Robot Wisdom Weblog Feb99waxing

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edited by Jorn Barger

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Next Full Moon: Tues 2 March 00:59 CST.

Robot Wisdom Weblog for February 1999 (waxing)

Tue, Mar 2, 1999 (Full Moon 00:59 CST)

Mon, Mar 1, 1999
Custom meta-search may be marginally better than Dogpile (requires a permanent cookie) http://www.savvysearch.com/custom [CopperSky]

1. select up to 100 remote search engines to be included in your personal metasearch.

Feb Harper's Index: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

- Estimated chances that a U.S. corporate merger will result in short- and long-term shareholder losses : 2 in 3
- Average amount the U.S. military spent last year on recruiting, per soldier enlisted : $7,187
- Average profit U.S. businesses earn per worker for every $1 spent on salary and benefits : $2.15
- Percentage change since 1987 in incidents of international terrorism worldwide : -50

High-bandwidth site following an ongoing rainforest research project: http://www.jasonproject.org/ [Fla]

Tom Tomorrow squeezes a last few laughs out of the impeachment: http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/tomo/1999/03/01tomo.html

"Coming up later... our panel of experts explain why Americans would rather claw their own eyes out than spend another second thinking about the impeachment trial!"
How the corporate assault on MP3 is divided against itself: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/log/1999/03/01log.html

IBM, for example, recently announced the "Madison Project" -- enabling consumers to download music by a cable modem using a special compression technology (Bonus: IBM signed on the Big Five labels).
While waiting for MCS to come back up, I worked on a new look for this page. (Anyone know a good PhotoShop-beginners' tip-a-day list?)

Sun, Feb 28, 1999
Tech mags lose ad bucks to mainstream: http://chicagotribune.com/business/printedition/article/0,1051,SAV-9902280370,00.html [OSRR]

"Technology advertisers aren't going after just the traditional techie anymore," said David Rowe, senior vice president and media director at Euro RSCG/DSW Partners, an advertising firm in Salt Lake City. "They want to reach corporate management, and that means going into consumer magazines and broadcast television."
"These publications were so used to getting double-digit ad increases, but it's a whole new environment now," Rowe said.

In a new Laissez-Faire City Times J Orlin Grabbe reviews the new book about the CIA-et-al's Intelink network: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.9/intelink.html [More]

One-meter-resolution spy-pix biz planned: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990228/tc/satellites_1.html [More]
Wilson said he expected governments to be attracted to Eros because it was less expensive than developing their own military surveillance program, which could cost five to 10 times as much. He said, however, the service would not be sold indiscriminately. "We will respect the 'denied parties' lists of the governments of Israel and the U.S. We are licensed and answerable to the government of Israel," he said.

Euro dream already over? http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990228/news/920224500-6-1.html

"...they have ignored the damaging effect of compelling countries with different economies at different stages of the economic cycle to have exactly the same interest rates and exactly the same exchange rates. It cannot work."

Counterpunch reviews the SF ADL-spying case: http://www.counterpunch.org/ [More]
In Gerard's computer they found files on more than 7,000 individuals, many of them Arab-Americans, as well as information on hundreds of left-to-liberal organizations filed by Gerard as "pinko". In his locker, they found a black executioner's hood, a number of photos of dark-skinned men bound and blindfolded, CIA manuals, a secret document on interrogation techniques, stamped "secret" and referring to El Salvador, and numerous passports and IDs in a variety of names, all with his picture.

Post-mortem Purple Moon interview: [3pg] http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/david_futrelle?id=36d7328f0 [OSRR] [More]
The top five game titles for girls in 1998 were all Barbie-related, PC Data reports; the top-selling Purple Moon title, "Rockett's New School," came in at No. 18.
[Brenda Laurel:] "We had a fantastic site with a very large and active community (about a 250,000 registered users), but CD-ROM revenues alone were not sufficient to fund it through its maturation as a business. "
BL: "You may not believe this now, but Barbie's early dominance will fall to diversity. It is inevitable, because girls are diverse and becoming more empowered and sophisticated in their tastes every day."
Keillor gives Ventura nod for president: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/docs/head1.htm [OSRR] [More]
"...he'd better run in 2000, because he isn't going to have a very long shelf life. In six months, he may be turning brown around the edges as far as a national audience."

Apropos of nothing: The Real Satanic Menace (or, Everything they think they know, they learned in kindergarten):

1. Everybody lies (nobody minds).
2. It's money we love.

Hackers seize UK military satellite? http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990228/tc/hackers_1.html [More]
The sources said the satellite's course was changed just over two weeks ago. The hackers then issued a blackmail threat, demanding money to stop interfering with the satellite.

Uncanny astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990228.html [More]
This disk, however, is unfortunate enough to lie in the Trapezium, which is also home to several immense, bright stars. These bright stars emit light so powerful it boils away the gas and dust in planet-forming disks.
More eerie Trapezium: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap971118.html

A little classic from Raymond Carver: (here entire) http://www.poems.com/today.htm [More]
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Harold-Bloom-on-Shakespeare, vivisected: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/02/28/stibooboo01001.html?1334425 [More]
An obvious response to Bloom's case is to ask for a single instance of a human faculty that is untraceable before Shakespeare. Mostly, Bloom floats above such tiresome details. But when, towards the end of the book, he briefly descends to specifics, the result is embarrassingly feeble...

Ebert's review of Kalifornia (a movie I found totally cliched) is a perfect example of his cluelessness about Real People: http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1993/09/876379.html

The film brings together four people who are, by themselves, fairly recognizable types. But while an ordinary film would simply plug them into a story, this film forces them to actually deal with one another...
Michelle Forbes was brilliant, however. http://www.jsp.umontreal.ca/~chabotma/Michelle.html

Sat, Feb 27, 1999
TV 2nite: ABC late show is "Kalifornia"; director's cut of Dune on SciFi Channel: http://www.tvultra.com [More]
Restored to Lynch's original four hours, this "director's cut" of Dune gives us all an opportunity to see if those giant worms command more dramatic integrity when buttressed by twice the content as they were before. [elegant prose, DR! ;^] We also get a rare look at pre-Showgirls-defiled Kyle MacLachlan doing something other than Twin Peaks deadpan.

The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Dancing: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0228cu16.htm [More]
"Several couples of men and women appeared, separating and joining together, moving backwards and forwards quickly and slowly. ... They simply went round and round to the quickening rhythm and there was no singing at all. The music all sounded the same to our ears, and too savage to bear," he wrote.

Grrr: I just spent half an hour reverse-engineering the current archive page from rendered-HTML back into the unrendered Frontier version... because a single inattentive keystroke had deleted the original, with no warning at all. I complained about this on the Frontier list once, and the reply was that I should keep a backup. But realistically, you'd have to keep an infinite number of backups because you may not notice for weeks or months that a page is gone.

Onion interviewed the Firesigns: http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3414/bonusfeature13414.html [More]
Onion: David Ossman referred to it as an audio novella.
Peter Bergman: I think that's true. You might also think of it as an audio symphony. You might listen to a good symphony a hundred times. I've listened to some Firesign albums a hundred times, and I'm still enjoying them, because it's theater, and it's also got this wonderful comic sense that just carries me along. I like this album best of all. I think this is the most engaging, the most compassionate, and I think it's got the most laughs.
PB: ...And the thing I've always found very difficult about The Simpsons, and I know it's some very funny writing, but it's still basically about idiots and underachievers. I think the new wave may be optimistic. Firesign is fundamentally optimistic. It's pro-people.

The Voice's 2nd World's Hardest Movie Quiz: (answers in a month or so) http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9908/atkinson.shtml

3. Who was the only actor to appear in films directed by Cecil B. DeMille, King Vidor, and Edward D. Wood Jr.?
6. Name the movie in which these poems are read and/or spoken aloud:
a. "somewhere i have never travelled. . . ," e.e. cummings
b. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Robert Browning
c. "The Hollow Men," T.S. Eliot
d. "Ample make this bed," Emily Dickinson
22. Name 25 directors who are also published novelists.

CyberSitter target-list cracked: http://www.bpm.ai/~sameer/cybersitter.txt [SN] [More]
[white][power,supremacy,seperatist,militia] 8&8& [fascist,fascism]
[sinnfein]
[gay,queer,homosexual,lesbian,bisexual][society,culture]
aryan,skinhead,hitler,hate,violence,racism,supremacy
bomb,gun,explosiv,hacker,hacking
exciting
forbidden
condom
homosexual,transgender,lesbian,gay,bisexual
crossdress,leather,foreplay,centerfold
hotwire,napalm,explosiv,bomb,c4,steal,ripoff
murder,kill,snuff,maim,mayhem,anarchy,anarchist
radicalsex,gaylinks
peacefire
lifestyles,popculture
dontbuycybersitter,peacehtml
dontbuycybersitter,don'tbuycybersitter

9am to 11am CST: This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive talk radio with special guest hacker Kevin Poulsen plus Prometheus pirate radio folks [good segment] and RU Sirius. [TKO in Q3, alas-- local power outage, maybe]

White on Proust is a pleasant read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/marcelproust.htm [More]
A young aristocratic woman recalled that when she was a girl she was supposed to be presented to him at a ball, but the great writer, "livid and bearded," wearing the collar of his overcoat turned up, stared at her with such intensity that when they were finally introduced she was so frightened she nearly fainted.
[Colette meets MP:] "I was pursued, politely, all evening by a young and pretty boy of letters." Because of her cropped hair, unusual for the period, he kept comparing her to the young god Hermes or to a cupid drawn by Prud'hon. "My little flatterer, excited by his own evocations, wouldn't leave me alone for a second.... He gazed at me with caressing, long-lashed eyes...."
He was hilariously funny and entertaining, but he emanated a calm spirituality except, perhaps, when he was doubled up with a crazy bout of laughter (his famous choking fit of hilarity, his fou rire, which could go on so long it struck strangers as weird, even slightly mad). He was such a presence that many people spoke of him as tall, but in fact he stood just five feet six inches.

Hot digital trade school: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/26/BU42434.DTL&type=printable [Wired] [More]
They're also charging a hefty tuition to recoup these costs -- $27,700 for the school's visual arts program and $25,700 for its sound arts program. That's well over the $13,500 per year charged by San Francisco's Academy of Art College. It's even more than the $22,100 per year charged by Stanford University.
"The first day we were here, they had us using a $25,000 digital camera," said Roy Miles, 27. "The second day, they had us taking apart Macintoshes. . . . I'm starting to look at things in `Ex'pression time.' Every day here is like a week on another campus."
In their first two months, Wallace and Allen have learned programs such as Photoshop, Excel, PowerPoint and Painter. They've filmed a short movie and edited it on the computer. They've recorded a sample radio ad for the school.
Welcome to the future: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/culture/story/18142.html?wnpg=all [More]
Officially launched this week, the site features more than 65 full-length films viewable with RealNetworks' G2 streaming video software.
In a retro-media e-commerce play, Raderman said he plans to sell videotapes of the films for those who can't cope with the herky-jerky look of streamed video.
Florida, One Million BC: [2pg] http://dogbert.kepler-solutions.com/newswise/articles/1999/2/SABER.KAN.html

The two saber-toothed cat fossils were found with dozens of peccary fossils, suggesting that the area was a den for the two cats and that they brought their game back to the den.

Three cheers for Bernie Sanders! http://www.commondreams.org/bernie_sanders_vs_alan_greenspan.htm [More]
REP. SANDERS: Okay. But let me ask you this question. If you're concerned about wage increases developing an inflationary spiral, how do you feel about CEOs of large corporations now making 200 times what their workers are making and getting huge golden handshakes and all this kind of stuff? Does that concern you?
MR. GREENSPAN: If their shareholders are willing to do it, they're wasting their money, in many respects, and I find a lot of that stuff, frankly -- I find a lot of what is being paid to individual CEOs not directed to the value that they are producing for their shareholders who are paying the bill.

