![[Silliness]](img4/jfkbell.jpg)
Artist's rendition
Yay! CounterSpin lives (also featuring Ireland): http://www.webactive.com/cspin/
...we'll speak to someone who has a decidedly different interpretation of Western intervention -- author and activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky will share some of the ideas from his forthcoming book, "The New Military Humanism: Lessons of Kosovo."
Kibologist Matt McIrvin delivers one of the best pieces of physics explanation I've ever read (cf Feynmann's QED, in places) on why the sky is blue: http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/bluesky.html
However, if the dipole is made to oscillate-- that is, if the positive and negative charge wiggle back and forth, out of phase with each other-- then the molecule can produce electromagnetic radiation of its own, for reasons I'll explain below. This is how air molecules scatter light: the oscillating electric field of the incoming wave makes the molecules develop oscillating dipoles, which in turn give off radiation....But the news about the charge only travels at the speed of light! If we are slightly closer to one end of the dipole than to the other, then the potential here depends on the charge at the near end of the dipole at some previous time, and the charge at the far end of the dipole a short time before that.
...If you look at a part of the sky where the sun is not, then your eyes are receiving the scattered light. That light excites the blue- and green- sensing cones in your retinas much more than the red-sensing cones (the largest amount of power is coming in at the frequencies covered by the blue cones, but they are less sensitive than the green ones). The result is the beautiful turquoise color of a clear sky-- and of Earth, when seen from space.
Funny account of a writer trying to act: http://www.nypress.com/col1.cfm?content_id=161&now=7/27/99&content_section=1
We sat down on two chairs and as she started to explain what she didn't like I started to bawl. I rubbed my head mournfully and my wig got crooked. I was wearing a wig since my real hair is frizzy and wild and that looks bad against a green screen. "I don't know what you want," I wailed, straightening the wig. I was embarrassed to be crying but I was glad I was dealing with a female director. If she had been a male, then it would have been like that scene in A League of Their Own, where Tom Hanks coaches one of the girls on the team and she begins to cry and he looks at her incredulously and says, "There's no crying in baseball."
12yo girlpals make a fashion splash: http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P21S3.html
"I must get thousands of similar ideas. But these were absolutely fantastic. They had detailed everything - sketches, colour, materials to be used and even recommended prices. We knew there and then that we had to use the designs."
New Onion loses the frames:
Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers
Funny MOTS on JFK Jr: http://www.theonion.com/onion3526/wdyt_3526.html
"We have lost a man who forged in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. No, wait -- that was James Joyce. JFK Jr. was that guy in People." Frank Cameron, Actuary
Pacifica News is back, sort of. WZRD reports the fix may take three weeks, because of the KPFA lockdown: http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/pnn.html
[Because of technical problems with Pacifica's satellite, today's show was received via telephone. The resulting sound quality is very poor.]
New Risks Digest is largely (but not only) about an HP-only ActiveX exploit: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.50.html
[Also:] I am an employee (15 + years) in the Department of Defense. In the last few days I have received the most ludicrous requirement yet. It applies to every part of DoD. It requires us to change every password on every system and then power down and power up the system. I have been told this was signed off by the Secretary of Defense upon urging by his Joint Task Force for computer security...[Also a risk-argument for Forth:] Hardware/ Software design should be the way to go in embedded systems. No more separation of the disciplines. There is no way to reasonably teach the complications of C in addition to teaching hardware design. Not enough time. It would add at least a year to the curriculum.
New Village Voice (I'm a bit behind, here) includes another appalling case-study of male/female NC-17 double-standards: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9930/taubin.shtml
"The board wanted me to do four things. First, I had to resubmit a lighter print of the sex scene so that they could examine it better. The implication was that I had darkened the scene to put something over on them..."
Vicious expose on Maus cartoonist: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9930/rall.shtml
Art Spiegelman's rise to power is a story less about one balding chain-smoker than a case study of the way carefully crafted perception can lead to the reality of power in a media town where people are too busy to keep track of more than one name per area of expertise. He has never hesitated to wield his domination of the New York cartooning world to the great benefit of his pals and the extreme detriment of those out of favor.For a profession that involves drawing funny pictures, there's an incredible atmosphere of fear in the city's cartooning community when it comes to Spiegelman.
Speigelman's tenure at the Topps gum company cranking out those Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids is a strange sidebar to a career centered on intellectual comix.
Even some of his most ardent supporters concede that he's the Quentin Tarantino of cartooning, a guy with one great book in him.
More often than not, Art's drawings are flat, poorly balanced, and strangely obsessed with the blue palette.
He's an editorial control freak and he's not shy about putting his personal imprint on others' work. When he wrote an obituary of Mad Magazine cartoonist Antonio Prohias for The New York Times Magazine's "The Lives They Lived" issue, the piece contained seven paragraphs, of which merely two referred to Prohias. The bulk of the piece was about Art, his early career and how he didn't particularly admire Prohias's work. The words 'I', 'me', and 'my' appear 25 times in a 500-word article.
Confessions of an editor at Celebrity Skin magazine: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9930/stone.shtml
I soon realized that, for some women, baring goods onscreen could lead to instant stardom. Take Heather Graham, whose most memorable moment in Boogie Nights was when she dropped everything but her roller skates. For others, onscreen nudity is the sign of a career hitting the skids, the sad final act of a Dana Plato or the miscalculation of an Elizabeth Berkeley. Some celebrities, like the aforementioned Ms. Hurley, seem to invite the paparazzi along on their vacations, while others, like Winona Ryder and Julia Roberts, have never been and will never be naked on celluloid.
(And the VV has changed their HTML so I can't copy selections any more!?!)
Depressing account of one KPFA DJ's career and termination: http://www.counterpunch.org/
The writing was on the wall. A secret re-programming committee was set up and convened behind closed doors. A series of lie-filled staff circulars were mailed out in an effort to conceal the real intentions of the management.
Unsolved riddles of video-on-demand: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jul/0727/feat.htm
Behaviorally, the challenge is even more difficult. It resides in the common belief that there is a fundamental, unbridgeable gap between "lean forward" technologies such as PCs and "lean back" technologies such as television.
Nader suggests spending the 'surplus' on particular public works: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/COMMENT/t000066832.html [CDreams]
At no time in recent history has a program to construct, rebuild or repair crumbling bridges, schools, drinking water facilities, sewer lines, docks, parks, mass transit systems, libraries, clinics, courthouses and other public amenities and infrastructure been so urgent or achievable.
Life imitates even worse sci-fi: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/daily/detail/0,1136,20500000000105626,00.html [CDreams]
Now, the new head of the state's Office of Drug Control hopes to kill Florida's lucrative marijuana business in the very ground in which it thrives, by someday dusting suspected areas with a marijuana-eating, soil-borne fungus called Fusarium oxysporum.The fungus, a bioherbicide engineered specifically to attack plants like marijuana, is otherwise harmless, said the Montana company, Ag/Bio Con., that developed it.
(Pitch: Hippies smoke fungus-tainted pot, mutate into human/fungi hybrids...)
Long-winded and mostly familiar but mostly righteous account of Kosovo from a congressman's perspective: http://www.progressive.org/kuc899.htm [CDreams]
In my congressional office, I read the latest reports concerning a recent Executive Order that hands the CIA a black bag in the Balkans for engineering a military coup in Serbia, for interrupting communications, for tampering with bank accounts, freezing assets abroad, and training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in terrorist tactics, such as how to blow up buildings. How this is intended to help establish a democracy in Serbia or Kosovo hasn't yet been explained. Nor has the failure to substantially disarm and demilitarize the KLA been explained. Nor has the reverse ethnic cleansing taking place in Kosovo by the KLA while NATO rules the provinces been explained. But the extracurricular activity is consistent with NATO's policy of the ends justifying the means, of might makes right, of collective guilt, of retribution upon a civilian population...
No sooner did I add a header-link for Pacifica News, than their KPFA troubles causes distribution to cease (I think): http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/pnn.html
July 23, 1999 Network News [entire program]
AtHome's theory of video-on-demand: [2pg] http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jul/0727/side.htm
The kinds of examples I would cite are on-demand news clips, two-minute video stories, short sports clips, movie trailers, software reviews, Quicktime VR components of products, stand-up comedy routines, short animated films and the like. All of these pieces in the short form are very appropriate in this medium.
Don't miss: Lego hackers: (short) http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0809/6403122a.htm
Last fall, when Lego Mindstorms hit stores, one buyer, Stanford University grad student Kekoa Proudfoot, dissected his RCX, reverse-engineered the "byte code" virtual machine inside it and posted the specs on the Web. That let Lego enthusiast David Baum in Lake Zurich, Ill. write a compiler for designing software for it."We needed floating-point numbers and hyperbolic functions for our neural nets," says Jes Nielsen, one of Grrr's masters.
Excellent National Enquirer includes this feline Julia Butterfly: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10690.html
The black and white stray kitten wandered near McLain's home outside Carthage, Miss., in May 1997 and scampered up a 60-foot oak tree in his front yard after encountering his dogs. He hasn't set a paw on the ground since.
Y2K fix for VCRs: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10701.html
Change the year on your VCR to 1972 -- which is the mirror image of 2000. For instance, in both 1972 and 2000, January 11 is a Tuesday.
The skinny on Steve Martin and Anne Heche: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10678.html
In "Bowfinger," the white-haired comic plays Bowfinger, a down-on-his luck movie producer. Heather Graham plays his love interest -- a young girl from Ohio who sleeps her way to the top, before coming out as a Hollywood power lesbian.
What ever happened to the original Wild Wild West cast: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10681.html
"I learned the fundamentals of acting from Ross," Conrad says. "He was a credit to this world and if more people were like Ross Martin, it would be a better place to live in."
Advice-twins end 40-year feud: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10696.html
"But when Ann heard about the Lifetime film, she broke the ice by calling Abigail to ask if she knew anything about it or had cooperated with its making. In the course of discussing the movie, they laughed and reminisced and had such a great time they both agreed to bury the hatchet and be sisters again."
Adam Sandler's alternative home-life: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/10686.html
"Farting contests, rug wrestling and indoor nerf football are the norm. Jackie has had to adjust to all the grammar school tomfoolery."Adam claims he has seen the Chevy Chase/Bill Murray comedy "Caddyshack" over 300 times -- and it's the reason for his getting into comedy.
Here's the already-outdated revision of yesterday's poll:
For each of these 22 pairs of taboos, imagine that you're getting to know a neighbor and they tell you they committed one of the two taboos the night before. Which would you find more shocking, more offputting? [Vote][Just view results]
Major-league statistics-consultant: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/27/text/p4s1.html
Wright chafes at being called merely a statistician. He repeatedly emphasizes his scientific approach. "Science is art," he says, "because we don't know it all."
