  |
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| "I came in as bright as a neon light... |
...and I burned out right there before him." [jm] |
| Usenet |
Wed, Dec 22, 1999
Yikes: Time to lay off the rarebit? http://www.jennicam.org/~jenni/journal/1221.html
I'm still having a really really hard time remembering my dreams. My friend Courtney and I were talking about it, and I realized that the dreams I DO remember are usually really bad. In recent memory, there's been one of my mother throwing me into the ocean and me drowning, one of me in a hellish obstacle course with pits of fire and screaming dead bodies reaching for me, one where all I remember is somebody tearing off their own face and eating it...
Tuesday project (still messy): http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/marta.html
Marta Sebestyen resources on the Web
(She's apparently best known for the opening song in The English Patient.)
Don't-miss-if-you-like-this-stuff: AI-savvy critique of XML-for-news: http://www.signiform.com/erik/pubs/newsund.htm
NewsForm documents, which we call NewsForms, describe 17 types of news events: competitions, deals, earnings reports, economic releases, Fed watching, IPOs, injuries and fatalities, joint ventures, legal events, medical findings, negotiations, new products, management successions, trips and visits, votes, war, and weather reports.Computer-understandable news opens up the possibility of news-aware rooms, furniture, toys, and clothing. Based on the outcome of a news event such as a vote or legal proceeding, a room could alter the lighting and music, furniture could change color, or stuffed animals could alter their facial expression.
Still a few bugs in the speech-recognition system: [messy Joyce query] [Bird/wire]
[Frank McCourt and Charlie Rose automatic transcript:] ...is the surveys done on trains planes boxes the airport on just what it sees any way I couldn't find any of the that the writings and but I I thought that that can really evading this biography of a book james joyce by over two thousand which is and that's the only product that and that one point choice that I can look we're going into a historic treaty s. pilots...
(Actual transcript: "...his(?) was written on trains, planes, buses, airport lounges, toilet seats, anywhere I could find... But that can't be good for writing then... Well I I I was looking uh rereading this biography of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann which is a masterly biography and at one point Joyce said I can write anywhere and he did Zurich Trieste Paris...")
An indie Yahoo: http://www.honeylocust.com/positive/tag/theweb.html
Built on Perl and PostgresSQL, Positive Propaganda uses style sheets and downloadable fonts to create a unique look without images. Paul keeps to a rigid format, reviewing four sites each week and hyperlinking only to the sites under review.
Krassner on Gaskin, RAW, et al: http://www.laweekly.com:80/ink/00/04/real-krassner.shtml
His wife, Ina May, president of the Midwives Alliance of North America, predicts that she would be "an unruly First Lady." She would turn the Lincoln Bedroom into a birth center for the poor. She would grow hemp in the Rose Garden, all meals at the White House would be vegetarian, and she'd teach a Secret Service agent to braid her hair. When asked if she has intern concerns, she replies, "No, we'll do the blowjobs in every room." Her husband will be left to explain to the media, "I can't control her. You try."
Don't ever spend a cent on the NY Times: http://www.woz.org/woz/features/microsoft.html [iforgetwhere]
The New York Times didn't print my op-ed right away. After months, as I recall, they decided to run it. They sent me a rewritten version that followed the theme of Microsoft being the great innovator. It was a 180 degree reversal, with my name attached. I refused to let them run it and I refused to work on my version because I saw that they were setting me up to be good PR for Microsoft. Then I found out that one of the key Microsoft executives writes a column for the New York Times...
One of the best Joni interviews ever: (6pg) http://www.rolandus.com/USERS/RUG/ARCHIVE/WIN_96/FEAT14_2/JONI1.HTM
Things were so bad that she actually called up the producers of Northern Exposure, a show she adored, and proposed that they cast her for a guest appearance based on this storyline: Joni Mitchell has quit show business, left all that L.A. craziness behind, and is driving through Cicely, Alaska, on her way to something better.
Keeper headlines:
Whistling a language (Language Miniatures)
Great mini-essays about language (via TracerLock)
Wilson Quarterly offering some articles online (via TracerLock)
A cynical theory of VA Linux's spectacular IPO (Salon)
Superb Lynda Barry interview (The Onion)
Daily preview of TV news magazines etc (Brill's Content)
Long summary of new Mailer bio (Scripps-Howard)
A quiet little weblog (Tanquelogue)
Good post-mortem on Mars failure (Dome of the Sky)
Michael Wolff on the new economy (NYMag-7pg)
This is my fave Joni Mitchell anecdote: [source]
"...A guard asked us for credentials. I kind of waxed passive and backed down. Jane, who was always trying to get me to use my existential edge, said, "Do you know who she is?" Well, she said my name and these kids standing at the gate went, "Aaaah," and sucked their breath in. My heart started to beat like crazy. I turned around and ran in the other direction like some crazed animal. I ran, and I ran, and I ran. I must've run about five blocks before I realized how strange my reaction was."
