Robot Wisdom Weblog for October 1999 (waxing)

Sun, Oct 24, 1999

Kendall Clark's entry in the They Might Be Chomskies contest (below) is going to be hard to beat: http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/tmbchomsky.html

Imagine a tune like "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas..." but with the words from one of Chomsky's touchstones, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

Odd:

Excite NewsTracker often has little bugs-- today my custom searches are being replaced by someone else's search for 'radical anarchist librarians'. [Anarchist-librarian FAQ]

Update: I asked:

I'm driving myself nuts by almost always taking my finger off the Shift key before I type the letter-to-be-capitalised. (When you go back to correct this, and do it again, and then again, you're in serious trouble!) Is there an option for the Mac that changes how the Shift key works, making it 'sticky'?

Someone suggested Apple's 'Open Access' which does use the term 'sticky keys' but it's set up so the stickiness turns off as soon as you hit the modifier key at the same time, which makes it useless for me. Any others?

Meta: Cam Laird suggests that '=dnc' URLs for Deja.com now need '[]'s for universal compatibility. (See below for examples.)

Don't miss: Excellent long recent Chomsky transcript on US 'sovereignty': [Deja URL]

What is the attitude outside the enlightened states toward the remarkable new era? Well, outside of the self-defined enlightened states, there was shock and dismay over the contempt shown for sovereignty and international law.

...In fact, the break was very close to what's nowadays called the "North-South" division. That's a euphemism for the distinction between the old imperial countries and their old colonies. In the former colonies, there was shock, fear, and dismay. In the imperial states, particularly in the more powerful of them, enormous exuberance over the end of any barriers to use of violence, such as musty old notions of international law and sovereignty.

...So, for example, in the case of the Convention On Rights of the Child, it's been ratified by every country in the world except two: the United States and Somalia. Somalia didn't ratify it because it doesn't have a government.

...In fact, by the 1990's, U.S. violation of international treaties has become so extreme that the professional society of international law, American Society For International Law, in a recent issue had an article called "Taking Treaties Seriously" - condemning the increasingly brazen U.S. refusal, to adhere to treaty obligations.

...The survival of the United States depends on making sure that Cuban children starve or die in hospitals from lack of medicine. So, therefore, we can't accept the authority of the World Trade Organization, our creation, in the case of the embargo of Cuba.

...Remember, their sovereignty in East Timor is comparable to that of Saddam Hussein's in Kuwait, or of Nazi Germany's in occupied France.

...It was put more graphically by high American officials, who said, in East Timor, "we don't have any dog in that race." In other words, it doesn't matter what happens there.

...Outside the self-defined enlightened states, there's plenty of fear and concern over the revival of some of the worst days of European imperialism and the arrogance and self-adulation that went along with it.

(Contest: What new songs would They Might Be Giants sing if Noam Chomsky were a member? Include lyrics, if possible, eg "Why did ol' Kurdistan get the works? Ain't nobody's business but the Turks...")

Best-ever example sentence wrt serial-comma use: [Deja source]

"This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

This image is going to haunt me like Christa McAuliffe's vapor trail: http://eXaminer.com/991024/1024yosemite.html

"We invited the whole world to see -- and showed them the worst."

I think Ana Voog has such a spectacular visual sense that even her glitches are enlightening... I wish she didn't clutter up her free page with all the noisy ads: http://anacam.com/anaframesn.html

Musing:

I think within five years-- hopefully much sooner-- someone will come out with a Microsoft-killing portable Internet appliance that's scriptable in a fashion as easy-- hopefuly much easier-- than HyperCard, but integrating email and Web surfing and Web publishing and netnews and word-processing and file-management and image-manipulation and basic (but not BASIC) programming.

And its multi-gig hard drive will accumulate your custom gigantic info library from webpages and news postings, etc, the most useful stuff being cached locally and the less useful being linked by a huge personal search-engineful of well-annotated and well-indexed URL-objects.