If the trappings of a Deja 'community' (eg registration, fancy layout, bells'n'whistles) are offputting to you, here's a clean old Deja-classic approach to the new weblogs newsgroup: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/dnquery.xp?ST=PS&groups=deja.comm.weblogs
Messages 1-15 of exactly 15 matches for search
(I guess I'll use this one for the 'Interact: groups' header-link above. I hope it doesn't require you to join the community before posting a reply...?)
Canadian pornmeister secedes from Internet: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/20954.html?wnpg=all
The ACS browser will serve pages with the addressing convention acs://domain/index.html, meaning that all of the lucrative names already claimed on the World Wide Web are up for grabs on the new network.
Woodstock diary (left early, missed riot): http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/1999/07/27/woodstock/print.html
Irresponsible: There's no other word for Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst. He's goading the crowd, pumping them up, higher and higher. ...He wants people to "smash stuff." "C'mon y'all, c'mon y'all," he shouts. Below him, the pit is a war zone, a sweaty, dirty, roiling mass of vicious guys knocking the f___ out of one another. It's not a fun scene. It's nasty, and people are getting hurt -- bad. Bodies on cardboard stretchers emerge from the audience a couple of times per song.
Old poll: (use the new one above instead, please)
This one is rather long, and extremely intense, so don't rush it. It's an attempt to rank sexual taboos from least to most offensive. The categories are: - public exhibitionism - private masturbation - consensual under-13yo with same age - lite fetish - 16-18yo male with adult female - first-cousin incest - lesbian - spouse swapping - female promiscuity - private hetero anal - 13-16yo male with adult female - soft porn displayed in public - non-consensual voyeurism - 16-18yo female with adult male - group sex - public masturbation - male homosexual - bestiality - 16-18yo male with adult male - 13-16yo female with adult male - under-13yo male with adult female - consensual brother-sister incest - under-13yo female with adult male(If you want to just mail me your re-arrangement of this list, that will probably be easier but less anonymous.) [Vote] [See results]
TV 2nite: Ralph Nader on Politically Incorrect
Portals morph into portable info-windows: http://www.pcworld.com/shared/printable_articles/0,1440,11990,00.html
Already, by visiting Excite@Home's site, you can configure a slick little Excite Assistant to dock on your desktop and deliver news headlines, stock quotes, horoscopes, and local TV listings. This is my favorite among the new applets, although it still lacks instant messaging. When it's time to shut down your PC, your Excite@Home portal can travel with you in a Palm VII wireless device. It will send whatever types of updates or alerts you wish.In the future, the company wants to let you access the Excite@Home portal while watching TV. The company is developing an "Excite Assistant-like" client to run inside its next-generation set-top box.
If you want to discuss the taboos-poll, I've posted a first revision using MrPoll's clumsy discussion area: http://www.misterpoll.com/message.wga?id=3336829072
Here's a revised version of the taboo list. The first number is the percent of answers who might fantasize about it, the 2nd might commit it, the third is the percent who thought its original positioning was too harsh, and the final column the percent who thought its original ranking was not harsh enough.
Markle Foundation earmarks $100M for Web philanthropy: http://www.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/019348.htm
The money will be concentrated on four areas:
- encouraging use of communications technology to "help people actively pursue knowledge and participate in democratic society";
- an improved public voice in communications policy;
- interactive media for children;
- and improvement in the ability of patients and doctors to use information technology.
(Markle's grant to Chris Crawford was what bought me my current Mac.)
Dvorak hates the iBook: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/29/ns-9051.html
It looks too juvenile--something a kid, a little girl, would like. Something you'd get at Toys "R" Us. It's awful, and I'm shocked that nobody in the Mac community has spoken up and said, "Stop, already!"
Cool new buzzword: problem resolution technology: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?990726.hnknow.htm
This new breed of software tools helps companies develop technical support systems that use natural-language query interfaces and expert system engines to solve technical support problems. Help desk support staff or end-users can type in simple statements, such as, "My printer won't work," and the system will lead them through questions and answers until it identifies a matching problem and a solution in its database.Molloy's Knowledge Bridge software uses fuzzy logic, neural networks, text parsing, and other techniques to automatically "learn" new answers as support personnel help users solve problems.
New NY Review of Books:
- George Kennan: The US & the World
- Garry Wills: Ventura's Worst Enemy
- A.O. Scott: Raymond Carver's Enigma
- Avishai Margalit: Why Barak?
- Brian Urquhart: The Making of a Scapegoat
- Bill McKibben: Nature Without People?
(That bookmarklet I promised for the last NYRB issue crashed my Mac, so I'm afraid to try it again!)
1997 Air Force hack, and their main e-cop: http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0726/fcw-peoprofile-07-26-99.html
In fact, the much larger problem turned out to be the equivalent of a cyberhijacking of all of the command's e-mail relays. "After turning up the logging levels on the e-mail relays, we discovered we had a much larger problem," Bass said. "The Air Force's mail relays were being used by hackers to covertly distribute illicit material, spam e-mail and hate mail."
A nice morning for the always-mellow Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/26/p-csmcontext.html
Yikes! http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/26/text/p2s1.html
- With a home drug-test kit, parents can test their kids' hair for evidence of drug use.
- Parents can also place tracking devices in the family car to report not only the vehicle's location but also its speed.
High-schoolers starting web businesses: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/26/text/p11s1.html
She now earns up to $700 a month from advertisers - like Netscape and Sara Lee Direct - and gets as many as 1,000 unique visitors to her site each day.
A thoughtful slice of a day-care worker's day: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/26/text/p19s2.html
Taking care of these children during a weekly staff meeting doesn't work very well. Two-and-a-half hours, one day a week, is not long enough to establish patterns. The children know me, and I know them, but they don't know me well enough to predict what I'm going to do. So they explore our relationship instead of resting or sleeping, as they're scheduled to do....Another rule, which I think is more of a recommended procedure than a rule, is, "Always sing your instructions to the children." I've had difficulty with that rule, maybe because my singing style sounds more like some strange combination of jazz, rock, and rap than a lullaby for preschoolers and kindergartners.
(Vignettes like the above need a special rating like 'meditative slower-downer'.)
Musing:
I have a list somewhere of skills that should be taught in school, and this morning I thought of adding filling out tax forms, filing for a patent, starting a corporation, and filing for bankruptcy. And then I asked myself, assuming kids have to arrive together at 9am or whenever, what (ideally) should they be greeted by?And the very first answer was that they should be able to hang out with their friends... so why not have a school where the faculty wanders from clique to clique, addressing them as a group about what their hopes and fears are? And accepting the challenge of winning the respect of the whole clique, so that a child's own chosen friends become the source of the pressure to do better?! ...And give raises based on a teacher's success with different sorts of clique.
What businesses are doing with supercomputers: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0809/6403120a.htm
A $1,500 PC today is five times more powerful than a $10 million supercomputer was in the early 1980s. Today's supermodels start at $100,000 and harness awesome power. IBM's RS/6000 SP supercomputer can include a total of 2,048 processor chips, each running at a blindingly fast 332 megahertz.First Union Corp., among IBM's largest customers, tripled its data warehouse in April to 27 terabytes. That's equal to 19 million floppy discs, a banking industry record. It's enough capacity to track 15 months of detailed transaction data for its 16 million customers.
Microsoft Dictionary tempting but flawed? http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0809/6403156a.htm
In this, however, the current volume's priorities appear a bit skewed, to put it mildly. In its smattering of South African English words, for instance, everyday terms like robot (traffic light) and braai (barbecue) have been excluded in favor of oddities like toenadering (a getting together of political parties)."I would wonder whether the Encarta would water down people's expectations of dictionaries," says John Simpson, chief editor of the 20-volume OED.
From a not-very-interesting 3-pager about neural-net data-mining: http://www.forbes.com/tool/html/99/jul/0726/feat2.htm
Using data about the insurance company's roughly 6 million clients who have bought a second policy, CA is building a neugent that will select the top five clients ready for a second policy on a given day. "The insurance agent will walk into his office, and there will be a message on his computer screen that a particular customer is ripe for selling another policy to him," says Gupta. "It is absolutely scary. This technology is mind-blowing."
Moderately interesting interview about designing hi-tech homes: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/07/26/house/print.html
In Paris at the turn of the 20th century, there was a cafe for every 67 people. Parisians had this very developed notion of the neighborhood as a public living room. And Americans are starting to feel more comfortable with that, even though we're normally thought of as generally very reserved, private people.
From an article on dance-as-exercise: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/0726/fea2.htm
She describes seeing a young girl dancing in the rain: "She skipped along splashing her feet in all the puddles singing a loud, out-of-tune song and swiping at the wet branches to make them rain on her."Spillane says they encourage students "to be stupid and ugly in different parts of their bodies - just to get in and make as many movements as they can".
TV 2nite: Promising-looking Tim Roth movie on UPN: http://us.imdb.com/Details?0119225
Gridlock'd (1997) Directed by Vondie Curtis-Hall
(Hilarious, mostly realistic, very very very dark-- four stars.)
The female body-hair taboo: http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P24S3.html
Some men would even dump their partner if she stopped using a razor, the poll found. Nearly a third said unwanted hair was the worst personal crime, with smoking just behind. Bad language was the next biggest sin - followed by boozing. Fuzzy armpits or legs are a turn-off no matter how beautiful a woman is, the Wilkinson Sword study confirmed.
Love is a drug? http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P11S1.html
The study at Cornell University, New York conducted 5,000 interviews across 37 cultures and found that true love is really a potent mix of dopamine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin. And the chemical reaction is programmed to last just long enough for the couple to meet, mate and produce a child.Shakespeare In Love star Gwyneth Paltrow has revealed how, after three years with Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, she realised she was no longer in love with him. She said: "I was sure Brad was the love of my life, and then suddenly one day I did not feel the same. Nothing happened, but doubt set in."
Dream:
I dreamt my ballpoint pen stopped working because of a Y2K problem!
Who knows where the Times (below) came up with 450 pounds!?! http://www.panda.org/resources/publications/species/threatened/bonobo/page1.htm
The weight of the Bonobo is also similar to that of the Chimpanzee: female Bonobos weigh an average of 33 kg and males 45 kg.
I replaced the old 'Interact: group' header-link (above) with a newly created Deja 'community' for weblogs-in-general. It has a huge number of features and customisation options: http://www.deja.com/~weblogs/
Select a forum and click Read (to browse its messages) or Post (to post a new message to that forum).- General discussion for weblogs (deja.comm.weblogs)
(You have to be registered, but you can now ask Deja to "Track this search for me" immediately after you click 'Read' and it will mail you when (if!) anybody ever posts new messages.)
I never knew Deja.com was in the personal news-feed business, too: http://bcandid.deja.com/
We are currently offering this service for just $9.95 per month or $69.95 per year
Theory blames crash on FAA weather report: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-25-1999/0000988885 [Drudge]
Kennedy's friend John Perry Barlow, who took a teenaged Kennedy in his Cessna more than 20 years ago, says he recently told Kennedy, "You're right at that point in someone's flying career that you know just enough to be dangerous." Still, Barlow did not consider Kennedy reckless. "He had this incredibly fine-tuned sense of the edge," said Barlow. "He loved to be on it. He knew it well. But he had no death wish. He wasn't self-destructive."
