Robot Wisdom Weblog for November 1999 (waxing)

TV 2nite: Frontline looks at the Book of Revelation: [superb!] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/

A report on the rise of the Antichrist as a central figure in end time scenarios.

Here's a discussion area for the banner-ad experiment: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001pno

The point of the tiny-banners experiment is to see how obtrusive they are, and how clever people can be about putting a very small space to good use. What do you think?

I'm not sure this is the best possible advice... anyone? http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/thumbs.html

Stamp Out Really Egregious Thumbnails!

Can someone send Tom Tomorrow a copy of "Understanding Comics"?!! http://salon.com/comics/tomo/1999/11/22/tomo/index.html

(Or else ask Salon to print 'em twice as big?)

Raphael suggests: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/

Since Hubble provides photographs to the Web, maybe NASA, as an Internet content provider, could solve all its funding problems by declaring an IPO.

Juicy new Progressive Review:

AMERICAN INDICATORS: Percent of children 12-18 who have a TV in their bedroom: 53%

If you submit a free banner and you don't want others to use it (eg because of bandwidth limits), please mention that. Otherwise, assume these are all up for grabs. Archive/FAQ: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/huger.html

Here's an example of what I'm offering (below):
And here's the HTML (with null alt-text, because otherwise it would look like a 'real' link to lynx-users):

<a href="http://www.robotwisdom.com/"><img src="http://www.robotwisdom.com/img4/rw.gif" width=175 height=24 border=1 alt=""></a>

(You can change your own text any time you think of something better-- like if you've got a hot article linked. If anyone wants to offer this one on their site, I'll be experimenting with updating it.)

Epinions.com decided to pass on my lowkey-banner-ads proposal (see just below) but I still want to try the experiment, so for a limited time, I'm offering free banner ads under these conditions:

- 24 pixels high, 175 wide or less
- you send me the HTML including an img on your server (with height and width specified!) and the link to your site
- text only, any colors, no animations
- nothing offensive or I'll publicly blacklist you-- the point is to be creative and attract intelligent readers, not to be obnoxious and repel them
- I'll run them as long as I like, depending on how much demand there is and how agreeable I find them.

Here's where the idea comes from: http://www.egroups.com/group/weblogs/427.html

- Low-key small banners work fine for the Hunger Site.
- Most webloggers would have no problem putting a row of 'em at the top of their log.
- It would be easiest for us, though, if the sponsor (eg epinions) served their own images.
- This would allow them to customize the message, especially if the visitor already has their cookie.
- Since they know their members' interests they can say, "New epinion on Tom Wolfe" in a simple plain font, and get huge targetted response.

Quentin Crisp dead at 90: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/crisp_991121.html

He declared his homosexuality in his 20s, "a terrible painted figure prancing the streets," as he put it. "Nothing can describe the hatred and the terror and the trouble that I caused," he told one interviewer.

(He used to keep his number listed in the NYC directory, and once c1989 I phoned him on a dare-- he was gracious, under the circumstances. His books are very readable.)

Keeper headlines:

Sex-lives of the French cats (via Honeyguide)
Intro to Bloomsbury 101 (IrishTimes)
Interesting Dvorak comparison of online phone directories (PCMag)
First chapter of Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism (TimeWarner)
Featured poem about Mulder and Scully (Poems.com)
Download a new Bjork MP3 (UBL)
Great update on Cat Stevens (via iBoy)
Intriguing rave for literary choose-your-own-adventure (UK Times)
Jean Butler's Riverdance sequel (IrishTimes)
The FAQ for his banner-ad source, eAds (via Sabren)
A more complicated DIY web-merchandising model (via NTK)
Sabren's elegant weblog portal (Don't miss)

Question:

The big problem with Liquid HTML (I think) is when their browser window is really wide, it can be hard to read. So ideally you want the browser in such cases to limit the display to less than the full window width... unless they have a giant default font. So is there any planned markup feature that can calculate a window width based on default fontsize? (You can use this XML BBS thread to answer.)

Unexploited phrase:

Where The Cool Things Are

(The domain is registered though.)

Federico Fellini: a kibological memoir: [deja]

"...But late that night, as we drove around Florence, I wondered... was he truly ashamed? After we arrived at our destination that night, I resolved to ask him more directly, even if it meant the end of our relationship. But unfortunately, as had happened so many times before, Federico forgot to open the trunk of the car and let me out."