I've done three Joyce-maps recently: Ulysses wide-angle, Ulysses close-up, and Joyce's own travels in Europe. What's coolest is that each of these giant GIFs is only about 5k in size (= 1000 words, coincidentally), but HTML lets you display them at double resolution. (Follow the 'up' links to see them at normal scale.)

Serious Joyceans need a reading copy of this 1958 HB edition of Finnegans Wake, with wide margins and beautiful type: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=186621761

(It's not too rare-- yet-- so you can probably find it w/o dustjacket for under $15.)

Poll:

I find it's pretty inconvenient to try to get to a webpage via the normal 'Bookmarks' menu. So: in the last seven days, how many different bookmarks have you accessed by means of the standard menu itself?

None. One or two. Three to five. Six thru ten. 11 thru 20. More than 20. View results

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

- "Balthus: A Biography," nonfiction by Nicholas Fox Weber
- "First Snow on Fuji," fiction by Yasunari Kawabata
- "The Barbie Chronicles," nonfiction by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Net.radio 2day: Check out the This is Hell marathon between 10am and 3pm CDT via http://www.wnur.org . Expected guests include Steve Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (Test Ban Treaty etc); Dr. Jame Orbinski of Doctors Without Borders (Iraq etc); Bella Galhos (East Timor); Paul Roberts of Harper's (economics of sugar). And Jeff Dorchen's Moment of Truth.

Here's a 60k GIF of my desktop (1024*768, colors simplified here): [GIF]

Musing:

An interesting approach to message-rating (in forums like Slashdot's) might be to offer, at the end of each message, a multiple-choice selection of alternative summaries of the message (plus a textbox to add a new alternative). The index page would then list only the top-rated summary for each indexed message (instead of the author's own title).

Sneak preview of tomorrow's This Is Hell's Jeff Dorchen's excellent Moment of Truth rant on the test-ban treaty and other topics: http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/jeff/99oct23.html

...And the fact that the Republicans glued not something trivial like a quarter nor even something just domestically symbolic like some do-nothing health care bill but rather an internationally symbolic treaty that could affect the political, military and environmental future of the planet, well, for them and the journalists to crow and point at the humiliation of the supporter of such a treaty is just ill, mentally and spiritually ill. And that the journalists saw this as some kind of black eye for Clinton just reveals how detached they are from the substance of any discourse. They don't even know how to pretend to care about the substance of an issue anymore. The thing that matters to them is how the upshot of any public debate is reflected in what they suppose to be the public perception of the figures involved. Which allows people like Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson to exist, so-called "news analysts" who analyze how decisions should affect the popularity of politicians rather than how they actually affect the human beings the government is supposedly of, by and for.

Keeper headlines:

The world's wiredest house (Icepick.com)
Beautiful how-to you won't want to (via chokingpear)
Amazing 'Eraserhead' FAQ (Google)
FAQ on uncompleted projects by David Lynch (Google)
The Canonical List of WEIRD Band Names (1450 so far) (Google)
Comparative thumbnails of webpage designs (via Daily)
Extensive library of first chapters (Time-Warner)
Great page of recent quotes related to cinema (via Google)
Fun daily movie-quote contest (National Review)

Poll:

This is to test how successfully weblogs are decentralizing newsgathering: How many hits a week does your weblog get?

I don't have a weblog. I can't track hitcounts. I don't bother tracking. Less than 100/week. 100 to 500/week. 500 to 1000/week. 1000 to 5000/week. 5000 to 10,000/week. 10,000 to 50,000/week. 50,000 to 100,000/week. More than 100,000/week. View results

Tori visits Ana: http://anacam.com/anaframesn.html

Hunger Site up to six sponsors: http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/donate.pl

If these early poll results hold up, then I'd say decentralization is doing brilliantly. And I expect everyone's numbers will be 100 times bigger in a year or two, as awareness becomes general:

<100         9
100-500      6
500-1000     4
1000-5000    4
5000-10k     1
10k-50k      3
50k-100k     0
>100k        1

Onion is taking the week off.

