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| UCLA Internet Report 2001 |
| Lord of the WebRing |
| Robot Dog Dildo: If It's Not True, It Should Be |
| PHKL - the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop |
| John Walker's Usenet Trail |
| A Whole Lotta Art |
| Have a NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Contrastlife Contrasts Life |
| Dictionary of Brit Slang |
| Crunchy Generation X.5 Essays |
| Images of Mars, As Seen from Surface Level |
| The Human Genetics Controversy You Haven't Heard of |
| Need a Prime? Bring out the GIMPS |
| SuperCroc |
| Troy's Still at It |
| A Gripe with Our Article on Computergripes |
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Hot+Cold Snack Box
Sharper Image
A versatile, personal electronic mini "fridge" keeps drinks and snacks
cold or hot. Pop one on your desk and no more sharing the corporate
fridge and having your bananas smell like soy sauce because your
co-workers are into Chow Mein.
RoboCub Walking Talking Robot with Wireless Remote Control
Sharper Image
Walks, talks and sings "I'm a little robot, da-da-da...". The eyes and
mouth light up as it spouts dozens of random phrases. What's not to like?
Holiday Dinner Wine Package
Wine.com
Six decent wines that are sure to please everyone during your holiday dinner,
along with up to 14 recipe cards, a wine aroma wheel, a food and wine
pairing pocket guide and a varietal/main dish advisor. An easy and affordable
way to avoid having to make wine choices for your holiday meal.
Millenium Truffle Bars
Bodega Chocolates
Mmmmmmm, truffles.... They're expensive, but really, really delicious.
Handspring Visor Edge
Handspring
It's the thinnest, coolest Palm OS PDA on the market. Plenty of power
and really easy to stuff in your shirt pocket or purse, something you
can't always easily do with the other PDAs. No business person or student
should be without one these days. Expandable too.
Scooter Mania Sweeps The Country!
BREAKING SURF
The US has released a videotape of Usame Bin Laden which it says proves his complicity in the September 11 attack. An English transcript of the tape is available in PDF format. Yahoo has links to international coverage of reaction to the video, and also the unedited version of the video itself.Transcript: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/d20011213ubl.pdf
Yahoo Coverage: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Terrorism/
Video: http://rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/audio/front/binladenarch/?http://vision.yahoo.com/lc?
id=2101288&aid=7669
US Pulls Out of Anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty
President George Bush announced that the US is withdrawing from the Anti-Missle treaty. He noted that "I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks". He also made the point that one of the signatories, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. The White House site has the full text of his statement. The State Department website has the full text of the treaty and supporting documents.President's Statement: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011213-4.html
ABM Treaty: http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/abmpage.html
Google Extends Usenet Archive to 1981, Unveils Collection of First Posts
Google Groups' online archive now contains 700 million messages going back 20 years and appears to be the most complete collection of Usenet messages ever assembled. Google has also assembled a timeline of significant postings as part of its announcement. The oldest article in the archive (May 12, 1981) is a review of the Versatec V-80 plotter and the timeline proceeds to the first mention of Microsoft, the first review of the IBM PC, CERN's announcement of the World Wide Web, Linus Torvald's Linux announcement, first Kibo post to alt.religion.kibology, and many more historic firsts. It's an amazing compilation of significant online history. Hats off to Google for putting this together, although it somehow missed the first Usenet mention of NSD, which sought beta readers in July 1994. Never mind, we found it. Twice per week? What were we thinking!Google: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html
NSD: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=Netsurfer+Digest&hl=en&scoring=d&
as_drrb=b&as_mind=17&as_minm=5&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=11&
as_maxm=12&as_maxy=1994&rnum=95&selm=302b8s%24cv9%40
news1.svc.portal.com&filter=0
