Robot Wisdom WebLog for October 1998 (waning)

TV 2nite: Desmond Pfeiffer (liked by the Voice)

Apple's got huge quantities of developer info online now: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/mac.html [OLB]

In a great issue of Salon, Chris Hitchens calls Gore Vidal colorfully on the carpet for his defenses of Clinton: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/10/20news.html

In point of fact, the Clintons have approached corporate America in the posture of love-slaves. This by the way is the same posture in which they have approached the national-security state and the military-industrial combines.

It seems now incontrovertible that the president ordered a strike on a civilian target, heedless of international law or of the canons of diplomacy, because he needed a diversion from his self-inflicted humiliations. Perhaps you have read Seymour Hersh's article in the Oct. 12 New Yorker, which pitilessly fills in any remaining blanks in this argument...

If the forces of reaction are clever enough to lure an innocent Clinton into workplace fornication and on-the-job perjury, there's probably no stopping them. But if they believe that he is the sworn enemy of the ruling class, they must be so stupid as to be negligible.

And the economics of homebrew web porn: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/10/cov_20feature.html

Other companies, such as Tiarra Corporation, will assemble the whole kit for you: A rudimentary site with pictures and ad banners goes for as low as $3,499; $4,999 will get you a video feed; $34,999 will get you an e-commerce subscription service.

Ken had expected to bring in nearly $20,000 a month, based on estimates he'd read in Interactive Week articles. Instead, he's making $2,500 a month in membership fees.

And an update on a late great zine called Might: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/poni/1998/10/20poni.html

As the foreword to "Tracksuits" admits, Might's editors soon realized their magazine would never offer "return on investment," and they cheerfully tell would-be imitators that there's no way to do what they attempted without ending up a "fringe-culture artifact." But, they say, do it anyway. Not that Might's roster ended up without any ROI altogether, what with its representation today in Spin, Mother Jones, Details, ESPN Magazine and on and on. If that's not the dream, it beats selling pencils.

Don't miss: Drudge counts pundits' use of "The American people...": http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

"The American people do want all of those things, except in moderation," smarted Cokie Roberts. "The American people would actually like some sort of HMO reform."

Tomb Raider 2 demo for the Mac (etc etc): http://www.eidosinteractive.com/demos_pc.html

Help with Tomb Raider 2: http://if.bidmc.harvard.edu/~ichou/archives/tomb/dagger/

New NY Review of Books includes a charming psychobiography of Cole Porter: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998110504R

Lorenz Hart, Rodgers's inventive lyricist, did share with Porter an impulse to go public with his prurience, but seemed content if it went undetected.

You rarely hear all five of the song's refrains performed, but as set out in another Robert Kimball compilation, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, Cole's little bestiary looks as neat as one of those French gardens Linda so admired: the first refrain concentrates on people; the second on birds; the third on marine creatures; the fourth on insects; and the last, bringing us round to where we began, on mammals ("I'm sure giraffes, on the sly, do it,/Heavy hippopotami do it...").

He composed songs in a sunny Venetian palazzo and set couples gamely dancing in gray industrial towns like Buffalo and Milwaukee, Liverpool and Rotterdam. He spread the gold around.

And a lucid enquiry on workfare: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998110527F

It would be irresponsible, almost Alfred E. Newmanesque, to depend on this idealized story to smooth the transition to welfare as we will come to know it.

...it seems likely that unskilled wages would have to fall by considerably more than 5 percent in order to make jobs available to those 1.75 million workers. ...But I hope it is not drastic at all to doubt that many reasonable people who favor welfare reform have had in mind the imposition of nontrivial additional impoverishment on the industrious working poor. ... An influx of former welfare recipients into the job market will not give the Federal Reserve much of a cushion against the economy's overheating.

Without some added ingredients, the transformation of welfare into work is likely to be the transformation of welfare into unemployment and casual earnings so low as once to have been thought unacceptable for fellow citizens.

I think it is legitimate for taxpayers to want welfare recipients to work, but not so legitimate to want them to live at the miserable standard their earning capacity can provide, least of all if children are involved.

The need for relevant data is not just the peculiar craving of academic social scientists. It is the lifeblood of rational social policy and its evaluation.

The cited March '97 Atlantic article, The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97mar/edelman/edelman.htm

I resigned as the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services last September, because of my profound disagreement with the welfare bill.

What-would-Jesus-do from hell: [Deja URL]

I asked myself, "What Would Jesus Do?" Moved with compassion, I spit on the ground, scooped up some dirt-saliva mud, and rubbed it in her eyes...

Hot event Wed night in NYC: http://newyork.sidewalk.com/link/51071

Hal Willner [qv] has rustled up some prime talent for an event dedicated to Marquis de Sade... On the roster are the freaky, frightening and literate singer Diamanda Galas, actresses Lili Taylor (Pecker, I Shot Andy Warhol) and Chloe Webb (Sid & Nancy, Tales of the City)...

Question: All the sites that use stylesheets seem to display on my screen with tiny fontsizes. Is this how they're suposed to work???

A promising NYC culture weekly: http://www.observer.com/main.htm [OSRR]

Includes this odd review of an odd book: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/bw101998

In A Very Private Woman, her provocative, erudite biography of Mary Meyer, Nina Burleigh unearthed no sisterhood. But she does describe Mary's plan to drop acid with John F. Kennedy.

Great, detailed survey of how neuroscience is guiding new teaching strategies: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/SCIENCE/t000094831.html

This revolution in reading research is being driven in large measure by a new generation of noninvasive imaging techniques that allow monitoring of rapid, subtle shifts in mental activity as people read.

No one is sure why the process of using written symbols to express a thought should be so separated from the process of extracting meaning from those same symbols or what it may mean in terms of reading ability. "Reading is a bizarre skill--and a very complex process," said Harvard neuropsychologist Alfonso Caramazza, who studies the neurobiological basis of language.

...Hidden in the games are special tasks that strengthen auditory processing speed, working memory, phonological awareness and the other skills of fluent reading. Only by repeating the tasks thousands of times for weeks are changes wrought in the structure of the brain.

A 2-lb belt-PC: http://www.flexipc.com/Webpages/via2.html [Slashdot]

Yay! Netscape 4.5 seems to solve the font-freeze-up bug: http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/ (It still suffers from Sudden Browser Death Syndrome, though.)

And if you're planning a many-meg download on a Mac, do yourself a favor and use Anarchie Pro, which allows interruptions to be restarted at the same point: http://www.anarchie-pro.com/anarchie/#DownloadAnarchiePro [TidBits]

Looking for female leads for the all-MASH version of Aubrey/Maturin (cf 27 Sept below), I find this neat list of guest stars you never realised were on: http://www.netlink.co.uk/users/mash/guest.html

Ron Howard Character: Pte. Wendell Peters. Episode: "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet"

Onion-editor profile: http://www.pioneerpress.com/tech/docs/tech3.htm

The Onion, which resembles a newsprint version of the National Lampoon in best years, was started in Madison, Wis. a decade ago. Dikkers joined the small staff as a cartoonist (he draws a strip called "Jim's Journal") right after its launch and, "by issue three, I was de facto editor." (The paper now has seven fulltime staffers.)

My.Excite NewsTracker is apparently wedged again.

