![[Big mess]](img3/forbes.gif)
Forbes redesign flunks font test:
http://www.forbes.com/ (quickly fixed)
I'm trying to make a bookmarklet that will cause my start page to always open at the lower left of my screen. This works fine except on the launch itself, when it just gives a blank window in the wrong place, and a useless 'Home' button:
javascript:moveTo(4,168);location.href='file:/blahblah.html'
A longish joke for sexist physicists: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Jan/manwrong.html
The question was raised: "If a man alone in the woods speaks, and his wife cannot hear him, is he still wrong?" I have considered this question in light of the principles of Modern Physics and offer my thesis, dedicated to my wife, who anchors me in reality...
Digital City seems to have orphaned its First Chapters page, but here's USA Today's huge one: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
To be sung to "Modern Major General" by Gilbert & Sullivan [Deja URL]
I am the very model of a Newsgroup personality.
I intersperse obscenity with tedious banality.
Addresses I have plenty of, both genuine and ghosted, too,
On all the countless newsgroups that my drivel is cross-posted to...
AP tells it straight, for once: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0116/d_ap_0116_52.sml
Retired Army Col. Harry Summers said the United States has a long history of demonizing enemies, sometimes an entire population like the Japanese during World War II, but more often individual leaders. "It helps explain things to the American people," Summers said. "It always makes it easier to fight a war if you demonize people so that you're not killing human beings, you're killing the devil."
Highway Patrol vs drug smugglers: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0116/d_ap_0116_51.sml
The going rate for transporting marijuana is around $100 per pound, with loads ranging anywhere from a couple pounds to several hundred.
9am to 11am CST This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive talk radio featuring ex-Kevorkian attorney Geoffrey Fieger [a no-show] Jason Gardner of Brat [sounds great for teens] and RU Sirius [funny but irresponsible]
(Next week will be Michael Moore, the week after Sam Smith!)
Here are the Bookmarklets I added to my local start page:
NewDeja | OldDeja | Google | AV | AVjorn | TotalNews | NewsTracker | NewsBot | Yahoo | IMDb | CD Universe | Dogpile | Dict | Profile
(Use View Source to copy these to your own local page. "AVjorn" is an egosearch of AltaVista's newsgroups, so change the names.)
This is a different guy, but an interesting-looking page: http://www.scruz.net/~kangaroo/LiberalFAQ.htm
THE LONG FAQ ON LIBERALISM Part of the Liberalism Resurgent web site Copyright by Steve Kangas, editor
Site of the Month: Steve Kangas is a GOD!!!
Bookmarklets are tiny JavaScripts (NOT full Java) accessed like bookmarks, that instantly turn your version 4 browser into a version 5 or 6 or 7 browser! [slightly chaotic multipage site design, may not work with Opera]
This index page should be worked thru exhaustively: http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/categor.html [SN]
The search bookmarklets may be the easiest to appreciate: http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/search/index.phtml
Search Bookmarklets allow you to select any word (by dragging across it) and quickly feed it into a search engine. We call this concept the user-defined hyperlink.[Or:] Search Bookmarklets allow you to avoid this step by providing a text box without a page, so you don't have to wait for that extra page to load.
But their Google search script is broke (old URL). Instead, try selecting some text and then click here.
It's a whole new world of surfing: http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/windowing/index.phtml
Make Link to Page & Window This is a "meta-bookmarklet"; it's a bookmarklet that makes other bookmarklets! It enables you to bookmark not just a webpage, but also the particular window size and position at the time of the bookmark.
And they offer a whole nother approach to multiwindow surfing, as well: http://www.bookmarklets.com/about/topics/multiwin.html
Once you have a second window, the slogan is "Don't Click - Drag!" That is, instead of clicking on the link you drag it to another window.
Anticipating a forthcoming Hemingway manuscript: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000004736.html
In 1952, Americans lined up at the newsstands to buy Life magazine for the novella "The Old Man and the Sea." In 48 hours, 5.3 million copies were sold.His 1926 novel of a foursome's escapades in Spain, "The Sun Also Rises," was, in the words of biographer and novelist Anthony Burgess, "one of the rare books able to influence the way people behaved and talked. Brett became a model of speech and behavior for a whole generation of college girls."
Three-mile cable of woven aluminum to help defunct satellites self-destruct? http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_256000/256115.stm
"Iridium [the satellite telecommunications company] have had seven satellites become inoperative already," says Forward. "They said to us, where were you guys five years ago when we needed you."
Fascinating new deductions about Catal Hoyuk and other 9000yo+ archeological sites: [Deja URL]
Maybe the wild grains were harvested, but there is no sign yet of grinding. And although the place is huge for the era, it lacks the characteristics of a city: there appears to be no sign of hierarchy, nor of communal institutions as such, nor of labor division.
Steven Schuldt is a Mac-lover who's perhaps just a tad insane: http://www.omnigroup.com/MailArchive/MacOSX-talk/1999/0544.html [MacOS]
So take this hint. MacOSX Server on an ice-white and blue G3 make the best computer you've ever touched. Here at last is the thing you prayed for every miserable hour spent holding NT's hand as it convulsed, vomiting and choking on its own excrement in front of you...
New Science News includes a short item about dark matter, if you liked Wednesday's New Scientist overview: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/1_16_99/fob7.htm
Analysis of several studies led Kormendy and Freeman to conclude that the tinier the galaxy, the higher its density of dark matter.
Oklahoman slams back at CJR, for poor research: http://www.ionet.net/~gpalmer/Letter.html (F Herbert)
However, Bruce Selcraig's "critique" of my employer is inept, inaccurate, distorted and ethically questionable. It does violence to the reputations of decent, caring reporters and editors, while doing little to advance the cause of good journalism. It is guilty of the very failings it claims to expose in The Daily Oklahoman. If I were the editor of a journal that purported to champion standards of fairness and accuracy, I would be doing some serious soul-searching as to how I had allowed this piece to find its way into print.
An utterly charming page about math in the movies: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html [HG]
It's My Turn (1980) In the opening scene of this romantic comedy, Jill Clayburgh, playing a mathematics professor, proves the "snake lemma" of homological algebra:
0 -> A -> B -> C -> 0 | | |
0 -> A'-> B'-> C'-> 0to an obnoxious graduate student. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most erudite mathematical scene in a major motion picture, though spoiled somewhat by a heavy handed portrayal of the grad student.
Long and dry but significant inquiry into the psychology of debt: http://www.demographics.com/publications/ad/98_ad/9812_ad/ad981202.htm [HG]
Despite the amount of money involved, almost nothing is known about these delinquent debtors. People who pay off debts are not lenders' profitable customers, while people who go bankrupt turn the profit equation inside out. It is the people in the middle, those who fall behind but are determined to make good, who can generate the best return for credit companies.The application of the kind of demographic, statistical and algorithmic energy that is common elsewhere -- from understanding how often to send someone a mail-order catalog to deciding whether to offer credit in the first place -- is only now being applied to delinquent debtors.
When psychologist John Bachman arrived at CFS from California last summer, his starting place was a file of letters from CFS customers -- 500 thank-you notes from people happy with their "collection experience." Bachman is using that batch of happy customers as a place to start his research into how CFS clients got into debt and what motivated them to get out.
Interesting stuff at Progressive Review:
"What I had told Lucianne Goldberg at the time was that it had been alarming to me that when I tried to enter data from a caller that I was working with on a tainted blood issue, that every time I entered a word that had to do with this particular issue, it would flash up either the word encrypted or password required or something to indicate the file was locked."
This story comes with a nice animated gif: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/plastics990115.html
"This is the next logical step in self-assembly," Jenekhe said. "We start with polymer molecules in solution. They self-organize into hollow spheres, and billions and billions of them come together in a precise, ordered way to form a larger periodic structure."
Visual Basic expert defects to Delphi/Pascal: (highly readable, even if you don't know the languages) http://www.vb-zone.com/upload/free/features/vbpj/1999/mckinney/mckinney1.asp [Slashdot]
- Delphi contract: "We will make 80 percent of the grunt work of creating GUI apps and components (COM or otherwise) easy through use of wizards, library functions, and inheritance mechanisms. We'll provide more complicated but standard means to do the other 20 percent of your work. "- Visual Basic contract: "We will make 95 percent of the grunt work of creating GUI apps and COM components easy by doing it for you in ways that you can't see. You're on your own for the other 5 percent."
"In Visual Basic, creating DLLs of functions is as easy as using forms." False. Global objects are some sort of sick joke that appears to have been designed by medieval theologians.
I spend 100 percent of my programming time doing general purpose stuff. The limitations that bug other people 20 percent of the time bug me 100 percent of the time. As a result, I developed a delusion and came to believe that the designers of Visual Basic wanted to make it into a good general purpose language. They never promised this in any way.
Visual Basic designers have chosen to pile more and more doodads on a weak foundation, knowing that doodads, not foundations, sell boxes. [write this on Gates's tombstone!] Perhaps they've made the right choice, but there's a price to be paid. They exchange the respect of their peers for financial success. Unfortunately, a committee can't choose self-respect over profits. The heart of the problem is that there's no one in charge. No one person designs the language. There's no vision because there is no visionary.
OSRR adds an update page (late-breaking gossip? original research?): http://www.obscurestore.com/updates.html
"A deal was not made with Larry Flynt Productions. Their offer of $500 was not acceptable..."
Another (too short!) pair of Patricia Barber samples: [RealAudio] http://www.fimpression.com/FIMCD/FIMCD010.ASP (John Wiseman)
This recording of an outstanding female vocal accompanied by an equally outstanding jazz band has, up to now, won over 15 awards or best reviews from international major magazines or music institutions.
Joe Bay on ark: [Deja URL]
"M. Otis Beard" writes: > I'm glad you asked that question, Sarah. It reminds me of the > time that my father and I had a conversation regarding just this > issue. My father was a self-made man in the truest sense of the > word; he educated himself, built his fortune on strict principles > of hard work and integrity, and never once tried to get ahead by > slinging mud or stabbing somebody else in the back.That's interesting, because my father was a self-made man in the truest sense of the word. He enucleated an egg cell from a donor, micro-injected a nucleus from one of his own pluripotent stem cells, and implanted it in a psuedopregnant female goat. After gestation, he delivered himself and educated himself. Of course his fortune was largely willed to him by himself, but he had made that before, so it was okay. And to this day, he prides himself on his integrity, his compassion, and his ability to eat tin cans.
Four out of ten doctors apparently disagree: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0115/d_ap_0115_84.sml
The editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association was fired today, and The Associated Press learned it was because he published a research article about college students' sexual attitudes apparently to coincide with President Clinton's impeachment trial.
Apropos of nothing: Anybody want to party like it's 1959?
Nuclear Blast Mapper: [multipage] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/amex/bomb/sfeature/blastmap.html [NTK]
Supply Blast Mapper with any location, and it will display a map that shows a nuclear weapon's "zones of destruction" with that location at the center.
(I did a posting like this a few years back.)
Some skinny on Sarah's hack: http://jya.com/flannery.htm [NTK]
The idea we were working on was to use 2x2 matrices with entries modulo n, n the product of 2 primes (ie an RSA number). The security is therefore exactly the same as the security of an RSA key with the same modulus. However, the encryption and decryption processes require only a small number of matrix multiplications rather than modular exponentiation, so both public-key operations (16 multiplications over the finite field) and private-key operations are as fast as a normal RSA private-key operation (17 multiplications). The downside is that both the key and the ciphertext are about eight times the length of the modulus, rather than more-or-less the length of the modulus as with RSA.
Cool: http://www.ntk.net/
...last Monday, RODDY MANSFIELD and his associates from the video newszine UNDERCURRENTS barricaded themselves into Shell's London offices to protest the company's mistreatment of the citizens of the Niger Delta. Hours later they were forcibly expelled by police, who smashed through partition walls to arrest them. Despite Shell cutting off light and electricity, the team managed to issue press releases and photos via the 133Mhz Toshiba Libretto, a cellular modem and digital camera. It's a hack that could have wider applications.
BitchX (see below) looks like a must-read: http://www.gaminginsider.com/
I was reading Computer Gaming World the other day and I noticed that they appear to be in almost complete denial that the web exists. A review of Shogo (yes, there's that BitchX Monolith Bias) included ZERO game specific URL's despite the fact that good fan sites exist as well as an excellent site by the developer at shogo-mad.com. I quickly paged through the rest of the magazine, and saw pretty much the same thing everywhere. CGW is in Web Denial. Guess what guys, it isn't going away anytime soon.
Juicy but way-complicated game-can't-ship scandal: [5pg] http://www.dallasobserver.com/1999/011499/feature1-1.html (Bruce Hollebone)
According to internal company documents, ION has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations, hiring New York and Los Angeles press agents to pitch them as the "it" boys of the information age....of the approximately 85 people ION employed a year ago, more than half have quit or been let go. Finally, six weeks ago, virtually the entire team working on Daikatana jumped ship and joined Wilson's company.
