
Killick - Joe Pesci
Sophie - Madonna
Diana - Sharon Stone

Sort-of request: I skimmed the Lewinsky transcripts this morning-- really depressing. I'd like to see the whole narrative summarised sympathetically, from her perspective, to understand her better and see how far BC used her.

A fun review of a ninja game for PlayStation: http://www.allaboutgames.com/x/x/2527/objinfo/8408386203

I think the stealth key is what's most attractive. In stealth mode you perform crouching rolls and slide along walls. This is a wonderful way of giving your character a 'third dimension' of motion rather than the normal walk/run combo. Even Lara Croft didn't have those moves and the camera work is truly inspired. Being able to look into a room before you enter it should be possible in every game, not just ninja titles.

A silly joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Sep/scientists.html

Naturally, the British government was not that easily impressed. They ordered their own scientists to dig even deeper. 100 meters down, they found small pieces of glass, and they soon announced that the ancient Brits 35,000 years ago already had a nationwide fibre net...

New Computer Gaming World trashes "Deer Hunter": http://www.gamespot.com/sports/deerhunt/review_cgw.html

Also, in the game, when you down a buck you are instantly transported to the trophy room to see your deer's mounted head - where's the field dressing?

Okay review of Bayley on Murdoch's decline: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/26/24033.html

It is no desperate tragedy, unless you insist on making a distinction between comedy and tragedy in order to keep your head straight -- that she now contentedly observes the Teletubbies.

And a forgotten bit of Monty Python history: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/26/24029.html

"It was on the first day's filming when Mike was dressed as an Australian outback character," remembers Jones, "having to talk up close to camera about kangaroos' bottoms, that we suddenly realised he'd got to do this in German with an Australian accent and the full enormity of what we'd taken on hit us."

NetSkink looks at "My CD-Now": http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/19980925/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw/

"Gift registries are going to be the next e-commerce killer app."

New Science News

Decent John Carpenter interview: (huge fontsize) http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2185

A: Which of my scores do I like the most? Basically I'm an improvisational composer. I can't read or write music. So what I do is: I cut the movie, transfer it to video tape and I synchronize the 24-track recorder in the recording studio with the movie and start playing on synthesizer. What you're hearing or seeing is an improv. I have no idea where it comes from. Probably I smoke a joint or something and start playing...

Revenge of the elephant nerds: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/9/25/23627.html

A survey in the Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda in the 1930s showed that only 1 per cent of adult elephants were without tusks. Then it was regarded as a rare mutation. This year Eve Abe, of the Ugandan wildlife authority, found that 30 per cent of adult elephants in the same area were without tusks.

Tidbits at NASA Watch: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

"Alert! Alert! MSFC gave ISO 9000 coffee cups to all employees Wed. in celebration of our registration. At least one of these cups has failed structurally, splitting in half along a bond line that allowed loss of all the contents. If the company which manufactured the cups is ISO certified, then ALL the cups can be expected to fail in the identical mode (ISO doesn't result in GOOD quality remember, it results in CONSISTENT quality...)"

In the many times the President has landed at ARC in the past he has immediately sped out the gates to attend fundraisers or see his daughter at Stanford. It would seem that this sudden interest in actually meeting the folks who work next to the airstrip is part of a broader plan to place the President in front of "safe" crowds talking about anything but, well you know...

Elsewhere: http://www.irish-times.com:80/irish-times/paper/1998/0924/hom19.html

The Irish Commission for Justice and Peace (ICJP) has published a document calling for four new rights to be put into the Constitution... The four rights are a right to adequate housing; health; adequate nourishment; and an adequate standard of living.

Chiquita eavesdropper pleads guilty!?! http://enquirer.com/editions/1998/09/25/loc_chiquita25.html [OSRR]

Although Mr. Gallagher could face up to 2 1/2 years in prison and a $7,500 fine, the judge said the charges carry a "presumption of probation," because Mr. Gallagher has no prior convictions.

(Isn't there also a pending libel suit?)