The Patk O'Brian series would be easy to cast as a rock opera: (article is about a smart 'naval' punk rock opera) http://www.post-gazette.com:80/magazine/19981019watt3.asp

"I think the day is the primary cycle," the bassist explains. "And you go through all your feelings - happy, sad, interested, bored, all in one day. It's like you die, and then you're reborn in the morning and you go through the whole thing day after day. A week is very abstract. It could've been five days. It could've been nine. A day is very real."

A darn good AlertBox about the crisis proportions of bad website design: (short) http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981018.html

Forrester Research audited 20 major sites, finding 51% compliance with simple Web usability principles such as "is the site organized by user goals?" and "does a search list retrievals in order of relevance?"

The most dramatic fix suggested in the Forrester report is to close down sites that are so bad that they damage the reputation of the company.

(Heh!)

Full review of OS8.5 (by a shameless zealot): http://macworld.zdnet.com/extra/os85.html [SB]

If any single feature makes using Mac OS 8.5 simply feel like a new computing experience, it's sound effects. If you turn on the sound option, whenever you use scroll bars, menus, icons, the Trash, windows, disks, or almost anything else that requires mouse manipulation, a crisp, cheerful sound plays along.

I haven't figured out Forbes' publication schedule, either-- I think this (bi?)weekly ToC: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/ gets new items added daily via this daily page: http://www.forbes.com:80/

Okay peek at digital video editing: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210364a.htm

With battery and tape, Sony's new PC1 camcorder weighs just over a pound, is smaller than a James Michener paperback and comes with dozens of such clever features as jerky sepia silent-movie emulation.

Okay interview with a Well founder: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/books/1998/10/19books.html (URL fixed)

People have different tastes. Some like to see the rowdy comments -- that's the entertainment factor. For other people, it's like fingernails on the blackboard; they just cannot stand it. So the more filtering options you can give to the users for how they experience the community the better...

The SciAm-author flamewar on rec.arts.books (Thurs below) winds down: [Deja URL]

So all your combined amateur efforts have been in vain but very entertaining. I thank you all very much for giving me so much of your not so valuable time. It has also been a very interesting for me to "hit the streets" by joining this group. Some of the street fighting strategies which I will no doubt acquire will surely be of great service in my work.

I missed this great overview of a revolution in thinking about Amerind origins: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981017/americans.html [Explorator]

A few years ago Wallace and his colleagues found a new mitochondrial lineage in Amerindians in the Central Great Lakes region in North America, which they called X. The same lineage is present, at low frequency, in European populations, but is absent in Asian populations. "Initially we thought X was present in Native Americans as a result of interbreeding between them and Europeans, post-Columbus," says Wallace. "But that turned out not to be the case."

(Does anyone know how to follow the New Scientist efficiently?)

Hip, suspiciously recent etexts: http://members.xoom.com/atlantablurb/library.htm

William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Pynchon, Franz Kafka, Ronald Sukenick, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll...

Yay! Last week's Sunday Times book review URL seems reliable: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stiboocon01001.html?1334425

(Dawkins, Robert Stone, etc etc etc.)

A board game of "Lucky Jim"! [Messy URL] [OSRR]

Valuable cards include being published in the New York Review of Each Other's Books, getting a cherished research grant or having your course load reduced. The most frequently used desirable card is represented by a kiss planted on the rear end of a donkey, apparently the surest road to success in the game.

Must-read for MacOS 8.5 ponderers: long Sherlock review: http://www.macintouch.com/m85_sherlock.html [SN]

For my main data volume, which currently contains about 28,000 items filling 3.7 Gbytes, the index fills nearly 50 Mbytes.

(But how much of that is indexable text???)

Dept of madcap hijinx: http://home.earthlink.net/~cacophonyla/CS_cement.html [PhilG]

I had been thinking for a long time about making cement-filled teddy bears ... so late in November, members of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society gathered in my backyard to gut several dozen plush toys and replace their innards with Portland's finest. We called them, "Cement Cuddlers"...

Ditto (only way more tasteless): http://home.earthlink.net/~cacophonyla/CS_cheeze.html

At any moment I expected a child to burst and begin shrieking in a psychotic snap that would jump from tot to tot like an explosive chain of lethal transmission, crashing & burning their fragile intellects with the subtlety of Ebola in extreme amplification. The prospect of Chuck-E-Cheese-Corp. kicking our asses in a half-decade long judicial battle paled in comparison to the imminent and mountainous psychotherapy bills we'd be levied for the rest of our garnished minimum-waged lives... But to our surprise the children accepted the brutal vision with the vapor weight of a cable channel, oohing and ahhing his passing like he was the White Power Ranger or something.

The Cacophony story: http://home.earthlink.net/~cacophonyla/press-zinder.html

"It would be great if we got in a big pileup," she yelps in a thick and ridiculously phony Southern accent. "Imagine the Highway Patrolmen trying to figure out why all of these bloody clown parts were strewn all over the highway "

One of the classes taught at the school was named the Suicide Club, which attracted the more extreme elements of Communiversity and branched off as a separate entity in 1977. Spearheaded by Gary Warne, one of Communiversity's founders, it took its name from a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a group of people who tried to live every day as if it were their last; and ran concurrently with Communiversity until they both disbanded.

"When I came to L.A. from San Francisco, I made a beeline for the Society," says Krista Krol... "I was involved with Cacophony up there, and that's where I met a lot of my close friends. We shared a bond that put us apart from the rest. I didn't know anybody in town who got excited by the same kinds of things that I did. "

"Man escapes the mundane through violation of his regimented world of scientific, aesthetic and social law. We sell the tickets. We know that something's out there, so that's where we hang out."

Also: http://home.earthlink.net/~cacophonyla/press-hill.html

"This is not about violence," M2 says. "This is about living a little. The group was really founded on three premises: No financial profit can be involved in the events. The events cannot propagate a religious point of view. And they must allow for active participation for all those in attendance."

Also: http://home.earthlink.net/~cacophonyla/press-wielenga.html

"So we had a half-dozen clowns spread-eagle against a brick wall. And then something else came over the police loudspeaker: 'OK, slowly now, put down that balloon animal!'"

"Once you've done it once, you pretty much know what's happening," says Invisible Ray, whose polka-dot shirt and black tuxedo jacket seem conservative in this company. "Then it ceases to be cacophonous."

Yay! New This is Hell from 9am to 10:30am CDT, with guests RU Sirius and Terry Jones [RealAudio] (They're skipping next week.)

PhilG has a chapter on online activism that's especially mind-blowing: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/better-living.html

Is distributing information sufficient to cut pollution? Remarkably, it seems to be. In 1988 the Environmental Protection Agency began collecting and publishing data on chemicals released from manufacturing facilities. If you check the nationwide report, you'll see a dramatic reduction in releases of chemicals covered by the federal Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

In order to really make this effective, we need:
- a cheap way of alerting group members to the impending decision, before it is too late for the members to voice their opinion
- a way of saving group members the trouble of figuring out who their politicians are and how to contact them
- a way of telling professional lobbyists, before they walk into a politician's office, that "15 FAXes have been sent by group members to this person so far"
- a way of informing members who responded that "your response was communicated to Jane Senator and she voted the right way" or "your response was communicated to Fred Congressman and he voted the wrong way"
- a way of reminding Jane and Fred, after they've voted, that their performance was conveyed to X thousand members of the group.

"Philip is one of my heroes. His blatant arrogance and self-promotion are the perfect mask for this sweet bodhisattva; it discourages worship and promotes critical thinking. ... A therapist once told me that people change because of a lover, a guru, or being thrown against a wall. Philip is all three, I think, to thousands of us."