Wired has a seasonal tale about the irresistible urge some folks have to take things apart and improve them. This season's plethora of electronic gadgets and toys provides lots of scope for such hobbyists. Manufacturers, however, don't always appreciate the consumer's urge to modify and primarily try to make sure all this freelance engineering doesn't sully their brands. They have to choose to either combat or adopt the human urge to find out how electronic gadgets work and then customize them. And having an unpaid army of customizers out there can be surprisingly good for business. Lego has finally established an uneasy peace with its volunteer army of coders for the popular Mindstorm robotics building sets. Sony has only recently settled its dispute with a hacker of the pricey Aibo robot dog. Want to add the word "pork" to the vocabulary of Vona the singing fish, speed up the hard drive of the Xbox, or modify your Furby? Instructions and sometimes kits for all these are now available on the Web, posted by inquisitive tinkerers.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48847,00.html
Blinkenlights: Huge Message Display
The famous German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is celebrating its 20th anniversary in true geek style. Members hooked up lamps behind the windows of eight stories of a building to create a gigantic eight-by-18 pixel display. Every night, the lights display all sorts of animations. The display can be controlled by users with cell phones. Call up a phone number and play pong on the side of the building, or send love letters to your significant other. Neat, and reminiscent of the building-sized Tetris game created by Brown University students last year (see NSD 6.14).Blinkenlights: http://www.blinkenlights.de/
CCC: http://www.ccc.de/
NSD 6.14: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v06/nsd.06.14.html#BS9
AnandTech Looks at the GameCube
AnandTech is at it again. We covered their in-depth presentation of Microsoft's foray into the world of gaming platforms (Xbox) in NSD 7.40. Now, it's taking apart the Nintendo GameCube in a new installment, and it's every bit as ambitious as the Xbox review. The short version: GameCube and Xbox outperform the older Sony PlayStation2 when it comes to graphics. Xbox beats GameCube at graphics as well, but GameCube has better controls and - this could be critical - a larger core of developers and users. If Microsoft is able to pull in some solid development and user support, its more powerful Xbox could pull ahead. Nintendo has the lead going out of the gate, but its proprietary format and other issues may come back to bite it. The jury's still out, but AnandTech can fill you in.http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1566
"The Fellowship of the Ring" Reviews
The film opened in the UK this past weekend and the major British papers have exceedingly favorable reviews. Don't read them if you don't want to pre-judge the movie.BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/reviews/newsid_1702000/1702177.stm
Guardian: http://film.guardian.co.uk/lordoftherings/news/0,11016,616644,00.html
Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/review?pg=/et/01/12/11/bfrings11.html
Official Site: http://www.lordoftherings.net/
We love NASA and the Shuttle and all, but some have grumbled about the agency's cost overruns. Perhaps the costs could be curtailed a bit by cutting down on unnecessary payload. The current STS-108 mission, for example, has carried over 11,500 non-essential items - high-tech, high-cost souvenirs, if you will - into orbit. Most of the space-borne souvenirs will be donated to families of victims of the Sept. 11 tragedies, but stuff like this piggybacks on Shuttle missions all the time. Our reviewer is married to a person who flew on the STS-80 mission, and - believe it or not! - you can't really tell whether or not something ever actually traveled into space. But that's kind of the idea, after all, especially with regard to astronauts. It might be more cost-effective to get the people and essential hardware up and leave the souvenirs in the gift shops. Or, if charity can't be left out, maybe collect $20 million from an orbital tourist, shoot his flabby butt into space, and donate the profit instead of little flags to the families.
http://collectspace.com/news/news-112801a.html
Canadian researchers, using advanced underwater technology, have detected what might be the remains of a sophisticated urban center off the west coast of Cuba. Cuba brought in the Canadians to help find sunken treasure ships in national waters, but the crew turned up suspiciously geometric stone blocks. The researchers, while commenting that speculation of what these stones are would be irresponsible, gave it a go anyway and said they believe they have discovered the remains of an ancient city. With no pictures on which to base an opinion, we're inclined to lump these stones with the debunked submerged stone roadways of Bimini. Regardless, this discovery will no doubt feed those who still search for Plato's lost city of Atlantis. The BBC has the story.
