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OUR AFFILIATE RECOMMENDATIONS
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Winter Gear
REI
Time to gear up for winter sports before global warming turns it all
into so much slush. We like REI, which has an excellent selection of
outdoor gear for every season. As long as you're browsing around there
(and hopefully buying something to earn us our comission) don't forget
to check out their first rate REI Adventures which arranges worldwide
travel trips, and their REI Outlet store which discounts a wide variety of
items.
Skagen Stainless Steel Pocket Watch
The Sharper Image
Valentine's Day is not that far away, and it's never too early to think about
potential gifts for ones significant other, either as payment for past sins
or downpayment on future ones. Or maybe just because you really, really like them.
How about this neat yet affordable pocket watch? It's got a stainless
steel case only 1/4" thick is water resistant to 100 feet and comes
with a 16" chain. If this is not quite right check out some
other great watches available at The Sharper Image.
Beetle CD Stereo with FM Tuner
The Sharper Image
Now this is kind of cool. A radio and CD player hidden in this small
model of a VW Beetle. Envision this on the nightstand in your - or your
friend's - bedroom. Makes a decent gift for the person who has
everything, or perhaps those who have little but strive for funky
interior decor.
Motorola T289 TalkAbout Radio
The Sharper Image
These rechargable two-way radios are on sale right now through the end
of January. They feature iVox technology lets you talk without
pressing buttons or wearing a headset, a two-mile range, and an 11 hour
rechargable NiMH battery. Check them out at $100 off the original
price. Good post-Holiday deal.
BREAKING SURF
Silicon Valley's Post-Euphoria Economy
Of course, the dotcom bust has had an impact on the economy of Silicon Valley. According to the just-released 2002 Index of Silicon Valley, in 2001 the region lost at least 25,000 jobs, real income dropped for the first time since 1993, and venture capital investment dropped 71%. According to SiliconValley.com, however, other indicators point to a relatively robust business infrastructure that should let the Valley weather the current recession in good shape. The social infrastructure, on the other hand, features super-expensive housing, traffic problems, and a dismal educational system. These two articles make good reading for those who follow the ups and downs of the high-tech economy.Index: http://www.jointventure.org/resources/2002Index/index.html
SiliconValley.com: http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svtop/valley011402.htm
Working with a massive database of stellar red shifts, astronomers at Johns Hopkins working with data from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey have determined that the average color of the universe is close to a greenish pale turquoise. The RGB values, for those with accurately color-synched monitors, are 0.269, 0.388, 0.342. Beyond the golly-gee factor of this finding is what it reveals about the evolution of universe. After all, we don't see anything like a slightly greener pale turquoise when we look up at the night sky. According to the framework developed by the astronomers, the universe started out full of hot, blue stars. As stars age, they shift in visible light to the red, hence the emergence of a greenish color as the current color of the universe. Green lies between red and blue in the light spectrum. The other striking consequence of this analysis is the discovery that the rate of star formation has declined dramatically over the past six billion years. Over time, the universe will become redder as even the black holes evaporate and all that is left is old light, reddening as the universe continues to expand.
Johns Hopkins: http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home02/jan02/color.html
2dF: http://msowww.anu.edu.au/2dFGRS/
British 1901 Census Web Site Crashes under Load
The UK Public Record Office (PRO) did a very cool thing, a thing so cool that we were all set to include it in NSD. It posted the full records of the 1901 census of England and Wales on a Web site. The census data, recorded a few weeks after the death of Queen Victoria, include names, ages, addresses, and other records of the 32 million people who lived in England and Wales at the time. The survey also contains records of 90,000 "lunatics, imbeciles and feeble-minded people". The site was designed to handle a million visitors per day but after the announcement, it was hit with traffic 20 times greater than expected. It seems that everybody wanted to grab the data, mostly to find records of ancestors and relatives. The PRO is now scrambling to put in infrastructure to handle the demand, but hasn't quite gotten there yet.PRO: http://www.pro.gov.uk/
Census: http://www.censushelpdesk.co.uk/
DeCSS Coder Indicted in Norway
After about three years of pussy-footing around, Norwegian prosecutors have finally indicted Jon Johansen, now 18, for developing and releasing DeCSS, a program he and two others wrote to allow them to view DVDs on the Linux operating system. The indictment was more concerned with DeCSS's ability to also break DVD copy protection. Johansen's been charged with "violating a computer security system", which might make sense were he deciphering ATM codes or otherwise hacking corporate computing systems, but he decrypted commercial DVDs specifically to use DVDs on a system that the DVD makers chose to ignore. If convicted, Johansen faces up to two years in jail. This, not surprisingly, ticks a lot of people off. CNET has a brief article; Wired goes further, even helpfully providing a link to the offending DeCSS code.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,49638,00.html
CNET: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-8434181.html
Yucca Mountain, Nev., Fingered for Nuclear Waste Site
