Robot Wisdom Weblog for April 1999 (waning)

New The Nation features Mike Milken's ed-tech empire: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990503/0503baker.shtml

The former Junk Bond King is positioning himself as a sort of Sam Walton of gray matter, offering Americans one-stop shopping for smarts from their diaper days to emeritus rank.

Following his conviction in 1990 he was permanently barred from brokering financial deals. Because Knowledge Universe is a holding company, not an investment firm, and because Milken is a founder and part-owner rather than executive, he is somewhat insulated from such accusations.

"He's like an addicted shopper," says Costello, who left Knowledge Universe in early 1998 over strategic differences. "They told us to buy absolutely everything that was possibly buyable in the education world..."

Knowledge University, Milken's version of an online institution of higher learning, is one of KU's most prominent flops. An idea that promised Internet courses taught by the nation's top professors, it has yet to open its virtual doors.

...Milken wanted to put $100 million into buying existing language-training companies. "I said, Jesus, why buy an old dog for a hundred million bucks?" Costello recalls. Instead, he urged spending $10-$20 million to create a new model for language training.

And Hitchens on the foreknowledge question: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990503/0503hitchens.shtml

The Clinton Administration had better be lying again, in other words, about its foreknowledge and about the extent of it. (It's OK--there'll be no domestic consequences. Everybody lies about ethnic cleansing. Or is it that everybody does it?) Because if this mass expulsion was anticipated and if the deliberate response was the bombing of urban targets well outside the borders of Kosovo, then our leaders belong in the dock also.

A few more coffin details and pix: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/16/timnwsnws02016.html?1334425

A jet canister might have been a jewellery box. It is still encased in a lump of earth and the archaeologists were yesterday hoping that there might be jewels inside.

And a nice evocation of her times: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/16/timnwsnws01017.html?1334425

However, our young woman's household would have imported olive oil from the Continent, along with fish sauce, an early version of Lea and Perrins that appears to have been an ingredient of almost every Romano-British dish, whether fish from the Thames or deer and wild boar from the encircling forests.

I never knew that: [Deja URL]

BP means before present, but it is defined as before 1950. That date was chosen because it occurred before all (almost all?) nuclear testing in the atmosphere which added radioactive carbon to the environment and thus will affect all carbon dating of objects postdating 1950.

(So are we now at -49 BP? Or 49 AP???)

Interesting debriefing-transcript of NATO's killer-of-60-refugees: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/15/BC-YUGOSLAVIA-NATO-PILOT.reut/index.html

"We see three uniformly-shaped, dark green vehicles -- look like deuce-and-a-half (two-and-half-tonne), troop-carrying vehicles. They come to a stop at the next house down the road, and I'm convinced now that the VJ and MUP forces (are) working their way down toward Djakovica and the refugees and they're preparing to set this next house on fire."

Feh, nothing bigger, I guess: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0415/i_ap_0415_106.sml

When the coffin was opened Wednesday night at the Museum of London, archaeologists discovered a female skeleton, well-preserved ancient leaves, fragments of a gold-thread textile and a glass phial.

Web multimedia reconsidered... without the hype! http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/15/webtrans.idg/index.html

Nielsen said providing multimedia on a corporate intranet, especially for training, makes a lot of sense. "Traditionally, an intranet has higher bandwidth, so you could allow more multimedia, such as a lot of training applications," Nielsen said. "That's a natural for a lot of internal applications."

"I love Flash because whatever you design looks the same on every computer and platform, is compact, and offers endless design options," said Eriq Chang, creative director at CyberDiva Studios in San Francisco. "It seems like a technology that has broken through its infancy: Everyone has it. It's definitely a standard now."

400 yen is $3.50!?? http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0416cu10.htm

A customer opting to take home a copy of the song can do so by paying between 300 yen and 500 yen per song into the machine. The machine copies the song onto a minidisc and prints an adhesive lyric card. It takes only about 30 seconds to record a four-minute song, the company said.

A fashion designer called "Trussardi" just died in a traffic accident-- here's samples of his work: [multipage] http://www.firstview.com/designerlist/Trussardi.html

Back Orifice (or equivalent) lets Pentagon white-hats spy via private cams and mics: http://www.fcw.com:80/pubs/fcw/1999/0412/web-mike-04-14-99.html [HNN]

Once inside the network, Loranger said he then probed the network and discovered a "read/write password file" that allowed him to delete the "super-user" password, allowing him to create a super-user password for himself, giving him free reign over the system. Loranger said this then allowed him to search the system for any microphones or cameras connected to it and then turned them on. "I can capture conversations and bring them back to my own computer," Loranger said, "and I can turn on video cameras and bring pictures back."

CNN maintains a very nice map of geology-etc news: http://www.cnn.com/NATURE/9904/09/diary.planet/index.html

High Temperature Extreme
Low Temperature Extreme
Eruptions
Tornado Season
Spring Blizzard
Drought
Blazes
Lightning Deaths
Earthquakes
Tropical Storms
Dolphin Slaughter

Euro-intellectuals debate Kosovo: http://asia.yahoo.com/headlines/150499/world/924144540-90415024958.newsworld.html [Drudge]

A common thread among left-wing opponents of the NATO airstrikes has been anti-Americanism. Thus, playwright Harold Pinter wrote to the Guardian newspaper to describe the allied action as "misjudged, miscalculated, disastrous", its humanitarian justification "clearly a very bad joke". The operation resulted, he said, from a US policy best expressed as: "Kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in."

Strategies to make web newspapers profitable: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/04/15/BU104760.DTL

Newspapers shouldn't start by simply digitizing their print product, he said. Instead, start with classified ads, a money-maker. Charge existing customers more to put their classifieds online, and even more to put hot links in their ads. Papers can also cut costs by hiring another company to host the Web site, instead of buying expensive computers and adding staff, Manning said.

ZDNet's tracking stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ZDZ, has rocketed to a market valuation of more than $2.9 billion. That's more than the $1.9 billion the market says parent Ziff-Davis, which trades under the symbol ZD, is worth.

Delightful multipage anticipation of next Friday's Nabokov centennial: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/books/1999/nabokov/

E-commerce yikes! http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/14/ns-7770.html

"Banks and companies including VISA and Mastercard have given merchants the impression that SSL is OK," says McGuire. "It's not OK and those merchants using SSL run a very real risk of not getting paid because of these disputes."

Better coffin pix, almost identical story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_319000/319833.stm

"People last night were saying they could be olive leaves which would be rather extraordinary if that were the case," Dr Thurley told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "Or perhaps it was some wonderful romantic moment when a gust of wind one autumn blew the the leaves across and they tumbled into the coffin. We just don't know yet."

Hubble takes a lickin': http://www.astronomynow.com/breaking/990412debris/index.html

Over 500 of the impacts were found on the aft shroud and equipment section where highly reflective surfaces facilitated detection of impact features. Approximately 80% of the impact zones measured less than 0.8 cm, although the largest was 4.7 cm in diameter.

Animal checklist from Futurama: [Deja URL]

- purple fruit snake
- sharktopus
- chilean space bass
- parasitic puppy
- gretchen mole
- vampire slug
- excommunicated cardinal
- four-legged mimic
- molotov cockatoo
- hermaphlamingo

Not much new yet (4th C coffin): http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_319000/319783.stm

The archaeologists were most excited by the inch of mud in the bottom of the coffin, suggesting it may have been waterlogged. This layer could preserve organic matter and a bundle of leaves have already been found, possibly the remains of a funeral wreath. Other bumps in the mud, possibly jewellery, are being carefully excavated now.

A messy page of scholarly mailing-list debate about the 2039 asteroid threat: http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc041499.html [NASA Watch]

Milani estimates that the chance of impact by 1999 AN10 is of order 1 in a billion (1 in a thousand million), a factor of a million smaller than the mistaken estimate of 1997 XF11's impact probability. He estimates the impact probability as 10,000 times less than the chance that the Earth will be struck by some as-yet-undiscovered kilometer sized object NEXT YEAR! That makes 1999 AN10 a matter of scientific interest, but of no practical interest and hardly meriting the "official press release" you call for.

SFGate finally catches up on the week's backlog of Zippy's: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/sfgate/zippy.cgi?weekday=2

Zerbina: "Zippy, is our marriage working?"
Zippy: "If it isn't, I hope it's at least collecting unemployment insurance!"

