Undoubtedly, our fave awards ceremony is the Ig Nobels, honoring those
whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." The theme of this
year's October 9 seventh first annual ceremony is "The Big Bang". The
evening will feature a Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate contest, the
premiere of a mini-opera ("Il Kaboom Grosso"), and 30-second Heisenberg
Certainty Lectures (time limit strictly enforced). Last year's Ig Nobel
winners included George Goble, the first to use liquid oxygen in a barbecue
(Chemistry); Harold Moi, the doctor who treated "Transmission of Gonorrhea
Through an Inflatable Doll" (Public Health); and plastic pink flamingo
creator Don Featherstone (Art). Though the event will take place at
Harvard's Sanders Theater, the ceremony will be telecast live on the Net.
E-mail info@improb.com for details or check out the site.
<http://www.improb.com/>
CYBER PROMOTIONS KICKED OFF AGIS
As the world turns, the spam wars continue. Yet another ISP has cut loose
spam pioneer Sanford Wallace and his baby, Cyber Promotions (CP). A denial
of service attack struck AGIS, the provider, which shortly thereafter
kicked off the venerable spam firm. CP rebutted AGIS's official explanation
that the spammer violated security rules with a posted statement from an
AGIS engineer indicating the dumping was due to the denial of service
attack. The attack, directed at CP, wound up intolerably clogging the AGIS
network. Stay tuned for a lawsuit and for CP to re-emerge from the ashes as
it has so many times. At press time, CP's Web site was unreachable.
CP: <http://www.cyberpromo.com/>
AGIS: <http://www.agis.net/>
Given the explosion of land-mine news (Di's promotion of a ban and US refusal to
endorse proposed land mine bans), we looked around for some topical
resources. Mark Dalton's Summary of Land Mine WWW Pages contains all the
links you could possibly want. Some of the major sections deal with mine
detection and land reclamation; effects of mines on people and the
environment; who's doing what about the problem; and much more. More of the
same with some variation is covered at the more official-looking MgM
International Landmine Almanach site from Germany. The treaty-instigating
Canadian government's site, Anti-Personnel Land Mines: An Annotated
Bibliography, has a large list of scholarly citations.
Mark: <http://lenti.med.umn.edu/>
%7Emwd/landmines.html
MgM: <http://www.dsk.de/mgm/mgmlinks.htm>
Bibliography:
<http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/english/foreignp/disarm/imb12/menu.html>
THE WHITE HOUSE PAGER TRANSCRIPTS
The Clinton administration, fighting to make strong encryption illegal, may
have ironically fallen into the clutches of hackers who claim they've
decoded the pager traffic of last April's presidential visit in
Philadelphia. The White House is playing down the security exposure, but
you can bet they'd much rather have had some of that stuff encrypted. Are
these transcripts real or a hoax? Hard to tell, but you bet the Secret
Service is going ape-feces over the whole thing. The transcript was
purportedly given to Pam Finkel during a ham radio festival in April.
Finkel also works for the deliciously subversive hackers' journal 2600.
