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Netsurfer Recommendations

The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition)
Peter Jackson (Director)
Warner Home Video

The big DVD boxed set of the big movie is finally here. Don't confuse this collection with the earlier DVD release, which was simply a straight cut of the film as seen in theaters. This is the director's cut edition with four disks. Two disks hold the main feature with 30 extra minutes of footage that flesh out the storyline. The other two disks are entitled "From Book to Vision" and "From Vision to Reality"; together, they tell how the Lord of the Rings story was translated into powerful film. The many fans of the movie certainly don't need our recommendation to buy this collection. We're hoping to convince those of you who may not be into all this elf and magic stuff. Never mind the fantasy genre - this is truly first-rate dramatic magic made real on screen. It's an epic story, epically told. Give it a try. Feeling flush? There's another, more expensive special gift set, which has the same DVDs, but also a couple of bookends, a National Geographic special about the making of the movie, and some trading cards.

Mutter Museum: Of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Gretchen Worden
Blast Books; ISBN: 0922233241

The Mutter Museum was founded in 1858 by the Philadelphia College of Physicians as a collection of medical specimens for the education of doctors. Perhaps not surprisingly, over time the museum has attracted large numbers of the general public who are fascinated with the gory details of the human body laid bare. The museum is filled with a mind-boggling collection of medical specimens, old medical photographs, and models that span the spectrum of the human species - and, more to the point, the human body gone wrong. You can see the connected livers of the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, skeletons of giants and dwarves, bits of human bodies in jars, amazing wax castings of intestines, photos of people with odd medical conditions - the list goes on and on. There's a grim fascination in all this material, not only for the light it sheds on the often messy innards of the human body, but also for the sheer spectacle of seeing it all go terribly awry. The museum has attracted the attention of world famous photographers whose work is showcased in this handsome book, complemented with an engaging account of the history behind the specimens. It makes a fine coffee table book for the profoundly non-squeamish.

The Hard SF Renaissance
David G. Hartwell (Editor), Kathryn Cramer (Editor)
Tor Books; ISBN: 0312876351

This book is a sequel to Hartwell and Cramer's earlier short story collection, 1994's " The Ascent of Wonder". The point of the earlier collection was to acknowledge the strong hard-science theme that has always run through the core of science fiction. In this new anthology, the editors focus on the resurgence of hard-science writing that followed the more humanistic approach of the so-called New Wave SF of the late '60s and '70s. (See, for example, the classic and groundbreaking " Dangerous Visions", newly re-issued in a 35th anniversary edition.) The stories in this volume come from both the old guard of SF writers and the many promising newcomers who grew up in an age of domestic high technology. All were originally published in the late 1980s at the earliest. One Amazon reviewer validly complains that women are seriously underrepresented here, with only three stories by Nancy Kress, Joan Slonczewski, and Sarah Zettel. Despite this lack, the book is still a great treat for any fan of hard SF.

Windows XP Annoyances
David A. Karp
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596004168

Face it: Windows has a long tradition of annoying its users. Processes you don't need use up CPU cycles; files you don't need take up disk space; decisions you don't need are made for you; and, yes, the user interface does sometimes get in the way of work. A lot of this is perhaps inevitable, given that Microsoft is trying to cater to a wide spectrum of users, from total newbies to battle-hardened sysadmins. Fortunately, it's possible to work around some of the more annoying features of Windows XP, something power users in particular will appreciate. This book follows the same popular theme as Karp's earlier " Windows 98 Annoyances", and gives workarounds for a number of annoying things in Windows XP. The book also provides an excellent guide to some of the more obscure features of the operating system. For example, there's a great overview of how to use scripting to automate many routine tasks. You may wish to pair this book up with the more compact reference, " Windows XP in a Nutshell".

Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics
Amir D. Aczel
Four Walls Eight Windows; ISBN: 1568582323

Quantum mechanics is inherently odd and sometimes spooky to the human mind, which evolved in the relatively predictable world of observable Newtonian physics. Entanglement is arguably one of the more mysterious phenomena of the quantum world. Scientists have separated two entangled quantum systems by a great distance then observed that changes in one are reflected in the other, seemingly in violation of that other bedrock of physics, the theory of relativity. The experimentally verified entanglement poses a difficult theoretical puzzle for physicists touching on the very fabric of reality. This accessible book is a great introduction to the mysterious subject for the general science reader interested in cutting edge physics research - which sometimes even seems to bleed into philosophy.