Request: Is anyone else suddenly having problems with Excite NewsTracker not finding any articles? I wonder if they tried to fix their boolean algorithm and ended up excluding too much... (Some queries still work okay.)
Part Two of the talking-chimp story (below): http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/07/25/stifgnusa01004.html?999
"Good coffee", says the synthesised voice as she presses the keys. Holding the hot mug she carefully pours it into a glass to cool it, gulps it down and then requests: "More".The conversation may seem unremarkable, but it is an example of an astonishing scientific breakthrough. For lounging at the computer keyboard is no ordinary technician, but a 450lb ape named Panbanisha.
(450 pounds!??)
Anonymous JackieO dish: [Deja URL]
JFK was given a ceremonial saber by some Mid Eastern king or prince, or whomever, and the handle was adorned with magnificent emeralds. Jackie wanted to pop the real stones out of the handle and have them replaced with imitations. It's because of Jackie that there is now the $25.00 gift rule for the presidents and first ladies, anything given to either one that has more than a $25.00 worth now goes into a museum...
Long, funny 1997 Onion profile: http://mediakit.theonion.com/media_kit/citypages.html [OSRR]
As with all such clubhouses, it seems, this one is populated almost solely by boys. There's a young white man here to see you, the joke goes when a new writer enters the office....And that economy is our own... a society where, as the Onion reports it, Frito-Lay scientists are ever discovering the miraculous properties of "Cheesium-109"; where ABC programmers cancel Yeltsin! after sluggish ratings; where Amnesty International demands gentler soap for Indonesian political prisoners; where NATO drops condolence cards over Bosnia...
Some of the topics on the brainstorm board are: tribute albums, caller ID, hostage crisis, CIA, liposuction, Tommy Hilfiger, CD clubs, fantasy camps, salary cap, health care, parental consent, one-drink-minimum, country music, golf, call waiting, food courts, success stories, Sega, Ninten...
Did Stalin execute American lefties for wearing US-made clothes?!? http://www.trib.net/special/soviet110997/spy.htm [via CityTimes]
They were artists, factory workers, teachers and engineers. They were arrested after engaging in such subversive activities as wearing American clothes, asking the U.S. Embassy for help or talking about life back home.
Ancient Kosovar epic rekindles the Homeric tradition: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-07/25/107l-072599-idx.html
"The sound of that one string is faint, rasping, screechy, tentative. The chanting that goes with it is toneless, monotonous, and unrelieved by vocal flourishes of any kind. The singer simply doesn't show off. There's nothing to do but pay close attention to the words which the guslar enunciates with great emphasis and clarity. . . . After a while the poem and the archaic, other-worldly-sounding instrument began to get to me and everybody else. Our anonymous ancestor poet knew what he was doing. The stubborn drone combined with the sublime lyricism of the poem touched the rawest spot in our psyche. The old wounds were reopened."
Elegant poem by Jeanne Wagner: http://www.poems.com/today.htm
He's a meat and potatoes man,
but he's learned to love
the olive;
its parsimony
and camouflage color,
like the color on the bills
he always carries
rolled tight for reassurance
in his pocket.
Don't miss: Bonobo achieves 3000-word vocabulary: http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/07/25/stifgnusa03006.html?999 [Drudge!]
She now speaks constantly, constructing sentences ranging from, "Please can I have an iced coffee" to discussing videos she has watched with the scientists who look after her at Georgia State University's language research centre in Atlanta.Recently Panbanisha, 14, has started writing words on the floor using chalk - apparently learning letters from the computer screens.
Backgrounder on 'Shakespeare for Dummies': http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/0724/d_ap_0724_63.sml
In romantic encounters, first base on a baseball diamond indicates a suitor who woos a lover. Second base is awarded for meeting a lover in private, third base for getting engaged. Getting married is a home run. A happy face means victorious in battle, a frowning face means defeated in battle.
Ice Man revisionism: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk:80/news/pages/Times/timnwsnws02037.html?999 [Explorator]
Claims had been made that the man was a 35-year-old vegetarian, a roaming hunter-gatherer and a warrior. He had a bow and arrows and a copper axe. But Jim Dickson, Professor of Archaeobotany at Glasgow University, working with Klaus Oeggl of Innsbruck University, concluded that the man was probably a shepherd aged about 46 - very old in stone-age terms.
My phonecall from DaveW:
Up until April 1998 I was a big Dave-Winer booster, admiring Frontier and Scripting News and promoting them enthusiastically. Then I sent him some suggestions for improving Scripting News, and got such a rude reply that I started re-evaluating everything he was advocating...There's a sort of egotism that sees any criticism as too much criticism, preferring a sort of thickly-laid-on flattery that I find pretty nauseating... and I began to see more and more of this in Dave's Net.relationships. So I made a point of resisting it, and speaking up (occasionally) on Dave's discussion group when I thought criticisms were going unspoken.
You can read most of these at http://search.userland.com, and I think they're all pretty clearly constructive, not confrontational... but Dave sure doesn't see them that way.
Yesterday, in response to a familiar boast from him about My.Userland having the best newsfeed for serious news junkies, I asked him how many serious news junkies were taking advantage of it, based on his server logs. This was definitely an attempt to start a dialog about the problems with My.Userland's interface, which nobody I know finds usable. But Dave ignored the question, as he had many comparable questions in the past.
I followed up this morning by posting that I was tired of feeling like my headlines were being used by him in so one-sided a fashion (the term 'shovelnews' occurred to me later), and I'd prefer it if he deleted Robot Wisdom from his system. He instead deleted my two messages, and asked if he could phone me to discuss the situation.
The phone conversation consisted almost entirely of him telling me what serious personality problems I must have, based on my discussion group comments. (Paradoxically, when I made comments about his sensitivity to criticism, his defense was that I couldn't possibly know anything about him since we'd never met!)
As far as I could tell, he's never explored my website, and reads RWWL only via the syndicated headlines. I invited him to use the search facility to see all the positive things I'd said about him in the past, but he made distinct negative noises about the likelihood of him making that effort. (When I brought this up, though, his defense was "There's no such thing as negative noises." And he refused to say whether he'd visit or not, along with comparable I'm-not-gonna-tell-you-that postures about every other material question.)
The upshot, finally, was 'don't post to my groups any more or I'll block you'. So I guess I have to stop recommending Frontier to new loggers. [Dave's reply]
9am to noon CDT: This is Hell funny live progressive RealAudio talk radio with guests Mark Potokof the Southern Poverty Law Center, website of the week: QuokkaSports, Moment of Truth: Reflections on South Africa, and Norman Solomon on KPFA [SFBG special].
I can't find this Gloria Trevi update on the Web: [Deja URL]
Mexican radio and television stations on Thursday played portions of a Trevi song backwards and claimed listeners could hear someone uttering the words "punished," "You did bad," and "That's why you have to obey." Newspapers also picked up on the theme. "The Satanic voices of Trevi and Andrade," reported Reforma daily. "The voices are of a man and a woman. They give orders. They scold."
Poll results (210 votes): http://arsdigita.com/voxpopuli/ViewResults?poll_id=724&poll_question_id=715
What emotions would you feel at the prospect of seeing the underwater video of JFK Jr in the wreckage?
- Yuk, what a horrible thought! 34%
- Mixed distaste and curiosity. 28%
- Totally boring. 15%
- Mild curiosity. 10%
- Very curious. 13%
The FCC solicits comments on microradio, after a fashion: http://www.fcc.gov/e-file/email.html [Slashdot]
Because E-mail filings are automatically processed, they must include specific ECFS Document Index Terms, and must be computer readable. To this end, FORM-ET includes SGML tags (similar to HTML tags).Sample of a Completed Form
<PROCEEDING>97-21
<DATE>11/21/97
<NAME>Jane M. Doe
<ADDRESS1>902 Snyder Lane
<ADDRESS2>Apt. 34
<CITY>Wichita
<STATE>KS
<ZIP>20530
<LAW-FIRM>Smith & Jones
<ATTORNEY>Robert Smith
<FILE-NUMBER>2314
<DOCUMENT-TYPE>CO
<CONFIDENTIAL>n
<PHONE-NUMBER>410-555-4657
<DESCRIPTION>essay on how the telecommunications act has
not helped me.
<NOTIFY>jdoe@public.com
<TEXT>I don't want to pay more for my phone
Let competition rule
Thanx,
Jane
(Why don't they just use an HTML FORM?)
Deja's back. This little-known JD Salinger story is one of my most popular net.secrets: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=260770998
HAPWORTH 16, 1924
by J.D. Salinger
first published in the New Yorker Magazine, 1965SOME comment in advance, as plain and bare as I can make it: My name, first, is Buddy Glass, and for a good many years of my life,--very possibly, all forty-six--I have felt myself installed, elaborately wired, and, occasionally, plugged in, for the purpose of shedding some some light on the short, reticulate life and times of my late, eldest brother, Seymour Glass, who died, committed suicide, opted to discontinue living,when he was thirty-one...
Actresses get more voting action: http://www.deja.com/rate/list_items.xp?CID=0&PCID=11725
Product Votes Score Natalie Portman 1934 4.1 Michelle Pfeiffer 1165 4.0 Jodie Foster 1504 4.0 Meg Ryan 1890 3.9 Jennifer Jason Leigh 319 3.8 Catherine Zeta-Jones 1239 3.8 Meryl Streep 562 3.8 Susan Sarandon 411 3.8 Sarah Michelle Gellar 1205 3.7 Drew Barrymore 551 3.7...
Re-sorting by sex appeal, the bottom six: http://www.deja.com/rate/list_items.xp?CID=0&PCID=11725&N=0&RVRS=0&SORT=crit3
Glenn Close 230 2.6 Cher 211 2.6 Courtney Love 310 2.6 Judi Dench 200 2.4 Kathy Bates 259 2.2 Whoopi Goldberg 586 1.8
Deja was broke this morning so I checked into how their polling is going: http://www.deja.com/rate/list_items.xp?CID=11461&PCID=11310&N=0
Best fiction title Votes Score Story Chars Writing Vision Memoirs of a Geisha 75 4.3 4.2 4.4 4.4 4.1 East of the Mountains 6 4.0 3.2 x x x Bag of Bones 17 3.9 3.9 4.1 3.9 3.8 Single & Single 8 3.8 3.6 3.8 3.9 3.8 Hannibal 18 3.7 3.6 3.9 4.1 3.3...
(And their list of discussion groups for fiction omits rec.arts.books.)