Decent first chapters at WashPost: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/front.htm

- "Crazy Horse," nonfiction by Larry McMurtry
- "Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future," nonfiction by Mark Hertsgaard
- "Marcel Proust," nonfiction by Edmund White

Hamlet of Oberon, mapped: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990227.html [More]
For the remote Uranian system of moons, namesakes from Shakespearean works have been chosen. Thus Oberon, king of the mid-summer night fairies, is also Uranus' most distant and second largest moon. Hamlet is the tragically dark, large and princely crater on its surface (right of center).

Fri, Feb 26, 1999
TV 2nite: Se7en on Fox; Karen Finley on PI
Wild UK architecture: (Telegraph)

John Wilson revives his weblog under a new name: http://www.csl.mtu.edu/~jowilson/weblog/

Alt.gossip.celebrities loves to bash Gwyneth: [Deja URL]

I, too, would like to confirm your sources who say Gwyneth Paltrow is no sweet tooth. I had the unfortunate experience of attending the same school as she did, and she was as snooty and patronizing then as she is reported to be now.
She was a classic snob who consistently sprinkled herself with fairy dust and believed she was the high school prom angel sent down from the Frankie Avalon heavens above. And while she may be smart in that social-climbing kind of way, she's no scholar, contrary to what her well-paid publicists would like us to believe...
Madonna may play Dali's Gala: [Deja URL]

The working title is The Great Masturbator (can't you just see that baby playing at the multiplex in Flower Mound, Texas?), and it's all about the intriguing and extravagantly sordid life of Salvador Dali, who was famous for his sexual voyeurism.
Review of the arguments wrt whether the Unabomber was also the Zodiac Killer: [Deja URL]

It has been protested that with the exception of the period from December 20, 1968 through June 30, 1969, Kaczynski's place of domicile was somewhere other than the scenes of the Zodiac events, to-wit, Ann Arbor, Michigan in the fall of 1966, and Lombard, Illinois from late summer, 1969 through spring of 1971, both periods of Zodiac activity. These assertions are true. However...

New Science News looks at taste-buds, quantum-well memory devices, and supercomputers

New Consortium revels in the impeachment rout

Movie version of "Tailor of Panama" also in works: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=3121 [More]
Mr Le Carre and I spoke at length about his book "The Night Manager" which Sydney Pollack is set to Direct, Le Carre ( a true gentleman and consummate artist) told me that Robert Towne had written a script for Pollack but it stank (My words, not his, he is far too gracious) and a second script is now being written.

New Wired Magazine includes a fine Matt Groening interview: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/futurama_pr.html [More]
W: How did you decide to do science fiction?
MG: As a kid I saw the 1956 movie version of 1984 on TV. I kept watching this horrible Big Brother dystopia and waiting for the space patrol to rescue everybody. But the space patrol never came! I realized then, as disturbing as it was, that there were really fun possibilities in science fiction. ...When I first read 1984 as a kid I found it very creepy and nightmarish. I just reread it last year and was surprised at how mild it was. Reality has gotten pretty bad.
Wired: Is Microsoft still dominant in 3000?
MG: Nope, out of business. All gone. Intel gone. Pepsi gone. By the way, if a sponsor wants to pay us enough money, they can still be around.
MG: I once created a font in my handwriting for The Simpsons. Somebody did a bootleg version, so now I see my handwriting on T-shirts, album covers, billboards, all over the place. I never thought when I created it in 1987 that 10 years later I could drive down the street and see a bad version of my own handwriting being used to advertise a Mexican radio station.
MG: My great unfulfilled ambition - to do my own amusement park - is really why I am doing Futurama. I'm not kidding. If this show takes off, I'm going to do an amusement park.
MG: ...during the Gulf War there was incredible pressure to get Bart on board to support the troops.

Some definitions from my fave Mary Daly book: http://www.womenbooks.com/mary_daly/ [More]
POSITIVELY REVOLTING HAG: a stunning, beauteous Crone; one who inspires positive revulsion from phallic institutions and morality, inciting Others to Acts of Pure Lust

Serious challenge to genetic 'molecular clock' datings: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/uchi-sdm022499.html [More]
"It's such a large discrepancy, we ended up concluding that it's difficult if not impossible to maintain that there are 65 million years of fossils missing from the history of modern placental mammals. This result calls into question the use of a strict molecular clock to date the origins of major biologic groups."

Deeper into the archeology of diet: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0226993.htm [More]
The howler monkey study spans two decades, so the scientists involved can see how the teeth have worn with time. Using the GRASS technology, they also can distinguish subtle dietary differences between howlers living in grassland or along riverbanks, Ungar said.

I'm with Mary Daly on this one: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000017994.1.html [More]
Opening her classes to men would compromise her belief that women tend to defer to a man whenever one is present, she said.

PC Mag surveys auction sites (eBay wins, duh): http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/auction/bestfor.html [More]
The Best Auction Site For...
Tips and Information: The Auction Guide
Meta-Auction Searching: Bidder's Edge
Computer Products: Onsale atAuction
Household Items: uBid
Travel Deals: Travel Bids
Collectible Cars: LiveBid
Toy Collectibles: eBay
Sports Collectibles: Auction Universe
Golf Clubs: Golf Club Exchange.com
Stamps: StampAuctions
Coins: Coin Universe
Wine Collecting: Winebid.com

Drudge parades his shallowness: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt1.htm

Reporter Howard Kurtz hit media gold with an account of the Barbara Walters session...

Tom Mangan forgives Elia Kazan: http://www.newsies.com/ [More]
So let the guy collect his Lifetime Achievement Award before he dies. They might have felt justified for despising him in the '50s, but they're wrong in the '90s. We know better now, no thanks to Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

I haven't seen any other coverage of this 'Headlines' story, so I'll archive it:

Have restorers ruined da Vinci's 'Last Supper' forever? (CNN)

Tim Goodman inventories tv cliches in the guise of an extended ratings system: http://www.examiner.com/990224/0224goodman.shtml [OSRR] [More]
GT: Groin thwack. For those of us who find a great deal of enjoyment from "inadvertent" shots to the groin, a la "America's Funniest Home Videos," this could be a real ratings plus.

Artiest nude-of-the-day in ages: (no nudity) http://www.nervemag.com/photoday/
Spooky sci-fi astro-pic: (false color, surely?) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990226.html [More]
Ominously foreshadowing events to come, a dark cloud of obscuring dust stands out against a luminous star field in the Milky Way...

A long, ambitious goddess-poem: http://www.poems.com/today.htm [More]
I saw her wearing black pearls, Queen of Voodoo
on Telegraph Avenue, I watched her beckon monsoon clouds
from her spirit house on the South China Sea.

I've been seeing a lot of buzz about this London production of Struwwelpeter: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/26/timartthe01003.html?1334425 [More]
Tamzin Griffin's Harriet, for example, who fatally plays with matches, lifts up her dress to reveal orange and red petticoats which she flutters into flamelike agitation before disappearing behind them through a trap, leaving just her button boots behind.
Mark Twain's translation of the original poems (illustrated): http://www.vcu.edu/hasweb/for/struwwel/pauline_e.html

Now see! oh! see, what a dreadful thing
The fire has caught her apron-string;
Her apron burns, her arms, her hair;
She burns all over, everywhere.

Great update on Joni's daughter: http://www.jmdl.com/articles/gam980411.htm [More]
At 16, she became a professional model and for 13 years plied catwalks on three continents, partying with the likes of Mick Jagger, Ursula Andress, Rick James and Cornelia Guest among others. It's entirely possible, she says, that she and Mitchell attended the same parties in New York; both lived there in the early eighties.
The second emotionally charged meeting, in a Yorkville bistro, reunited Joni Mitchell and Lauren's father Brad MacMath for the first time in 32 years. "They were blushing," says Gibb. "Radiant. It was like they were back in school. I took pictures."
Thoughtful update on Joni and family and art: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1999/0226/fea4.html [More]
"...when I was pregnant and looking for an institution to hide away in, I went to places like the Salvation Army and I was refused. I ended up living in the attic of a Chinese white slaver and, finally, was warned `get out of there, he's just waiting for you to give birth'."
Mitchell was recently reunited with her daughter, Kilauren, though this process is "difficult", she says. "Right now she's going through some changes and she has ostracised me, so there's much we haven't worked through."
..her towering status in the singer-songwriter genre is probably only matched by Bob Dylan, whose song Positively Fourth Street first inspired her to compose music. "That's where I picked up the gauntlet," she says. "...the first music that actually inspired me to make music was Rachmaninov's Variations on A Theme by Paganini."
"Wayne Shorter has played high heels clicking on stones for me."
"...there was this cartoon, which I didn't see, but my friends did. It was based on Taming The Tiger, I think. It had Jewel reading her poetry and the stars behind her spell out `this sucks'! I shouldn't laugh but her stuff is insipid!" [Pic source, 12 Apr below]
Positively 4th Street lyrics: http://www.fmi-fcia.uchicago.edu/~jrr/lyrics/8positi.html

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Background on Dylan's writing this song: http://www.edlis.org/twice/threads/positively_4th_street.html

Positively 4th Street, which had a working title of Black Dalli Rue, was recorded in New York City on July 29, 1965 - 4 days after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The specific target of the song is generally thought to be Dylan's critics in the Greenwich Village folk scene...

Thu, Feb 25, 1999
New The Nation
New "Deep Throat" theory: [Deja URL] [More]

Then on Larry King's CNN show a few weeks ago, with both Bob Woodward and David Gergen present, Woodward alluded to "many phone conversations" he had had with Gergen during Watergate. I think it was Woodward. Maybe Gergen said this of Woodward. The other man made no comment, but I was surprised nobody picked up on it...

Heh: http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,22149-36169-264956-0,00.html

A senior Microsoft official testified Friday that he declined permitting computer makers to change the Windows operating system because the change would be like tearing out a chapter of Moby Dick.
...Not the happiest analogy: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/censorship_books/6568 [More]

Allow me to direct your attention to Ch. 95 of Moby Dick, titled "The Cassock." This particular chapter, a clever assault on the church in which a whale's sexual organ is used as an analogy for the cassock of a priest, is the Wandering Jew of literature. It was censored from the first edition by the English publisher, Bentley, and has appeared and disappeared through hundreds of reprint editions like a ghost.

Push comes to shove today for Pacifica: http://www.counterpunch.org/ [More]

Of the crucial elements in CounterPunch's reporting of the Pacifica story none is surely more important than this: what we are seeing is a put-up sham ultimatum hatched by Pacifica's former manager Pat Scott and Robert Coonrod head of CPB, and a former executive of Voice of America and Radio Marti. It is the claim of the Pacifica governing board that they have no option but to curtail the board's democratic accountability at Pacifica. In support of this position they have mustered the flimsiest of rationales and the most self-serving of legal opinions.
...They are not only the custodian of enormously valuable properties, they are the custodians of an enormously vibrant idea: the idea that a progressive radio network can be receptive to eccentric ideas, wayward attitudes, and disruptive turbulence from below--in short everything that is anathema to corporate America and to PBS, NPR and other cultural structures effectively neutered as far as any substantive dissent is concerned.
So where are we? A broadcast outlet created to support the ethical decisions of programmers and producers about what should be broadcast to whom and for what reasons has grown too large and valuable to be able to protect itself against assault by its would-be rulers, who aim to make the important decisions themselves and sell the resulting product to as many as will buy it.
Apple ][ nostalgia from VisiCalc designer: [multipage] http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiearly.htm [SN] [More]

There were no fixed decimals, yet, so we carefully typed in numbers that would all look good, with no zeros to be suppressed...

E-Letter prints and posts e-documents: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/feb/0224/feat.htm [More]

The document, which can be sent in almost any format--Word, Postscript, plain text, PDF, HTML--is then transferred to E-Letter's web site in a process that is as easy as FTPing a file. The user can then select production options such as mailing dates and paper sizes and types, and distribution choices such as first class, bulk postage, fax or electronic mail.
E-Letter then sends the electronic document to a fully automated 1,500-square-foot plant where the mail is printed, folded, inserted into envelopes and stamped. The lot is then sent to the nearest U.S. Post Office location.