The US gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear power, so finding a way to manage the resulting nuclear waste is a must. The Yucca Mountain site, in Nevada, had long been studied as a possible location for an underground nuclear waste storage facility. Finally, the US Secretary of Energy has notified the governor of Nevada that he will recommend to President Bush that Yucca Mountain become the nation's nuclear waste repository. If all goes smoothly - not very likely - the first waste shipment would be accepted at the end of this decade. The Yucca Mountain Project Web site offers a lot of general information about this interesting project but it's disappointing for those who want to get their teeth into the technical details because of the recent removal of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and, for security reasons, of detailed regional maps. This is a curious action, since US law requires public hearings and public disclosure of the full EIS before the project can proceed. You might also want to visit the site of the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent body of technical experts.Yucca Mountain Project: http://www.ymp.gov/
Review Board: http://www.nwtrb.gov/
Unions a Bust in High-Tech World
Getting a union toehold in the high-tech sector has proven just about impossible. After all, it's tough to unionize when the call to gather your personal stuff and meet for an announcement can come at any moment. As well, union resources are stretched pretty thin in looking after existing members, with little effort or funds to spare for organizing drives. Unions can't entirely blame the current economic climate, however. Organizing in the tech sector has proven a bust even in good times, when stock options, other employee perks, and the exhilaration of optimism and newness make unions seem irrelevant and unnecessary. As well, unions seem so old economy, reeking of the rust belt and blue collar functions, and often union officials don't seem to have much understanding of the business needs and realities of the high-tech sector. One new wrinkle is the rise of independent employee groups that offer negotiation and worker support but lack true collective bargaining power. CNET's take on the situation is informative and useful.http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-8437119.html
Why those Muslims Misjudged the US
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist with a strong interest in the present. In his City Journal article "Why the Muslims Misjudged Us", Hanson brings his powerful intellect and rhetoric to bear upon the events of Sept. 11 and the current war against terrorism. Hanson argues that the causes of this situation are firmly rooted in the corrupt and bankrupt regimes of the Middle East rather than in any American policy or act by Israel. It is a refreshingly blunt and straightforward piece that articulates, among its many points, why people emigrate to the US rather than to Egypt, Syria, Iran, or Iraq. Plastic's online community got its collective teeth in Hanson's article and shook it a bit, as well.City Journal: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_why_the_muslims.html
Plastic: http://plastic.com/politics/02/01/11/0345237.shtml
The Love Affair with eBay Earnings
It's hard to argue with a 72% increase in annual revenue. That's the number eBay just announced, in the middle of a massive recession, as part of its quarterly earnings report. The company has 37.6 million users who sold 109 million items worth some $2.4 billion in the third quarter. All well and good, but the company also has a price per earnings ratio of over 200 and a market cap of over $17 billion, more than Sears and K-Mart combined (OK, bad example). These are stratospheric numbers by brick-and-mortar standards. Fortune has a long article about eBay that sings the praises of the company. Call us ornery contrarians, but that kind of kissyface press coverage usually comes right before the fall.http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=205936
Online Ad Revenue Mostly Steady, but Market Is Consolidating
A reader called us on the carpet for our description of "utter collapse of the online advertising market". Online ad spending only dropped roughly 15% last year, but from our perspective it truly was an utter collapse because the distribution of ad revenue is so skewed. The top 50 online properties receive 95% of online advertising revenue. This essentially means that unless you are serving millions of ad impressions per month, your site will not earn any serious money selling online ads - well, except maybe for porn sites. This report from the Internet Advertising Bureau provides some other comparative online ad statistics for the past two quarters. The numbers mostly reflect continuing trends in new ad types beyond the banner and a gradual growth in pay-for-performance billing models.http://www.iab.net/news/content/12_04_01b.html
National Domain Registrars Threaten ICANN over Security
Many of the 13 root domain name servers are not under the direct supervision of ICANN, but rather reside under the care and feeding of private companies which don't have any contractual relations with ICANN. Organizations that host the master lists of national domains like .uk or ..de want ICANN to guarantee the stability and security of those servers and are threatening to withhold money from the organization if it does not comply. ICANN, on the other hand, doesn't want to sign any contract with the root server maintainers for fear of lawsuits over any potential outages. The BBC has the full story.http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1761000/1761362.stm
Jordan Ritter was tired of the hype surrounding the Gnutella network and decided to analyze just what it was truly capable of. He has written this paper, which outlines the results of his research. He actually wrote the paper early last year, but since Ritter was one of the founding developers of Napster, a competitor with Gnutella, he did not want to release the findings publicly until now. After some fairly sophisticated mathematical analysis best appreciated by the technically inclined, Ritter concludes that Gnutella will not scale up to a network of any reasonable size.