Sociobiological founding-father rethinks Eve theory: (Telegraph)

Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis.

A historical reader on sexuality: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/15/timbooboo04007.html?1334425

Of course, as the editor explains here, perversions were the creation of the 19th century. The intellectual police, in the mid-point of that era, committed the extraordinary sin of naming them, and then created "a small army of medical and legal specialists devoted to studying, curing or punishing them".

First pic of the opened 4th C coffin: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/15/timnwsnws03023.html?1334425

The bones had been preserved in a deep, moist layer of silt, which could contain more organic matter, such as hair or pollen. Whether there are body ornaments - jewellery, clothes or grave goods - will be announced today.

Don't miss: This 30-min RealAudio report on the real roots of the Kosovo crisis: http://www.igc.org/MakingContact/

On this program we take a look at some of the less-reported factors behind the U.S.-led attacks on Yugoslavia: NATO expansion and forced economic reforms in that region.

Project Censored Top Ten of 1998: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=361

1. Secret international trade agreement undermines the sovereignty of nations ..

April Wired online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/

The Whole World in Your Hand: A Wired guide to handhelds.

UseIt, or LuseIt? http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=466354293

Under normal web conditions, if a person wants to read a long article, it should ALWAYS be on a single page. As Nielsen well knows, normal web users find each new page will probably take >10 seconds to load, and nothing could be less convenient for comfortable reading.

Balloon successfully gathers stardust: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_319000/319313.stm

It landed 240 km (150 miles) away in the garden of a puzzled Georgian resident called Homer Yarnshop. "It was just like the movie Men in Black," laughs Noever. "Five government men turn up in dark suits and knock on his door one night asking if they could retrieve this alien looking package marked 'flight sensitive Nasa hardware'".

New New Scientist features Antarctica, plus "In space, no one can hear themselves think." http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990417/newsstory1.html

"There's an indication that a significant number of astronauts have lost hearing in Mir," says Jerry Goodman, who works on the acoustics of the space station.

Thrilling piece on the 4th C lead coffin, to be opened today, w/pix: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_319000/319172.stm

Assuming there is a skeleton found inside, the archaeologists hope that clothes, jewellery, and even shoes will be found, alongside plates and jugs containing food for the journey into the afterlife. The bones themselves will, after analysis, reveal the diet and health of rich Roman Londoners. There is unlikely to be a name inside the coffin but there is a small chance that some body tissue will have survived. The Romans sometimes packed coffins with gypsum or chalk and this may have preserved some of the body.

JenniCam's journal is pretty interesting: (it's her 3rd anniversary today) http://www.jennicam.org/~jenni/journal/

[March 24:] No, you can't get a refund for the two weeks I'm out of town. And no, I'm not going to feel guilty about it any more, like I always have in the past. For $15 a year, you didn't buy the right to dictate my life, only the right to watch it. :) And speaking of money, there is an end in sight to my monetary problems. Unfortunately, the end isn't until June, and it gets worse before it gets better. For the next two months, I'm still paying my mom's rent, plus an extra student loan payment...

[March 18:] I've discovered over the last few days that I've lost virtually all ability to speak english. I can still write and type it fine, but my speaking skills have detiorated drastically. I have actual conversations so infrequently, and spend all of my time talking via computer, complete with backspace. What wouldn't I give for a verbal backspace...

Great Joel Hodgson (MST3K) update: http://www.ultimatetv.com/news/celebrityfiles/a/99/04/07hodgson.html [Windowseat]

"I know there were people expecting the next big thing right away," Hodgson says. "But I'm not in a hurry. I'd rather take my time and do something right."

New newsgroup: alt.music.joni-mitchell

Camille on Kosovo: http://www.salonmagazine.com/people/col/paglia/1999/04/14/paglia/print.html

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, playing out her childhood scenarios (when she was the Czech ambassador's little princess in Belgrade), has systematically misinformed her distracted White House boss and the American people about the ancient, cold realities of Serbian nationalism. Albright's conceit and deceit have damaged the cause of women everywhere who aspire to high office and public responsibility.

[Also:] Images of nuns used to be powerful, even menacing, rather than buffoonish -- for example, the rustling pack of Furies who haunt the edges of Giulietta Masina's consciousness in Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965). And Audrey Hepburn's brilliantly focused performance in "The Nun's Story" (1959) gave my adolescent psyche quite a zap, let me tell you.

TV 2nite: Billy Tipton bio on E: http://www.tvultra.com/

Accomplished jazz pianist Dorothy Tipton realized that the only gig for women in jazz bands was as a singer. At 18, Tipton donned a suit and landed a job as "Billy." The ruse would continue until the day she died.

New Onion

Inspirational Nike Ad Gives Woman Courage To Reach Full Spending Potential

TV 2day: Mary Daly on Roseanne (Roseanne truly idolises her!)

Awesome TV! They talked first about biotech as patriarchal rape of Nature-- MD calls it "necro-tech".

New Village Voice includes this excellent piece on term-paper web-mills: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9915/rao.shtml

Evil House of Cheat is among the 100 or more Web sites currently found on the Internet that allow students to download archived or custom-written papers.

Her software removes every fifth word of the essays in question, then asks writers to fill in the blanks. A low score usually indicates plagiarism, since "you know and can recall your own writing better than anyone else . . . assuming you've authored it..."

Last October, Brantner and Drawbaugh downloaded 14,200 term papers from a variety of term paper sources like Evil House of Cheat and schoolsucks.com to create the essay database for their software program, which costs $4.95 per month.

Since all its money comes from advertisers, who pay between $500 and $4000 a month to display their banners on the Web site, 270,000 schoolsucks.com users are able to download term papers free of charge 1.6 million times a month.

An interesting bundle of political tidbits: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9915/ridgeway.shtml

...This got a shot in the arm last week when it was revealed that U.S. intelligence knew about Serb plans to abduct U.S. soldiers. Columnist Bob Novak said he got a call from one source March 23 alerting him to the plan. The soldiers were captured eight days later. Armed Services Committee chair John Warner of Virginia, who has supported the NATO bombing, wants to know why the intelligence on the threat of abduction was ignored.

Interesting Progressive Review: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm

"Piles of unopened packages - each labeled "A Food Gift from the People of the United States of America'' - litter the grounds of makeshift camps housing many of the 150,000 ethnic Albanians who have poured across the border in recent weeks. ~~ The refugees . . . are used to a diet based on potatoes, rice and beans. Medical experts said similar problems were reported during a humanitarian mission in Somalia, where U.S. military rations were too rich for the local population."

Since the last time I looked (c1995), three full synopses of Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations have been posted:
http://www.wordplayer.com/archives/poltisitu.01-12.html [handsome 3pg]
http://bricolage.bel-epa.com/etc/drawer/polti.html [plain 1pg]
http://www.heliograph.com/space-1889/Adv/fs-36-plots-long.html [1-liners, text]

1.        Supplication (Elements: Persecutor, Supplicant,
          Power in Authority)
   A. 1.  A fugitive imploring the powerful for help against
          enemies (or some other threat).

May Discover features a T Rex hunter

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

- "Morgan: American Financier" nonfiction by Jean Strouse
- "Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan" nonfiction by John Taliaferro

Icebergs 'sterilize' seafloor: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_317000/317410.stm

They dived beneath the sea and used vacuum pumps to suck up the animals living on the sea bed both before and immediately after the berg impact. They were shocked by the totality of the death toll. In some cases, literally everything had been ground to a fine powder.

Kibological whipping-boy Lee Bumgarner researched the early evolution of netnews: (awful proofreading) http://www.vrx.net/usenet/history/rename.html

The original scheme of just three worldwide hierarchies --- net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for moderated groups and fa.* for from ARPAnet --- and the fairly haphazard way in which new names were developed was becoming difficult to administer.

Transmitting news was quite expensive in those days, so the Europeans refused to pay for the fluff groups like net.religion and net.flame.

Early in Usenet's life, one could create a group simply by posting to it, and a number of groups were created because of typos.