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1697000/1697038.stm
Bimini: http://www.intersurf.com/~heinrich/Bimini1.html
Atlantis: http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/Atlantis/
"Devastating" File Download Vulnerability in Microsoft Explorer
Word of another security flaw in Internet Explorer has leaked out. The vulnerability, found by Jouko Pynnonen, a security researcher with Finland's Oy Online Solutions, lets malicious Web sites install Trojans on your computer while you think you're downloading harmless text, images, audio, or other files. According to Newsbytes, Microsoft has no comment on the bug, which was disclosed to the company Nov. 19. The bug description has been deliberately left a bit vague to prevent the exploit's use. Despite this, the bug has been replicated by contributors to the Bugtraq security mailing list.Bug: http://www.solutions.fi/index.cgi/news_2001_11_26?lang=eng
Newsbytes: http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172878.html
Bugtraq: http://securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/archive.pl?id=1&threads=1&tid=243754
Open Source: Code, Culture, and Cash
According to a paper by David Lancashire in the peer-reviewed Net journal First Monday, the supposedly insulated gift economy of the open-source movement is not entirely unaffected by the stain of filthy lucre. Lancashire puts it a bit more academically: "hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost." Lancashire notes that a small number of countries produce completely disproportionate amounts of free software and suggests that differences in international market conditions account for this skewed distribution. Complement your reading of this paper with another at First Monday in which Christopher Kelty compares the economics of free software to those of scientific research. Both are driven to a large extent by the currency of reputation (or as Kelty neatly derives for software, "greputation"). Kelty examines how the currency of reputation relates to the age-old question, "How do you make money with free software?"Lancashire: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/
Kelty: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/kelty/
ONLamp: New Web Site Covering Open Web Technologies
Way back in 1998, the German hacker magazine c't coined the acronym LAMP, which stands for Linux + Apache + MySQL + (PHP | Perl | Python). The O'Reilly Network, well known for its excellent technical Web sites, has just opened a site dedicated to LAMP technologies. ONLamp.com presents a variety of in-depth articles on the modern open-source world. Current offerings cover, among other topics, recent security vulnerabilities, an open source replacement client for Outlook called Sylpheed, an interview with the creator of Ruby, and a report from a meeting on Lightweight Languages at MIT. Much of the content links to other O'Reilly Network sites. Open-source Web developers will want to bookmark this one.http://www.onlamp.com/
A Primer for Accessible Web Pages
Late last year, the US government published a new standard for accessibility of Federal Web sites for disabled users. The rule, known as Section 508, applies by law only to government Web sites but, as this article notes, it's not that hard for any Web site to comply. A lot of the Section 508 requirements can be met if your Web site is readable in a text-only browser such as Lynx. This article outlines some simple steps designers can take to make their sites accessible to disabled users. It's only a couple of pages worth of material, and makes a large difference to disabled netsurfers.http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/synd/2001/11/30/accessibility.html
Anonymous Remailers Expand in Number in Recent Months
In the last three months, law enforcement activity has increased, and many interpret that as threatening online privacy. As a result, CNN reports, the number of anonymous remailer servers has also increased. The article says Len Sassaman, a security consultant who runs a remailer of his own, estimates that the number of remailers has doubled. This piece supplies a layman's introduction to remailers, but for the technical scoop and to set up your own anonymous remailer - it's not that hard - check out the Mixmaster project at SourceForge. An informative page at Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA) discusses the different theories and practices of varying remailers.CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/12/10/anonymous.e.mail.ap/index.html
Mixmaster: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mixmaster/
EFGA: http://anon.efga.org/Remailers/
Chris Raettig found KPMG Consulting's theme song, "Our Vision of Global Strategy", amusing enough to post on his Corporate Anthems Web page along with a link to the company site, and thereon hangs a tale. In the wake of a flurry of Web and media interest in the anthems site, Raettig received an e-mail from KPMG asserting that links to its site "require that a formal Agreement exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization's Web Link Policy." Raettig posted the request and his response on his personal site where it caught the attention and roused the scornful ire of a goodly portion of the Web community, and inspired such actions as Metafilter's "Link to KPMG Day". Wired has details on the fallout of KPMG's global linking strategy; the backstory is available from Raettig's site.
Raettig: http://chris.raettig.org/email/jnl00040.html
KPMG: http://www.kpmg.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48874,00.html
One Angry Judge Shuts Down US Department of Interior Web Ops
US District Judge Royce Lamberth has a reputation as a hard-nosed jurist, but he's outdone himself here. In a ruling that didn't generate much discussion in the major media, he ordered US Department of the Interior (DOI) to immediately disconnect from the Internet every single computer that has access to Indian trust fund data. In brief, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a subsidiary of the DOI, has for years stood charged with mismanagement of American Indian trust funds and housing private fund records on systems that were easily penetrable, and after ignoring reports that said so and stalling in court, the gavel finally dropped. Visit the independent Indian Trust site for details, especially the deep, deep hole Department of Justice attorney Matt Fader continued to dig with every word out of his mouth. We'll give you the URL of the DOI site too, even though it seems to be offline for the near future....Indian Trust: http://www.indiantrust.org/clips.cfm?news_id=158
DOI: http://www.doi.gov/
The full implications of the US Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act are now coming into focus. According to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, Americans can successfully seek redress in American courts against World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) decisions on domain name disputes. A Brazilian soccer team won a WIPO judgment against a US Web site owner and took over the disputed domain name. The American appealed in the US judicial system and lost, but the Court of Appeals found that, under the cybersquatting law, a US court can order that an American domain name owner regain a disputed domain in spite of any WIPO decisions. The full implications of this ruling are not yet clear, but apparently the US won't stand losing sovereignty to international organizations in these matters. CNET's got the goods.
