![[HS entrance]](jorn/maplegrove.jpg)
My 8th to combined 11th/12th grades, 1966-70:
http://www.mghs.org/
Tue, Dec 7, 1999
Topnotch new Onion:
Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race Of Skeleton People
New wishlist suggestion: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001RXF
I'd like a Yahoo (or DMoz) equivalent that consists entirely of critiques of every listed topic.So I could look under "Internet:WWW:HTML:Stylesheets" and find links to everybody who's criticised stylesheets for whatever reason.
Complicated old poll:
This poll is about net.latency-- how long a delay you see before the Web delivers a page, even with a fast modem. Last year I did a version of the poll where I offered a link and asked people to time how many seconds it took before they got control of the scrollbar.But the first page from a site takes much longer than the second (&c) page, so this time the poll is more complicated. (If you're in too much of a hurry to do this carefully, please skip it-- I really want good data.)
Here's the first link to open-- but don't bother timing the first one. Make sure you don't have anything running in the background to slow things down. After you follow the first link, scroll down that 'Style Guide' page until you get to "Table of contents: Structure of hypertext documents" and start timing when you click the first link in that table of contents... and count the seconds until the scrollbar appears (becomes usable for scrolling).
How long did it take the second page to load?
Why not build our own archives of every webpage we visit? http://www.egroups.com/group/weblogs/650.html
Our browsers currently throw away incredible amounts of info that they should be saving-- even if they saved the full text of every page we ever loaded, it would still take more than a year before this amounted to one gig. (Math: If an average page has 25k of text, a gig would hold 40k pages, which is over 100 pages per day for a year. I'm not sure I even reach 100 on a busy day.)
Vote early, vote often: http://www.msnbc.com/modules/Millennium_People/MillP_artletters.asp
1. William Shakespeare (2215 votes)
2. Leonardo da Vinci (1407 votes)
3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (464 votes)
4. Michelangelo (416 votes)
5. Johann Sebastian Bach (200 votes)
6. Ernest Hemingway (183 votes)
7. Rabindranath Tagore (160 votes)
8. Omar Khayyam (91 votes)
9. Pablo Picasso (83 votes)
10. Ansel Adams (74 votes)
11. Dante Alighieri (56 votes)
12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (52 votes)
13. James Joyce (44 votes)
14. Toni Morrison (44 votes)
15. W.B. Yeats (40 votes)
16. James Baldwin (38 votes)
17. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (37 votes)
18. William Faulkner (26 votes)
19. Igor Stravinsky (19 votes)
20. Eugene O'Neill (13 votes)
What wildlife-photographers envy: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/05/004l-120599-idx.html
"I propose that on the spectrum of what might be called existential contentment, animals surpass humans."
Hacking Yasser: [UK Telegraph]
The computer security breach is believed on the West Bank to have been carried out by PLO officials disgruntled with Mr Arafat's leadership.
(If they were insiders, why did they need to hack?)
Net.radio 2day: 9am to 4pm CST: This is Hell live hilarious progressive RealAudio talk marathon featuring many live Seattle-WTO interviewees, plus this lucid moment of truthful rage from Jeff Dorchen: http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/jeff/99dec04.html
...It's possible that we are on the verge of being condemned to live under the uncontested rule of the most basic, unevolved, brainless, brutal, stupid, vicious force in all of biology.That seems like something worth protesting against.
Don't miss: More great WTO coverage from Progressive Review:
It is fascinating how gracefully the President and the Congress have left the WTO to take the heat. Why is no one holding our officials responsible since they voted on and agreed to all of the provisions they now say are wrong? The WTO did not arrive in a spacecraft from a distant galaxy. It was created by the US and its structure owes as much to our President and our Congress as to anyone else.
I haven't been following the WTO coverage that closely but I was delighted by Clinton's early statements that it needed to be more open and more concerned for the people. I can't find where he also made a pathetically dishonest argument that freer trade would be good for family farms, though.
