BREAKING SURF
| Smiley Follow-Up |
| Spam Wars: Find a Spammer, Earn $10,000 |
| The Etymology of Online Terminology |
| In the Beginning, There Was Tolkien |
| The History of Personal Computing |
| Geeks, Exciting and New... |
| The Science of Design - and Toilet Paper Algorithms |
| Black Sabbattum |
| The Dictionary Goes Karaoke, or Vice Versa |
| Channel Changers Choose Champs |
| Underwater Music |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Totally Excellent Fark Blog |
| Fred on Everything |
| How to Build a Time Machine |
| NASA Continues to Aim for Mars |
| If Pitch Drops in a Lab, Does Anyone See It? |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
The UK government, and especially Prime Minister Tony Blair, have weighed in on the debate regarding war with Iraq. This week, Blair unveiled a dossier which seeks to make the case that Iraq's work on weapons of mass destruction poses "a current and serious threat to the UK national interest." The document is based on work by British intelligence agencies. The key points the report emphasizes are that Iraq is seeking to acquire nuclear materials and is also seeking to increase the range of its missiles - not exactly news to people who have been following the debate. International reaction to the document has been muted - non-combatants generally believe such claims are part of a public relations play in support of a potential strike against Iraq's leadership. The Guardian has a sample of opinions.Dossier: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6142.asp
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,798046,00.html
Google Expands News Search Engine
Last April, Google introduced a test version of its news search engine. This week, Google significantly expanded the service to include over 4,000 publications. Its search indexes are updated every hour. Google News determines the most popular stories based on a combination of freshness, credibility of the sources, and the number of sources that cover it. Google still calls the service experimental but it looks useful and functional to us.http://news.google.com/
Internet Archive Censored by Scientology
Operation Clambake is known for taking on the Church of Scientology, an organization with a long history of trying to suppress any information about itself. This week, the Internet Archive bowed to pressure from Scientology lawyers and removed Operation Clambake, also called Xenu, from its archive. In case you don't remember, the Internet Archive is a huge and growing archive of the historical Internet. Google faced the same pressure this spring over Operation Clambake material in its cache, but decided not to remove at least some of that site's anti-Scientology content from its cache servers. Amazon also was presented with a letter from Scientology lawyers way back in 1999, but did not cooperate. CNET has the details.Operation Clambake: http://www.xenu.net/
Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959236.html
Anti-Domestic-Violence Advocate vs. Santa Clara County vs. Girl Scouts
For six years, Douglas Daily was paid to add government documents to his Web site, the Domestic Violence Project of Santa Clara County. He owned and operated the site, which he started after his sister was attacked and killed by her husband. He began with his own content, although he soon came to post information the county paid him to host. A few weeks ago, the county suddenly stopped paying him and curtly ordered him to remove the content or face legal action. Not surprisingly, Daily balked, although he altered the name of his site to the Domestic Violence Project of Silicon Valley California. Santa Clara County holds that websurfers think his site is official, which it isn't despite the county's own past efforts to promote it as if it were. Daily's first line of text at the site says it is "not affiliated with any government agency". The Girl Scouts of America have thrown their sashes into the bruhaha as well, and claimed Dailey has misused their intellectual property. Daily countered with a charge of Girl Scout racism. Lawyer palms are heating up from all the gleeful rubbing, but an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the county's case is flimsy. Salon gives us all the juicy details and plot twists of this great and glorious kafuffle.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/19/domestic/index.html
Teachers vs. IM-Speak: R U Up 4 This Nu Stuff, Cuz It's 4 Real