Internal ION e-mails and interviews with former employees suggest that Romero is missing in action and that Porter has taken the supervision of Romero's long-delayed title.
The company has run through $26 million and is spending at a rate of nearly $900,000 per month.
Two years ago, when ION Storm started with $13 million, it was the place everybody in computer gaming wanted to work. Billing themselves as the shop where "design is law," ION would pay game designers to pursue their artistic yen.
"Game developers are a special breed," he explains. "They're very loyal, and all you have to do is treat them with a minimal amount of respect, and they'll stay with you forever."
Within hours, "BitchX," a wicked little Web site that serves as the gaming industry's Drudge Report (but is better written) had posted the item.
Soon ION snared a whopper: Game publisher Mindscape offered the partners a $13 million three-game contract with a $3 million per game advance, as well as $4 million for 4 percent of the company -- a figure that implied ION was worth $100 million.
"I also didn't know at the time that John had pretty much decided he had paid his dues and he was gone," recalls Wilson. "He just wanted to do interviews and be John Romero. Just be a producer..."
"And on the way to the meeting, John says 'You know, I don't think I can do it. I think we're firing Porter just because everyone hates him. And we really haven't given him a chance to f___ up.' "And not only did John choose not to fire him, he chose to tell him that we were going to fire him. And that's when the whole thing started shifting."
E-mails show that Porter had convinced Romero and Hall that they had to grab the cash now, because the company's valuation would never be higher.
"VERY VERY VERY concerned about Daikatana not shipping on time (as well as the other titles)...VERY VERY VERY concerned about people leaving Daikatana -- though I tried to assure them that most of those who left were s___ anyway...VERY concerned that John's heart is not in Daikatana...VERY VERY VERY concerned about the AI in Daikatana and that there is a TREMENDOUS amount left to do."
As of late November, when the old Daikatana team walked, the innovations upon which the game is being marketed and that will distinguish it from similar first-person-shooters did not exist. The artificially intelligent sidekicks had not yet been programmed. And neither had the daikatana itself.
Most excellent: (Netscape only, alas) http://www.http2.com/ [SN]
HTTP2 gives you an address to your homepage that is very easy to remember. For example:http2/ /www.yourname.com
You can register any domain you want, for example http2/ /www.fbi.org or http2/ /www.quake.com. It's completly free to register any domain.
(So I should now be reachable at: http2/ /jorn. Except Netscape appends it to the current URL!)
It's the filename from Hell! [Messy URL]
http:/ /www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/`~!@^*()_{}|[];,..html
Request: Who's got the best big-picture reporting on Brazil today?
Garbageologists in space: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0115995.htm
ARGOS's scientific payload will include the University's space dust experiment (SPADUS), which will measure the mass, speed and trajectory of dust particles in low-Earth orbit, and will allow scientists to determine whether they are particles left in the wake of comets or man-made orbital debris.
Jodie's next: http://mrshowbiz.go.com/news/Todays_Stories/990113/foster011399.html
The drama, set in the '30s, is about a circus freak who opens his heart to a poor waif. He turns her into a star and eventually falls in love with her. Said Foster back in September, "Everybody thinks she's this sweet girl, but by the end of the movie there are questions of whether she's causing the demise of everybody in the circus." Claire Danes is in talks to star...
Awesome jazz vocalist-- Patricia Barber: [RealAudio, #3 is what I heard on the radio] [Messy URL]
(Her voice may be too subtle, too smooth for RealAudio.)
I'm pursuing my resolution to read up on globalisation: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/01/15/text/p1s3.txt
After the Russian crisis, many of the highly speculative hedge funds reduced their operations or went out of business. Many of these groups had borrowed money to speculate. This is called using leverage. "The leverage is out of the markets," says John Burgess, managing director for Bankers Trust Company in New York.
Dreams are: In the last month, I've had several dreams that caused me to wake up laughing (not at all a common occurrence for me). Today's ended with me dancing down a city street, singing "Uptown Girl"...
(Disclaimer: I've never even met any uptown girls, and I think it's an idiotic song.)
Everybody talks about the weather... now we can be paranoid about it: [Deja URL]
The openly-stated goal for the U.S. military is to "own the weather" [2] by year 2025 and to thereby be able to bring target populations to their knees by "storm enhancement," "storm modification," and being able to "induce drought."
Detailed look at PalmPilot VII: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/2/ns-6632.html
Palm.Net's new approach to Web access bears the name of "Web clipping," a phrase that invokes the image of a reader clipping a fragment of a page for reference rather than ripping out the entire page. Palm.Net doesn't attempt to provide Web surfing, with its bandwidth-intensive norms of graphically rich pages and its multibranching hyperlinks that lead from one page to many others. Instead, Palm.Net queries for specific information...
They didn't used to archive any content, but maybe the Christian Science Monitor has mended its ways? http://www.csmonitor.com/todays_paper/graphical/today/p-csmcontext.html
(This is the first news page I've seen that does the obvious-- offers a neat summary of each story.)
Six out of ten doctors agree: http://www.washtimes.com/news/news3.html
Just in time for the impeachment trial, a medical journal is publishing an 8-year-old survey of college students that found 60 percent agree with President Clinton's belief that oral sex is not really sex. News of the report -- embargoed by Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) until Tuesday -- was disclosed Thursday on the Junk Science Home Page on the Internet, which called it "politically convenient science."
Who's got the agenda??? http://www.junkscience.com/
"Junk science" is bad science used by: personal injury lawyers to shakedown deep pocket businesses; the "food police" and environmental Chicken Littles to fuel wacky social agendas; power-drunk regulators; cut-throat businesses to attack competitors; and slick politicians and overly ambitious scientists to gain personal fame and fortune.
Best poem-of-the-day ever, by Joe Salerno: [Deja URL]
O blessed rainy day, glorious
as a paper bag. The kingdom of poetry
is like this -- quiet, anonymous,
a dab of sunlight on the back of your hand,
a view out the window just before dusk.
Meet Joe Salerno: http://www.garden.net/users/swaa/Salerno.html
Although Salerno received his doctoral degree and taught for some years at the undergraduate level, the concerns of marriage and family compelled him to work in the private sector as a technical writer, a job he did surpassingly well in spite of a lifelong aversion to technology.
New variant on Magic: the Gathering: [3pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/01/cov_15feature3.html
Since the game's introduction, Wizards has printed and sold well over a billion Magic cards.Instead of using an existing story to sell a card game, they created a new story of their own and designed a card game to tell it. They believed that the hunger to find out what happens next, rather than the appeal of well-known characters, would keep people coming back to their game.
As it was in Japan, honor is central to Rokugan. Gain enough honor and you will win the game; accumulate enough dishonor and you will lose it.
Salon looks at the sanctions: [3pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1999/01/15newsb.html
It's one thing to kill civilians as collateral damage, as an unfortunate side effect of taking down a megalomaniac like Saddam. It's another thing to countenance a policy in which all the damage is collateral, none of it apparently hitting its intended target."If it's 200,000 or 500,000 really doesn't matter," he says. "It's still a criminal activity. It's illegal, it's inappropriate, it's disgusting."
Excellent semi-comic piece on stock-market addiction: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/money/feature/1999/01/15feature.html
Soon enough, I brought my addiction home. I began reading articles about market direction, hoping to parse the words of sages like Alan Greenspan and Abby Joseph Cohen.
Dilbert goes to Oxford: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/01/15/timnwsnws01008.html?1334425
Under headings such as "Collaborative Dynamic, Process Determination and Actualization", the council was urged to improve its "functional participatory channels". Agreement would "necessitate the establishment of protocols which dictate the means and timing of co-option into the council dynamic".
New The Nation doesn't do much for me...
In a new Progressive Review, a nice comment from Sam about Maine vs DC:
...I did not make this decision on religious or philosophical grounds; rather it was -- as subsequent events indicated -- highly pragmatic. I simply took advantage of one of the places left in America where a person's word is still considered worthy bond. Washington, in my time at least, has never been such a place...
Character on "Felicity" extends fiction via website: http://www.BusinessToday.com/techpages/noel011419991.htm
In a recent episode, Noel offhandedly mentioned that he had a Web site, and gave the URL -- a move that kicked-off the unique Internet-based experiment. When a few of the show's wired fans gave the URL a try, they found a detailed, Web-based extension of the show.
Frequent-surfer points have arrived: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/willmott/dw.htm
50,000 points for $100 worth of merchandise? Hmmm. When you stop to think about that, it doesn't make much sense to bother with such programs if you operate under the assumption that your time has any value at all.
Greater-fool reserves dangerously low: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cte156.htm
The lower denomination after a split is critical if you're looking for greater fools. Modestly priced stocks are perceived to be more affordable and less risky. No wonder, then, that there was whining and complaining among Yahoo! speculators Wednesday night ... after its split announcement. The beef: that management split its shares, then trading at about $400, only 2-for-1, translating into $200 a share...
Billion-dollar penalty for negligent go-kart maker: http://www.jsonline.com/news/0113kart.asp [OSRR]
Workers at the Tiki Island track, where the accident occurred, testified in depositions that they found three or four of the caps on the track every day. They told Johnson about the problem, but he ignored their complaints, according to evidence presented at the trial.
Sarah Flannery's 15 minutes: [2pg] http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/17330.html
"It's just being crazy," she said. "I don't know where I am. I have done over 100 interviews, and I have to go back to school Thursday.""I think we should be very cautious about comparing the Cayley-Purser algorithm to RSA. RSA has undergone the test of time. But, at the very least, this will help introduce the field of cryptography to the general public," Del Torto said.
What Stephen Wolfram (Mr "Mathematica") is up to: (Telegraph)
Some cellular automata, like the first one (above left) do indeed produce simple patterns. But others do not. "The Rule 30 automaton is the most surprising thing I've ever seen in science," says Wolfram, referring to the largest pattern shown above.
This Day in Joyce History: In 1941, at 2:15am in Zurich, James Joyce died.
MacHome is doing an iMac fruit-race of their own... but they won't let you see the results!?! http://www.machome.com/flavor.html
India gets nervous about net security: http://www.economictimes.com/120199/lead2.htm [Slashdot]
The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has issued a 'red alert' against all network security software developed in the US. And the Central Vigilance Commissioner, N Vittal, is following up on the warning -- he might make it mandatory for all Indian banks and financial institutions to buy only software developed in India.
Not funny to me: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Jan/exports.html
Seems this Russian wine exporter was trying to get his product past a bureaucrat who insisted on a payoff. The bureaucrat quoted a figure of $10,000 to let the shipment past his checkpoint...
Blueberry surges back in the fruit-race:
Blueberry 77
Grape 73
Lime 32
Tangerine 31
Strawberry 24
(Oop! Grape just surged back-- is somebody playing games?)
The overdraft revenue-stream: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/story-69365.html
"Many banks have programmed computers to deduct a customer's biggest checks first on any given day -- instead of in the order they come in. This makes it more likely that several smaller checks will bounce with the bank charging a fee for each. This racks up profits -- and boosts the amount you're overdrawing your account."
New New Scientist includes copyright extremism: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990116/newsstory4.html
The executors of her will are attempting to trademark a virtual reality model of her face to prevent Princess Diana's image being used on unauthorised goods.
Better way to screen for cancer: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990116/newsstory5.html
The technique, called Hall Effect Imaging (HEI), relies on the interaction between ultrasonic vibrations and strong magnetic fields to map the dielectric properties of the body.
Excellent overview of the dark matter mystery: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990116/spaceoddity.html
Eventually, two candidates took the lead: MACHOs (massive compact halo objects), which are failed stars, too dim to see, and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which are exotic particles that interact only reluctantly with their surroundings. For years, the battle raged between MACHOs and WIMPs, but by the early 1990s it seemed that MACHOs had finally won the day. Now everything has changed. MACHOs are down and out, and exotic WIMPs are in the ascendant.Many physicists believe that to unify the strong nuclear force with electromagnetism and the weak force, there must be twice as many subatomic particles as we have yet discovered. This is the theory of supersymmetry. Each familiar particle has a much heavier "super-partner": quarks have squarks, electrons selectrons, photons photinos. Most of these particles are exceedingly unstable, and quickly fall apart. But the least massive super-partner, the neutralino, should be stable.
Over billions of years, a huge stock of WIMPs could have built up in the Sun's core.
Pesky "vegetarians" vs McD's, part deux: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/0113/i_ap_0113_71.sml
Richard Rampton, lead lawyer for McDonald's, argued that while an elected government does not have the right to sue citizens for libel, the same does not apply "to the rights of individuals or corporations to protect themselves from unwarranted damage to their reputation."
