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BREAKING SURF
Those Really Are Martian Bacteria Fossils
We are probably not alone - more precisely, our bacteria are not alone. Recent analysis of ALH84001, the famous Martian meteor found in Antarctica, confirms what many have long suspected, that bacteria did indeed live on Mars in the distant past. Through a fascinating analysis of the magnetic crystals in the fragments, Johnson Space Center researchers have confirmed that these crystals are the product of biological processes and not the result of terrestrial contamination. With the recent announcement of water in abundance on Mars, the Red Planet is beginning to appear a viable target for even greater exploration. Maybe movie aliens, instead of demanding "Take me to your leader" should have been asking "Which way is north?" NASA has published a press release and offers a reprint of the paper from Applied And Environmental Microbiology (AEM). Astrobiology Magazine has commentary.NASA: ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2002/02-150.txt
AEM: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/astrobiology/biomarkers/pubs/ASM2002-Keptra.pdf
Astrobiology: http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=250
Critical SSL Security Flaw Found in Internet Explorer
This one is a major, major security problem with the Microsoft browser. It turns out that Internet Explorer improperly trusts certain security certificates. This means that it is bone simple to forge a security certificate for a popular site such as Amazon.com and using what is known as the man-in-the-middle attack pass off a hacker web site as one belonging to Amazon. You will think that you're communicating with Amazon via secure SSL connections but in reality you're talking to some hacker web site and blithely handing them your credit card number. The open source Konquerer browser is also vulnerable, but a fix has already been posted. At press time Microsoft has not yet reacted. Yep, it's a monster security hole affecting all secure sites, including banks. The BugTraq thread has the technical discussion, while EWeek has the plain language story.Story: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,462375,00.asp
BugTraq: http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/1/286895/2002-08-08/2002-08-14/1
Konqueror: http://www.konqueror.org/
Few people are aware that in recent years there has been a number of breakthroughs in the field of artificial vision. There already exist systems which allow limited visibility to the blind via brain implants and cameras. True, these are low resolution systems working at very low frame rates, but the fundamental problem of giving sight to the blind seems to have been solved. The rest is just engineering. Steven Kotler writes for Wired about his experience witnessing one such system, designed by Dr. William Dobelle, at work. Dobelle's work relies on implants sitting on top of the visual cortex, hooked up to portable computers and a mini-camera mounted on a pair of eyeglasses. The surgery has to be done in Portugal - US law won't allow these kind of implants - and the cost is a mere $115,000. At the end of the process the blind patient can drive a car around a parking lot. The piece also discusses some of the other engineering approaches to the vision problem which are being perfected around the world.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html
Microsoft Buys University Programming Course
There is a long tradition of corporate sponsorship in the halls of academia, but as far as we can determine nothing quite so blatant as this move by Microsoft. In return for a $2.3 million grant from the company the University of Waterloo has agreed to create a mandatory course in the C# programming language for its Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering students. An introductory programming course will be changed from teaching the dominant C++ language to using C#. The money will be used to fund research to develop equation recognition for the upcoming Microsoft Tablet PCs, and for some networking infrastructure enhancements at the University. Needless to say the imposition of a mandatory course in corporate sponsored technology is not likely to endear Microsoft to the academic community which traditionally has highly valued their academic freedom.Story: http://uwstudent.org/msstory.html
Microsoft PR: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/press/releases/08_15_2002_fund.asp
A Statistical Technique For Fighting Spam
Most of the modern spam filtering techniques rely on recognizing unwanted email by recognizing various specific features in the messages. The problem with this approach is that while it will catch a large amount of formulaic spam, it will also generate a modest rate of false positives - good email flagged as spam - and will always miss some small fraction of real spam. The popular SpamAssasin program is a good example of this approach. Another way to deal with spam is to use statistical methods. Instead of checking for specific strings in the message you check the statistical features of the message as a whole. The approach is explained here by Paul Graham, a well known personality in the Lisp programming community. Not surprisingly his algorithm is written in Lisp, but the ideas behind Beysian filtering are universal and worth checking out.Beysian Filtering: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
SpamAssasin: http://www.spamassassin.org/
Social Engineering an Attack Against PGP and GnuPG