Is this the first time a new-media conference has taken place on the Web?!? http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/20912.html?wnpg=all
The current online RE:PLAY conference brings together academics, prominent game designers, artists, and members of the public to discuss the state of computer game design on a short-term, moderated bulletin board.
Discussion pane extracted from annoyingly overdesigned RE:PLAY site: http://bbs2.thing.net/replay/forum/m1/mod.1.Q.quest.php3?1
Responses Topic
9 Algorithmic and instantial games
20 Games and the arts
10 Skill and luck
10 Your most ambitious game design
8 The increasing complexity of games
9 Abstraction and "immersion"
9 New technologies, new games
(Alas, the fontsize is unreadable.)
July Wired magazine online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.07/
Gen Equity: Descend into the valley of riches. Feast on the nourishment of hope. Start up a tech company and sell it. By Po Bronson
Tender poem of the day by Dan Belm: http://www.poems.com/today.htm
Driving home from the hospice, from his death,
four a.m. now, his last possessions in a paper bag
beside me on the seat...
Today's featured header-link:
I swapped out the ImagineRadio link in favor of Pacifica's daily 30min Realaudio newscast. I believe it's posted around 4pm CDT every weekday.
TV 2nite: Battlefield Vietnam (PBS)
Wild teen memories from Susie Bright: http://www.salon.com/health/sex/col/brig/1999/07/24/summer/print.html
Her bedroom was a freestanding tree house in the eucalyptus trees adjacent to her granny's home, and she treated me to my first dose of peyote by bringing the buttons to me in a bowl filled with rose petals. Like a priestess, she set down her record needle on "Sister Morphine" and told me to start chewing.
Camille 'da Lip' on the Kennedy curse: (long, excellent in parts) http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/07/23/camille/print.html
Therefore, I'm even more aggravated, as tens of thousands of other people also must be, that JFK Jr. played so fast and loose with his own life, since his mother had given so much to shaping his character and ensuring his survival. It's almost like someone vandalizing a great painting. He was the artwork that was created by his mother's patience and devotion....Something was starting to get unhinged there, as early as a year ago. Things were coming apart. Obviously his magazine wasn't doing as well as might be hoped, but the fact that he broke his ankle this year in that sports accident was a sign that his control of the physical world and of his own physicality was starting to slip.
I've always been troubled by his relationship with Carolyn Bessette, whom I saw as the equivalent of the very annoying Linda Eastman in the Paul McCartney saga. In both cases, you have an outgoing, warm, pretty boy who takes into his life an often petulant, very private woman who is introverted to the point of neurosis.
Sneak preview: Tomorrow morning's This Is Hell's Jeff Dorchen's triumphantly returning from South Africa Moment of Truth about South Africa: http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/jeff/99jul24.html
...And the real thing they're whining about is that they, who like other formerly progressive whites like Alan Patton and Athol Fugard and JM Coetzee saw themselves as important to the struggle against apartheid, whether the black revolutionaries knew it or not, they, these whining pussies who by some miracle weren't massacred but instead continue to live privileged lives -- these artists are the most repulsive of all, and they know it.
Heather of lemonyellow was too embarrassed by this NYTimes encomium to send me a copy. [registration required] (Got it, thanks to CL.) http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/07/circuits/articles/22lemo.html [SN]
Lemonyellow.com (so named, Ms. Halpert said, for no particular reason) makes one wonder what would have happened if Franz Kafka had had a Web site.
New Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_wekly/sn_ind99.htm
- Abracadabra! Magnets float in midair [strange!}
- Kids adopted late reap IQ increases
- Women's heart attacks kill more often
- The Honeycomb Conjecture - I. Peterson [pretty obvious-seeming minimal-surface proof]
New first chapters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/front.htm
- "Informer," fiction by Akimitsu Takagi
- "The Holocaust in American Life," nonfiction by Peter Novick
- "The Nazi War on Cancer," nonfiction by Robert N. Proctor
Excellent update on the video-game university program: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/23/t_t/video.games/index.html
"There are 13 courses of math, 23 levels of computer science, two levels of physics, four courses in computer animation as well as eight semesters of projects," says Jason Chu, DigiPen's registrar.
Free US ISPs: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/23/nocostnet.idg/index.html
NetZero is the first free ISP to prove that the concept can work. According to Forrester Research, it is now the 9th biggest ISP in the country, having garnered its first 800,000 subscribers in just over 6 months.NetZero's S-1 registration statement reveals that it has been unable to sell its much-touted targeted banner ads effectively; the company's revenues are "primarily from nontargeted banner advertising."
Here's a funny old project I did many years back, re-sorting the hierarchy of newsgroups: http://www.robotwisdom.com/finder/index.html
I thought I'd written about full-disclosure capitalism, but I can't find where! It's simple-- no privacy for corporations. Everyone should know exactly how products are made, how much people are paid, etc.
JFK-Jr mournographers as dope-pushers: http://eXaminer.com/opinion/0722salter.html
Trust us. This stuff's different from anything you've tried before. This one's got it all. It's an upper, a downer, an aphrodisiac and a hallucinogen, all rolled into one...
Deja.com has recovered the older archives... but now Excite NewsTracker seems to be unable to find new articles!
Courts defend wanking-rights of private peepers: http://www.hotcoco.com/news/frontstories/dan44453.htm [OSRR]
In their 1998 federal lawsuit, seven men arrested during the sting claim police violated their rights when undercover detectives spied on them masturbating in video peep booths. The men claim they were targeted by police who thought they were gay and were "prejudiced against their perceived lifestyle."
Don't miss: Brilliant, brilliant summation of the Chiquita/Enquirer fiasco: http://www.citybeat.com/issue/newsarticle3.html [OSRR]
Hamilton County has spent almost $512,000 of taxpayer funds on special prosecutors to handle the Gallagher and Ventura cases, with the last two months of current prosecutor Daniel Breyer's time still to be billed... And what did we, as county taxpayers, get for our money? Well, if the wiretapping crimes were so serious, why is no one going to jail? If they weren't serious, why did we spend half a million dollars? County officials should remember that figure the next time they moan about not having enough funds to fix the county's emergency communications system....But the way Chiquita went about leveraging civil lawsuits against criminal charges might offer ideas to other corporations that think they're being treated roughly and unfairly by the media. On the heels of Food Lion's winning case against ABC's 20/20 program, corporations now are successfully beating the media on news-gathering techniques (ABC's hidden camera, Gallagher's voice mails) rather than on libel issues. [Original censored articles]
(My proposal of 'full-disclosure capitalism' would deny Chiquita that right to privacy.)
Weird science: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/990722134232.htm
These "atmospheric light guides" or "light strings" could be used to detect wind shear at airports, to find factories that are emitting deadly biological or chemical agents, or to create artificial stars as navigational aids. They also could be used to create "laser-induced" lightning rods.If the pulses are not short enough, the high-powered lasers that produce them rip the atoms of air apart and the laser light goes nowhere, Wright says. But if the pulses are ultra-short, they don't have enough energy to pull too many electrons from the surrounding air molecules. Instead, they create a low-energy, electrically charged air channel in which laser light glides through the atmosphere.
New The Nation includes Cockburn on Pacifica: http://www.thenation.com/issue/990809/0809cockburn.shtml
The national directorate embarked on a makeover designed to match the network to its value, estimated at $300 million. A postmodern headquarters rose up on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley. But even as the donors' names were etched into the walls of the glamorous new structure, purges were being conducted with chill zeal.
TV 2nite: Kubrick festival on TCM: http://www.tvultra.com/
Clarifying the Joyce-AI connection is what makes me happiest: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=504133478
Theory: Adventures in storymath
A long page of very short but mostly funny jokes: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Jul/truenews.html
I was having a problem with NT 4.0. Only a Microsoft OS could report the following:
> The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service depends on the > Microsoft Exchange Directory service which failed to start > because of the following error: > The operation completed successfully.
Police sketch-artists on the unemployment line? http://www.seattletimes.com/news/local/html98/face_19990722.html
The CD-ROM program, created by Montreal-based InterQuest, has nearly 4,000 facial features that can be selected to create billions of faces. It allows authorities to create a composite of a suspect in about 30 minutes.Even a novice can put together a face in about 30 minutes. It's so easy to use, developers say, that victims can sit at private computers and create composites themselves.
A short account of BSD Unix: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/28/ns-9005.html [Slashdot]
"In late 1991 there were 100 programmers on UseNet producing improvements for (BSD)," said Wes Peters, a BSD user from the beginning. "If not for the AT&T lawsuit at the worst moment.... because of that, people said, 'I don't want to go with BSD now.' That was the time Linux was gaining functionality."
Search-Engine Annoyances FAQ (v0.2): http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=503573385
Please post suggestions for additions (or corrections) to this FAQ, either about a specific search-engine or about search-engines in general. These should be constructive criticisms, about things that could reasonably be fixed.
Don't miss: But if you got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in... http://www.apbonline.com/safestreets/1999/05/28/online0528_01.html [Slashdot]
"AOL is extremely law-enforcement friendly," Horack says. "They don't hold anything back."Horack prepares warrant applications for police from other parts of the country, some so new to digital detective work they need their children's help to get online. Once approved by a magistrate, he takes them to AOL and retrieves the information. It's almost a full-time job, offered by the sheriff because the company gives such a big boost to the county.
The problems and promise of online polling: http://www.forbes.com/asap/html/99/0722/feat.htm
Last January, the Pew Research Center released a study showing "significant attitudinal differences between the general public and those who participate in online polls." According to the study, 52% of the participants in an America Online poll about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal responded that the President should resign. A series of telephone polls conducted concurrently by national news organizations found just the opposite--Americans supported the President by a 2-to-1 margin.
(That's the biasing factor of corporate news coverage!)
Today is Demo-day for that multi-language conference-translator: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/22/text/p15s1.html
Still, it makes mistakes, saying at one point that the plane will "flight" Langley at 5 p.m. More important, it handles only a single subject: travel-agent requests.
Dilbert vs the Berserkers: http://www.reston.com/nasa/arc/arc.viking.raid/Viking.Raids.html [NASA Watch]
Since the decline of the Carolingian Empire in the 10th century, Building 245 of the NASA Ames Research Center has been subject to periodic raids by Viking marauders. These marauders generally attack in search of gold, religious icons, and other forms of plunder. The NASA Ames Barbarian Affairs Office has established the following procedures for defense against Viking raids...
Somewhat-complex new Risks Digest includes a serious caveat wrt spam-busters BrightLight: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.49.html
To use their new POP service, you have to route ALL of your inbound e-mail through Bright Light servers. Your POP account accesses Bright Light, then they login to your ISP to pick up your mail. It passes through Bright Light, and then to you. From both a Privacy and Risks standpoint, it's hard to imagine a system more primed for potential trouble...
