BREAKING SURF
| A Guide to the History of Operating-System GUIs |
| The State of Jefferson |
| Skiing over the Top of World |
| Picture Australia Portal |
| Gum Blondes |
| Females in Art |
| Retro Art of the Automobile |
| The 48-Hour Film Festival and Its Films |
| Cool and Varied Photo Essays |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Subscribe to Bruce Holland Rogers |
| Jock Bios |
| The Odd Little AIT Times |
| Killer Storms |
| Spelling Viagra 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 Ways |
| The History of Food |
| The Protozoan Universe |
| Virtual Copepods |
| Trek Tech Enters Our Lives |
| PlayFair: Stripping Apple's AAC Music Encryption |
| Hydrocephaly on Our Brains |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Amazon.com has released into the wild, wild, Web a beta of its A9 search engine. Based on Google technology, A9 provides essentially the same results, but with added value. A9 will also search the Amazon.com catalogue of books. Register at A9, and the search engine will retain a history your search results. By far the most novel feature is Amazon.com's application of the user-review technology it uses for books to Web pages. Click on A9's Site Info buttons, and you're transported to an Amazon.com Web page with reviews, traffic rank, contact info, and more about that page. Being a beta, it has some glitches. Sites that exist as directories within master domains, such as those at EarthLink, will sometimes be subsumed under the larger domain. Some people have expressed concerns over privacy, but A9 is freely available to anyone, even if they don't register - although A9 will not retain a search history. John Battelle, who runs the Searchblog, has some detailed info. The Slashdot crowd seems less impressed. Business 2.0 has an interview (conducted by Battelle) with the mastermind behind A9, Udi Manber.A9: http://www.a9.com/
Searchblog: http://battellemedia.com/archives/000575.php
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/14/2017208
Business 2.0: http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,611251,00.html
How Scammers Abuse Voice Relay Services for the Deaf
Whatever the failings of the US government behemoth, every once in a while it does something useful. One of these useful somethings is the funding of a telephone translation service for millions of Americans who are hard of hearing or speech-disabled. Such folk can use the Net to reach human telephone operators who can serve as intermediaries in a phone conversation, whether to order pizza or reach an emergency operator. Unfortunately, scammers have discovered how to exploit the service, called IP Relay, in order to defraud merchants and individuals. This lengthy article from the Baltimore City Paper provides background on IP Relay and details how the scams, which often originate offshore, work. The problem is so bad, many of the IP Relay translators are resigning or risking their jobs by talking about the scams to law enforcement and the media. Meanwhile, the telecom companies that provide the service profit from the volume of calls, in part from compensation paid by state and the US governments. This is a superb story, one that even the Secret Service seems to have been unaware of, and is very much worth reading.http://www.citypaper.com/current/feature.html
Most people don't like rats much, but scientists do because rats are invaluable lab animals for exploring human health. Compared to mice, rats are smarter, less aggressive, and less active, which makes them easier to use in medical research. That's why it's news that the Rat Genome Sequencing Consortium (HGSC) has sequenced the complete genome of Rattus norvegicus (the Brown Norway rat), the most popular strain of research rat. Joining mice and men, the rat is the third mammal to have its complete genetic code deciphered. The rat genome holds some 25,000 genes, 90% of which also appear in mice and humans. The work paves the way for rats specifically genetically modified for invaluable research into drugs, psychiatry, and cardiology, among other fields of medicine. It will also allow researchers to associate specific genes and mutations with particular traits and disease conditions. Nature has several articles stuffed with information about the significance of this feat. As well, a public draft of the genome assembly covering over 90% of the genome (some 2.8 GB worth) is available for download from the HGSC.