Vacuum on Ani (and Utah P): http://www.epinions.com/musc-review-41DB-12712E93-38054E9E-bd4

Best line from the disc: "If I cannot dictate the conditions of my work, I will henceforth cease to labor." ...try that out at your next job interview

(I don't think I like the new Epinions affiliates program-- the domain name you happen to enter via sticks to your links like gum on your shoe...)

My epinion of the new Scott Turow: http://www.epinions.com/book-review-1BDF-11A20479-3837F84A-bd3

To bring it to life he takes special care in portraying a handful of central characters-- the sleazy-but-lovable lawyer who wears the wire, his dying wife, the undercover FBI 'nanny', the various judges and their henchmen, the ambitious prosecutor, etc...

I've gotten about two comments on AntiMath in all the years it's been on the Web: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/antimath.html

*o|o*|*o     tennis
o*|oo        oops
*o|*_~o      too hot
oo|o_~o|*_   benefits of being unpopular

Very well-written exploration of medical records and privacy: (long) http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dbnation/chapter/ch06.html [iBoy]

Some people think that the best way to handle the morass of medical privacy is simply to eradicate it: unlock the files and the databanks, and make everybody's medical records freely available. David Brin, author of The Transparent Society, is a big proponent of this viewpoint...

I launched a new pro-scrolling initiative on alt.hypertext et al: [Deja thread]

I have a degree of respect for epinions.com, which includes Jakob Nielsen and RV Guha among its founders. I just found they've put up a meta-guide to web style guides [qv] that ranks Hitbox's guide (which I'd never run across, amazingly) as #1...

Old poll:

In ten years, if the technology allows anybody to create a weblog effortlessly, what percentage of websurfers do you think will be maintaining one pretty regularly?

Under 5% 5% to 20% 20% to 40% 40% to 60% 60% to 80% 80% to 95% More than 95% View results

No 'This Is Hell' this week (but listen via the Web next Saturday morning): http://homepage.interaccess.com/~saaf/main.htm

"This Is Hell!" will return to the airwaves on Saturday, November 27 at 9 a.m. and will run till 3 p.m. (central time). Keep checking this site for upcoming guests.

Also, check out the December issue of Wired and look at page 104. Yep, that's right. That's us. Can you freaking believe it!! We got our purty picture in the shiny maggy-zeen!

Here's a simple bookmarklet for Britannica (requires Javascript).

Request: Britannica supposedly renamed their online Propaedia 'Spectrum' ...but where is it???

Musing:

Imagine your keyboard had an 'Edit' key that worked with every application, declaring that you wanted to edit the current selection...

And further, a 'Frame' key that changed that focus from editing the selection to editing the objects that frame it...?

Excellent gossipy look at economists: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/question/toolbox/downamong.html [Whump]

The fastest growing portions of the US economy today include such things as crime and prisons, gambling, disease, and entertainment. Is it any wonder, then, that "growth" doesn't always leave people feeling that life is getting better?

(The Nobel in economics isn't really a Nobel; it was created by the Central Bank of Sweden to sound like one.)

...Fallows went further. What American writers glibly refer to as "economics," he observed, is really just Anglo-American economics. Elsewhere in the world people do not regard Adam Smith and his intellectual successors as the fountain of economic truth...

The conventional economic model turns a description of a hypothetical state of affairs into a prescription for an actual one. It encourages a society in which people deal with one another increasingly in this very way. The social cohesion of Main Street gives way to the isolated consumerism of the Mall.

And loneliness makes people buy. Most people don't go to malls to buy particular items; they go because it's a way of "alleviating loneliness," "dispelling boredom," and "relieving depression"...

"When a country is as rich in GNP and as poor in social tranquillity as the United States," Luttwak said, "it makes no sense to purchase more GNP through deregulation and increased efficiency, at the expense of tranquillity. It's like a man with 24 ties and no shoes buying himself another tie."

(America is the Awful Empire...)