(But this couldn't have taken place at Newport in 1966!??)
Saturday project: (mostly complete) http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/joni.html
1943: 7 Nov, born Roberta Joan Anderson in Ft. McLeod, Saskatchewan, Canada (only child of grocer Bill and schoolteacher Myrtle)
Revisiting an experiment from last January:
Chacun a son annee: Tonight they're gonna party like it's:
1999 (2692 pages found) (was 404 a year ago)
1998 (52) (was 31)
1997 (13) (was 23)
1996 (3) (was 47)
1993 (5) (was 7)
1990 (1) (was 2)
1979 (26) (was 3)
1969 (30) (was 6)
1959 (10) (was 17)
1949 (7) (was 4)
1929 (3) (was 2)
1899 (156) (was 23)
1699 (38) (was 47)
1399 (5) (was 5)
2199 (1) (was 2)
Bitter new Anti-Math panel:
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| "I came in as bright as a neon light... |
...and I burned out right there before him." [jm] |
| Usenet |
One-line version: *)))|))))
I'm very slowly overhauling my portal-page on search.literacy: http://www.robotwisdom.com/netlit/search.html
# syntax
# bookmarklets
# searchlinks
# deja
# alltheweb
A good day to tell Ellen (ellen@lfs.nl) you love her: http://www.lfs.nl/
today i just feel miserable, like i shouldn't exist.
Excellent review of the Contra-cocaine evidence: http://www.consortiumnews.com/121499b.html
Levine still fumes when he reviews the incriminating entries in Ollie North's notebooks that were turned over to the congressional committees. On July 12, 1985, for instance, North wrote about one contra arms warehouse in Honduras: "Fourteen million to finance came from drugs."
Ellen's present today didn't seem to do anything for quite a long time, but eventually I got the keyboard to respond: http://www.lfs.nl/present/12-15-99/12-15-99.html
Bigger (80K) than i thought, but you can type anything!
Detailed rave for Replay TV: http://www.sfbayguardian.com/videocard/04.html
The only downside I've found with the Replay is that MPEG-2 artifacts ("jaggies" across images or a snowy picture) are very noticeable with low-quality recordings. In scenes with a lot of motion, the picture will slightly break up as the digital decoder attempts to keep up with the information. Low-quality recording is really, really low quality, on par with an over-used videotape...
Fun old backgrounder on Being John Malkovich: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9942/lim.shtml
[JM:] "The last [stalker] I had was in England. I hit him on the head with my knuckles about 400 times. I never saw him again. I was doing a play in the West End. He was outside after the show with a sandwich board on which he had scrawled hundreds of thousands of times with an ink pen, 'I'm waiting.' And I just sort of literally flipped my wig- I was wearing a wig- and went downstairs and just started rapping him in the head, and said, If you really think you're going to come here and play a psychopath with me, you'd better go away and study for a while. I've been waiting for you my whole life..."...Spike? "Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I figured the less you show, the better. And, um, the less we try and, you know, the more we leave open to people to just imagine, what you want to fill into the blanks, the more, um, the more sort of real it would be."
Bizarre performance experiment: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9950/griscom.shtml
"We're going to run it like an intelligence agency, a cross between the CIA and the KGB," Harris says. "We're using a combination of psychological profiling, measuring the strength of a person's ego, and rigorous surveillance tactics." The idea is to control behavior among citizens by creating a climate of fear, within a climate of acceptance and pleasure-so you have, simultaneously, absolute freedom of expression, and absolute lack of privacy.
Fascinating glimpse of how Mike Leigh directs: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9950/taubin.shtml
"Some people have said to me that I must have had fun staging the excerpts from the shows and that I must direct an opera. I can't think of anything I'd rather do less. Those were the least interesting scenes for me. We worked from Gilbert's prompt book for The Mikado and reconstructed the original staging. But the filming of the rehearsal scene [one of the film's big set pieces] was a delight. I had all sorts of battles about that scene because people thought it was too long and repetitive. But you've got to do it. Movies about artists where you never get a whiff of how they manufacture things have always bugged me. And since this is finally a film about process, we drop anchor for a while and let the audience see the tedium and repetition."
(Sounds like Jacques Rivette!)