HGSC: http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/projects/rat/
Nature: http://www.nature.com/nsu/rat/
Watch the Transit of Venus in 1882
In 1882, Massachusetts astronomer David Peck Todd took the long trip to California, more specifically to Mt. Hamilton which looms over Netsurfer's very own Silicon Valley headquarters. Todd was there to record the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. He captured 147 glass plates of the event under almost perfect observing conditions. More than 120 years later, astronomers Bill Sheehan and Anthony Misch found Todd's archived plates and assembled them into a short movie that shows Venus moving across the solar disk. This is now the oldest movie in existence - the photos that make up the movie frames were developed before movies were invented. Neat. Sky and Telescope has big and smaller versions of the QuickTime movie.http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/sun/article_1187_1.asp
9-11 Commission Hearings in Audio and Text
The hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the US (known as the 9-11 Commission to friends) are just a pointless exercise and a waste of good cash. Let's face it: whether you support or dislike the current President and his policies, the hearings won't change your mind. So what's the point? Still, we suppose it is sorta history in the making, so we should draw your attention to the fact that Audible.com is providing the audio downloads of the hearings for free. You have to register for an account and use RealPlayer to get the goods. It's not every day that a National Security Advisor testifies under oath in an open hearing, so grab a copy for posterity. The content is completely unrestricted - you can burn it to a CD, play it on your iPod, or e-mail it to friends and enemies without a care in the world. Those of you who prefer text can pick up PDF transcripts from the 9-11 Commission itself.Audible: : http://www.audible.com/911hearings
9-11 Commission: http://www.9-11commission.gov/
Final Report on the August Power Blackout
The responsibility for the Aug. 14, 2003 blackout that darkened much of the northeastern US and southern Canada lies at the feet of Ohio's First Energy Corp. First Energy has been blamed by the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force for its failure to prune trees near power lines, its insufficient staff training, and its poor communications. You can read all about it in exhaustive detail in the task force's novel-length final report, all 6.8 MB of it. Although the document discusses many contributing factors in the cascade of failure that produced the widespread electricity outage, a dozen of the report's 46 recommendations deal specifically with software. On Aug. 14, a flaw deeply hidden in the 4 million lines of C code installed on First Energy's energy-management computers surfaced for the first time and silenced the control room's alarms. Because control-room operators didn't know alarms had been triggered, they failed to take actions that could have prevented the blackout or reduced its severity. It took General Electric, the maker of the software, eight weeks of intense effort to uncover the bug. The report also reveals some critical cybersecurity flaws, although these did not contribute to the blackout in any way. The most disturbing finding in this final report is that investigations following previous large-scale blackouts had already identified many of the causes and the remedies to be implemented. There's little point analyzing these things if conclusions are ignored. Security Focus has an excellent summary of the report. Report: https://reports.energy.gov/SecurityFocus: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8412
Will Gmail, Google's announced e-mail service, be as central to the Net as the search engine itself? Not if privacy advocates have their way. Although Gmail will offer users unprecedented storage space, the service also plans to scan users' e-mail and deliver appropriate ads. For a mail provider to have the ability to read private e-mail is a major problem for 28 groups and individuals that have jointly sent a letter of concern to Google's founders. The letter takes issue not with the ads per se, but with the potential for others to also read the e-mail or for the government to force Google to turn over the e-mail of individuals. It sets a bad precedent by lowering the global expectation of e-mail privacy, the letter states. A short Wired article lays out the issues.