(I'm still pondering how to break up my over-blurbing of PhilG's book, so it will be a turn-on instead of a turn-off.)

Lively day for the Irish Times features page, including two nice pieces on changing sexual attitudes: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1017/fea.htm

And an ambitious new Elizabethan-era flick: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1017/fea4.html

...it strips away the accumulated varnish of 400 years of reverential myth-making and reveals the Elizabethan world as a place of terror, brutality and betrayal. A dark Darwinian stew where survival - at whatever cost - is all.

The shadow to Cate Blanchett's luminous Elizabeth is Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham, queen-maker, spy-master, a man - in this version of history - as willing to dip his hands in blood as in water.

"He said `I see Walsingham very much as Krishna'. And I thought, `He's out of his tree'. But he was completely right. Because he was hinting at the long-term qualities of the guru disciple relationship..."

"In the screenplay we looked very much at how the four principle men influenced this young woman and buffered her through this extraordinary kind of monarchical rite of passage..."

And a merciless summary of a new Monroe bio: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1017/fea16.html

...her story properly begins when Marilyn was on the "party circuit". When such film moguls as Joseph Schenck and Sam Spiegel came to Hollywood, "house" girls served them with drinks and lit their cigars. Unless they were already spoken for, they were expected to be "available" to the guests. Orson Welles said of Spiegel's parties that they had the "best delicatessen and the best whores" in town.

1997 causes of death in the USA: http://www.channel2000.com/news/stories/news-981007-192552.html

                     1.Heart disease -- 725,790 
                     2.Cancer -- 537,390 
                     3.Stroke -- 159,877 
                     4.Lung diseases -- 110,637 
                     5.Accidents -- 92,191 
                     6.Pneumonia and influenza -- 88,383. 
                     7.Diabetes -- 62,332 
                     8.Suicide -- 29,725 
                     9.Kidney disease -- 25,570 
                    10.Liver disease -- 24,765 
                    11.Blood poisoning -- 22,604 
                    12.Alzheimer's disease, 22,527 
                    13.Homicide -- 18,774 
                    14.HIV and AIDS -- 16,685 
                    15.Hardening of the arteries -- 15,884


                        All other causes -- 361,635

Observation: Clinton's humiliation -- the most truth we've seen in public office in my lifetime -- has made his opinions interesting again, at least momentarily. If he has any genuine ideals left, this would be a great time to express them.

Readable 1st-hand account of life in Russia, with the ruble worth seven cents: http://www.zolatimes.com/v2.34/russ_apocaly.html

In ordinary food stores, the shelves are already filled with uniform rows of tubes with "synthetic" pate and concentrated drinks -- classics of Soviet times. Domestically produced sausages have lost all their taste and quality -- one benefit of the reform years -- and downgraded to the Soviet level of pure ersatz.

'Miss Croatia' title becomes battlefield: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/1016/i_ap_1016_96.sml

The mass circulation daily Vecernji List reported that organizers tried to persuade one judge, former winner Anica Martinovic, to stop lobbying for Sehovic, "fearing that the public would be disturbed if a Muslim is elected.''

I won't feel I understand economics like this, until I have a simulation that lets me vary one dimension at a time: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/nation/101698/nation16_15913_noframes.html

The unexpectedly weak manufacturing report Friday underscored the likelihood the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates again next month to prevent world financial turmoil from sending the American economy into a tailspin, economists said.

And the lack of consumer price pressure means the Fed can cut rates without worrying about overstimulating the economy and causing an outbreak of inflation, they said.

(Some say this is pushing on a string.)

Janet Reno vs the 'Information Warriors': http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15643.html

When fully staffed, NIPC will employ 125 at the FBI headquarters in Washington, and another 300 to 400 around the country. The center will also run a multimillion dollar computer system that will house a massive national infrastructure security database.

In practice, this process would involve installing surveillance sensors on high-profile Web sites that are commonly targeted by crackers. That information could be stored and later analyzed.

Today's Dilbert is pretty wise: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/ab.html

This Day in History: In 1854, Oscar Wilde was born.

New Science News includes a netnews sociology study: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_17_98/fob4.htm

McKenna and Bargh monitored participation in 12 Internet newsgroups during a 3-week period. They selected four groups that focus on mainstream interests (such as politics), four that concern culturally undesirable but conspicuous conditions (such as obesity), and four that focus on culturally "marginalized" but concealable behavior (homosexuality, illicit drug use, sexual bondage, and sexual spanking).

The true story behind "The Exorcist" is finally being told?! http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/17/27610.html

"Speaking in tongues, levitation, puking, he said all that was valid," recalls Bober. "There are some things that you just can't explain medically, because the boy supposedly not only spoke Latin but ancient Aramaic and ancient Hebrew -- I mean, languages you just don't pick up."

The Village Voice cleans up its act?!? and adds a ton more content: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9842/

Origami Macintoshes! http://www.zdnet.co.jp/magazine/macuser/craft.html [NTK]

Ralph McGehee reports:

"...But defense officials were stunned by the size of two other add-ons that came at the insistence of congressional leaders -- $2 billion for a wide variety of intelligence programs....The intelligence money was reportedly pushed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)...." -- Washington Post 10/16/98 A16.

Decent look at the new challenges of online advertising: http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/oct/1016/side2.htm

"If the global positioning system in my car can tell me where the nearest parking garage is," he says, "then why can't McDonald's use it to tell me where their nearest restaurant is?"

Roger Ebert is a true geek: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_rc_display/0,3443,2149988,00.html

Rummaging through my old Bookmarks, I am reminded that I once regularly visited the Random Site of the Day. Those days are long gone, and yet here are Bookmarks to remind me of the Ohio State librarian with the alphabet tattooed on her back in Garamond Bold.

(His review of "Assassins" (Stallone) was also hilariously on target.)

Zap wises up: http://www.charlotte.com/click/wiretech/pub/009510.htm

Zapata said that all the offers it made were simple letters of intent that were not binding on either party and that all were contingent on Zapata's conducting due diligence reviews of the target companies. But Cole of Mass Music said that the due diligence was conducted entirely by fax and overnight mail and that no one ever visited his company

Good short peek at the likely successor to silicon: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/news/trends/t981015a.html

Taken together, these properties suggest that carbon nanotubes may make it possible to shrink current computer designs down to the molecular level, without falling prey to the problems that prevent existing materials from functioning at such small size.

New Discover magazine: http://www.discover.com/

Drudge reviews Alanis (etc etc etc): http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

On her new album, she wrote all the lyrics, sings all vocals, including backing parts; plays piano, flute and harmonica. But it is the words of her songs that had some in the hall scratching head.

New The Nation sounds the alarm about the Republican plan to dominate redistricting in 2000: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981102/1102NICH.HTM

In a groundbreaking 1997 study, "Monopoly Politics," the Center for Voting and Democracy detailed the power that rests in the hands of those who control the redistricting process. The report shows that the overwhelming majority of House seats are safely in the hands of the party for which redistricting mappers designed them -- so safely that three-fifths of all House races are routinely won by landslide margins of more than 20 percent.

What's the big deal? Currently, the North Carolina General Assembly is split 61 to 59 in the GOP's favor, and the shift of a handful of seats will not merely give Democrats the control they need to raise teachers' pay, enact environmental protections and maintain fair tax policies...