I'm starting to have doubts about epinions, because it seems to be 'read-once, write mostly': http://www.epinions.com/

You have written 22 opinions
Your opinions have been read 1063 times
You have earned $24.58 in Eroyalties

(Of that $24, $22 is bonuses-- the normal payrate has delivered a whopping ten cents per review over the last two months... and it flatlined after the first week, so there are probably more new reviews being written than old ones being read. TV ads may improve this slightly by bringing in non-writers, but I think only the most persistent writers are really going to see any return, and I can't imagine it will compete with professional writers' wages, even at the low end of that scale.)

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

- Editorial: A Bush Family Book Burning.
- The WTO: What's That Organization? Free trade clashes with democratic principle. By Sam Parry

Great-looking New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991120/news.html

- Hot and bothered: Monsanto's modified soya beans are cracking up in the heat [YAY!]
- Peppermint power: It's mean, it's minty, and it could beat malaria [Dr Bronner was right!?]
- More haste, less speed: Attempts to hurry up the hunt for aliens dismay SETI's astronomers [Slashdot-effect redefined?]
- A hole in the head: Inhaling heroin fumes can cause serious brain damage [Duh!]
- Hell on Earth: Were the last of the dinosaurs roasted alive?
- It ain't heavy: Robolift will make light work of the heaviest load
- Rock-and-roll revolution: At last a plastic acoustic guitar that's as good as a wooden one
- Relativity tester: Watching the fabric of space-time as it ripples
- Squeeze box special: The accordion inspires a new generation of vertical computer keyboards
- Write on: The best and the worst of Net fiction

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

- "Second Wind" Dick Francis. Author gallops across best-sellers list with latest novel. (Fiction)
- "John Glenn: A Memoir" John Glenn. The astronaut and ex-Senator shares his adventures. (Non-Fiction)
- "My Movie Business" John Irving. A memoir of Irving's time adapting 'The Cider House Rules' to the big screen. (Non-Fiction)
- "Lies Across America" James W. Loewen. The author corrects common errors about historical monuments. (Non-Fiction)

Internet achieves new low: (incl pic) http://www.gavelnet.com/auction_item.asp?auction%5Fid=829

Drew Barrymore Baby Clothes: Current bid: $600.00

Drew Barrymore's baby clothes from the first year of her life. With a candid photo. Includes: undergarment with chicks and ducks, baby sleeper outfit, and white bonnet with pink ribbon and lace. The collection comes with a letter of authentication from Drew's mother Jaid Barrymore.

Scabrous Paglia: http://salon.com/people/col/pagl/1999/11/17/cp1117/print.html

Well, first of all, I think Naomi Wolf's parents should sue her alma mater, Yale University, for malpractice. If we judge by her clarity of reasoning and command of language at age 37, her education was a fraud...

For almost 40 minutes, Rush Limbaugh played and replayed individual sentences from Wolf's appearance the day before on ABC's "This Week" with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson. It was an excellent example of the genuine intellectual service that Limbaugh has done for American culture... Limbaugh concluded, that "we're up against a wigged-out bunch of New Agers who don't have a grip!"

...I often mentioned the striking physical and psychological similarities between Monica Lewinsky and Naomi Wolf, who arrived on the scene tossing her hair and thrusting her bosom at hapless male journalists even as she denounced the cult of beauty as a sexist plot against women... No nation in the world has ever produced shiny, hysterical, depthless women quite like these, who as they age find themselves in pitiable free fall.

[on Susan Faludi:] ...Third, I suspected that "Stiffed" would flop without any help from me, so I stepped back up on the curb, as it were, and let the rickety, rattletrap Faludi hippie bus hurtle down the hill into the shrubbery and bougainvillea on its own. ...(Stand tall, Matt Drudge!)

(She should do a daily-- weekly is too much at once.)

Controversial heroin anthropologist: http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage4.htm

"I made rigorous searches in Harlem, and I couldn't find a single heroin user," Dr. Hamid said. "I scoured all my old haunts from the crack research and in Brooklyn-the children of the people who used crack and their younger brothers, and, in point of fact, they all shunned the stuff. It was white people who were using it. So that's how I got into the white community-a vice president at a charitable foundation, authors, artists, lawyers."