Weekly sleaze: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/more_stories.html

- Student I Saw Every Day Was My Granddaughter -- & I Never Knew!
- Sharon Stone's Making Love '24 Hours A Day' -- But No Baby
- TED AND JANE IN LAST-DITCH BID TO SAVE THEIR MARRIAGE
- Sneak Peek At Wackiest 'X-Files' Ever

Outstanding issue of Obscure Store includes the WSJ doing some Elvis Index-style calculations wrt Pam Anderson: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2240979,00.html

Consider those 9,000 daily searches for Ms. Lee's name on AltaVista. On every page of search results, AltaVista displays a paid advertisement costing advertisers anywhere from two cents to 8.5 cents each time it is viewed. That means AltaVista - itself not in the sex business - could book $200,000 a year thanks to Ms. Lee.

Mis-info, I believe, in AV's case:

This is because AltaVista, Excite and most other search engines decide how to index Web pages in part by examining invisible code words put there by a page's author.

If you love thesauri, you'll love this free-rangeing comparative review essay: http://metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.07.96/cover/thesaurus-9645.html

I sincerely doubt, however, that anyone looking for a synonym for "interfere" is going to want to start under Class "Dimensions," go under Section "Centric (general)" and find what they're looking for under the head "Interjacence."

These late-model lexists have out-Rogeted Roget in this respect by deciding to include the proper nouns, which Roget sagely omitted, for fear of losing control of his work.

For example, Robert L. Chapman, the becadizened editor of Roget's International, has concluded that Roget's original classification scheme is based on an outdated "Platonic-Aristotelian" system. He replaces this with a "developmental-existential" system based on more modernized classes such as "The Body and the Senses" and "Occupations and Crafts."

Cool, bulky gif of Roget's original manuscript: http://www.rain.org/~karpeles/rogetdis.html

The first draft of the Thesaurus was written in 1805, two years before Webster started on his dictionary. However for a period of 47 years Dr. Roget used his manuscript as his personal, secret, treasure trove. Not until he was 73 years old did he decide to reveal and publish this great manuscript.

Reviews we never finished reading: (Telegraph)

A LITTLE more than 2,000 years ago, very likely in AD 30 or 33...

Frontier 6.0 reviewed, for non-Frontier-users: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-476.html#lnk3

Or, let's say you and I both have copies of part of the database, whose contents must be synchronized; you just choose the Update menu item, and presto, whatever has changed in my copy is downloaded across the network and incorporated into your copy ("subscriptions"). And, intriguingly, the sending of commands and data across the network is done with XML, which is just machine-coded, machine-parsable text; so an application from a completely different conceptual world, such as Perl or Java, could exchange information with Frontier as easily as another copy of Frontier can ("XML-based distributed computing").

New Scientific American features:

- Tsunami!
- XML and the Second-Generation Web

More Melissa detective work: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1999/04/11/BUSINESS743.dtl

Peter Tippett of ICSA.NET has compiled a whole list of coincidences linking David Smith to VicodinES. Both had accounts with an Internet service provider in Monmouth, N.J. Smith signs his e-mail "peace d." Vicodin signs his e-mail "peace vic." And both are self-confessed pill-heads. On Usenet postings, both David Smith and VicodinES talk up the same virus, sex, music and art Web sites, and confess a love for anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs.

After an overlong buildup, some bleak forecasts about biodiversity in 2150: http://www.enviroweb.org/coe/e-sermons/weedplan.html [YAWL]

Forests will be tiny insular patches existing on bare sufferance, much of their biological diversity (the big predators, the migratory birds, the shy creatures that can't tolerate edges, and many other species linked inextricably with those) long since decayed away. They'll essentially be tall woody gardens, not forests in the richer sense.

Having recently passed the great age of biogeography, we will have entered the age after biogeography, in that virtually everything will live virtually everywhere, though the list of species that constitute "everything" will be small.

TV 2nite: Michael Moore's Awful Truth on Bravo

Some inconclusive mathematical thinking about search: http://search.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=465071971

Here are some tools for thinking about net.search:

- hypothetically, one could arrange all the questions that searchers want answered, in order from most common to least common. (Ask Jeeves is trying to classify all the top ones. They have 10,000 'templates' so far, according to Forbes [1].)

Enjoyable Matt Groening chat-session transcript: http://www.fox.com/futurama/chat_fr.htm

Matt_G: I have about 8 or 9 ideas for tv shows. "Life in Hell" is number 7 on the list.

Question amber22f: Who is the brains behind Ralph Wiggum. He must be a genius!
Matt_G: Nancy Cartwright, who plays Bart, also does the voice of Ralph. When you see her do it in person, she gets this Ralph-like stare on her face that brings the character to life.

Don't miss: US spy services engaged in industrial espionage?!? (Telegraph)

Experts have little doubt that the NSA is at the forefront of the European industrial espionage war, not least because Washington has instructed its security services to collect information for the benefit of American industry. Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton decreed that industrial espionage should be one of the main tasks of the CIA. "What is good for Boeing is good for America," he was quoted as saying.

Automating the [More] button: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/04/11/stiinnnws01006.html?1334425

Autonomy, a Cambridge software company, is developing a system that can identify key words. Its software, called ActiveKnowledge, then instantly finds background information on the Net.

Obscure Store reports:

NOTE: The New York Times has ended its early Saturday uploads of The Magazine, and has changed the URL to http://www.nytimes.com/magazine, beginning tomorrow, April 11.

(And it requires registration, sigh.)

9am to 11am CDT: This is Hell with guests Mark Rosentraub (Major League Losers) and Mike Bremer (Voices in the Wilderness)

Long, easygoing Tom Waits profile: (Telegraph)

'I usually play small parts,' he says, 'which is just as well. But a small part in a film is rather wasteful. You go and you sit and you sit... The acting is free. You charge them for the waiting. That's the way I see it.'

Waits describes Robert Altman as 'a good sheriff in a bad town'.

'Do you know how many teardrops it takes to fill up a teaspoon? A hundred and twenty, actually. I tested it. I was very sad and I thought, I'm going to make some use of it, so I held a spoon at my cheek and I cried. This is my science project for the year.'

'Here's another one. In Viking times, it was humans who were sacrificed on the prow of a ship, and of course from there it went to a bottle of wine. But the first time it was human beings. They'd volunteer. It was a short line - that real short line off to the right, just on the other side of the wharf, just two or three people. Depressed people.'

Short, fun review of the MS trial to date: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0419/6308086a.htm

"This is a disaster," says Alan Dershowitz, professor at Harvard Law School. "Lawyers watching this case are aghast. This case will be taught at law schools for years to come as an example of how not to conduct a trial."

Lovely poem by Rachel Loden: http://www.poems.com/today.htm

And I'm as grateful as a thankless child can be.
Someone has been here in this night with me,
Someone whose bitterness, I want to say,
Is even more impressive than my own...

New edition of a gorgeous progressive world atlas: http://www.oneworld.org/ni/catalog/serious.htm

The World Guide contains more than 600 pages of global information with over 250 maps, 650 diagrams, 10,000 references and an easy-to-use index.

Tongue-in-cheek literary guide to Ireland: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/0410/fea13.htm

There are lots of dangerous jokes, such as telling the innocent tourist that B&B stands for Bar and Brothel ("Knock boldly on the front door and don't be fooled by the homely, respectable appearance of the Madame who opens it").

TV 2nite: Jennifer Jason Leigh scheduled for Leno

Jess Nevins' legendary compilation of gossip finally gets html-ised: (130k, interstitials) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/7160/gossip.html

The following may or may not be true...

TV 2day: Michael Moore on Roseanne less than ten minutes, almost entirely flattery towards Roseanne

BBC on the depleted-uranium scare: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/europe/newsid_315000/315396.stm

But the US Defense Department said there was no evidence of a link between cancer and DU, which was no more radioactive than lead.

(...in fact, it's good for you! 100% of the MDR for DU!!!)

Yikes! Susie Bright on Reuben's new edition of "Everything You Always... Ask": http://www.nerve.com/Bright/sex/ [Salon]

I am deathly afraid of men who wear their degrees around their necks like medals, who think that their brand of male chauvinism is a gift from God (and, in the good doctor's case, the A.M.A.).

In fact, I would say the average water-cooler delivery man at Harper's knows more about what is going on in sex in America today than David Reuben.

Salon starts a weblog, but without its own URL: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/col/shre/1999/04/09/alt/print.html

An opinionated roundup of the most interesting stories in the alternative press.