Inside Wired Digital: [includes timeline] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/25/BU88233.DTL&type=printable [More]

Is Vanderslice so hooked on new media that she'd rather go with Lycos, the No. 4 portal, than with NBC, a major television network with the top five rated shows? The answer is yes. The deal with Lycos "filled a lot of check boxes," she said. What Wired Digital needed most was help running its business -- accounting, personnel, sales, marketing and the like. Lycos of Massachusetts will provide that; NBC would not have.

Some experiments in charging for online content: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/25/244l-022599-idx.html [More]

Time Warner got several thousand takers at $14.95 each last month when its normally free-of-charge site DrWeil.com offered an "8 Weeks to a Healthy America" online course in which the bearded guru promised to lead members to optimum living.

Priceline on the rocks? http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,32908,00.html?pfv [More]

While the company said its $24 million advertising campaign resulted in name recognition among 62.5 million U.S. adults, less than 10 percent of online bids result in a sale, and "the fact that they ticket so few people is very worrisome," said online shopping guide eSmarts.com founder Ariff Alidina.

Don't miss: A rare slip reveals a global truth: http://www2.startribune.com/cgi-bin/stOnLine/article?thisSlug=mill25 [More]

Rubin's flub here was to admit that the policy Treasury and the International Monetary Fund have imposed on struggling economies since the global crisis began is something we would never stand for ourselves. And for obvious reasons. You don't need a Nobel Prize in economics to know that forcing a country to raise interest rates during a downturn is "counterproductive." Third World officials can be forgiven for screaming: Now he tells us!

Musing:

The early results for More like this's poll on "click-thru tracking" suggest most people aren't conscious of the risks here. Dvorak pointed out that hard-drives are doubling in size every year (faster than Moore's Law's chip-rate), which means cheap terabytes are only a few years off. How much of a privacy invasion can you achieve in one terabyte?
That's a 10k file on each of 100 million web surfers. If you run a headlines-aggregator like NewsHub (which does use click-thru tracking), you simply record one bit for each story read, for each cookied visitor. Ten kilobytes then allows you to build a profile based on 80,000 news topics-- from which you can extract a near-perfect personality profile, I'd wager: which celebs you favor, what sort of news stories, etc etc etc.
So I think click-thru trackers should (at least) swear they aren't saving individual profiles...

Detailed analysis of Sun's prospects: [3pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/feb/0225/feat.htm

"The halo effect of Java and the Internet is getting Sun a lot of new accounts..."
On an average it takes two technicians to keep a server running smoothly, which is an expensive option since a server technician can easily command a salary of $70,000 a year. That is, if you can even find such an employee, given the programmer shortage in the U.S. The thinking within major U.S. corporations is that if you can consolidate a lot of servers down to just one machine, it cuts back the number of tech-support personnel a company needs.
The key component of Serengeti is the Solaris 7.0 operating system. The brand new Solaris is the outcome of a Sun's late 1980s software development project, Project Spring, which basically involved an object-oriented rewrite of the UNIX OS.
Numbers deflate 'bubble psychology': http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0308/6305148a.htm

The S&P 500 index is trading at 32 times trailing earnings, a multiple that could only be justified if earnings were to shoot ahead at a better-than-20% rate for years. But rather than soaring, earnings were flat last year and are likely to advance, at best, 8% in 1999.
I can't say just when it will end, only that when it does, the losses in many stocks will reach 80%.

Winer: "I think this piece about an Apple employee being fired is a joke.": http://www.theonion.com/onion3507/thinking_different.html

In an effort to prevent such incidents of "excessive iconoclasm" in the future, Apple has developed a manual outlining the company's rules and regulations regarding individualism. Permitted will be such unorthodox activities as removing shoes when seated or within four feet of a desk; whistling when given prior written permission from a direct supervisor; and kicking puddles, provided the kicking is conducted during one's lunch hour and the puddle is one of the 35 on the Apple campus specifically designated for such a purpose. Prohibited will be such "gratuitously idiosyncratic" behaviors as singing out loud, flying kites and catching butterflies.

Cool pix of rainforest-research tool: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_285000/285685.stm [More]

A giant, inflatable raft slung beneath the balloon can be lowered on to the canopy to allow researchers direct access to one of the most important ecosystems on the planet. The scientists can be left on the roof of the forest to work among the plants and animals for several days at a time.

Speech-recognition app review offers some interesting details: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990224S0037 [More]

For instance, if the user says, "Please make me a reservation for the opera Mon ... no, Tuesday night," the Nuance core will respond, "What night would you like to go to the opera?" rather than ask the user to repeat the whole sentence.

Decent overview of Japan's dance-contest arcade game and its ilk: (Telegraph) [More]

"One of the problems here in the West is that no-one releases anything remotely like this. The majority of these games come from Japan because they're the only people crazy or brave enough to actually put something like this on the market."

Wed, Feb 24, 1999
Cool-sounding Mac-driven non-web-browser Net-community app bogged down in money battles: [4pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/24feature.html [More]

Users love Hotline because it incorporates the utility of Internet-standard protocols like FTP (file sharing), IRC (chat) and Usenet (bulletin boards), and does so via a svelte and simple graphical program.
Hotline's Macintosh inheritance is also on display in the "icon wars" between dueling groups of graphic artists, like Bad Moon and SoSueMe, who design the strikingly elegant icons often used in Hotline chat rooms and battle to win the widest following among Hotline users.

Okay Dibbell review: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/25/timbooboo01004.html?1334425 [More]

Fusing the dot-com linguistics of the online world with the flourishes of a Victorian mystery, My Tiny Life is a stylish attempt to convey the striking sense of reality which can be induced by cyberspace. Dibbell narrates events in the online world as though they were more real than his real life, which is described in the typeface of LambdaMOO.

Here's one of the 13 web pages that mention Guha and XML and Cyc: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/dfe/ka2-kaw/ [More]

23 relations defined:
Address
Affiliation
Cooperates-With
Editor-Of
Email
First-Name
Has-Publication
Head-Of-Group
Head-Of-Project
Last-Name
Member-Of-Organization
Member-Of-Program-Committee
Member-Of-Research-Group
Middle-Initial
Organizer-Of-Chair-Of
Person-Name
Photo
Research-Interest
Secretary-Of
Studies-At
Supervises
Supervisor
Works-At-Project
(How mightily they labor to bring forth this mouse! Or: what relations would you have to add to talk about Monica and Bill?)
W3C's RDF spec shows a distinct convergence towards Guha (a listed committee member) and Lenat's Cyc project, which suggests to me it will be fun and ultimately valuable as AI research, but minimally practical for the shortterm needs of the Web: http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/ [More]
[6.24] string         ::= (any XML text, with "<", ">", and "&" escaped)
[6.25] sequence       ::= '<rdf:Seq' idAttr? '>' member* '</rdf:Seq>'
                        | '<rdf:Seq' idAttr? memberAttr* '/>'
[6.26] bag            ::= '<rdf:Bag' idAttr? '>' member* '</rdf:Bag>'
                        | '<rdf:Bag' idAttr? memberAttr* '/>'
[6.27] alternative    ::= '<rdf:Alt' idAttr? '>' member+ '</rdf:Alt>'
                        | '<rdf:Alt' idAttr? memberAttr? '/>'
[6.28] member         ::= referencedItem | inlineItem
Dept. of ridiculous war-game excess: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/urbanwarfare990224.html [More]

The Marines are advertising for somebody who can play the role of "Spunky Woman War-Zone Reporter (CNN Christiane Amanpour-type)" from the "Political Spin News Network (PSNN)." The Marines also want an "older woman" and "older man" over the age of 40 who can play the role of "Furzian Cleric" and the "Hagi Cleric."
They want a contractor to provide people to pretend they live in a city in an unstable developing nation, where unrest has gotten so bad the Marines have been called in to conduct a humanitarian operation and restore order.

LA Times offers a withering 'devil's dictionary' for Clinton's foreign policy: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000017181.html [More]

- Rogue State...
- Engagement...
- Cookie Cutter...
- Agreed Framework...
- Senior Administration Official...

Excellent issue of the Daily Yomiuri offers a new Japanese fad combining vitual pets with email: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0225cu21.htm [More]

Depending on how they are treated, they evolve in ways that are quite sophisticated. PostPets can betray, rebel or be sickeningly nice. The point is, they don't just show emotions--they act on them as well.
"It's not like Tamagotchi, which is a very short-term character. We think of PostPet like Disney or Miffy. We see these characters as having a very long life." [Pix] [Sony PostPet site]
Excellent overview of Japan's love affair with robots, including up-to-the-minute examples: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0225cu19.htm [More]

With experts predicting that 25 percent of Japan's population will be 65 or older by 2015, the idea of home robots starts to make a lot of sense. Tokyo University's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology has already hinted at the possibilities with its "Robotic Room," where the elderly or infirm can manipulate their environment simply by speaking or pointing.
Plus the new humanoid series: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0225cu20.htm [More]

There was the gentle giant Wabian, sauntering down the catwalk with a roly-poly grace that would warm the heart of the most militant technophobe. Then came WE-3RII, the sexiest robot in Tokyo, lighting up the room with her astonishing expressions. The smartest of the bunch was the bookish Robita. Revealing a stunning ability to connect names with faces, she exchanged small talk with professors and mimicked their gestures.

Here's a pretty technical peek at how to resist serious crackers: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990224S0007 [More]

The logs proved the crackers' attempts to find a service on 1234 -- the default port used by the remote-control Trojan Back Orifice, Brace said.

Great, long preview of Quake III Arena: [Messy URL] [More]

John Carmack, who is considered the best 3-D games programmer in the world, has given Quake III Arena a new look. The game is now capable of displaying curved surfaces, something not possible in the previous Quake titles. As a result, Quake III Arena is full of arched doorways, curving hallways, bridges and circular windows.
One level features a maze with a mirrored ceiling, allowing players a view of their opponents' location. Walls pulsate, as though they were living.

Great new New Scientist features GM-food, plus this sunspot alarmism: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990227/fireinthes.html [More]

Later in the day, when public officials called for an explanation, engineers at Hydro-Quebec, the region's power generating company, had begun to suspect an unusual culprit. Four days earlier, a giant bubble of plasma had burst from the surface of Sun. That morning it had hit the Earth, wreaking havoc.
The remnants of AntiTerra? http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990227/newsstory7.html [More]

A chunk of rock some 50 metres across has been found circling the Sun in an orbit close to Earth's. The object, which was discovered on 10 February by an automated asteroid-hunting telescope in New Mexico called Linear, is probably a chip off the Moon, say astronomers. [Pic source (old)]
Yow! http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990227/newsstory12.html [More]

Buck says the entropy of the whales' calls hints that they may have a hierarchical grammar, in which one sound is varied to agree with a sound quite far back in a sequence. This is the same as human languages, where a word at the end of a sentence can be grammatically linked to the first word.
Nifty inputter's sign-language: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990227/newsstory9.html [More]

By touching your thumb against the tip, middle or base of each finger, and by grouping your fingers together in different ways, the language gives 96 different combinations, which represent upper and lowercase letters, numbers and other characters.

While confirming the Irish Times for my 'most readable' award, I found this nice review of the painter Max Ernst: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1999/0224/fea2.html [More]

Memories of his early years, including a trip into the forest with his father and two deaths, that of his sister and "one of his best friends", a pink cockatoo, provided a fund of imagery that he drew on throughout his life. [Some lesser pix]

I added one more best-site nominee, for external linking: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/awards.html#links

How can you post a news story about a website, and not include a live link to that site???