Nader on Greenspan: http://www.sfbayguardian.com/nader/78.html

If only just once Mr. Greenspan would testify before a Congressional Committee, as if he represented the American worker, consumer, and small taxpayer, instead of the Wall Street establishment, he might open his testimony this way: "Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Joint Economic Committee, I come before you to declare that the state of our economy is not very good. I realize that this conclusion is at odds with my previous testimonies in recent years, but an entire new set of indicators has come to my attention. Please consider that nearly twenty-five percent of our children are growing up in poverty -- the highest percentage by far in the western world. The bottom eighty percent of the workforce is making less in inflation-adjusted dollars than was made twenty-five years ago. The same is the case with inflation-adjusted income of the median family..."

Great overview of the low-power-radio situation: http://www.nypress.com/col1.cfm?content_id=659&now=11/17/1999&content_section=2

What station owner wouldn't be concerned about the curious patchwork coalition of low power proponents, including the United States Catholic Conference; the Green Party; civil rights groups; Ralph Nader; university presidents; the Library Association of America; the cities of Detroit, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Santa Monica, Berkeley and Richmond; the United Church of Christ; Kurt Vonnegut; college professors; the Council of Calvin Christian Reformed Church; everyday listeners; Grammy-award winning artists; congressmen and senators; Native American tribes; and the ACLU, who have all explained to FCC commissioners that more voices are desperately needed on the dial?

...In other words, Telcom, which the NAB spent millions of dollars lobbying for, has been more profitable than broadcasters could ever have dreamed. It turned mom-and-pop operators into millionaires many times over as conglomerates lined up to buy FM.

Maybe if virtually every major-market FM station in the country hadn't eliminated its news department (relying now on wire service copy and clipping the local newspaper), hadn't canceled its local community program (even if it did air at 7 a.m. on Sunday) and hadn't loaded up its spot breaks with record levels of commercials, the grassroots campaign wouldn't be so strong. But they did, and it is.

According to M Street Journal, over the last four years there has been virtually no increase in the number of commercial AAA, classical or smooth jazz stations. And there are still virtually no commercial folk, punk, blues, world music, opera, reggae or traditional jazz stations.

Keeper headlines:

Backgrounder on 'Sessions at W54th` (PBS music series) (AP-notFox)
Interesting old tale of Goldie Hawn vs Jonathan Demme (Salon)
Cool chart of top four recording artists in many different countries (The Nation)
Booksmith author trading cards (via Copernic99)
Predatory spices-pricing by McCormick, and its cure (via Looka)
Ted Nelson critiques XML-et-al (via Flutterby)

Great-looking new Onion:

Species Of Blue-Green Algae Announces IPO

PhilG on XML: http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000Kez

XML would be a great Web/db tool if it had anything to do with the Web (i.e., a Netscape browser were able to understand it) or had any of the capabilities of a database (e.g., indexing, concurrency control, transactions).

[Another poster's view:] Congratulations, you are the latest victim of the runaway marketing scam known as XML. Microsoft took an idea so simple that many of us have been using it for years without fanfare, and convinced people that this "technology", which should be grouped together with things like flat-files of comma separated values, is somehow the answer to everything. For a monopoly like them, it is very convenient since it means they can make up whatever prorietary data schemes they like for exchanging information between their apps and then claim they are standards because they use XML as the format.

From PhilG's BBS on Web database programming: http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=web/db

Older Messages (by category)

AolServer (123)
ArsDigita Community System (ACS) (85)
Authentication and Security (17)
Databases (91)
Design Philosophy (19)
Development Tools (25)
Ecommerce (20)
Free Software (17)
HTML (18)
Hardware (10)
Hosting (23)
Images (8)
Instructional Examples (9)
Interface Design (13)
Legal Issues (3)
Performance (10)
Platforms (RDBMS + server) (38)
SQL and Data Modeling (15)
Scripting (26)
Searching (16)
Sources of Information (7)
Traffic and traffic analysis (12)
XML (3)

New BBS thread: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001mcA

I'm interested to hear what people think of PhilG, why he's doing what he does, why the major media pay him scant attention, which of his resources you find most useful, and which you wish were different?

(Sorry I'm such a slug about replying to email and BBS comments, lately. I expect to catch up on a lot of it in one burst, sooner or later.)

Forbes special issue on privacy: [multipage] http://www.forbes.com/Forbes/99/1129/6413182a.htm [WebWord]

Cohn's firm will get a client your unlisted number for $49, your Social Security number for $49 and your bank balances for $45. Your driving record goes for $35; tracing a cell phone number costs $84.