Crypto researchers have discovered an attack against the popular email encryption programs PGP and GnuPG. The attack hinges on being able to intercept encrypted communications, sending an encrypted plaintext to the target of the attack, and convincing him/her to send back the decrypted message. In reality this is not very hard to do, and even easier to do with people who don't understand encryption very well. The attack will not work in every case - it fails if the messages are compressed by the encryption program itself. Nevertheless, this is a big hole in how these very popular programs are used. The web site has an abstract and a link to the full PDF format scholarly paper explaining the exploit. Big news in encryption circles.http://www.counterpane.com/pgp-attack.html
New York Times Botches Their Password Security
Recently the New York Times changed their paid subscriber login handling system and in the process committed a major security faux pas. The new system created new login names and passwords for each subscriber. The problem is that both are very easily guessable. So what's the big deal? It's just a magazine subscription, right? Well it turns out that users can buy archived articles and have them charged to their credit cards. If you guess the userid and password of such a user you can do so too - a classic e-commerce security hole. The NYT makes it entirely too easy, and in the process may be violating their own privacy policy as well. The obvious question everyone is asking is how a large respected organization such as the NYT could pull such a security fiasco on its users. Marc Hedlund at O'Relly Network has the sad details.http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1482
Near-Earth Asteroid Flyby Visible August 17-18
On Saturday night, August 17-18 recently discovered asteroid 2002 NY40 will pass the Earth just outside the Moon's orbit. The asteroid should be visible to anybody with a small telescope or a decently powerful set of binoculars. This is a relatively rare event and big news in amateur astronomy circles. The asteroid itself is about 0.5 km in diameter and will make closest approach at 7:47 Universal Time on August 18th. Sky and Telescope has the information along with detailed observation sites.http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/asteroids/article_697_1.asp
Last year, acting on a tip, the Danish National Police accused a man and his wife of sexually molesting their nine-year old daughter and posting pictures of her on the Internet. The police found evidence of a network of pedophiles on the man's computer, members of which resided primarily in the US. So began Operation Hamlet, which involved the Danes, the US Customs Service, the US Justice Department, and the offices of state attorneys general throughout the US. On Aug. 8, Customs announced that they had arrested ten US citizens and rescued 37 children as a result of the kiddy porn investigation. Eight more suspects have been arrested in northwestern Europe. Customs expects there will be more arrests in the US as the investigation continues. Sexual abuse of children is a sickening crime, but when parents abuse their own children, it is especially nauseating. It's heartening to see international cooperation bring these creeps to justice. The Customs announcement and CNN tell how the perps were tracked down and arrested one by one.
Customs: http://www.customs.ustreas.gov/hot-new/pressrel/2002/0809-00.htm
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/08/09/internet.child.porn.bust/index.html
Read This: Coincidences, Patterns, and Statistics
Remember Don Wiley, the ebola expert who mysteriously fell off a bridge not long after last fall's anthrax mail attacks? Was his death a random stroke of bad luck or was it part of a pattern of deaths among microbiologists? Nearly a dozen other microbiologists lost their lives at the same time, so there had to be a sinister force at work, no? No. In this must-read article from the New York Times Magazine, Lisa Belkin examines the pattern of deaths among these scientists as a case study of the human instinct to falsely detect organization in randomness. These deaths, which occurred among 40,000 or so card-carrying microbiologists, mean nothing - furthermore, that some of the folks included in this alleged pattern were lab techs expands the pool of randomness by several times. Some of the conclusions Belkin reaches are obvious: people falsely detect cause and are amazed more often when they themselves are involved in a rare, random event. As the article points out, events that have a one in a million chance of happening to a person will happen 280 times a day in the US. We'd be remiss in our duty to keep y'all informed readers if we didn't point you to this, and you should tell everyone you know about it as well.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html
The blockbuster film "Signs" has made crop circles fashionable, again. Although most people accept the artifacts to be the work of youths and artists, many still believe that the signs in the fields are of extraterrestrial origin. The debate is lively and these articles give you all the details you might ever want. Mind you, it still doesn't explain the movie, but that's a matter of interpretation. Space.com and National Geographic explore crop circles with a properly skeptical eye, and Scientific American has an article by one crop circle maker. More crop circle artists publicize their craft as the Circlemakers with a Web site as confusing as some crop circle formations.