http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/doc/gnutella.html
This is getting so monotonous.... Reuters reports that Microsoft's automatic update servers, used to remotely patch Windows XP on customers' computers, crashed and stayed down for nearly a week. But even when the update servers are working, not everyone is happy. In eWeek, IT professionals complain that XP's automatic online patching leaves them in the dark about what Microsoft is manipulating remotely in the operating systems they administer, rendering their jobs tougher when things go wrong. Additionally, flaws in Windows, and specifically in XP, have begun raising hackles. The LA Times reports that US House Rep. Rick Boucher, every American technogeek's favorite legislator, and a panel of tech experts at the National Academy of Sciences have begun to muse that perhaps manufacturers who allow security flaws in their software releases should not enjoy immunity from product liability lawsuits, as they now do. Possibly to head off such talk, Bill Gates announced that he has asked his minions to pay more attention to security issues in Microsoft products. See the MSNBC link. Now we're sure we'll never publish another Windows security note again....
Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=technologynews&StoryID=515143
eWeek: http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D701%2526a%253D21023,00.asp
LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-000003463jan14.story?coll=la-headlines-business-manual
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.com/news/689243.asp
ONLINE CULTURE
In almost every episode of South Park, Kenny dies - only to be presumably resurrected offscreen before the next episode. This has profound theological implications, at least according to the Door Magazine, which calls itself "the world's pretty much only religious satire magazine." Alas, the magazine normally only appears on dead wood pulp, but an excerpt from a recent issue, entitled "The Search for the Historical Kenny: Salvation in South Park" is online. Plastic.com, which recently resurrected itself with an updated look and new software, hosts a discussion on related themes.South Park: http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/southpark/
Door: http://www.thedoormagazine.com/webintro/179intro.html
Plastic: http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/13/0148240
As most are aware, porn is popular on the Web. It's so lucrative, in fact, that sites featuring the stuff are in a constant duel for - um, position and dominance. One of the means employed to jack up a site's visibility involves deploying the names of popular stars to direct would-be consumers to the porn site. In this case, one particular girl who portrays herself as sexy and slinky in her own performances claims that her image has been hijacked and spliced into a porn video. CNET has a blessedly brief article; Christina Aguilera's site has the heated denial.
CNET: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-8445931.html
Aguilera: http://www.christina-a.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Online Experience Music Project
Music lovers will want to meander around EMPlive, the online presence of the Seattle-based Experience Music Project interactive museum. We tried to make a systematic exploration of this eclectic, hefty site, but managed to get lost, lured, and waylaid at every turn. There is no search function, and the site seems designed to function as a series of exploratory riffs rather than a general resource. Our advice? Relax and enjoy the ride. You'll find audio, arcana, and artifacts aplenty, all with links to related site features, outside sites, and recommended listening and reading. To get your bearings, use the site map. The EMP Digital Collection is a nice stand-alone section that mixes and matches names, styles, things, and places with a timeline, background info, and museum artifacts.http://www.emplive.com/
Stanton Studio is a bright, brash commercial design studio in Barcelona that likes to make a splash whether its artists are designing plastic placemat giveaways or a 50-meter mural for the Barcelona Aquarium. We love their Web site's Homage to Barcelona page, which features fine art images in various styles and media from different artists in the city. Ranging from a bleak, monochromatic industrial landscape to a high-color carnival cutout, this celebration of the city does a lovely job of giving texture to Barcelona's diversity of modes and moods.
http://www.stantonstudio.com/english/default.htm
Admit it. Sometimes you stay up to watch the late night shows not for the guests or musical artists, but just to see what amusing things the hosts have to say about the day's news. Often, it doesn't take much work for Craig Kilborn or David Letterman to make a joke out of politicians, who do that just fine on their own. If late night television is not an option for you, but you still want to get all the jokes at the water cooler tomorrow, check out NewsMax, which consolidates some one-liners from the more popular late night shows. Letterman's official site also posts his show's most recent Top Ten List.