Unfortunately, we're all used to the familiar litany of classic errors people make when they write, such as confusing "its" and "it's" or "your" and "you're". Teachers are increasingly discovering new items to add to their lists of grammatical dos and don'ts as a result of the pervasive popularity and influence of instant messaging. Dealing with the wide range of typed shorthand has become a teaching challenge. Some teachers think the new shorthand is wrong, period, while others see it as an opportunity to teach students about the evolution of language. Many teachers suggest that the informal typed language is fine, so long as students recognize what they are doing and understand that for some kinds of communication, it just won't do. It may be fine for kids to use among friends, for informal communication, and for first drafts, but never for formal presentations - emoticons don't belong in term papers, for example. The New York Times helps us understand the issue and how it's being tackled.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/technology/circuits/19MESS.html
Lessig to Battle Mickey Mouse's Extended Copyright
Lawrence Lessig is the authority on the law and cyberspace. His first book, "Code", made clear how the very architecture of software might restrict rather than expand one's rights and abilities in cyberspace. His second book, "The Future of Ideas", refreshingly and invigoratingly rethought intellectual property. On Oct. 9, Lessig is going to bat for American consumers; he will argue his case against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the US Supreme Court. At stake, nothing less than the possibility of an intellectual public domain; or more bluntly, the ability for someone to do with Mickey Mouse what Disney did with the Brothers Grimm. Disney's copyright to Mickey Mouse should have expired, but this act extended copyright beyond previously accepted norms. Wired's portrait of the legal battle, and battler, is good reading and thought-provoking. If you want to know the future of intellectual property, start with Lessig.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig_pr.html
Sorkin: No Need for Cyber Laws
A wise and thoughtful expert on Internet law speaks his mind about cyber law in this interview with CNET. David Sorkin, well known in the online community, doesn't think the Internet needs specific new laws. In his mind, existing legislation is plenty powerful enough to handle Internet society. He's particularly fearful of the whole anti-linking nonsense, which he thinks reflects ignorance about how the Web works and is intellectual property protectionism run amuck. While Sorkin feels the courts generally do a good job of trying to understand the Internet, he thinks politicians do not successfully comprehend the issues at hand. Sorkin says that new laws need to be carefully considered and researched because bad law can do more harm than no law. In terms of privacy protection, he suggests that the European approach, which values individual privacy above corporate rights, is superior to that of the US, although he remains leery of regulation. He's concerned about the current rush to draft legislation of all kinds that focuses specifically on the Internet. The interview is an interesting, no-nonsense read. Legislators would do well to ponder his opinions.http://news.com.com/2008-1082-958576.html
Laws Muzzle Seekers of Secure Software
The debate over the disclosure of software security flaws - whether or not to do it - generally is not framed in strictly black and white terms. On one extreme, certain security experts believe in no disclosure and security through obscurity; on the other, people believe disclosure is the best road to ultimate security. In between, a vast middle ground is inhabited by those who think some balance is probably a good compromise - notify the vendors, give them time to fix the flaws, then go public. Maybe, some surmise, even do some ethical hacking to discover flaws and notify the software owners. Unfortunately, laws such as the DMCA now make such disclosures legally risky, as noted in a CNET piece that explores the moral and legal dilemmas of such a course. The article uses anecdotal evidence to show that the legal climate is stifling the disclosure of security flaws. A member of a security firm sums it up: "There are a lot of (flaws) still being discovered, but no one is releasing them".http://news.com.com/2009-1001-958129.html
Forget Oil - The World Needs Fresh Water
Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink - water really is becoming a scarce and valuable resource. This series of articles and special multimedia presentations from the New York Times offers a fascinating global portrait of water supply and demand. Increasingly, nations are going to great lengths to move water to users; other states are preparing to fight for the control of water. Within the US, farmers and ever expanding urban areas are straining the nation's reservoirs and aquifers. This problem is not going to evaporate.http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/worldspecial/index.html
Extrasolar Planet Count Hits 100
Despite recent re-examined claims of some extrasolar planets, astronomers continue to discover more. The 100th to be discovered orbits Tau Gruis, approximately 100 light years distant in the southern constellation of Grus (the Crane). Extrasolar planets seem to fall into two varieties - those that are close in and those that are much further away from their stars. This newest addition is a member of the latter group, but astronomers still don't understand why extrasolar planets belong to these two categories. Like many of the other discovered planets, Tau Gruis's world is a large gas giant resembling Jupiter. This national Geographic article describes the discovery process as well as the technologies and organizations involved in the search.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/09/0917_020917_planet.html
MacArthur Foundation Announces Grants
The announcements of the MacArthur Fellows always makes great copy since winners receive large awards ($500,000) with no strings attached. The MacArthur Foundation rewards interesting people who have no idea they are even in contention. One day, a MacArthur Fellow gets a phone call and bang! - they're $500,000 richer just like that, with no obligation regarding how they can spend the money. MacArthur Fellows are nominated and selected by a collection of anonymous reviewers who have a history of choosing people who do unusual and valuable work in science and art. Among this year's 24 recipients are a novelist, several artists and scientists, a robotics researcher, a journalist, and a trombonist. It's a lot of fun to read the winners' bios and marvel at the cool things they're doing.http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/2002announce.htm
Privacy and The Hazards of Tracking Down Intellectual Property Violators
In his column last week, Robert X. Cringely wrote about a company called BayTSP, which is employed by owners of intellectual property to search the Net for copyright violators. Cringely related in a cloak-and-dagger manner that Mark Ishikawa, BayTSP CEO, gets death threats and that the company does not disclose where it or its servers are located. The Slashdot crowd made short work of any secrecy as it used public online resources to uncover all sorts of info about BayTSP and Mark Ishikawa. The episode reiterates the fact that we have only a thin veneer of privacy in a networked society. Your past will most certainly come back to haunt you. Incidentally, Cringeley uncritically repeated the false allegation that Osama Bin Laden used steganography in eBay images to communicate with his followers. Studies we reported in NSD 7.34 and NSD 8.01 disproved this.Cringely: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020919.html
Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/09/19/1926222.shtml
NSD 7.34: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.34.html#BS5
NSD 8.01: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.01.html#BS4
iCalshare, one of those simple ideas that make you wonder why they hadn't already been implemented, is making waves. The free site allows people to update and share calendars created with Apple's iCal program. This is a good thing, if you're in charge of running a kids' soccer team or anything else that would otherwise cause you to spend hours on the phone, updating members with changes. iCal has only been out a week or so, but the ball is rolling; there are more than 250 calendars on the site. Mozilla's been using the same sort of public calendaring for a few months, but iCal users have really taken the ball and run with it. Mozilla, which runs on just about every platform, and iCal use the same open-standard format so calendars created in iCal can now be used on pretty much any box. Even Microsoft's Outlook calendaring function incorporates the format; albeit in that company's tiresome "embrace and extend" approach. Public calendars may be the next big Web fad. It appears to be building fast, and looks to be a great ride. Wired has a brief story on this; iCalShare shows you what they have going, and Mozilla's - well, Mozilla.