Enjoy. <http://www.inch.com/~esoteric/pam_suggestion/output.html>
PEKING TO PARIS VINTAGE CAR RALLY
Imagine trying to nurse a finicky 1928 Bentley Le Mans over 16,000 km and
43 days as you bounce along some of the most exotic roads in the world on
your way from Peking to Paris. Anyone who survives the breathtaking route
will have driven half way around the world in the longest rally ever
organized for vintage and classic cars. It took a cool 25,000 pounds to
enter this magnificent adventure - plus, of course, a vintage car. Among
the 94 cars (model years from 1907 to 1972) in the rally are a 1915
Vauxhall Prince Henry, a 1934 Rolls Royce Saloon, a 1964 Aston Martin DB,
and a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon. The event is billed as a sequel
to the legendary 1907 Peking to Paris rally in which five pioneer motorists
tried to prove that the motor car was a viable way to get around. All the
news bulletins and all the cars are here. Sure beats the daily commute,
don't you think? <http://www.carnet.co.uk/pekingparis/>
WHITBREAD ROUND THE WORLD SAILING RACE
The Whitbread lasts nine months and is sailed with state of the art
computer designed vessels - to call them boats would be downright rude. In
the past, it was difficult to know which of the participants were even
alive as the race plowed through the vast oceans, and indeed some wound up
dead. Now, not only position but weather and vessel performance
characteristics will be uploaded from the boats every few hours via
satellite along with e-mail, images, and video. Settle in for the long, wet
run, and let the sailors know that you give a damn when they hit those
endless, unforgiving Pacific swells. <http://www.whitbread.org/main.html>
CONSUMANIA: VISA SHOPPING GUIDE BY YAHOO
This is no banal Net shopping site. This is backed by the two 400-kg
gorillas in their respective fields. This is also a deceptively simple idea
that seems to work. Visa and Yahoo have wrought an organized one-stop
collection of major shopping sites divided into reasonably logical
categories. For example, click on Games and you can choose to shop by
category, by merchant, by system, even by game designers. Click on
Electronics and you get everything from SpiegelTronics to Circuit City,
along with categories like Home Theater and Television - simple, clean, and
to the point. The site is fairly cosmopolitan about who's featured, though
it does lean to the leading merchants in the field. This one is a bookmark,
especially with the holiday season a few months away.
<http://shopguide.yahoo.com/>
CNET'S SNAP! ONLINE IS FINE WITH BREAKFAST
CNET's new invention, Snap, crossbreeds a news site with a search engine
and divides the offspring into the inevitable "channels", such as business,
health, etc. Each page contains two or three stories, some columns, and a
number of related links with, according to the press release, "deep links
to information". Snap lists our humble little NSD as one of the "Ten
Essential Computing Resources" - nice, eh? Snap features a good look and
feel, fluffy news, and decent links. Think of it as one of those early
morning infotainment TV shows; it's everything without too much mental
exercise, perfect with your morning coffee. The hurdle is that just about
every news organization out there from AOL to ZDNet is trying to do the
same thing.
Press Release:
<http://www.cnet.com/Community/Welcome/About/Press/Releases/snap2.html>
Snap: <http://www.snap.com/>
The Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement patent has just expired, putting in the
public domain one of the robust public key encryption systems so essential
to modern information security. The Diffie-Hellman system is one of the
methods used by PGP to generate keys. It's likely to become an
international standard now that the question of licensing royalties is
moot. In case you're interested, here's a brief high-school math
description of the technique.
<http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/seven/diffie.html>
ROCKWELL DEVELOPS JAVA MICROPROCESSOR
The chip is the first one to directly execute Java code without requiring
an interpreter. We'll go out on a limb and make a fatuous media prediction:
this chip, or ones much like it, will be turning up in add-on boards for
PCs before you know it (how's that for precision?). In the meantime,
Rockwell says they will use it as a microcontroller core for telecom and
navigation applications. The press release is rather terse, but notes that
the chip is 6 mm square in 0.5 micron CMOS with "an interrupt controller;
two programmable timers with prescaler; 32-, 16- and 8-bit external data
bus support; two power-saving modules; and an IEEE 1149.1 (JTAG) test
interface." Alas, we couldn't find any snazzy four-color block diagrams.
<http://www.rockwell.com/News/PressRel/PR970923.html>
INTERNET ADVERTISING BUREAU PUBLISHES AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT STANDARD
The IAB has just released a standards document dealing with online audience
measurement. The "Metrics and Methodology" document covers terminology and
methodology details and is designed to make it easy to compare online
advertising audience exposures. More jargon of interest to online
professionals. <http://www.iab.net/advertise/metricsource.html>
Weeb Tech is a relatively low-tech text-based, self-effacing monthly
publication with good nuts-and-bolts articles for programmers and other Web
developers of all levels. You'll find how-to articles about mailing lists,
Pretty Good Privacy and authentication, and CGI and other programming. One
page solicits articles from ActiveX gurus, Java wizards, and other techies
who can write. The site may take a while to gain the depth of similar
resources with more graphical flash, but it's a solid start and makes a
nice addition to a developer's hotlist. <http://www.meep.com/magazine/tech/>
FOR THOSE FIRST UNCERTAIN ONLINE STEPS
Want tips on how to use Internet software with Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or
MacOS but don't want to spend $20 or $30 on paperbacks or hours jumping
from FAQ to readme.txt to FAQ? Check out an online manual called Netprep,
sponsored by Planet Internet. Veteran surfers will be familiar with most or
all of these tips, but they're great for newbies who prefer instruction
rather than experimentation. In addition to help with Netscape and Internet
Explorer, readers can learn about some of the most popular programs for
e-mail, newsgroups, FTP, and chat. The site uses frames.