(And I think Salon's frontpage article-blurbs have actually gotten worse!)

Meta clarification:

My scaling-back of this weblog includes: no current cams (a huge timesink), much spottier coverage of most NewsHub pages, no attempt to be thorough with periodicals like New Scientist and Nation, less arduous pullquoting, and less effort to catch new material as soon as it's posted. I may also drop the slow-n-painful UK Times and Telegraph.

What's left is the reading I do purely for myself, augmented by the systems I've worked out for semi-effortless monitoring and linking. There's a sort of 80/20 rule where I'll still be getting 80% of the old level of links, with 20% of the effort, but I'm abandoning (for now, for temporary personal reasons) the 80% of hard-labor involved in being fast and thorough.

I encourage people to pick up the slack if they're at all inclined, especially via NewsHub.

New The Nation looks at George W Bush, plus Cockburn on Pacifica: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990426/0426cockburn.shtml

Then, presto! Pacifica and its stations would be creatures of the foundations, brought to heel just like the environmental movement.

Don't miss: I'm not a fan of Ask Jeeves, but this backgrounder is superb anyway: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0419/6308230a.htm

It brought in ad sales of about $1 million last year, and Ask Jeeves hopes to make considerably more by selling its know-how for use on corporate Web sites, typically for $400,000 a pop.

Some fun new Mars images: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/index.html [NASA Watch]

And don't miss: A surprising NASA memo [qv] inspired this NASA Watch parody-image: http://www.reston.com/nasa/humor/shuttle.ads.html

Space Commercialization: The Shape of Things to Come?

Depleted-uranium weapons promise to generally poison the Balkans: [Deja URL]

"The use of Warthogs with DU shells threatens to make a nuclear wasteland of Kosovo," Flounders said. "The Pentagon is laying waste to the very people--along with their children--they claim to be saving; this is another reason for fighting to end NATO's attack on Yugoslavia."

Sociobiology wins again: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_314000/314669.stm

The discovery is of a new gene in mice for good mothering. Ironically, this is inherited from the father. Mothers without the gene do not nurture their offspring well and only eight per cent of the babies survive.

JenniCam on hiatus: http://www.jennicam.org/guests/index.html

Gone to New Orleans for two weeks to look for a new home! Back on April 14...

Progressive Review url-confusion semi-resolved: http://emporium.turnpike.net/P/ProRev/indexa.htm (bob)

Multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power and economic success. In the two decades prior to 1980, annual GDP growth averaged 6.1 percent, medical care was free, the literacy rate was of the order of 91 percent, and the life expectancy was 72 years. But after a decade of Western economic ministrations and five years of disintegration, war, boycott, and embargo, the economies of the former Yugoslavia are prostrate, their industrial sectors dismantled.

Free-Lunch Dept: http://www.internetnews.com/prod-news/article/0,1087,9_94511,00.html

If a site goes down, NetWhistle.com notifies the owner free of charge by e-mail or pager. The vendor said it plans to generate revenue by offering additional, premium level monitoring services, and by attracting corporate advertisers.

Sony to add proprietary MP3-alike to Memory Stick: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/netman.idg/ [Slashdot]

In particular, Kellar pointed to an MP3-like audio compression technology expected next week from Microsoft as a potential candidate for the Memory Stick.

I dare ya to solve this one! http://www.deepfun.com/msgReader$172

We have a small grant to develop an educational board game designed for African youth to use as part of a school curriculum called Family Life Education. The goal of the game would be to get them to talk about bodies, and/or meanings of traditions. The bigger goal behind that is to end female genital mutilation or female circumcision.

Worrisome? No updates for a week to Progressive Review

BMI's greatest hits: http://bmi.com/repertoire/awards/FIVEUP.html

- "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by Mann, Spector, and Weil
- "Never My Love" by Addrisi and Addrisi
- "Stand By Me" by King, Leiber, and Stoller
- "Yesterday" by Lennon and McCartney

Another Kubrick-bio tidbit: (p138) http://mrshowbiz.go.com/games/linked/hi/119.html

Sir Laurence Olivier had a ten-year romantic liaison with Danny Kaye.

Here Comes EveryObject:

Back on 27 August I wrote: "What's needed, imho, is an OS built around a highly refined toolkit that combines the best of Emacs and HyperCard and ResEdit and Frontier and Netscape..." At the core of this would be a universal object-type that combines 'window' and 'image' and 'text' and 'url' etc etc etc. Each of these objects can appear on the screen as a single rectangle or grouping of rectangles, with consistent conventions for dragging them, manipulating layers, ungrouping and editing, etc. HTML would be one shorthand for this grouping, but it will allow (eg) links to be added to any page by drag-n-drop. (Dragging a link that's also an image will bring along both image and link, while allowing you to delete either.) A consistent scripting language will unify all these objects...

D'oh! (confirmed by Cameron Laird)

DejaNews has indeed gone and broken everybody's article-thread links again (30 Mar below). A longterm 3rd-party workaround is in the works.

Salon buys the Well!?! http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/culture/story/18992.html?wnpg=all [Slashdot]

Logic would dictate that Well Engaged would likely replace TableTalk, Salon's existing clunky discussion forum area. But Salon spokesperson Dayna Macy flatly denies this will occur.

(I'm still waiting for the day when the elitists on the Well realise they're a smug, selfish Internet backwater.)

Fascinating, doomed XML-proposal for news stories: (no site-navigation bar!??) http://www.xmlnews.org/docs/story-tutorial.html [Whump]

Traditionally, news stories have included inline codes specifying how they should appear; XMLNews-Story goes a step further, and uses inline elements to say what things are, as in the following example: "<p>An <event> earthquake </event> struck <location> western <country> Colombia </country> </location> on <chron norm="19990125"> Monday </chron>, killing at least 143 people and injuring more than 900 as it toppled buildings across the country's coffee-growing heartland, <function> civil defense officials </function> said.</p>"

...The pronounce element supplies a pronunciation for a word or phrase. The element itself is empty, but the guide and phonetic attributes provide useful information for a news reader...

The q element (from HTML) marks a direct quotation. You should use this element type instead of entering quotation marks in the text...

(Grrr: The 'q' should be in addition to the quotes. And why are 'hedline' and 'copyrite' intentionally misspelled? And why no pullquote or lead-par tags? And again, the content markup would do better in a header, if you put it in the body you end up compromising your prose style to please the machines...)

New Lingua Franca: http://www.linguafranca.com/9904/toc.9904.html

- FIELD NOTES: Professors battle impeachment
- BREAKTHROUGH BOOKS: Exploring the universe
- INSIDE PUBLISHING: Wisconsin comes out
- WHEN WORDS FAIL: Voynich manuscript [long, fun, Google search, GIF]
- HYPOTHESES: Jim Holt on Emmy Noether and symmetry

This week's CounterSpin has a very good segment on the Exxon Valdez:

We'll talk with Greg Palast, a US-based investigative reporter with the London Observer, who's been looking into still-uncovered aspects of the Exxon Valdez story...

Serbia as Iraq: http://www.counterpunch.org/

Belgrade itself is going the way of Baghdad, on exactly the same US targeting strategy: bridges gone, power plants gone, sewage treatment destroyed. Missiles will go on killing civilians as they did the other day in Novi Sad. The limitations of air power are once again being exposed.

Any peace movement here would take a long time to get off the ground. Most of the crucial organizers, seemingly unable to think of more than one thing at a time, are presently preoccupied with the campaign for Death Row prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.

New New Scientist

New at the Consortium: http://www.consortiumnews.com/

- Kosovo's Moscow Fallout: The Serb brutality against the ethnic Albanians and NATO's bombing of Serb targets have rattled Moscow's fragile political order. By Robert Parry
- Japan's Kill-the-Whales Plot: The U.S. helps Japan on a hunting loophole. By Sarah Christie

Sixties photographer David Bailey on his womanizing: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk:80/dynamic/lifestyle/review.html?in_review_id=129754&in_review_text_id=105786

I shall always treasure the smile that froze on Cindy Crawford's lips when he explained why he wasn't intimidated by famously beautiful women: "For me they were always the easiest lays, because no one ever made a pass at them. They were so pleased when I grabbed their arse."