iCalShare: http://icalshare.com/
iCal: http://www.apple.com/ical/
Wired: http://wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55244,00.html
Mozilla Calendar: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
Journalists Blame Selves for Dotcom Crash
When looking for a scapegoat on which to blame the dotcom crash, some journalists find themselves a convenient target. After all, at the height of the technology frenzy, there seemed no end to the optimistic gushing of the business press and the uncritical fawning of supposedly capable reporters. In this SF Gate article, Joyce Slaton apologetically helps us to understand what it was like at certain journalistic epicenters. Back then, optimism sold magazines. It was what readers wanted and companies, too, and the press clamored for profitable ads. Going against that grain was hard. New magazines arose to drink from the cash flow and traditional publications added scads of pages. The cadre of seasoned business writers couldn't stretch to fill all the editorial pages so neophytes were thrown into the frantic battle and careful digging, methodical research, and healthy skepticism often went missing. Although some journalists may assuage their guilt by confessing their sloppy reporting and starstruck instincts, it's egotistical of reporters to blame themselves for expanding the dotcom bubble. Everyone was caught up in the mania (well, mostly everyone), and we've all learned the hard lesson that there are no end runs around business reality.http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/09/19/techjourn.DTL
Cruel Stats of the Dotcom Implosion
The dotcom bubble was even uglier than you might have thought, according to a recent CNET article. One out of five start-ups burned through the cash and flared out before initial investors could sell any of their shares. Venture capital funds lost big in information technology sectors; those who invested in health-care start-ups did surprisingly better - these failed at half the rate of Internet businesses. It seems reasonable expect the health-care sector to grow, as baby-boomers realize that they need that stuff. This might be a good time to re-check your retirement investments.http://news.com.com/2100-1017-958725.html
Online Journalism Awards Again Ignore the Cream
Darn. We at NSD keep pushing on, but we get no respect. Sounds sort of like your job, eh? The Online Journalism Awards, from the Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, feature MSNBC, ESPN, the New York Times, and other mainstays of conventional journalism. They'll announce the winners next month. Good for them. We'll just keep shoveling. Meanwhile, check out some of the smaller independent sites nominated here. Lot's of good netsurfing for people with eclectic news and journalism interests.http://www.onlinejournalismawards.org/pr-2002finalists3.html
VeriSign Withdraws .Gov Whois Info
The Register has a wire-service story that tells how VeriSign will no longer provide domain information for .gov domains. VeriSign never administered .gov - that job is done by the General Services Administration (GSA) - but it did provide a list (called a zone file) of the domain name servers that serve .gov domains . VeriSign cited security against potential hacking as the reason for its move, but the action will hardly inconvenience any hacker since there are easy ways to get the same information via other means. The story also notes that VeriSign also removed the zone file for in-addr.arpa, which is used for reverse-DNS look-ups.http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27210.html
There's Diego Rivera, Jimmy Buffet, Archile Gorky, and Carey McWilliams. There's also life at the extremes, weird animal sex, a dash of quantum computing, and the usual bits of murder, insanity, and the obsession with words. If you're watching The Civil War on PBS there's also Gettysburg. Top it all off with gifts for children courtesy of none other then Salman Rushdie and you have the latest issue of Netsurfer Books. Have fun, buy something and send a small comission our way.
http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/sub/v04/nsb.04.05.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The 20th anniversary of the smiley (see last week's NSD 8.37) brought out of the woodwork all sorts of historical emoticon trivia. Some folks contend that Scott Fahlman did not first originate the symbol. According to the Jargon File, one rival claimant is Kevin McKenzie, who seems to have proposed the smiley on the MsgGroup mailing list, Apr. 12, 1979. The Jargon File also mentions the famous early educational computer system at the University of Illinois called PLATO whose users created emoticons possibly as early as 1972. Print emoticons have been found as early as 1953, in an ad for the movie "Lili" in the New York Herald Tribune. Expanding the discussion, conventional wisdom credits the familiar yellow happy face to Harvey Ball, who invented it for an insurance company morale campaign in 1964.Jargon File: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/emoticon.html
PLATO: http://www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html
Lili: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0110B&L=ads-l&P=R4596
Ball: http://www.goodbyemag.com/apr01/ball.html
Spam Wars: Find a Spammer, Earn $10,000
That's the proposal from cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig (remember him from above?). His piece is really an essay attacking proposed legislation that would allow copyright holders to hack your machine if they thought you were sharing files. Lessig instead proposes a law that would require e-mail advertisers to include a tag in an e-mail's subject header, and to reward the first person to track down a spammer who does not include such a tag with a $10,000 bounty to be paid by the guilty spammer. Lessig also takes to task spam fighters who spend their time developing filters rather than tracking down spammers. Lessig thinks that finding spammers and punishing them is a more effective tactic, though he ignores the legal problems of enforcing national laws on international spam. Worth reading.http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,3959,533225,00.asp