Metallurgical archeology yields surprises: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0224995.htm [More]

"A lot of modern engineers say it is quite obvious how these old technologies operated and there is no need to go in the field to look at them," Killick says. "But if you go into the field, you find that a lot of the common sense understanding is quite wrong."

Jules Feiffer on Clinton-as-Nixon: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

SF Examiner does it again: http://eXaminer.com/990218/0218dylan.shtml

Those who came late to Dylan's table might find it hard to believe that he was ever this young and vibrant and - dare I say - handsome. Dewey-faced and lithe...
(IE, looking like he's just lost to Truman?)

Don't miss: The Progressive Review's rap sheet for Hillary is full of compelling tidbits: [More]

The American Spectator reports in 1996 that on her Asian tour, Hillary Clinton told New Zealand television that she had been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Sir Edmund, however, was an unknown beekeeper the year of Mrs. Clinton's birth.
Coming soon to a vending machine near you? http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/bs/story.html?s=v/nm/19990223/bs/coke_1.html [More]

After two years of negotiations, U.S.-based Coca-Cola said it would take a half-interest in Inca Kola Peru, a unit of JR Lindley Corp., whose bubblegum-flavored, yellow-colored soda is a local favorite that has evolved into a symbol of national independence in Peru.
"The reason Coke did this was not to take Inca Kola out of the country -- I never heard of it. This is about market penetration. It is a way of penetrating the Peruvian market..."

Ex-girlfriend survives bad poet's 5-story push: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/055/metro/Defendant_s_poetry_told_of_pushing_girl__prosecutors_say-.shtml [OSRR] [More]

The poem included stanzas such as the following:
As we stand here on the roof top
for an unknown reason
my girlfriend took a hop
I screamed
call a cop
because I threw my
girl from the top.

Bad-design-award winning Boardwatch has posted their Feb issue, including a sensible Dvorak on Net.stock mania: [3pg w/wok tips] http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/99/feb/bwm33.html [More]

When confronted with the fact that these stocks are really worth closer to 50-cents than $200 and that the book value is closer to nil, they tell you, "Yes, but you don't understand the scalability! If anyone of these companies can really turn the corner, start making money, then scale up, the sky is the limit." It was always an interesting argument to hear and one I knew was somehow wrong - specious, in fact. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly why it was wrong...
None of these companies have a trade secret or patented technology giving them a virtual monopoly. All they have is a head start and a brand name which has suddenly become God.

Good day to visit More like this and take Bill's new privacy-related web-design poll:

Would you object to click-thru tracking to help me understand what links are of interest to More Like This readers?

Mother Jones has cranked up its PR-machine for this depressing special on US arms sales: [multipage] http://motherjones.com/arms/ [CDreams] [More]

From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. government sold, approved, or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on earth.
Don't miss: A scathing (and witty!) Ralph Nader on corporate welfare, with great new research: http://www.sfbg.com/nader/45.html [CDreams] [More]

1. General Electric bought RCA (which owned NBC) in the mid-80s with funds it was able to save by using an outrageous tax loophole passed by Congress in 1981. That loophole allowed GE to pay no federal taxes on three years of profits, totaling more than $6 billion dollars. It also gave them a $125 million refund! That gave GE the money to buy RCA. GE should arrange a media extravaganzas on NBC to say "Thank you, taxpayers."

I added a few thoughts to my web-design awards page, plus the winners(?) for worst readability and slowest loading: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/awards.html
(Other nominees and categories are welcome.)

A Manhattan Project for earthquakes: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/nsf-ecf022399.html [More]

NEES funds would be used to: create new shake tables and upgrade existing shake tables; build centrifuges and Tsunami testing tanks; build new reaction walls, load simulators and response modifiers; and create field test facilities (i.e. mobile equipment, field sites and post-quake labs).

Google movin' on up: http://www.useit.com/hotlist/spotlight.html

Last week's server stats for UseIt.com show inflow of traffic from search and navigation engines in the following order: Yahoo, Go (formerly Infoseek), AltaVista, Google, Excite, Snap, Go2net, Mining Co., LookSmart, Lycos, HotBot, AskJeeves, WebCrawler, GoTo, AOL NetFind, RealNames, EuroSeek.

New NY Observer offers some mildly interesting gloom-n-doom from Chris Byron: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/be030199 [More]

Gone is the happy-faced scramble of buyers back into the market following last autumn's sharp correction-the bounce-back optimism that sent the Dow industrials soaring by nearly 32 percent between October and year's end. Gone is the mindset that, right up until the last couple of weeks, has viewed every sell-off as a chance to buy more (of what, it doesn't seem to matter).

Don't miss: A short note about how FRAMs will beat DRAMs for low-power applications, plus a hilarious list of failed memory-technologies: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0308/6305132a.htm [More]

Ferroelectrics have been around for a century. The name aside, they contain no iron; they are ceramic crystals that, when zapped with an electrical charge, take on a positive or negative electric polarity.
WILLIAMS TUBE: digital grid on cathode ray tube. IBM installed it in first commercial computer, 1953. Knocked out by press flashbulbs at unveiling. Eventually abandoned as unreliable.

Tue, Feb 23, 1999
Web-based economics sim: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/24/timintint01021.html?1334425 [More]

Closely based on the HM Treasury economic model, it will allow anyone to enter the league of cybergentlemen by accessing the model on the Net. You can increase taxes, lower interest rates and sit back and watch the economy collapse.
Rave for Enfish Tracker Pro: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/24/timintint03003.html?1334425 [More]

An information tracker is an intelligent search engine that routinely checks the contents of your PC hard drive and network, and can also update Internet searches automatically and track the contents of websites you need to monitor regularly. It tracks any changes or additions, and creates a fast, direct route to the data you need.

New Onion:

Apple Employee Fired For Thinking Different

New Village Voice includes one last gasp about the TWA 800 puzzle: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9908/davey.shtml [More]

These anomalies- the witness accounts, the CVR sound, the damage to the wing rib, the FDR's last line- all nourish a band of TWA 800 conspiracy theorists, some of whom still believe that an accidentally fired U.S. Navy missile hit the plane.
Don't miss: Excellent new info on the UNSCOM fiasco, and US spy eavesdropping in general: (longish) http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9908/vest_madsen.shtml [More]

While details of one of the failed operations were widely reported, the Cockburns fleshed out details of an arguably worse coup attempt gone awry in June 1996. Iraqi counterintelligence had not only managed to finger most of the suspects in advance, but months before had even captured an encrypted mobile satellite communications device that the CIA gave the plotters. Adding insult to injury, the Cockburns report, Iraqi counterintelligence used the CIA's own device to notify them of their failure: "We have arrested all your people," the CIA team in Amman, Jordan, reportedly was told via their uplink. "You might as well pack up and go home."
Perhaps one of its most extraordinary areas was its "live room," a 30-foot-square area where NSA and CIA devices were put through dry runs, and where engineers simulated the electronic environment of cities where eavesdroppers are deployed.
Scrapping its old Cold War A and B Group SIGINT organization, NSA expanded the functions of its W Group to include SIGINT operations against a multitude of targets. Another unit, M Group, would handle intercepts from new technologies like the Internet.
Interactive art with cellphone scanner: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9908/bunn.shtml [More]

At his February 13 headline show at the Knitting Factory, Scanner caught a woman chatting with a friend, repeating in an unthinking loop, "That's pretty cool. . . . Wow. . . . That's pretty cool. Huh." Then, just when you thought she'd be done, again came, "That's pretty cool."

Playing 'cloaking' games with search-engine spiders for ethically dubious profit: http://www.internetday.com/archives/022399.html [More]

Two pages are created. The first is the VISIBLE page, the one that we want our visitors to see. The second is a HIDDEN page, visitors don't see it but search engines do.

Tantalizing preview of breakthru work on social spiders: http://unisci.com/stories/19991/0223995.htm [More]

Rereading E.O. Wilson's landmark book, "The Insect Societies," she found that the tome was dominated by findings from studies on ants and bees, but "only had a page and a half on social spiders."
Her spiders first led Aviles to wonder why they were producing ten females for every one male. Research into this biased sex ratio led to the realization that natural selection was acting at the level of the colony rather than the level of the individual.
After years of contentious debate, biologists have now approached consensus that individual selection is the rule, but that group selection may also occur under a certain restricted set of conditions. Since social spiders meet all those conditions, Aviles' work is recognized as an important example of group selection in nature.
Google is so much better than AV at finding Julie Taymor pages (B'way Lion King director, see below) that I think I'll reconfigure my More-buttons for Google: http://www.indiewire.com/film/production/pro_981002_briefsSoderTaym.html

Celebrated, Tony Award-winning theater director Julie Taymor is set to make her feature film writing and directing debut with "Titus," an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" currently shooting in Rome. The low budget film is produced by the Overseas Filmgroup, and stars Jessica Lange ("Cousin Bette"), Anthony Hopkins ("The Edge"), Linda Reisman ("Affliction") and Angus MacFadyen ("Braveheart"). [Pic source]
Beautiful Julie Taymor interview: http://arts.endow.gov/explore/Taymor.html

"One of my favorite things about The Lion King is hearing from parents whose kids go home after the show, put fabric on a stick and run around pretending they're birds."
"Sitting in a chair in front of an ugly box [ie, computer] when you could be running around in an open space seems regressive to me, not something that is going to make a more creative human being."
"When you work on a piece as a designer/ director, you try to abstract everything down to its essence. That's an ideogram. The element of the circle was so obvious in The Lion King that it became the element that I tried to weave throughout the piece as a visual component."
"Quite often, with this kind of story, you know it already. It's nothing new. It's a reaffirmation of something you know. That's why it falls into the ritual mode."

Lively Telegraph book review includes a new slang dictionary with 65k words: (Telegraph) [More]

Green once puffed a funny cigarette, and it very much shows in his huge spread of drug references.
And a delightful recap of an overlooked influence on Proust: (Telegraph) [More]

Proust owed Nordlinger another great debt. In April 1904, for a few francs in a Paris market, she bought him some pressed Japanese paper flowers. Watching them expand on contact with water, Proust was drawn to make an analogy with the processes of involuntary memory, and in an early draft of his novel, it is not the madeleine dipped in tea which sparks off the narrator's reveries, but the sight of Nordlinger's flowers opening up in water.
(Note to self: when fictionalising Joyce's 1903 Paris adventure, include cameos by these characters.)
Don't miss: Gorgeous appreciation of Julie Taymor's Broadway Lion King: (Telegraph) [More]

Taymor creates theatrical magic by deceptively simple means. Drought is a curtain of blue silk gradually receding through a hole in the stage. The African savannah is represented by 27 actors carrying on their heads a square of wood with long grass sprouting from it. A sheet of billowing silk with a design projected on to it becomes a waterfall. When the lionesses cry, they pull endless lengths of white ribbon from their eyes.
'When I started, I thought the movie was shallow. I told them I was perplexed and concerned there were no strong adult female characters.' She rectified this by making Rafiki (the witch-doctor baboon) female, and fleshed out the role of Nala, Simba's girl pal who becomes his lion queen.
As a teenager she studied mime in Paris and began working with masks and puppets. Then came spells in American avant-garde theatre; at 21 she left for a four-year stint in Indonesia where she learned traditions of ritual theatre, contracted hepatitis and had a chunk torn from her leg by a piece of rock from a live volcano. (Her biographer, Eileen Blumenthal, notes Taymor has been called 'strong-minded' from an early age.)
(Wow! ...Chicago's Mary Zimmerman is also in this class.)

Intro to Firewalls 101 for Dummies: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-468.html#lnk3

How Does It Work? Traffic on the Internet consists of individual packets of data, generally either TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) packets or UDP (Universal Datagram Protocol) packets. Every packet includes a header which identifies the sending computer and port, and the receiving computer and port. Both TCP and UDP use IP numbers (such as 209.177.45.3) to identify individual computers, and port numbers (which range from 0 to 65,535) to identify individual programs on each computer.