Space.com: http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_signs_020808.html
National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0801_020801_cropcircles.html
Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00038B16-ED5F-1D29-97CA809EC588EEDF
Circlemakers: http://www.circlemakers.org/
Leave it up to American ingenuity to take the battle with al Qa'ida (one of these days, we'll standardize a spelling) into cyberspace. As reported in NSD 8.30, Jon Messner recently hacked Alneda.com - the official al Qa'ida Web site - with old-fashioned technical skills and a piece of software that intercepted the movement of the site from one set of servers to another. Messner ran the site as if it were the real thing, tracking users and translating the various posts on the site. Only five days on did an al Qa'ida webmaster post a note telling people that the site was no longer what it appeared to be. What is most disturbing is that it took Messner quite some time to explain to the FBI what he had done and to make them interested. This lively story in Wired presents some thoughtful discussion of the Internet's critical role in the war against terrorism.
NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.30.html#BS4
Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54455,00.html
Houston Journalist Chooses Blog over Job
Steve Olafson covered the Brazoria County beat for the Houston Chronicle until his editor discovered that he covered the same beat under the pseudonym Banjo Jones for his blog, called the Brazosport News. For some reason that most people can't fathom, when Olafson refused to abandon the blog, the Chronicle's editor fired him. According to Olafson, he used no off-the-record material in his blog and we can perceive no ethical dilemma in his actions. He may have used on-the-record comments he gathered as a Chronicle reporter for the blog, but that's not unethical - reporters use comments prompted by other reporters all the time when covering press conferences, for example. Sources couldn't have resented the use of any on-the-record comments, by the very nature of the comments. Maybe he was sacked for criticizing his employer. Regardless, the situation helps dissect the interesting dichotomy between old and new media. You can read more in Houston Press and the Register. The blog has more relevant links.Brazosport News: http://www.brazosportnews.blogspot.com/
Houston Press: http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-08-08/hostage.html/1/index.html
Register: http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25932.html
UK Leads Europe into the DMCA-ification of Content
The UK consultation paper on implementing EC Directive 2001/29/EC has just been published. The paper explores how the UK will comply with the copyright directives of the European Community. The text is long and torturous, stuffed with impenetrable bureaucratese and legalese, with no attempt to explain what it means. The UK Patent Office invites comments on the proposals, but hasn't bothered asking whether the thing is needed in the first place - and all such questions will be summarily excluded. The minute details of the proposals are terrifying, squeezing the life out of any exceptions that may still have a faint quiver of life left in them. There's a lot of DMCA-style regulations about anti-circumvention technologies too, spreading the rot beyond the shores of the US. For a brief, sarcastic view of what it means (doom, pretty much) see NTKnow. We think it's unconscionable that this kind of legislation is drafted largely outside the public arena and entrusted to lawyers and experts with no mandate to represent the voice of the consumer in any way. Our remedy for such stifling legislative overkill? Require a consumer impact statement with public hearings.Paper: http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/index.htm
NTKnow: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/
Congress Wants US to Arrest File-Sharers
The US Congress has asked US Attorney General John Ashcroft to track down major file-sharers on peer-to-peer (P2P) network services. No doubt it's another effective tactic in the war on terrorism. Nineteen congressmen and senators sent Ashcroft a letter that asked him to address the problem of copyright infringement and theft on P2P networks. Read these reports for some fresh insights on the problem of getting the Justice department to arrest casual users. Wired has news of the letter and CNET has a nice backgrounder that looks at the copyright issue's current state of affairs. Slashdot has discussion.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54460,00.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2009-1023-948672.html
Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/08/09/2347245.shtml
FCC Promotes Digital TV by Fiat, Wants to Imprint Content
