![[Liffey map]](jaj/fwmap.gif)
I've been adding a lot of hyper-bells-n-whistles to the still-unfinished shorter Finnegans Wake: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/shortwake.html
Fri, Oct 8, 1999
LA Times redesigns their first-chapters page: http://www.calendarlive.com/calendarlive/books/chapters/chaptersindex.htm
- The Book on the Bookshelf Henry Petroski ("The Evolution of Useful Things" and "The Pencil") makes engineering concepts understandable.
- The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis Award-winning fiction writer Will Self's 96-page novella is about a London journalist.
- A Star Called Henry Roddy Doyle's written books such as "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" and the "Committments." Now he's back with a new tale.
- An Equal Music: A Novel Vikram Seth's new book begins this way: "The branches are bare, the sky tonight a milky violet...." Read an excerpt.
New first chapters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/front.htm
- "A Gesture Life," fiction by Chang-rae Lee
- "Having Everything," fiction by John L'Heureux
- "Plainsong," fiction by Kent Haruf
Two new topics at the RWWL BBS: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001Xkr
Why do Slashdot's forums suck so bad? This is a two-parter: Why are the posters to Slashdot's forums overwhelmingly jerks? and How can you set things up there to effectively minimise the noise? (Not theoretically, but what actually works for you.)
And: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001Xl3
Is Nervana worth getting excited about? Slashdot today (8 Oct 99) features a supposedly new 3D algorithm in a game called Nervana. The demos and documents suggest the 3D part was a late addition, and the real interest of the designer is artificial personality. Anyone see anything cool there, or is it as lame as the Slashdotters claim?
Great thread on computer graphics at Slashdot: [multipage, very noisy] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/07/1620257&mode=flat
The difference between ray casting and ray tracing is that tracing is done recursively while casting is not. By that I mean that in ray tracing after a primary ray from your eye hits a point in the scene you then spawn new reflected and or refracted rays from that intersection point and those rays spawn other rays and so on. In ray casting you just stop with the first hit and call it good enough. Consequently ray traced scenes can (and ususally do) have lots of interreflections between objects with mirror-like surfaces, but in Wolfenstein and Doom everything is opaque and diffuse....Now, i may have misunderstood the article and webpage for this technology, but what i got out of it is that this uses something like a fractal generation system, using a formulae and number of iterations, to generate real objects. Not just a mesh of points some of which have polygons drawn between them, but something closer to a physical reality.
..."This is the coolest 74K ever" I suggest you check out some of the 4k intros on ftp.scene.org. They've got 3d AND sound too. In 4096 bytes.
Here's another new web-design page. I expect it will flesh out over the next few days or weeks: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/resources.html
Web publishing has brought about an entirely new paradigm for authors-- a good website must integrate all the available resources on that topic. I expect that in a few years, many schools will have discovered that building such synoptic sites is an ideal class activity, so every topic will be covered by dozens or hundreds of different, well-maintained sites...
Note to new readers:
I've been 'on sabbatical' for the last couple of months, working mainly on a shorter Finnegans Wake [qv]. Normally this section of the weblog would have ten or twenty news stories per day, but I'm not even reading my regular sources of daily headlines. See the orientation FAQ for background.
Where I disappeared to today: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/dgate.html
This is an experiment in annotating a very difficult novel on the Web. "Damascus Gate" should work especially well because it's grounded in a very complex, very real, very contemporary conflict-- and one that's already well-documented on the Web.
Poll:
Farewell, Akio Morita: How many Sony gizmos have you bought in your life? (not including media or accessories, just Walkmans and up, and include gifts you bought for others but not gifts you received)
WebWord interviews... me! http://webword.com/interviews/barger.html
Q: Do you expect to get rich off the Net?
A: Selling enough books to live on is all I'm really after. But my ideas are so unfamiliar I've had to 'build my brand' somewhat first. And the weblog has been wonderfully effective for this, because it forces me to focus almost entirely on more familiar topics instead of just Joyce and AI and hypertext theory.