Keeper headlines:
If you ever hear this song it will drive you nuts forever after (via Google)
DinoMorph software tests hypotheses about dino-skeleton engineering (via Simcoe)
Quirky 'Best Rock Musicians' list, by year 1955-1999 (via Google)
MTV's 100-best-videos-ever list (via Medley)
I'm still looking for pix from 'Gemma Bovery' (via Google)
JenniCam RealVideo show archive (via alt.fan.jennicam)
PDF version of Ashby's Intro to Cybernetics (PrincCyb)
Ancient World weblog (via Occasional)
Convert your phone number to its oldstyle exchange name (via Looka)
Rave review for Intel's $100 digital microscope (AP-notFox)
New Onion:
The Onion's Man of the Millennium: Death
Michael Wolff on Seattle/WTO: (3pg) http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?cat_id=4&area_id=1
What if the nineties are actually the fifties, and here, as the decade turns, we are looking at the first sign of the sixties, the turn against prosperity and mindless commerciality (mindless e-commerciality) and anti-intellectuality and the endless stupefying banality and conformity of fast food and malls and dot-coms (and just when you were thinking prosperity was fun)?On the other hand, speaking of globalism, my favorite restaurant in the world is a chain restaurant -- a highway restaurant called the Autogrill, which spans the coming and going lanes of Italy's Autostrade. It's an imitation of U.S. highway fast-food franchisees. Except that the food in these places in Italy is the most delicious (for the most reasonable price) I've ever had. Big pots of risotto. Mountains of mozzarella. Come-hither figs...
New first chapters: http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/chapter.htm
- "When All Hell Breaks Loose" Camika Spencer. When Gregory Alston proposes to his girlfriend of three years, things don't go as planned. (Fiction)
- "Carl Sagan: A Life" Keay Davidson. Prophet or skeptic? Dreamer or analyst? Pulizer Prize-winning scientist remains an elusive puzzle. (Nonfiction)
- "The Way We Lived Then" Dominick Dunne. Novelist and reporter drops names, spreads celebrity gossip and photographs (Nonfiction)
New Scientific American:
- Snowball Earth
- Narcolepsy
- The Nobel Prizes for 1999
Early poll results (29 votes): http://www.misterpoll.com/poll.wga?id=1798897860
I've dreamt I was working at a computer. (17)
I've dreamt I was trying to write a program. (17)
I've dreamt I was playing a video- or computer-game. (14)
I've dreamt I was looking at a computer. (12)
I've dreamt I was seeing the world in terms of computer techniques. (12)
I've dreamt I was web-surfing. (12)
I've dreamt I got some new computer equipment. (12)
I've dreamt I was face-to-face with someone I really only know via the Net. (10)
I've dreamt I was applying computer techniques to solve a realworld problem. (8)
I've dreamt I was writing email. (3)
I've dreamt I was net-chatting. (3)
I've dreamt I was inside a computer or program (cf Tron). (2)
I've dreamt I was in a VR version of the Net. (2)
I've dreamt I was web-surfing for porn. (0)
Doing this Incredible String Band resource page was so absorbing I forgot all about doing the weblog: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/isb.html
1969: flopped at Woodstock [detailed account]
Woodstock setlist:
- Sleepers Awaken
- Catty Come
- This Moment Is Different
- When You Find Out Who You Are
Here's the Cyber-Dreaming poll (Fri below) with many fine new suggestions: http://www.misterpoll.com/poll.wga?id=1798897860
What sorts of presence do computers and the Net have in your dreams? Check all that apply, but only if you're quite sure they're correct. [View results only]
Net.radio 2day: 9am-3pm CST: This is Hell live Realaudio funny progressive talkradio with many hot interviews plus Jeff Dorchen's Moment of Truth
Don't miss: Profile of Van Dyke Parks: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/1999/1211/fea8.htm
"As my friend Randy Newman says, I'm a musical goat. And I concur. And I think eclecticism is, by now, a standard operating procedure in a composer or a musician's life. I just follow my own conscience. As Kinky Friedman said, `you gotta find what you love, and let it kill you.' "Van Dyke Parks can indeed claim Einstein as a former accompanist. It all happened on the front porch when the Boychoir School, out singing for the locals, called at Einstein's house. "He went back inside when I was singing and I was frightened. I thought I had made a mistake and that maybe my German wasn't good enough. I looked at the choirmaster and he gave me the evil eye..."
(His 1968 "Song Cycle" is one of the most magical albums ever, and his unproduced 1984 "Jump!" one of the most joyous musicals. Guess I'll make a quick resource page.)
Don't miss: Backgrounder on webmistress Jane Siberry: http://www.sfgate.com/eguide/music/derk/
The singer auctioned off her first gold record, a guitar, and the pink bustier from the cover of Maria. She also kept up her email stream of "Museletters" -- announcements, updates and occasional gifts of poetry to her fans -- and used the Internet to promote her $200-per-ticket "Siberry Salon," a combination concert-workshop-dinner held in private homes. "I made a lot of acquaintances and found it's been acceptable to me to ask them for help," Siberry says.