Digital television is coming...very slowly. To speed up the process, the FCC has decreed that by 2004 all new televisions larger than 34 inches must come with a digital tuner; smaller sets must have one by 2007. TV manufacturers insist the price of a TV will increase by roughly $150 to $250, but we suspect volume and a drop in cost of the technology will prove that estimate high. More importantly, the FCC has plans to imprint digital content with electronic signals to prevent unauthorized recording. The FCC may be doing Hollywood a great favor without consulting the public. Such "broadcast flags" may prevent recording for viewing later, for example, but it's not certain that the FCC, TV manufacturers, and studios will agree on a single technical standard. CNET and Wired have more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is wary, at best, of the broadcast flag plan.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-948956.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,54426,00.html
EFF: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/20020807_eff_bpdg_pr.html
Most DVD users just sadly accept that their DVD players are saddled with technical encumbrances such as regional encoding that limit their usefulness. At Slashdot, less meek consumers can find plenty of advice on how to get around some of these annoying built-in limitations, which stem Hollywood's desire to control markets and paranoia about pirating. Perhaps the most absurd artificial limitation of DVD players is their built-in inability to skip non-content like the FBI warning, trailers, and ads. Note, however, that you don't need to be stuck with such annoying insults to consumers, at least not if you don't mind tinkering. Apparently, the most modification-friendly DVD players are made by Apex. This discussion offers lots of practical advice on how to hack the things so that you can get right to the movie without all the preamble, but also plenty of naysayers who complain that the Apex brand is cheap and unreliable. If you have a flair for hacking, go ahead and tinker. As for us, we just want to watch the danged movie.
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/02/08/08/162216.shtml
Katharine Mieszkowski's secret admirer has blond hair and blue eyes, and wants to go on a safari - or so an e-mail told her. Like most people, Mieszkowski likes knowing someone has a crush on her, but she's wise enough to wonder how real he is. Salon recounts her bold crusade to find out if the sender of that admiring message is flesh and blood or virtual, carbon-based or silicon. In doing so, she stirs up enough bad-smelling stuff to make anyone but the most incurably romantic dubious. About half a dozen Web sites practice the e-mail go-between marketing routine, but SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink are more coy than most, hiding not only the identity of your admirer, but also the names of the folk who run them. Some of these cupid services are legit, but it's hard to think of these two as anything more than crassly exploitive. Both work by dangling clues about the secret admirer in return for e-mail addresses: the more addresses you provide, the more clues you get. Meanwhile, the sites send a crush message to each address you've supplied, spreading the plague wider and wider. Salon's story is an engaging but ultimately sad story about human affection, weakness, and greed.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/07/crushmaster/index.html
FTC Gets Microsoft to Fix Passport Security
Microsoft's Passport, long a source of concern among security professionals, finally attracted attention from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC expressed dismay with Microsoft's "false or misleading" claims in a six-page complaint. Microsoft has reached a settlement with the FTC, one that has hardly generated cheers and applause. Some security professionals argue that the basic model for Passport remains essentially unchanged, although the settlement requires Microsoft to have its programs' security professionally audited and certified every other year. Wired has a useful synopsis; ZDNet provides more detail. You'll need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to wade through the PDF complaint, which includes such fascinating lines as "In truth and in fact, respondent did not maintain a high level of online security by employing sufficient measures reasonable and appropriate..." blah blah blah. Who'd have guessed?FTC: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2002/08/microsoftcmp.pdf
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54428,00.html
ZDNet: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-948922.html
Consumer Reports Rates Tech Support
Technical support got you down? You are not alone. A recent study by Consumer Reports observes that, save for Apple and Dell customers, consumers feel they are getting a raw deal on technical support and quality. It is enough to make you think that Apple's switch campaign is on to something. Consumer Reports offers the "Computer repairs and tech help" article for free on its home page. CNET summarizes it. Slashdotters have posted their thoughts.Consumer Reports: http://www.consumerreports.org/main/home.jsp
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-949018.html
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/09/0234212.shtml
Activists of Open Source on the Move in California