Excellent analysis of the economics of Net.radio: http://www.pcworld.com/shared/printable_articles/0,1440,11909,00.html
Fewer than a million people can hear online radio at any given time, estimates Joe Pezzillo, who attended the Jupiter panel discussion and is the founder of Eclectic Radio's GoGaGa station. "It would max out the Internet if everyone tried to listen to all Internet radio sites at once--Imagine Radio, all the ShoutCast servers, Spinner," he says. "Multicasting would be a partial solution but has been slow to develop by the telephone companies and others in the business of selling bandwidth because it's less profitable for them."
Pilot's-eye view of JFKJr's last flight: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/07/22/last/print.html
To recover from a spin, if he recognized it, he would have had to stomp hard on the rudder with his injured right foot, if the plane were spinning to the left.
Generous review of a half-baked Homeric theory: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Thursday-Times/timbooboo01006.html?999
She knew little astronomy and less Greek but she conceived the notion that The Iliad was a stargazer's mnemonic, recording the lay-out of the constellations. She also thought Homeric constellations were "sky-maps" - diagrams in the sky for finding your way around Greece.
I made a hasty, half-assed overview of my web-design pages: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/index.html
HyperTerrorist's Secret Lab for Hypertext Design Theory
Poll:
What emotions would you feel at the prospect of seeing the underwater video of JFK Jr in the wreckage?
No place like ark for Unicode jokes: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/viewthread.xp?AN=502913338
>06D7 : ARABIC SMALL HIGH LIGATURE QAF WITH LAM WITH ALEF MAKSURA ADD HUMMUS OR BABAGANOUGHE FOR ONLY A DOLLAR >06EC : ARABIC ROUNDED HIGH STOP WITH FILLED CENTRE (please specify apricot, spinach and onion, or eggplant filling) >0F36 : TIBETAN MARK CARET -DZUD RTAGS BZHI MIG CAN ASHG NAZG DURBATULUK, DOOD!
Arrived, finally: Chris Crawford posts: [Deja URL]
Several people have also countered with the observation that current implementations of my own work fail to impress; they seem to suggest that this negates my hypothesis. My own take on the situation is that I aimed so high with the Erasmatron that I ended up with something too complicated to be used successfully.
Question: When you resize a 'watermarked' graphic, is the watermark preserved?
USB looking good: http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/20863.html?wnpg=all
An emerging standard in the consumer electronics industry, USB devices are "hot swappable," meaning that they don't have to be powered down before they are unplugged. They can draw power from the USB port instead of having their own power sources and many can load their own drivers.
Twice the error rate, with none of the risk: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990721/tc/arms_research_1.html
The Defense Department is trying to develop unmanned combat aircraft that could be commanded remotely and conduct maneuvers not possible with piloted planes, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said Wednesday.
Revised New Scientist bookmarklet
Ambitious robot competition: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990724/newsstory1.html
In a novel competition, robots are having to overcome the same hurdles that face anyone who attends the Orlando meeting. They are dropped outside the conference hotel, and have to ask people for directions or follow an array of signs to the registration desk. Having checked in, they are given a map showing the way to a room in which they have to give a short presentation.
Counterexample ...anyone? http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/20859.html?wnpg=all
"If you look and go back in history, there has never been an example where two major devices converge and that the resulting device displaces the other two devices," he said. "It just doesn't happen."
Molly Ivins on a new corporate scam: http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=iv21
How many times should a corporation be allowed to violate the law before the government refuses to do business with it? How many workers should they be allowed to fire for being in favor of a union? How many times should they be allowed to endanger the lives of workers by putting padlocks on fire exit doors? How many tons of untreated waste should they be allowed to illegally dump into a lake or river? Here's my suggestion: Three strikes and you're out.
Mind-It upgrade includes optional massive privacy invasion: http://www.netmind.com/html/newmindit.html
Minder Wizard will record all the information necessary to retrieve a web page, including post data, login names, passwords, tracking numbers, or just about anything needed to access your web pages of interest.
![[Open view]](img4/ibook.jpg)
Pic source and info:
http://www.apple.com/ibook/
Fascinating study of boy-on-boy sex-related bullying in the UK: http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990721/news/p11s1_932553381.html
Sexual bullying is usually done by older boys uncertain about their own masculinity. Taunts such as "gay", "wimp" and "dweeb", lead on to stripping, also known as "kegging". Some schools invent terms of abuse, such as "sconner" for someone with no pubic hair.
Witty fashion stunt: (no pix yet) http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990721/news/p9s2_932553381.html
By the 10th and final layer - a giant canvas overcoat with 5ft-long sleeves - Rizer's head looked like a pin atop a mountain. She had been swallowed by the clothes. This was a clever feat of engineering, let alone dress making. It was also couture at its most irreverent.
Don't miss: This week's CounterSpin starts with an unbelievably damning indictment of Peter Jennings' report on AIDS-drugs in Africa: (10-min RealAudio) http://www.webactive.com/cspin/
[Main story:] USA Today says car fuel efficiency standards are killing us. Literally...
Don't miss: Ethically unambiguous cloning project: http://www.cnn.com/NATURE/9907/20/cloning.enn/ [Slashdot]
The project began when students at the Hastings Boys High School in New Zealand wondered if their school emblem, the extinct Huia, could be revived. The students researched the idea, invited speakers and organized a conference.
Heh: (strange design contest) http://www.core77.com/competition/officepillow.html [ly]
The patented office cushion which was developed as a pneumatic structure avoids keyboard imprints on the forehead and allows undisturbed breathing through the center opening. The use of transparent material helps the user to startle out of sleep and recognize persons entering the office, even with the pillow sticking on the nose.
ClicheWatch:
slouching.toward.bethlehem 133 web pages
slouching.towards.bethlehem 318
toward.bethlehem 339 - 133 = 206
towards.bethlehem 502 - 318 = 184
slouching.toward 807 - 133 = 674
slouching.towards 1138 - 318 = 820Uncertainty Principle finessed: http://unisci.com/stories/19993/0721991.htm
In the experiment, a rubidium atom passes through a cavity. If a photon is present, the atom acquires a phase shift which can easily be detected. Sending additional rubidium atoms through the cavity allowed the researchers to measure the photon repeatedly without destroying it or, as the French would say, "Avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre" (Getting the butter and money out of it at the same time).
Great, illustrated summary of early pictures of Moon: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_399000/399918.stm
Before the stone map was revealed it was generally thought that the oldest known drawing of the Moon was by Leonardo da Vinci in about 1504. That is what the history books say...
Giuliani fan hacks DNS server: http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,5578,00.html?home.tf
"To divert individual computers, you would've had to have gotten root access, in order to change the DNS entry," he said. "They would almost have to have committed an illegal act." Irvine added that most such hacks are designed to spread throughout multiple networks, but that this one appears to have affected only one server.
Sun-Netscape's new brand: 'i-Planet': http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,39506,00.html
Sun's existing i-Planet Webtop product allows users to gain access to personalized desktop computer services hosted on a central server through a Java-enabled Web browser. Essentially, it revives Sun's network computer concept without relying on deployment of new "thin clients" to replace ordinary PCs.
Technically war crimes: http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,72456-114543-812967-0,00.html
In an opening statement drafted for delivery at the hearing, Senator Grams noted that human-rights organizations have said that NATO's use of cluster bombs and the bombings of Serbian power plants, factories and broadcast facilities were possible violations of the Geneva Convention. "And technically, they may be right," Grams said. "We may have violated international law. But we didn't have to fear indictment by the Yugoslav Tribunal. ... If the ICC were up and running, it would be a different story."
Older poll:
How much do you have to pay your local phone company to connect to the Net? [Vote] [See results] (The results are kinda interesting, after 50 votes.)
Keeper headlines:
Malcolm Forbes was gay!? (via Kikaze)
Goofy free service lets you add a voice message to your website (PCWorld)
Facial expressions of virtual supermodel (Illusion2k)
Alex Cockburn backs Jesse Ventura (LA Times)
Recent UK slang: http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P21S3.html
ZOG: To snooze
MORT: A lot
SKETCHY: Strange, odd
BLACK: Good, cool
DECENT: Nice looking
BANGING: Enjoyable, fun
PLUFF: Unwell
And regionalisms: http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P21S2.html
But they should listen out for various ways of saying hello - from "watcha" in London and "ay up" in Liverpool to "Oroit, me old lover" in Bristol.
Jaw-dropping cluelessness: http://eXaminer.com/990720/0720dobbs.html
Lou Dobbs said that the subject of space is one of the large niches that's mostly unserved on the Internet.
New Onion:
Fundamentalist Aesopians Interpret Fox-Grapes Parable Literally
New Ellen Flash chapter:
http://home.luna.nl/~ellen/present/07-20-99/07-20-99.html
Meta: I guess I'm seriously not-in-the-mood today!
New Village Voice
US gov't quid for Iridium quo? [2pg] http://www.theregister.co.uk/990720-000021.html
Enfopol 98 plans to have tapping built into all communications systems. Each country will have "interception interfaces" in telephone exchanges, ISPs, cellular networks and satellite ground stations. Intriguingly Telepolis alleges that the Iridium ground station in Italy is slated as one of these.
TV 2nite: Ken Burns on Frank Lloyd Wright (PBS)
Update on Japanese Truman-Show guy: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/07/20/timfeafea01003.html?999
His answers often seem rehearsed, his manager anxious to deflect particular lines of inquiry. I had the distinct impression that the impact of doing the show was still working its way through his system - that he was still haunted by it.
Random punditry: http://www.pcworld.com/shared/printable_articles/0,1440,11854,00.html
Jupiter forecasts that seven key inflection technologies will influence the Internet consumer economy in the next three years:
- Internet radio
- Portable identity technology [e-wallets]
- Digital delivery of multimedia files
- Persistent Internet connections
- Interactive TV
- An improved consumer user interface
- Targeted television advertising
Don't miss: Edward Tufte on self-publishing, and info design: [3pg] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/features/t/tufte/tufte-edward-interview.html/t/002-7741720-4353618 [SB]
I try to use the illustrations as sentence elements. In a number of cases the text is going along, there will be a comma, and there will be an illustration, and the text continues. I believe that's the way things should be, that we shouldn't bust these up.If the numbers are lying, it's too late. Information design can't help you. Or if the numbers are boring, or you've got the wrong numbers, the cartoonist can't help. It's too late. So I've been pushing very hard for the people who are displaying the information to come back to a richness of content and a very transparent, invisible type of design.
I go around making measurements, and you are lucky these days if 40 percent of the screen is devoted to content. The rest of it is devoted to 5,000-pixel icons. And the icons need a name underneath them so you can tell what they mean!
UK typology of female drinkers: http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P16S3.html
Princessing, Hunting, Bloking, Being, Shepherding, Indulging, Bonding, Minxing
(I think I'll add 'typology' to my bot-patterns.)