The Etymology of Online Terminology
Most of us know that spam refers not only to junk e-mail but also to the Hormel meat product. You may even be somewhat aware of a connection between spam and a Monty Python skit. You probably use the word "netsurfing" fairly frequently (certainly, we do). But how did these terms enter the lexicon of popular computing? You can find out here from minor Net deity Brad Templeton, who offers a fairly exhaustive etymological study that clearly traces the paths as one terminology evolves into another. It's an interesting read, and following the links sprinkled liberally throughout adds to the fascination. Language is a fluid medium. If you visit, you'll see it in action.http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html
In the Beginning, There Was Tolkien
So, you think you were there in the beginning of the whole virtual world thang, eh? If you really were, you'd be getting mail from AARP, according to this Online World Timeline, which tracks the evolution of interactive online worlds and games. Raph Koster, the author and a professional game designer, spreads more on the origins of virtual worlds throughout the gaming section of his Web site, but for this page, he's collected snippets about all sorts of virtual realities and compiled them into one long chronological list. It would be even niftier if it were more of a genealogical chart that showed how certain forms of online gaming direct descended from previous code or ideas. But we'll take it as is, too.Timeline: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.html
Koster: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/index.html
The History of Personal Computing
You've got yourself a state-of-the-art computer system. It might be an iMac, or a high-powered Windows machine. You have your GUI, graphics software, word processing, spreadsheets, and more. It's connected to the Internet. You have a mouse or maybe a pen. Think you're cutting edge? Think again. All of the above was operational in the 1970s. Stop by here for an in-depth look at computing history. When you leave, you'll be wondering what a really cutting-edge system might offer. It isn't what you have today, that's for sure.http://som.csudh.edu/cis/lpress/articles/hist.htm
ONLINE TRAVEL
Fellow geeks, can you imagine looking forward to your certification class? No? What if the class were held on the observation deck of a cruise ship en route to sunny Mexico? Neil Bauman, the man behind that idea, created Geek Cruises so that you can get the latest on Java, Linux, .Net, or your Mac alongside Wil Wheaton while working on your tan. Best of all, your company just might pay for it. It would be interesting to know the male-to-female ratio on the cruises. It might be hard for someone lacking a Y chromosome on one of these cruises to get any peace and quiet without being asked to play shuffleboard every five minutes, if you know what we mean.http://www.geekcruises.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Science of Design - and Toilet Paper Algorithms
Most consumers grumble now and then that a home appliance or other commercial product is hard to assemble, hard to use, or otherwise poorly designed. Welcome to the buggy and provocative world of design guru Don Norman, a founding member of the Nielsen Norman Group consultancy (which gets a lot of attention for its critiques of Web sites). Norman has engineering and psychology issues with contemporary product design, and releases them at his Web collection of essays, book chapters, and other musings. His credentials are impressive, as are his critiques. In a June 2002 essay, "The Perils of Home Theater", Norman describes his frustration with a home entertainment system. "I am appalled by the lack of understanding of consumers in the home theater industry, by the complexity, by the emphasis on jargon, by the lack of standards (and the competing standards wars), and in general, by the whole mess." This may sound like a familiar complaint, but Norman goes farther, at times with psychobabble about "perceived affordance." He does get down to earth, though. Take, for instance, his piece entitled "Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn't know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper." It's a cry for better roller design in face of common sense. We agree with Norman that "attractive things work better," but our shamelessly extrapolative male reviewer can't help wondering whether this principle would apply to winless tennis celebrity Anna Kournikova.Norman: http://www.jnd.org/
Toilet Paper Algorithms: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ToiletPaperAlgorithms.html
If a more original tribute album than this has ever been cut, we'd like to know about it. "Sabbattum" is the project of Rondellus, a classically trained medieval music outfit from Estonia, and is a collection of Black Sabbath covers played on medieval instruments and sung in Latin. This must be some sort of arch and ironic postmodern prank, right? Wrong. These dudes wail (or should that be "hi homines ullulant"?), according to the press reviews that appear on the site, largely taken from respectable rock and metal mags. But don't take their word for it, listen for yourself - there are audio samples of all 12 album tracks, including "Verres Militares" ("War Pigs") and "Funambulus Domesticus" ("National Acrobat"). Also, meet Rondellus, see what kind of instruments Ozzy, Tommy, Bill and Geezer would have played if the Sabbath heyday had been in the 14th century, and order your copy of "Sabbatum" online. All this, and not a headless bat in sight.