New free mailing-list site includes archiving: http://spyglass1.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/060863.htm [More]

Poler also expects to get backing from e-mail list owners because Topica will offer free technical help, free list hosting, message archiving and promotion services, and management tools like usage statistics.

Mon, Feb 22, 1999 (First Quarter)
TV 2nite: PBS American Experience does Three Mile Island: http://www.pbs.org/
The graphics at Hero Joy's site needed compressing, so I made a tweaked copy of her photos page: http://www.robotwisdom.com/hojoy/photos.html
...And a lot of the writings, too: http://www.robotwisdom.com/hojoy/hojoy.html

New Progressive Review presents a detailed chronology of the Arkansas tainted-blood scandal: [More]

Henderson also describes his efforts to obtain a buyer for the plasma: "Historically this [was] the worst possible time to do it. I called all over the world and finally got one group in Canada that would take the contract."
"Something had upset Vince Foster greatly just days before he died. Something about 'tainted blood' that both Vince Foster and President Clinton knew about, this man said."

New New York Magazine includes an exploration of the bond market in the scheme of things: http://www.nymag.com/Critics/view.asp?id=1995 [More]

Consider, by contrast, the passage from Bob Woodward's The Agenda in which Clinton asks the rhetorical question "You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f___ing bond traders?"
Bond traders, with Fed chair Alan Greenspan as their honorary leader, were understood as controlling the secret levers of the economy. If they didn't like what they saw in Washington, or in the housing market, they'd stamp on the brakes, sending interest rates soaring and making unemployment lines longer. Keeping the bond market happy was, it seemed, a president's first priority.
Don't cry for Monica, says Wolff: http://www.nymag.com/Critics/view.asp?id=1996 [More]

In classic marketing terms it takes not only talent and discipline but often an unexpected opportunity to break through the clutter and thereby achieve real brand equity (at the very least, that equity means lifetime financial security for Monica; beyond that, it offers a range of career opportunities, which the Monica brand managers are no doubt evaluating as you read this). A good brand is counterintuitive: Yahoo, Amazon, Snapple, Monica.

Hero Joy Nightingale update: (email)

She's now in Australia having spent a week in Tanzania and just over a week in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the Childnet International Awards in ceremony it was announced that she had won the first prize in the individual section for her web mag. Unfortunately she could not be there in person to collect the award since she had been hospitalised because of a fever and dehydration: she seems to have picked up a bug in Bangladesh. However, she is now out and recuperating with family and friends before moving on to New York for the final leg of her round the world trip. She gets back home on 9 March.

Dvorak scoops a new Windows-for-idiots strategy: [2pg w/screenshot] http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm [More]

The rest of the screen is divided up into Favorites (which can be Web pages or programs), Activities (a mishmash of things), and History. ...This page and its simplicity strike me in a number of different ways. First of all, it has the earmarks of a Microsoft Bob without the cartoon characters.

Hacking Barney: http://www.geekchic.com/~jpd/barney/ [Slashdot] [More]

The basic Barney control mechanism is implemented as a Delphi component. It can be driven directly via an on-screen control panel, to move Barney around, play sound samples or read his sensors. Alternatively, it can listen on a network socket for remote control connections. The remote interface allows applications to be written that talk to a remote Barney server; you can telnet to Barney (which is more than I can do to my NT box).

Excellent shortish overview of how investigators use databases: [Messy URL] [More]

AutoTrack files are interesting, but not nearly as revealing as companies that use what they politely term ``pretexts'' to shoehorn information from banks, phone companies, and whomever else you may do business with. The major weapon here is a huckster's patter rather than a computer.

New FAQ answer: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblogs/orientation.html

Why is MSNBC evil? I swore off MSNBC links when they dropped RealPlayer support (in a typically monopolistic attempt to promote their own proprietary WindowsPlayer standard). So when they have something I can't resist linking, I include the 'Evil MSNBC' caveat.

Dept of Silly Excess: http://www.vtiscan.com/~samkass/theories/RPSSL.html [Windowseat]

Scissors cuts Paper covers Rock crushes Lizard poisons Spock smashes Scissors decapitates Lizard eats Paper disproves Spock vaporizes Rock crushes Scissors...
The news shows in Chgo have been showing old clips of Gene Siskel with hair and moustache-- if anyone sees a better one than this online, I'd appreciate the URL. (That's Ebert, too!)

Decent long first-person Iraq-sanctions report (but the Examiner needs new proofreaders): http://eXaminer.com/990221/0221iraq.shtml [More]

We arrived in Basra at dusk. Stuck in traffic, a bus full of teenagers pulled alongside, playing instruments, singing and dancing in the isles. Noticing that we were bouncing along to the beat, they hung out the window and sang to us...
Don't miss: GREAT first-person account of casting the Right Stuff movie: http://eXaminer.com/990221/0221shephard.shtml [More]

I never suspected back then that the Ace of Aces, the unsung hero, was gonna be all over the TV selling Delco batteries and other products after the film came out...But that's another story...In this story, right then Yeager said "Y'see Sam, this here's how it really happened..." And Sam leaned in, and right then and there something clicked. And pretty soon the two of them are talking away with one another, going from picture to picture...
I think Sam always secretly wanted to play Chester in Gunsmoke.
He walked right up to the head guy and said right into his face like he was gonna put four more holes in his nose: "These guys givin' you any trouble, Phil?" There was a long pause and then the guy said meekly, "No, we're not." And the problems were resolved right then and there.
It's neater that way: (another typo) http://eXaminer.com/today/

When Mike Gnoss was looking for a job last December, he did not pick up the newspaper and pour over the classifieds...

A good day for Obscure Store includes how Tinky Winky got that way: [The Evil MSNBC] http://www.msnbc.com/news/238176.asp [OSRR] [More]

One account, in the British tabloid News of the World, dubbed Thompson "Kinky Winky," saying he once "carried a gasping, half-naked blonde" woman across Tellytubbyland. "It felt really wicked leaping across the Teletubby stools and lifting Petra on to the Teletubby table," he told the tabloid.
WSJ on Purple Moon's collapse: [via Evil MSNBC] http://www.msnbc.com/news/243356.asp [OSRR] [More]

While at Interval, Brenda Laurel spent four years interviewing more than 1,000 boys and girls about their likes and lifestyles. Girls, she found, were bored by violent, action-packed games. And realistic graphics that boys like interfered with girls' ability to project themselves into a game.
A parting message to girls on the company's Web site reads, in part: "Keep your dreams alive, your hearts open, and your hands on the keyboard ... cuz even on the Web, Girls Do Rule!"
Life imitates Ally: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/22/016l-022299-idx.html [OSRR] [More]

Rizzo said he had a "psychosexual disorder" that made him unable to supervise women without trying to coerce them into having sex with him. That condition prevented him from working as a principal again, Rizzo's attorney argued.

Hilarious old USA Today guest editorial about Ulysses: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=446793067 [More]

Few scholars, liberal or conservative, will object to that novel being assigned as an exercise for very bright and committed language or literary scholars to exercise their deductive reasoning skills. But to exalt that hodgepodge of psychic waste products as the century's foremost piece of novel writing goes beyond the absurd to be utterly perverse. It would be as if an organic chemist assigned his brightest students to scavenge through Dublin's sewer system to detect what Dubliners had eaten that week. No doubt it's an educational exercise, but couldn't this aim be accomplished far better with less danger of contamination?

Test your gender: [Deja URL] [More]

8. The age it hits home that junk food will devastate your body is:
- a. 35
- b. 14

Another nifty Coppersky rant: http://www.coppersky.com/ongir/news/index.html

In what I consider to be a bit of semantic silliness, Encyclopedia Britannica has changed its site name from eBLAST to www.britannica.com. Remember when it was ebig.com? Then it was eBLAST and now it's britannica.com. It's probably because of the Britannica brand, but I really liked eBLAST better. eBLAST I could spell easily. eBLAST I could remember. It's like being tuba.com and changing your name to sousaphone.com. (I'm probably just grumpy because they reviewed a Web site of mine and gave it only one star. I can't spell, either -- I keep trying to put an extra t in Britannica.)

Meta: Here's a surfing strategy that's only just sunk in for me:

When you see a link you want to check out later, just drag it onto Netscape's Bookmarks window (or another bookmark utility). I now keep this window always-open to use the 'What's New' feature (checking for updates on a dozen news pages), so it wouldn't be too awkward to stash these 'later' bookmarks there, too. But there are shareware utilties (eg LinkPad for Mac) that I find more convenient for this drag-n-drop technique.
When you eventually get back to the link, it will get marked visited, which reminds you to delete it (with a single click of the Delete key). Sites like Fast Company or the Village Voice where dozens of new articles are added at once can be simplified by grabbing all the good-looking links for later. (This is another argument for making the link-text self-explanatory.)

WWAGD? http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/story-69546.html [More] (This particular [More] button works great, btw. Thanks to Steve Bogart for a tip on embedding the plus-signs.)

The Twickenham Church of Christ is driving home its lessons on family values by running old episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show" in jam-packed Bible study classes. The first class, which began early last summer, attracted 24 people. Astonishingly, by the end of summer, as many as 300 people were flocking each week to see the old episodes and discuss them.
(I'm in awe of how Andy would go to any length to spare people embarrassment when he corrected them...)
Amazingly, the full lesson plans for these classes are online: http://www.barneyfife.com

July 8: Opie and the Spoiled Kid
July 15: Opie the Birdman

From a multipage feature on Andersen Consulting: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0308/6305098s3.htm [More]

The Net threat could one day have a severe impact on Andersen and its ilk. For now, enterprise software from SAP and others is frustratingly complex. Andersen's main worry: that someone will simplify the programming so much that its armies of high-priced consultants won't be needed.
Sony steals a page from the GameBoy: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0308/6305138a.htm [More]

The PictureBook is a "concept" computer. It's not for everybody. It won't take truly high-quality pictures, no matter how hard you try. But it just may be a harbinger of a visual era when high-speed connections are commonplace and every computer doubles as a camera and picturephone.

Sun, Feb 21, 1999
Clever-sounding Y2K 'blue box': http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/22/timnwsnws02017.html?1334425 [More]

The analysis box is able to establish whether the chip processes the date and time. If so, the lap-top computer records the actual lines of computer code in the chip responsible for that function and sends them off by e-mail for detailed analysis. This can reveal whether the chip is likely to fail, and if so, how bad the effects are likely to be.

Open season on Yahoo: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/cov_22featureb.html [More]

Pick any old day -- say, Feb. 17: 365 new sites added to "Business and Economy," 25 added to "Computers and the Internet" and an impressive two into "Education."
So now Yahoo's got its mitts into two honey pots: classifying Net content and providing it, too. Excuse the fashionable cynicism, but would you walk into McDonald's and ask, "Hey, where can I get a good burger around here?"
The solution to information overload is not content-provider oligarchies strung in place with networks of licenses between creators and distributors; we already had that, and it was called television.
Topnotch Tom Tomorrow: http://www.salonmagazine.com/comics/tomo/1999/02/22tomo.html

These days, investors can't throw enough money at the Internet...

Norman Solomon's "Media Jeopardy": http://www.fair.org/media-beat/990218.html [More]

A: A current full-page ad for this network TV newscast proclaims: "It's all you need to know."
Q: What is the "NBC Nightly News" with Tom Brokaw?

Their 'best' site hides all its text in gifs! http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/best_19990221.html [OSRR] [More]

"The design is tacky and crappy. The writing is bad. It's unaesthetic and unappealing. The typography is extremely poor," he said. Anything else? "It has no utility for any individual," he added.

