Wed, Jan 5, 2000
17 questions about the ideal webpage length: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/pagelength.html
Say you have a 100k article you want to put on the Web. How many webpages should you divide it into? The questions to weigh include...
New BBS topic: Will the bubble burst in 2000? http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002EHf
When a company does an IPO, it raises a certain amount of cash, usually in the tens or hundreds of millions. No matter how much the stock price rises, this pile of cash doesn't increase, and the red ink of salaries and office space and advertising and other expenses immediately starts nibbling away at it (the 'burn rate').So long as the company runs in the red, as almost all Net companies do (yes?), there's no new cash flowing in, right? (Can they dilute the stock with a second offering? Has anyone done that successfully yet?) Can analysts predict when the bottom will be scraped? Do the media even report the bankruptcies, or is it good-news-only?
TV 2nite: PBS has bees on Nova and Revelation part two on Frontline.
I've made a ton of progress on the jazz history page:
http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/jazz.html
A heroine of jazz, Mary Lou Williams: (includes RealAudio) http://shoko.calarts.edu/~hill/2music/mlw/mlwbio.htm
She hit her first "artistic identity crisis" at the age of twelve. After seeing her perform with her elbows and feet, spinning around on her stool, an adult musician approached her and said that he liked her harmonic innovation on one chord and to "drop the clowning." Mary Lou said, "From then on, I settled down to play seriously."High points included meeting Fats Waller in New York in 1926 and winning over the initially skeptical master by flawessly playing back to him his brand-new compositions after one hearing--she was delighted when "he picked me up and threw me in the air" with congratulations.
Mary maintained that she played Cecil Taylor-like unrestrained avant garde piano at jam sessions in the formative Swing years. The men called her movement away from chord-based improvisation "frozen sounds," or "zombie" music, partly because of the way Mary Lou was often withdrawn and absorbed inside her head, mentally writing tunes, arranging, and reexamining her last performances. In 1943, Time magazine reported that the "zombie" she had played in Kansas City was "an unearthly swinging dirge."
Mary Lou recorded "one of the earliest modern jazz symphonic compositions," the marvelous Zodiac Suite, in 1945, a work she constructed in twelve tone-poems, each named for one of the astrological signs and inspired by the personalities of favorite musicians born under that sign.
The night before her first return gig in 1957, she dreamed she was performing with Oscar Pettiford, Dick Wilson, and other friends of hers who'd passed away, and they were "rejoicing" that she was performing again.
The short-webpages mystery: http://www.egroups.com/group/www2k/
Cut me in half and I increase in value-- what am I?
(I think eGroups may have a Y2K problem with their cookie expiration date.)
Great new Harper's Index: http://harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.php3
Average number of U.S. cruise missiles launched per month during the Clinton Administration : 11
Number of toxic spills reported within one mile of the Clintons' new house in Chappaqua, New York : 43
Percentage of U.S. children who say their greatest wish for their parents is that they make more money : 23
Percentage who say their greatest wish for their parents is that they "spend more time with me" : 11
How to keep great content out of the public's hands: http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/webstyle/mandatory.html
It is advisable to keep the size of a Web page (HTML file) under 32 kilobytes. As a page approaches this size, the Web page creator should consider breaking the document into smaller parts.
(Browsing their exhibits is like having someone repeatedly bash your thumb with a hammer...)
Pleasant review of Updike essays: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/01/02/stibooboo03002.html?999
"It is laid upon each Christian worshipper to exalt a man who confessed to fatigue, who gave way to moods, on occasion wept, who impulsively withered a fig tree, who founded his church on a pun, who waved away centuries of Judaic observance, who consorted with publicans and tax collectors and women of dubious reputation, who kept asking his disciples who they thought he was, who begged God to relieve him of his coming ordeal, and who on the cross asked God why he had forsaken him."
The theory behind my jazz history page: http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=567154526
I see a cool opportunity, at this moment in the Web's evolution, for writers to fairly easily create something new and useful and fun.What makes it possible is that a huge, huge, huge range of resources has been posted on the Web-- mostly by fans and other enthusiasts-- but the level of hypertext design is so abysmal that it's practically useless.
Consequently, anyone who masters a few basic design principles can go out and 'cherry pick' the existing materials, restructuring them into a more nearly optimal format...
This reads like automated speech recognition, but it's really just the (human-transcribed) closed captioning: http://www.TVEyes.com/database/expand.asp?ln=590308&key=james%20joyce
...You've seen the elegant, whimsical clothes of carnival. (Background music) winter break is a time for kids to have fun. And having fun is what lego lynn is all about. Lego in 1914 james joyce wrote that. Six characters in search of an author where the play write isn't in control. In 1982, t.S.Elliot published "the wasteland." He missed frontline, which broke ground in television...