(The book about this trial makes it clear that Rampton is one of the most contemptible human disgraces of our era.)
ROM-based browser for wireless devices: [multipage] http://www.uplanet.com/tech/products/upbrowser.html
Whereas the fundamental structural unit of HTML is a page, in Handheld Device Markup Language the fundamental unit is a deck of cards. Each HTTP response from a Web server is packaged in the form of an HDML deck...
Musing:
The conservatism of search-engines -- that is, their reluctance to innovate -- seems to reveal some deep truth about the current Net economy. The conservatism of browsers, too. One such truth may be that the current playingfield will get swept clean every time someone does innovate. (The lack of attention to PhilG's brilliant book is another example of this timidity. It sees miles deeper than any other Net.pundit.) Maybe it's because programming is so much harder than other forms of business activity? And starting a large project is harder than tweaking an old one...
Associated Press writer humiliates self utterly: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cte151.htm
A 16-year-old Irish schoolgirl may have made e-mail even faster. Sarah Flannery from Blarney, in Ireland's Cork County, is being hailed as a mathematical genius for devising a new code for sending electronic mail...
Does Jakob Nielsen have the biggest ego on the Internet? http://www.useit.com/hotlist/spotlight.html
"... me ... my ... I ... me ... my ..." etc
Coppersky rants! (against me-too portals): http://www.coppersky.com/ongir/news/index.html
I'd be the first to agree with you if you told me this is a geeky thing to feel strongly about. Alas, I can't help it. All the knowledge on Earth is useless if an infrastructure for finding it hasn't been developed.
(Who's the author of this site, anyway? ...Tara Calashain.)
Five sane predictions about the 'Net economy': http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue63/news-editor.html [Wired]
1. No one knows what it is.
2. Standards -- both open and closed -- matter.
3. Some markets are global; some aren't.
4. Margins will shrink.
5. Change will accelerate.
Psychology applied to AIDS prevention: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0113/d_ap_0113_140.sml
For example, the researchers found that cleanliness, including not "eating behind" others - sharing their plates or silverware - is important among blacks. So the counselors explained that just as it is important not to eat or drink behind someone, you don't want to have sex "behind someone."
Unpasteurised cider may be safer? http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0113993.htm
They also found that bacterial concentrations declined over time in apple juice and cider, with the greater decrease occurring in unpasteurized cider, possibly due to the presence of other microorganisms that competed with the E. coli.
Very cool image: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/01/990113080636.htm
Although most people think of space as empty, it does, in fact, contain highly dilute gases. These gases, moving at incredible speeds, constitute the superwinds. They can span distances equal to about 1 percent of the size of the observable universe.
Clever archeologists' trick for guessing population growth by prey size: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0113994.htm
Stiner says these pulses are signaled by size diminution in slow-growing prey types, such as partridges and hares, that were more difficult for hunters to chase down, but also were more abundant and fecund than the readily-harvested tortoises and shellfish.
New stuff on Pinochet at Consortium (there's a simple typo in the first URL there)
From a fine day's Common Dreams, this boggler about the Pentagon's latest boondoggler: http://chicagotribune.com/version1/article/0,1575,SAV-9901130101,00.html
With fewer and fewer places to store people and hardware around the globe and a growing desire to respond to a wide range of contingencies, the Pentagon is studying the feasibility of off-shore bases to get around the political sensitivities in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Japan that complicate access to existing bases.
And Norman Solomon worries about AOL: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/990106.html [CDreams]
Meanwhile, CBS has pledged to boost AOL via "extensive on-air promotion within each of its news broadcasts" -- including "CBS Evening News," "Face the Nation," "48 Hours" and "60 Minutes."
And Molly Ivins on this year's Congress: http://www.wald.com/news/ivins011299.html [CDreams]
How nice to see the National Salvage Motor Vehicle Consumer Protection Act back again. The mis-naming of bills has gotten so bad that newspapers are going to have to start putting the real purpose of every bill in parentheses right after its name, as in: the National Salvage Motor Vehicle Consumer Protection Act (Another Rip-off).
Forbes redesign flunks font test:
http://www.forbes.com/ (quickly fixed)
New NY Observer
TV 2nite: Frontline's look at the drugwar gets highest marks from VVoice and NY magazine (dire)
That gum I like is coming back in style: http://www.tvgen.com/newsgossip/dish/990112c.htm
It's been more than a decade since David Lynch brought his unique sensibilities to TV with ABC's Twin Peaks, but he'll give it another shot in the near future on the same network with a drama called Mulholland Drive.
Teen girls seize another high ground: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/01/13/timfgneur02008.html?1334425
Miss Flannery, 16, from Blarney, Co Cork, used matrices to formulate an alternative to RSA, the current data protection code, devised by three students at MIT in 1977. The result is an algorithm that is far faster than the RSA and equally secure.She is considering publishing her findings rather than patenting as she does not want people to pay for her discovery.
A quick peek at Microsoft's UK research center: [Telegraph]
The Cambridge lab is working on five areas, determined by the personnel it has been able to attract: security, networking, information retrieval, statistical learning, and programming language theory.
They're back! http://www.theonion.com/
Jewel Organizes 'Save The Unicorns' Benefit
New Village Voice includes Nat Hentoff defending Clinton's cast-offs: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9902/hentoff.shtml
The president's acolytes -- such as Alan Dershowitz -- continually bray, "Sex lies! It's all sex lies!" They insist that these thrown-away women are making all this up, including the threats and intimidation. But is every one of these women lying?
Homepages for the homeless: http://www.dallasnews.com/technology-nf/techbiz30.htm
At shelters, the terminals are always open around the clock. People inside are teaching each other how to find lost family members and job opportunities. ... It opens up new worlds.One of the powers of this whole technology is that you become owner of your time again.
They come to us and say, "We want to put our resumes on your network. How can we do that?" We used to say, "We don't have a mechanism." They would say, "Why not?" And we would have to answer, "Well, no good reason."
Good backgrounder on ICQ: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cte126.htm
ICQ has a core of 5 million users who are logged on 2 1/2 hours a day and actively use the software 69 minutes a day, says chief operating officer Fred Singer.
But how many did you click on? http://www.internetnews.com/Reuters/1999/01/1204-doubleclick.html
Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc. said its network connecting buyers and sellers of online ad space placed more than five billion advertisements on 6,400 Web sites worldwide in December.
Excellent update on net.radio for the masses: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/culture/story/17230.html?wnpg=all
Shoutcast server responsibilities are easily distributed, making it feasible for someone with only a modem and a network of other servers to broadcast to an infinite number of listeners.
Rant: The press and Wall Street are behaving with extreme, catastrophic irresponsibility in touting ignorant, speculative, stock-price inflation as an economic wonderdrug. (Need To Know nailed it Friday, pointing out how Zapata's stock rose on their announcement of an Amazon Associate program ...meaning they make about $3 off every sale they refer there, just like every other damn site.)
I suppose it will keep on until Bezos etc start cashing in their reserves, so the price drops dramatically and folks get scared sensible. But when will that start? Is there a scheduled delay they have to observe?
That AstroPic I liked is coming back in style: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990112.html
Wind erosion has been discovered on Mars. Pictures of regions surrounding the north polar cap show sand dunes covered in frost.
Environmentalist loses it, over shrimp, AIDS, etc: http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/weeping.html [CDreams]
There was silence in the car for a minute. "My gosh," said another colleague. "If people with death staring them right in the face can't open their minds and change their ways, why are we bothering with environmental work at all?"...Suffice it to say that the last black crested macaques in the world are being caught by desperately poor Indonesians to satisfy the appetite of rich Taiwanese for fresh, raw baby monkey brains.
Here's a stable, topnotch Rescuers-nude page: http://snopes.simplenet.com/disney/films/rescuers.htm
Disney also claimed that the images were not placed in the film by any of their animators, but were inserted during the post-production process.
Gates-sighting at Seattle Thin Red Line: http://www.dejanews.com/thread/431551957
Bill and Melinda seemed to have enjoyed the movie, and he has a goofy laugh as she joked with him before the show started.
NASA Watch bristles at eBay scam: http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html
"This could quite possibly be one of the rarest and most unique items ever offered on Ebay. This is an absolutely genuine steel o-ring from the space shuttle Challenger!"
Plus a space-science site with brilliant design: http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/
Readable poem of the day: http://www.poems.com/today.htm
Short Course in Semiotics1.
"Naked woman surrounded by police": that's one way
to start the poem...
Flynt flops; Starr Report goes Live: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm
Adult film legend Ron Jeremy is on board to direct and star as Bill Clinton in the reenactment.
Scorched-earth 2nite: Flynt live on C-SPAN at 10pm CST: http://www.c-span.org/watch/ [RealPlayer] (cancelled!)
Chris Burden retrospective: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/01/12/timnwsnws02020.html?1334425
But the critics know him best for the Shoot incident of 1973, in which he received a nasty bullet wound when he stood against a gallery wall and was shot by a friend with a rifle. He still has a scar on his arm.
Online book: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/marksomers/40.html [OLB]
Amy C. Edmondson, "A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller"
Salon claims these are real Chinese movie-title translations: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/log/1999/01/11log.html
"Fargo": "Ice Blood Cruel and Sudden"
"Gone With the Wind": "The Confused World of a Beautiful Woman"
"Clueless": "Clever Women's Power Manager"
"Psycho": "Sight Fear Touch Heart"
And a worthy paean to Sigourney W: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/bc/1999/01/12bc.html
But Winona Ryder quickly proves she's no match for Weaver, on- or off-screen. Foul words fall from Ryder's innocent mouth like little pebbles dropping with a dull thud -- "Jesus Christ, what'd you put in this sh__" -- whereas Weaver spits out bad words like bullets.
Here's excerpts of a hilarious play Durang originally did with SW (15 Jan 98 below): [multipage, annoying frames] http://www.nervemag.com/Durang/longing/
LULU: I am unmoored. I have lost my mooring. You know, a boat is moored to the dock, but if the rope breaks, it drifts and drifts. I have no idea how to live or how to behave. (calls out) Anyone want to sleep with me? I'm available!REVEREND DAVIDSON: Please, we're on C-Span.
I expect this is making the rounds: [Deja URL]
In the wake of the Exxon/Mobil deal and the AOL/Netscape deal, here are the latest mergers we can expect to see:Hale Business Systems, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Fuller Brush, and W.R. Grace Company merge to become Hale Mary Fuller Grace.
Polygram Records, Warner Brothers, and Keebler Crackers merge to become Polly-Warner-Cracker.
3M and Goodyear merge to become MMMGood...
World's central bankers seek controls on speculation: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/0111/i_ap_0111_97.sml
"It doesn't make sense that you run your own financial system well and with rules ... and the financial system, internationally, has no rules,'' Chatu Mongol Sonakul, governor of the Bank of Thailand, said outside the meeting.Greenspan declined to comment to journalists, at one point breaking into a brisk jog to get past reporters outside the meeting.
Prize-nominated poems to an anorexic daughter: [Telegraph]
So seeing her now
rise from the station subway
with bags marked for home,to the lip of the crowd, and hesitate,
not a child now, and not any image
I could make to hold her,I can't call her name,
I can't find words for her,
I wouldn't dare.
New New York Magazine features Wall Street's winners: [multipage] http://www.nymag.com/This_Week/view.asp?id=2078
On the following pages, you'll find ten success stories, players who either made big Wall Street reputations or expanded them in the past twelve months.
(I'm not sure I'm gonna read any of these.)
Activist brain-trust: [Deja URL]
We have been working on a call to action with Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn. Below is the final draft, which all four of them have signed off on and given permission to distribute. ...A CALL TO ACTION ON SANCTIONS AND THE U.S. WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ by Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn
...If we remain silent, we are condoning a genocide that is being perpetrated in the name of peace in the Middle East, a mass slaughter that is being perpetrated in our name.
Something for musicians to experiment with: [Deja URL]
I make instruments (mostly flutes and whistles) for fun. Last week, I tried an experiment and drilled an extra hole about mid-way between the top-most finger hole and the embouchure (blowing hole) then covered it over with a very thin piece of plastic. It was the annoyingly noisy, crinkly stuff they make some grocery bags out of. ... The sound was amazing!
Industrial strength VR: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/tech/docs/029920.htm [Wired]
ETC can simulate all of that very realistically, Mitchell said. It can simulate the amount of fuel aboard the simulated airplanes and how long and hot it would burn, as well as the amount of liquid the simulated fire trucks carry to fight the fires.
Progressive Review tidbit:
As part of the media's scorched earth coverage of Tripp, the Washington Post even sent a reporter out to raise money for her defense fund. Total garnered: $1.01 and an extremely snide article. A few days later, however, a story appeared in the US News & World Report that may shed some light on the Post's antipathy towards Tripp. In her deposition in a Judicial Watch lawsuit, Tripp said that while she was at the White House, the Post would give the administration a "heads up" when a damaging story was about to come out. "It happened frequently," said Tripp and "it was someone high up. It wasn't some gumshoe reporter."