From a Kubrick bio: (Baxter, p91)

Hoping [in 1956] to find a project on which he and [dancer-wife] Ruth could collaborate, Kubrick approached Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, one of whose continuing characters was a barefoot modern dancer, but a plot based on her adventures failed to emerge. [Still dancing, 43 years on!]

Lunatics' "8-Ball" autopsy: http://ofb.net/8ball/procedure.html [CSky Weblog]

Two human subjects (including one of the authors) volunteered for a non-blind Type I safety trial of the blue fluid. The investigators initially believed the fluid to be water with dissolved dye. The trial subjects self-administered small doses of the fluid to their tongues...

Meta: This weblog is going to be scaled way back for an unknown period, while I work out some things.

A nice, short, lucid overview of the genetically-modifed food debate: http://www.pioneerplanet.com/opinion/ocl_docs/006418.htm [CDreams]

American farmers have been willing to pay a higher price for GM seeds because they have increased yields or lowered production costs. But now they are finding that they cannot sell them in Europe and, if organic labels come into effect in the United States, they might even be shut out of many American markets.

Privacy law and the tracking of Melissa: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/13/ns-7648.html

"I think AOL made the decision that David Smith wasn't a person they wanted to protect," he said. Jennifer Granick, a San Francisco criminal defence lawyer who specialises in high-tech issues, said the Smith case "definitely" broke new ground.

Nauseating update on the trademarking process: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0419/6308115a.htm

Think this is tricky? Try getting a trademark on a color; UPS is filing for the rights to the color brown. The AQC Group, an office-products company, tried to protect the scent of its toner (lemon) but later withdrew its application.

Excellent short piece about a hi-tech fountain designer: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0419/6308126a.htm

Fuller founded WET (water entertainment technologies) Design, now of Universal City, Calif., by maxing out 13 credit cards. His lab was the yard behind his house and a couple of garden hoses.

Excellent new Onion

Kodak, Nabisco Apologize For Drunken One-Night Merger

His "Newsies" identity may be gone, but Tom Mangan is keeping a lively weblog going: http://tom.mangan.com/

Last night I figured out what's the matter with "Futurama": No Homer, No Bart...

Okay piece on non-lethal weapons: http://www.discover.com/science_news/gthere.html?article=feature.html

After Somalia, advocates of weapons that don't kill toned down their rhetoric. "They were making wild claims that this technology would do everything but cure the common cold," says Aftergood. "The limited field experience yielded a more realistic assessment."

Not only must nonlethals work as weapons, they must do their job gently enough to avoid what is sometimes called the CNN effect: as soon as Americans see televised images of bloody bodies, support for even reasonable peacekeeping missions evaporates.

Similar problems plague sonic weapons, which blast high-intensity sound waves to make internal organs mighty uncomfortable. Unfortunately the line between nausea and death can be rather thin.

Alexander thinks a smell assault, for example, might have worked well against the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was attacked by U.S. cruise missiles last August. A stink bomb that leaves behind the smell of a ripe corpse would have allowed the salvage of some equipment from the facility but would have insured that the location remained unusable for some time.

(Cruise stink bombs!)

Decent case-study on the Gannett newspaper juggernaut in Hawaii: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=356

Publisher Fisch, in disputing this, makes the point that Gannett doesn't interfere with the HNA's editorial policy, and that what goes into both papers is determined here. However, when asked if he ever hears from Gannett, Fisch says, "Not if I make the numbers." It is this emphasis on making "the numbers" that has driven the Advertiser to de-emphasize the news while trying to please the average taste.

What goes into the news hole is the increasingly fluffy and light stuff that does well in focus groups.

My favorite model for web-commerce is the merchandising model: http://www.amcity.com/triad/stories/1999/04/05/smallb5.html

Small companies with a spiritual bent are profiting from the $3-billion-a-year religious-products market...

New Village Voice includes these excellent Kosovo tidbits, capped with a don't miss real-life howler: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9914/ridgeway.shtml

Station #1: This is the aircraft carrier Enterprise, we are a large warship of the U.S. Navy. Divert your course now!

And a fun piece on an obsessive Atari historian: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9914/hakim.shtml

During the musical chairs, Vendel began flying out to California to raid the company's trash bins with local Atari fanatics. The archaeological expeditions yielded a wealth of microchip schematics, prototype video games that never made it to market, confidential memos, even test-marketing reports on how focus groups responded to joysticks. He believes he took part in about 18 raids, and was only caught- and escorted from the premises- once. During one of these exploits, Vendel found his "Rosetta stones"- twenty-two cherry red engineering notebooks. [His website]

An old (Twelve Monkeys) Terry Gilliam interview: http://www.tcj.com/archives/interviews/gilliamint.html [SB]

Only one film went over budget, and the next film we did after that was back on budget. They said, "That doesn't count. That was a studio production. This one is an independent production." I have to prove myself again. So, this film is on budget, and that'd better be the end of that s___. If I hear it again, I'm going to kill someone.

Fine new Chomsky interview, on general topics: http://weeklywire.com/ww/current/boston_feature_3.html

One of the things it wouldn't do to say is that actions the United States government is taking might be fundamentally wrong or immoral. It just wouldn't do to say that. And it wouldn't do to think it. And if you're a well-educated, respectable type, it can't occur to your mind. For the 70 percent of the population who don't have the benefits of a good education, they can see it. Because it's obviously true. This is true on issue after issue, including unimportant issues.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave away maybe a hundred billion dollars' worth of publicly owned property -- namely the digital spectrum -- to a few megacorporations. That wasn't corrupt. It was highway robbery on a massive scale, but not corrupt.

For example, the Soviet Union was a monstrosity, but it had a pretty fast growth rate -- a growth rate unknown in the Western economies. In the 1960s the economy started to stagnate and decline, but for a long period they had a growth rate that was very alarming to Western leaders.

I mean, you and I are sitting here and we're not starving, so something's working. It's a little unfair in my case because I'm up in that top few percent who, like I said, are making out like bandits.

Wild child raised by colobus monkeys??? http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10168.html

When finally rescued seven years ago by flabbergasted African villagers, the boy grunted and squealed like a monkey, walked on his haunches and couldn't speak.

Hogamus, horius, boys are vainglorious... http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/cfah-bot030999.html

Girls may be more likely than boys to attribute their failures to their own low ability, the scientists noted, and this type of attribution has been related to depression in both children and adults. Boys are more likely to attribute their failures to bad luck, the difficulty of the task, or not trying hard enough. These attributions have been associated with resistance to depression.

The first skyspam! http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

The Russian Space Agency has incurred the wrath and ire of amateur radio operators world wide by having contracted with the Swiss watch company "Swatch" to deploy a small French built satellite which will transmit advertising and messages sent in from Swatch website users. The satellite will transmit a narrow band FM signal in the 145.80 MHz - 146.00 MHz portion of the two meter amateur (HAM radio) band. This is in apparent violation of International Telecommunications Union treaty and U.S. FCC regulations.

Lively Drudge tidbits: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Could America's million dollar anchormen -- Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather -- be afraid of Yugoslavia?

Bandwidth light slowly dawns at MSNBC: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2236748,00.html [SN]

MSNBC, seeking to provide continuous, fresh news updates, typically has allowed publishers to hold its Web site in cache for only short periods. That means access providers would have to repeatedly request data updates from MSNBC servers throughout the day. To lighten the load, MSNBC has begun to define some "evergreen" elements of its design template, such as its logo, that can remain in remote cache for months at a time, Nicol says.

"We've really gotten religion on our need to manage caching," Nicol says.

Even worse: Re Salon's redesign (below)-- the daily TV column no longer has a stable URL!

My first impression of Salon's new layout is that it achieves a new low for 'stotting'. Stotting is a term I picked up from E O Wilson's "Sociobiology", referring to flocks of white-tailed deer that seem to distract predators by flashing their white tails as they flee-- each flash momentarily drawing the predator's attention, only to be overwhelmed an instantly later by a neighbor's flash.

So in web design, stotting means overwhelming the surfer with so many competing choices that one simply shuts down. Salon's front page almost does the right thing by listing blurbs for each new article in a central column, with only minor stotting from the parallel side-columns. But they now also offer offsite links, split up over ten subtopics, with each of these ten pages absolutely unreadable from extreme stotting, imho.

So I'm just not going to look at those subpages, ever again. Bleagh!