Why I revere Sam Smith: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
...Still, as we close out this year, century, and millenium, perhaps we can pause to remember the tens of millions of people who have died of war, pestilence, starvation, and avoidable ecological catastrophe so a few could regard themselves as great.[Also:] UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte has backed off her planned investigation of possible war crimes by NATO commanders and pilots in the war against Yugoslavia. The move came after the White House and Pentagon protested.
My New Year's resolution project: http://www.egroups.com/group/weblogs/895.html
I just started a new eGroup at.... [URL]The idea is to do our best to build a solid consensus by the end of the year, about which Web design principles are the most important problems that currently need fixing.
TV 2day: Marta Sebestyen [qv] is on PBS from Hungary, right now!
I had to understand the roots of rock better, so... http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/jazz.html
RealAudio history of jazz
(Please tell me if you spot errors in the pre-1930 era, which is mostly done except for the music links. After 1930, it's still raw cut-and-paste. The sound samples I've found so far are extremely awesome, though-- full songs, not 30sec teasers.)
The Foresight Exchange is shorting Y2K futures: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Y2Kdth
The Claim: The Year 2000 problem (also known as Y2K bug) will cause 200 or more human deaths...
My nominee for best characterisation of the Millennium Bug: http://x21.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=350976950
...AOL chat screens of people saying "My DOS sorts the files by date in a slightly different order now!"
Don't miss: Sam Smith's comparison of WashPost's pro- and anti- rhetorical styles: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
The moral for public figures in all this: if you want the Post to be objective about you, get on its good side first.
I'm planning to create a new PhilG BBS just for website reviews... but PhilG is wedged: (link 'greyed out' here, out of respect) http://greenspun.com/bboard/add-new-topic.tcl
Sorry but we aren't accepting new bboards until after January 1 (having some serious performance problems with this ancient machine due to Y2K fanatics trying to download hundreds of thousands of messages onto their desktops).
I wasn't going to link this 'standard issue' Gamasutra postmortem until I got to this last paragraph: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991228/fristrom_pfv.htm
What Have We Learned: Unless you're willing to cut features, your game is probably going to slip. And when it slips, you're going to need to add features to stay current. The only way to do that, on the programming side, is to take the hit from day one, always doing things correctly instead of doing things quickly.
Contest update (see just below): The completed page should be mainly a series of short, readable-prose paragraphs, each linking one song and describing its place in rock history, sorted chronologically.
Design-contest: I think once this new rock-history page is done, if it just looked half-decent, Yahoo et al would have to grant it cool-site status-- so I'm encouraging anyone who thinks they can create a simple, elegant, quick-loading, easy-to-read redesign for it to post that and send me the URL and I'll take votes on which one people like best. (The prize is a prominent mention of your name and link to your site.) http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/rock1.html
This page is mostly based on James Miller's "Flowers in the Dustbin: the rise of rock and roll 1947-1977". It attempts to use existing Amazon RealAudio samples to add a soundtrack to that book, while summarizing the main points of Miller's history.
Hitchens on Bush and Gore (et al): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/hitc2201.htm [LakeEffect?]
Both are distinctly average human beings; one of them a bit weird and the other a bit twisted. The weird one is Gore.Bush countered the Christian conservative petition on behalf of Karla Faye Tucker by mimicking her last-minute entreaties ('Oh, please don't kill me') to a reporter for Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard.
New Year's tip:
If you haven't backed up your most important files for a while, now would be a very good time. Save a full copy of your website, too.
Brilliant review of Topsy Turvy: http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=945&now=12/29/1999&content_section=4
As you may know, Leigh doesn't make movies the standard way, by writing or procuring a script and then hammering it into a shape that pleases him. He comes up with a story outline and a list of themes first. ..What Leigh has done is the equivalent of assembling a brilliant free-jazz ensemble to record an album, then telling the musicians they can't employ any melodies, styles or riffs that predate, say, the Dixieland era.
One of the highlights of Topsy-Turvy is a very long sequence of Gilbert directing several singers during rehearsal. One character delivers a line in a distracting cadence and accent. Gilbert barks, "Again, please -- this time in English!"
TV 2nite: Frontline reruns the excellent episode on the history of interpretations of the Book of Revelation: 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.
They're feasting in Rotterdam: http://www.lfs.nl/
Dark bread with butter
Smoked salmon, halibut and eel
Green beans with bacon and hazelnuts
Caramelised onions with honey
Red cabbage with pear...
New BBS topic: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0027vI
Which 20th century Jesus is the most historical?