Dibs: If I ever start a band, it will be called the MonkTones. (It will try to sound like the Scandalous All-Stars, whoever they are.)

That's clout! Slashdot announces free Britannica... and Britannica.com goes down: http://www.britannica.com/

Killer book review by my latest fave, Blanche McCrary Boyd [qv], of an obscure Olaf Stapledon sci-fi, Sirius: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/164/boyd.shtml

The most awful problem is his lack of hands. Unable to sit at the table with his family, he must have his meals on the floor; he finds many ordinary human activities horribly difficult, whether using tools for minor repairs, committing his music to paper, or writing letters to his soulmate.

Ana's adventure continues: http://anacam.com/anaframesn.html

Firesign album news: http://www.rhino.com/features/75983p.html

Track list:
We Heart Billville
Drink Global, Eat Local
The Mayor Is The Problem
Bless Their Strange Names
Back Room At The Ash 'N' Onion
The Glue-It-Yourself Show
Doom Bot Dust
Devilmaster By Infermco...

If you've personalised your Slashdot account, here are my recommended 'Slashboxes': http://www.slashdot.org/

10 Hot Comments [excellent if you hate their forums]
Hacker News Network [decent news tips]
The Be Site [okay BeOS news]
MacWEEK [okay Mac headlines]
[What are yours?]

A new sad tale of Net.stalking ending in murder-suicide: [Boston Globe article] is still documented by the killer's Geocities site pix page, poems, and guestbook. His other links are all 'under construction' and this site will probably vanish quickly. (ark)

Tim Remsburg, Boyer's stepfather... would like to see a federal regulation requiring companies that host Web pages to alert police when a user threatens a criminal act.

New NY Review of Books

Joan Didion: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris
Ian Buruma: China in Cyberspace
Jonathan Mirsky: Misfortune in Shanghai
Colin McGinn: Freud Under Analysis
Robert Herbert: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism by T.J. Clark
Andrew Delbanco: In Plato's Cave by Alvin Kernan
Literature: An Embattled Profession by Carl Woodring
The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes

Wired (recently acquired by Conde Nast, a Web non-starter) had been promising to post the October content last week, but now even that promise is gone: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.10/

Morning project: Bloom in downtown Dublin [Zoom and key]

(This sort of map is pretty easy to do even with limited PhotoShop skills, starting from one or another of the many maps already on the Web.)

Cable 2nite: Hitchcock's Birds: http://www.tvultra.com/

No birds were hurt in the making of this film. Tippi, however, wasn't as lucky. In one of the final scenes, Hitchcock attached a bunch of live birds to Tippi's clothes with thin nylon strings, forcing the animals to frenetically flutter around her face...

Ana Voog [qv] due at JenniCon today: http://www.jennicam.org/guests/index.html

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

- "A Place Called Waco: A Survivor's Story," nonfiction by David Thibodeau and Leon Whiteson [pre-Koresh]
- "Losing Nelson," nonfiction by Barry Unsworth
- "Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey," nonfiction by Jane Goodall and Phillip Berman [pre-primates]

New first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm

- "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" Edmund Morris (Random House) Controversial biography of the former president.
- "All the Best, George Bush" George Bush (Simon & Schuster) The letters and diary entries of George Bush.
- "Hitler's Pope" John Cornwell (Viking Penguin) The "secret history" of the church's most dangerous man, Pius XII.
- "Dark Lady" Richard North Patterson (Knopf) Political/legal thriller with corrupt lawyers, weird sex. (Fiction)
- "Diana in Search of Herself" Sally Bedell Smith
- "Black Notice" Patricia Cornwell

Excellent long John Carmack interview: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/15/1012230&mode=flat

There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, and they sometimes produce some nice things. There are some damn useful features of MSDEV that I have not seen on any other platform - all the intellisense pop up information and edit-and-continue, for instance. I chose NT as our development environment because, after evaluating all available platforms, I decided it was the best tool for the job.