California leaps to the head of the class, at least in the minds of some, by entertaining a proposal to prohibit purchase and use by state entities of proprietary software code - in other words, to mandate that all government offices use open-source software. While the open-source legislation would obviously be aimed at the monolithic Microsoft corporation, it would leave Apple and other software providers in the lurch as well. Granted, passage would be a coup for Linux adherents and publishers. Does this mean it's particularly good for anybody else? This proposal has a long way to go, even in California. CNET has a brief story that's worth a quick peek. InfoWorld previews an associated march on San Francisco city hall.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-949241.html
InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/09/020809hnrally.xml
PC Magazine looks over the horizon to peek at new tech toys that should appear in the next one to five years. You can expect methanol fuel cells for your notebook, 100-GB holographic storage, and more. This isn't vaporware - the devices exist today. All that remains is to overcome the traditional hurdles involved in bringing the products cost-effectively to the market. Think you're pretty wired? Check out what you can plug in tomorrow. Oh, and make sure you have plenty of napkins. That drool running down your chin is really unbecoming.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,429441,00.asp
The fog of war, which limits a player's knowledge of a battlefield, is an important part of most good strategy games. It's clearly no joking matter that some players have found a way to use a map hack to remove the murky stuff in Warcraft III, giving them a clear view of the entire battlefield and a huge advantage over online opponents on Battle.net. Blizzard, the game company, says it knows about these cheats and is working to solve the problem. There's nothing foggy about what Blizzard promises to do either. One remedy it has promised is to ban the CD key of anyone caught using the hack, thus locking them out of the online arena. Blizzard also asks players who think it was used against them to save the replay of the game and send in the file. Gamespot clears the air about the situation.
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870,6023247,00.html
ONLINE CULTURE
In the days of phone phreaks, among the giants towered the infamous Cap'n Crunch, given name John Draper. Using a free whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal and the popular "blue box", Cap'n Crunch was able to produce audio tones that let him take control of the Bell System telephone trunk lines and switching systems. Control established, he could make free telephone calls, to anywhere. Naturally, Bell and other authorities frowned on this - they busted him and tossed him in the slammer. Oddly, and unlike later phone hacker Kevin Mitnik, Draper was allowed to enter a work furlough program, wherein he wrote Easywriter - the first decent word-processing program for the Apple II (and subsequently ported to the early IBM PC). In this fascinating site, Draper recounts how the blue box/whistle system worked, and why. Read also about the toilet paper crisis during the Nixon administration, and many other bizarre and presumably true tales. Today, Draper leads an intrusion protection company, which just recently released an updated version of CrunchBox. He gives speeches on computer security. Heck, he was even interviewed on TechTV's "Supergeek" segment. He's turned so almost respectable that the authorities don't chase him around anymore. But you will.http://www.webcrunchers.com/crunch/
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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 Maharajah's Box: An Exotic Tale of Espionage, Intrigue, and Illicit Love in the Days of the Raj
Portrait of a Burger As a Young Calf: The True Story of One Man, Two Cows, and the Feeding of a Nation
The Loved One
Hidden Empire: The Saga of Seven Suns, Book 1ONLINE TRAVEL
The ePodunk Guide to American Communities
ePodunk "believes in the power of place." It has pretty much every place in the US in a nice relational database, linked to census data, school districts, real estate, festivals, attractions, and a really nice collection of antique local post cards. There's room for comments, and people have made a few. The basic content is all there, although it does feel a little thin in places. The interface is clean and easy to use. This is a great resource for anyone contemplating a business or collegiate move. Drop on by, submit a comment, or send 'em a postcard.http://www.epodunk.com/
The Magic Traffic Circle of Swindon
The phrase "magic traffic circle" conjures images of kids' TV - in reality, this traffic circle in Swindon, England should be called a "multi-mini roundabout". The device is noteworthy enough that Swindon's own XTC performed a song about it ("English Roundabout"). What makes this different from the normally savage variety of rotary, common in the UK and elsewhere, is that it's really many traffic circles in one. One main circle runs in the normal direction and another runs in the opposite direction. Micro-rotaries occupy the nodal points. How can this possibly work? Stare at the overhead photo awhile and see if you can figure it out.http://www.swindonweb.com/life/lifemagi0.htm
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Hey, Man - You Got a Light and Shadow?
