|
Home Subscriptions Netsurfer Science E-Zine Netsurfer Education E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine |
| All Your Base Are Belong to Us! |
| Schuiten and Peeters's Obscure Cities |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Plastic's Unusual Look at Current Events |
| The Nervous Dog That Wants to Be an Onion |
| Somebody Give Us a Beat |
| Debunking Bad Astronomy |
| Paleodieting - What Is It? |
| Trying Science at Starfleet |
| More Fun Than a Food Fight |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Mir, Russia's big space station, is about to come crashing to earth. Fifteen years old, the battered, 135-ton space veteran has served long past the end of its useful life and the Russian space program is ready to let it give up the ghost. Countries under its descent shadow aren't quite as ready to see it fall, and worry about something going wrong. Russia plans to bring Mir down in the Pacific between New Zealand and Chile in mid-March, but only has limited ability to control the huge satellite during its descent. As a result, countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan are nervously keeping an eye on Mir and doing their own calculations, not that there's much anybody can do if the 40 tons or so that are expected to survive the fiery descent in thousands of pieces crash where they're not supposed to. Some Canadians still remember the mess Russia's nuclear-powered Cosmos 954 made when it scattered debris over the north in 1978. Where's Bruce Willis when you need him? Wired and CNN have helped sow the seeds of insecurity.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41865,00.html
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/22/mir.fear.ap/index.html
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is best known in geek circles for being an organization that helps resolve domain name disputes. It undertakes close to three-quarters of such disputes, for good reason - it historically sides with big business and celebrities against domain squatters and other no-names and so, understandably, big business and celebrity plaintiffs tend to choose to lodge complaints with WIPO. WIPO's two latest decisions, for ex-MTV VJ Julie Brown and Sony Canada (on behalf of Celine Dion) and against domain squatter Jeff Burgar, seem like carbon copies of each other. That's because they are, and sloppy cut-and-paste practices reveal that. Regardless of the moral or legal bases of the cases, each needs to be heard and judged on its own merits. The one-man (!) WIPO panel apparently took the easy way out and decided the two cases as one. That's not right. The Register, long an outspoken critic of WIPO, details further errors and prejudice and links to the two decisions as well as to its own past criticisms.
WIPO: http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/index.html
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17161.html
Napster Tosses a Billion but Nobody Catches It
A week after a court ruled that Napster knew its users were violating copyright laws, the company offered the recording industry $1 billion over five years to just forget the whole thing. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), smelling blood, rejected the settlement which astonishingly represents a mere 1% of the industry's annual revenue. Perhaps the wisest voice in the crowd belongs to Senator (and recording artist) Orrin Hatch, who sides with the RIAA legally, but who also foresees the migration of music traders to less centralized, free services should Napster institute a subscription scheme. The music industry and artists have every right to try to keep the copyright barn door closed - but the horse has already left and they might as well try to ride it because it's not going to be corralled.CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/02/20/napster.settlement.03/index.html
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4891103.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41941,00.html
Google's Usenet Archive Offline, Usenet Users Pissed Off
We adore Google's highly popular search service, but the site put its popularity in jeopardy with Usenet junkies when it cut access to most of the Deja Usenet archive it recently purchased. The decision has sparked renewed interest in establishing a Usenet archive at a public, open-source facility, although that's a tall order in terms of required resources. Google protests that it's just trying to get a handle on how best to manage the archive and that full access to the five years of material will be restored in a few months. In the meantime, many disgruntled, mistrustful users are venting, including a programmer with the handle of "Deja Refugee" who has challenged Google to make freely available the archive and the programming code. The controversy raises some intriguing issues of ownership. Given Usenet's broadly based authorship and considering that many postings were earlier housed on computers run by tax-supported organizations, does Google really own this stuff or is it in the public domain? Do posters retain rights of ownership to their posts? How is society going to deal with the issue of reliable custodianship and access to this type of material? Wired has more.http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,41926,00.html
On the Internet, No One Knows You're Hiding a Corpse