NewsMax: http://www.newsmax.com/liners.shtml
Official Late Show Top Ten: http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/top_ten/
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.
 For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Bombast Transcripts
Building Wireless Community Networks
Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age
Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AIhttp://www.bookgenies.com/
Cleaning the (Mumble)ing Kitchen for Dummies
Everybody's had that roommate. You know who we're talking about. The one who leaves socks on the floor. Never waters plants. Turns on the stereo at 2 a.m. Takes your lasagna out of the fridge, warms it up, eats it, and then leaves nothing but the nasty pan for you to clean up. Fridgemagnet, the author of this tome, has not one but three of them. He's written Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies as a handy guide for his inconsiderate flatmates, but it's clearly a public service, since so many people may benefit from sending this handy, helpful link to those in their own lives befuddled by the relationship between the stack of dishes in the sink and the lack of them in the cupboard. Not surprisingly, considering the title, the language here isn't for the little tykes.http://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html
"I Didn't Know You Could Stop Being a God"
It's a bizarre feeling to find out that famous people are just like us, only more frequently asked for autographs. Neil Gaiman - creator of the DC Comics cult phenomenon, Sandman, and author of the acclaimed "American Gods" - types almost daily in a blog that reveals him to be an eloquent (not surprising), intelligent (also not surprising) human just like the rest of us (surprising). For instance, he's an Iron Chef junkie. He reads in the bathtub. He struggles with Blogger. Don't believe us. Go find out for yourself. By the way, that quote up there is a Sandman quote, so don't get all snippy.http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp
Strata Magazine is a new e-zine that mixes illustration, photography, and non-fiction. There are plans to add fiction into the mix, although the first issue certainly doesn't suffer from the lack. The illustrations are of professional quality as are the intriguing photos. The words are the stars though. The interviews and essays vary in subject, but all are well written and well edited. The magazine has an ambitious agenda and if and as long as the initial quality is maintained, Strata has a bright future.
http://www.fifth-letter.com/strata/
SURFING SCIENCE
Steven K. Roberts calls himself a "technomad", for good reason; after journeying 17,000 miles around the US from 1983 to 1991 on a computerized, networked recumbent bicycle, Roberts envisioned and began engineering his current project. The Microship is a canoe-sized, amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran that Roberts calls a "high-tech adventure platform". Fitted with an "infinitely reconfigurable" integrated network of onboard sensors, GPS, wireless Internet connections, video, radio, and more, Roberts's two one-man Microships, Io and Europa, are the endlessly inventive result of what their creator terms "geek passion" and "techno-lust". His Microship site has the full story, in detail, plus a Microship lab webcam.http://www.microship.com/
Felix Wankel's 1950s rotary combustion chamber engine is the Betamax of auto engines. It's superior in every way to the standard internal combustion engine, but has never gained widespread acceptance. It exists in commercial form - in Mazda's RX-7 sports car, for example - and has a small, but hard-core group of supporters. The Rotary Engine Illustrated site has a decent history and links to additional resources for anyone interested in Betamax - sorry, Wankel engines. A few pages are still being finished, but the heart of the site is complete with many stunning animations of the engine's operation.
http://www.rotaryengineillustrated.com/
When Global Consciousness Is Meant Literally...
Do you ever get the feeling that some researchers in the big ol' Ivy League schools just don't have enough to do? Out of Princeton comes the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The opening line: "We do not feel that our minds are isolated within our bodies." A lot of teenagers probably feel the same way. The keyword, here, is "feel". Our gut feeling is that this is a load of crap, sort of an attempt to discover a worldwide 100th monkey theory, but we find the approach admirable. This is an attempt at an objective, scientific procedure and analysis of a roughly paranormal phenomenon. The results are shaky at best, and at the very least you gotta admire how hard the analysts work to justify them.GCP: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
100th monkey: http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/btcarrol/skeptic/monkey.html
CORRECTIONS
Footnote to Footnotes to History
In NSD 7.10's "Histories of the Small and Overlooked", we admired the Footnotes to History Web site for its attention to oft-overlooked historical details. The site is now at the following URL.http://www.footnotes.buckyogi.com/