CNET: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-8105325.html
Are you already tired of pop-up ads? No longer wanting to "LOWER YOUR BILLS!!!"? Maybe you'll enjoy this new form of Web advertising, the Shoshkele. A Shoshkele is sort of a cross between a pop-up and a Flash animation, but don't ask why they are so named because we couldn't find out (although we suspect it might mean something like "little secret" in Yiddish). According to the inventors, United Virtualities, Shoshkeles are "browser driven, platform agnostic, sound enabled, free moving forms that marry total creative license to a whole new level of effectiveness." In practice, they appear as animations that overlay the Web page you are trying to read and while they will tickle your curiosity at first, they are bound to become annoying. The Boston Globe has some examples.
United Virtualities: http://www.unitedvirtualities.com/
Globe: http://www.boston.com/mediakit/attshosh.shtml
The 1996 Telecommunications Act was supposed to deregulate the field and open up markets to competition, improving choice for consumers, but it just hasn't worked out that way. Small, diversified telecom companies are struggling, especially at the local level, or last mile, where economic imperative usually forces them to merely resell network access from local monopolies. In response, the consumer-oriented Phoenix Center think tank has released a paper strongly promoting alternative distribution companies (ADCOs). ADCOs would concentrate solely on building alternative, high-speed, local telecommunication loops and would market the bandwidth wholesale to independent telecoms; a Maryland ADCO, for example, is using sewer-crawling robots to lay fiber-optic lines. SF Gate has the story on how this fresh approach could finally bust open local phone and Internet-access markets.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2001/12/06/adcosbust.DTL
European GEANT Gigabit Network Online
The European GEANT network is roughly analogous to the US Internet2 network, connecting educational and research institutions at gigabaud speeds. The network reaches over 3,000 nodes in over 30 countries and serves as a testbed for such technologies as Quality of Service, remote imaging, distributed computing, and others. This is a notable and significant expansion of high-speed Net capability. In addition to information about the network on the main Web page, you can also check out the degree of GEANT traffic on the Weathermap page.GEANT: http://www.dante.net/geant/
Weathermap: http://stats.dante.org.uk/nep/weathermap.html
Advanced Encryption Standard Released
The US Secretary of Commerce has proudly announced the release of the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), destined for wide use by business and individuals for transmission of sensitive, unclassified information. The process of finding a new standard started back in 1997 when researchers from all over the world submitted candidates for evaluation. The 15 original submissions were reduced to five in 1999, and these were then subjected to additional tests. The winning algorithm for the AES involves the Rijndael encryption formula developed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. AES replaces the current Data Encryption Standard (DES), heavily used for financial transactions through bank machines and over the Internet, and which dates back to 1977. The DES system has keys only 56 bits long, and is vulnerable to modern computerized key exhaustion attacks. The AES supports key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits, suggesting - fingers crossed - that it should be resistant to decryption for many years.Announcement: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/g01-111.htm
AES: http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/
First World CyberGames Results
The results from the very first world CyberGames are in. The games, held in Korea this past week, featured an international roster of players who battled each other in various PC games, including Starcraft, Quake III, Age of Empires II, Unreal Tournament, FIFA 2001, and Counter Strike. The games were not without controversy, as the elated Chinese Taipei team that won the Age of Empires II gold medal celebrated by waving Taiwanese flags - an action not appreciated by the game organizers in politically sensitive South Korea.http://www.worldcybergames.org/
ONLINE CULTURE
UCLA has released its second major annual report on Internet usage. The report surveyed Americans on over 100 major issues and is packed with data. Some of the major findings include a decline in the number of people who bought goods online, increased Net usage at the expense of television, and the existence of broad concerns about security and privacy. The UCLA surveys provide a good snapshot of American Net usage at the dawn of a new century and are of interest to historians, marketeers, and those curious about what their neighbors are doing online.http://www.ccp.ucla.edu/index.asp
Salon's little history lesson about the relationship between Yahoo and WebRing neatly illustrates the deepening struggle between corporations desperately mining the Internet for revenue and the geek non-profit culture that's driven the development of much of the really useful Internet things. A poignant twist to this story involves Yahoo's own grass-roots geek culture, but that seems a long time ago, far, far away. WebRing is a way of weaving topic trails through the thick forests of the Internet. When Yahoo acquired it, it was determined to find a way to make it pay, something it was never designed for. In the process, they nearly scuppered the whole thing. Yahoo's initial euphoria about WebRing, back in the bright, shiny Internet times when almost anything seemed possible, has faded in the duller glare of reality. As we reported at the time, Yahoo sold WebRing in mid-October to Tim Killeen, an early WebRing engineer. Killeen hopes to breathe new life into the system, but whether anything can breathe new life into Yahoo may be another story.