Fine WTO-101 info-design from the Miami Herald: http://www.herald.com:80/content/thu/docs/048380.htm
There are several specific cases that have infuriated environmentalists, labor groups and farmers:
- Monarch butterflies...
- Clean air act...
- Sea turtles...
- Beef hormones...
- Bananas...
Norman Solomon on WTO: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/991202.html
Over the years, news coverage has been stuck in a default position, routine and implicit: When government leaders and top corporate officials reach agreement on economic rules for the planet to live (and die) by, those rules are basically sound.
Kottke to Yahoo: (2Dec entry) http://kottke.org/
Attention Yahoo! This is what My Yahoo! should be (instead of a lame news portal thing like everyone else): allow people to aggregate their bookmarks in their own personal Yahoo! hierarchy. Yahoo!, first and foremost, is a tool for people to find sites that they want to go to...
Keeper headlines:
Cambridge dictionaries online (via AcqWeb)
Xblog, mostly visual-communication weblog (via Sabren)
Pioneering academic defense of Wicca (UK Times bk review)
Far-out table of correspondences between personality-type classifications (via Ptypes)
Awesome Ptypes weblog (via Sabren)
US zipcodes translated into 'lifestyle clusters' (via lemony)
Google-like rating of weblogs (via Bump)
Heh: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/
Payless.com gets honorable mention in the "make a common feature sound like a selling point" competition:
Leather upper laces up the front for a good fit.But greatentertaining.com takes grand prize:
Chocolate-scented wax pillar candle culminates in wick.
Passionate Sam Smith report on Seattle: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
It will never be the same for the bulimic boomers of brutal capitalism. The serial rapists of the planet's economy and environment still retain their power but they have finally lost their cover of respectability. Even C-SPAN felt obliged to interview a union leader. As Matt Drudge said, "The news was becoming real again."
Glad to see my old MCS ftp directory is still functioning: ftp://ftp.mcs.net/mcsnet.users/jorn/
fwdigest1.txt 104 Kb Sat Sep 11 00:00:00 1993
^^^^six years old!
WTO on the news:
ABC and CBS spent all their time on the mechanics of the rioting. PBS gave ~25 minutes to a four-person panel three of whom opposed WTO (one Reaganite protectionist, one law professor, one Global Trade Watch-er). It was good enough to awaken people's curiosity, but nowhere near enough to make them educated on the subject.
Five games that will change gaming? [multipage] http://www.gamespot.com/features/game_evol_hub/index.html
1. Freelancer
2. Halo
3. Black & White
4. The Sims
5. Good and Evil
New Onion:
Terrorist Bomb Not Defused In Thrilling, Suspense-Packed Final Minutes
I'd hardly gotten any way into my RegExp for Poets page (see below) when I discovered that there's no obvious source to compare different implementations (the one I use-- Nisus-- is apparently very non-standard). So I've started doing a RegExp-resources portal: http://www.robotwisdom.com/net/regexres.html
Origins: In the forties, Warren McCulluch and Walter Pitts created neuron-level models of how the nervous system operates. The mathematician, Stephen Kleene, later described these models using his mathematical notation called regular expressions...
Source-code as literature: http://salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/30/lions/print.html
When I finally found the man who would become my fiance, he was a Unix hacker. This baffled me. I couldn't begin to imagine how the arid world of over-lit computer labs and humming server rooms could have produced someone so much droller and more insightful than my fellow humanities graduates. So I did what I always do when I want to get inside someone's head: I browsed his bookshelves...The Unix code base enchanted Lions -- so much so that he decided to make significant changes to two of the courses he taught. Until then, most teachers of operating systems loftily imparted general principles about programs their students had probably never seen, or encouraged students to build toy operating systems of their own. Unix offered a third approach...
"Because we couldn't legally discuss the book in the university's operating systems class, several of us would meet at night in an empty classroom to discuss the book," said Reintjes. "It was the only time in my life when I was an active member of an underground."