New Scientific American features space travel:
- The Way to Go in Space
- Air-Breathing Engines
- Space Tethers
- Highways of Light
- Light Sails
- Compact Nuclear Rockets
- Reaching for the Stars
And a nice 'world turmoil map': http://www.sciam.com/1999/0299issue/0299numbers.html
A rating of "moderate" turmoil indicates that international business is sometimes affected by expressions of discontent. The U.S. is given a moderate rating for many reasons, including the threat of racial riots (such as those in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1996), terrorist acts (such as the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995), continuing drug-related violence, and attacks on abortion providers.
Atheist O'Hair's diaries to be auctioned: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0111/d_ap_0111_73.sml
At least a half-dozen times, sometimes set off in a separate box, she pleaded: "Somebody, somewhere, love me."...1973: "I want money and power and I am going to get it. By age 50, I want a $60,000 home, a Cadillac car, a mink coat, a cook, a housekeeper. In 1974, I will run for the governor of Texas and in 1976, the president of the United States."
Fixed: This exciting account of the NEAR spaceship crisis changed suddenly to an HIV study at the climactic moment: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0111994.htm
>From midnight and into the morning hours, sleep-deprived APL scientists tested the sequence for errors that could permanently inent HIV subtypes, lettered A to J. The United States subtype, for example, is largely subtype B...
Fruit-race reaches 100 votes with new leader:
Grape 34
Blueberry 32
Tangerine 12
Lime 12
Strawberry 10
200-plus witty translations between UK and US terms: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dgl3djb/ukus/ukus_noframe.html
18) Some food differences
UK US
courgette zucchini
mars bar milky way
milky way three musketeers
opal fruits starburst
chips french fries
crisps chips
A browser utility that parses image-names: http://members.aol.com/Trane64/java/SmartBrowser.html
The SmartImage browser will iterate through images with numbers in their name. If there are two sets of numbers (e.g., 12Image001.jpg) the program will increment the number with the most digits in it (so the next image searched for would be 12Image002.jpg).
Lightweight automatic weapons lead to lowered world 'draft age': http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/011/nation/Children_forced_into_armies__group_says+.shtml
The age of 15 was laid down as part of what the London-based human rights organization described as "a weak compromise" when the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was negotiated in 1989. It has since been ratified by every country except the United States and Somalia.
Great new Consortium looks at some scenes missing from "Evita": http://www.consortiumnews.com/c010699a.html
But her charity extended, too, to her husband's Nazi allies. In June 1947, Evita left for post-war Europe. A secret purpose of her first major overseas trip apparently was pulling together the many loose ends of the Nazi relocation.
And don't miss The President With Two Brains: http://www.consortiumnews.com/c010699b.html
Yet, perhaps, the most startling discovery became public only on Nov. 9. Douglas Horne, the board's chief analyst for military records, reached a shocking conclusion: that a brain other than Kennedy's had been substituted in the autopsy photos.The story of the "second brain" was assigned mostly to the inside pages, as in The Washington Post of Nov. 10. There was no serious assessment of what the analysis could mean to the official version of events and no strong demands for a follow-up.
(Alternate title: And Then There Were None:)
Horne dated the brain's disappearance as sometime between April 26, 1965, and Oct. 31, 1966.
(Alternate title: The President's Brains Are Missing!)
Forbes was way late this morning: http://www.forbes.com/
PhilG&co are encouraging teens to build 'tasteful' websites: http://arsdigita.org/prize/
The annual ArsDigita Prize recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained Web services.
Here's that Enquirer item on Hillary hitting Bill: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/story-71012.html
"Hillary has a vicious temper and when the Gennifer Flowers scandal erupted she physically attacked him -- punched him, scratched him," a source close to the Clintons revealed. "And she's even madder than that now!"
Here are the nekkid vidcaps from the Rescuers cartoon: [very tame]
[1] and [2]
Quake-god evaluates the Mac platform: http://www.webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger.cgi?id=1 [Slashdot]
So, I got a mac and started developing on it. My first weekend of effort had QuakeArena limping along while held together with duct tape, but weekend number two had it properly playable, and weekend number three had it brought up to full feature compatability. I still need to do some platform specific things with odd configurations like multi monitor and addon controlers, but basically now its just a matter of compiling on the mac to bring it up to date.The low level operating systems SUCKS SO BAD it is hard to believe. ...I rebooted my mac system more times the first weekend than I have rebooted all the WinNT systems I have ever owned.
Carbon sanitizes the worst of the crap, but it doesn't turn it into anything particularly good looking.
J-school blues: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/career/1999/01/08career.html
According to the Freedom Forum's 1996 survey of the industry, "Winds of Change: Challenges Confronting Journalism Education," graduate degrees in journalism play little or no role in positively influencing hiring decisions."OK," she said. "It's like the fog. You know those nights when you're driving and the fog's so thick you can barely see. And with each corner you turn, you think that it has to clear up or else you won't be able to go anymore. But it doesn't clear up and somehow you keep going, not being able to see the end or even more than a couple of feet ahead of you. But you just keep moving forward or in the direction that you think is forward at the time." I think I grunted some snort of commiseration before asking, "And then?" "Oh, well that's it," she said.
Salon's copy-editing scrapes bottom:
In a survey of national newsroom recruiters, only 8 percent of those interviewed felt that a journalism degree was a very important preperatory step.
After 52 survey-votes:
Blueberry 21
Grape 17
Lime 6
Tangerine 5
Strawberry 3 [my first choice!]
Laissez-Faire City Times editor takes the bull by the horns: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.2/Bull&Bill.html
We are short the market. The put gives us the right to go short one March Dow Jones futures contract.,,,Speaking of stock market, the price/earnings ratio on the S&P 500 is now 38. We thought it was rich at 19.
USA first in the bad things, last in the good: [Deja URL]
#1 in foreign MILITARY aid to developing countries
LAST in humanitarian aid to developing countries (%GNP)#1 in UNEQUAL pay (ratio CEO to worker pay)
LAST in paid vacation days per year#1 in greenhouse gas emissions
second-to-last in % of population "very concerned" about greenhouse/CO2
A multipath-HTML hacker-sim: http://24.1.84.100:81/game?what=Hack [Risks]
It's now two hours later, and you have broken into and crashed at least 100 Windows boxes. You feel a bit edgy because you think that they might start to suspect something, but then you come to your senses. Hundreds of windows boxes crashing in a university in a few hours wouldn't likely even be noticed. It's below the noise level.
Google closes the kimono: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.14.html#subj8
If you go to that site, you'll find that the research group no longer exists. It's been reconstituted as a corporation Web site. That site currently has very little on it. The research papers are no longer on the Web.
(The next few items after this are also great.)
TV 2day: Chgo's 2nd PBS station reran Ken Burns' lovely Jefferson miniseries.
New Yorker scoop: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0110/d_rt_0110_48.sml
The report, a copy of which was released Sunday, cites senior members of the U.S. intelligence community as saying Pollard passed on copies of a highly secretive surveillance manual as well as other details of systems "that are so secret that they have never been cited by name in public.''The New Yorker said that Pollard gave away a 10-volume surveillance manual, described by one ex-intelligence officer as "the Bible,'' which contained detailed information on how U.S. intelligence collects signals anywhere in the world.
...Such material could help "reveal ways to hide a military operation'', the report claimed.
Local grousing about MCS's new ownership:
Customer service is still closed "due to the weather"...what the devil are they waiting for, spring thaw? The way they're responding one would think a glacier rolled over the office.MCS is rapidly becoming a four-letter word in my vocabulary...
Pushing the envelope: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0111sc04.htm
Japan's International Trade and Industry Ministry plans to develop a computer system to record and analyze the techniques of highly skilled workers in action, so that they may be passed on to trainees, ministry sources said Sunday. According to the plan, computers will be used to analyze minute movements of the eyes, limbs and muscles of welders, turners and other skilled workers. The recorded data would then be analyzed and digitally and graphically processed so that young trainee workers could learn the techniques of skilled masters of their chosen trade.
Japanese voters more alienated than USA? http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/poll/poll2.htm
Regarding politics in general, 45 percent of Americans expressed some level of satisfaction, compared with only 17.7 percent of Japanese.
Japanese weather-magicians: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0111so09.htm
The following winter, Otake visited the hot-spring resort and performed a strange experiment in front of Shibasaki. Otake filled a pair of panty hose with dry ice and swung it around in the air, creating diamond dust."When we were re-creating the phenomenon in an experiment, I saw an elderly couple looking at the sky with tears in their eyes. It made me forget about the cold and feeling tired," he said.
Still a few bugs in the system: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0110/d_ap_0110_12.sml
When it comes to returning goods to many online merchants, you still need to phone in, wait for a representative who can give you a return authorization number, pack up the items and schlep to the post office.
Within a burst of new efforts, HoneyGuide casually solves the Millennium-Start Bug: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/
The discrepancy is fixed if, instead of regarding AD and BC as the + and - signs of a single scale, we consider them two separate scales that overlap, so that the year 1 BC was also the year 0 AD, 2 BC was -1 AD, and so on. All existing year numberings still work with the new system, and the millennium now starts on January 1, 2000.
A hilarious spontaneous experiment with ocean currents: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/MadRad/madrad990108.html [HG]
From these data and published information on Atlantic currents, he figured that Lego bits would begin landing on beaches in Florida, Georgia and the Carolina in the summer of 1998. This time, however, Ebbesmeyer was wrong.
Japan's hi-tech 'dating club' culture: [OSRR] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-01/10/086r-011099-idx.html
Often, the young women tell police that they wanted money to buy the expensive designer goods that are popular among Japan's trend-conscious youth.
Dead-tree zine startups scramble for ad dollars: http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/010799n1.htm [OSRR]
"We own the 18- to 34-year-old group now," he says. "We've been able to peg our median age in the middle: 32-year-olds." More than 60% of The Stranger's readers are between 18 and 34 years old. Fifty percent are between 25 and 34 years old, the most active readers, Keck adds.
This sounds way too good to be true: http://www.genius2000.com/et/cm.html [Whump]
Crossword Maestro can tackle almost all types of cryptic clues including anagram clues, charades, straight cryptic clues, double definitions, container and contents, hidden words, reversals, reverse hidden words, "sounds like" clues, word deletions, specified letter deletions, initial, final, alternating and central letter clues as well as clues that combine any of the above types!
(I used to love composer Stephen Sondheim's UK-style crosswords in New York Magazine in the late 60s.)
Decent closer look at Microsoft's line of furbies, and the Media Lab's toy research: [multipage, long] http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc990107.htm [Wired]
As the show begins, the Barney doll sitting next to you or on your lap says, "I like watching TV with you," and then, "Here we go!" Soon it begins to respond coherently (if gratuitously) to the dialogue and images on the screen.TV Barney: "Will you help protect our earth and keep it clean?"
ActiMates Barney: "Yes!"
("Okay... will you give Bill Gates all your money?")
Attaching microchips to squishy stuff is likely to make a lot of people very, very rich."When a Cray becomes a Crayola, when a teddy bear sends a hug halfway around the world, when the beads on a child's necklace communicate with one another to make lights sparkle or music sound, we will be playing with the toys of tomorrow."
"We sometimes use a phrase around here -- 'hard fun' -- that we've heard kids use when they're working with our products," he says. "We like to hear them use that term, because it's not meant to be easy. If it's too easy, if it's cotton candy, that's not what we want."
"I would find it objectionable to have a plush being unreservedly positive about a television program, because that's not how I am when I watch television..."
...by and large, we already know as a society how to raise highly verbal, curious, and intelligent children. The ingredients for doing this turn out to be surprisingly low-tech -- parents and their surrogates spending lots of individual time with kids...
Tepid, spoiler-less rumors about Eyes Wide Shut: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2789
Kubrick is attempting to quash reprints of original source of the film's plot, an obscure 20s novel.
Sig quote of the day: (alt.tv.sctv)
"I would rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University." -- William F. Buckley (!??)
The moderator of comp.theory.info-retrieval (Art Pollard) shifts toward my XML skepticism: http://www.dejanews.com/thread/430846306
If you look at users behavior, they do not say "I want to find word X in a "heading" or in a "list"". Users don't want that kind of power -- or even if they do they do not use it.
Good-looking WashPost BookWorld includes a new Grateful Dead 'bio': http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-01/10/229l-011099-idx.html
As a reformed Deadhead, I was skeptical that any book could accurately convey the unique quality of the band, let alone provide fresh material about the band's past.