And critiques Robert Rector's definitions of poverty: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981102/1102POLL.HTM

About crumbling schools, substandard medical care, the prevalence of guns and drugs, decline of public transport, the fees now charged for many once-free public amenities and the many other ways life -- air-conditioning and all -- has become harder for the poor than a generation ago, and much more difficult in America than in the rest of the industrialized West, he has nothing to say.

The Code of Hammurabi: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/hamframe.htm [OLB]

2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.

Paul McCartney's first girlfriend-- Jane Asher-- sells Victorian hats, shoes, and saucy cakes: http://www.jane-asher.co.uk/

Norman Solomon on Vanunu: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981001.html

This year, the Nexis database confirms, U.S. media coverage of Vanunu has remained paltry: just a few scattered newspaper articles and scant dispatches from The Associated Press, plus a fleeting story on CNN and another one on National Public Radio. ... That's quite a contrast to the situation in Britain, where coverage of Vanunu's case has been extensive and sustained. So far this year, mainstream British outlets have done at least 45 "major stories" about Vanunu, according to Nexis.

Meta: If I had a universal killfile, I think its first entry would be "Viagra"...

A better-than-average variant on the if-[religions]-were-programming-languages joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Oct/rellang.html

Protestants (P, J++-): In a reaction against the ornateness of J++, several European programmers developed P by removing contentious library calls in J++ (eg. "checkCelibacy", "payIndulgence", "enterPurgatory", "fishOnFridays", etc.)...

A comp.ai.nat-lang thread about my new browser-vision: [Deja thread]

So what's really needed is a scriptable web-parser, with an extensible set of data-types, that can remember the patterns of a given page or site, and can be taught to process these automatically.

(Frontier, or Perl, or Rebol?)

The four SOHO-EIT filters compared (see below)

Scientific American explained SOHO in March: http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398lang.html

(Apparently these four colors correspond to four temperatures between 60,000 K and 3,000,000 K.)

Spiritual utopia in Italian Alps? http://www.forteantimes.com:80/artic/116/alchemy.html

Each hall of the Temple is dedicated to a specific magical function and every element of its architecture and decoration has been imbued with meaning derived from ancient culture.

A great day for space pix: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm

Millennial history scrapes bottom: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day58.html

In 1114 there occurred what may have been the most disgusting crime of early medieval times: the infant son of David, heir to the Scottish throne, was murdered by a demented priest. The background would fill a tabloid newspaper for a month: the wretched cleric had been found guilty in Norway the previous year of ritually sacrificing a fellow-priest during a black mass. He had been judicially mutilated: his eyes were put out and his hands and feet were struck off. David took this miserable creature into his household as an act of charity, which the nameless priest repaid by disembowelling the infant Prince Malcolm with his artificial iron fingers. The distraught father ordered the priest to be tied to horses, and pulled apart.

On a more cheery note, a record ebb tide allowed Londoners to wade across the Thames, with the water at knee-level. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said: "In this year also was so great an ebb of the tide everywhere in one day, as no man remembered before; so that men went riding and walking over the Thames eastward of London bridge."

Grady Ward clarifies the Scientology settlement (28 Sept below): (email)

"...I was never adjudged nor did I ever concede that I comitted any tort of any kind against the criminal cult of scientology, including copyright infringement. The $200 was part of a settlement agreement.

Also, your note forgot to add that I prevailed (won) on the claims of trade secret misappropriation. As far as "$200 a month for life," that works out to NPV $35,000 or so. Much cheaper than an attorney for trial, rather less than the $2 million the cult spent in attorney's fees alone."

A writer for Scientific American appears on rec.arts.books, to defend his honor against a typical thoughtless flame: [Deja URL]

I stand by my comment that quantum mechanics has not explained the order of shell filling from first principles. What I mean by this is that the order of filling has NOT YET been deduced purely from quantum mechanical calculations...

This Day in Joyce History: In 1901, James wrote "Day of the Rabblement". In 1903 in "A Painful Case", Mrs Sinico stepped in front of a train. In 1961, Harriet Shaw Weaver (patron) died.

TV 2nite: PJ Harvey on Leno; ballet on PBS' Great Performances: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/zizi/index.html

Nice Suzanne Vega update: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/15/27233.html

What she will admit is that she was born and raised in New York, and trained not as a musician but as a ballet dancer at the High School for the Performing Arts (the basis for Fame) -- a career path she quit, she says, because she was intimidated by the other dancers.

Stella McCartney's cheap shot: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/1014/i_rt_1014_46.sml

"What I'm just trying to do is contain my natural impulses and get back to work," rang out President Clinton's voice on a recording of his deposition as scantily clad models began sashaying down the catwalk in slinky satin slip dresses, their hems flaring like tulips.

(Runway pix haven't gotten to her yet:) http://www.worldmedia.fr/fashion/catwalk/pap/99eppar/whosshow/calendar.html

New New Scientist

New URL for Whump: http://jasper.he.net/~whump/moreLikeThis/index.html#weblog

Life under the Asian crisis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gweekly/boomtown.html

Meanwhile the forests that were the ultimate safety net were hugely reduced by logging, both legal and illegal. Cash crops for export have replaced food crops, giving farmers far higher returns, but requiring such huge investments in fertiliser, pesticide and other inputs that they slid every year further back into debt, and simply cannot return to simple rice subsistence.

Good gossip at WashTimes: http://www.washtimes.com/politics/inside.html

"President Clinton, whom GOPniks privately title Our Groper-in-Chief, will spend the rest of his White House time on the road," reports New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams.

...Yesterday, the eccentric LaRouche movement took to the Capitol steps shouting "Save Clinton, jail Starr, let's go back to FDR," and "Who lies the most? The Washington Post."

A nice, varied issue of Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.03.html

Someone apparently succeeded last Saturday in the old trick of copying banking cards' magnetic stripes and reading then the PIN codes from the keypad over the shoulder. What makes this scam spectacular is that the artist(s) had attached an additional "small black" card reader on top of the opening of the real reader in the cash dispenser.

Good sense: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/10/14news.html

...That means that for every dollar spent teaching Americans how to reduce cancer risk through diet, the National Cancer Institute spends $2,400 on research.

(But why don't they even mention enforcement of pollution rules???)

Another splendid notch in the ongoing cathedral/bazaar inquiry: http://slashdot.org/features/98/10/13/1423253.shtml

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who think it would be neat to run Linux on an 8086 who feel obliged to "take part". Most of them in this case are in the "wannabe programmer" category...

Beware "We should", extend a hand to "How do I"...

Garage-psychedelic nostalgia: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/music/42asante.shtml

It's telling that "Shape of Things To Come," by Max Frost and the Troopers, which was concocted for the teen-uprising epic Wild in the Streets, sounds no more artificial than anything else here. The words are not the content.

...Anyway, kiddies, these are your ancestors, who suffered through innumerable sock hops at American Legion halls so you can be the little Antichrists you are today.

The Progressive Review reappears with a great issue:

John Crudele of the New York Post points to big purchases of index futures at stock market crisis moments as evidence the government may be manipulating what happens on Wall Street.

If you've never played Close Combat, even the old 6 meg demo is eye-opening: http://www.atomic.com/downloads.html

(Duffers like me can play the defenders, and win on autopilot.)