The current MacOS X server is a bit of a disappointment. I really enjoyed NEXTSTEP on a lot of levels, and if it had workstation quality 3D acceleration, I probably would have stayed there. Unfortunately, much of the development effort spent on it during its transformation to MacOS X seems to be steps sideways instead of forward. Macifying the user interface, porting to PPC, deprecating ObjC for java and C++, etc. They probably all had to be done, but it just hasn't brought anything new to the table. As a user environment, it still feels sluggish, and it still doesn't have 3D graphics.

I knew I wanted to work with computers from a very early age, but there were also a lot of other stereotypical geek aspects to my life growing up - phreaking, hacking (nobody called it "cracking" back then), rockets, bombs, and thermite (sometimes in not-so-smart combinations), sci-fi, comic books, D&D, arcades, etc. I was sort of an amoral little jerk when I was young. I was arrogant about being smarter than other people, but unhappy that I wasn't able to spend all my time doing what I wanted. I spent a year in a juvenile home for a first offence after an evaluation by a psychologist went very badly.

I still remember the first time I saw the original Star Wars DOOM mod. Seeing how someone had put the death star into our game felt so amazingly cool. I was so proud of what had been made possible, and I was completely sure that making games that could serve as a canvas for other people to work on was a valid direction. A Doom/Quake add-on has become almost an industry standard resume component, which I think is a Very Good Thing. The best way to sell yourself is to show what you have produced, rather than tell people what you know, what you want to do, or what degrees you have.

Going open-source from development day one with a game probably doesn't make much sense. Design by committee doesn't work particularly well, and for something with as much popular appeal as games, the signal to noise ratio would probably be very low. I tagged along at the beginning of a from-scratch open source gaming project (OGRE), and it more or less went how I feared it would - lots of discussion, no code.

Anita invites comments on the new Imagine: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001aAE

Imagine Radio has redesigned their site, added stuff, and changed stuff. What pleases you or bugs you about it?

Today's featured header-link:

"Zines" (top row far right) links to today's anticipated updated periodicals. Great stuff if you're bored. (Follow the back-arrow there to yesterday's list, as well, since those are likely fait accompli.)

Overheard on alt.music.joni-mitchell:

"A tribute album is supposed to come out in the next few months. She is also working on a new album of her favorite standards, to be released sometime in the spring!"

I created an eGroup for Hero Joy Nightingale: http://www.egroups.com/group/hojoy/

Welcome to the hojoy eGroup

Ana Voog of AnaCam organised a site for watching camfolk sleeping. Today they've added one-word poems: http://www.sleepstation.com/

Ah, David Lynch is back! (long) http://www.nypress.com/col1.cfm?content_id=440&now=10/13/99&content_section=4

To my mind, his career contains three incontestably great films -- Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and now The Straight Story. (I'm leaving aside TV's staggering Twin Peaks.)

American movies seldom give us people like Alvin and Rose (she has a speech impediment, builds birdhouses and is thought to be "slow") without caricaturing or patronizing them. This is the first of Lynch's accomplishments, and it echoes throughout the movie.

Lynch's earlier movies seem to view the world from the dashed perspective of childhood (that other lost paradise), where the beauty of life is suddenly seen to have a dark, decaying underside. Here, though, he looks from the angle of old age and impending death and sees something else: that the other side of decay is beauty.

Q: Sissy Spacek is terrific in the film.
A: She makes it look easy, because she's a great actor. It's a very difficult thing that could go bad with the wrong person doing it.

Q: The story that was in The New Yorker recently painted a very sad and disturbing picture of what an artist like you faces in the realm of television. Has that left you soured on doing tv?
A: Oh yes, I'm through with that. It's a system that's not real friendly to, you know, creative people. It's something I don't want to get anywhere near.

Keeper headlines:

Analysis of JenniJournal's Tim as a 'speed seducer' (Jaffo)
Passing data between pages via URLs (Javascript tricks)
Deja.com now posting bug notices (via alt.fan.dejanews)
Finally someone comments on IPv6 privacy issues (via Slashdot)
Righteous-sounding philosophy zine (LinguaFranca)

New Onion:

Telegeneticists Breed More Mediagenic Humans

Winner of the most evil site redesign of 1999: the Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/machineage/

(Q: How many different pages do we have to visit to discover the new content? A:.All of them.)