Just So: How The Multinational Got Its Brand: (long, hilarious) http://salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html
"We've done this process with hundreds of companies," Redhill says wearily. "They all say, 'We want to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring.'"After four months of this sort of intensive brand therapy, the group settled upon the only name capable of conveying such protean emotions -- "Agilent."
Among Landor's rival name-slingers around the Bay Area, the choice of Agilent was immediately greeted with snorts of derision. "The most namby-pamby, phonetically weak, light-in-its-shoes name in the entire history of naming," declared Rick Bragden, president of the naming firm Idiom. "It's like a parody of a Landor name. It's insipid. It's ineptly rendered ... It ought to be taken out back and shot."
"Perhaps it would be best if Landor just closed up shop," he says quietly. "I don't want to trash them too badly. It's just that their last four, five naming projects have been total disasters."
"Their names are nothing more than a bunch of concatenized prefixes and suffixes -- totally soulless," he insinuates.
In addition to Lexicon, Idiom and Metaphor, the discriminating brand managers may now choose between NameLab, NameBase, Name/It, NameTrade, Namestormers and TrueNames. Each of the firms has its own jealously guarded methodology, a signature "naming module" that distinguishes it from its competitors.
"I had one guy from a naming firm ask me me how I expected to get a name from a non-expert. He literally said, 'I charge $150,000 just to sneeze.'"
"It's like using a computer program to write a song," Manning says. "You can do it, but why?"
WTO coverage on the network news:
I saw all of ABC's report tonight, and most of CBS's and NBC's. ABC was rather good, with many good soundbites from protestors. CBS and NBC had almost no soundbites from protestors, and NBC made some claims that I believe are serious BS, about how the USA is trying to get more labor and environmental protections. NBC also framed WTO dominance as an inevitability, and a 'win-win' situation.PBS only gave it a minute, mostly Clinton's press secretary, but they better do a long segment tomorrow, with a reasonable spokesperson...
New NY Review of Books:
Alison Lurie: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
James Fallows: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis
High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars by Charles H. Ferguson
Gore Vidal: Chaos [1000 AD]
Geoffrey O'Brien: Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 by James Miller
Vaclav Havel: The First Laugh
Pankaj Mishra: The Other India
Nielsen to Web startups: "I deserve more pie!" http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991128.html
Contrary to this advice, Internet start-ups typically spend 300 times as much money on advertising as they spend on usability.
(But how many of Epinions' initial design flaws can be laid at JN's door?)
Keeper headlines:
RealAudios of old Hoagy Carmichael classics (via metascene)
metascene web log (Tripod)
First two chapters of 'The Perfect Storm' (WashPost)
Patrick O'Brian praises Sebastian Junger (UK Telegraph)
Ghastly new Kosovo depleted-uranium revelations (UK Independent)
XML-driven search engine (via WebWord)
Low-key Montessori-inspired educational software (Alabama)
Readable transcript of 'Sports Night' pilot (via Windowseat)
Sunday project (under construction): http://www.robotwisdom.com/net/regexps.html
Regular Expressions for Poets
Useful review of Vincent Price bio: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-11/28/040l-112899-idx.html
The book does perk up a bit in the later years, mostly because Price had the good sense to marry Coral Browne, a fine actress with an even finer tongue. (Decked out in an oversized wig for "Tamurlaine the Great," she complained: "I feel as though my face is coming out of a yak's ass.")
Another long critique of a web style guide: [deja]
> Only add information if the resource is in > some unusual format, or is very large. For example, if the site > offers a 1.44 megabytes AVI movie, a text like "(AVI, 1.44MB)" > after the link could be used to indicate this.The weblogs community has a wide range of warnings they add-- every sort of criticism of the site design, really. (Beware the: frames, tables, fonts, colors, typos, plug-ins, pop-ups, etc etc etc.)
Another bit of thinking for my ultimate OS: [deja]
I'm thinking that one of the core dimensions of object-interface behavior is how we schedule their next appearance once we're done with them. So if you're looking at or editing an object, when you finish, you should always choose from a set of possibilities like this (from most 'negative' to most 'positive'):- destroy every trace, quick (eg for espionage)...