http://www.sabbatum.com/
The Dictionary Goes Karaoke, or Vice Versa
Karaoke, that enduring pastime of off-key and often drunken sing-alongs to popular music, has, thanks to audio clips from the pronunciation guides of several online dictionaries, evolved into something perhaps even more derisively amusing with this site, which features audio dictionary clips spliced together to perform the songs of artists from ABBA to Weezer. Dictionaraoke - the work of a collective of musicians and "audio collage artists" who call themselves "the snuggles" - also features pointers on how you can recast your favorite tunes in the sterile, pitch perfect tone of a computer dictionary. Much like actual karaoke, all this computerized harmonizing straddles the fine line between eardrum-rupturing awful and comically entertaining, so while Dr. Dre's "Nuthin But a G Thang" comes across as a confusing mishmash of colliding - though extremely well pronounced - words, Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" may actually be an improvement upon the original. Believe us, you haven't lived until you've heard Microsoft Encarta cover Leonard Cohen.http://dictionaraoke.mirrors.gweep.net/
Channel Changers Choose Champs
Forget the Emmys. The best TV awards are the TeeVee Awards, presented as op-ed pieces since 1996 at TeeVee by "a group of malcontents, most of whom went to college together and most of whom work in the media, the computer industry, or both." We like the no-nonsense titles of some of these awards, such as "Worst Host" and "Biggest Disappointment". To be fair, many of these one-page reviews are positive. We suspect the writers, who call themselves "vidiots", really do spend a lot of time watching the shows, and they seem to invest intellectual energy in their habit. For a good introduction, read the Aug. 16 installment, the 2001-2002 TeeVee Awards: Split Decisions. You'll find yourself agreeing and disagreeing as the vidiots drop celebrity names and press entertainment buttons in a valiant attempt to portray state of the art. Overall, the prose is a bit high-strung in spots. When's the last time you came across a phrase such as "schadenfreude-induced chorus of joyous hosannas" in TV Guide? If your taste runs to acid, you'll enjoy the Aug. 22 send-up, TeeVee Awards '02: Worst Actresses. Tough luck, Reba.http://www.teevee.org/
You can feel music underwater with your entire body rather than just with your ears. If you're interested in experiencing that for yourself, Underwater Music is the Web site for you. It rates international hotels with pool sound systems, reviews music, such as Vangelis' Oceanic, that capture the essence of water, and provides plenty of information on submarine audio equipment. Bathtub speakers and an underwater Walkman sound like a must-have for the gadget-hungry in your life. The site's feature articles include an interview with a man who plays music to whales, and a project in Nottingham, England that uses underwater harmonics to protect fish from a hydropower scheme. Easily the most interesting piece of trivia we gleaned from the site was that Australian Aborigines invented dolphin sticks and played them underwater to attract dolphins, who then brought players fish. Now, that's our kind of fishing.