Another NYer teaser by Seymour Hersh, about UNSCOM: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/040599art.html

The encryption system on Saddam's telephones, made in Sweden, was as sophisticated as any on the international market. The phones had a series of channels, and on each channel were algorithms that chopped the signals into hundreds of bits as the channels were switched. To get at the signals, Ritter's people took the extreme risk of operating, under the cover of the U.N. flag, an interception station in UNSCOM's offices in Baghdad and in a mobile unit. Early in the spring of 1998, the gamble paid off. The algorithms were unscrambled, and Saddam's most closely protected communications were suddenly pouring into UNSCOM.

Yikes: http://www.counterpunch.org/

"I believe in killing people who try to hurt you.. And I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks." -- Clinton ordering the bombing of civilian targets in Somalia, as quoted in All Too Human, George Stephanopoulos

Nerve assembles a promising crew for a forum on Catholicism and sexuality, but so far it's a lot of short pages and not much light: http://www.nervemag.com/voicebox/religion/

...Camille Paglia, ex-monk Thomas Moore, professor of religion Elaine Pagels, married priest Robert Francoeur and feminist Catholic reformer Frances Kissling...

New NY Review of Books:

- Brad Leithauser: Irving Berlin
- Elizabeth Hardwick: The Passion of Monica L.
- Ada Louise Huxtable: The Museums in Your Future
- Larry McMurtry: On the Indian Trail
- Christopher Hitchens: 'Essential Gore Vidal' [13pg, looks good]
- Timothy Garton Ash: Hail Ruthenia!

Short, pleasant Kubrick tribute by one of his writers: [2pg] http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19990422028F

For one thing, he was not sure if this Freudian tale of eros, guilt, repression, and death was a comedy or a tragedy. (He leaned toward the comic and, I have heard, explored it with Steve Martin.)

In the early 1980s he was a funny, brilliant, well-read eater of Chinese sweet-and-sour ribs and an appreciative watcher of other people's movies, loyal to old friends, a tender-hearted animal lover, father, and husband, and of course a brilliant filmmaker. He liked dinner parties, and had the reaction of a shy foreigner to meeting well-known English people ("Harold Pinter? Really?").

Is there something fishy (scary) in this Melissa tracking? http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,22646,00.html

The culprit, AOL discovered, had logged on from New Jersey. A high-tech FBI-police unit there narrowed the possibilities still further. "Eventually," says deputy attorney general Christopher Bubb, "we were able to trace it back to the specific telephone that was being used." It belonged to David Smith.

Decent exploration of defensive hacking by the US military: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2236739,00.html

Allowing men and women in uniform to "hack back" means abandoning, at least in a minimal way, a basic Constitutional principle: that the military cannot be used against its own people.

What's more, the old maxim that it takes more troops to attack than defend is precisely reversed.

Unsurprising update on US gov't use of XML: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0405/fcw-techbrief-4-5-99.html

A similar project, the Defense Department's Emall, allows vendors to maintain their catalogs at their own locations. Emall uses XML to query vendors' databases to get new information.

Heh: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0405/fcw-newsmelissa-4-5-99.html

The Melissa virus managed to spread into the Defense Department's worldwide classified intranet, FCW confirmed. A spokeswoman for the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense said DOD identified "one occurrence" of the virus ending up on a computer connected to the DOD Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, a highly secure network designed to carry highly sensitive traffic. But the spokeswoman declined to identify the location of that infected computer.

Microsoft raiding academia: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/05/049l-040599-idx.html [OSRR]

"Microsoft Research has become a parasite on the academic establishment," said Jim Morris, chairman of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. "They are eating our seed corn. If you take away great people from schools and put them in a place where they're not teaching anyone, who will train the next generation?"

"My annoyance with Microsoft is that there aren't 300 extra great PhDs waiting to replace the people they steal," Dopkin said.

Jokes anti-environmentalists tell: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Apr/airplanes.html

...The Galileo probe, however, was the first spacecraft to be outweighed by its own environmental impact report, according to the people I talked to at JPL this winter.

(I bet he really means Cassini.)

Excellent expose of the Pew Charitable Trusts: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=355 [More]

Critics say what the Pew journalism grants often do is use tax-free money to subsidize big private businesses -- large chain-owned newspapers -- which use the cash to run puffy stories that don't challenge the power structure.

Nice AP snapshot of Poland's economic 'reform': http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/business/story/0,2469,34879-56171-410964-0,00.html

Enterprising Poles, often the young, are finding jobs with well-paying foreign companies and starting their own small businesses. Older people generally prefer the modest certainty of a state job or they lack the training to take a risk.

Jakob Nielsen on headline-writing: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990404.html

For a company with 10,000 employees, the cost of a single poorly written headline on an intranet home page is almost $5,000.

Chgo TV 2day: Cinema Europe marathon on ch20

New EuroCams make a nice sunset panoply: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/eurocams.html

Clinton to Belgrade:

"You better put some ice on that."

Scouring My.Userland for comprehensible headline-sources, I find this Haddock link to news-related webcams: http://www.camcity.com/breakingnews/breakingnewshome.html

Unfortunately all Kosovo webcams have been disconnected so we can not bring you this breaking news. Sometimes this link towards Belgrade still works: Belgrade

The same site is sunrise-sensitive! http://www.camcity.com/cgi-bin/home/gowebcams/weather.html

Best Viewing times 6-8am (eastern) for the sunrise. Fishing Boats depart from 5:30- 9am and return all day, moon rises 7pm-10pm (eastern).

I'm auditioning new EastCams: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/ewestcams.html

Passionate WashPost condemnation of Clinton's latest lies to Dan Rather: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-04/03/067l-040399-idx.html [CDreams]

No, Mr. President, say what you wish to the cameras, but your administration was not caught flat-footed in Rwanda. Your State Department and United Nations ambassador -- then Madeleine Albright -- heard the terrifying words of warning. Your White House just didn't want to get involved.

Okay poem, daughter to father: http://www.poems.com/today.htm

...What does he want? I've learned one trick.
I tell him a story - almost any will do -
as long as I've done or said something in it
that makes me sound like a fool.
This always works.
My father laughs.
His laugh is gorgeous...

I thought this was finally a 'candid', but when I refresh I find they're chasing with the mobile cam again (0230CST, detail) http://www.africam.mweb.co.za/sabi.htm

Huge crowds at the Western Wall: http://www.thewall.org/

Bitter arguments about the Bible's historicity: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/04/04/stibooboo01009.html?1334425

Only last month, Binyamin Netanyahu kicked off his election campaign by encouraging Jewish settlers to "return" and colonise the Palestinian village around the oldest archeological site in Jerusalem. Yet despite renaming the area "the City of David" and desperately searching for the buildings referred to in the Bible, Israeli archeologists have to date found no significant David-period remains, and most of what has been found has recently been shown to predate his assumed period by some 800 years.

Hero Joy Nightingale (12yo UK genius with locked-in syndrome) has started posting to her website for the first time since her world tour, and is advertising for a new assistant: http://www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/hojoy/hojoy/enablers.html

the ideal enabler must be:
a woman who is right handed, probably in her thirties ..

New Science News has bumblebee dances, hormone-pollution, and ancient human growth-patterns

9am-noon CST: This is Hell with best-of reruns: provocative Not Dead Yet anti-Kevorkian activists; and Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness Iraq-blockade-busters; website of the week: Charlie Manson's website. Temporary substitute email address for Chuck Mertz: thisishell@mail.com

Brief, well-written history of computer viruses: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/9904compuvirus.htm

The first macro virus, Concept, arrived just as boot infectors suffered their mortal blow, late in 1995. Its one overt act was to put up a message box containing the number 1. A message in the macro code, at the spot that could have included instructions for more-damaging action, read, "This should be enough to show the concept."

Armed with the location and date of each incident, the number of infected PCs, and the type of virus involved, researchers employed techniques from mathematical epidemiology to figure out how viruses replicated and spread.

The basic concept is that anti-virus clients will be networked directly to the prototype's central computer. Monitoring programs on clients' PCs will beam a copy of any suspicious program to the system's analysis engine, which will make a quick guess as to what kind of virus might be arriving.

Kephart and a few colleagues brought a virus-plagued PC onstage, and the delighted audience watched as errant code was transmitted to Hawthorne, a cure derived, and the solution beamed back -- in just over three minutes.