The Voice reviews the new TV season: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/tv/42acarson.shtml

But an undignified romp about the Lincoln White House, with batty Mrs. L. (Christine Estabrook, sensationally good) clapping on Abe's stovepipe hat to croon "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" and suave Desmond (Chi McBride) bemoaning the Great Emancipator's jones for telegraph sex -- now, that just makes me giggle.

Dvorak rants against the new copyright law: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

It's designed to protect those in the recording and movie industries and nobody else. The reverse-engineering edict is to keep people from trying to figure out encryption schemes used to encrypt satellite transmissions and to keep people from building little boxes to remove copy-protection. Apparently, the current copyright laws are not strong enough for these two industries, so they want a law targeted at guys who try and crack copy-protection schemes. To hell with the rest of the world if this bill screws up everyone else in other industries, such as the computer business. Too bad!

New Village Voice looks at Russia's stockpiles of chemical weapons: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/42avest.shtml

"Simply put, if a country or group poisoned a water supply of a whole city, it would bring the wrath of the world down upon them. Poisoning a building, on the other hand, would get attention and scare the hell out of people."

Insider gossip about your local TV news teams: (slow loader) http://www.newsblues.com/ [OSRR]

The local-paper equivalent: http://newsmait.com/intel.htm

This Day in Joyce History: In 1917, the Joyces decamped to Locarno, where James would ready the Telemachia chapters of Ulysses for their first publication.

New Consortium summarises the newly released 2nd volume of the Contra-crack-CIA report: (it was worse than Webb imagined, I guess) http://www.consortiumnews.com/consor29.html

In an historic document released on Oct. 8, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed long-standing allegations of cocaine trafficking by contra forces -- and disclosed new cases of drug involvement in all areas of the CIA-backed operation.

Here's the ToC of the report itself: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/cocaine2/contents.html

Kibo can have more fun just shopping in an Indian grocery than normal people have at an expensive four-star fun-place: [Deja URL]

...Now, for those of you unfamiliar with Indian food, all Indian food is described by some combination of these three words:

   dal        --  beans of any sort, from microscopic to house-sized
   vegetable  --  unidentified leaves or roots or stems of any sort
   masala     --  means "mixture", "spiced", or "stuff"

I suspect this London Sunday Times Book Review link includes someone's embedded password: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stiboocon01001.html?1334425

Science - What Remains To Be Discovered by John Maddox
The Victorian Internet, The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th-Century's Online Pioneers by Tom Standage

And here's an author index to recent reviews: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/infotimes/recent_times/books.html?1334425 (URL fixed)

French Photo has an elaborate tribute to Africa-photographer Peter Beard: [multipage] http://www.photo.fr/portfolio/peterbeard2/carnets/index8.html

"Man destroys everything he touches. In a few years time, the African continent will probably be totally devastated. Twenty years ago, in the evening, you heard the roars of leopards. Now, all you hear are dogs barkings at the garbage-truck. Living in Hog Ranch today is like standing on the deck of the Titanic: the orchestra is still playing, but the ship is sinking."

DNA-detection on ancient Irish cattle: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1012/science2.html

The cattle bones recovered at Wood Quay were not far removed genetically from today's animals, however. "They were very similar to modern European cattle. This would suggest that the diversity found in modern cattle arose 5,000 years ago when cattle first appeared in Europe."

Two images from this Hunter Thompson profile have stuck with me: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/11/26582.html

He worships F Scott Fitzgerald and particularly The Great Gatsby, which he has typed out and plotted graphs of in an effort to crack Fitzgerald's magic art.

What was Thompson like? I asked... "First word is very sensitive. Second is a person who is not mediocre in his sense of self or place, so that means that when you go somewhere you don't just go somewhere, something happens and he'll make it happen."

This day in Joyce History: In 1904, James and Nora first consummated their relationship.

TV 2nite: Dostoevski (NBC) vs Lear (PBS)

WashPost BookWorld finally turns up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/m-bookworld.html

The Mining Company has a weblog-like approach, that I've not explored in depth. Here's their archive of updates on English lit: http://englishlit.miningco.com/msub-new.htm

This inventory of Hollywood movie cliches seems useful, though it's got a long way to go: [multipage] http://www.like.it/vertigo/cliches.html

Categories: Airplanes | Alcohol | Aliens | Animals | Answering Machines | Asteroids | Bars | Binoculars & Glasses | Biology & Genetics | Bodily functions | Bombs | Cabs | Cars & Driving | Chases | Chess | Computers & Electronics | Conversation | Clothing | Crime | Death | Dining | Elevators | Environment | Evidence | Fights | Food | Helicopters | Heroes | Houses | Independence Day | Injuries | Kids Knives | Language | Light | Locks | Medical | Men | Middle Ages | Minorities | Money | Monsters | Motorcycles | Music | Nightmares | Phones | Police | Pregnancy | Prison | Product Placement | Radio TV & Video | Restrooms | Ropes | School | Sex | Shopping | Signals | Skydiving | Smoking | Space & Vacuum | Spaceships | Sports | Stairs | Suspense | Teenagers | Time | Traffic | Travel | Trees | Villains | War Weapons | Women | Wood.

Dept of near misses: http://www.geocities.com/MadisonAvenue/1003/BADIDEAS/graceslick.html

Grace Slick planned to hide LSD powder under her fingernails and when she got near Tricia Nixon she would casually wave her hand and the LSD would land in her tea.

Fun B-movie: Arachnophobia

Appalling true facts: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/10/07news.html [HG]

Behind the scenes, it's business as usual here in the nation's capital -- which is to say that lawmakers of both parties are busy trying to sneak into law dozens of special favors for the special interests who shower them with campaign contributions.

Useless cool fact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day55.html

Innovations (1108): The royal revenues were being reorganised by the second most powerful man in the kingdom, Bishop Roger of Salisbury. As Justiciar or Viceroy, he was in charge of the embryonic royal treasury, in which accounting was aided by an ingenious checker-board, acting as a form of abacus, on which counters represented the tax income. The Latin name for this device, scaccarium, developed over the years into a new English word: exchequer.

Crow stories: http://www.boston.com:80/dailyglobe/globehtml/283/Crows__gifted_but_difficult.shtml

In laboratory tests of "reversing habit" behaviors -- the pellets suddenly stop coming from the green lever and will come only from the red, for example -- crows score as high as monkeys in figuring out the switch.

Yay! I hate to program-- filling my head with syntactic analities is not my idea of fun. So my use of Frontier has been very basic. But I've been wanting to add a very-low-maintenance headlines section for NewsHub-style stuff that the major media will probably cover, that's not worth archiving or blurbing, but that you might miss if you're not much into the news. After some thought, I realised a very little tweak to Frontier's "Add to Glossary" script should do it... et voila! (Frontier only crashed three times, from a missing at-sign.)

Drudge has a FileGate rumor: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

THE INVESTIGATIVE SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE GOVERNMENT REFORM AND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE HAS GATHERED HUNDREDS OF DOCUMENTS, CONDUCTED DOZENS OF DEPOSITIONS, THAT IT SAYS SHOWS A TRAIL.

Stats appeal: In the last week, about 500 semi-distinct visitors requested this URL, 50% of them just once, 25% less than daily, and 25% daily or better. So if you feel like doing some PR to pump these numbers up a bit, I'll be very grateful...

Also: Is anyone using Frontier (or Perl, or Rebol) to automate the search for updated web content? Eg, watching for a new issue, and then downloading each page to a separate browser window? Or creating a dialog with a checklist of new-page headlines, that you can tick off and batch-fetch?