Due today: The Nation

Columbia Journalism Review has yet another Chiquita piece, with a decent sidebar on the ethics of investigative reporting: http://www.cjr.org/year/98/5/hoyt.asp

(Their recent Tailwind piece was a disgraceful whitewash, though. And CJR is largely funded by Time-Warner )

A useful LeCarre fanpage: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8907/lecarre.html (rab)

Some numbers on the banner-ad model: http://www.canoe.ca/TechNewsExperts/readme.html

You need at least one million impressions per month to be taken seriously by advertisers, according to Elliot Noss, VP of Corporate Services for TUCOWS Interactive.

Lego hackers: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/15171.html [Slashdot]

"Lego Mindstorms hasn't told us how to download executables -- only byte-code programs," wrote reverse engineer Russell Nelson in an email. "There's no documentation for writing native-code language. But we'll figure out how to do our own firmware, before too long."

Request: Is there a good weblog for cool new space images? I want more like Friday's Whole Earth, but that site disappeared them the next day.

Meta: MindIt (Tues below) is doing great so far-- no false hits, and two good ones, both within hours of when my WebWatcher backup detected them.

New Lingua Franca includes a short bit on an academic insta-symposium about "Titanic": http://www.linguafranca.com/9809/ip.html

"As far as I know, nothing like this has been applied to a current film in such a short turnaround time," muses Sandler. "We gave contributors two and a half weeks for the abstract, two months to write the article. It would be perfect if it could come out immediately."

New New Scientist

The Village Voice adds a color Tom Tomorrow: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/39atomorrow.shtml

In the Guardian's millennial history, William the Conqueror is making big changes in England: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day36.html

Even in this early, turbulent, period of his reign, William was systematically imposing Norman ways on England. No more than 100,000 of his countrymen followed him from France, but they were a distinct race, with distinct advantages. Pampered with generous land grants, they settled down in scattered groups over all England, protected by a network of garrisons. Castles sprang up in key cities: Cambridge, Chester, Shrewsbury, Exeter -- and, of course, the Tower of London.

As is shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, Saxon-English and Norman men had very different ideas of facial fashion. The English favoured long flowing hair, moustaches and beards. The Normans, on the other hand, wore their hair cropped short, and shaved their faces.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1957, Oliver Gogarty (aka "Buck Mulligan") died.

TV 2nite: NBC's "Encore, Encore" co-stars Chicago's Glenne Headly

Slow-load olympics:

5- Feed                       30 secs
4- Obscure Store              33 secs
3- Slashdot                   35 secs
2- Ain't It Cool              50 secs
1- Online Journalism Review   58 secs

(This is how long it took to get control of the scrollbar on my sluggish PowerPC, with a 33.6 modem. Nielsen claims the mind wanders after ten seconds.)

Duplicate your favorite junk food at home: http://www.topsecretrecipes.com/recipes.htm [Slashdot]

They don't include Coke: http://www.nzine.co.nz/personalities/realthing.html

6 drams of fluid extract of coca...

I'd been meaning to find a good page-change notification service: http://mindit.netmind.com/addpages.shtml [CopperSky]

New Village Voice looks lively

Clinton reflections: What the USA needs, to grow from a young country into a mature one, is shared national trauma. Perhaps yesterday was one, and in consequence we'll pay less attention to sexual smear campaigns in future elections.... OSRR points to an awful quote from Starr about 'perverts' that's the first glimpse I've seen of that side of him (I paid no attention for the longest time). And RU Sirius's apologia (Sat, below) has connected the Clinton on the tapes to the one in "Primary Colors"-- basically a decent guy who was willing to make whatever compromises he had to, to get into office.

Quote of the day (paraphrased, alas):

"If in the end it turns out I'm wrong and there IS an afterlife, I'm sure I'll go to Heaven -- not for what I've done, but for what I've had to listen to." --James P. Cannon (American Communist)

Cf:

"Contracts are invalidated by violence done to 1 party therefore the social contract has no validity, for the individual is constrained by the violence of birth to enter the society of the living on their terms." --Joyce's notes for Cyclops, slightly paraphrased

Obscure Store supplies excellent post-video coverage (I'm still looking for a best-of-Lewinsky transcript.)