CJR reposts a short, more-detached 1994 report from Kosovo: http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/kosovo.asp

In more peaceful times, Bujku (Farm Worker) was about what its name suggests -- farming. It was a monthly in Yugoslavia's Kosovo Province in southern Serbia, on the Albanian border. Kosovo has a population that is 90 percent Albanian, and in those days Bujku ran Albanian-language stories about crop harvests and farm machinery.

(They did this for Scaife, too, during the heat of MonicaGate (28 April below, a 1981 repost), and it worked brilliantly for me.)

Online book: Curious Punishments of Bygone Days: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8792/curpun.html [OLB]

1 The Bilboes
2 The Ducking Stool
3 The Stocks
4 The Pillory
5 Punishments of Authors and Books
6 The Whipping-Post
7 The Scarlet Letter
8 Branks and Gags
9 Public Penance
10 Military Punishments
11 Branding and Maiming

April Atlantic features Tracy Kidder, and Confucian revisionism: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/index.htm

Formulas for everything? (short, fun) http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99apr/9904shoefits.htm

The Texas-based Semantics Research Corporation promotes an Utterance Crispness Index, which defines the crispness of any statement as the quotient of "number of utterances containing no form of the verb to be" divided by "total number of utterances" -- a maximum score of 1 representing ultimate, perhaps unbearable, crispness. (Hemingway's novels score 0.64; Bill Clinton's grand-jury testimony scores 0.24.)

(My dream wp would be able to generate graphs like this for any such criteria-- the hardest case, Ulysses, would give different scores for each chapter!)

Subscription-only poetry search-engine: http://www.poemfinder.com/about.html

"Reasonably priced... Poem Finder is a very useful and sure-to-be used ready reference source for libraries... The full-text search capabilities are powerful... Subject indexing of poetry is an inherently risky business and Poem Finder carries it out respectfully."

Caravaggio assassinated by the Pope? http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/03/timfnffnf01002.html?1334425

According to Sieni, who has spent 20 years researching in the Vatican Secret Archives and a number of private archives, Caravaggio had close links to Giordano Bruno, the Catholic philosopher burnt at the stake in 1600 for heresy, and through him to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's ruthless intelligence chief.

Signor Sieni believes Caravaggio acted as a "postman", carrying messages and using hidden codes in his art.

Full 100-fave-tunes list: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/04/03/timnwsnws01003.html?1334425

79 Every Breath You Take (Sting) 1983
80 Winter Wonderland (m. Bernard/w. Smith) 1934
81 Killing Me Softly with His Song (Gimble/Fox) 1973

Fine-art astropic: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990403.html

Tune your radio telescope to 408MHz (408 million cycles per second) and check out the Radio Sky! You should find that frequency on your dial somewhere between US broadcast television channels 13 and 14. In the 1970s large dish antennas at three radio observatories, Jodrell Bank, MPIfR, and Parkes Observatory, were used to do just that - the data were combined to map the entire sky.

Knock-out poem of the day by Alice Friman: http://www.poems.com/today.htm [More]

...A crush
of giants, of prehistoric brides, captives
of the Laestrygonians, shrouded in a purdah
dark as the forbidden closet door
Mother undressed behind....
[Author bio]

This day in Joyce history: In 1899 in Ulysses, Bloom saved a pink ribbon off an Easter egg.

Heads in Futurama jars: http://futurama.simplenet.com/lists/head_in_a_jar.html

[1ACV01] Dennis Rodman
[1ACV01] Woody Allen
[1ACV01] Dick Clark
[1ACV01] Lucille Ball
[1ACV01] John Dillinger

New reviews (plus best-of-98 awards-- slow, multipg, Half-Life wins) at Computer Gaming World:

Starsiege: Tribes (4 stars, great multiplayer action) [Cool pic], [ditto]
- Uprising 2: Lead and Destroy (3.5, strategy) [Okay pic]
- Moto Racer 2 (3, same old cycles) [Decent pix]
- Newman/Haas Racing (1, comically bad) [Okay pic]
- Test Drive 5 (1.5, poor physics) [Cool pix]

Also their worst-of-category's all on one page: http://www.gamespot.com/features/cgw_awards98/page16.html

...a monumentally cumbersome interface and a physics-based engine that slapped down the slightest hint of fun. Idiotic voiceovers, pogo-ing stegosauruses, maddening collision detection, movement that redefined "crawling framerate," dinosaurs that periodically freeze in their tracks, guns that absolutely refuse to pass through doorways...

Another poll:

Do you ever use the [More] buttons in this Weblog?

I never even noticed them. I never tried them-- I never knew what they were. I understood them, but never found any need for them. I liked them when I tried them, but I rarely tried them. I occasionally find them quite useful. I rely on them, and miss them when they're omitted. View results-- in jumbled order!?

Don't miss: Wired's guide to committing online credit-card fraud: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/business/story/18904.html?wnpg=all

The Web also solves another problem for would-be criminals. Banks can catch credit card crooks by tracing the shipping address for goods like CDs or books. But there's no such protection for downloads of software, music, or subscriptions.

"Romania, in fact, is the center of Internet fraud," says Yahoo's Graham.

More Clintonian cynicism at CounterPunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/

Koh said he hoped the human rights groups would enthusiastically support the mission and promised that if they did, Albright might even meet with them in person in the near future.

Kibo declares HappyWeb 99: (long) http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happyweb/ (Curt Salada)

JavaScript will be replaced by Apple Computer's friendly, English-like AppleScript: "please (pretty) do tell the only application whose name may or may not be "Finder" aka "The Finder" to do while in parentheses ( make a beep ) end parenthesis The End. also forgot make(it) loud. The End again."

Any page which has an "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" logo for more than six months may be completed by any Web visiting surfer, using the new Page Vandalism Protocol (PVP).

New newsgroup: alt.tv.futurama

From my Dad in Hamilton, Ontario:

...A phone call a few days before had informed me of an opportunity to let more people know about some of the difficulties being faced by some of our earthmates in Guatemala. Many of them have worked hard to get improved working conditions & better pay. But now a factory, that makes shirts for a well-known brand, has just announced that it plans to close the one factory there with decent wages, in order to subcontract their work to 'sweatshops'. I agreed to help.

We met in a local mall just outside a store that sells those shirts. A boycott was NOT our goal; we only wanted to encourage concerned citizens to let the retailer known of their concern & perhaps to try, themselves, to persuade the company to keep that factory open. The mall security staff called the police & the police informed us that if we didn't leave we would be arrested for trespassing. We left. I was startled by the number of police cars parked outside, including a paddy wagon...

Russian nuke testing-ground disaster revealed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_295000/295161.stm (Doctress N)

Everyone in the village wanted to show me their disfigurements because, they said, they welcomed any outsider who showed any interest.

Great, wide-ranging interview with ethnobotanist Wade Davis: http://www.outpostmagazine.com/feature.html (Jeff Crooke)

[Wes Craven's version of "Serpent and Rainbow":] The original intent was to make a kind of "Year of Living Dangerously." They tried to get Peter Weir to direct it, but he had just done Mosquito Coast. They tried to get Mel Gibson to play the lead, but he wouldn't touch it because he's a devout Roman Catholic and he wouldn't touch voodoo.

I'm boycotting Online Journalism Review until I've heard they've fixed their unbearable site-design: http://olj.usc.edu/sections/index.shtml

Don't miss: A very smart rethinking of the Melissa trail: http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cybercrime/viruswatch/story/0,3700,2235162,00.html [HNN]

First, the Melissa code is better structured and more readable than anything I've been able to find by VicodinES.

From reading through his website, code, and documentation, I can predict with some certainty that VicodinES lives in North America-- most likely in Canada. His fake press releases are purportedly from Canada; he's a large-scale consumer of Diet Mt. Dew...

Don't miss: Mozilla project-head resigns: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html [SN]

Netscape has been a great disappointment to me for quite some time.

The company got big, and big companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.

Netscape no longer had the talent, either in engineering or management, to ship quality products.

The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only those who write the code truly control the project. And here we are, a year later. And we haven't even shipped a beta yet.

The Mozilla project has become too depressing, and too painful, for me to continue working on.