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62976,00.html
Letter: http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/GmailLetter.htm
New Hampshire Court Rules Chat Record Is Illegal Wiretap
A New Hampshire detective posed as a 14-year-old girl in an AOL chatroom as part of a police sting of pedophiles. A man joined the chat room and solicited the "girl" for sexual acts. The detective chatted him up, then saved a copy of the instant-message conversation as evidence. As a result of the conversation, the state prosecuted the man for soliciting sex with a minor and tried to use the transcript of the chat as evidence. The defense objected, and the court ruled that the chat record was illegal under New Hampshire's wiretap law, which states that both parties to a conversation must consent to the recording of that conversation. The accused did not agree to to have the conversation recorded, so it cannot be used. SecurityFocus has details of this case and background on wiretap laws in various US jurisdictions.http://www.securityfocus.com/printable/columnists/233
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Wins Millennium Technology Prize
In case you forgot, Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the World Wide Web, having invented the Web browser, Web server and the Web communications protocols. He was knighted last New Year's. Now he's being honored again. The Finnish Technology Award Foundation has chosen Berners-Lee as the inaugural recipient of its Millennium Technology Prize. Recipients of the prize receive a cool million Euros in cash. Until now, Berners-Lee has not realized much financial windfall from his invention, and surely he deserves to do so. The foundation's Web site has a press release and more information about the new award.http://www.technologyawards.org/
Web Design: Gurus vs. Bloggers
Ever wonder what makes a Web site well designed? You're not alone. Design by Fire decided to undertake the subjective task of evaluating Web site design. The site compares and contrasts Web sites designed by gurus with Web sites designed by bloggers in a version of MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch - alas, without claymation. There is a great deal to learn in these matches, not the least of which is that being a guru doesn't necessarily help you make a great page. If anything, simpler is almost always better. If you work on a site, this is a must visit. And even if you don't, it is a great deal of fun.Design by Fire: http://www.designbyfire.com/000076.html
MTV: http://www.mtv.com/onair/deathmatch/
2004 Hugo Nominees, 2003 Nebula Winners
It's spring again and time for the World Science Fiction Society to honor the best works of last year. In addition to its standard Hugos, the society will this year also award Retro-Hugo awards for eligible work from the year 1953. The full list of Hugo nominees is on the Web site. The winners will be announced Sept. 4 at the Noreascon SF convention in Boston. In a related matter, by the time you read this, the Nebula award winners for last year will have been announced. The Nebula Web site offers extensive excerpts from all nominated works and entire shorter stories. It's a great way to find out if you like the authors and their work.Hugos: http://www.noreascon.org/hugos/nominees.html
Nebulas: http://www.sfwa.org/awards/2004/nebfinal2003.html
Creative writers have always striven to adopt and adapt new ideas and forms, while by definition remaining rooted in text. Now blogs, which have risen to prominence on the strength of reporting and commentary, are providing both inspiration and a new form for fiction. The Belle de Jour blog phenomenon (see NSD 10.11) has brought new erotic sizzle to a drooping format - the diary of a prostitute - and has triggered a broader interest in blog-based fiction in authors and publishers. Blogbusters, the Guardian's term for fictionalized blogs, can have unrivalled immediacy and direct involvement that draw readers in and invite interaction, although exactly how well suited the form is to each genre of fiction remains to be seen. Blog fiction may be new (or not - remember the Spot?) but the challenge of keeping habitual readers interested without confusing new readers is an old conundrum, one that Charles Dickens and his compatriots faced as they wrote their serialized novels back when the height of communication technology was the telegraph.