<http://henshaw.net/netprep/>
DEPLORABLE PERSON, TRANSCENDENT MUSIC
Composer Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite, callous egotist, serial
adulterer, and philosophical reactionary. That said, Wagner is also the
source of opera's most ambitiously heroic and tragic works. Although it
includes much more, Wagner on the Web focuses on his Ring cycle, the
complex four-opera series based on Teutonic mythology. There's information
about the composer and his works but, by and large, contributions and
discussions center on reviews of particular productions, conductors, or
artists, and especially on the relative merits of classic performances and
recordings. If you're not an opera fan, keep in mind that Wagner isn't the
easiest introduction; he often used only music to advance theme and plot.
This site assumes that visitors are acquainted with Wagner, but aficionados
will find something to deepen their understanding of his music.
<http://www.zazz.com/wagner/>
FASHION + DRESS + THEATER = COSTUME
The Costumer's Manifesto is a fascinating site, and we say that fully aware
that it's about fashion. Tara Maginnis includes among her 307 pages her
Ph.D. dissertation, "Fashion Shows, Strip Shows, and Beauty Pageants: The
Theatre of the Feminine Ideal"; the title tells you how seriously and
playfully she looks at fashion and its illusions. Tara teaches costume
design and theater at the University of Alaska, and offers everything from
instruction in sewing and dyeing to advice about a Web presence. A small
sampling from hundreds of specialty links covers the history of clothing
and sources for vintage, ethnic, and Native American dress. Here attention
to detail awards lipstick and eyeliner their own site. For more exotic
tastes, try links devoted to body modification, chainmail, and fetish dress
and accessories. From chastity belts to mortuary make-up to Merchant-Ivory
costuming, its hard to imagine a more comprehensive resource.
<http://www.costumes.org/>
This site, i/us, is committed to helping the desktop publishing, graphics,
and illustration community use their tools more effectively. Here, you'll
find some 70 discussion conferences with a team of 40 moderators to answer
your questions, as well as directories for such things as service bureaus,
training firms and user groups. There's a lot here to see and do. Be sure
to stop by the live chat and content areas. <http://www.i-us.com/>
BC-AD is an Asian graphics archive containing thousands of ancient
pictographs from rock art, brick carvings, pottery, and more. Use them as
they are or manipulate them within your favorite graphics programs. A
moderate registration fee is charged. <http://www.bc-ad.com/>
This week we bring for your sweaty pleasure "Getting in Shape: Workout
Programs for Men and Women", and "Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Men
and Women". Why? Just because. And to show you we haven't taken complete
freaking leave of our senses, we'll throw in "Beyond the Little Mac Book"
and "Exegesis", fiction by Astro Teller.
<http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/books/book.03.30.html>
While you might think sex, drugs, and baggy clothing pretty much sum up
Generation X, think again. Jive, a new e-zine targeting this age group,
delves deeper into the real-life issues, jobs, and relationships. Sex,
drugs, and baggy clothing (as well as many other acceptable fashions) are
also covered. Stop by and take in a fresh perspective on life and the
world. Perhaps not so fresh - we're still waiting for issue number two to
appear. <http://www.jivemag.com/>
The Annihilation Fountain looks a bit spooky. Though only two issues old,
the topics are in-depth and intelligent, from channelling Nietzsche in the
Montreal Pool Room (that has no pool table) to an analysis of bad
advertisements. Against a background of crushed black satin, personal
essays and critiques rest comfortably without a hint of pretention.