And volume 2 of a completist bio of Elvis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-01/10/226l-011099-idx.html
Rather than concentrate on the relatively few high and memorable moments of Presley's life, Guralnick has chosen to give us the life in full, to proceed toward its debased and pitiful end at a pace as slow as that by which Presley himself lived it.Presley succumbed to the Colonel's seduction because he held the Colonel in awe, because he did want to be rich and famous, because the Colonel's way was the easy way. In so doing he abandoned the small but hard and bright artistic vision he had once possessed, and the rest of his life was a waste.
All I really wanted was to see which iMac color would be least popular, but after spending an hour looking for a poll, I ended up making my own... and sending out a half-dozen announcements of it. If it turns out to be the first such poll, expect a huge influx of visitors this week! (The DannyW PR has jumped daily hits by 10-20%.)
NetSkink's a Mac-lover who's not-insane: http://www.examiner.com/990110/0110skink.shtml
"To design an object that elicits the reaction of 'I really want that' is enormously fun," boasted Apple's vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ives.Among all this good news, there were a few downsides to this year's MacWorld Expo, most notably the absence of the annual Wired party. ("Conde-Nast doesn't do raves," explained a former Wired Digital employee.)
Restaurant guide pre-adapted to the Net: http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jan/0109/side1.htm
The Zagat Survey offers exactly the kind of lifestyle-related content that can succeed on the net. It has the brand, it has the partners, it has the database and, most important, its reviews are written in the kind of abbreviated fashion that is ideal for the Internet."We've been one of the only people making money on the Internet for the past ten years..."
Okay Jules Feiffer 'toon: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html
"Running here... Running there..."
This Day in Joyce History: In ?1894 in Ulysses, Rudy Bloom died, age 11 days. In 1901, the Freeman's Journal praised James's acting.
Don't miss: Ex-UNSCOMer Scott Ritter speaks: [Messy URL]
We trusted the US to safeguard the very sensitive information that we had shared. Our trust was betrayed when the US used it instead to further its unilateral objectives.On April 9, 1998, I informed Richard Butler that I could no longer provide him with assurances that the data collection activity was being done in strict accordance with the mandate given to him by the Security Council and not serving the unilateral intelligence aims of the US. I recommended at that time that this activity be stopped.
Testing the limits of bad taste: [Messy URL]
"People giggle about chocolate nipples but they seem to find chocolate eyeballs and intestines repulsive. We expect that Stephen Shanabrook's morgue series will be considered quite offensive by many adults," she said.Among those Miss Hamilton turned down for the show was a sculptor who reproduced a urinal in milk chocolate. It was deemed "too derivative".
Making Google the default search engine for Netscape Communicator: (Windows only) http://www.google.com/defaults.html [UseIt]
For Netscape 4.0 and above, it is possible to search by entering "?[search terms]" in the URL box instead of a URL. You can set the search engine used in this case by directly editing the prefs file.
Or AltaVista ditto: http://www.ufaq.org/commonly/userprefs.html
The target URL should complete a form submission - for example, the AltaVista URL is http:/ /www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&q= where the value for q will be filled in by whatever text follows the ? input by the user on the location toolbar.[Another option:] Disables the HTTP_REFERER header sent to the destination web server when you click a link. Be aware that disabling this header may cause failures in some scripts and pages requiring authentication partly dependent on this header.
Dang! http://www.drudgereport.com/
WHITE HOUSE DNA CHASE: TEST RESULTS NEGATIVE, SAY SOURCES.
Okay PJ Harvey interview: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/01/09/timmetmms03012.html?1334425
Then she comes out with a phrase you never thought you would hear from the lips of Polly Harvey. "Life is for diving into and enjoying," she says. "That's what it is all about really - love. I know I sound like a hippy, but it is all about love, giving and receiving, and if you carry that in your heart you are on the right path."She lived in the country until she was 18, the daughter of hippy parents who raised her on a diet of blues and folk, Captain Beefheart and Bob Dylan.
Here's the list of Saddam-myths Chuck mentioned on This Is Hell: http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/sanctions.html
In February, 1998, Voices in the Wilderness members interviewed officials from the WHO and the WFP. Both UN organizations gave an "A" rating to the Iraqi government distribution of food and medicine throughout every governorate. Over the past two years, dozens of doctors in Iraqi hospitals have told our delegations that they believe distribution of available medicines is fair.
Web Critic eviscerates Developer.com site: http://www.atnewyork.com/sitesnow.htm
The architecture of the site needs to be overhauled, and content needs to be more tightly focused. It contains the seeds of something better, but right now, Developer.com is a sprawling mess.
9am to noon CST: This is Hell live Realaudio funny progressive talk, featuring Henry-Hyde experts: Liane Casten of Chicago Media Watch, and Russ Baker of Salon. Also Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness (Iraq relief).
"One of the theories why there was so much press play against Clinton with the Monica Lewinsky scandal is because reporters don't want to be seen as liberals-- that is a career-killer." --Miranda Spenser of FAIR (a few weeks back)
Here's the full gallery of Nerve nudes by Veronique Vial, of celeb babes 'before 10am': [multipage] http://www.nervemag.com/Vial/
Everybody is more soulful when they first wake up. You catch them off guard and real, not as they pretend to be or as they are made to look. We are so used to seeing famous people as they are presented to us; here is a chance to see what they really look like.
(I think these were all offered via the daily link, but I like them in a Vanity-Fair way.)
Gulf War II planned: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/news/nat_docs/024396.htm [CDreams]
Such an attack would begin if Iraq downed an American or British plane patrolling the "no-fly" zones in southern and northern Iraq. Other triggers would be if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein threatened the Kurdish minority in the north or Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the south, or if the administration learned the Iraqi leader was reconstituting biological, chemical or ballistic weapons.
Longer, much clearer than usual Chomsky interview about Iraq: http://www.the-hindu.com/fline/fl1601/16010120.htm [CDreams]
I have yet to find a single word in the mainstream media or in other discussion in educated sectors suggesting that it might be a good idea for the U.S. to observe the principles of international domestic law.There is a growing conflict between the U.S. and Europe about bringing Iran back into the international system. While Europe and Japan are strongly in favour of doing so, the U.S. is opposed, and if Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates and Egypt improve their relationship with Iran, the prospect is a threatening one for the United States.
Every time Tony Blair opens his mouth, he looks more disgusting and ridiculous, and his performance marked a painful and shameful day in the history of Britain.
The U.S. will be happy for oil prices to go up and does not want Iraqi oil on the market right now. They are hence quite happy to bomb a refinery in Basra and hold back oil exports.
Today, one of the worst human development catastrophes in history is taking place in Russia. Who knows how many millions of people have died as a result of the imposition of the market regime?
The U.S. has sought to work with the military elements of the Iraqi opposition. The idea has been that there should be a military coup that would replace Saddam Hussein with a more or less equivalent regime but without Saddam Hussein. Those efforts have been penetrated by Iraqi intelligence and have failed.
Slouching towards savvy-ness: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jan/0109/feat.htm
The results are in. Traditional lifestyle articles on everything from travel to sport to clothes do not work on the Internet....What people want instead is nuggets of information, easily-digested bites of data that can be scanned quickly. They don't have to strain their eyes reading too much or their patience waiting for the material to download. On the information superhighway, people only have time for fast food, not a leisurely three-martini lunch.
Specifics about the nude hidden in Disney's Rescuers: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=430343611
The scene depicts a topless woman in place of one of the windows of a building in the background. The precise location of the frame is aprox 38 minutes into the video as Orville (carrying the two mice) flies down the building...just as Orville is coming out of the freefall, the image of the topless woman is visible in two frames when viewed in slow motion/still.
A page that should add a vidcap shortly: http://www.banzai.net/sublime/disney/disney.html
Jessica Rabbit sans panties. Click for larger view.
90k list of Disney 'secrets': http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/9673/DISNYHID.TXT
The following is a list of hidden or interesting things found in some of Disney's animated films and its theme park in California.
Interesting censorship test case: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0108/d_ap_0108_213.sml
It includes John Paul's scheduled stops in St. Louis, as well as links to attractions, hotels and sporting events. But nestled at the bottom of each Web page is an advertisement for IEG's erotic adult Web site Clublove, which features sexually explicit material.
Goad gets three years: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0109/d_ap_0109_34.sml
Goad, 37, is the publisher of Answer Me, a magazine that has devoted an issue to rape with articles entitled "Let's Hear it for Violence Toward Women" and "Rape is Love." Other issues include drawings by serial killers.
Excellent examination of the difficulties of Arabic fonts: [Messy URL]
Arabic's problems derive, ironically enough, from its very sophistication. Unlike Roman script, its 28 letters change shape depending on where they appear in a word. Some characters look entirely different on their own, at the start, in the middle or the end of a word. So type designers have to draw a hundred-odd letters.
Cameron's innovative Titanic CD-ROM: [Messy URL]
"I don't think interactive media will supplant the cinemas. They said that about the Internet, and the irony is that now the Net has proved to be a forum for people to talk about movies."
Vivid account of the 1993 Amsterdam El Al crash scandal: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1999/0109/fea1.html
What they could have mentioned, but didn't, was the kerosene, the asbestos, and the 220 kilos of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), a key component in the manufacture of sarin nerve gas which was on board. ... All of these substances, along with about 20 kilos of something mysterious the Israeli authorities will not discuss, formed part of the fireball and its cloud of smoke and dust on that night in Bijlmermeer.
366 Irish celebs contribute an image for each day of 2000: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1999/0109/fea25.html
Enya gave a beautifully handwritten version of the music of Silent Night; Ruairí Quinn wrote a tribute to Seamus Mallon; Bono described the chaos of his heart in the moment before he walks on stage; The Edge offered a list of Things to Do.
Strange pleasant poem of the day: http://www.poems.com/today.htm
Compulsion is always narcissism:
I miss you, admit it.
Impressive Astropic of a Soviet lunar rover: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990109.html
Lunokhod 1 actually toured the lunar Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) for 11 months in one of the greatest successes of the Soviet lunar exploration program.
![[High forehead]](img3/jessie.jpg)
Girl, 11, stuns chess experts with adult women's world amateur title win (Telegraph)
Mrs Gilbert said she bought an electronic chessboard for Jessie shortly after she joined the club. She said: "She was locked in her room with it for about two months. Now she is a Master under the international chess governing body, Fide."
$49 phone comes with phonebot: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0108/d_ap_0108_177.sml
"The consumer won't be able to tell the phone is searching for the lowest long distance rate because it works within 50 milliseconds,'' said John Harris, Uniden's senior vice president.
From Raphael, a lovely meditation on the strange beauty of orchids: http://www.chaparraltree.com/essays/wolfe.shtml
The best of them are beautiful in a non-Terran sort of way -- if aliens visit Earth, and they bring flowers, the flowers had better be at least as weird as Odontoglossums, or I'll start looking for zippers among their tentacles, because it's probably a hoax.I haven't read every Nero Wolfe book, but I've read about 15 of them, and I can't recall a single mention of an ugly orchid, or even one whose strangeness overwhelms its beauty. ...In fact, Wolfe's lack of geekiness strikes me as a character flaw.
New Science News
![[Wicked grin]](img3/balk.jpg)
Backgrounder on "The Craft" from its wicca-expert: http://cog.org/devi.htm
Fairuza Balk had been born into a Renaissance Faire family and had a Pagan upbringing. She had a lot of books and knew quite a bit. After the movie was completed, she bought Panpipes, a Magickal supply shop in Hollywood. Though she does not run the shop, she owns it. [Pic source]
(I bailed pretty quick on this movie, but stayed long enough to be awed by FB's performance. Panpipes claims to be the oldest occult store in the USA.)
WashPost rips Clinton: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-01/08/010l-010899-idx.html [CDreams]
Well, on Monday Clinton unveiled the ultimate in signature programs -- his so called long-term care initiative. This program, ostensibly aimed at the financially and emotionally devastating medical needs of millions of frail and disabled Americans and their families, bore all of the marks of Clinton's signature -- the cynicism, the tokenism, the cheap symbolic politics.
Don't miss: UN neutrality an utter sham? http://www2.startribune.com/cgi-bin/stOnLine/article?thisSlug=KOFI08 [CDreams]
A U.N. official said it was naive to assume that his organization was innocent in espionage matters. "The U.N. has been and continues to be a focal point for espionage by everybody," he said.But Rolf Ekeus, then the chairman of the U.N. inspections team, needed help. He asked the United States to help him create a system to listen in on the Iraqi security networks, many of which operated at frequencies that U.S. spy planes and spy satellites couldn't hear, U.S. officials said.
CounterSpin is always great, but this week's is an especially focused rallying cry against the recent bandwidth giveaway: [30 min RealAudio] http://www.webactive.com/webactive/content/cspin.html
A special year-end edition of CounterSpin. Hosts will look to media's past and look forward to the media's future in a special in-depth interview with historian, author and professor Robert McChesney.