I've added a bunch more links to the My.Internet Years page [qv], including this recap of my old signature files: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/sigs.txt
"Witches have no wit!" cried the magician who was weak
A gorgeous image, from a long, unevenly brilliant Wm Gass piece on bibiophilia: http://www.calendarlive.com/calendarlive/books/bookreview/19991226/t000117586.html
When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. Here were more than turns of phrase that could brighten an otherwise gloomy page. Here were statements that seemed so directly truthful they might straighten a warped soul on seeing them again, inscribed, as they were, in a child's wide round trusting hand, to be read and reread like the propositions of a primer, they were so bottomed and basic. Jonson translated or rewrote the quotes and connected them with fresh reflections until their substance seemed his own, and seamlessly woven together, too, which is how the work reads today, even though it is but a collection of loose pages taken, after his death, from the defenseless drawers of his desk...
(There's an etext of this!)
I was going to characterise Shahak (below) as Israel's Chomsky. Here's a short item about an appearance they made together: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V114/N55/chomsky.55n.html
Echoing the words of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin about Baruch Goldstein, the Jew who last February murdered 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Israel, the audience member said to Chomsky, "We spit you out with every bit of power we have." Chomsky responded, "The feeling is mutual."
(I found this while comparing the page-frequencies for 'Islamic fundamentalism' (7000), 'Christian fundamentalism' (1400), and 'Jewish fundamentalism' (300).)
Revived BBS topic: http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001gTK
Are people finding the Britannica site useful? I'm looking for info on Africa 200kybp, and it's pretty good compared to what Google turned up... and much, much better organised than Yahoo.
TV 2day:
Chgo's WGN is showing 'Lawrence of Arabia' at noon, and our PBS station has ballet at 1pm.
Long, detailed summary of Cavalli-Sforza's 1994 analysis of human genetic differences: [messy URL]
For purposes of comparison, the genetic distances between the English and the Japanese is 1244, between them and the South Chinese, 1152, and between them and North American Indians, 947.While the first split in the tree is clear and appears to be well established, the second split is a little surprizing. With the preferred set of distance measurements, the non-Africans split into Australians, and all others, and then into Southeast Asians, and the remainder. Only then do the Caucasoids separate from the Northeast Asians, Arctic Asians, and American Indians.
Calculations showed that the European gene frequencies could be explained well by a mixture of the Chinese with a smaller percentage of the pygmies. Obviously, this is not the actual racial history of the Europeans (who are both taller and lighter skinned than either group for instance).
The demic diffusion model makes it likely that the ancestors of modern Europeans were not primarily Ice Age Europeans, but paleolithic Middle Easterners. The gene frequencies of modern Europeans were shaped not only by the cold conditions of Ice Age Europe, but primarily by the conditions in a somewhat warmer Middle East...
The San (Bushmen) in southern Africa are a group that physically looks quite different from other Negroids. [pic] ...An alternative hypothesis, that is supported by mitochondrial DNA evidence and the San's distinctive morphology, is that they are a relict population of an early race of humans whose territory once covered much of Africa, and are the ancestors of all humans.
Long, extremely lucid (and appalling) history of Jewish fundamentalism, by Israel Shahak: http://home.att.net/~nuenke1/Shahak.htm
Almost every moderately sophisticated Israeli Jew knows the facts about Israeli Jewish society that are described in this book. These facts, however, are unknown to most interested Jews and non-Jews outside Israel... Jewish fundamentalism is here briefly defined as the belief that Jewish Orthodoxy, which is based upon the Babylonian Talmud, the rest of talmudic literature and halachic literature, is still valid and will eternally remain valid.It is insufficient, if not folly, to advocate Palestinian rights without understanding and referring to the principal cause of the denial of those rights: Jewish fundamentalism in general and the messianic variety in particular.
The Halacha forbids Jewish males to listen to women singing whether in a choir or solo regardless of what is sung. This is stated directly in the halachic ruling that a voice of a woman is adultery. This is interpreted by later halachic rulings stipulating that the word 'voice' here means a woman's singing not speaking. This rule, originating in the Talmud, occurs in all codes of law. A Jewish male who willingly listens to a woman's singing commits a sin equivalent either to adultery or fornication. ...After further consultation with the censor, the settlers devised an acceptable solution that is still being employed. Men sing the songs, made popular by women; the male voices are then electronically changed to the female pitch and are broadcast accordingly over Arutz 7.
Rabbi Yoseph argued in a September 18, 1989 article in Yated Ne'eman that since Israel is too weak to demolish all Christian churches in the Holy Land it is also too weak to retain all the conquered territories... Before the 1996 election, both Peres and Netanyahu regarded Rabbi Yoseph as an important political figure and often courted him openly. This was done in spite of Yoseph's publicly declared doctrine that Jews, when sufficiently powerful, have a religious obligation to expel all non-Jews from the country and destroy all Christian churches.