New Scientific American:

- Floating in Space
- A Zeppelin for the 21st Century
- The Balloon That Flew round the World

Don't miss: Wolff's excellent defense of the new Reagan bio: http://www.nymag.com/Critics/view.asp?id=2447

The main subject here is time and place, and Reagan is merely the writer's foil. The nuances and pacing of Reagan's ambition (first radio, then motion pictures, then politics) and opportunism (the New Deal, the Red scares, the sixties), his drift from the Midwest to California, his peculiar familial relationships, his responsibility (or lack of same) for the end of the Cold War, provide a remarkably good plot line for the story of the American century. Along the way, the picture of Reagan is finally and credibly fleshed out. Not just Chance the Gardener but Babbit too.

...The fear is that crazy Edmund has the story -- has found a way to tell this heretofore unbelievable tale. The reality distortion that dare not speak its name.

Don't miss: Right on, right on, right on: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/991007.html

While the prestigious American Psychological Association says that it seeks to "mitigate the causes of human suffering," the letter's signers contend that "a large gap has arisen between APA's mission and the drift of the profession into helping corporations influence children for the purpose of selling products to them."

Meta: I'm mostly working on Damascus Gate and resource-page theory

Some reviews on news.groups.reviews after a year or more of inactivity

alt.food.mexican-cooking
alt.obituaries
alt.silly.little.newsgroup
comp.sys.apple2
soc.org.nonprofit

The author of the original 'Harsh Realm' comic posts his criticisms to alt.tv.x-files: [Deja URL] and [Deja URL]

My problems with the pilot are echoed by many people on here. I hate the messianic element ("He's the one"), that's a big time cliche and one of the things I didn't like in the Matrix either. I don't like the Sophie character so far. She is a typical girlfriend character, just a prop, almost. She just stands around either dumb or sexy. I hope that gets fixed.

...This show is different in surfacy ways, and it swipes from other sources besides mine. The big difference is, my characters were fleshed out and there were no plot holes. He needs to work on it some more. But he is focusing on this show a lot more heavily than he did Millenium and even the X-Files in recent years, so I think you will see marked improvement. Or so I hope.

Keeper headlines:

Provocative Wolff on political 'counterprogramming' (NYMag)
Weblogs sorted by place w/map (via GeneHack)
Funny, useful post about spam-tracking (news.admin)
Detailed account of current romance w/Geof (JenniJournal)
Overview of databases not indexed by search-engines (via RBuzz)

They're back! 10am to noon CDT, This is Hell live RealAudio funny progressive talkradio featuring guest Edward Kline, president of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation (human rights).

Sneak preview of today's This Is Hell's Jeff Dorchen's Moment of Truth: http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/jeff/99oct09.html

...As you go, let the vague memory of our destination influence your journey -- our destination being the eventual advent of a just and joyous society in which the power of money has been annihilated, and the only measure of success is our collective joy in a world meant for the enjoyment of all living things.

TV lastnite: I thought Harsh Realm showed a lot of promise: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/mill/1999/10/08/harsh/index.html

In the thoughtful BBS thread about Slashdot, Arthur Alexander writes: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001Xkr

Regardless of how poor the [Slashdot] forums might be at any point in time, I know I would love to read Slashdot-style user comments on [RWWL] selections.

(This is easily done, but inconspicuous-- if you want to start a thread, just click the little 'Interact: group' button in the header, above, and create a new topic. I'll link it so people know it's there.)

Fascinating Waco details from the FBI's files: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/19991008/aponline190851_000.htm [Drudge]

Westinghouse Corp. offered, at no cost, the use of an aircraft and crew with "state-of-the-art" radar and infrared technology that not even the military possessed, one handwritten note stated.