Stock Market Value in Billions of dollars---June '97---'Dec 98---Percent Gain or Loss (from part 3 of the NY Times series on the global crisis) [Deja URL]
Germany      766---1181----plus 54%
USA         8920---11721---plus 31%
 
Hong Kong    427---348----minus 19%
Argentina     56---44-----minus 21%
South Korea  157---111----minus 29%
Thailand      60---35-----minus 42%
Brazil       311---154----minus 50%
Philippines   74---34-----minus 54%
Malaysia     282---74-----minus 74%
Indonesia    111---22-----minus 80%
Russian       84---12-----minus 86%
Bankers killed Lincoln? [Deja URL]

8) After Lincoln and the Union had routed the Brit threat in this hemisphere, a living Lincoln would have finished the work he'd started. At that point, Wall Street speculators caused the murder of Lincoln. THAT IS THE PIVOTAL OCCURRENCE IN U.S. HISTORY.

Anne Rice minimised: [Deja URL] [More]

Read "Interview With the Vampire" and then quit while you're still ahead. The reason IWTV was so popular is that it is a love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, written in a style which evokes him faithfully. She throws in every device he has ever used and you get a big kick out of recognizing them. Except for one or two lapses, she captires his atmosphere wonderfully. It is evident she is a real Poe fan and her style is a tour-de-force. After the first book, Rice has to depend on her own talent which is not nearly as interesting. The rest is money.

Excellent Vivienne Westwood profile: http://www.globeandmail.ca/gam/Arts/19990220/SAWEST.html [More]

She has lived in the same cramped council flat (paying about $400 a month) in Clapham, in south London, for 30 years, and often bicycles to her studio in Battersea. She doesn't own a television, rarely looks at a newspaper ("It's such a wasteland") and can quote Bertrand Russell to a journalist with a perfectly straight face.
Five years ago, her company's annual sales were just over $5-million (U.S.). Today, after a lot of belt-tightening and product diversification, Westwood Studios appears to be a solid commercial success, with sales of $45-million, said D'Amario, who transformed what was essentially a shoestring operation into a global brand. He has done this by introducing a perfume, Boudoir; by putting Westwood's orb logo on a range of licences and, above all, by plundering her extensive design archives for new and cheaper lines like Anglomania.

Multifile search-and-replace with Perl: (Kendall Clark)
perl -pi -e "s/oldstring/newstring/g;" *
More hippies in trees: http://outside.starwave.com:80/magazine/0399/9903dispenv.html [More]

We swiftly discover that the RCTers have anointed each of their trees with a name. Yggdrasl, the "party tree," is inhabited by a protester with the admirably unpretentious nom de guerre Dirt, who describes himself as a "freelance forest defender." Fangorn contains the group's library, which includes works by Einstein, Thoreau, and Emerson, plus a variety of field guides. (The books are circulated via pulleys from one tree to the next.) There's also Comfrey, Guardian, Friendly, Grandma, and a tree called Happy, which we ascended by means of a rope to speak with Nettle, a 22-year-old anarchist hailing from Augusta, Georgia.

Musing: There should be a website that carefully compares all computer books and recommends the best on each topic.

A nice tale of Shakespearean scholarship: (Telegraph) [More]

His papers record in fascinating detail, and often in Latin and in code, his experiments, his appointments with clients, and his numerous sexual exploits, many of them with patients. He recounts his dreams, including a sexual one about Queen Elizabeth, and his accounts of visits to the Globe offer the earliest eyewitness accounts of performances of several Shakespeare plays.
I was not surprised to find that the transcripts were riddled with error; scholars of Rowse's generation were often cavalier about this kind of thing. But when I came to the words that he had transcribed as "brown in youth" I began to see that I was on to something.
"How dare you suggest that I've misread the manuscripts. After all, I am the world's leading Elizabethan historian - and what's more I'm a poet too, which is more than most third-rate academics are."

Sat, Feb 20, 1999
Something I didn't know: http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article2.html [OSRR] [More]

Named for both the physicist Linus Pauling and the Peanuts character, Torvalds grew up in Helsinki in a family of journalists.
(Are there allegorical possibilities here? Blanket = Open Source, Lucy = Microsoft?, Charlie Brown = ???)

The return of the multicolor-text research pages: http://www.robotwisdom.com/colors/bgcolor.html

How do you know but ev'ry Bird
that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight,
clos'd by your senses five?

Another record slow Saturday!

Fri, Feb 19, 1999
TV 2nite: X-Files special rerun [yeah!]
New Science News includes Mars and DES

Doctress Neutopia has a dark and stormy history with Carl Sagan's son Dorion (her original Gaia Messiah, I believe), so this development is quite a surprise: [Deja URL] [More]

I am really still in shock. Yesterday I received a letter from Lynn Margulis. She said that Dorion is reading the Gaia Religion and is impressed. She also invited me to a conference with the Gaia Society at Oxford University in April.

Kevin Poulsen on the media as a metaphorical, hackable network: [2pg] http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cybercrime/chaostheory/story/0,3700,2210323,00.html [Windowseat] [More]

I'd say media hacking has been around at least since 1985, when a government prosecutor planted a story about phone hackers successfully repositioning orbiting satellites with their touch-tone pads. Since then, media hacking has grown into a stunningly successful tool for spreading alarmist InfoWar propaganda.

Is AOL distancing itself from its gay membership? http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/features/99_stories/stories_gay_021899.htm [More]

For an old member, returning after an absence of a year, there's a distinct smell of antiseptic in AOL's queer cyberspace. You see it in the more prominent warnings from forum moderators that "distasteful" comments will be deleted, in top-of-the page admonitions that "personal ads" are inappropriate and perhaps most forcefully in the fact that it now takes three navigational turns to reach the gay and lesbian sections.
As a gauge of AOL's power, The New York Times cited an International Data Corp. report saying that with 16 million subscribers, America Online is now the gateway for more Americans than the next 15 largest Internet service providers combined.
The two largest print magazines, Out and The Advocate, have subscription bases of roughly 130,000 apiece - over half of which are sent to subscribers in brown paper wrappers.

Google has upgraded their site... and my standard test search ("James Joyce") now returns my Joyce page as #1! [multipage] http://www.google.com/more.html [Slashdot] [More]

NEW! The - operator. Sometimes it is helpful to choose words to exclude from a search. That is, you want all relevant result pages except those containing a certain word. We support this "not" functionality with the "-" operator.
Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it easier to find high-quality information on the web. The company is based on three years of research in web search and data mining done by the founders in the Stanford University Computer Science Department.

Yow! http://eXaminer.com/990218/0218letterman.shtml [More]

David Letterman's list
Top 10 signs the president is trying to kill you

A good day to visit Laurel's warmly personal weblog (and take her poll): http://www.windowseat.org/weblog/

A simple poll: How do you prefer your external links? Do you like that I have my links set to open in a new browser window? Would you prefer I didn't do that? Does it matter?

Here's a sample of my daily html.log analysis. (Not all ISP's include this service without extra charges.) http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/jorn/Report.html

Total successful requests for pages: 3,066
Number of distinct files requested: 432
Number of distinct hosts served: 1,622
(If I'm applying Nielsen's algorithm right, this makes my site approximately 50,000th in popularity on the Web.)

This free-pc-with-net-access model sounds totally viable: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/business/story/17998.html?wnpg=all [More]

What he's selling is Internet access, complete with a fully rigged PC, color printer, and software, for US$40 a month. Sick of the service after two months? Cancel at any time.

Don't miss: Righteous whistleblow by a teen-death-plot reporter: http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/20/08/headlines/cover_story.html [OSRR] [More]

No, the reason that I am ashamed and in need of absolution is because of the scant information, real facts, that were the basis for the ensuing "Tragedy Averted" theme. You see, in Paducah and Jonesboro and Springfield, actual children succumbed to actual wounds from actual bullets fired from actual weapons. In Burlington there weren't injuries, there weren't killings, there weren't even weapons. There was, however, a group of local officials so conditioned to the needs of the news beast that a group of five otherwise unremarkable teenagers were transformed into beasts themselves.
...Let me explain. In the absence of any good biographical information about the youths implicated in the plot, I was told by the aptly named police Lieutenant Gary Large that the alleged ringleader "was known to police." This is shorthand in policespeak for "he's a little f___-up."
"There is no presumption of innocence. Not when you're dealing with the media."

Hard to believe that three years ago I was still this apolitical! http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/fc/fc.html

The topic-area of the Unabomber Manifesto isn't the sort of thing I'd ever read, on my own. It's an analysis of how the human psyche is being affected by technology: sociology- futurology- politics- ecology etc etc etc.
(It was the OKC bombing-- and in retrospect Waco-- that gradually started sucking me in.)

Finally some (predictably skeptical) US coverage of Japan's big giveaway: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000015652.html [More]

"Young fathers come in with the coupons and say, 'My kids gave these to me. Can I buy beer?'" said Etsuko Yokota, owner of the Hinoya Liquor Store in Noda, about 20 miles northeast of Tokyo. "They're a bit embarrassed, but we let them."
Coupons can be used to buy gold rings but not gold bars; for gambling on pachinko--Japan's national pinball pastime--but not on horses or the lottery; for rent payments but not rental commissions paid to landlords.
"I'd like the money. I'd buy a video game," 11-year-old Hayato Yoshihara said. "But my mother says we've got to use them to buy my gym uniform."
"Is this designed to help the economy or boost social welfare?" asked Fuminori Komata, a thrift-shop owner. "It's all a bit vague."
(The [More] button for this piece is the first where I've utterly failed to create an effective search pattern.)

Unabomber loses my sympathy [qv] entirely: [Deja URL]

Another of their dogs had to be put down because someone "had repeatedly stabbed and gouged the entire area under his tail, shredding his colon, hips and rectal area" with a spear or sharp knife, Waits writes. A different dog was shot up the rectum with a small-caliber bullet, dying an agonizingly slow death.

Forbes praises search-engine dolby-izer: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/feb/0219/feat.htm [More]

Direct Hit's Popularity Engine aims at solving these problems by having its users function essentially as unpaid editors. As users search with it, the program tracks the sites selected and monitors how much time is spent there in order to determine which sites are most relevant to that search and rank them accordingly.
(I'm skeptical-- how are the early users supposed to feel compensated for this extra overhead? A test run at Hotbot on "James Joyce" produces average garbage...)

Perhaps more promising is Direct Hit's latest product announcement in January--Personalized Search. This program is the first to take into consideration age, gender, geographic location and other demographic information while it performs a search...

Broaddrick on Clinton rape: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt1.htm

"This is the part that always stays in my mind -- the way he put on his sunglasses. Then he looked at me and said, 'You better put some ice on that.' And then he left."

Unabomber trashes vacation home: [Deja URL] [More]

"Some (expletive) built a vacation home ... so one night in fall, I sneaked over there, though they were at home, and stole their chainsaw, buried it in a swamp. That was not enough, so couple weeks later when they had left the place, I chopped my way into their house, smashed up interior pretty thoroughly. It was a real luxury place." Waits, who saw the damage at the time, describes the scene: "An ax had been used to hack a hole in the cabin to gain access. After entering, he then had chopped up the kitchen cabinets and emptied the contents of the refrigerator and thrown them across the floor. Mustard, glue, bleach and other substances were squirted and poured all over the carpet furnishings and bedding. Even the phones were smashed and phone lines were pulled out of the walls."
"According to Kaphart, it is the testimony of gourmets who survived the siege of Paris that cats, rats and mice are the most misprized of all animals from a culinary point of view. If domestic rats are up to woodrat standards, I quite agree. That rat was (expletive) good eating."

Decent Dilbert: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/ab.html

Dogbert's Tech Support: "I'll need your serial number, which is conveniently located inside the unit..."
(I'm still half-watching the marginally funny tv version, too.)
Neat AstroPic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990219.html

This exceptionally bright fireball meteor trail was photographed with a fish-eye camera at a Czech Republic station of the European Fireball Network on January 21, 1999.

So I got two requests to skip the last background color ("Silly Putty" or "Bruised Band-Aid"). Is this better?

Thu, Feb 18, 1999
A nice account of a Pre-Raphaelite love triangle: (Telegraph) [More]

Millais painted slowly, working with the inch-by-inch gravity typical of the Pre-Raphaelites. When not working, he would take Effie off for long walks, while Ruskin toiled on his masterpiece, The Stones of Venice, in the small cottage nearby.