Vague stats on who uses which portal: http://www.cyberatlas.com/big_picture/demographics/portals.html

Alta Vista, CyberDialogue found, has the best-educated visitors of the major portals. Their median age is 40, they are experienced Internet users, and 78 percent of them go online for business.

MSN users spike on software and travel purchases, but they have the lowest median income of all major portals and spend the least amount ($300 per purchaser).

More than half of the users of AOL's service are female, and they aren't the Web newbies they used to be. They now average 2.4 years of online experience.

Info design: This me-too look at IBM's Clever search algorithm has an adventurous summary-design at the end: http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,2235686,00.html

Clever Technology: 5 questions
- What is it? ...
- How does it work? ...
- Where was it developed? ...
- Who developed it? ...
- What are its uses? ...

Popup menu of the day: (regional grocery chains, edited here) http://www.dietcokerewards.com/cgi-bin/login1.cgi

- A&P
- Bi-Lo
- Eagle
- Food Lion
- Foodtown
- Lucky
- Pak n' Save
- Piggly Wiggly
- Ralphs
- Super Fresh
- Tom Thumb
- Waldbaum's

Weird headline: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0401/i_ap_0401_107.sml

Former Diana lookalikes finding work as Sophie Rhys-Jones

Request: What do magazine advertisers pay per pageview?

Amazing pix (unlabelled, alas) of an asteroid with its own moon: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_308000/308672.stm

Now scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado have reported the discovery of another moon orbiting an asteroid. What is remarkable is that it was not discovered by a spacecraft flying past the asteroid, but by a ground-based telescope.

Thom Gunn slags lit-crit: http://www.poems.com/today.htm

He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence
of a lifetime reduced to
half a foot of shelf space...

New The Nation

Melissa clearinghouse: http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade/melissa.txt

The following is an attempt to bring together the information about the Melissa virus...

SpamWatch: I got an email from Jeff Bezos this morning, but I don't think I've ever given my email at Amazon, so I suspect he's buying lists... (PS: Now I remember-- I asked them to tell me whenever new books had 'ulysses' in the title.)

Personal: I'm in my usual first-of-the-month funk... I may launch an appeal for donations in the next few days, with some sort of premium in the form of one of my old self-published booklets.

Strange question: can you sense my mood from my choice of cam?

Use bookmarklets to turn your browser into a programmable calculator!?! http://www.bookmarklets.com/about/make/calculate.html

For example, here is the source of a simple version of a Download Calculator which roughly tells how long it will take to download a file of known size using a 28.8 modem...

Hollywood Stock Exchange (free online gamesite) backgrounder: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/BUSINESS/CUTTING/t000027912.html [Wired]

The recent death of legendary director Stanley Kubrick--known for classics such as "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange"--posed a dilemma for HSX operators. "How do we handle the death of a bond?" Keiser said. "Do we call him in at zero?" Some wanted the rules to be revised and for Kubrick's bond to be delisted at the last trade, rather than at zero. But Keiser and crew decided to stick to policy and the bond was delisted at zero value.

"We've become a real working economy here, but on a smaller scale. It's like a Faberge egg and quite beautiful," Keiser said. "It's the economy in a petri dish."

In February, Curtis Edmonds, a Texas lawyer and film buff, auctioned off his fantasy portfolio totaling more than 130 million "Hollywood dollars" on the EBay Web site for $1,050, but the buyer never paid. In March, Edmonds resold it for $31.

(I tried it way back when, but eventually got the feeling it was more about exploiting the design-quirks than predicting movie hits.)

Fellow Popocateptl-fans can find all sorts of info here: [multipage] http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_tour/mex/16Popocateptl.html

March 23, 1999: Popocatepetl erupted again on Monday, sending ash and steam 3 miles (5 km) into the sky. The explosion was heard in the neighboring state of Puebla. One observer stated that Puebla was showered with volcanic debris from the event for most of the day. [Cam link]

TV-Ultra tidbit:

When Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In debuted on television in 1968, lots of viewers complained that they missed too much of the show. The comedy was so rapid fire and the program contained so many fast edits (over three times more than any other program in history) that some viewers claimed they literally could not see the program.

Very excellent moderated-feedback page for Nielsen's recent column on URL-design: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321_comments.html

Register domain aliases that abbreviate long domains, especially for brands often abbreviated. For instance, Barnes & Noble, in addition to www.barnesandnoble.com has www.bn.com and www.barnesnoble.com.

...It turns out that cookie string-matching is case sensitive in the two major browsers. If the webserver is case-insensitive, a user who types in a mis-cased URL will get his page, all right -- and a new cookie (e.g., he is treated as a new user).

Tip for the hip (webmasters only): Unless your URL ends in ".htm" or ".html" (or .txt, etc), it should probably end with a forward slash "/"-- if you omit this, the server has to work twice as hard, first reporting that there's no such page, and then rechecking if there's a directory and/or default/index page. Eg: http://www.robotwisdom.com/

Tommy, we hardly knew ya: http://www.newsies.com/

April 1, 1999
Newsies on the Web is officially in retirement.

People we admire: Cat Yronwode's bio-page: http://www.sonic.net/~yronwode/cat.html

...i also own and operate two online businesses, The Comics Warehouse and The Lucky Mojo Curio Co.

Revisionist interpretations of Paul: (longish) http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/990405/5paul.htm

Paul knew little and cared less about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. More important in Paul's mind was the death and Resurrection of the exalted Christ who appeared to him in a mystical vision.

...he did not intend his sometimes stern judgments on doctrinal matters and on issues of gender and sexuality to become church dogma applied, as it has been, for nearly 2,000 years.

... he saw the Christian movement as a means of expanding and reforming traditional Judaism. He had no thought of starting a new religion.

Meta/confession: I totally hate this new white background, but I assume I'll eventually find some way to retouch it (without giant, slow tables). I'm increasingly embarrassed by my banner, too...

Don't miss: A very radical (and plausible) approach to net.support: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0405/6307099a.htm

Not only will Radio Shack soon sell high-speed modems and Internet access via Sprint's ION network, but it will also send a technician to your home in a little white van to help you hook all this stuff up. "We are going from a DIY -- Do It Yourself -- business model to DIFM -- Do It For Me. The Internet is at the heart of it," Roberts says. In five years 10,000 such white vans will swarm the country.

Starting in July about 1,500 of Radio Shack's total 5,000 catalog items will be available online at RadioShack.com.

While my Foolsday palate is still unjaded: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-474.html

In exchange for the DOJ and the 19 states dropping their antitrust suits, Microsoft has agreed to "perform 2.1 billion hours of community service." ...In short, Microsoft must now provide free (and toll-free!) technical support for any Windows application. ...The terms of the settlement call for Microsoft to hire and train existing welfare recipients in those states to make up at least 65 percent of the total technical support staff necessary to handle the increased call volume.

Mother goes to extremes to enable 11yo's becoming a professional painter: (kinda scary, actually) (Telegraph) [More]

Freya soon realised how rewarding were the consequences of extended bouts of concentration, and ever since she has wanted more such consequences.

When Freya was born a friend advised us that television stunts a child's imagination and, partly because of this, we have never upgraded from our small black-and-white set. Now we are reaping the rewards...

Superb Cranberries profile: (Telegraph)

Showing no signs of her former despair, she clatters noisily into the room, over-made-up, dressed in a curiously mismatched ensemble of designer garments (according to the Financial Times, O'Riordan is the fifth richest woman in the British Isles, but there is no substitute for taste), cheerfully nursing a hangover and talking a mile a minute.

O'Riordan has often been portrayed as a kind of innocent, a naif, perhaps because she spent her youth singing in church and speaks with the sweetest of Irish accents. In fact she's something of a ladette, quite capable (it would seem) of sinking eight pints and still functioning the next day.

"...During that last tour I became a recluse. I never talked, just sat in a corner, silent, shaking my head, really freaked by people, and very paranoid."

Disturbing expose of the masochism/ ballet connection: http://www.salonmagazine.com/urge/feature/1999/04/01feature.html

"When F first so unexpectedly hit me, he taught me more than to pay attention to the small things, like battement tendu. He also showed me beyond words what it felt like to be a woman with a woman's submission and a woman's power over a man."

For Zimroth, there is a natural climax to the secret pact between teacher and student, the story that began this piece...