At the highest yeshiva level, one out of twelve to fourteen hours per day of sacred studies may be devoted to the study of morality, which primarily consists of lurid descriptions of the punishment, inflicted by God either in the life of this world or in hell, for even the smallest deviations from religious commandments... The classes are noisy, because the students shout about what they are studying. Studying in silence is considered to be a sin. Chaos is often the result in the classroom; different students often shout about different passages of texts.
In 1985, when twenty-two children, twelve and thirteen years of age, were killed in the town of Petah Tikva in a traffic accident involving their bus, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, one of the heads of the Shas Party and the then Minister of the Interior, stated in a television appearance that the children were victims, because a movie house was allowed to remain open on the Sabbath eve.
[c1950?] The Israeli government induced Jewish immigration from Iraq by bribing the government of Iraq to strip most Iraqi Jews of their citizenship and to confiscate their property.
[Rabbi Schneerson in 1965:] "Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness... A Jew was not created as a means for some purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all emanations was created only to serve the Jews." ...According to the Cabbala, a satanic soul cannot be transformed into a divine soul by mere persuasion [conversion].
Rabbi Ginsburgh told the Jewish Week "If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA." ...Changing the words "Jewish" to "German" or "Aryan" and "non-Jewish" to "Jewish" turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past.
The Halacha permits Jews to rob non-Jews in those locales wherein Jews are stronger than non-Jews.
The book in praise of [mass-murderer of Palestinians] Baruch Goldstein, titled Blessed the Male, was published in 1995 and sold in many editions. Most of the readers were from the religious public. The book contained eulogies of Goldstein and halachic justifications for the right of every Jew to kill non-Jews.
In dealing with political factors in our book, we did not specify many of the often petty forms of hatred of Christianity that are officially approved. One case in point is that Israeli educational authorities removed the international plus sign from the textbooks of elementary arithmetic used in the first grades of Israeli schools. Allegedly, this plus sign, which is a cross, could religiously corrupt little Jewish children. Instead of the offending cross, the authorities substituted a capital "T."
Few Christian or Muslim scholars have been or are interested in Jewish history between AD 70 and modem times, the third period. Apologetic writing of Jewish history is not unique. Most national histories include apologetic writings. The writing in English by Jews of Jewish history has remained far more retarded than have the writings of other national histories.
Newspaper wars in Jerusalem being fought with bullets and private wiretaps!?? http://www.usatoday.com/aponline/1999122603/1999122603452600.htm
A key witness in the wiretapping case was Yaacov Tzur, one of two private detectives who had carried out the wiretapping for Nimrodi. The other detective, Rafi Pridan, who has started serving a 4-year sentence for his role in the case, told police this summer that Nimrodi had solicited his assistance in a plan to ambush and kill Tzur before he was able to testify.
Older, local analysis: http://www.jpost.com/com/Archive/08.Nov.1999/Features/Article-5.html
If the wiretapping affair dragged newsroom morale down into the mud, the alleged assassination plot, and the view of the troika of nation's media families as three warring mafia clans, has positively buried it. The question that journalists must grapple with is whether the case of Nimrodi and his alleged activities is a unique event, or whether something has gone fundamentally and terribly wrong with the Israeli media as a whole.
Keeper headlines:
Opaque attack on Chomsky by Hitchens (The Nation)
Nice poem about a mother (Poems.com)
Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the Century (CounterPunch')
Prize-winning image of black Jesus (via Drudge)
Smart rave for Mike Leigh's Gilbert & Sullivan (VVoice)
Monsanto expanding monopoly from seed to water??? (via Pacifica)
First chapter of Catch-22 (CNN)
GirlHacker's weblog (via Bogart)
MIT students make $20M over summer (via Haddock)
Explaining relativity with only 4-or-less-letter words (via Bogart)
New autobiographical resources-project: (just getting started) http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/internet.html
My.Internet
1989-91...
Heh: Now with added (optional!) frames: http://www.robotwisdom.com/frames.html
(This doesn't work unless you always open the links in a new window-- I could start adding 'target' modifiers though if people want.)
Hasty Friday project: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/leigh.html
Mike Leigh resources on the Web
Hasty Thursday afternoon project: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/coughlan.html
Mary Coughlan resources on the Web
(Includes full RealAudio of latest album.)
Thursday morning project: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/rivette.html
Jacques Rivette resources on the Web
Long, decent Mike Leigh interview: http://salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/12/23/leigh/print.html
At an early stage, I had him in mind for Gilbert's manservant. But then I had to find a Richard Temple, and the truth was that little is known of this guy except a few material facts. So it left us huge scope to invent this definitive Victorian actor, which is right up Timothy's street. We both, at different stages of our early childhood, secretly wanted to be Charles Laughton.