I boiled the 400k shorter FW down to 40k: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/shortwake.html
The online shorter Finnegans Wake (synoptic table of contents)
New toc-page for NYRB: http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/content.html (Ian Feldman)
Lars-Erik Nelson:
- Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir by John McCain with Mark Salter
- John McCain: An American Odyssey by Robert Timberg
Charles Simic: Who Cares? {Serbs]
Andrew Hacker:
- Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi
- The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger
- The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence by Michael P. Ghiglieri
- What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us by Danielle Crittenden
- A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit
- The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World by Helen Fisher
Steven Weinberg: A Designer Universe?
Charles Rosen: On Playing the Piano
Thomas Flanagan:
- True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway
- Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael Reynolds
- Hemingway and His Conspirators by Leonard J. Leff
- Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels by Rose Marie Burwell
Another chapter in Dvorak's home-broadband trials: [3pg w/wine tips] http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/99/sep/bwm33.html
This is the irony of DSL. The affluent suburbs where people can afford it and want it most can't get it.Let me say this: No California Cabernet is worth over $60 a bottle and no California Zinfandel is worth over $30.
For me, the most interesting thing about Jakob Nielsen's latest 10-commandments is that he's thinking exclusively in terms of e-commerce sites: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991003.html
6. Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product family pages with lots of photos.
(Also, #8 is very evil, relying on a non-universal browser-feature for a function that needs to be treated much more directly. And #10 is plain scary!)
The Hunger Site is down to three sponsors:
http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/donate.pl
Excellent JenniJournal retells an old e-romance: http://www.jennicam.org/~jenni/journal/1002.html
He said he felt like the three biggest things in his life were his job, his sanity, and me. He said he could only have two at a time. He picked the first two...
Major new issue of the New Internationalist looks at the effects of sanctions on Iraq: [multipage]
http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue316/contents.htm
Outstanding Norman Solomon on the budget 'debate': http://www.fair.org/media-beat/990930.html
In the midst of an intense national debate over federal budget priorities, TV networks could broadcast live from food stamp offices, emergency rooms at public hospitals, day care centers, school breakfast cafeterias, drug rehabilitation centers and nursing homes for elderly Americans on fixed incomes.
Keeper headlines:
College Music Journal Top 20 list (CMJ)
Online events calendar by College Music Journal (CMJ)
Haircuts: How to Do Them Digitally (Google)
Congrats
to This is Hell voted best radio show in Chicago by the readers of New City.
New first chapters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/front.htm
- "The Catastrophist," fiction by Ronan Bennett
- "The Million Dollar Mermaid," nonfiction by Esther Williams and Digby Diehl
- "The Sun King," fiction by David Ignatius
Excellent glimpse of punk and politics: http://www.thenation.com/issue/991018/1018temple.shtml
After moving to DC, Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna continued her outreach at such venues as Blair High School in Maryland, where she spoke to student assemblies about rape and the services available to women who have been abused. The response from girls at the public school was overwhelming, and school administrators cleared out the nurse's office to bring Hanna back for private sessions with students.
Keeper headlines:
Free linkchecker for one page at a time (via Google)
Limited free 404-link checking (via WebWord)
The Daily Web Log (via WebWord)
I've been adding a lot of hyper-bells-n-whistles to the still-unfinished shorter Finnegans Wake: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/shortwake.html
Take the long way home: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Sep/expedia.html
Highlights from the Microsoft-Expedia-generated directions follow...
Phrases I saw in my dreams that aren't anywhere else on the Web:
dog flue ['dog flu' though]one-time barometers
Person I shook hands with in my dream:
David Koresh
Keeper headlines:
A calculator-in-the-URL hack (Bodin)
Definitive overview of hi-speed Net access? (Salon)
FAQ on pattern languages (via Slashdot)
Online Ivan Illich etexts (via OLB)
Don't miss: Famous last words (nuclear waste disposal dept.): http://www.seattle-pi.com/local/nuke27.shtml [LakeEffect]
In fact, in June 1996, the Energy Department crossed hydrogen off its list of problems at SY-101; in October of that year, it announced that "all safety issues with the tank are now understood."