The most useful JFK updates I've found are these RealAudio blurbs at :00, :20, and :30 from ABC: http://play.rbn.com/?swave/abc/demand/status.ra
JFKWatch:
I have a combination acrophobia/ acrophilia that makes air disasters endlessly fascinating, and I have enough vestigial Kennedy- sentiment to make me especially interested in following the progress of this search. I wish there were a static newspage I could 'ping' for updates (using Netscape's What's New feature)-- one should be able to subscribe to any news story this way. (BTW, Yahoo's notification service has already missed a Joyce-item that NewsHub found, about the death of an actor from Huston's The Dead.)
For a few thousand dollars, LinuxLaptops will sell you a top-of-the-line laptop with pre-installed Debian Linux: http://linuxlaptops.com/ll/software.html [Slashdot]
Your Linux Laptops computer comes with hundreds of software packages installed and ready to go, and with thousands more easily installed from the included CD.
Don't miss: Net.usage stats: (take w/grain of salt) http://www.amcity.com/louisville/stories/1999/07/19/smallb3.html
6. The average e-mail user receives 31 e-mails per day, which projects to 618 billion e-mails per year based on 81 million U.S. users. By comparison, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 186 billion pieces of snail mail in 1998.
Game-violence test case: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/07/19/kingpin/print.html
To play you must recruit gang members in a fantasy ghetto, where women loiter under streetlights and winos slump in the shadows begging for booze. You can tell the bums to "f___ off," but curse at the wrong "bitch" and she attacks with a pipe or pistol. Bludgeon her if you want to survive, then pat down her corpse for cash.
Two news sources for the KPFA wars: http://www.radio4all.org/freepacifica/
Free Pacifica Radio!
And: http://www.savepacifica.net/
We are the FREE community of KPFA
![[JFK Jr photo montage]](img3/jonjon.jpg)
Congrats to Jim Romenesko on getting banner ads: http://www.obscurestore.com/
Your mother would want you to visit this sponsor
(Estimating 1/2c per view times 5000 views/day, this might yield $10k/year.)
Richard Dawkins ponders the 'meme' meme: [2nd page negligible] http://cgi.pathfinder.com:80/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,22988,00.html
To quantify this "metamemetic" statement, I did a quick search of the World Wide Web. The adjectival form "memetic" clocked up 5,042 mentions. To put this into perspective, I compared a few other recently coined words or fashionable expressions. Spin doctor (or spin-doctor) got 1,412 mentions, dumbing down 3,905, docudrama (or docu-drama) 2,848, sociobiology 6,679, zippergate 1,752, studmuffin 776, post-structural (or poststructural) 577.
American Journalism Review has a massive multi-multipage examination of the state of the American newspaper: (frames, too) http://ajr.newslink.org/special/ including this decent piece on Web news: http://ajr.newslink.org/special/12-3.html
There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows two commuters sitting on train, one holding a paper that says Lots of Important Stuff You Have to Know and the other a paper headlined Rumors, Gossip and Wacky Stunts. The joke is that Lots of Important Stuff is peeking over at Rumors, Gossip and Wacky Stunts...
And avoiding bias in opinion polls: http://ajr.newslink.org/special/9-10.html
- Order bias
- Uncertainty bias
- Assumption bias
- Participation bias
- Question bias
Don't miss:
I linked this yesterday with the 'Hell' stuff, but it bears repeating-- this guy got pranked in an extremely awesome way via Back Orifice's remote cam capabilities: (large gifs) http://altern.org/bo2kfun/best.html
Request:
I just registered at Yahoo for email notifications when they detect 'James Joyce' in any newswire stories. Has anyone compared the various sources that offer this service? Can I do better than Yahoo? (I just reposted my overview of good bots-- TracerLock, MindIt, etc.)
Salon is deeply evil: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/07/17/kpfa/print.html [Whump]
But with the erosion of the American left as a viable political force, Pacifica has also become an island of lefty eccentricity... devoting overmuch airtime to conspiracy theories about ties between the CIA, the Contras in Nicaragua and crack cocaine in the United States that its reporters were never able to prove.
(Nobody who's read the documentation still believes this official spin.)
Badly-edited NetSkink on magazine advertising: http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/current/rebecca.htx?source=htx/http2_mw
With fewer readers and relatively wider verticals, pubs couldn't charge as much for ad space. And, with so much money to be made from selling directly over the Net, the Web gave birth to an open question: Why would any company rely on sales of ad inventory?
Life imitates really bad sci-fi: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/07/18/stinwenws02029.html?999 [Drudge]
The committee is to examine the possibility that, once formed, strangelets might start an uncontrollable chain reaction that could convert anything they touched into more strange matter. The committee will also consider an alternative, although less likely, possibility that the colliding particles could achieve such a high density that they would form a mini black hole.
Review of Ackerman's 'Deep Play': http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-07/18/036l-071899-idx.html
Does the function of the hand, or the history of the horse, really have anything to do with atonement? It sometimes seems as if she has researched these topics and she is, by God, going to get them into her book no matter what.
New first chapters: http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CALENDARLIVE/BOOKS/CHAPTERS/index.htm
- Essential Feng Shui: A Step-By-Step Guide To Enhancing Your Relationships, Health, And Prosperity By Lillian Too
- Fleur De Leigh's Life Of Crime: A Novel By Diane Leslie
- Buxton Spice By Oonya Kempadoo
- South from the Limpopo: Travels through South Africa By Dervla Murphy
New first chapters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/front.htm
- "Deep Play," nonfiction by Diane Ackerman "Deep play is the ecstatic form of play"
- "The Fencing Master," fiction by Arturo Perez-Reverte
- "Layover," fiction by Lisa Zeidner
Urk: Deja.com archives now go back to October 1997 and no further? http://www.deja.com/
The official explanation: http://www.deja.com/~customersupport/
Announcement:
- Our old database has been taken down temporarily for maintenance. During this time, when searching for older posts, you may receive the error message: "No matches" or "Invalid Document Request". Thank you for your patience.
- Threaded search results using Deja Classic under Power Search is temporarily down and is being fixed.
VH1's 100 greatest women who rock: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/music/lem996.htm
1. Aretha Franklin
2. Tina Turner
3. Janis Joplin
4. Bonnie Raitt
5. Joni Mitchell
6. Billie Holiday
7. Chrissie Hynde
8. Madonna
9. Annie Lennox
10. Carole King...
Missing names: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/music/lem997.htm
Mariah Carey, Rosanne Cash, Celine Dion, Lesley Gore, Lauryn Hill, Wanda Jackson, Jewel, Brenda Lee, Lulu, Shania Twain
NY Post gossip: http://www.nypost.com/071699/gossip/travis.htm
My sources say that when Ted Turner finally got to view the late Stanley Kubrick's last film, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, he exploded. I'm told he "couldn't believe" that Daly and Semel would give Kubrick final and absolute control of the movie, right down to the marketing strategy. One source claims that Ted, after seeing the very long and turgid movie, demanded of Daly and Semel that they have it drastically recut and shortened, arguing that since Kubrick was dead, all former agreements were canceled. They refused to go along with him - and now they are out.
9am to noon CDT: This is Hell funny progressive live RealAudio talkradio with guests Jake Tapper (Salon gun-control story); Kate Moses of Mothers Who Think; Cult of the Dead Cow (Back Orifice 2000 mentioned screenshot, screenshots page, and more); and RU Sirius (sold soul on Ebay)
![[Jenni and Geof reading in bed]](img3/jennibed.jpg)
Complacencies of the peignoir...
http://www.jennicam.org/guests/index.html [Quote-source]
Review of Oxygen Media website: http://www.atnewyork.com/site446.html
The folks behind the animation section here are doing some really interesting new things with digital storytelling. They're taking a sort of Ken Burns-ish approach to the documentary, manipulating still pictures and adding animated elements (all using Macromedia's Flash) while a narrator speaks over background music. It's quite effective and, in certain cases, very moving
Don't miss: Silicon Valley housing crisis: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/990719/19sili.htm [Slashdot]
With rents for a nondescript one-bedroom apartment starting at $1,100-and landlords routinely demanding three times that amount as a deposit up front-the region is rapidly becoming out of reach for those on the lower rungs of the high-tech ladder, not to mention the army of service personnel who keep their communities humming."In Silicon Valley, you're at the poverty level if you're making $50,000 to $70,000 a year," says Barry Del Buono, a former Jesuit priest who runs the nonprofit Emergency Housing Consortium, the county's largest shelter provider. "We're serving firemen, cops, and teachers. We even have the human-resource departments of some of our biggest companies calling us, asking, 'Can you get this employee into your shelter?' "
TV 2nite: Battlefield Vietnam (PBS) http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/timeline/index.html
Mac only:
Nisus has rereleased the older version of their full wordprocessor with amazing capabilities like menu-driven grep, non-contiguous select, and block-select for ascii-art editing: http://www.nisus.com/free416
I've been plowing thru Kurt Andersen's 'Turn of the Century' for the last few weeks-- I recommend it for its hip wit (it mentions Back Orifice, and has a subplot about webcams), but warn that there's zero suspense, it takes serious concentration to follow, and it will all seem dated in two years. Its strongest suit, I think, is the portrayal of how a TV series gets made. Here's a safe review/profile: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/0710/fea10.htm
He went to Harvard to study sociology which was "the easy way to write my Marxist ideology in papers and get passing grades". Apart from that brief period he says he has never been an "idealogue" but has kept his "eyes open, ears open and mind open . . . that way you see things clearly". At 22 he went to New York without a job when everyone else was "going to law or graduate school". "I don't know what I was thinking," he muses. "I was just plunging in." He found work straightaway writing scripts for a morning TV chat-show. "It was a great job right out of school but once I had figured out how to do it was pretty boring," he says.
New Science News: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_wekly/sn_ind99.htm
- Ocean Fever Heralds African Epidemics
- Immune blockade impedes blood poisoning
- Africa's Latest Scourge
Shere Hite's latest theories aren't out in English yet: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/0717cu19.htm
How does the loyalty taboo manifest itself? Apparently, research has shown, for example, that a female voter is more likely to vote for a man than for a woman, even if she agrees with the female candidate's policies. Women often say they prefer not to work for a female boss, or complain that other women do not take them seriously enough.
Ellen continues yesterday's [qv] Flash adventure: http://home.luna.nl/~ellen/present/07-16-99/07-16-99.html
A night to remember
Musing: Why do actors get roles 'on' tv series, but 'in' movies?
New NTK: http://www.ntk.net/
There's something quintessentially UNIXique about NGREP. It's a stubby, simple tool, with thousands of potential (but as yet unforeseen) uses. Also - and this has to be the best indicator of a perfect CLI tool - you've already guessed what it does from the name. Yes, it's a packet sniffer which can pluck out regular expressions from network traffic and pipe them to STDOUT.