On the Internet, you can be anybody you want, adopt any persona you desire. Still, sooner or later, reality has a way of intruding. Twenty-seven-year-old Trevor Tasker from Yorkshire, England found that out the hard way when he flew to the US to develop a budding romance with Wynema Shumate, a South Carolina woman he'd met in a chat room. Wynema had already sent him alluring pictures of herself. Expecting to meet an attractive 30-year-old, Trevor found himself entering the apartment of 65-year-old, 280-pound Wynema, who'd obviously been less than candid about herself online and who'd plumped up a bit in the 30 years since the aforementioned alluring photos had been snapped. Alas, young Trevor was in for an even more gruesome surprise. He discovered in Wynema's freezer the year-old corpse of her roommate. Wynema's roomie had died of natural causes, and she wanted to continue living in his house. Anyway, at that point Trevor just wanted out of there. He's back home safely now with Mom and is vowing to stay offline forever. Lest you think we're making this up, check out ZDNet UK and the Register.ZDNet UK: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/7/ns-21143.html
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17117.html
Gosh, Another Outlook Security Bug
Microsoft has let the world know that there's another security loophole in its Outlook and Outlook Express. The weak link this time is a module that processes virtual business cards - vCards, they're called - which can be spoofed. If you open a hacked vCard, "the attacker could cause the mail client to run code of her choice" on your machine. Or the attacker could just crash the target machine. Online security firm AtStake uncovered the exploit and Microsoft offers a patch on its security bulletin page.AtStake: http://www.atstake.com/research/advisories/2001/index.html#022301-1#022301-1
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms01-012.asp
MSN offers a useful page that tests the true honest-to-goodness speed of your Internet hook-up. Forget all the marketing jabber and hypothetical speeds. Simply go to this page, let it load, and it tells you your bona fide Net connection speed. You may be surprised by the results. You know those commercials by DSL sellers that denigrate cable connections for the way they share bandwidth with neighbors? Our editor's Canadian cable connection downloads data at a repeatable 1550 kbps, equivalent to T-1 speeds. Don't hate him for it.
http://msn.zdnet.com/partners/msn/bandwidth/speedtest50.htm
Don't flood us with junk, identify contact info clearly, use e-mail instead of fax or phone, don't send attachments, understand the publications you target, treat us as busy people with limited time, and don't send attachments. Those are just some of the suggestions you can read as part of the results of an online survey of 1,750 technology journalists who were asked about their experiences with PR professionals. Politis Communications did the survey in December and January and has posted a news release summarizing the results on their Web site. It also links to a PowerPoint presentation, which wasn't sent as an attachment, of the complete results. If you're in the PR game and you want your material used and influential, the useful tips and lessons here might help, unless you send MS Word docs or other attachments. Reassuringly for PR types, despite the sometimes critical tone of their comments, 60% of the journalists agreed that their job would be difficult without the input of PR people. Oh, if you send us info, don't send attachments.
http://www.politis.com/news/news7.htm
ONLINE CULTURE
All Your Base Are Belong to Us!
Every so often, some insubstantial piece of online fluff catches on and spreads through bulletin boards and e-mail lists like nerdy wildfire. Usually, the best we can do is tell you, "Hey, there's this nifty insubstantial piece of online fluff that has caught on and spread like nerdy wildfire." Such items are rarely understandable yet contagious - the perfect example is Mahir Cagri's "I kiss you" page. One of the latest such contagions is "All Your Base", a Flash movie based on an old arcade game called Zero Wing, famed for its Japlish subtitles. Take those subtitles, insert them into everyday situations like some kind of conspiracy, and add a techno beat so catchy it could easily get you dancing at your local club, and you get this. But that's not all. "All Your Base" has a history that we've rooted out. The concept started last summer with a Wayne Newtony parody of the game's intro screens and developed in a thread (which we can't reach) at Tribal War Forums that inspired still photos. These stills were then incorporated in a non-Wayne Newtony "All Your Base" techno version. There's also a FAQ on the game. Somebody's got to release that song as a dance mix....All Your Base: http://www.thefever.com/AYB2.swf
Start: http://www.overclocked.org/OCzerowing.htm
Stills: http://www.planetstarseige.com/allyourbase/index.html
Game FAQ: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/genesis/file/zero_wing.txt
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Schuiten and Peeters's Obscure Cities
The images on this fantasy site are so well executed and beautiful that it's hard to believe they're Web graphics. The site relies heavily on JavaScript and Shockwave Flash. Be sure you have a current Flash plug-in. The content is a series of images of older European-style cities that are nothing at all what they seem to be at first glance. The details are interesting, but the sheer overwhelming beauty of the art is the real reason to spend time at these obscure cities.http://www.tram81.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
|
Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
|
After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life
Tales of The Dying Earth
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People
SSH, the Secure Shell: The Definitive GuidePlastic's Unusual Look at Current Events