Will weblog-ratings spoil weblog individuality? (24Nov entry) http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/
Henceforth, major programming changes are in store. We'll be concentrating our news linking to sensationalistic stories -- lots of Y2K hysteria, blood and gore (webcams near major freeway accident-prone spots!) and crimes of passion. We'll also consider more links to exciting sites with content that'll get our ratings way up!
9am to 3pm CST: This is Hell as seen in Wired magazine (live RealAudio available)
I think I like the html <BIG> tag.
Taken: First-come free copy of Patrick O'Brian paperback:
The library copy of the latest Aubrey/Maturin Napoleonic British Navy saga by Patrick O'Brian has a card stuffed in it for a free paperback copy of the first book in that series, "Master and Commander". I'd like to target it to someone who's been hearing about the series and thinks they might well continue thru with all twenty. If you think that's you, mail me your postal mailing address where they can send the package (USA only, 4-6 wks).
I got to read part four of Peter Dickinson's latest children's series, an imaginative reconstruction of life 200k years ago: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/dickinson.html
The Kin (1998) Noli's Story, Suth's Story, Mana's Story, Po's StoryPublished in UK as a single 640pp monster, in the US as four separate volumes.
I've read only the fourth so far, but it was outstanding. Very sweetly-drawn portrayal of what the earliest humans with language might have been like 200,000 years ago. In Po's Story they're facing a drought, and deal with a giant crocodile and a different tribe that lacks language.
(Our imaginations need much better visualisations of this era than previous writers have managed. The stereotype of grunting brutes is hard to overcome, but PD is wizardly. Nabokov has a great image somewhere of literature originating with a 'furry woodland fellow crying wolf'.)
Complete list of current BBS threads: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=Robot%20Wisdom
What's up with Salon?
The keyboard-vs-streets continuum of activism
What's up with the tiny banner ads?
What's the deal with PhilG?
Dot.com's and the death of ideas?
What's up with Mozilla?
Can you mark up prose with XML?
How wired will we be in 2005?
Prayer and telepathy
Can we make an Open Source IMDb replacement?
What lesson from Britannica.com deluge?
What are your fave hacks of all time?
Good or bad on new ImagineRadio site?
Is Nervana worth getting excited about?
Why do Slashdot's forums suck so bad?
Web services we'd like to see
Does Waco have you upset, now?
Where does Google fail?
Yesterday's Present from Ellen [qv] didn't animate for me till I upgraded to Flash 4:
http://download.cnet.com/ (if you get it here you don't have to register)
The dominant theme of the RW BBS seems to be site critiques. Today we add Salon: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001rRM
How do you approach Salon?Do you ever dig for the content not linked from their main page? Do you ever visit their talk forum?
Do you flee screaming from the caricatures of their columnists? Do you read their logs?
Do they offer too much content these days? Do they index it too poorly?
Overheard on rec.arts.books:
The online Britannica is not the latest edition!??
I ignored dozens of links to this timeline of GUIs, but now I cave in it's beautifully done, with fascinating screenshots: (heavy graphics) http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/guitimeline.html
1985: Geos released for Commodore 64 and later the Apple II.
Old poll:
This hard-to-explain poll is about weblogging as compared to pre-Web discussions of newspaper and magazine articles.Think about the year before you got seriously into the Internet. Think of what newspapers and magazines you read then... and who you discussed them with. I'm not interested here in how many articles you read, but rather in how often you had a chance to express a weblog-like opinion of an average article to any other person.
So imagine a period of time in which you read 100 articles-- maybe a month or three. During that time period, how many times would you have mentioned to someone else your opinion of an article?
So if you only talked to one person, but you talked to them about every single thing you read, your answer here would be 100. If you talked to five different people about one article each, your answer would be five.
So the question is: In the days before you were on the Net, considering 100 average articles you read, how many times did you give a weblog-like opinion of one of those articles to any person?