...This gave him the ability to map my routines, if he had chosen to do so: how much cash I burn in a week ( $400), how much I deposit twice a month ( $3,061), my favorite neighborhood bistro (the Flea Market Cafe), the $720 monthly checks I write out to one Judith Pekowsky: my psychotherapist.

Here's a theoretical way to stop this linking process without compromising the IRS' ability to track unreported income: Suppose that, instead of issuing you a single 9-digit number, the IRS gave you a dozen 11-digit numbers and let you report income under any of them. You could release one to your employer, another to your broker, a third to your health insurer...

If a business without a legitimate need for the Social Security number asks for it, leave the space blank--or fill it with an incorrect number. (Hint: To make it look legitimate, use an even number between 10 and 90 for the middle two digits.)

New Scientific American, finally:

- The Unexpected Science to Come
- A Unified Physics by 2050?

New NY Review of Books:

Louis Menand: Opening Moves [Gore/Bradley]
John Russell: The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper by John Richardson
Helen Epstein: The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS by Edward Hooper
J.M. Coetzee: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass
Tony Judt: Is There a Belgium?
David Brion Davis: In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 by Hasia Diner
Struggles in the Promised Land edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West
Blacks in the Jewish Mind by Seth Forman
What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance by Murray Friedman
African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict edited by V.P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil
killing rage: ending racism by bell hooks

These 'DNA personal ads' are mostly way technical: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/99/Nov/dna.html

I've been single-stranded too long! Lonely ATGCATG would like to pair up with congenial TACGTAC...

Keeper headlines:

Incendiary attack on Linux GUI coders (comp.human-factors)
Detailed account of soldier AI (Gamasutra-3pg)
Long GV Higgins obit (Tuesday UK Times)
Convenient book-reviews page, mostly AP (Seattle)
Old-fashioned syndication model working on the Web (USAToday)
Overview of Flash file format (via Sabren)
Cute idea for simplifying yahoo-index via the hostname (via RBuzz)
Detailed review of new Waco documentary (VVoice)
Chimps review new tv season (don't-miss NatEnq)
Guide to current Dublin slang (via Piffle)

I liked this image on alt.fan.ana-voog: [deja]

...it is hard to describe the thrill of being verbally confronted and reprimanded by somebody while watching them on a computer monitor. In fact, I might recommend this experience to some as a sort of ritual of passage, a departure from simple chat to a new realm of psychic manifestations.

Decent new first chapter on the advertising industry: http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9911/deadly.persuasion/index.html

Our public policy -- or lack thereof -- on every children's issue, from education to drugs to teen suicide to child abuse, leaves many to conclude that we are a nation that hates its children.

...Imagine the public outcry if a political or religious group offered schools an information package with ten minutes of news and two minutes of political or religious persuasion. Yet we tend to think of commercial persuasion as somehow neutral...

According to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, in 1997 a major advertiser (unnamed in the article) warned all three newsweeklies -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report -- that it would award all of its advertising to the magazine that portrayed its company's industry in the most favorable light during the upcoming quarter.

Gloria Steinem provides a striking example of this in her article "Sex, Lies & Advertising," in which she discusses an award-winning story on Soviet women that was featured on the cover of the November 1980 issue of Ms. In those days, Ms., like every other woman's magazine, depended on advertising. Following that story, Ms. lost all hope of ever getting Revlon ads. Why? Because the Soviet women on the cover weren't wearing makeup.

In 1980 the Gwich'in tribe of Alaska got television, and therefore massive advertising, for the first time. Satellite dishes, video games, and VCRs were not far behind. Before this, the Gwich'in lived much the way their ancestors had for a thousand generations. Within ten years, the young members of the tribe were so drawn by television they no longer had time to learn ancient hunting methods, their parents' language, or their oral history. Legends told around campfires could not compete with Beverly Hills 90210.

Mike Collins asks, wrt IMDb and Deja (etc): http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001lgX

I'm wondering if it's because the web doesn't have a formal tradition of public service... has anyone ever built a web-based nonprofit?