<http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/neil/taf/>
"Star Trek" too tame? "X Files" too mundane? Your quarrel with "Blade
Runner" revolves around electric sheep? Then take a look at Sphere Online,
a slick e-zine for hardcore fans of the literature and culture of fantasy,
horror, SF and live-action role-playing. We uninitiated may glimpse
sophisticated, fully realized, self-sustaining, fantastic worlds and the
species and races that populate them, ravage them, devour them, or redeem
them. These are universes of vampire clans in eternal cold war, time and
star travelers, mages, spacescapes, and were-spider jokesters. They live in
books and board games, SF conventions and RPGs, occasionally off-world,
often merely in a hidden or nether world. Fans, writers, and gamers are
dead serious, and they reveal themselves here. <http://www.fantasylink.com/>
Interesting, isn't it, how the characteristics each culture attributes to
animals vary from society to society. For a prime example of the
difference, read this handful of Mayan folk tales. The rabbit, for
instance, seems to be very near the top of the pecking order in Mayan
perception, a cunning opponent often nicknamed "the Mayor". In addition to
these transcribed and translated tales, there's an excerpt from an
historical novel by Mayan author Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez. Catholicism and
Mayan traditions are prominent in the narration, but in this passage at
least, Mayan writing doesn't seem to incorporate the magical realism that's
become so familiar in works originating in Mexico and South America. Mayan
folk tales are part of the international FolkArt and Craft Exchange site.
<http://www.folkart.com/~latitude/folktale/folktale.htm>
If you're in the Milwaukee or eastern Wisconsin area, have we got news for
you! At least, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online does. This sleek, fast
online newspaper has not only news, but entertainment and restaurant
reviews, features of interest to tourists, and classifieds. Front page news
on a recent day? "Cheese factory to be sold - One of the nation's largest
Swiss cheese makers plans to buy the Old Wisconsin Cheese plant in
Platteville". So it goes in the heartland.... Non-cheeseheads should check
this out to see a newspaper's online presence done right.
<http://www.jsonline.com/>
The Blue Moon Review contains fiction, poetry, plays, and more. The
quarterly journal gives you access to previous issues, Writer's Guides,
interesting links, notes from the writers (e.g. "Why I Wrote the Play,"),
and more for literary types. The offerings in the review vary widely from
traditional to e.e. cummings-style. Our personal favorite: "Still Life with
Bad Dog". <http://www.thebluemoon.com/>
DR. DOBB'S COMPUTER BOOK REVIEWS
You can't judge a book by its cover, but if you're in the market for a
computer book, the information here will help. The site consists of reviews
of computer book, written by people in the computer industry, many of whom
are also authors (heck, even one or two of us has a computer book out).
Each review scores a text in parameters including readability, accuracy,
and design, and provides details on price and publisher. The reviews are
written with obvious knowledge and authority and point out both the
weaknesses and strengths of each book and who should and, more importantly,
should not read it. Search facilities make it easy to find reviews of books
on a particular topic. This site could save you a great deal of time and
money in helping you find exactly what you need. <http://www.ercb.com/>
ASTRONOMY AND TRIGONOMETRY FOR EVERYONE - HONEST
Winchell Chung's inspired 3-d star map site touches on algebra, astronomy,
physics, trigonometry, science fiction, and just plain good humor.
Ostensibly, it's a resource site to help SF and fantasy writers place their
imagined worlds in the right galactic zip code. In fact, it's a great
resource for teachers and students of astronomy and trigonometry. Chung
details step by step how he constructs and interprets star maps, computes
distances, and "accurately" builds neighboring galactic empires - and even
our liberal arts reviewer followed his science much of the way. He's quick
to credit others' work and he relishes his own mistakes for what they teach
him. Winchell shares his discoveries so enthusiastically that even when his
math was over our heads, we were more than pleased to go along for the
ride. <http://www.clark.net/pub/nyrath/starmap.html>
With invasion, plague, fire, and pageantry, few cities can match the
richness of London's history, though the City Museum of London rather
immodestly boasts that it's been 500,000 years in the making. Still, museum
displays include Roman artifacts and a cache of skulls likely attributable
to Queen Boudica's war arts. There's a Mickey Mouse World War II gas mask
for toddlers and a look at the toll from the Great Plague. You'll see a
sublime but fragile gown from a minor royal of the 18th century and a
considerably less subtle, far more durable one-man band from the middle of
this century. Where else can you catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria's
undies? We hope the size of this modest Web collection increases, though -
the museum has barely scratched the surface of those 500,000 years.