Today's spelling conundrum, stats courtesy AllTheWeb.com:
152432 brigitte (bardot, eaton)
117026 bridget (fonda, hall)
102047 birgit
19776 brigid
17575 birgitte
16173 bridgette
10511 bridgett
6358 brigit
6193 brigette
2872 birgitt
2361 bridgit
1261 briget
944 bridgid
814 brigitt
762 bridgitte
724 birgid
532 brigite
347 brigett
310 bridgete
289 birget
222 bridgitt
88 birgette
45 bridgite
42 birdget
25 birgett
11 brigete
1 birdgett
1 birdgette
1 birdgit
0 birdgete
0 birdgid
0 birdgite
0 birdgitt
0 birdgitteWhere I'm at wrt tiny banners:
All the negativity about the ads was a bit traumatic, but the archive page is getting tons of hits, and I'm continuing to add new submissions there, even if they don't all make it onto this page.I don't accept them at all unless they're in the HTML format I requested. And I mostly won't feature them if they have any graphics (because the combined effect is visually overwhelming), and I definitely favor them if they're bland and have text that changes from time to time. Be creative.
The point of the experiment is to hand over a part of my page to others to demonstrate their creativity, but there's a degree of cooperation required.
Anita Rowland and Brian Jones offer earlier Mike Leigh/Gilbert & Sullivan coverage:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0151568
http://upcomingmovies.com/topsyturvy.html
http://www.britfilms.com/britfilms99/films/topsy_turvy.html
http://www.morgensterns.co.uk/Morgensterns/Client/kipling.t.1963.htm
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.htm
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyfffilms99.htm
http://www.panix.com/~dangelo
Candi Strecker's homepage: (multipage, nothing new in many months, I don't think) http://members.tripod.com/~lifestyle1970s/index.html
...I escaped with husband Matt Householder to San Francisco, where through most of the 80s I published zines and puttered around and utterly failed to have anything resembling a career. In 1993 we became the parents of Nicola (as in Tesla) Sage Householder and I elected to stay home with her. To my complete surprise, for the first time in my life, I became productive and self-disciplined enough to do some serious, salable freelance writing in the minutes I snatched from naptimes and evenings.
So far my highschool memoirs (see below) are more in the style of an epinions profile than Joyce's Portrait... which cowardlily skirts the interesting stuff Candi Strecker was after: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/hs.html
Bemus Point had a bit of an artists' colony subculture (influence of Chautauqua Lake and the Chautauqua Institution, plus a heritage of religious fringe groups like the Spiritualists at Lilydale (memorialised by homey band 10,000 Maniacs))... but (like the USA in general) high school culture was mostly about sports and getting drunk.
Don't miss: Short Jello Biafra interview on the WTO protests: http://192.245.12.37/current/music.html
"I mean, we have to get away from this whole notion that it's more important to be a marketplace than a community, that it's more important to be competitive than to care about your fellow human beings and the state of the planet."
General challenge:
Zine-godess Candi Strecker once pointed out that the hardest and most interesting autobiographical subject-matter isn't the cool stuff we may have done, but the uncool periods, eg small town high school tales. So I invite all web authors to create a page of high school memories, that truthfully sketch what your school was like and how you fit in (or didn't).
My 8th to combined 11th/12th grades, 1966-70:
http://www.mghs.org/
Home of the Red Dragons
Unexpected Net.success story... www.speech-writers.com: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/1125/fea2.htm
A sharp increase in inquiries over the previous six months encouraged Crowe to develop a range of "pre-prepared" speeches; shrink-wrapped vignettes stacked on the shelves of her virtual supermarket like so many tins of soup. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
The Rule of Thirty: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/research/mjbates2.html (David Haan)
- A book title is 1/30 the length of a table of contents in characters on average.
- A table of contents is 1/30 the length of a back of the book index on average.
- A back of the book index is 1/30 the length of the text of a book on average.