Special day for first chapters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/chapterone.htm

Blue at the Mizzen fiction by Patrick O'Brian
Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945 nonfiction by Ruth Brandon
Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality nonfiction by Lilia Shevtsova

(Here's my intro to Patrick O'Brian: epinions. The new chapter is pretty hard to follow, online, if you're a newcomer to the series. Briefly, the beloved 'Surprise' suffers a serious collision at sea.)

If Picasso built a homepage...?

One of my gripes with XML-- and stylesheets, too-- is that you couldn't ask Picasso to learn them (if he were alive and interested in this new media). And don't tell me we'd build him a nice software tool-- real artists can't be dependent on a tool, they have to get their hands on the markup. And you can't create good markup, even with a tool, unless you understand the concepts. And the concepts of XML are not relevant to the expression-- they're contrary to it.

Picasso shouldn't have to ask, 'What are the semantic structures behind these text-shapes I'm arranging?' That kind of thinking is just for indexheads. He should just be able to arrange shapes, without having to think about any intervening layers of abstraction.

I think the situation we're stuck with now is to create attractive-as-possible pages using an extremely impoverished set of tags: blockquote, i, b, pre, br, p, and (I think) small and big and basic color commands. And I'd grudgingly add one level of tables, because without that you can hardly do anything...

(I'm feeling like the design of this page is losing me new readers, and wondering what's the smallest change I can do to improve it.)

(Comments can go here.)

I just heard a gospel singer on the radio who could sing Chaka Khan under the table... and I don't even know what station it is!

Weekend project (mostly done): http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/tpportal.html

pynchon portal: a one-layer approach [qv] to web design...

Where EB gets their web-links: [Old Deja post] (Leonard Grossman)

"Skilled writers needed to review WWW sites for [Britannica]. Must have subject-area expertise, Internet access, email. Min. 30 reviews/wk., $10 each."

Wordy-but-knowledgeable account of coding Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation: (3 pages, each better than the last) http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991112/GavinWhite_01.htm

The Crash series employs an extremely complicated virtual memory scheme which dynamically swaps into memory any kind of game component: geometry, animation, texture, code, sound, collision data, camera data, etc. A workstation based tool called NPT implements an expert system for laying out the disk. This tool belongs to the class of formal Artificially Intelligence programs. Its job is to figure out how the 500 to 1000 resources that make up a Crash level can be arranged so as to never have more than 1.2 megabytes needed in memory at any time.

Object control code, which the gaming world euphemistically calls AI, typically runs only a couple of times per frame. For this kind of code, speed of implementation, flexibility, and ease of later modification are the most important requirements. This is because games are all about gameplay, and good gameplay only comes from constant experimentation with and extensive reworking of the code that controls the game's objects. The constructs and abstractions of standard programming languages are not well suited to object authoring, particularly when it comes to flow of control and state. For Crash Bandicoot we implemented GOOL (Game Oriented Object LISP), a compiled language designed specifically for object control code that addresses the limitations of traditional languages.

Dramatically increasing performance does not just mean moving instructions around; it is a complex and involved process. First we study the performance of all relevant areas of the hardware in a scientific and systematic fashion...

Cute metaphor from Kestrel's Eric W: http://www.egroups.com/group/weblogs/426.html

I find LinkWatcher [qv] to be a very important service for me. The fresh blogs list is akin to the "Hot" sign at Krispy Kreme...

Don't miss: Sam Smith praises Lady Bird Johnson (Mrs LBJ): (also activist hip-hoppers) http://prorev.com/indexa.htm

Your editor is perhaps biased by having had some direct contact with the Lady Bird approach. I was editing the Capitol East Gazette, in a 75% black area behind the Capitol, when Mrs. Johnson selected our neighborhood as part of her beautification program...

I transcribed Nielsen's comments on long pages from ZDTV, for a comp.human-factors argument: [Deja post]

JN: Give me the information, give me the solutions, give me information about this, don't give me MAC FACTS in the middle of, you know, a religious website because you're EITHER on an Apple website or you're on a religious website...

While I'm at it, I don't understand Mozilla either (current Slashdot thread) so I'll ask my questions on yet another new BBS thread: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001kym

My worries about Mozilla:
- it'll never run on my MacOS 8.1? (they say it will)
- it won't display pages with 'bad' HTML?
- it'll be too complex for hacking?