Excellent Dvorak on the PlayStation, and on west coast DSL problems: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/inside_track/it990622.htm
After reading Microprocessor Report's description of the PlayStation II CPU, you have to wonder whether it can be priced reasonably or even built at all: "At a whopping 240 square mm in a 0.25-micron process, the 10.5-million-transistor chip will cost more than $100 to manufacture. Never mind the companion 279-square-mm rendering chip--or the I/O processor. The EE and GS sizes are frightening; vendors of PC processors break out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of a die size larger than 180 square mm."The rendering speed of this thing can make it do A Bug's Life animations in real time. Hmmm.
Dvorak supports the 'murder simulator' argument: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak_print/jd_p.htm
My eldest son learned to drive a car on a computer, and he's the best driver in the family. I've been using a simulator to practice skeet shooting, and last year when I grabbed a shotgun for the first time, I hit the first four birds out of the chute. The instructor called me a natural. The fact is, computers are great training tools.
Early XML success stories (mostly data not webpages): http://clippings.cameronmartin.com/ [SN]
- News Headline Syndication
- What's Related Information
- Instant Messaging
- Wireless Messaging
- Remote Procedure Calls
- Making the Web Writable
Alternative-sports sites have their act together better than alternative-news sites: http://www.freep.com/tech/qtcha16.htm
But Prosl is a 32-year-old editor for MountainZone.com, a Seattle-based World Wide Web site dedicated to alpine pursuits from skiing to rock climbing. He covered the sporting events held in San Francisco in late June with a kind of immediacy and depth that extreme sports seldom get from traditional broadcasters.Armed with a digital camera and a backpack stuffed with techie toys including a rugged laptop and a wireless modem, Prosl easily dodged the Monday afternoon crowd of teen-agers at the bouldering finals.
Net.apercus from the eponymous Jaffo: [Deja URL]
The only thing more pathetic than not being able to find a song you want a free copy of is being so desperate to hear a song that you go to CDNOW and play the 10 second audio sample of your song over and over again.Today, I was writing about a "Kirlian Scanner" that photographs bioelectric fields emitted by human beings. Then I did a web search for Kirlian and found a retail price and instructions on how to BUILD one.
And there are NO CUTE ATHEIST CHYKS. Period. There seems to be a correlation between sexy and mystical. All the atheists chyks I know are angry, boring, ultra-rational types like those tedious women on humanities.philosophy.objectivism.
![[B&W screenshot]](img3/visicalc.jpg)
The original DOS VisiCalc (now freeware) was just 27k! (screenshot shows original-er Apple ][ version)
http://davenet.userland.com/1999/07/danBricklinsVisicalc
Dan says: "It's amazing that it still works! It shows that Microsoft took the backward compatibility requirement seriously."
Meta: I've been getting a LOT more spam than usual this week.
No The Nation tonight
New at the Consortium: http://www.consortiumnews.com/
- Hillary's Presumption of Guilt: Ken Starr ends his pursuit of Hillary Clinton. By Mollie Dickenson
- Aborigines & Uranium: Australia plans to mine uranium on scenic Aboriginal land. By Sam Parry
New Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.48.html
Every e-mail sent out from the hotmail system carries, in the e-mail headers, the IP address of the machine hosting the web browser used to compose the message.
Another quantum leap for Ellen's Flash storytelling: (and she's got an explanatory note for yesterday, too) http://home.luna.nl/~ellen/present/07-15-99/07-15-99.html
One cute single square
Here's a new poll on hacking vs cracking: [Vote] [See results]
The First-Cut Manifesto flamewar was pretty tame: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/viewthread.xp?AN=500945872
> A solution that does not handle "foreign" text is no solution > at all.A 'solution' like XML that doesn't gracefully handle raw email and netnews is worse than no solution at all.
Jenni's account of being murdered on-cam for Diagnosis Murder: http://www.jennicam.org/~jenni/journal/1005.html
I was ushered into the "autopsy room" for my autopsy photo. I had to lay down on an actual, real autopsy table and stick my neck into an actual, real dead-people-neck-holder that really hurt!
Intro to Ani DiFranco 101: http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/ent/docs/ani12.htm
With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and wearing plaid pants and a tight red backless top, DiFranco fronted this funk band like Christie Brinkley's evil, intelligent twin gone awry.
Crossover Sufi devotional music: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/0715/fea4.htm
An infectiously insistent rhythm, exuberant vocals, steady, mantra-like chant patterns whose kaleidoscopic effect is, every so often, exploded by an inspired whirl of spontaneous improvisation - small wonder that when qawwali was introduced to the burgeoning world music scene by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the mid-1980s, it proved hugely popular with western audiences, turning the Pakistani singer into a household name among the cappucino-drinking classes. [RealAudio samples] [MP3 query]
Low-cost medical diagnosis revolution around the corner: http://www.forbes.com/asap/html/99/0715/feat.htm
Using a new technology that combines traditional assembly line machining with integrated circuit (IC) technology, Microbionics believes it can produce biosensors using a plastic or polymer base--creating a biochip at one-tenth the cost of existing silicon-based chips.
Good day for RBuzz: http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/
ResearchBuzz -- Internet Research News
Jenni an actress? http://www.jennicam.org/~jenni/journal/0714.html
In GOOD news, my money situation has sorted itself out, as it usually seems to do. Diagnosis: Murder re-ran while I was gone, and while I suspected I may receive residuals for my remarkably brief performance, I didn't realize how much. They paid the entire full amount again. $3,000 before taxes, $1,750 after, which covers all the late bills I had stashed in my desk cubby so as not to get too depressed watching them get later and later every day.[Also:] I live one of the most public, open, revealed and exposed lives in the world, so it baffles and frustrates me when people accuse me of hiding anything...
Keeper headlines:
Novelists who got ideas from dreams (AP-notFox)
Alaska oil disaster 'imminent' (BBC)
Man killed in whale tank was drifter (OSRR)
Poll:
Tuesday I linked a list of the top 20 e-commerce sites. Here's a quick poll to doublecheck their stats: [Vote] [Results so far]
TV 2nite: Dragonheart (Fox): http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1996/05/053103.html
While no reasonable person over the age of 12 would presumably be able to take it seriously, it nevertheless has a lighthearted joy, a cheerfulness, an insouciance, that recalls the days when movies were content to be fun. Add that to the impressive technical achievement that went into creating the dragon, and you have something to acknowledge here. It isn't great cinema, but I'm glad I saw it.
Jenni answers her critics: (with followups from Ana) http://www.peepingmoe.com/forums/jennicam/index.cgi?read=7815
As president and CEO of JKR, Inc., I am a paid executive. I make a modest amount of money. For $15 a year, with three T-1 lines, a full time accountant, $5k+ per month lawyer fees, there's not much left over.
Future subcultures? http://www.ic24.net/mgn/THE_MIRROR/NEWS/P18S2.html
gated tribes
tribal tribes
outclass
survivors
new calvinists
village tribes
nomadic networkers
new new romantics
post punk outlaws
barbie babes/ken clones
new hippies
new young fogeys
citzens of state ford
global villagers
liveaiders
Don't miss: Goto.com's rate-schedule for search-engine placements: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctf596.htm
According to Goto's metrics, Mohammed is worth 1 cent, Moses is 10, Buddha is 4. And it perhaps is a telling comment on the state of Western civilization that while Jesus Christ is worth 31 cents a hit, he's not the highest-ranked name on the site. That honor, at $1.27, goes to movie actress Cameron Diaz from There's Something About Mary.
Ellen sez no update today, ISP problems.
New first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
- "High Five" Janet Evanovich (St. Martin's Press) Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum has nothing to wear to a Mafia wedding and her luckless Uncle Fred is missing (Fiction)
- "Shadow" Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster) Star reporter looks at the Watergate fiasco and how it affected Ford, Carter, Reagan Bush and Clinton (Nonfiction)
Cook-by-number gourmet meals via the Net, $30/two: http://eXaminer.com/990714/0714food.html
So let's open a box. Picture two hunky slabs of perfect fillet mignon. This is meat you can't buy at the market. Then there's a bag of pristine, uniform spinach leaves, washed and trimmed. A tiny container of minced garlic. There's a little cup of red wine-rosemary demi-glace, slightly gelled. A tub of roast shallot-kalamata olive relish. And there's a mound of horseradish mashed potatoes, already cooked and seasoned. There's also a little booklet. It tells you what additional ingredients you'll need to finish the meal - in this case, a tablespoon of olive oil and salt and pepper. Then you follow the step-by-step directions...
New Progressive Review:
When told the healthcare plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton sighed, "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America." When a woman complained that she didn't want to get shoved into a plan not of her choosing, the first lady lectured, "It's time to put the common good, the national interest, ahead of individuals." As for privacy, forget it: Her plan would have required people to carry national identification cards that embedded confidential patient information on computer chips.
Whew: Leary-snitch story was outdated hype: http://www.leary.com/fbifiles/index.html (Chris Tarkington)
Dr. Leary long acknowledged that he gave information to the FBI while in prison, just as he gave due credit to the CIA for helping usher in the psychedelic era. It's in his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks, and it's discussed in the Leary / G.Gordon Liddy debate movie, Return Engagement. The information he provided was years out of date and led to no arrests, but it contributed to getting him out of jail early.
A RWWL-reader's website offers lots of cool tech-stuff, including the forerunner of the flying robot-spheres linked below (today): http://nd1.neodesic.com/
AERCam Sprint, a brainless version of AERCam, was very successfully flown aboard Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-87) on December 3, 1997. You can get MPEG videos of AERCam at the official NASA Shuttle site.
FBI ramps up perv-watch: http://www.phillynews.com/daily_news/99/Jul/14/local/FBII14.htm
Gulotta said about 100 agents in six cities - Baltimore, Tampa, Fla., Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, N.J., and Birmingham, Ala. - constantly monitor chat rooms over the Internet.
Can Bunny-brand yoghurt be far behind? http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_392000/392490.stm
In a small laboratory in the Belgian town of Geel, a rabbit is strapped into a canvas sling. The research assistant attaches rubber teats to the animal and switches on the milking machine. This rabbit has been genetically engineered to produce a special human enzyme in its milk.
Admirably level-headed look at Back Orifice 2000: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2292276,00.html [HNN]
If common sense is used, you won't need to worry about BO2K or any other software being run maliciously on your machine. Just remember, software doesn't kill data -- people do.
Decent new New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990717/news1.html
- Power plants: Soggy algae look like a promising source of energy [neat]
- Stealing a march: Could viruses be getting a head start by grabbing genes from bacteria? [ah, promiscuity!]
- Happy ever after: Here's the mathematical recipe for the best possible divorce [complex ratings of valuables]
- The sea gliders: Meet the robot probes that just can't stop moving [kinda cool]
Don't miss: Coolissimost flying robot-sphere: (w/pic) http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990717/newsstory7.html
Suspended in microgravity, a PSA will need only tiny fans to move about. It will use range-finding sensors to detect objects--such as astronauts--that get in its way. The battery-powered device will be armed with sensors to detect changes in gas levels, temperature and atmospheric pressure.