Ralph McGehee's summary of an NYT report on the CIA's new venture capital firm: [Deja URL]
In-Q-It will work on smarter CIA search engines, better ways to visualize data, and better security for CIA web surfers. [NYT link, req reg]
I finally dug deep enough into Danny Sullivan's Search-engine Watch site to find the good pages:
Summary chart of search engine features [qv]
Which search engines support which syntax features [qv]
Which search engines offer which auxiliary modes [qv]
Which search engines use which indexing techniques [qv]
He calls double-quotes 'boolean multiplication'!?? http://www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/math.html
Using Quotation Marks To Multiply
Hunger Site FAQ: http://www.thehungersite.com/frequentquestions.html
Each sponsor on the "Thank You For Your Donation" page pays one half cent per donation. This half cent buys food that, when cooked, is equal to a quarter cup of food.
(They say here that Monday's 128k hits bought ten tons of food.)
Cool: Opera of Ben Katchor comic: http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=389&author_id=4
The opera is based on a single strip that appeared in Metropolis magazine last December. "The plot is that a delivery is made between two buildings," Katchor told me. "This takes an hour and a half... It's an incredibly short narrative arc. But it... analyzes those moments before this happened and as this is happening... We learn about two buildings that were sort of a phenomenon in architecture-the carbon copy. One building is put up using the exact plans of an earlier building. And they've both led different lives. That gets set up, and then a delivery gets made between the two. It's exactly the narrative of the strip it's based on. I just went into it at certain points and expanded what was happening.""There's a music to speech," Katchor added. "It's set in time, it has a rhythm. And a composer tries to find whatever that secret rhythm is." [More recent Metropolis sequence]
Poll:
My PowerMac takes more than five minutes to boot fully, including all the applications I keep loaded. How long does your computer take to cold boot, from hitting the ON switch until you can start your first new task? (I'd like good data on this, so please time the actual process before answering, even if it takes a few days to get around to.)
Sam loves Brad? http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
The Bradley health plan, whatever its weaknesses, is like a crocus blooming in February. It has been a long time since a national politician of either party has offered a solution to a major problem that wasn't loaded to the gunwales with political or corporate payoffs of one sort or another.
I've been giving a daily click to this Hunger Site to feed the Third World... but I have a nagging sense it's a sucker's deal. Anyone see what the catch is?
Robert Anton Wilson and Karen Finley... this log-journal knows how to punch my hot bot-buttons: http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/renegade/ [TracerLock]
...They since moved on to making Quake levels of several art museums, a project called Museum Meltdown...
I wrote some new movie reviews-- the Cat Ballou one is actually pretty deep, and most of the others have some outrageous bit: http://www.epinions.com/user-jorn
- Apprentice masterpiece: Deer Hunter
- Evil, evil, evil! Defending Your Life
- Ideal infotainment for teens: Clueless
- An absolute must-see classic: Crumb
- Pre-60s time capsule: Cat Ballou
- Irresistible indulgence: Barbarella
- Overrated classic Apocalypse Now
- Lame breakthrough: Exile In Guyville - Phair, Liz
Fun Google query: haircuts: http://google.com/search?query=haircuts&num=20
El Pulpo Barbershop, Baja, Mexico
(No, I'm not looking for one for me! I'm analysing their shapes.)
Epinions has fixed the bug that required extra logins, and is apologising by offering bonus royalties: (but it appears you can no longer link specific reviews from outside the site!??) http://www.epinions.com/eroyalties.html#rates (kmm)
As a special reward for members who write reviews, we are offering bonus Eroyalties until the end of 1999. For every qualifying member visit to your review, we will add bonus visits to your account. You'll receive Eroyalties credit for bonus visits just like actual member visits. We're offering 4 bonus visits for every qualifying member visit until October 4, 1999. We will adjust our bonus offering as we continue to build readership for your epinions.
(My royalties jumped from 81 cents to $4.50.)