What I want is scriptable components that let me build my own browser with OS scripts...?

I don't understand BillH's XML-for-weblogs proposal, but I'm starting a BBS thread to discuss it: http://www.whump.com/www/unwrappingLinks.html [Flutterby?]

The intermingling of links and narrative makes a simple XML representation of a WebLog's content difficult. I've simplified the problem by refactoring the WebLog's XML representation as two documents.

Keeper headlines:

Some stats about affiliate programs (via RBuzz)
The Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game (via eatonweb)
Dan Bricklin ponders weblog prose-style (5Nov log entry)
Brilliant, mysterious poem (Poems.com)
Fine art with a Game Boy Camera (via comp.infosystems.www.announce)

Update: The Wharton page is about done, but I still haven't gotten the Polish translated. (There's several full interviews, even.) If you're curious about Wharton's books, a Web discounter has lots of them, dirt cheap (see url below).

Request for Polish translation: I had so much fun doing the Tom Wolfe page yesterday I decided to pick another author off my favorites list, and fixed on William Wharton before I remembered that's a pseudonym, so bio details would likely be scarce. But the very first page Copernic99 listed was a Polish site that appears to give his real name and birth data, unless I miss my guess: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/wharton.html

1925: born Albert W. DuAime, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Followup questions for the 'web-future' BBS thread: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001k18

- Can't cable providers send a different HDTV stream to each subscriber, simultaneously? If not, how far off is this?

- Amazon royalties are a big success. Epinions-like models should do okay when they get better known. So why are micropayments not equally reasonable, even if they require a plug-in?

- Can you efficiently exploit 'Caller-IP' on your website, if it's hosted elsewhere (not in your home)? Something about this seems impractical to me.

Afternoon project (pretty juicy): http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/wolfe.html

Tom Wolfe resources on the Web

Fun, long, dense talk (?) by Tom Wolfe about de Chardin, McLuhan, the Net and sociobiology: http://www.forbes.com/asap/99/1004/212.htm [Occasional]

One year later, when the First World War broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-all-infantry-wars' bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterets, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God's plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.

...Three years ago the first Big Issue of Forbes ASAP asked the question, "What will be the most important development in technology over the next 10 years?" My nomination was brain imaging, the recording of brain activity on-screen in real time. And why? Specifically because I saw brain imaging as a means, eventually, of testing Edward O. Wilson's arresting theories of the brain and human behavior.

...Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.

... After three months of organizing, the cadre opened its campaign with a letter, signed by 15 faculty members and students in the Boston area, to the leading American organ of intellectual etiquette and deviation sniffing, the New York Review of Books.

Dawkins is now Archbishop of Darwinian Fundamentalism and Hierophant of the Memes.

Wilson theorizes about something called "culturgens," which sound suspiciously like memes, but then goes on to speak of the possibility of a "gene-culture coevolution."

Some very-lo-fi 30sec RealAudio samples of the Shaggs, a band with an extremely unique sense of rhythm: http://www.cgocable.net/~focus23/shaggs/sound.html [nubbin]

An excerpt from "My Pal Foot Foot" (64 Kb) (taken from Philosophy Of The World)

New BBS thread relocated from the weblogs eGroup [qv]: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001k18

How wired will we be in 2005? Agree or disagree with the following semi-uninformed guesses:

- Most US households will have cable modems that can receive streaming HDTV...

Decent episode of CounterSpin includes a segment on ISP-cable-access that claims AtHome forbids downloading video files more than ten minutes long..??? (30min RealAudio) http://www.webactive.com/cspin/

[Also:] Recently, a group of psychologists and professionals have started a campaign that raises the question of whether it's ethical to sell one's professional skills to corporations and marketers that prey on children. Gary Ruskin is at the forefront of this campaign-he heads the advocacy group Commercial Alert, and he'll be here to talk about advertising to children.

Emergent standards in game interface-design: (p3 of 5) http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991108/dalmau_03.htm

- Good guys are Green. Bad guys are Red.
- Saturated, bright colors mean "this is alive."
- Non-saturated, gray colors mean "this item is dying."