Milton Friedman gets pied: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/national/1010/d_ap_1010_31.sml

Decker said he pied Friedman because the brigade opposes the privatization of education, which is "responsible for the destruction of our environment, the deterioration of our social structure and has brought the world to the brink of an economic collapse." Decker, 27, was arrested for misdemeanor battery and released.

ABC has a short funny RealVideo clip of Michael Moore and a dozen 'pilgrims' chasing Ken Starr, but there's no textpage for some reason: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/us/ or [straight to the RealVid]

TV 2nite: Sheryl Crow on Letterman; Kibo recommends the Mr Show marathon on HBO

Decent feel-gooder about an NYT journalist taking on Detroit over light truck safety, and winning: [multipage] http://www.cjr.org/year/98/5/bradsher.asp

And at a small dinner party, one woman approached Bradsher and said, "You should die."

New Science News includes a great piece on steel-drum acoustics: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_10_98/Bob2.htm

More than half a century ago in Trinidad, a teenage Elliot "Ellie" Mannette hammered 14 bumps into the steel bottom of an upside-down, 55-gallon oil barrel...

The design and processing methods that Mannette pioneered, and that steelpan makers have used ever since the 1940s, turn out to be perfectly suited for producing the drum's complex, rich sound.

Mannette is one of only a few master steelpan tuners in the world, which places a high demand on his services.

A lively weblog for math/physics brainiacs only, from net.fixture John Baez: [multipage] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/twf.html [200k ToC]

Week 118:
1.Michael J. Duff, The theory formerly known as strings, Scientific American 278 (February 1998), 64-69.

...By the way, this means you have to take the particles you see in Feynman diagrams with a grain of salt. They don't arise purely from the mathematics of the interacting theory. They arise when we approximate that theory by a free theory.

(Baez is quoted in the SciAm piece on "moonshine".)

A convenient condensed Pepys: [multipage] http://www.bibliomania.com/NonFiction/Pepys/Diary/index.html [OLB]

August 3rd 1664: By and by met my Lord Crewe returning; Mr Marr telling me by the way how a maidservant of Mr John Wright's (who lives thereabouts) falling sick of the plague, she was removed to an outhouse, and a nurse appointed to look to her; who, being once absent, the maid got out of the house at the window, and run away The nurse coming and knocking, and having no answer, believed she was dead, and went and told Mr Wright so; who and his lady were in great strait what to do to get her buried At last resolved to go to Burntwood hard by, being in the parish, and there get people to do it But they would not; so he went home full of trouble, and in the way met the wench walking over the common, which frighted him worse than before; and was forced to send people to take her, which he did; and they got one of the pest coaches and put her into it to carry her to a pest house And passing in a narrow lane, Sir Anthony Browne,40 with his brother and some friends in the coach, met this coach with the curtains drawn close The brother being a young man, and believing there might be some lady in it that would not be seen, and the way being narrow, he thrust his head out of his own into her coach, and to look, and there saw somebody look very ill, and in a sick dress, and stunk mightily; which the coachman also cried out upon And presently they come up to some people that stood looking after it, and told our gallants that it was a maid of Mr Wright's carried away sick of the plague; which put the young gentleman into a fright had almost cost him his life, but is now well again.

Meta: Mind-It caught the Scientific American update within a couple of hours.

New Scientific American includes this GREAT feature article-- Evolution and the Origins of Disease-- by the legendary G.C. Williams: [Don't miss!] http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198nesse.html

Darwinian medicine asks why the body is designed in a way that makes us all vulnerable to problems like cancer, atherosclerosis, depression and choking, thus offering a broader context in which to conduct research.

The evolutionary explanations for the body's flaws fall into surprisingly few categories:
1- Evolved Defenses
2- Conflicts with Other Organisms
3- Coping with Novelty
4/5- Trade-offs and Constraints

Less widely recognized as defenses are fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, anxiety, fatigue, sneezing and inflammation.

...Sure enough, women with more nausea were less likely to suffer miscarriages.

Each guppy group was then left alone in a tank with a bass. After 60 hours, 40 percent of the timid guppies had survived, as had only 15 percent of the ordinary fish. The entire complement of bold guppies, on the other hand, wound up aiding the transmission of bass genes rather than their own.

The smoke-detector principle. A smoke alarm that will reliably wake a sleeping family in the event of any fire will necessarily give a false alarm every time the toast burns.

An organism that kills rapidly may never get to a new host, so natural selection would seem to favor lower virulence. Syphilis, for instance, was a highly virulent disease when it first arrived in Europe, but as the centuries passed it became steadily more mild. ...But when water for drinking and bathing is contaminated by waste from immobilized patients, selection tends to increase virulence, because more diarrhea enhances the spread of the organism even if individual hosts quickly die.

...Most of these substances, including nicotine, cocaine and opium, are products of natural selection that evolved to protect plants from insects. Because humans share a common evolutionary heritage with insects, many of these substances also affect our nervous system.

More sensitive ears might sometimes be useful, but we would be distracted by the noise of air molecules banging into our eardrums.

...appendicitis may, paradoxically, apply the selective pressure that maintains a large appendix.

And The Day the Sands Caught Fire about a possible Hiroshima-sized asteroid blast in Arabia, maybe in 1891: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198wynn.html

Glowing fluid has coated the white boulders with a splatter that first looks like white paint but then turns progressively yellow, orange, red and finally black as it solidifies -- all within the few seconds it takes the rocks to hit the ground.

Cool jargon of the week: "smart dust": http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus4.html

A thruster is essentially a silicon box that measures about 700 to 1,000 microns on a side and is filled with a propellant such as lead styphnate.

And a tidbit: http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198inbrief.html

John Allman of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues found that among 10 different primate species, the parent that cared for the offspring significantly outlived the one that didn't--regardless of gender. For instance, male titi monkeys, which care for their children once the female has given birth, outlive their mates by 20 percent.

Here's the goods on that lost Joplin rag (22 Jun below): http://wwa.com/~weese/

Picturing a typical turn of the century upright piano in a corner of what was ostensibly the composer's apartment, the photograph clearly shows three pieces of sheet music upon the instrument, one the first published page of "Solace", and the other two handwritten -- and unfamiliar -- manuscript scores.

(Solace is my fave by Joplin.)

And a rave review for the zine: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=387833870

First, it has the appearance of a publication from the period, done with taste and humor...

Hi-tech lollipops (next: a built-in web browser?): [multipage] http://www.lightvision.com/ [NTK]

It is sculpted with light making thousands of grooves on its surface. No inks or dyes are used to make the images seen on our holographic candy; they are a part of the candy itself.

(They seem to be $2.50 each, min 6.)

Philly journalist turns the religious beat into a muckraking crusade: [multipage] http://www.newslink.org/ajrshepardoct98.html

"I didn't want to do stories about anybody sitting around a table talking about theological stuff."

"My whole pitch has always been that I wasn't out to get the cardinal," says Cipriano. "I just thought he should be held accountable. Why would that be a taboo topic?"

Cosmonaut-perks scandal: http://www.reston.com/nasa/russia/10.07.98.dachas.html

When one NASA official was outraged enough to describe them in a trip report, he was ordered to rewrite and resubmit the report after deleting mention of the mansions.

Oral history of neural nets: http://www.herring.com:80/mag/issue60/print.html

"Invited to give the keynote address at a large neural network conference in the late 1980s to an absolutely rapt audience, Minsky began with the words: 'I am not the Devil!'"