http://www.playalongathome.com/underwater/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
Jump the Shark: When Good Things Go Bad
Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PRThe Totally Excellent Fark Blog
Drew Curtis's Fark has come a long way since its earliest incarnation, when it showcased nothing more than a photo of a squirrel with enormous testicles. Nowadays, Fark - which, as the FArQ informs us, was Curtis's euphemism for you can guess what - serves as a depository of links to almost everything of interest on the Web, from serious news stories to the obligatory photos of naked women. Each link is helpfully organized under categories like Weird, Cool, and Boobies, and each features a summation of what you'll find on the respective sites, so discovering exactly what tickles your fancy isn't a problem. For a small fee, you can even gain entry to TotalFark, where you can access the links as they are added in real time - almost 1,500 a day. Web guides are a dime a dozen these days, but the staggering number of links added daily makes Fark stand head and shoulders above most of the competition. And yes, the photo of the squirrel is still there.http://www.fark.com/
Fred Reed writes a cop column in the Washington Times. His opinion columns are well researched, often hard-hitting, and sometimes hilarious. His well argued positions on modern times in America and worldwide are unlikely to be printed and framed by any liberals with a humor deficiency but they do make for informative reading. His columns have been collected recently into a book claiming to "cure scurvy and grow hair on bald men" called "The Great Possum-Squashing and Beer Storm of 1962". You can read a generous sample of more than two hundred columns on his Web site here; topics range from "Cannibalism in the Ivy League" to "Why you Should Stay out of the Military". The site's name implies Reed has opinions on everything. It's a tall order but the site delivers. Well, when was the last time you read about little boys being banned from playing cops and robbers?
http://www.fredoneverything.net/
SURFING SCIENCE
Einstein's theories of relativity sure gave a boost to speculation about time travel, although Jules Verne might take a bit of credit. Is time travel possible? A fascinating article in the September 2002 issue of Scientific American lays out the prerequisites for such a feat. Atomic clocks prove time is stretched by motion (jet relativity lag consists of a few measurable nanoseconds) and using speed to travel into the future is an accepted possibility. Gravity works, too. The trick is going back. Enter wormholes, which aren't entirely a SF plot device. Place one mouth of a wormhole near a massive neutron star, and a time difference between that mouth and the other would accumulate. This non-technical article outlines the steps involved - obviously, blueprints await future generations. the article also nicely summarizes time-travel paradoxes. There's a wonderful Flash illustration of the mother of all paradoxes - namely, can you kill your mother before she gives birth to you? These four Web pages, and a short sidebar on known forms of forward time travel, make a good introduction for readers who may never have given time travel much thought and for those who consider the very notion preposterous.http://tinyurl.com/109s
NASA Continues to Aim for Mars
NASA's many missions to Mars have been something of a hit or miss affair. For every successful undertaking (the Viking landers), there have been a string of costly failures (Mars Polar Lander, et al). The eggheads at NASA are nothing if not persistent, however, and trips to the red planet are already planned through 2007, beginning with the Mars Explorer Rover, which launches next year. On this site, you can view maps and photos of some of the proposed landing sites for that voyage and others, and read about mission objectives and the rationale behind the choice of locations. There's quite a bit of technical mumbo jumbo to wade through, but it's a worthwhile trudge nonetheless, especially considering the fascinating prospect that the landers will be at least partially concerned with exobiology, i.e., possibly uncovering actual Martians (admittedly, of the fossilized, microbial persuasion) beneath the soil. Though NASA considers the chance of such a discovery remote, the potential impact of such a finding makes these missions ones to watch.http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/index.html
If Pitch Drops in a Lab, Does Anyone See It?
For those not interested in visiting the site, the answer, in short, is no. The physics department at the University of Queensland started an experiment in 1927 to examine the viscosity of pitch. As is stated on the site, "In the 69 years that the pitch has been dripping no-one has ever seen the drop fall." That's roughly one drop every nine years, folks. If you think you're the lucky one who'll see the next drop fall - any time now, we're sure - you can spend your day watching it via RealVideo. Just don't say we didn't warn you. And the next time you talk about watching paint dry, use the "watching pitch drip" analogy instead. It takes far longer, even if you're thinking oil paint.http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/pitchdrop/pitchdrop.shtml