NSD 10.11: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.11.html#OC4
Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1187641,00.html
Intel's 100 Most Unwired Universities
Intel has posted a list of the top 100 American universities for wireless computing access. The findings are based on the number of hotspots, number of undergraduates, and number of computers. The results were also based on the proportion of area at each college campus that is covered by wireless technology. A pretty big caveat is in order. The coverage numbers do not come from actual on-the-ground research but from "university interviews and documents, and a variety of industry sources." Top your skepticism off with the realization that these results come from Intel, a company deep in the wireless hardware business, and it's hard to accept this list at face value. Take it with a grain of salt. The Intel page also has links to its lists of the most unwired cities and airports.http://www.intel.com/products/mobiletechnology/unwiredcolleges.htm
Bluesnarfing: Hijacking Your Bluetooth Phone
Will they never learn? Phone vendors are shipping these neat Bluetooth-enabled phones with security holes wide enough to allow even a stereotypical fat hacker to slip through. When a hacker, fat or slim, hijacks a phone, it's called bluesnarfing. Attackers who've hacked into your phone can read and change your address book, forward calls, send SMS messages, and grab data that lets them clone the phone. Daily Wireless has a short story about the problem and points the finger at two particular models as being vulnerable: a Nokia 6310i with firmware version 5.50 and the Sony Ericsson T610 with firmware version R1A081. Martin Herfurt hs written a paper that explains the vulnerability with an eye-openingly illustrative field test.Daily Wireless: http://www.dailywireless.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=177
Herfurt: http://student.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~mherfurt/BlueSnarf_CeBIT2004.pdf
If you're an AT&T subscriber, you can dial a number and ask AT&T to identify a song for you. Dial #43 and hold the phone next to the speaker playing the song when instructed to do so. After a few seconds, the service tells you the title of the song and the artist. Daily Wireless ran a test and even with significant background noise the service correctly identified four out of five songs. The service costs 99 cents per call. It may be more rewarding to place an urgent call to your significant other and ask them to identify a song, but it's probably more expensive, in several ways.
http://www.dailywireless.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=179
Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has been giving out Jefferson Muzzles awards since 1992. This year's winners include CBS, which received one for spiking an unflattering bio of Ronald Reagan and for refusing to air an anti-Bush political commercial during the Super Bowl. Other winners include a Dearborn, Mich. high-school administration that refused to let a student wear a political T-shirt and the South Carolina House of Representatives for passing a resolution calling the Dixie Chicks unpatriotic for speaking out against the Iraq war. Other winners tried to supress religious and legal speech. The full list is on the Jefferson Center Web site.
http://www.tjcenter.org/muzzles.html
Do video games have politics? In this thoughtful essay, Kevin Parker argues that games certainly do have politics, specifically, they foster a strain of individualism and anti-authoritarianism. Parker manages to go beyond the idea that games must have story lines to think about how most games are about playing and how narratives provide game authors with power over the user. Grand Theft Auto 3 bucks this trend; although many criticize this game for excessive violence, it lets the user truly design their individual game as they see fit. As Parker notes wryly, players are recently freed prisoners once enslaved by games. His essay also gives insight into what a new field of inquiry, game studies, might look like.
http://reason.com/0404/fe.kp.free.shtml
Being a futurist is sort of like being a meterologist. You get paid to predict, and people really don't expect you to be correct, for the most part. Best of all, you're usually either dead or long past caring or both by the time anybody can judge your accuracy. It makes for a lot of fun, and a parlor game: gather five futurists and ask them to discuss life in the year 3000. Closer to Truth hosted such a gathering and came up with a variety of views: a world populated entirely by women; human brains supplanted by chipsets; and/or humans joining the thus-far-undiscovered galactic community. This is all of interest, if only because it demonstrates that you, too, could be a futurist. Who knows? There could well be more money to be made in that than in trading pork-belly futures. As it happens, Plastic's denizens have a much better take on the whole situation, using the futurist discussion as a springboard to further, likely more realistic, musings. Sure....