The new Mac browser has gotten hacked into English at record speed: http://home.earthlink.net/~gregmerritt/iCab/ [More]

There's a great new small, fast, and fully-featured Web browser for Macintosh in the works called iCab, made by Alexander Clauss und der iCab Company. Yes, it's all in German!
Deja pattern for recent iCab comments

iCab is ostensibly the work of one lone programmer and this preview release is most exciting.

New The Nation features Cockburn on Hitchens: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990308/0308cockburn.shtml [More]

But what did Hitchens actually find out? The answer is, nothing. Either from ABC's Nightline, Murdoch's Fox News or the New York Post he swallowed a concoction of lies put out by Starr's people.

Last week in a thread on comp.human-factors, someone asked what could be done to improve the level of web design. My first reply was: http://search.dejanews.com/thread/443766736

I think the big, visible names in web design should sign on to a set of standards, and send violation-notices to the major offenders. Then, if those main sites start setting a better example, the rest will follow...
Realizing that this was massively unlikely, I decided to try it myself. Here's the half-draft I've been working on today: http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/net/awards.html (It should be a lot better in a day or two, but I post it now because the idea of people looking at it gives me some added hurry-up...)

Driver's license photo-database privacy grossly violated by sinister government plot! http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/business/story/0,2469,19710-32369-235741-0,00.html [More]

"We now find out that this out-of-state operation was really busy getting nearly a million-and-a-half-dollar grant from the Secret Service to develop technology for anti-terrorist techniques and to discover immigration violations," Condon said Thursday in a statement. "Why were state officials not told?"

Add data and MP3 capabilites, and you've got a pardigm: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990218/tc/sony_1.html [More]

Sony said it planned to start selling a 64-megabyte Memory Stick in April that will be capable of recording up to 10 minutes of video or 260 photographs.
("The 4- and 8-Mbyte cards are priced at $23 and $31, respectively.")

I have to give an enthusiastic thumbs-up to Dave Winer's free Mail to the Future service. (You type in a message and a recipient and a date and time, it mails it out when you say.) You have to register and accept a cookie, but it looks enormously useful, and sure to be widely copied. (Is there a weblog patron who'd be willing to donate us the full $299 Frontier package? They seem to be having major fun!)

Ann-Margret intervenes in Fonda-Hopper Easy Rider feud: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/story-70537.html [More]

"There was a lot of marijuana and LSD offscreen as well as on. Once Dennis was bugging me to find some dope, and I rolled a huge joint with dried-up mule dung. He saw me with it, and it went around the crew. 'This is good,' they agreed. 'Well,' I said, 'there's lots more out there' -- and I pointed to the ground where the mules were tethered. We all had a big laugh over that."

Corporatizing the web-presence of local school districts? http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/willmott/dw.htm [More]

The Family Education Network's deal is pretty straightforward. The network provides a school with the tools and templates to set up a school-specific site. The school pumps all its information--schedules, school lunches, intramural sports events--into the site, and the final result blends that information with FEN's national feed, creating a well-rounded site for the school that's useful on all sorts of levels.

No regrets?! http://www.nydailynews.com/1999-02-18/News_and_Views/Scandal_Sheet/a-20002.asp [OSRR] [More]

"I don't think you have to not like sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll just because you stop," Kate Moss said. "I've always liked that lifestyle. I just can't act upon it."

Wed, Feb 17, 1999
Decent Chris Byron interview: [3pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/18feature.html [More]

"The problem is that most of the data providers don't want to take the trouble to go back and look up every single S-4 registration statement, and find out how many shares are actually sold to the public." Do you do that? "I do that constantly. So I know my numbers are right. It's a pain in the ass and it's really anal and I don't like doing it, but it's the only way you can get the right number.
"I don't think the market should be policed to prevent this kind of stuff. But I do think there should be a constant public education process in the media. Instead of becoming a cheering section for bull markets, the media would do a better job if we were constantly trying to take the punch bowl away."

Old Testament barely older than Christianity? http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/18/timbooboo03003.html?1334425 [More]

The Bible, he suggests, was mainly written as late as the 1st century BC and reflects the sectarianism of the Maccabbean era projected back into founding myths and legends: "The Bible is not a history of anyone's past. The story of the chosen and rejected Israel that it presents is a philosophical metaphor of a mankind that has lost its way."
(Robin Lane Fox's timeline is somewhat similar.)

An Iris obit with new info: [Messy URL] [More]

This Wise Man figure would seem to be largely based (not the suit and car) on Elias Canetti, a Ladinospeaking polymath of Bulgarian origin who washed up in England and under whose spell Iris Murdoch languished for many years. Something of a genius, something of a charlatan, his presence broods over many of her novels, down to the character of Peter Mir in The Green Knight.
Malcolm Bradbury has assembled a useful list of recurring types in Iris Murdoch's books: the Near-Saint and the Failed Priest, the Strange Enchanter and the Love-Prisoner, the Haunted Child and the Deathbed Contemplative, the Bookish Bureaucrat and the Radiant Woman.
Oh my god: http://www.latimes.com:80/excite/990216/t000014496.html [More]

Now comes word from the publisher, Duckworth, that the book will be made into a film, or in its words, "a big movie, a bit like 'Shadowlands.' " But over here, we mostly love the news that Dame Judi Dench will play Iris Murdoch.

Cool title for a bland pro-XML article: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/news/viewpoint/view-990217.shtml [More]

The Grand Unified Database Theory

Yay! I tweaked my Frontier scripts so that when I want to link a webpage in Netscape, first I copy the pullquote, then I hit cmd-L (for link), then I fill in a 'searchwords' dialog and hit Enter. The searchwords are formatted onto the Frontier version of the weblog-page, but without any of the messy Altavista HTML... which gets substituted later by Frontier's pageFilter! So almost all links should have [More] buttons from now on.

New New Scientist lucidly explores why GM potatoes might have made rats' brains shrink: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990220/newsstory1.html [More]

The most likely explanation, says Willy Peumans, whose team at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium has supplied Pusztai with lectins to feed to rats, is that the process of inserting the lectin gene into potato cells and their growth in tissue culture disrupted the behaviour of the potatoes' other genes. This may have altered the plants' biochemistry and made them produce high levels of other toxic substances, such as alkaloids.
Crop engineers already test for altered biochemistry, and regulators won't approve such a plant.
And cockroaches with dazzling reflexes: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990220/newsstory8.html [More]

The cockroaches maintained a constant distance from the wall during their runs, the team found. The insects appeared to be using their long antennae to achieve this feat, because they almost always kept one antenna in contact with the wall. When the researchers swapped the straight wall for one that zigzagged in and out, the roaches still managed to follow its contours, making rapid turns to avoid colliding with the projections. In some of the runs, they managed 25 turns per second.
"The most talented roboticist in the world is not going to come close to what a cockroach can do," says Roy Ritzmann...

Topologies for hyperfiction: http://www.kentinfoworks.com/people/nick/models/index.html [More]

- Dual Loop
- Loop Within A Loop
- Tree-like Structure
- Counterpoint
- Bifurcating Lattice
- Parallel uni-directional 3-way
- Cycles and Alternate Paths

Experiment: The [More] link after the URL below is designed to query AltaVista for similar stories. Not very automated at my end (just a template-macro), but it works great!
Excellent Hitchens follow-up/defense: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=319 [More]

On CNN, Hitchens looked more like Ted Kaczynski than the charming and pitiless Clinton-hunter his adopted city has come to know and love/hate.
All of those stories calling her "Elvira" and "the Stalker" that were attributed to White House sources? Well, they just emerged from the mists coming up off of Foggy Bottom.

I just noticed that ABCNews offers a more-like-this search-pattern at the bottom of some (all?) pages: http://abcnews.go.com/onair/DailyNews/wnt_weatherseries.html

Search for more on: ["hurricane and tornado and earthquake"] [SEEK]
(My brainstorm yesterday was to build these into every 404-able Web link, sending them to a default search engine to find the next-best matching page.)

Is this just hype? (My.DejaNews error message)

Due to the tremendous response to our new service, Deja Communities, our system was temporarily overloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please reload this page or try again at another time.

Whew: NewsHub revives after 13 hours without updates

New Jules Feiffer is okay: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

"Mommy, I just saw all these old men on TV at this trial..."

Talk about your tacky headlines! http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,1087,8_4282_Ext,00.html

Virgin Offers Free Net Access

A new Mac browser, in German only: (Babel translation here) http://www.icab.de/

"iCab is a new Web Browser for the Macintosh. The development of iCab is not final yet completely, it is missing still some features to the final first version. But iCab in the meantime so far it progressed nevertheless that we want to give you the possibility of throwing a first view of it. On the Download page you find therefore a first Preview to download. The final version of iCab will be available at a price of only 49 DM."

Yay! The Evil AMA gets whistle-blown: http://chicagotribune.com/business/businessnews/article/0,1051,ART-23558,00.html [OSRR]

In his first interview since he was fired as JAMA's editor Jan. 15, Lundberg described an almost daily struggle to resist pressure from forces at the AMA to strip the journal of its editorial independence.
Backgrounder on the Dummies books publisher: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/17/BU49325.DTL [OSRR]

But IDG Books attracts a stable of thoroughbred authors because its name often guarantees high sales volume.
Most of the $4.95 Cliffs Notes titles also are available online. Students who put things off until the last minute can download most of the 220 book summaries any time, any day for $6.00.

Webpages we never finished reading: http://www.amherst.edu/~sbauerba/hy-lit.html

I didn't actually find it that useful, but for your reference, alt.hypertext is the group which supports hypertext literary theory discussion...
(First, netnews is what you make of it. Second, that 'actually' is pretentious...)

A beautiful Eden joke: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Feb/creation.html

"Sounds great," says Eve, with an ironically raised eyebrow. "Yeah, well. He's better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. But, you can have him on one condition..."

If nothing else, it's a great plot-device: http://www.techweb.com/printableArticle?doc_id=TWB19990216S0008

They have identified signs that organized criminals and "professional" crackers are using trick software that lets teenage enthusiasts -- known as "script kiddies" -- attack networks for amusement. The software then secretly sends the findings of these surveys to experienced crackers.

Java Speech Markup Language: http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/speech/forDevelopers/JSML/JSML.html
The SUB attribute for the SayAs element defines substitute text to be spoken instead of the contained text. For example:
      <SAYAS SUB="I triple E">IEEE</SAYAS>
When the CLASS attribute value is literal, the letters, digits, and other characters of the contained text should be spoken individually. In English, this is effectively doing spelling.
The EMP element specifies that a range of text should be spoken with emphasis. The LEVEL attribute's values are strong (for strong emphasis), moderate (for some emphasis), none (for no emphasis), and reduced (for a reduction in emphasis).
Where possible, the break should be defined by a SIZE rather than a MSECS, because, in most languages, breaks are produced by special movements in pitch, by timing changes, and often with a pause. Those factors are significantly affected by speaking context. For example, a 300 millisecond break in fast speech sounds more significant than it does in slow speech.
Java Speech Grammar Format seems to offer a simple, deep, useful sort of word-oriented regexps: (horrid 'W3C gray' first-things-last writing style, though) http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/speech/forDevelopers/JSGF/JSGF.html
The @example tag may include rulename references. For example,
    @example I want a pizza with <topping>
would expand out with each example tag defined for the <topping> rule ("I want a pizza with pepperoni", "I want a pizza with mushrooms" and so on).
Not all ways of speaking a grammar are equally likely. Weights may be attached to the elements of a set of alternatives to indicate the likelihood of each alternative being spoken.
- "open a window"
- "close file please"
- "oh mighty computer please open a menu"
IBM's answer to VoxML has the most overdesigned website I've ever seen: http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/formula/speechml

SpeechML could be used to enable conversational access from (for example) a car, a telephone, a PDA, or a desktop PC, to information sources and applications anywhere on the Internet.