Plastic uses the subtitle "Recycling the Web in real time." It styles itself a news filter/group Web log devoted to pop culture. That's accurate. The editors or readers start topics with short articles that cry out for reader comment. The comments are filtered and crosslinked with the result almost always being far more than the simple sum of its parts. Plastic.com is a way of examining issues that simply couldn't exist without the Web, or maybe Usenet. The topics range widely, from films, games, and humor to politics, technology, and work. All views seem to be welcome and tolerated.http://www.plastic.com/
The Nervous Dog That Wants to Be an Onion
Everyone knows the Onion, the best satiric newspaper on or off the Web. The Nervous Dog can give the Onion a run for its money, maybe even beat it. Right now, the Nervous Dog has the right attitude all the time, but the quality can only be found most of the time. The format is standard news site style, with teaser paragraphs and continuation pages. It's clean and it works (gee, that's no surprise). The content is a mix of current news that is funny standing on its own and fictional material with a good dose of plausibility. Some of the material will enrage the serious readers and those with a limited sense of humor. If your friends don't like the Nervous Dog, take a real hard look at them.http://www.thenervousdog.com/
Whether you're a poet, songwriter, author, or evil villain, there's a place you can go to sound just like Bob Dylan. You'll get the intonation and the disillusionment in time, but if you visit this site, you'll already have the rhyme. Take a sec out of your day to write a sappy greeting card and next thing you know, you're thinkin' you're the Bard. They're a part of Lycos; their logo's bright orange. And uh... they have this online poetry slam, too, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
http://www.rhymezone.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Some still hold that the Apollo moon landings were a hoax - so much so that NASA recently felt obligated to confront the movement. Others say you can stand an egg on end on the spring equinox. To shed light in the darkness of movies, TV, and misconception, Sonoma State University astronomer Phil Plait fights for objective truth with a site called Bad Astronomy, which describes many ways in which "science has been misused and misrepresented." If you throw around idioms such as "meteoric rise" and "light years ahead", Phil has news for you.... Movie fans tired of suspending disbelief may agree with his debunking of recent SF flicks "Armageddon", "Deep Impact", "Red Planet", "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace", and others. (On the other hand, he loved "Contact".) TV writers, especially those at NBC, would do well to explore his Bad TV List. Phil has also posted his answers to astronomical questions put to the Mad Scientist Network between 1996 and 2000. When the media play up the next extraterrestrial discovery or threat in a big way, Bad Astronomy will likely be around to illuminate.http://www.badastronomy.com/
The PaleoDiet advocates merely eating the foods our pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. In modern terms, that means simple foods, minimally processed and varying daily depending on where you are and what's available. This sounds like a joke, but it's actually a highly scrutinized scientific method. It's a serious diet and, most likely, a very healthy diet. If you choose to follow the diet, you can find complete directions and sample menus at this Paleolithic Diet Page and at other sites linked here. The biggest advantage you have over the originators of the diet (who died out thousands of years ago) is that you always have food sources. Pre-agricultural communities didn't have that assurance. There's a ton of reference material here including groups and sources lists.
http://www.panix.com/~paleodiet/
This place isn't just for kids. We were fascinated by the Flash effects, and the place is supported by some heavy hitters in science, technology, and entertainment. Think New York Hall of Science, IBM, and Paramount Pictures, among others. Join StarFleet Academy to explore, and Captain Janeway from the "Voyager" mission pops up to welcome you. Collect knowledge cards to earn increases in rank. And some of these things really make you think. This isn't a short-term endeavor, either; it's designed for repeat attendance. Space missions not your cuppa? Why not program a robot to navigate to a biohazard, retrieve it, and take it to a containment vessel? It's not as easy as you might think. There are also field trips, and selected webcams to view. We'd guess this site would be best experienced on a high-bandwidth connection with parents or mentors helping kids think, learn, and expand their horizons. From what we've seen, it'll make the adults think and learn, as well. Content changes often, so there's usually something new to explore.
http://www.tryscience.org/
Will preschool through seventh grade test scores improve after kids visit iKnowthat.com? We can't say, but an inquiring young mind will have a blast learning new words, playing math games, and drawing with the kind of graphic arts tools you find in professional software programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Macromedia Shockwave, put to great use here, enables compelling interactivity (except for some of the wonky synthesized voice audio). One of our juvenile-minded Netsurfer offspring spent a good portion of Saturday morning engrossed - and her spelling already shows signs of improvement.
http://www.iknowthat.com/