Closer to Truth: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/technologysociety/201/201transcript.html
Plastic: http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/04/09/16124929;sid=04/04/09/16124929
The Urban Legends Reference Pages at Snopes.com are a known stop for most Net-savvy folks. Every time your relative of choice forwards you an e-mail that exhorts you to send cards to some new cancer-ridden five-year-old, you should stop by Snopes.com to find out it's another urban legend. Snopes.com's newest feature, the Scam Report, links to media reports of ongoing scams, and it's worth noting that the media tend to be getting a little better at discerning this junk. Consider it an additional resource in your ongoing battle against ignorance.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/daily/2004/20040410.asp
ONLINE CULTURE
A Guide to the History of Operating-System GUIs
Marcin Wichary has put together a GUIdebook to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in operating systems. Get it? GUIdebook? Anyhow, these Web pages will dredge up memories of operating systems you had forgotten existed (remember GEOS?) and perhaps some you wish had never existed. One of the most comprehensive single pages is the comparison of icons for common utilities (like the calculator) across different platforms and different versions of the software - a sort of evolutionary chart of the iconography of each utility, if you will. Definitely worth checking out.http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/index
ONLINE TRAVEL
The good people of northern California and southern Oregon have long been tired of having their interests ignored by the state governments in Sacramento and Salem, respectively. In November and December 1941, the anger bubbled up like so much Modoc Plateau lava and solidified in the declaration of the State of Jefferson, built of counties that declared themselves independent of California and Oregon. The movement spawned a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the rest of the US was to learn of the new state in newsreels scheduled to start playing Dec. 8. The attack on Pearl Harbor put an end to all of it. Still, the spirit lives on. Bravely adapting the double cross for their state flag (and their T-shirts, which you can order), the modern, bold, individualist would-be Jeffersonians represent all that is good, bad, and amusing in the American body politic. You could argue that these people are a bunch of black helicopter-sighting wingnuts. Agree or no, it is refreshing to see that eccentricity still has a role to play. As the secessionists themselves say, "It's a State of Mind."http://jeffersonstate.com/
Right now, since February and until May, 26-year-old British adventurer Ben Saunders is aiming to be the first man to ski unaided from Russia to Canada via the North Pole. He's hauling a 400-lb sled behind him on this 1,240-mile journey through temperatures expected to bottom out at -70 C (with wind chill). For that added frisson of excitement, parts of Saunders's route are known for their high concentrations of polar bears. The expedition Web site has daily dispatches, including stunning photographs, that Saunders sends via satellite phone as he makes his way across some of the most extreme terrain on the planet. You can check out his daily progress on the route map.
http://www.sercotransarctic.com/
Every nation/continent should have a visual research trove as rich as Picture Australia. At this image portal, run by the National Library of Australia, you search across outside image collections pertinent to the country. Search results consist of thumbnails linked to larger versions at the participating libraries, galleries, or archives. Many visitors will likely start in the student-friendly Picture Trails. A triumph of librarian logic and the Dublin Core metadata schema, Picture Trails is a group of themes such as architecture, sports, and travel that fork into subthemes. For example, the Sports trail forks into two subtrails: "Australians and the Olympics" and "Cricket in Australia". The former contains 120 thumbnails. In contrast, the Arts and Literature trail has nine subtrails and (as of this writing) 922 thumbnails. Organization by theme makes browsing easy and fun, especially for adults who don't have to submit class reports. For all its size and authority, you'll have to look elsewhere for maps, video clips, and images of contemporary items with copyright restrictions.
http://www.pictureaustralia.org/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Punsters may guffaw at the title of this Web site. Artists desperate to make a splash may decide to take up chicle instead of the brush. In any case, Jason Kronenweld, whose medium of preference is chewing gum on plywood, isn't likely to offend anyone other than dentists and the hypersanitary. He confronts a popular stereotype with Gum Blondes, a gallery of ten (soon, apparently, to be 12) portraits in pure, colored gum. We recognize Britney Spears, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Claudia Schiffer among the bare-shouldered subjects. Maybe Kronenweld wants to make a sarcastic point. Maybe he can't afford decent paint. Regardless, our teeth ache with delight in sweet contemplation as we click in admiration from one chic cheek to the next. Are we at long last perhaps at a turning point in the evolution of distinguished Western portraiture when environmental frugality in the face of pop culture renders classical representation obsolete, when dentin outdoes delineation, when saliva outlasts fresco, when lines between chewer and chewee blur in visions of eternal beauty and enamel caresses star until taste itself is a matter of art? One other item of note: the gum he uses is chewed by others.http://www.gumblondes.com/
The Picturing Women online exhibition explores how women have been portrayed in words and pictures throughout the ages. By examining both modern and ancient portraits, the collection seeks to establish female identity and a woman's place both now and in the past. The exhibition tries to maintain interactivity despite an understandably heavy reliance on images in some sections. For example, a Web tool called the Juxtaposer lets the visitor create and publish a selection of art objects based on a theme, write an introduction, and launch a discussion forum about the chosen collection. It blurs the traditional line between curator and public in a positive way. Other interactive elements include lesson plans, a tool that changes hairstyles and lets you examine unconscious reactions to those changes, and the story of a 200-year-old female mannequin who teaches us about attitudes of her time towards female modesty.