Don't miss: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/10919.htm [OSRR]
Joan Rivers went ballistic on the air Monday night after a commercial for Jews for Jesus aired on her WOR radio show. "Do not prostyletize [sic?] on my show, you a-holes!" Rivers ranted after coming back from a commercial break where the ad was played.
Patk O'Brian juvenilia republished: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk:80/dynamic/lifestyle/review.html?in_review_id=154698&in_review_text_id=125040
Here, fully 30 years before Master and Commander was published, is the unmistakable texture of O'Brian's historical fiction. Hussein has it all: the immersion in another world, the delight in a specialised vocabulary, the relish of male camaraderie, travel, food, treasure and fighting. It is no surprise to find O'Brian saying in the foreword that "in the writing of the book I learnt the rudiments of my calling: but infinitely more than that, it opened a well of joy that has not yet run dry".
Mideast water rights: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/07/14/text/p1s3.html
Israel for decades has been pumping 80 percent of the water from the aquifer that was mostly under the occupied West Bank, and Palestinians have been prohibited from drilling any new wells themselves. Today fully half of Israel's water supply comes from territory captured in 1967.
Chris Byron attacks Yahoo's 'anonymous cowards': http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm
But I also think none of this would be happening if Internet operators were subject even to a few of the publishing standards that the rest of the media must live with every day.
Enthusiastic interview about the history of Unix: http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_program.html?program_id=34 [SN]
The original Internet --the incredible, wonderful 1969 investment by our government of barely over a million dollars, probably the best thing that government research has ever invested in-- was built to connect four different university research sites that were operating four different machines using four different operating systems. That was the real battle.
Quantum leap... or quantum hype? http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/cmu-cms071399.html [Slashdot]
Video conference participants will plan trips to Heidelberg, Germany, Kyoto Japan, or New York City, speaking in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean. They will converse with each other in their native languages as they plan their trips, while the computer systems in each of their respective laboratories verbally provide the necessary translation of their spoken conversation.
Camille Paglia interview only gets going in the last half, on Hillary: http://www.iwf.org/article.cfm?ID=211&TO=0 [Drudge]
...Similarly, Dianne Feinstein has the manner. She was mayor of a very fractious city and has a lot of experience--which Hillary Clinton does not!--no experience whatsoever with any political matter outside of sitting inside the White House with her sunglasses on making phone calls to her Yale law school friends.I want to fall on the floor laughing--imagining Hillary Clinton working well in the Senate with everybody else! Oh, give me a break! I've already joked in print that they would need to build her a private cloakroom on the Mall. This is not a woman who has any ability to deal with the mass of humanity. She is the most arrogant, the most moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on the earth--and it is just a joke that the media have allowed this to go on as long as it has.
She has no friends. All this talk about her great female friendships! She has no friends aside from him. I think they are a dysfunctional pair.
They are all weird Ichabod Crane men, all high IQ men who have no natural virility, okay? It's really weird. She loves to have her little cabals with them. And the other one--the lawyer David Kendall--they're all alike, and they all bond with her. They're all joined at the hip with her!
The top 20 shopping Web sites for June: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,39065,00.html
...according to PC Data, were:
amazon.com,
ebay.com,
download.com,
bluemountainarts.com,
cnet.com,
cdnow.com,
classifieds2000.com,
freeshop.com,
barnesandnoble.com,
mp3.com,
valupage.com,
coolsavings.com,
ubid.com,
beyond.com,
egreetings.com,
etoys.com,
buy.com,
spree.com,
columbiahouse.com, and
launch.com.
Gossip-drought breaks big: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/newsid_392000/392230.stm
Singer Sinead O'Connor is pregnant with her third child, according to the father, Mirror journalist Neil Michael. Michael told the paper: "The baby is due next year and we're both really happy about it. It was a bit of a shock at first... but we hope we can have a bit of privacy," he added.
New Village Voice features a new Chomsky-on-Cambodia debate, plus Coke-poisoning spin-control: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9928/cotts.shtml
The issue? Chomsky, the legendary linguist and political dissident, has been tarred of late by mainstream liberals, who accuse him of being an apologist for Pol Pot. Chomsky sparked the flame wars when he appeared on the Charles Grodin show May 21, questioning NATO's intervention in Kosovo and asserting that if the justification had really been humanitarian, "They'd stop contributing right now to comparable or worse atrocities elsewhere." Grodin played the tape the next week for Jonathan Alter, who said Chomsky lacked credibility, given his stance on Cambodia.As Press Clips has previously reported, The New Yorker can now be counted on to champion the infallibility of U.S. products such as electromagnetic radiation, breast implants, and psychoactive drugs. While rhetorical in nature, these arguments are variously presented under the rubric of editorial comment, reporting, or criticism.
How indie-miracle 'Blair Witch Project' was made: http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9928/kaufman.shtml
Shooting over eight days in Maryland's Seneca Creek State Park, the Haxan team developed an improvisational technique where the actors (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams) were given 16mm film and Hi-8 video cameras, then thrust into the woods to capture the action themselves. Using handheld Global Positioning System tracking devices ("technology that was used in the Gulf War to steer the MX missiles- you can get it in any Sears," says Sanchez), crew and cast maneuvered through the woods, with checkpoints along the way where directing notes, gear, and food were left in baskets marked with Day-Glo orange flags."Think about it. It's Hi-8 video, as raw as you can get. Are people going to look at over 80 minutes of shaky-cam? I'm thinking, 'It'll never play in a theater.' "
Various Ridgeway tidbits: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9928/ridgeway.shtml
According to a log he kept, NATO bombed the complex for 23 days. On April 18, NATO scored direct hits on facilities holding 1500 tons of vinyl-chloride monomer, 250 tons of chlorine, 1800 tons of ethylene dichloride and 15,000 tons of ammonia. "Thousands fled the city, coughing and complaining of burning eyes, stomach upsets and choking. The fires raged as long as 12 hours. Nearly a third of the toxic chemicals went up in smoke," Mikovic told the Tribune.
Dan Lyke's technical followup to my post-XML, First-Cut Manifesto (Sunday below): http://www.flutterby.com/archives/1999_Jul/12_Newwwsboy2NewwwsHarder.html
More recently, my users reinforced this decision when I mentioned that I was going to stop duplicating links from other sites. People wanted my take on links, and why I thought they were important.So itching in the back of my mind waiting to get out is a new application. And over the weekend Jorn Barger wrote an anti-XML screed which made me think "wait a minute, Newwwsboy already does most of that!" So now I'm making notes for the next step...
I didn't know that: http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/
bellwether \BEL-wether\, noun: 1. A wether, or sheep, which leads the flock, with a bell on his neck. 2. Hence: A leader of a movement or activity.
("In words a bit duskish he aptly described the scene, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the fallow doe belling softly her approach and how brightly he outed his wallet and gives him a topping cheroot and says he was to suck that one and spend a half hour in Havana." --Finnegans Wake draft)
Clever archeology of early wool: http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,69926-110556-783000-0,00.html
Around 4000 B.C., however, shepherds began keeping all their animals, both males and females, for seven or eight years. "If they were only keeping the females," Barber says, "you could say, 'This is a milk flock.' But the fact that they kept both sexes demonstrates beyond all shadow of doubt that this is a wool flock."The genes that make pelts woolly are located close to the genes that make sheep easier to domesticate. While shepherds were selecting the sheep that responded best to domestication, an unintended result was that they also ended up with sheep with woollier coats.
Thrilling cell-bio: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/990713074313.htm
Block's new work shows that kinesin's fuel consumption is "tightly coupled," that is, it burns exactly one ATP molecule for each 8 nm step it takes, no matter how much resistance it faces. (That means it would take 3,000 to 5,000 ATP molecules for a kinesin molecule to travel the width of a typical cell, a distance of 25,000 to 40,000 nm.)
Fun new Enquirer: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/more_stories.html
- Welfare Mom Strikes It Rich Teaching Gals How To Wed A Millionaire
- Angry Wayne Newton Sues Tony Orlando: You're A Loser And I Want $20 Million
- I SURVIVED 90-FOOT TERROR PLUNGE INTO 3 FEET OF WATER
- ROBERT REDFORD'S DARK SECRET Heartbreaking reason he'll never marry again
- Oops! Even Clinton Can Dial A Wrong Number
- 7-YEAR-OLD ART GENIUS SELLS HIS PAINTINGS FOR BIG BUCKS
US food-labelling insanity: [Extremely silly URL] [CDreams]
Steven Druker, executive director of the Iowa-based Alliance, said the FDA ignored its own scientists in concluding that biotechnology products generally required no label. For instance, in a 1991 critique of FDA policy on food biotechnology, Louis Pribyl of the FDA's microbiology group wrote, "There is a profound difference between the types of unexpected effects from traditional breeding and genetic engineering which is just glanced over in this document."
Don't miss: Works.com offers free online small-biz management (purchasing dept.): [2pg] http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3561.html
Let me be clear: Works.com's procurement system is not suitable for Fortune 100 companies. But it is far superior to the systems in place at most small businesses (and many medium businesses, sad to say). Users save a few dollars over buying retail. More importantly, their companies get a sophisticated purchasing and workflow application that can dramatically reduce the time, expense and waste of manual purchasing.
UK public hate biotech: http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_393000/393262.stm
Only 1% of people questioned said that GM food was beneficial; 2% believed that cloning and Dolly were good. On the other hand, 45% of those questioned said GM food was bad for society and 57% said cloning and Dolly were not beneficial.
Intro to PokeMon 101: http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/0726/6402054a.htm
Tajiri, the creator of this phenomenon, is the reclusive, 33-year-old geek president of Game Freak (he doesn't do press interviews). The boom his company set off was put together on a shoestring budget by four programmers. Tajiri drew on childhood memories of bug-collecting and monsters from Japanese TV shows to create a monster-capturing game. Children navigate through an extensive artificial world to hunt, capture, train, fight and trade 151 different monsters.Pokemon's staying power comes from the complexity and variety offered by the original game. It incorporates electronic commerce, hunting and gathering and a very complex game of paper, scissors and rock involving 160 variables. Pokemon monsters pack such powers as poison, ESP, electric shocks, strength, water jets and toxic gas.
New TidBits describes MacHack hacks: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-488.html#lnk3
This year's top five hacks had little in common, although there was no doubt which was going to win: Lisa Lippincott's Unfinder, which provides an Undo command in the Finder for non-destructive actions such as moving files, was a shoo-in for first place. Lisa had been one of the first to demo, and as she finished her introduction, moved a few files, and chose Undo from the Finder's Edit menu, the crowd gave her a full-bore standing ovation (after a few catcalls of "Useful!"). I hope Lisa's hack shames Apple into adding the feature to a future version of the Mac OS. It wouldn't be the first time a hack contest entry led to improvements in the Mac OS.