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

- "The Code Book" Simon Singh. The evolution of hidden messages and cryptography.
- "All Souls" Michael Patrick MacDonald. A tale of growing up in Southie, Boston's Irish Catholic enclave. (Non-Fiction)
- "The Plutonium Files" Eileen Welsome. The author reveals the breadth of the 50-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections. (Non-Fiction)
- "Those Bones Are Not My Child" Toni Cade Bambara. A novel centered on the Atlanta child murders.

Don't miss: TV-ads breaking the IPO-bank? http://www.observer.com/pages/financial.htm

"We think there is definitely going to be a shakeout at the end of the fourth quarter," said Kozmo.com chief executive Joseph Park. "You're going to see a lot of dot-com companies who have blown all their money on advertising and didn't win in the fourth-quarter Christmas wars, and they're going to be in financial trouble in the first half of next year."

Thanks to the dot-coms, the networks are booked solid for November and December. "The fourth quarter has essentially sold out," said Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS Corporation.

"...With dot-com advertising, we want you to sign on to the damn site tonight, or tomorrow morning or the next day at the latest, because we need you to do that because there is no other option. Somehow I have to get you to remember a brand-new name you've never heard of, in the midst of an environment where there's a new one coming at you every 15 minutes."

Classic Chris Byron gloom-n-doom, plus praise for Intuit: http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm

Having cranked open the monetary spigot in the autumn of 1998 to keep a half-dozen private hedge funds from collapsing, the Fed told the world that, when runway speculation threatens the stability of the economy as a whole, the regulators will do whatever is necessary to prevent a collapse-- a message that the market has properly read as a Government guarantee against failure.

New Onion:

Least-Abused Substances:
28-- Contact-Lens Cleaner
22-- Cumin
19-- Tin
13-- Gefilte-Fish Jellied Broth...

I finally updated my list of link-sources (weblogs). Sorry if I traumatize anybody: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/loglist.html

[WHump] Bill Humphries drives me crazy with his textbook liberalism, but aside from that he's topnotch, a few per day.

EFF founder Stanton McCandlish slams TRUSTe: (near end of long page) ftp://vorlon.mit.edu/pub/f-c/v04.n322 [Slashdot]

There is (or companies seem to be under the impression that there is) more money to be made screwing over their customers by selling out every detail they can about every customer to the highest bidder, than in keeping their customers happy with them and comfortable trusting them.

Still spine-tingling: http://atlas.ucpel.tche.br/~grupis/marley.html#war

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war

That until there are no longer first class
And second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war

Highly technical stuff about rewriting Perl6 in C++: (from September) http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/09/topaz.html?wwwrrr_19990928.txt [rc3]

Those of you who have seen the mini-series Shogun might remember when the pilot is suppose to learn Japanese, and if he doesn't learn it the entire village will be killed. He can't stand the possibility of all these deaths being on his head so he's about to commit suicide and finally the shogun says, "Well, whatever you learn, it will be considered enough," and so then he's okay with it. Well, that's kind of how I feel about Visual C++.

Perl's guts are, well, complicated. Nat Torkington described them well. I believe he said that they are "an interconnected mass of livers and pancreas and lungs and little sharp pointy things and the occasional exploding kidney." It really is hard to maintain Perl 5.

...I finally realized that Perl may be competing with Java in the problem space, but when you're writing Perl, implementing the Perl runtime, really what you're doing is something equivalent to writing a JVM. You're writing the equivalent of a Java Virtual Machine. Now, would you write a JVM in Eiffel? I don't think so. No, so neither would you write the Perl runtime in Java or in Eiffel.

Two good weblogs with overlookable names: rc3 (lots of links daily) and dsl (just a few per week).

Morning project: Atomz.com sends me a weekly report on what strings people are searching for with my onsite searchforms, and it's mostly always undergrads looking for tips on Joyce's "Dubliners" (which I never did anything with)... so I threw together a resource page on it (just links, real boring): http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/dubliners.html

Keeper headlines:

Long Grey Areas interview with Subgenius Ivan Stang (via Ed)
How to make a real arrowhead from a beer bottle (via LarkFarm)
Ed's (very excellent) Weblog (via LarkFarm)
Mike 'Factsheet Five' Gunderloy's very excellent weblog (via eGroups)
Dan 'VisiCalc' Bricklin's new illustrated weblog (via kottke)