Funny gush about a movie script about a young film-geek's witnessing Star Wars origins, etc: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2770
The next day, the American Cinematographer guy took him to a little warehouse near the Van Nuys Airport in the San Fernando Valley to see what was described by the magazine guy as "some college kids shooting models on sticks... We're not sure what the hell it is but they call it STAR WARS..."
Musing:
Microsoft is a 'tragedy of the intellectual commons': where one player poisons the well of thought for personal advantage.
Social-science approach to NGO-fatigue: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/BMJ.915567371.html
They explain that complex humanitarian emergencies generate more stress among relief workers than "natural" disasters (such as earthquakes). These relief workers are faced with the risk of violent personal assault; ethical dilemmas, such as having to negotiate with warlords; witnessing human rights abuses, but being prevented from responding by operational considerations, as well as having to deal with the concern that their assistance is perpetuating the conflict.
Danny W. DNA-revelation's slipping publication date: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm
"We close our next issue on Monday," one source explained Thursday night.
This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, James composed his 2500-word autobiographical sketch, A Portrait of the Artist
Susie Bright's 1998-year-in-sex is a breath of fresh air, amazingly: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/brig/1999/01/08brig.html
First of all, every woman in the country who uses birth control pills was amazed to discover that men were by and large getting the cost of their Viagra habit covered by their health plans. Meanwhile, contraceptives are still the most widely excluded prescription in American health-care coverage.
Yay! http://www.interbridge.com/lineups.html
SCTV reruns will air in place of Later until Feb. 1
Righteous plans for SimCity website: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990107S0015
In the coming months, Maxis said it hopes to get New York Mayor Rudolph Gulianni to contribute an essay on his zoning efforts, particularly those that limit where stores selling pornographic material may do business. Ratan also wants to post an essay by former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who consulted with the game's makers about his ideas for incinerating garbage to make energy.
New The Nation includes this fascinating account of Kevin Brownlow's experimental historical films: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990125/0125KLAW.SHTML
To me, this understated, sympathetic portrayal of fascism-by-default is more startling than the "actualities footage" of German soldiers sightseeing in London or the concocted, collaborationist newsreel that's inserted as a film within the film.Hippie communards calling themselves Diggers had recently sprung up in England and the United States; one of their number, a fellow named Sid Rawle, could be transposed into the seventeenth century with hardly an alteration of his outfit, and with no haircut required.
Inspired in large measure by Roberto Rossellini's historical films, these pictures maintained what psychiatrists would call a flat affect, stressing no moment over any other, whether a character was eating a meal at home or being ambushed on the road.
A shortish recent Chomsky statement on the Tobin tax, etc, translated from the French but pretty clear: [Deja URL]
One idea advanced by supporters of financial liberalisation is that the Articles of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should be changed to incorporate something like MAI principles as conditions for credits. The "advantage" of such a solution is that the IMF operates out of sight and is unaccountable to the public.
Bruce McGuffin in the elitist-Well thread:
The real problem with elitism is that the elite and the elitists are two different groups of people.
WebTV offers this, but claims Java would be too expensive?!? http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/1999/01/0704-webtv.html
EchoStar said its EchoStar Model 7100 satellite receiver is the first satellite receiver that offers a built-in multigigabyte hard drive, which is able to record and play back simultaneous full-quality digital video. The receiver's disk drive provides various enhanced digital TV features, such as a TV Pause, which freezes a TV show for as long as 30 minutes, automatic recording of several hours of high-quality digital video and downloadable video games.
Johnny got his ouija board: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SCIENCE/SCIENCE/t000001849.html
Now, John's mind has been released. Thanks to two Atlanta doctors -- and a technological leap that may offer hope for millions of invalids -- John's brain does something no other brain has ever done: It controls the cursor of a computer. Like a mouse, his brain manipulates the cursor across the screen, making it possible for John to spell out words and activate icons that communicate basic needs.
Backgrounder on the Guardian's new Web strategy: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_250000/250621.stm
In Net jargon, the Unlimited sites are trying to be "category killers" or the newer buzzwords - "affinity portals" or "vertical portals".
(I may make this the next poll question-- do you want the Guardian enough to make everyone here register for it?)
Wall Street Journal opens their for-pay kimono for columnist Walt Mossberg's archive: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive.html [SN]
Compaq's Linux palmtop uses 'inertial' guidance: (includes pic) http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/projects/RocknScroll/RocknScrollOverview.htm [Slashdot]
Buttons still have their uses though, as a port of Doom to "Itsy" uses Rock 'n' Scroll to navigate through the game space, while buttons are used to fire weapons and open doors.
The TV Guide on Tailwind (below) is by a very long shot the best I've read. Too bad it's broken up over dozens of pages.
Whistleblower claims MS cooks books: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/romano0107/index.html [OSRR]
Judge Dimmick threw out most of Pancerzewski's allegations for lack of evidence, but left it for the trial to determine the truth of his charge that Microsoft fraudulently "borrowed" from its cash reserves in relatively lean reporting periods and hoarded cash in the reserves during fatter times, in order to give a more orderly appearance to its earning pattern.
Tailwind gets a fair hearing in... TV Guide?!? http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/007/living/At_U_S__News__news_is_breaking_again%2b.shtml
While it can't be considered an endorsement of the Tailwind findings or a flattering look at CNN, TV Guide paints a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the fired producers - April Oliver and Jack Smith - behind the Tailwind story. And it raises questions about whether their vigorous defense of the story deserves more attention.
Here's TV Guide's part 1, part 2, and part 3 [each multipage]
One gadget that looked like a small football became a highly sensitive land mine at jungle temperatures. A second item resembling a Frisbee would sprout tiny wire threads when warmed to room temperature. The threads would attach themselves, weblike, to trees and bushes and, if touched, would trigger the disc's explosion.If the enemy was closing in, the cameraman was to call for a type of gas, code-named Glink, that would then be sprayed over the entire area. He was to lie on the ground face up, arms folded over his chest. The gas would paralyze him as well as the enemy, but U.S. helicopter troops would swoop down, haul him out and administer the antidote. The paralyzed enemy would be left in the jungle to convulse and die.
Interactive football experiment: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/willmott/dw.htm
They were creating Enhanced Television, a simultaneous accompaniment to the game that was sent out over the Internet to viewers who were willing to watch the game and fiddle with their PCs at the same time.
Opera offers a 'multipage bookmark': http://www.windowseat.org/useful/operawin.html
And the best feature (IMHO) allows you to bookmark a group of webpages and their window locations.
This Day in Joyce History: In 1888 in Ulysses, Bloom flirts with Molly Tweedy at Georgina Simpson's housewarming party.
New reviews (finally) at Computer Gaming World:
- Caesar III
- Knights and Merchants
- Axis and Allies
- War Along the Mohawk
- Entrepreneur: Corporate Expansion
'Modesty' rehabilitated as a virtue? http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/sneaks/1999/01/07sneaks.html
But it is the first book of its kind, the first argument by a third-waver to blaze down the center of the postfeminist battleground between left and right.You may find Shalit's tone too cloying, in places, but that may be less because Shalit is too earnest or too sheltered to be taken seriously (she is, in fact, a first-rate intellectual who has done her homework) and more because we are too cynical.
TV 2nite: The PBS Hirschfeld tribute is unexpectedly charming.
More virtual Michelangelo-- reconstructing a smashed tableau: [Messy URL]
The research division of the computer giant has recreated the statue inside one of its machines. The next stage will be to manipulate the four figures to study their proportions, literally to raise them from the positions in which they have been frozen since 1550.
(Weird-- the two projects (one below) seem unconnected!??)
New first chapter: http://cnn.com/books/beginnings/9901/06/robot/index.html
'Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendant Mind' by Hans P. Moravec
Meta reminder: Deja URLs sometimes take a few hours to kick in. They're constructed from the message-ID, often before DejaNews has actually gotten the article.
Well-shaped zinger: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Jan/hinckley.html
Mr. John Hinckley
St. Elizabeth's Hospital
Washington D.C.Dear John, Hillary and I wanted to drop you a short note...
Digital Michelangelo Project: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/stanford-dmp.html
The project not only holds the promise of making virtual copies of Michelangelo's statues available for appreciation and study around the world, but it also may set a new standard for the computer representation of three-dimensional physical objects.
First open debate about DoD 'offensive hacking': http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/06/infowar.idg/index.html
According to the Rand report, there are four "plausible and potentially desirable" scenarios facing the United States and the world when it comes to strategic information warfare...
Alternative to phone-line networks-- power-line networks??? http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,9249,00.html
The external adapters plug into any 110-volt AC power outlet, and computers and printers connect to the adapter via parallel port cables. The package also includes Internet proxy software, letting you and your kids surf the Web independently.
Very excellent new New Scientist offers a mystery about why the Sun doesn't incinerate us regularly: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/990109/newsstory9.html
They studied records of lone stars in our Galaxy with roughly the same brightness, size and composition as the Sun. They found that over the past century, almost all these Sun-like stars had produced superflares that made them dramatically brighter for minutes or even days.
A scam to charge small amounts to random credit card numbers: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/990109/newsstory2.html
However, a spokeswoman for US Bank of Minneapolis says that firms who make small recurrent charges ask banks to waive these steps because repeatedly asking for expiry dates takes time and annoys customers.
Trying to evolve a robot cat, in software (bogus, imho): http://www.newscientist.com/ns/990109/newsstory1.html
Through random mutations and breeding of the "genetic material" that describes the structure and connections of the network, the program will be evolved over many generations to get the optimum design. Robokoneko will not be built until this work has been completed on a computer simulation of the robot cat.
And mind-boggling plant sociobiology: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/990109/flowerpowe.html
In fact, evolutionary theories designed to explain animal behaviours such as mate choice, offspring greed and sibling rivalry are just as enlightening when applied to plants.
(I've been arguing forever that anywhere you have sex you must have sexual selection.)
Ralph McGehee, who maintains the most detailed public database on the CIA, has massaged all his material on Chile into a narrative: [Deja URL]
Others were a newsletter mailed to two thousand journalists, academicians, politicians and others; a booklet showing what life would be like under an Allende presidency; distribution of chronicles of opposition to the Soviet regime; posters and sign-painting teams. The latter painted "su paredon" (your wall) evoking an image of communist firing squads. It used the violence of Czechoslovakia with large photos of Prague and of tanks in downtown Santiago. Other posters showed Cuban prisoners before the firing squad, and warned that an Allende victory would mean the end of religion and family life in Chile.
(Realise he could do the same for every other CIA target!)
In an excellent new Progressive Review, Sam gets mad:
Finally, isn't it time for the mediacrats to grow up and start treating those in other than the two corrupt major parties as something more than barely disguised freaks?[And quoting Leno on Danny W:] "Only President Clinton could distract people from a sex scandal with another sex scandal."
Here's a funny rec.arts.books thread about the Well as elitist-- be sure to catch Smits, jti, MT, and then jti again: http://www.dejanews.com/thread/428715083
(Notice this very slick URL-format, too, contributed by Cameron Laird.)
WashPost has the good sense to be embarrassed by Sally Quinn's anti-Clinton rant: http://www.washingtonian.com/thismonth/capcom.html [OSRR]
"The piece is such a vivid illustration of the Beltway/ American-people disconnect that it has become an instant camp classic on the Internet."
MSIE 4.5 (Mac) tries to solve the multipage problem: http://www.macintouch.com/sf99msie45.html [SN]
If you ever find yourself repeatedly jumping back and forth between a web page full of links and the sites it references - a page full of hits from a search site, say, or maybe a news page like www.cnn.com or even www.macintouch.com - you'll appreciate the Page Holder. It's a pane that slides out when you click on the new Page Holder tab in the "Explorer Bar" along the left side of the IE window. (It replaces IE 4.0's "Channels" tab - happily, Microsoft has decided to abandon that confusing concept.) By dragging and dropping or clicking a button, you can store any page in the Page Holder pane, either in standard HTML mode or in a links-only view. Then, when you click on one of the links there, the page you're requesting opens in the main window, while the page you put in the Page Holder pane stays in view; thus when you're ready to follow up a second link, it's right at your fingertips - you don't need to hit the Back button.
I keep getting blown away by Pinetop Seven, but you wouldn't guess it from the audio clips here
Documenting NAFTA's devastation: http://www.sfbg.com/focus/23.html [CDreams]
The Public Citizen report card notes, "several years ago the U.S. Commerce Department canceled its program of bi-annual surveys of U.S. companies to document NAFTA job creation because the data was so embarrassing fewer than 1,500 specific jobs could be documented."