TV 2nite: Frontline's "Farmer's Wife" (did I miss anything in the last 90 mins? ;^)

New NY Review of Books includes powerful debate between the UFO investigators and their attacker, Crews (8 Jun below): [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998100853E1

So far as I know, Carl Sagan never became involved in the firsthand investigation of a single UFO abduction case, despite his frequent authoritative statements that UFO abductions can be easily explained away as psychological phenomena. And on the now infamous Nova program -- which so dishonestly distorted the evidence for UFO abductions -- he implied that he had personally investigated such cases and found the evidence to be lacking.

Among the other NYRB stories, the one on Wall Street seems dull, the one on China looks very good, the one on Kuhn seems longwinded (but if you don't know Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts, in the philosophy of science, it's a lucid intro).

New Consortium looks at Starr, etc

WebClog? I can't get thru to most major sites today, and where I have gotten thru I haven't found anything decent on the new video, etc. I'm half-watching the video on TV, though ...and I think Clinton wins every round, surprisingly enough.

The Cincy Enquirer's Clinton-hypocrisy: http://www.citybeat.com/issue/newsarticle4.html [OSRR]

I can think of no better description of the long-term effects of The Enquirer's capitulation to Chiquita than to borrow those words: We can never look at The Enquirer with respect or confidence again. It has recklessly sacrificed the things no newspaper can function without: credibility, moral authority and the trust of its readers. The Enquirer is a walking joke, a cowardly parody of a newspaper.

Analysing Clinton's hidden anger: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/21/058l-092198-idx.html [OSRR}

In his book, "Behind the Oval Office," former Clinton consultant Dick Morris described a scene in which advisers debated options as though the president were incidental. "I mean, I'm the president, so I get a vote, don't I? Don't I?" Clinton snapped.

Drudge previews the language of the tapes: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1913, the Saturday Review (UK) published Joyce's poem, "Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba":

I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!

O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.

Yay! Dan Bricklin likes my hypertext wing: http://www.gooddocuments.com/related/relatedhome.htm

Details on LEGO Mindstorms: http://www.mercurycenter.com:80/columnists/langberg/docs/tt092098.htm

Commands in RCX code look like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, and programs are built by connecting one piece to another. You can order motors to stop and start, for example, either in pre-timed bursts or in response to the sensors.

An intelligent update on director John Frankenheimer: http://www.canoe.ca:80/JamMovies/sep20_franken.html

Gary Sinise, who won an Emmy for the title role in George Wallace, had wanted to be cast in Ronin, but MGM felt he wasn't a big enough box-office draw. "That perception will certainly change. Gary is in a class by himself. He is the most remarkable actor I have ever worked with. He is a true chameleon. He's one of a kind. I can hardly wait to work with him again."

Today's Dilbert is way too true to be funny: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/ab.html

PHB: "I want you to feel afraid 24 hours a day!"

A villanelle-variation called the pantoum: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/20/273l-092098-idx.html

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.
We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows...

A sweet review of an Abbie Hoffman bio: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-09/20/270l-092098-idx.html

Much that is told here is invaluable in reconstructing the inner life of the Movement. For instance, "Superjoel" says of the Pentagon action in 1967 that "on top of this bunch of trash there's this bunch of flowers, daisies, right. I grabbed them. I saw these soldiers, and they're all standing there and they were my age. So I just took the flowers and one by one, boom, boom, boom, put 'em in the gun barrels." Two and a half years later, on the day before her death, Kent State student Allison Krause would put a flower in the gun barrel of a national guardsman, saying, "Flowers are better than bullets."

Literary cat-lovers: [WPost item]

...Raymond Chandler considered his Persian, Taki, his "feline secretary." Poe wrote with his, a tortoiseshell named Catarina, perched on his shoulder. Edward Lear, when he moved, built a new house identical to the old, so that his aging cat, Foss, wouldn't feel dislocated. When Henri Matisse was confined to bed, his faithful black cat kept him company.