- An abstract is 1/30 the length of the technical paper it represents on average...All these results suggest that human beings process information in such a way as to move through levels of access that operate in 30:1 ratios.
(So should anchor-text (or link text) be 1/30th the length of the page it links? That I'd like to see!)
Interesting Byron analysis of IBM: http://www.observer.com/pages/envelope.htm
Meanwhile, I.B.M.'s stock price began a rise reminiscent of its performance as the ultimate growth stock back in the go-go 1960's, when Tom Watson was running the place, and people who knew what they were talking about would regale their grandchildren with what awaited them in the will-never forgetting to admonish the youngsters, "Whatever you do, never sell the I.B.M.!" (1962 to 1968: $5 to $20-remember when performance like that was considered something?)
TV 2nite: Nova sounds pretty good: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lasalle/
An archaeologist finds the wreckage of La Belle, a French ship from the 1680s.
Old poll:
Assuming the rules I stated (no animation, no graphics, any colors), how many random tiny (175-by-24) banner ads would it take to gross you out as much as one normal-sized (468-by-60) banner ad?
New Onion:
Area Man Hasn't Told Co-Workers About His Billy Joel Fanpage Yet
Meta: The reaction to the ads is so intensely negative I think I'll have to scale back the experiment sooner than planned. Probably I'll first request white backgrounds and a simple line of text.
New first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
- "Sony: The Private Life" John Nathan. Author details the successful and secretive company. (Non-Fiction)
- "The Ladies Auxiliary" Tova Mirvis. The tale of a close-knit Orthodox community in Memphis. (Fiction)
- "What the Body Remembers" Shauna Singh Baldwin. The story of two Indian wives fighting for the attention of their husband. (Fiction)
- "Lies Across America" James W. Loewen. The author corrects common errors about historical monuments. (Non-Fiction)
Yikes: I never woulda guessed: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
[With how many of the following statements do you agree? For extra points, identify the source of each statement.]1. We were told we were fighting to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Before NATO's air strikes, 90,000 had fled. But after NATO's peace, 180,000 Serbs have been driven from their homes...
[And elsewhere:] ...(The United States has suffered no consequences from its nonpayment of UN dues, but it snaps to attention when threatened with a WTO sanction.) It is as if on a global scale we had a government with only a Commerce Department.
[And:] The energy to make, use, and dispose of catalogs this year will be the same as that used by 1 million households generating the greenhouse gas equivalent of 1.7 million cars driven 200 miles a week.
New BBS thread on activism vs(?) the Web: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001qDH
Someone was recently arguing that the Internet is going to be a bust for activism, and that if we really want change we need to take to the streets. (He included Pacifica Radio at the ineffectual/ keyboard end of the spectrum.)I'm not sure I've ever participated in a political rally, and I definitely feel like I'm making a difference by propagating the unreported stories in the alternative news.
But is this 'weblog activism' a feeble echo of what getting out might do?
Don't miss: Ridgeway on Hillary's meltdown, and a threat to whales: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9947/ridgeway.shtml
The navy's proposed sonar project will reach out in a radius of 300 miles, engulfing an area of thousands of square miles with 140 decibels of sound. Just as humans depend on sight, fish, marine mammals, and other marine species depend on sound to get around in the murky depths. Being subjected to the navy's sonar blasts has sometimes been likened to standing next to a revved-up 747 just before it takes off.
Smart article about electronica: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9946/wolk.shtml
His favorite source material is the sound of guitars, pianos, autoharps, whatever, hammered and plucked and electronically altered; his aesthetic grew up on rock, but was baptized by the "amen." That beat, the drum break from the Winstons' "Amen Brother," is worse than a cliche in drum 'n' bass: It's the default option, which seems to be exactly what intrigues Hrvatski about it. He treats the amen as an alphabet rather than a slogan, crumbling and remolding it until only its timbre is recognizable.
(Thanks to the VV for making pullquote-text selectable again!)