Meta: Looks like NewsHub crashed all night for updates.

Hollywood plastic surgeon's trial produces most sordid gossip ever: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=119424&in_review_text_id=96183

Two of the allegations concern Michael Jackson. In the first, he was conned into thinking he had had surgery. Clocks and his watch were moved forward while he was under anaesthetic to create the illusion that he had been operated on for hours when nothing had happened...

George Martin interview: http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/048/living/Martin_travels_the_long_and_winding_road-.shtml

"Many years ago, before John Lennon died, we spent some time in his flat and he said he'd like to do everything again," recalls Martin. "I was appalled by this and I couldn't really believe he meant that. I said, `You mean you'd like to record everything again?' And he said, `Yes, I would.' I said, `You know, I think some of those records were great.' I couldn't understand what he was on about. I was just saying to myself, `Well, his imagination is always much better than real life,' which I think was true. I think his dreams were much more vivid than reality."

Powerhouse Internet consulting: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/feb/0217/feat.htm

"We were very impressed by Viant's ability to build an intranet of this magnitude in only six months," says Herczeg. Following the creation of a companywide intranet, Viant helped Kinko's build a web site that allows customers to design and order materials via a browser; the company then has the order delivered to any of its outlets.
To keep clients rolling in, the firm offers everything from new business models to web site design to backend technology input for a client project, all done in the space of 90 days, for a pre-set price of between $1 million and $3 million.

In the new NY Observer, a decent Wendy Shalit ("Modesty") profile: http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage3.htm

"The most fundamental assumption of the culture is that promiscuity is sexy and virtue is boring," she said. "And this dates back from the Marquis de Sade, who said virtue is boring, and the only thing exciting is being bad, but he was in jail! So this idea was in currency, but it was a marginal view-and since the 60's, it's been the dominant view: Virtue is boring. It's no fun. Promiscuity is what's exciting, and I'm challenging that."
And Chris Byron on daytrader insanity: http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm

A stock that goes up 422 percent in a single day on 10,000 times normal volume-and all on the basis of nothing more than a single press release that says basically nothing?
Industry experts now say one in every seven stock market transactions is being conducted on line, and the percentage is expected to grow sharply in the next year.
And of course, all the traders in the game, including the moderators, are busy simultaneously watching the advice being put out in all the other chat rooms, creating a kind of nonstop, self-reinforcing public opinion poll among thousands of people trading billions of dollars daily-all of them trying to second-guess each other regarding which way they think hundreds of different stocks will move in the next two minutes.
...by 4 P.M. more than 10.7 million shares had traded-this for a company with only 800,000 publicly tradable shares in the first place.

Neat galaxies-pic (ground-based): http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990217.html

Of the five prominent galaxies in Hickson 40, three are spirals, one is an elliptical and one is a lenticular.

Tue, Feb 16, 1999 (New Moon 00:40 CST)
John Malkovich directs a short fashion film: (Telegraph)

"The basic story is about a Japanese man who was extremely worried about tidal waves to the point where he invented his own rubber underpants which would inflate to 30 times their size in the event of a flood," he says.

A bountiful post-holiday Salon looks at fluoridation: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1999/02/17news.html

A growing body of scientific research suggests that long-term fluoride consumption may cause numerous health problems, ranging from cancer and impaired brain function to brittle bones and fluorosis (the white splotches on teeth that indicate weak enamel). An estimated 22 percent of American children have some form of fluorosis.
A cheery Suzanne Vega interview: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/ent/music/int/1999/02/17int.html

Wasn't your grandmother a glamorous singer? She was a drummer. A female drummer? Yeah! There were all these women bands in the 1930s doing the vaudeville circuit in the Midwest. I've seen her picture. She is utterly beautiful to look at. She ran into this trumpet player on the road...
Camille on hatchet weevils (plus lesser topics): http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1999/02/17pagl2.html

Amid the post-impeachment wreckage, I am thanking almighty Zeus for our deliverance from the daily media infliction of that seedy, lumbering lard pot Henry Hyde (doesn't he ever shampoo his hair?) and that bawling, petulant persimmon Barney Frank, two of the most blindly partisan hatchet weevils of the U.S. House of Representatives.
An enlightening peek at what teenage girls write about: [2pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1999/02/17feature.html

I found that most stories featured one of three plots: The narrator decides that this is the year she's going to become popular; a cute boy moves to the narrator's neighborhood/joins the narrator's class/makes meaningful eye contact with the narrator at the amusement park; or early death of some sort occurs, usually by either suicide, homicide, car accident, AIDS or cancer.
"I almost flipped when Jackie read the words "does Melanie really like me? If she does, then ask her out for me." We all looked at each other, screamed at the top of our lungs and then burst out laughing."
The overview I got of what it was like to be 15 years old in 1998 did not lead me to believe it was much different from 1990, when I was 15, or even 1970.
And an insanely complex backgrounder on Wired and Lycos: [3pg] http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/02/cov_17feature.html

Part of Wired's troubles came from bad timing. The Nasdaq Composite Index -- the bellwether yardstick for the technology sector -- slid 19 percent in the seven weeks after Wired filed its IPO.
...Once again, a market slump hit at the worst possible moment for Wired: While the board was considering the Lycos offer, the Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 25 percent in midsummer.
Beneath the complexities lies a simple story line: The East Coast venture capitalists took control of Wired's board and held a fire sale of the company. In the process, they and the Wired executives who worked with them appear to have engineered plans to grab the bulk of the company's value...

But did he swallow? http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Late Monday evening aboard Air Force One, stewards passed out HEMP GOLDEN BEER to the president, members of Congress and the press! HEMP GOLDEN BEER -- "smooth, mild, mellow herbal flavor" and "brewed with hemp seeds," according to the label -- was an instant hit with Washington insiders who have been stressed out over the year-long Lewinsky scandal. President Clinton was returning from Mexico when the hemp based drink was served.

New Onion:

Corporate-Welfare Recipients: Are They Eating Steak and Driving Cadillacs?

Don't miss: A spy in the house of Moore: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=445119828

I was fortunate enough to attend several of the taping sessions more held for "The Awful Truth" at the Illinois Institute of Technology. As a reporter, I took copious notes. The following should account for around 80 percent of what we will see during the twelve episodes that air on Bravo...
21. VOICE BOX CHORUS During Christmas, Moore takes a group of people who have lost their voice boxes to cancer to sing Christmas carols at the offices of tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. The chorus also visited the office of former Republican Senate leader Howard Baker, and speak to his associate lawyers. When one attorney says "Everyone deserves representation," Moore responds "Even the worst criminals."

The Extremely Reliable Operating System: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~eros/project/novelty.html [OS]

The key features of the EROS system are:...
Orthogonal Global Persistence: All user state, including both data and running programs, are transparently saved on a periodic basis. In the event of system failure processes are resumed as of the last checkpoint. No special action or programming on the part of the application is required.
Minimal Kernel: The EROS kernel contains relatively little code. The current (incomplete) system is 24.3k of binary code. The final, non-distributed kernel is expected to weigh in at 50k to 60k on completion...

New poll reaches 200 votes:
Hate it.            4%  7 votes
Pretty tacky.      11% 21 votes
Either way.        24% 48 votes
From time to time. 37% 73 votes
Heartily endorse.  26% 51 votes
Grrr: Just minutes after I commented in email that MCS had been keeping things together for the last couple of weeks... it crashed again for an hour or three.

New Village Voice looks at how APB Online is building a net.audience: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9907/chansanchai.shtml

The message board in this section reflects an audience high on the true crime buzz. "This is the positive side of the Internet. I'm amazed at the focused intelligence of 60 million to help solve crimes and find missing people and fugitives," says Sauter.
A searing indictment of the New Yorker's medical propagandising: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9907/cotts.shtml

Rather than cite authorities, the narrator is the authority, a priestlike figure addressing the reader from a vantage point so lofty and removed there is no room left for ambiguity or debate. (As if anyone would dare to question a soft-spoken gentleman who hurries by in a white coat.) Indeed, dispatch writers are considered omniscient.
Michael Musto agrees with Falwell: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9907/musto.shtml

It doesn't really matter anyway, since there are enough other queer signifiers to justify Falwell's gay panic. Tinky carries a patent-leather handbag, prances around in a tutu, and does pretty much all the same things that I do.
Hillary's excess political baggage, plus gossip re DC, etc: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9907/ridgeway.shtml

In Clinton's first term, there was, of course, the First Lady's bungled handling of health insurance reform. At the time, health-care activists were taken aback by her arrogance coupled with an utter lack of knowledge of the subject.

A giant Progressive Review reviews the UK Genetically Altered Groceries (GAG) flap, plus much more:

A BBC call-in poll got 10,392 calls from viewers saying they would not eat genetically modified potatoes -- 280 people rang to say they would.
...A friend hauled his first load to the apple warehouse. He was told that there were too many worms in the apples. My friend said, "But can't you use them for cider?" Replied the wholesaler, "It seems to me it don't make much difference whether you eat a worm or drink it."

I've been speculating on the weblog as a model for e-commerce, and posted some thoughts to comp.society.futures: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=444986650

- Your home webserver will offer "Caller IP" options (comparable to Caller-ID, but vastly extended) that allow different levels of access to known visitors (including videophone, etc).
- It will be trivially easy, after viewing an item of content, to publish your review to the whole web or to a select subgroup, and you'll automatically earn commissions on the micropayments of viewers you refer to each site.

Dvorak maps out the writers' pecking order: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

Best-selling novelists
Network TV anchors (the top three to six)
Nonfiction book writers
Magazine columnists
Magazine writers
Newspaper columnists
Syndicated radio talk show hosts
Newspaper reporters
Newsletter writers
Network TV reporters
Local TV anchors
Local radio talk show hosts
Local TV reporters
Freelance TV reporters
Local radio reporters
Radio personalities
Web columnists
Web writers/reporters
Tabloid reporters
[...Weblog editors!]

New NY Review of Books:

- Fintan O'Toole: The Seamus Heaney Saga [gorgeous writing!]
- Jonathan Spence: Kissinger Meets Mao: The Secret Transcripts
- Garry Wills: Italy's Lyric Dictator
- V.S. Naipaul: India
- Rosemary Dinnage: 'Elegy for Iris' [4pg, nothing new]
- Joel E. Cohen: The Bright Side of the Plague
- Anthony Grafton: Remaking the Renaissance

I hadn't recognised the Douglas Adams URL (below) as just a GeoCities equivalent: http://www.webjump.com/

You'll get 25 MB of disk space with no limits on bandwidth and no setup fees. We simply place a banner ad on your web pages - that's it!
In as little as 15 minutes, you can begin hosting with WebJump as yoursite.webjump.com.

(And in the wrong hands?) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/02/990216073628.htm

Duke University Medical Center researchers report that they have modified a common virus so that it can carry corrective genes to defective cells without stimulating an immune response.

Brill's Content seems to be offering more online content, including a father's detailed accusation that CBS falsified its defense of the Grosse Pointe rapists: http://www.brillscontent.com/complaint/cb_tallarigo_letter.html

My concern is with the deceptive methods used by Abra Potkin to gain the trust of our family, and then through creative editing and staged production techniques create doubt as to my daughter's credibility.

My latest brainstorm: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=444610476

...what I'd like to be able to do is include, with the link itself, a short search pattern that could be submitted to a search-engine-of-choice when the 404s appear...

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The Robot Wisdom Pages include far more text than anyone could be expected to read online, so within the next few months we hope to offer most of it in a $20 hardcopy edition-- some two megabytes of text in a 240-page, large-size format, divided four ways between James Joyce, artificial intelligence, internet culture/ hypertext design, and miscellaneous topics. If you'd like to be informed by email when this becomes available, please send me email with the words 'hardcopy list' as the subject or in the body. [More on the hardcopy edition]