In the new NY Observer, Chris Byron continues to sniff out stock scandals: http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm
In other words, folks, more than one-third of Yahoo's total sequential revenue growth during the period came directly from Softbank-financed advertising -- which is to say, via money that had been leeched from Ziff's balance sheet by the Morgan Stanley I.P.O., then funneled by Softbank into the revenue coffers of Yahoo.I mean, holy smokes, folks, it was only last April when Ziff went public! Now it's looking at the prospect of loan defaults? That fact alone is an amazing commentary on underwriters like the Morgan Stanley bunch -- one of the most puffed-chested, snootily self-important firms in the business.
Final: I'll put up a new poll shortly. If you have suggestions, mail me.
How often do you visit the Robot Wisdom Weblog?
- This is my first time. (34)
- Less than once a week. (3)
- Once or twice a week. (21)
- Almost every day. (83)
- More than once a day. (48)
(I was quite surprised at how top-heavy these numbers were. I've started moving stuff into the archive after two days instead of three, as a consequence, weekends excepted.)
An aspiring-Amazon for chemicals: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jan/0106/feat.htm
After graduation Perry became the CEO of Virogen, where he encountered the inefficiencies of the traditional catalog-based method of ordering and procuring life science products. On average, scientists at his company would spend four to five hours a week looking for specialty chemicals, thumbing through at least a half-dozen catalogs.Knowing that simply listing the chemicals would not be enough, Chemdex is adding mountains of research data and other related information to its web site.
Decent unpublished short Borges story about Paracelsus: [Messy URL] [ALD]
"You are famed," he said, "for being able to burn a rose to ashes and make it emerge again, by the magic of your art. Let me witness that prodigy. I ask that of you, and in return I will offer up my entire life."
TV 2nite: Jennifer Jason Leigh on Letterman?
Raphael mentioned that Siboot is now free, but he didn't say anything about these others! http://www.erasmatazz.com/free.html
And for all you collectors of Macintosh antiquities, here is some old software from the dim past:
- Balance of the Planet (1990) (800K sit file) an environmental policy game
- Balance of Power II (1988) (200K sit file) geopolitical policy game
- Siboot II (1987) (132K sit file) Siboot, the world's first narrative-game
- Guns and Butter (363KB sit file) a macroeconomics game
Camille on public speaking: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1999/01/06pagl2.html
I began to explore this topic when I suddenly had to appear on radio and television after my first book was published. The speed and stridency of my natural speech border on the pathological. At an early booking on "The Dick Cavett Show," for example, I was like a wild animal -- and I'm not kidding! The situation is fairly manageable now, but I do regress when too relaxed or inattentive.
Corporate priorities sucking brains out of academia: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/it/feature/1999/01/06feature.html
Noble, who has written two scathing articles about the shotgun wedding of higher education and corporations (the first, "Digital Diploma Mill," was commissioned by the Nation, but spiked), says schools have left behind education in the constant chase for dollars.
Joe Bay reviews the Bible: [Deja URL]
Starring: The LORD, Moses, Elijah, Jesus, the Beast, others
Moral Acceptability: We're not even going there.Content: Largely amoral worldview, including characters cheating, abducting, and/or selling into slavery their siblings, wholesale destruction of nearly all living creatures, sporadic acts of genocide and/or nonconsensual circumcision of adults; younger viewers might be terrified by the sight of the Nile turning to blood; alcohol use; ritual alcohol use; graphic scenes of torture; use of hallucinogens and sedatives; agenda which seeks to normalize slavery, polygamy; repeated instances of infanticide, political assassination, biological warfare; sexualized imagery; double penetration; lesbian scene; popcorn too greasy, lots of "dud" kernels. (Aa, B, EV, Du, B&Bh, AD&D, CoS)
Here's another site I found via spam, but I've always wondered how much it costs to get foods checked for pesticides, etc: [multipage] http://www.forensica.com/
Forensic Analytical's Laboratory Services Division includes two accredited locations with capabilities for the analysis of asbestos, heavy metals, hazardous waste, and particle identification. Known throughout the industry as a leader in customer service, Forensic Analytical's laboratories remain committed to providing the highest quality service at very competitive rates.
A giant page of dangerous pyrotechnic fun: http://www.ittc.ukans.edu/~botanika/warning_label.htm [Slashdot]
Not too many things burn as well as Pinatas soaked in starter fluid and/or crammed with gunpowder and/or fireworks!
Color iMac pic: http://www.apple.com/imac/
Pilots go for Pilots: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/17147.html
The PalmPilot comes with the ability to add GPS navigation for only $27. Among other applications for the handheld computer are software for flight planning and flight logs.
Only 21 stars are bankable? http://www.tvgen.com/newsgossip/dish/990105c.htm
1. Michelle Pfeiffer
2. Sandra Bullock
3. Tom Cruise
4. Jim Carrey
5. Jodie Foster
6. Brad Pitt
7. Steven Spielberg
8. Oliver Stone
9. John Travolta, Kevin Costner
11. Tom Hanks
12. Cher
13. Harrison Ford
14. Michael Douglas
15. Robin Williams
16. Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson
18. Eddie Murphy
19. Arnold Schwarzenegger
20. n/a?
21. n/a?
Not due tonight: No new Onion yet
New Village Voice includes droll anti-Oscars: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9901/atkinson.shtml
Notably Modest Semi-Achievement in Visual Effects: Lost in Space. All things being equal, a substantial improvement over getting hit in the head with a shovel.
Don't miss: Choreographer Bill T Jones gets motion-captured by the creators of the Dancing Baby: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9901/bunn.shtml
After months of painstaking and subtle digital manipulation, Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, his partner in the digital arts studio Riverbed, have effectively subtracted Jones from his own dance. The results are spectacular. ... In an application called 3D Studio Max, Eshkar draped ribbons of color along Jones's body that knot, spiral, and spin. ... It's as if Jones's form had been replaced by calligraphy twisting in space.
Updates on Jim Goad and Gary Webb: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9901/cotts.shtml
The publisher says that Sh__ Magnet is "heavily confessional, not of committing a crime but of committing extremely bad judgment in his life. I found it remarkable, because I never read that sort of thing from Jim Goad before."
MacWorld Expo hype: http://www.macosrumors.com/
John Carmack of id Software, one of the biggest figures in the computer gaming industry, came up to show his support for Apple's announcement that it had licensed OpenGL from SGI (as expected), and showed off an early version of Quake 3: Arena (which was EXTREMELY impressive, the image quality was three generations beyond anything currently available -- for any platform).Also as expected, Steve unveiled five new colors of iMac: Tangerine, Grape, Lime, Blueberry, and Strawberry. (By all appearances, Blueberry is the same color as Bondi Blue).
Drudge's sponsors evince surprise: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,3049,00.html
DeWayne Martin, general manager for Forbes Digital Tool, told The Standard that his company's ad "was part of a buy we did with ValueClick," the Santa Barbara-based interactive ad network. The network was attractive, Martin said, because of its low cost per thousand viewers reached, but he had no idea that his ad was running on the Drudge Report site.
URL fixed: Norman Solomon's 'Chomsky 101' essay was offered to many papers, but hasn't appeared on any of my news-search engines yet: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=428811256
It's symbolic that he is often at the studios of WGBH in Boston -- not to be interviewed on that public television station but to appear via satellite on broadcasts abroad.
Sound samples from the album that just got ten Grammy nominations: [Messy URL]
(I like "To Zion" best; the first few are all different styles.)
Here's a lively-looking page for various alternative weeklies: http://weeklywire.com/ww/current/ww_contents.html
Albuquerque, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Fort Worth, Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Tucson
![[Sphynx]](img3/kirkwood.jpg)
Meat Puppets drug tragedy:
http://weeklywire.com/ww/current/austin_music_feature1.html
After numerous, futile attempts to convince Cris to step back from the abyss, Curt now seems resigned to his brother's fate. He describes Cris as "a suicide in progress." The two haven't played music together for almost three years."All that loose dough brought out the weasels," says Curt. "I observed the weasels, and learned their ways. Wherever you are, the weasels find you after the show, and push really good dope in your face."
Hmmm: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,30525,00.html?pt.isyndicate.ne.hl
Compaq will launch a line of Presario Internet personal computers that let consumers digitally network their homes using phone lines--allowing several users to simultaneously use the Internet and print to a shared printer. The computers will be able to access Internet digital service lines that are much faster than current 56K modems.
Noel Godin's day in court: http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/0105/i_ap_0105_34.sml
A court fined each man $88, the first time Belgium's long tradition of pie throwing has been punished in court. The Microsoft chairman had not pressed charges after the attack Feb. 4.
(Here's my favorite profile of Godin:)
http://www.cinenet.net/users/jaybab/observer.html
Heh: My five newsgroup ads for the Danny pic yesterday already brought 250 extra hits!
Implausible claim that Clinton plans to add the CIA Dark-Alliance report to his scorched-earth arsenal: http://www.copvcia.com/alert_Jan.1.htm
Various sources are reporting on the net that Bill Clinton is threatening to bring down the entire government with Volume II hearings which are supposed to occur within the next three weeks.
Kibo baits a doozy of a science kook: [Deja URL]
> My Universal Patent as number one has no experation > date to protect my invention right whgile I undergo > relativistic time dilation effects therefore those > I do not take to heaven can follow later unless I > revoke my permission for their misbehavior.This is all quite clever, although you misspelled "relativistic brain dilation".
Nice Jerry Brown profile: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1999/01/05news.html
Again, I follow, thinking he's a little crazy venturing where Williams wouldn't go, but also knowing that God blesses drunks, children and patrician white men who used to be governor.He lives there with about a dozen other people; it also houses his "We the People" organization, which spearheaded his last presidential drive and housed his mayoral bid. White people in their 20s mill around in a communal kitchen making an organic vegetarian dinner.
Just as in the '70s, when Oakland managed the transition from white to black political power without violence, Brown is presiding over a transition from black to multiracial political power in Oakland with exactly the spacey, colorblind sang-froid that's needed.
And the city's sometimes scolding poet laureate, Ishmael Reed, was beaming. He recited a poem that could be Brown's platform, and the manifesto of the quiet urban cultural revolution that's remaking cities, which has gone almost unremarked...
Odd animated Astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990105.html
Large cloud systems on Jupiter rotate, and the newly formed oval pictured above is no different...
I think I fixed the Doonesbury link above so it goes direct:
http://www.theadvocate.com/comics/doonesbury_redir.asp?url=http://www2.uclick.com/client/adv/db/
Fast track edutainment: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/newsid_248000/248200.stm
...Jump Ahead Baby, a software program for infants as young as nine months. The UK version of this "lapware" - designed for children sitting in their parent's lap...
Purple pea trap crop for nut-lovin' stinkbug: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0105/d_ap_0105_4.sml
The stink bugs will be lured to their favorite speckled purple hull peas and pig out on them instead of the moneymaking nut trees, the Agriculture Department's research service said."It's like building a moat around a castle," Smith said. "The bugs stop at the trap crop to dine and don't make it to the farmer's moneymaking crop."
White House press corps asks about Danny: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm
"And my question is, how can you use that same defense to just dismiss out of hand the story? I'm not asking whether the story is true, but wouldn't it be more instructive to just deny or acknowledge the facts that are in question here, rather than try to smear that tabloid?"(Also other details:)
"He was rubbing my big belly and said: 'Girl, this can't be my baby.' But I knew it was..."
(I read this first as "HIS big belly"!)
Strange dream: At a crossroads, a group bearing JFK's dying body (head supported by ~20yo Caroline) meets up with a group mourning Martin Luther King...
Newhouse bleeds Oregon paper: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=288
If Felsenthal is right, what else do The Oregonian's profits probably support? Fabulous magazine-sponsored parties, like Vanity Fair's $250,000 pre-Oscar bash at the Hotel Bel Air.
TV 2nite:
Ally McBeal pilot rerun (This was the first time I ever turned the sound up... and I really enjoyed them!)
Note to LW: You can stop mailing 'em-- I've stopped reading 'em.
Hopeful new study of tv news: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0104/d_ap_0104_127.sml
Researchers also found a correlation between longer stories and rising ratings.Researchers were surprised at how many times some of the basics of journalism, like seeking both sides to a story, were overlooked.
Seven stations were given failing ratings: WABC in New York City; WGNX in Atlanta; KMOV in St. Louis; KIRO in Seattle; WCCO in Minneapolis; WPXI in Pittsburgh and WTAE in Pittsburgh.
New New York Magazine includes an excellent update on new painters: http://www.nymag.com/this_week/view.asp?id=2050
"...I guess in my mind, it's a return of the pleasure principle to art. It's okay for people to like the art and want to live with it, and it's okay for the artist to like making it. It's a very heartening development.""...You know infomercials for starving kids in Africa? Every once in a while if it's shot well enough, you have a plunge in your stomach. That's what I'm looking for."