I'm starting to rotate out banner ads so there's still three rows: http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/huger.html
If you get rotated out, change your image to make it more useful-- I'll check these archived copies from time to time to see who's making the effort. (Good = attractive, informative. Bad = just a site name)
Brain-busting online book: http://www.netlib.org/utk/lsi/pcwLSI/text/node341.html [Renegade]
...Thus, as an attempt to explore a part of this interesting, poorly understood region in algorithm space, we implemented chess on an nCUBE-1 hypercube. Besides being a fascinating field of study in its own right, computer chess is an interesting challenge for parallel computers because:- It is not clear how much parallelism is actually available-the important method of alpha-beta pruning conflicts with parallelism.
- Some aspects of the algorithm require a globally shared data set.
- The parallel algorithm has dynamic load imbalance of an extreme nature.
Wolff backgrounder on magazine-design eminence Roger Black: (2pg) http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=1588
...(once, in a rare working meeting I had with Roger, he spent a few minutes looking carefully at a prototype and then made his single and singular contribution to the project: "Lose the Bodoni")...Roger has designed or redesigned Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, McCall's, The New Republic, Fast Company, Reader's Digest, Foreign Affairs, Advertising Age, Esquire, and now the National Enquirer... His new, parallel Web career goes from parentsoup.com and barnesandnoble.com to the U.S. Senate. [links to his sites]
In the mid-eighties, leaving Newsweek, he embraced the Macintosh. The advent of the Mac is a pivotal moment in design -- roughly equivalent to the arrival of the spreadsheet in finance or sound in movies or the sitcom in comedy.
Question:
Is anyone noticing that Google's results are including a lot more bogus commercial sites near the top? ...Maybe they've cracked the algorithm???
I really want a good recommendation for a make-your-own-banners site. Here's a directory of possibilties I don't plan to explore myself: http://directory.hotbot.com/Computers/Internet/WWW/Authoring/Webmaster_Resources/Online_Tools/ (MikeG)
And a tutorial on doing it by hand: http://members.tripod.com/~ukulju/bannermaking.htm (MikeG)
Mike adds:
What I really want is an automated command-line text-to-gif tool that I can tie into my database... I found one for OS/2 but none for Windows.
Early poll results: The only other poll that was this polarised was last June's 'how gay are you?' [qv]. How many random tiny banner ads would it take to gross you out as much as one normal-sized banner ad? (24 votes so far)
58% Even one 13% Two or three 8% Four or five 0% Six to eight 21% Nine or more
Hunger Site banners are 120-by-60 (and they're finally full up, congrats!): http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/donate.pl
Wow: A dad who dutifully plays Barbies with his daughter: http://salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/11/23/ken/print.html
The mere prospect of the game can induce a heavy urge to go to sleep, surf the Web or reach reflexively for the liquor cabinet. I will ask to play cards or a board game, anything but Bar ... then pinch myself awake, summoning my daddy conscience. This is, after all, a passing moment of childhood, one I should cherish. In years to come, utters my better self, I will long for the days when a little voice cried out for me to play Barbies. And on occasion, a kind of magic ensues, and the little plastic faces come alive for both of us, laughing, crying, snorting in anger. They are contract players in a studio where we pull all the strings...So I play my part (Ken) with a mind to showing her how to get along with a guy, with perhaps some subtle indication of the kind of guy she might want to get along with.
(With a nod to my own dad, who made comparable efforts when we were small!)
I expect there are several websites where you can make fancy tiny banner ads. This may be one: (reg req) http://www.digitalmediaworks.com./ [RBuzz]
Your source for all your web design graphics needs Direct from the Internet, without having to invest in expensive stand-alone software! Instantly create banners, buttons, business cards and other graphics suitable for your web site
(Any others?)
Keeper headlines:
Seven Wonders site-of-the-day page (via LinkWatcher)
A photographer's insights on light (PhilG)
Catcher in the Rye (Old first chapter)
New Ani DiFranco RealAudios (iforgetwhere)
Yet another Microsoft OS nightmare (Salon- don't miss)