Poll:
I suspect many firsttime visitors to this weblog find it offputting, and only gradually come to trust it. So today's poll question is for regular readers only, asking how long it took you to add RWWL to your regular rotation, after your very first visit:
Poll results:
Check any of these that regularly causes you to change the radio station or turn off the radio:83 An annoying commercial 65 A song you just don't like 59 Dull talk 55 A song you've heard too many times recently 52 Talk when you want music 47 An announcer with an annoying voice 38 A song that's too soft/lite/mellow 27 A song that's too repetitive 24 A song that's too harsh 10 A beat that's too slow 9 A beat that's too fast 6 The news 2 Nothing, I just stick it out
TV 2nite:
The double best-of edition of Sessions was brilliant. The website is un-navigable, alas: http://www.sessionsatwest54th.com/ (Can anyone tell me who the African woman, and the tiny old gent were in the first half?)
Old poll:
"Change the station, quick!" What different things on a radio station will cause you to change the station or turn it off? [Vote] [View results]
Update:
Graeme Williams suggested Big Brother for linkchecking on the Mac. I did most of the 1998 archives... and it's a sorry sight to behold. The Village Voice clobbered months of work by changing their site layout and discarding all the old issues. (The Irish Times rearranged things too but I think they can be fixed with a batch replace.) The UK Guardian started requiring registration. The SJ Merc's breaking news page, and My.Excite, and the NY Post, and MSNBC, and many local papers, I shoulda known better than to link. The Washington Post and LA Times I knew were doomed (in fact, some even look to have survived).But I'm shocked that some URLs seem to have died for: Wired, Time, Fast Company, The Nation, Science Daily, New Scientist, CS Monitor, CNN, News.com, Nikkei, Canoe, Nando, and NYTSYN...
InfoJump hacking:
Here's an InfoJump bookmarklet (Netscape, for the Newspapers category). And here's an example URL that searches InfoJump's Newspapers category ("cat=33", substitute from list below) for either 'james joyce' or 'jorn barger' [search format = ("james joyce","jorn barger")] and sorts the results by date. The pattern can be up to (at least) 200 chars long, so you can pack lots of names in. But you have to limit it to a category:1- Academic
2- Alternative
3- Animals and Pets
4- Architecture
5- Arts and Humanities
6- Astronomy
7- Automotive
8- Business and Economy
9- Career and Employment
10- College and University
11- Computers
12- Design
13- Education
14- Entertainment
15- Environment and Nature
16- Fashion
17- Finance and Investment
18- Games
19- Gay Lesbian Bisexual
20- General Interest
21- Government and Politics
22- Health and Medicine
23- Hobbies
24- Home and Garden
25- Humor
26- Internet
27- Law
28- Literary
29- Media
30- Men
31- Military
32- Music
33- Newspapers
34- Outdoors
35- Parenting
36- Photography
37- Recreation and Fitness
38- Regional
39- Religion
41- Science
40- Science Fiction
43- Sex and Erotica
44- Society and Culture
42- Sports
45- Tabloid
46- Technology
47- Travel
48- Women
0- All Categories
Searching my name on InfoJump turns up some excellent new finds: http://www.sfsite.com/fi/045.htm
...Jorn Barger's radar covers the largest scope, from the humanities to politics, breaking Internet news and games. Bill Humphries covers a lot of new technology and more liberal politics than Jorn. Raphael Carter is heavy in the sciences, while Laurel Krahn is big on culture.
Takebacks:
Several people were shocked by my dismissal of InfoJump the other day, so I went back to try it again, and got great results-- I can't even replicate my first try. I just wish it would merge results from all categories, is all... http://www.infojump.com/
Keeper headlines:
Hilarious 'Learning for Dummies' links (via LindsayM)
The study of 'paralanguage' like 'huh?' (via Bouzou)
Why VR hasn't arrived yet (Deja thread)
Newswire story on Hero Joy (CNN/AP)
Snarky 100-most-overrated-of-20thC list (Nat'l Review)