Remember the old cigarette and candy vending machines with the pull knobs? They made a resounding "thwack" when you released them, far more satisfying in a visceral way than the present day push-button machines with the red LEDs that blink "sold out-sold out-sold-out". Well, the old-style machines are coming back into circulation, but not to sell carcinogens. This time, they're selling art in New York, D.C., North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas so far. Put in a few bucks, pull a knob and out pops your own personal piece of art. The art actually runs less than a pack of smokes if you're in New York, and pretty comparable elsewhere. It's a lot of fun, and we can only hope they end up in more locations soon.http://www.ibiblio.org/artomat/
You might think tattoos go only skin deep, especially if you're an epidermal virgin. Tattoos are more than curiosities at Tattoos.com. Conventions, directories, want ads - that's just the tip of the needle, so to speak. This site crawls with anonymous freaks and the patient dye purveyors who make them beautiful, at least in their own minds. Parents whose children threaten to get tattoos will freak out when they browse the gallery photographs. Many of the dermal works in the color category are more ornate than ornamental vases. How'd you like to have Clint Eastwood or the Three Stooges riding around with you on a permanent basis? People do. People sport snakes and flowers, too, but they usually cover them for job interviews. To see what's possible, spend some time browsing the many photos submitted by featured artists in North America. If you're looking for an experienced skin specialist who could make Freddy Kreuger jealous, or just want to find a local parlor (excuse us, "studio") to get a cute little butterfly, this is the place to start. Don't say we didn't warn you if you start hearing wolf whistles from a pack of Harleys.
http://www.tattoo.com/
The MP3 revolution has virtually bypassed classical music, so Andante has stepped up to help fill the gap. What makes this Web site devoted to classical music and its recordings so special is the obvious care and devotion that have gone into it. It is not just a site, but a label for a project that will produce new CD recordings of classical works, including operas. The CDs will draw upon the archive of materials at the site. Andante's French and American management includes the boss of Yves St. Laurent, so we suspect the project won't lack funding. In addition to the editorial materials, Andante has a guest-edited section called Carte Blanche in which a different prominent musician creates an online magazine addressing his interests each month. The inaugural guest editor is Philip Glass and his selections make fascinating reading. If you like classical music, this is a keeper bookmark.
http://www.andante.com/index.cfm
Timeless Vintage Space Age Pop
Working at the same time, with many of the same musicians and in the same studios as Henry Mancini and Juan Garcia Esquivel, Bob Thompson was one of the defining figures of the original Lounge Sound. This is a nicely tricked out site with a lot of music, album covers, photos, and information. Our only regret is that there aren't larger scale versions of the album covers - they'd make lovely wallpapers.http://www.bobthompsonmusic.com/
Mori would be just the thing to have up on the wall on a large flat-panel display. Mori is a real-time visual interpretation of seismic data from the Hayward fault in Northern California. Mostly, you get to watch the effects of seismic noise, storms, high surf, and the moon's gravity. You'll have to watch a long time to see any earthquake activity, but there are a few archived earthquakes to look at. They provide a surprising thrill.
http://memento.ieor.berkeley.edu/
The concept sounds suspiciously like a chain letter, but it seems legit. You, an artist, make 20 things in 20 days - bits of art, preferably. On the 20th day, you answer a call, and, if chosen, you send your 20 things in and get 20 different things back (one from each of the other participants). The traded objects run the gamut from cutesy crafting creations straight out of your local hobby shop to something you might find black-bereted art critics mulling over in a downtown gallery. Calling it mixed media would be an understatement. It's flambed, pureed, sauteed media - nothing is left out here when you engage the imaginations of 20 people. Er, or should that be 21?
http://www.20things.org/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
Kelvin's Much More Than an Absolute Zero
Kelvin can be cool, but you scientific types already knew that. What we're talking about, however, is not the temperature scale that starts at absolute zero but the magazine. It's probably of most interest to folks in the Northwet coast (yes, that's an intentional misspelling for the benefit of a weak pun) since it focuses on the indie scene in Portland, Ore., but art is art. In Kelvin, illustrators, photographers, and writers come together to - well, as with most collections of artists, we're not quite sure what they're trying to do, but whatever it is, they seem to be doing it well.http://www.kelvinmagazine.com/
But Does It Have Shtick-to-it-iveness?