<http://www.museum-london.org.uk/>
WEIRD SCIENCE AT HOME AND SCHOOL
We were expecting the usual vinegar and baking soda recipe when we perused
Brian Rich's instructions for making an easy chemical volcano. When we got
to the part about viewing the volcano only through welder's goggles, we
were hooked. Rich runs an outfit called Santa Barbara Science that provides
technical information and resources to the home-schooling, hobbyist, and
artistic communities. His do-it-yourself science experiments are few, but
undoubtedly fun. In addition to detailed and informative instructions, Rich
also offers mail-order services for the materials used in some experiments.
We're not sure if he offers the welder's goggles.
<http://www.west.net/~science/expindx.htm>
Ivars Peterson is one of the few journalists around who not only can make
sense of math for the algebraically challenged, but also make it intriguing
and even entertaining. Although he has penned several books on the subject,
it seems he's never out of good material. At his Mathland Web site, you can
explore the intervals between prime numbers, tussle with riddles from 19th
century ladies magazines, or get a critique of the math written into the
plot and text of a Tom Stoppard play. Erudite yet easy to read, Mathland is
a great port of call for the mathematical day-tripper. Take the time to
visit the page's landlord, the Mathematics Association of America, and peek
at Making the Invisible Visible, a commencement address delivered by Keith
Devlin to the mathematics graduating class of the University of California.
Mathland: <http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathland_archives.html>
Mathematics Association of America: <http://www.maa.org/>
Anyone wanting a handy concise summary of recent science news might want to
check in with Science Week, an abridged version of Science Report, a weekly
compilation of news from the world of science. Science Week is belatedly
available free in a archive. Science Report will set you back $36 a year.
Science Week offers straightforward, fairly technical reports from a
variety of sources, though reports from Science, Nature, and the like
predominate. Science Report offers more in-depth reporting and a few extra
features, such as spot news reports and focus sections. There's a good deal
of competition on the Web for science reporting services, but at the price,
Science Week is hard to beat. <http://members.aol.com/sciweek/index.htm>
NETSCAPE RELEASES COMMUNICATOR 4.03, GETS PATENT ON SSL
Communicator 4.03 contains the latest security fixes and a bunch of bug
fixes for all platforms. Netscape has also announced that it has obtained a
patent for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology, a secure data encryption
and transfer method. The company also said it has no plans to charge
developers licensing fees for using SSL source code. Check the site to see
how a technical software patent is written.
Communicator: <http://home.netscape.com/download/index.html>
Patent: <http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/details?patent_number=5657390>
NEW BETA VERSIONS OF IVISIT WIN/MAC VIDEO CHAT SOFTWARE
BoxTop Interactive has just released new beta versions of iVisit, their
video conferencing software, for both Windows 95/NT and Mac. The product
competes with CU-SeeMe but unlike CU-SeeMe, iVisit doesn't require a
reflector or other central server to handle multiparty conferencing since
it's based on a peer-to-peer communication model rather than the
client/server model of CU-SeeMe. This version does not yet support color,
but is still worth playing around with.
<http://www.ivisit.com/>
YAHOO DID THINK OF IT A YEAR AGO
Last issue, we were so impressed with the Online Bookmark Manager, we asked
"Why didn't Yahoo, Netscape, or other companies with lots of traffic and
advertisers think of this innovation years ago...." A Yahoo named Harold
Stusnick responds: "We did think of it years ago. (Actually, one year ago.)
It's called the Web section of My Yahoo! (PS - mine has Netsurfer Digest
bookmarked! :-) I kid you not!)" The really dumb thing is that our own
editor has his own My Yahoo page, too. <http://my.yahoo.com/>
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