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2001/12/05/webring/index.html
Robot Dog Dildo: If It's Not True, It Should Be
There's no way to tell if this is true or some inspired hoax, but our tabloid instincts won't let us pass on passing it on. This April 2001 article in Japan Today reveals that a toy robot dog - if not the expensive and popular Sony AIBO, then something like it - has been adopted to be not only man's best friend but also woman's. It's a truism in engineering circles that the sex industry tends to be an early adapter of personal technology. There's no reason why this should not be true in robotics as well. We predict huge fortunes will be made based on robotic sex aids, especially when the Japanese perfect the artificial tentacle.http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=kuchikomi&id=87
PHKL - the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop
Oh, the horror! The horror!http://www.exonome.com/fj/phkl/
THREAD WATCH
John Walker, the American citizen cum captured Taliban soldier, was a fan of hip-hop, the Sega Genesis, and music hardware in the 1990s. How do we know? We read his Usenet posts in the new Google Groups archive, after searching for them with his then e-mail address. These 45 posts start with a 1995 complaint about a logo design company, progress through a sell-off of his music and equipment, travel through some Muslim theology, and wind up, incongruously, with a request for the manual of a musical keyboard in 1997. Check it out.http://groups.google.com/groups?as_uauthors=doodoo@hooked.net&hl=en&num=50
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
One way to get over the too-much-design-not-enough-content blues is to visit Mark Harden's Artchive, a plump site bursting with images and information on art and artists. You'll find art analysis and review, as well as capsule histories, backgrounds, and links to other Web resources, and more than 2,000 onsite images. The main body of the site, the Artchive itself, is organized alphabetically, encyclopedia-style for fingertip access to all available information on your subject. Accompanying sections include a virtual gallery of special exhibits, a collection of theory and criticism, a Juxtaposition section that offers some interesting contrast and comparison of artistic work and method, and a great links page featuring a nice eclectic collection of "pick of the moment" selections.http://www.artchive.com/
Have a NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com
Thanks to the magic of clickable links, you don't have to risk tendonitis to visit this site. Just click the URL below, and if you like it, bookmark it. This site has a decidedly British atmosphere to it. Pour a cuppa, sit down, and take some time. We enjoyed browsing the shiny baubles, but this is far more than just a gallery of pretty things. As the webmasters recently noted, "A new wave of creative idiots are storming the web. Flash is their weapon of choice." Oh, yes, and some of the weapons are displayed here - well, unless the weapons are the idiots themselves rather than the Flash, but no matter how you look at it, it's a potent mixture. We enjoyed the sheep game, and we weren't wearing dairy boots at the time. This is also one of the few sites that features a decent image of cat-fishing, which of course you may not find all that amusing if you happen to harbor an affinity for hairballs.http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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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.
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Simpsons Evil Krusty the Clown Doll
A Box of Unfortunate Events: The Trouble Begins (A Series of Unfortunate Events Boxed Set - Books 1-3)
Creation: Life and How to Make It
A Cook's Tour
Designing Large-Scale LANshttp://www.contrastlife.com/
Cor blimey! They really don't speak English in the UK, at least not as far as dictionaries and rules are concerned. They speak instead a dynamic slangy patois. If you need to translate, visiting and studying the A Dictionary of Slang site well in advance is a great idea. The site lists a huge number of terms, mostly from the UK, but some from Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the West Indies. Terms invented last week might be missing (although the site is frequently updated), but little else will be. The slang is for the most part ordinary street language and there are holes in specialty slang areas such as military slang. There's more than enough though to get foreigners through the streets of any UK city (assuming they can fathom the accents). The Links page is a portal to slang sites worldwide and is simply smashing. The internal search engine is also world-class.