The new art is nothing if not eclectic. Its only common characteristics seem to be its total lack of irony, its unabashed embrace of pop culture, and the fact that most of it is based on secondary-source material -- from photographs to the Internet.
In one painting, a suburban landscape (Suburban Lawn) features two female figures sunbathing, one of whom is about to be removed by a giant spatula, the other melting in the spray of a sprinkler.
Collins points to a painting that looks like a silhouette of an antler. "It's sort of a parody of a dominatrix, an evil woman," he says, reluctantly explaining that the image was originally derived from the negative space in a spread in a fashion magazine featuring a lot of black leather
Their pix: Shahzia Sikander, Damian Loeb, Lisa Ruyter, Cecily Brown (near bottom of page)
Nerve offers an excerpt from the book Monica gave Bill (Vox): http://www.nervemag.com/JacksNaughtyBits/Baker/
What's great about the passage is that Baker articulates the rudiments of an erotics of restraint.
Dept of Self-Promotion:
Since the stories about Danny Williams haven't included the photo, I just went via DejaNews to a half-dozen newsgroups where the topic is being discussed and offered my pic-URL. (Maybe it will provide a traffic-boost like Dr Laura did!)
What Boardwatch's editor is up to: http://www.amcity.com/denver/stories/1999/01/04/newscolumn2.html
"The Web right now is a fifth of the speed it should be." In fact, the transfer rates revealed a painfully clogged infrastructure that often could manage little better than 1500 bytes per second.
Heh: All of the NY Times is available without registration today: http://www.nytimes.com/
TO OUR READERS: Because of a hardware failure, the archives and forums are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.
(Download your fave first chapters now!)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/index.html
Pirates get free ride in Israel: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990104/tc/israel_1.html
It said the percentage of pirated software relative to all software sold in the market had declined to 54 percent in 1997 from 69 percent in 1996.
I love this controversial cosmic-hail theory (here refined): http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0104992.htm
At that rate, the steady stream of comets would have added about one inch of water to the Earth's oceans every 20,000 years -- enough to fill the oceans over billions of years.
docSpace carries the Java-web-app torch: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jan/0104/feat.htm
The system provides a way for digital files of any size, or complexity, to be shipped to anyone else. It includes tracking and authenticity guarantees, and includes advanced encryption to keep prying eyes from being able to intercept the messages. Better yet, in the version installed by Ogilvy & Mather (and called docSpace Express) the recipient of a file transferred through this web-based system doesn't need any special software other than an up-to-date web browser in order to receive the file. The cost? About $1 million...The company's most intriguing product along these lines is called docSpace Drive. For about $10 a month a customer can rent several gigabytes of storage space on the firm's web servers.
The idea, according to Chrapko, is to use Java server applets (which are at the heart of all the company's products) which can run in any web browser to make end-user software unnecessary. "We're not trying to make people get rid of their Microsoft applications," he claims. "Just to begin to create a suite of applications that can run over the web. We have no idea what the business model for all of this might be, but we figure that if we keep running as fast as we can, eventually we'll figure it out and there will be money to made somewhere in this web top space."
Readable poem of the day: http://www.poems.com/today.htm
The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed...
Since when has the NYT Book Review been free (no registration required)? [multipage] http://www.nytimes.com/books/home/ [CG]
(They have yet another huge archive of first chapters to explore.)
A company that transfers LPs to CDs: http://www.lp2cd.com/ (via spam!??)
Crackles, pops and scratches, signs of aging or heavy use, vinyl or shellac noise, tape hiss will all be miraculously gone, replaced by pure music, in true CD quality.
Fascinating anthropology of Laotian refugees: http://www.georgejr.com/98/excerpts/spirit1.html
Although the Hmong believe that illness can be caused by a variety of sources--including eating the wrong food, drinking contaminated water, being affected by a change in the weather, failing to ejaculate completely during sexual intercourse, neglecting to make offerings to one's ancestors, being punished for one's ancestors' transgressions, being cursed, being hit by a whirlwind, having a stone implanted in one's body by an evil spirit master, having one's blood sucked by a dab, bumping into a dab who lives in a tree or a stream, digging a well in a dab's living place, catching sight of a dwarf female dab who eats earthworms, having a dab sit on one's chest while one is sleeping, doing one's laundry in a lake inhabited by a dragon, pointing one's finger at the full moon, touching a newborn mouse, killing a large snake, urinating on a rock that looks like a tiger, urinating on or kicking a benevolent house spirit, or having bird droppings fall on one's head--by far the most common cause of illness is soul loss. Although the Hmong do not agree on just how many souls people have (estimates range from one to thirty-two; the Lees believe there is just one), there is a general consensus that whatever the number, it is the life-soul, whose presence is necessary for health and happiness, that tends to get lost.
Sabren's New Year's identity crisis: http://www.manifestation.com/rants/1999/01/19990102a.php3
What I really need is some direction in life.. I feel like I'm just treading water. I think if I had something more interesting to do with my life, I'd probably scrap most of my projects.
(My advice: Follow your bliss, don't worry so much.)
New Laissez-Faire City Times includes an argument that Gary Webb actually pulled his punches: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.1/Ciacrack.html
"I am a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective. I worked South Central Los Angeles and I can tell you emphatically and without equivocation that the CIA has dealt drugs in this country for a long time." I then referred Director Deutch to three specific Agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower. ... "The CIA did not just deal drugs during the Iran Contra era. It has done so for the full fifty years of its history..."
New Science News
Breaking netnews: [Deja URL]
Some people may be unaware that for the past couple of weeks at least there have been a series of general attacks on a very wide variety of newsgroups. The effect of this attack has been that well over 50000 articles have been cancelled, and at the same time messages supposedly from the senders of the cancelled articles have shown up in newsgroups and in people's mailboxes. These usually mention a Barry Bouwsma and include either obscenities, gibberish or both.
Disappointing rant about how PR masquerades as music news: http://www.impressionmag.com/media.html
Even in towns like Columbia, Mo., there's the rave promoter being hassled by the cops, the local concert hall that won't ever book hip-hop, the death metal band whose Satanism is unfairly derided by their church-going folks when the musicians are really such nice clean-cut kids, and the earnest vegetarian punks who are trying to raise money for that teen who got gay-bashed.
Lively morning for Obscure Store includes a look at Dilbert, Inc: http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Jan/03/front_page/DIL03.htm [OSRR]
Meanwhile, the microwave "product" -- Adams talks about the cartoon and its offspring, without discernible irony, as "products" -- will remain under wraps for a couple more months. But it's something called the Dilberito, a frozen, meatless "food item" for the office that you can nuke and eat.Adams commands $25,000 to $30,000 a speech, and in 1997 he gave 50 speeches. About 100 companies worldwide make licensed Dilbert items.
And stockmarket stocktaking: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-01/03/037l-010399-idx.html [OSRR]
Best of the Dow Return, 1998 Wal-Mart Stores 106.1% IBM 76.6 McDonald's 60.5 United Technologies 49.4 Merck 39.3 General Electric 39.1 Johnson & Johnson 27.3 AT&T 22.7 Exxon 19.5 Eastman Kodak 18.9
And an unpretentious insider's look at Playboy playmates: [multipage] http://www.impressionmag.com/voyeur.html [OSRR]
It made me realize these star-struck women are doomed. They're only tangentially interested in acting, which is how movie stars are made. You won't find them cutting their teeth in low-budget plays or anything like that. These women are driven solely by stardom, which is shallow.
(Sunday morning under 20-inch blizzard:) [Deja URL]
The McCormick Factory is actually about 5 miles upwind of The Institute, and on some wet, windy days the whole area smells like French Toast, when the spice grinders are set to "cinnamon." Other days, it smells like when you stuck your head inside mom's pantry when you were a kid looking for the hidden chocolate bars (baker's chocolate, HA!): mostly black pepper, but with a hint of cinnamon and cloves.
A big issue of the London Times Book Review includes Islam in England in the 17th century: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo01009.html?1334425
The origins of both British attitudes to Islam are charted in Nabil Matar's brilliant and gripping study, an astonishing compendium of groundbreaking research whose very title is a measure of quite how original and surprising this book is: I certainly did not know that there were Muslims in Britain during the time of the Tudors and Stuarts.
And unfamiliar autobiographical pieces by Dickens: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stibooboo01014.html?1334425
No writer ever had less use for abstract thought. What he writes about with endless, unquenchable variety is how people talk, move, compose their features, dress, cough, eat, and go about their business.
In a ?newish NY Review of Books a long, prosaic but okay review of two recent de Sade bios: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1999011419R
The legal barrier suited the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, because it had enough fissures for the books to reach the right sort without falling into the wrong hands. And it also suited the bohemians, because it marked off the borders of bourgeois society, where inhibitions could be flouted and an imaginary world, charged with libidinal energy, waited to be explored.When the dishes failed to meet his standards, Sade sent an epistolary rap on the knuckles: "The Savoy biscuit isn't at all what I'd asked for: I wished it to be iced all the way around its surface, on top and underneath."
In fact, Sade enjoyed quite comfortable conditions, especially after his transfer from Vincennes to the Bastille in 1784. He had a large, well-lit room sixteen feet in diameter, hung with tapestries and family portraits, fragrant with fresh flowers, and furnished with a library of six hundred volumes.
Speaking as a reader myself, I find Sade's writing far inferior to much of the libertine literature of his era, a literature brimming with humor, social criticism, philosophy, and narrative high jinks as well as sex. I would not trade the fourteen-page masterpiece by Vivant Denon, Point de Lendemain, for the entire oeuvre of Sade.
(NYRB copy-editing scrapes bottom:)
How can one understand a man who flaunted the deepest taboos of his time and threw his life away in the pursuit of immorality?
And a long, mostly unsurprising interview with George Soros: [multipage] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1999011436F
Interviewer: One of the longstanding controversies involving yourself and other hedge fund investors is that you sell an enormous amount of the currencies when you think they are high. But this puts pressure on the currencies to be devalued, forcing the nations to spend a lot of their reserves to buy their currency in an attempt to hold it up...Soros: Russia under Prime Minister Kierenko actually had the best, most determined reform government that it had had since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it had to deal with the fact that enormous economic power in Russia was held by the groups that can accurately be called robber capitalists. And it's exactly because the government officials were trying to collect taxes from them that they went out of their way to destroy the government.
Interviewer: To summarize, isn't the central issue that the current structure is such that the IMF first protects those who make the loans?
Soros: ...there is a systemic problem. There is an asymmetry in the treatment of the lenders and the borrowers, the haves and the have-nots. The lenders expect favorable treatment. This has made it rather attractive to engage in international lending, even at considerable risk. ... The need is to find a mechanism to provide capital to the periphery when the market will not do so.
Soros: Americans are already spending as much or more than they earn. If consumers cut back, it could send America and the entire world into recession. In the US, this could lead to a political demand for protectionism. If it succeeded and we limited our imports, that would make it even more difficult for the Asian nations to rebound.
Soros: And just as Marx claimed communism was based on a scientific theory of history, market fundamentalism relies on an allegedly scientific economic theory. Basically, I think it was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who were the main movers in adopting a vulgarized version of laissez-faire economics, turning it into a kind of fundamentalist position.
Soros: I think one should distinguish between competing by a given set of rules and the process of making and improving those rules. When it comes to making the rules, I'm guided by the common interest. And when it comes to competing, I'm guided by my self-interest.
Musing:
As storage costs plummet, web design could be based on the principle that every page you visit gets saved, compiling a local mirror of every page that might interest you. Live web access would be purely for detecting and downloading updates. And there'd be a huge premium on an indexing system that laid everything at your fingertips.
New Fast Company looks pretty dull to me:
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/21/index.html
Hacking the ground from under Bill Gates: [Messy URL] [OSRR]
The result is 98lite, a program that is run by the user during the installation of Windows 98. It simply prevents certain parts of the software from being installed. Brooks says the final result gives him all the usual functions of Windows 98, only without the browser.
A short history of the graphic novel: [Messy URL] [OSRR]
"The flat black called to mind mud, excrement, and the burnt bones that are the source of a carbon soot pure enough for India ink." Graphic novels are anti-escape literature.
Snowed out?
I can't get this station on the Web or on the air: 9am to noon CST: This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive talk with guests Geoffrey Feiger (Jack Kevorkian's former attorney), Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness (Iraq relief), Liane Casten of Chicago Media Watch (Henry Hyde, etc), Russ Baker of Salon (Henry Hyde too), Peter Longworth on classical music, Stephen Schmidt on The Baffler, and cyber-wanker R.U. Sirius.
Bgcolor
FF66CC (lurid pink) lasted about 20 minutes before getting shouted down... a new record!
![[1]](http://members.home.net/richard.parker/rescuers1.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://members.home.net/richard.parker/rescuers2.jpg){kind=link}