New BBS topic in preparation for a new poll: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001yGf
I don't think I can remember a specific dream about computers or the Net, though I expect I must have them sometimes. I want to do a poll on this but I need preliminary feedback on questions to ask. I'm thinking of a multi-answer (MrPoll) format that includes these options:- I've dreamt I was inside a computer or program (cf Tron).
- I've dreamt I was in a VR version of the Net.
- I've dreamt I was web-surfing.
- I've dreamt I was net-chatting.
- I've dreamt I was writing email.
- I've dreamt I was working at a computer.
- I've dreamt I was looking at a computer.
- I've dreamt I was trying to write a program.So what else am I missing?
I'm not near happy with this new page yet: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/molecular.html
This webpage is meant to aggregate Web resources about computer modeling of human encounters, especially models that view an encounter as a 'molecule' built by combining instances of two or more personality types (the 'atoms').
A Mac app like Isys Hindsite (below): http://www.seracsoftware.com/iremember.html (jjg)
Compatibility
MacOS 7.1 and later (including MacOS 9)
PowerPC or 68K Macintosh.
MacTCP or OpenTransport (1.1.1 and later).
Web Browsers:
Netscape Navigator (2.02 - 4.5)
Explorer (3.0 - 4.5)
AOL (2.7 - 4.0)
iCab 1.x
The Robot Wisdom List: Spy magazine used to have an annoying puzzle each month-- a list of celebs who had something extremely non-obvious in common. I don't think they ever gave the answers, but I'll give the answer here at the bottom of this page:
25 Jan 1961 Woody Guthrie 2 Jan 1963 Robert Graves 9 Oct 1963 Henry Miller 26 Dec 1963 Allen Ginsberg 6 Feb 1964 Carl Sandburg 28 Aug 1964 The Beatles 3 Sep 1965 Marlon Brando
Long profile of infanticide-sociobiologist Sara Hrdy: http://salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/12/09/maternal/print.html
"What does it mean," she asks in the book's introduction, "to be born a mammal, with an emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of a primate, possessing the mind of a human being. To be a semi-continuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, filled with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?"
Wrt archiving visited webpages (6Dec below), mokane writes:
There is a program written for Windows platforms by Isys Development Company called Isys Hindsite which creates a searchable database of all web sites visited. Unfortunately, it's not for the Mac, nor does it archive the site. Say you visited one site last year which contained the word 'velociraptor' and wanted to visit it. Hindsite will quickly provide you with the URL. If the site is no longer on line, the URL is unfortunately worthless, as there are no available web archives such as that which Dejanews maintains for usenet.There was another similar program called "Elephant Tracks" but the author abandoned it because of pirating.
As text-only web pages are small in size, I agree with you that there ought to be a way to archive visited pages.
Theoretically, Isys Hindsite should work with Opera, but I have never been successful in getting it to work. (Opera claims compatability with Netscape Plug-ins, and there exists a plug-in version of Hindsite). For that reason alone I no longer use Opera.
Keeper headlines:
Clickable world-conflicts map (via LakeEffect)
Long Norman Mailer update (NYObserver)
New intro to Linux kernel internals (Byte)
Chuck Colson blames Littleton on postmodernism (via rec.arts.books)
Very short and mysterious poem (Poems.com)
100k GIF of Viacom's media empire (CJR)
Yikes! (don't miss) The sociobiology of infanticide (etc): http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991211/inhumanfut.html
Human male violence towards babies and infants may be brutal and tragic but it's nothing like what a langur male is doing. When these males target a mother with an infant, they stalk them for hours with an erect penis and a distinctive hacking vocalisation termed a "cackle bark", rarely heard in other contexts. The attack is as organised and as focused as a shark's.This is the first book to really come out and say that humans must have evolved as cooperative breeders.
I am convinced that current child-rearing practices jeopardise the future of the species, not in the sense that the species will die out, but in the sense that we are altering the conditions under which natural selection can operate. People who grow up without committed kin are less likely to develop along the usual path. They're more likely to be narcissistic, not so able to put themselves in another person's shoes, and in extreme cases, unable to feel any empathy at all for other people.
Getting primate mothers to adopt infants not their own is absurdly easy because, evolutionarily, becoming attached to the wrong baby was rarely a problem.
Seen on Slashdot:
"How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for. I only coded it." (Attributed to Linus Torvalds, somewhere in a posting)
25 Jan 1961 Woody Guthrie 2 Jan 1963 Robert Graves (chilly reception) 9 Oct 1963 Henry Miller (played pingpong) 26 Dec 1963 Allen Ginsberg 6 Feb 1964 Carl Sandburg (chilly reception) 28 Aug 1964 The Beatles 3 Sep 1965 Marlon Brando
(Bob Dylan sought out each of these heroes on these dates, according to "Bob Dylan: Day by Day".)