http://dictionaryofslang.co.uk/
Crunchable.net is still in its infancy - all of about three months old at this writing - and is cobbled together by seven more or less fresh-out-of-college folks in their mid 20s. You're thinking, "There can't be much content there." And you're right; there isn't. In its present form, the content consists of about a dozen short missives from the various contributors, but some are remarkably well done, with the promise of more on the way. This isn't a site for Flash addicts or hardcore gamers; this is for folks who like to explore life through the written word. Among the most recent reads is an enjoyable piece called "Penalty for delay of childhood, fifteen yards, loss of training wheels". We're looking for more. And by the way, if you'd like to contribute to their literary effort, they'd like to hear from you.
http://www.crunchable.net/
SURFING SCIENCE
Images of Mars, As Seen from Surface Level
Using Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) elevation data, researchers have created some stunning panoramic shots of the Valles Marineris region. The great images make the mountains and canyons of Mars appear as they would to an observer standing on the planet's surface and looking towards the horizon. The site is in French, but Space.com has a short blurb on how the data were processed. Extremely neat. The MGS mission has also released new photographic data that show annual growth in holes in the Martian South Polar carbon dioxide ice cap. If you have the bandwidth, try downloading the animated GIFs.Panoramas: http://www.astrosurf.com/planete-mars/goursac/marineris.html
Space.com: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_renderings_011204-2.html
MGS: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/
The Human Genetics Controversy You Haven't Heard of
A team led by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena published a research paper called "The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations" in the September 2001 issue of Human Immunology. According to the abstract, the paper examined genetic variation among Middle Eastern populations and concluded that Palestinians were genetically indistinguishable from Jews, and thus any rivalry is cultural rather than racial. Depending on how you define Jews, that seems to be an odd conclusion - would Palestinians really be so closely related to Jews of European ancestry? Unfortunately, our inquiries to the author have gone unanswered, and we can't check the original paper as it has been retracted - well, obliterated, really. The Guardian covers the affair in more space than we can afford, and it's quite a story, rife with enraged and puzzled scientists, and implications of anti-Semitism and pro-Israel lobbying.Abstract: http://journals.bmn.com/journals/list/latest?uid=
HIM.bmn02810_01988859_v0062i09_01002889&rendertype=abstract&
node=TOC%40%40HIM%40062%4009%40062_09
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4307083,00.html
Need a Prime? Bring out the GIMPS
A new, largest known prime number was recently revealed and if you'd like to jot it down, better get started - it takes about three weeks to write out the 4,053,946 digits by hand. Summarily expressed as 213,466,917 - 1, the number was discovered by a participant of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project, a Canadian student named Michael Cameron. One of the 130,000 volunteers worldwide who contributed to the 13,000 years of distributed computer time it took to find the new prime, Cameron used George Woltman's Prime95 program to put his computer's idle cycles to work. The last largest prime had been discovered in 1999. You can read more about the new discovery at Prime Pages, and if you fancy yourself a contender to find the next big-time prime, you can get full details on the project and download the software at the Mersenne GIMPS page.Prime Pages: http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/notes/13466917/index.html
GIMPS: http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
What was 40 feet long and ate dinosaurs for lunch? The SuperCroc, a.k.a. Sarcosuchus imperator. This site, which makes extensive use of Flash and static imagery, takes you from discovery of the remains of the beast in the Sahara Desert to articulation of the skeleton at a Canadian company. This critter roamed the planet around 110 million years ago, a fact which fills us with gratitude as it was the size of a city bus - and as any urbanite knows, you can pack a heck of a lot of people into a bus. That's one ride we're happy not to take. This exploration was funded in part by National Geographic Society, so the site includes a link to NGS with even more information. The main site offers a host of resources on its own, as well.
http://www.supercroc.org/
Good ol' Troy Hurtubise is still developing his anti-bear armored suit. We were under the impression that he'd abandoned the quest but, no, he's entered the snout-to-face phase of testing his Ursus Mk VI. A Kodiak bear tore an unmanned suit to bits, but the suit so spooked a smaller grizzly bear that it refused to cooperate. NewScientist.com reports the latest results. We met Hurtubise at the 1998 IgNobel ceremony and wrote up a NSD special feature worth reading if you have no idea who he is. Also check out Canada's National Film Board (NFB) for further info. (We couldn't get the film clip to start.)
NewScientist.com: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991668
NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/misc/troy.html
NFB: http://www.nfb.ca/grizzly/index.html
CORRECTIONS
A Gripe with Our Article on Computergripes
Michael Horowitz, the guy behind Computer Gripes, doesn't exactly agree with our assessment of his Web site ("Computer Gripes", NSD 7.41). As you might expect, he posted a gripe about our grip of his gripes. He makes some good points.http://www.computergripes.com/NetsurferDigest.html