Shtick! is an absurdly amusing e-zine. Celebrity Death Pool 2002 tracks the predictions of participants who chose 50 celebrities most likely to die by the end of this year. Check the alphabetical list - surprisingly, it contains many youngsters. The Casting Bot offers "logical next choices" to movie producers and directors who can't get their first choice of star - one progression is Marlon Brando/Charles Durning/Brian Dennehy/George Kennedy/William Conrad/John Madden. Periodically, Shtick! has a survey; at our visit, it was "Vote your 3 Worst Saturday Night Live Sketches/Characters". We could only think of 30. Columnist Ickey Woods describes leprechauns in an installment of "Our Insane Guide to Little People". You may also get a kick out of the "Ask Baby" and "Ask Robot" columns and Zenia Minskoff's column on animal astrology in the advice archive. A sample of her insight: "You crave unconditional love, constant pampering and total indulgence. Your ideal scenario is a feather bed to sleep on with roast beef brought to your bedside on a china plate." Maybe she advised the Shtickers that it's OK to be a week late with their August issue.http://www.shtick.org/
SURFING SCIENCE
Effervescent Science: Pop/Soda Linguistics
The tomato/tomato pronunciation debate doesn't look so good in print, but along with that great argument and the sofa/couch options comes the soda/pop controversy. What can your waiter or waitress tell about you from how you order a fizzy drink? As it turns out, she can probably tell what general section of the US you grew up in, because where you were raised probably led you to ask for either a soda, a pop, a coke, or a soft drink. This site asks visitors to take a linguistics survey, which drives the graphical results. We found the coke distribution most fascinating, centered as it is on the southeastern US, the birthplace of Coca Cola. Like Xerox and Kleenex, the Coke brand name appears to be evolving into a generic term.http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~almccon/pop_soda/
Leeches? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Leeches
Maybe you don't, but some people do. So many, in fact, that an American has established the world's first leech farm, to supply hospitals and research facilities globally. This site describes how leeches have been employed in medicine over time and their present importance to "...overcome the problem of venous congestion by creating prolonged localized bleeding uniquely characteristic of the leech bite." Microsurgeons have little difficulty re-attaching arteries thanks to their thick walls, but veins, with thin walls, present greater difficulty. In the presence of functioning arteries and poorly functioning veins, circulation is impaired, and the painless bite of the leech functions to create an artificial circulation of sorts, which allows the grafts time to take hold and become functional. The anticoagulant the leeches leach into the system remains active for up to ten hours - considerably longer than substitutes such as heparin. Looks as though you'll need to come up with some other term to describe your brother-in-law, now; leeches appear to be useful.http://www.biopharm-leeches.com/
Lots of places are getting really sticky about Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) these days. Safety's a good thing, but paperwork isn't, necessarily. Still, in a growing trend in the US, employees can successfully sue their employers for not providing access to MSDSs on every chemical with which they may come in contact in the workplace. The easy answer for employers is to go here and type in what you're looking for (bleach, for example). That term will pop up a list of sheets by every manufacturer - thousands of sheets in the case of bleach. Find your manufacturer, print your page. Put it in a nice binder. Put it on a shelf, clearly labeled MSDS. Not one employee will ever look at the pages in that binder, but now you're covered! The site also offers translated documents, so you can print one up in English and another in some other language, depending on your requirements. The Web is a wonderful resource for peace of mind, no?
http://siri.org/msds/
CORRECTIONS
Swarming, Flash Crowds, and Larry Niven
A number (OK, OK, it was two) of people recognized a concordance between the phenomenon of mobile-phone-driven swarming and a number of Larry Niven short stories written in the early 1970s, like "Flash Crowds" and "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club". In the Niven stories, teleporting humans gather at points of interest. As the number of inbound teleporters mounts, you get "flash crowds". You can rehash swarming in the last NSD; here are also a few sites on the Niven stories.NSD: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.31.html#OC3
Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/mw?t=book.htm&bookid=4449&id=18188
Known Space: http://www.larryniven.org/short.html#64