...a story that the neural modeling pioneer Warren McCulloch liked to tell, of how von Neumann called one night saying, "Warren, I've drunk a whole bottle of absinthe. I know the thresholds of all my neurons are shot to hell. How is it I can still think?"

Dry Chiquita update: http://www.ljx.com:80/cgi-bin/f_cat?prod/ljextra/data/texts/1998_1005_12.html

Mr. Gallagher is suspected by some to have named Mr. Ventura as a confidential source, in hopes of receiving lenient treatment from the prosecutor and from Chiquita. The civil suit against Mr. Gallagher is pending, however; his reply is due in November.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1888 in Ulysses, Poldy and Molly were wed. In 1904, James and Nora eloped to Zurich.

TV 2nite: Patrick McGoohan meets Columbo; PBS Mystery's "Touching Evil": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/programs/evil/episodes.html

Titanic morbidity: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/9/26219.html

Many find the most erotic moment to be Jack's death.

"You know, when the stern is tilted up and everyone falling? I wanted to be the one falling."

Fun with expanding geodesics: [hefty animated gifs] http://www.hoberman.com/fold/products.html

He has devised (and patented) numerous smooth ways for materials to evolve from scrunched up to puffed out: he can turn a baby-pool-size metal ring into a filigree dome, expand a basketball-size ball of aluminum into an airy geodesic sphere, covert a shoebox-size wad of corrugated polypropylene into a one-person tent or unsnap a Gucci handbag-size polypropylene hunk into a full-size briefcase.

Handwriting recognition by standalone pen device: http://www.innovate.bt.com/showcase/smartquill/ [Slashdot]

By harnessing the earth's gravity, it uses an innovative spatial sensing system to translate handwriting into typed text as it is being composed. Connecting to a PC, printer, mobile phone, or modem is as simple as slotting the pen into a special "inkwell."

New The Nation includes a superb overview of websites for informing voters: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981026/1026STOL.HTM

And a nice inventory of the corporate-crime scandals unreported by NYT - WSJ - WashPost - LATimes: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981026/1026MINT.HTM

Does immorality encompass conduct unrelated to sex? Not if you take your guidance from newspapers, television and national leaders...

Lisa Rea update: [Deja URL]

...Also, you forgot that I have a magical tiara now that glows in the dark and tricks those stupid bugs that want to go into my head and eat little passageways through my brain.

Also, I have a pony. It's on the tiara. And I sit all day long in the suburban wood-panelled den of my soul with many achingly beautiful Pierre et Gilles prints, reading Andrew Love Peacock and pushing those howler monkeys down, down, down, down to where they can never hurt nobody ever again.

A long, interesting profile of Ben Stiller: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/archives/98/46lede1-dargis.shtml [AAN]

Stiller is ubiquitous, inescapable. "Yes," wrote The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, "he's been in every movie released this year."

"I mean, that's like, you know, if Kafka were in show business, that's how he would be raised."

Lots more details on satellite radio: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=148

CD Radio bid $83.3 million to win one of the licenses. The second went to American Mobile Radio Corp., a Virginia-based company that paid $89.9 million.

According to Margolese, market research shows that "27 percent of people's taste in music is not met in any given market."

(Would it make sense for cable-tv outfits to carry these radio stations, too?)

Cool zine for electronics geeks: http://www.penton.com/ed/Pages/magpages/current.htm

Whump links to a very cool personality test: http://www.ullazang.com/personality.html

You do not mind being alone for extended periods of time; you rarely become bored.

(Notice the GIF-names.)

Good week for HoneyGuide

Hubble pic (reduced 33% here) http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/probes/hubble/1998/100898a.htm

Some of the reddest and faintest of the newly detected objects may be over 12 billion light-years away, as derived from a standard model of the universe. ...The area of sky is merely 1/100th the apparent diameter on the full moon.

NASA Watch chews Clinton a new orifice: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

Editor's Note: it is my understanding that no one from either the White House (OMB) or the State Department will be showing up at these hearings - this despite a formal request from Congress to do so. It should be clear by now that the White House has no interest in facing up to the mess they have made of the ISS program. This is to be expected: the White House has no coherent space policy. Now that everything is going to hell in a handbasket they are too embarassed to show up and take the blame. So they call in sick.

This mix of arrogant indifference and abject cowardice from the White House borders on dereliction of duty since the net result is going to be yet another immense bailout bill knowingly foisted upon U.S. taxpayers.

Patrick O'Brian revives a genre: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/08/205l-100898-idx.html

Henry Holt and Co. has launched a series called Heart of Oak Sea Classics with the republication of Dudley Pope's "The Black Ship," about a bloody 18th-century mutiny in the Royal Navy; Frederick Marryat's "Peter Simple," about a young midshipman in the Royal Navy of Horatio Nelson; and "Doctor Dogbody's Leg," James Norman Hall's 50-year-old collection of the sea stories of a peg-legged sailor.

Yay! Karen Finley's gonna be in Playboy: http://www.laweekly.com:80/ink/archives/98/46the-morris.shtml

"I think it's funny that I'm the Ms. Magazine woman of the year, then I go right to Playboy," she adds. "I think that a lot of my thoughts about this are confused and hypocritical, and I feel totally comfortable with that."

"I hope I can contaminate more people with my obscene art.."

Microcredit vs the IMF: http://www.webpage.com:80/hindu/daily/981008/03/03080001.htm

...Prof. Yunus described this as "financial apartheid" when he referred to the need for change in conventional banking and lending practices that are currently based on "the more you have, the more you can get."

Juicy day for the Obscure Store includes a don't-miss look at celebrity branding gone hogwild: [Messy URL]

Ernest Hemingway... Greta Garbo... Bob Mackie... Cole Porter... Faith Popcorn... F. Scott Fitzgerald... Marilyn Monroe... Amelia Earhart... Arnold Palmer

Whew: My problem with Netscape 4.5pr2 turned out to be a font-bug that's fixed by setting preferences to always-use-my-fonts.

Free virtual-world-app demo download: (Oops-- coming soon.) http://www.stagecast.com/

Stagecast Creator and Stagecast Player are both written in Java. Stagecast chose Java to easily deliver products that will run on a variety of platforms, including Windows and Mac OS. Creations may be run either standalone or in a networked web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Stagecast's products build upon Apple Computer's Cocoa technology, adding a number of valuable enhancements.

A prose excerpt from the new Nobelist: http://www.brazil-brasil.com/p54ju95a.htm

Leading Jesus to the hearth, with its floor of brick, Mary Magdalene insisted on removing his tunic and washing him herself, stroking his body with her fingertips and kissing him softly on the chest and thighs, first one side, then the other. The delicate touch of hands and lips made Jesus shiver, the nails grazing his skin gave him gooseflesh, Don't be frightened, she whispered.

Two others: http://www.brazil-brasil.com/p24oct96.htm and http://www.brazzil.com/p54oct97.htm

Very nice 'obit' for Myst-style gaming: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/10/cov_08feature.html

Instead of yearning for more games in the Myst-Riven immersive genre -- where lushly beautiful environments and hidden puzzles are themselves the stars -- perhaps the general audience Myst appealed to really just wanted some eye candy for their new CD-ROM drives.

According to Blizzard producer Bill Roper, the company's free Battle.net service has played host to 1.2 million unique users in the past 90 days.

...But while he's mindful of the "massively persistent" genre's limitations -- he also thinks the players lose perspective on their world if more than 10,000 play at once -- his competitors aren't.

The Atlantic recalculates that the poverty line is really $25k for a family of four, and the current underemployment rate is 15%: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98oct/clintec.htm

Imagine a family of four living on $15,100 (almost 40 percent less than the $25,000 budget just described) trying to find decent housing with no more than about $300 a month for rent and utilities combined, having no more than $52 a week to spend on food for four people -- sixty-three cents a meal per family member.

In 1994 there were more than 65 million Americans living in households unable to attain this ($25k) standard.

Ain't It Cool is still impossibly slow: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/section.cgi?type=Coolnews

New New Scientist discusses how (rational) game theory is being extended by (irrational) drama theory: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981010/drama.html

"The basic idea is that paradoxes have an emotional effect on the characters," he says. "And the reason these emotions emerge -- like anger and fear, or affection and goodwill -- is that they have a drama-theoretic role. They shake the characters out of old ways of thinking, allowing them to see a new way forward."

Good Nader rant on CounterSpin: [RealAudio] http://www.webactive.com/webactive/content/cspin.html

More painful truths in the Progressive Review

Number of persons currently in prison on federal perjury charges: 115
Number of Muslim countries bombed by the US in the past fifteen years: 5

Silly genetic-algorithm parody: http://www.brunching.com/toys/toy-hamburger.html [Whump]

The Current Burger: "Chicken Animal-Style Fish Tasty Jumbo Western Philly Sourdough Extreme California Spicy Country-Style Sandwich"
Current burger generation: 574

Science Daily introduces creative topical archives: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Life Sciences
Health & Medicine
Cells & Microbes
Mind & Brain
Males & Females
Plants & Animals

Physical Sciences
Space & Time
Matter & Energy
Earth & Sky
Circuits & Chips
Order & Chaos

Social Sciences
Fossils & Ruins
Science & Society
Dollars & Sense
Fun & Learning
People & Places

Meta: I haven't heard a peep from Mind-It in eight days. Makes me suspicious...

It's been a long road since "The Wizard and the Princess"! King's Quest adds 3-D engine: [multipage] http://www.gamespot.com/adventure/kingsque/preview_cgw.html

...In fact, as I maneuvered Connor through the world - crossing streams, climbing walls, exploring hillsides - it crossed my mind that this is what Myth would look like at ground level, rather than from a "god view."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1891, Parnell died (commemorated as Ivy Day).

The Beeb rethinks its tone: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/7/25924.html

...the relationship between the BBC and its viewers should be "adult to adult". In the past, he confessed, the relationship had been "parent to child".

New NY Review of Books includes Didion critiquing the pundits' relentless spinning of MonicaGate: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998102216R

The 1998 Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokespersons tellingly provides, for producers with underdeveloped Rolodexes of their own, 1,477 telephone numbers to call for those guests "who will drive the news issues in the next year."

The Gulf War made CNN, but it was the trial of O.J. Simpson that taught the entire broadcast industry how to perfect the pushing of the stakes.

The Starr "narrative," in other words, offers us what is known among students of fiction as an unreliable first-person narrator, a classic literary device whereby the reader is made to realize that the situation, and indeed the narrator, are other than what the narrator says they are. It cannot have been the intention of its authors to present their witness as the victimizer and the President as her hapless victim, and yet there it was, for all the world to read.

You don't have to like Orwell to enjoy this biographical study: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998102210R

The bare biographical facts are curious enough: a talented scholar at Eton perversely goes off to become an imperial policeman in Burma, a dishwasher in Paris, and a tramp in London; runs a village shop, fights in the Spanish Civil War, abandons left-wing literary London for a farm on a remote Scottish island, and dies of tuberculosis at the moment of literary triumph, aged forty-six.

Very few writers harvest this double tribute of becoming both adjective and noun. Offhand, I can only think of Marxist, Freudian, Darwinian, Dickensian, Tolstoyan, Joycean, and Jamesian.

Mailer as philosopher: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998102227R

The something good is what Mailer calls "democracy" ... The dark side is what he calls "technology"...

Where Mailer differed from Sartre and Reich (and from all his other teachers except Lawrence) was in making sex the site of metaphysical struggle as well.

The essay is notorious for a passage in which the case of two eighteen-year-olds murdering a candy-store owner is proposed, without much qualification, as an example of "daring the unknown." ("One enters into a new relation with the police," as the essay explains.)

Mailer took feminism to be a tool of technology, an attempt to divest sex of spiritual content. ... If a vibrator is as good as a penis, life has no meaning.

Mailer's novels seem today to enact a panic about masculinity that has a very mid-century flavor to it; the sorts of gender roles central to Mailer's imagination have virtually disappeared from the repertory of contemporary identity.

Isaiah Berlin on JFK's character: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998102231F

I've never known a man who listened to every single word that one uttered more attentively.

And he was riveted by the thought of great men. There was no doubt that when he talked about Churchill, whom he obviously admired vastly, when he talked about Stalin, when he talked about Napoleon, Lenin -- every time he talked about one of these world leaders, his eyes shone with a particular glitter...

I think he had to screw himself up each time and expend nervous energy upon obstacle after obstacle, hurdle after hurdle. It was a hard thing.

If ever there was a man who directed his own life in a conscious way, it was he -- it seemed to me he didn't drift or float in any respect at all.

A dry attempt to rehabilitate 'group selection': [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998102259R

In fact, none of these schemes of "genetic algorithms" has yet succeeded in solving a design problem that was not already solved by more conventional methods.

Demographic studies of Native American groups have confirmed that, as might be expected, so-called "war chiefs" who were elected to lead their fellows into battle had smaller numbers of children as a consequence of their greater likelihood of death in combat.

NetSkink exposes the venture capitalist party scene: [Messy URL]

"Parties are an important marketing vehicle for technology companies," said Jeffrey O'Brien, editor of Marketing Computers, a San Francisco-based technology marketing magazine, "because they're a perception of health. A good party can go a long way in creating a buzz around a company, as well fostering good feelings among the press, customers and prospects."

New Village Voice includes a portrait of a savage artworld gossip: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/41apinchbeck.shtml

"He is a great gossip writer, and he is absolutely fearless. The thing I like about Charlie is that he has created this position of power for himself out of nothing -- out of his voice alone."

And Spike Lee's 70s flick: http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/41amorales2.shtml

"It was a very crazy time in New York," says Lee, clad in a Knicks jacket and an Aussie field hat. "You had the blackout, Son of Sam, Plato's Retreat. The Yankees won the World Series. We're trying to get all of that into this film. And something we demonstrated already in Do the Right Thing -- the heat definitely makes people go over the edge, particularly in New York. With so many people living on top of each other, when it's about 95 degrees, things happen."

NASA climbs in bed with Mattel: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/LIFE/lat_toys1005.htm [NASA Watch]

The toy, he said, is more real than he could have imagined. Count the solar panels atop the toy rover -- the real robot's solar panels have the same number and configuration. Turn the toy upside-down -- details of wiring and diodes are molded on in the right spots. Check out the cleats on the toy wheels -- the number and texture mimic the Mars rover's.

Yay! A beloved Mac word processor-- Nisus-- is giving away an older version free: (Spanish Inquisition required) http://www.nisus.com/nisusdl/login.asp?new=yes [TidBits] (Its best feature is grep-via-menus, imho.)

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