http://www.picturingwomen.org/
Lost Highways is a gallery in Philadelphia, but its online face is a museum dedicated to cars that never happened, strange and bizarre vehicles that never moved on asphalt. The current online exhibition is of the futuristic art by a rediscovered 20th-century artist named Arthur Radebaugh, whose illustrations of the future were looked at by 19,000,000 newspaper readers in the 1950s. His cartoons of the future included machines that closely resemble modern helicopters, miners on the moon, and a hovercraft bus that gave passengers access to air-conditioning and telephones. Other features of the site include vintage posters for purchase at the e-shop, online issues of their club magazine for fans of retro vehicles, and slide show lectures on road-related topics. The site is image-intensive and frequently opens new browser windows.
http://www.losthighways.org/
The 48-Hour Film Festival and Its Films
So you want to make films? Get out your camcorder and start shooting. The 48-Hour Film Festival gives would-be independent filmmakers the opportunity to have their features shown on the silver screen. Submissions for the seventh festival are being received until Aug. 6, 2004 and will be shown at the end of that month. For inspiration, check out some previous submissions on the Films page. Each film runs approximately eight minutes. You'll need QuickTime to view them. Some sure winners are "Cock Tales" and "Fish Guys". If you're interested in submitting a piece, be sure to familiarize yourself with the entry guidelines and helpful hints available on this site. Any aspiring filmmaker or film aficionado will find this site an invaluable source of inspiration.http://www.extremefilmmaker.com/
Sam Barcroft is a photographer with attitude to spare as well as an eye for the arresting stories that lurk behind the images, although it could be argued that the images speak for themselves in this series of photo essays. Guys of a certain type will probably click straight to the collection on the air charter that uses lingerie-clad models as stewardesses. Folks with a yen for a different kind of pleasure may want to check out the Chocolate Spa in Hershey, Pa. Dedicated netsurfers will definitely want to see the office on the beach. There's certainly something here for everyone.
http://www.sambarcroft.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)
Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
Ethereal Packet SniffingSubscribe to Bruce Holland Rogers
Many writers complain that they can't get published or that when they do, the publishers and the editors get all the kudos and most of the cash. One author, Bruce Holland Rogers, has decided to challenge that distribution model by using the Internet to sell his stories via subscription as well as targeting magazines for his work. His clients, who pay $5 a year, get three stories every month. These flash fiction pieces, are shorter than the average short story and can come from almost any genre. It's like having a fiction collection delivered to your inbox each week, only they all just happen to come from one man. Obviously, Rogers has tapped a market; he has accumulated 500 subscribers since he began the experiment in 2002. That's not a living wage, but it's a good deal for subscribers. Where else can you buy a story for 14 cents? Think hard.http://www.shortshortshort.com/
Combination athlete biography collection and memorabilia store, JockBio.com features article-length portraits of selected professional athletes written by professional sports writers. Don't come here expecting a comprehensive database of past sports heroes; the emphasis is very much on current athletes. The number of written biographies totals 83, although there are also a few interviews and articles with former greats and a couple of not-so-greats. On the other hand, if information on the heroes of today is what you seek, the articles are informative and well written, and a new bio is added to the site every Tuesday. Alas, almost nothing is free in this world any more, so the site is also the place to go if you're looking for that hard-to-find 1969 Alex Karras Topps card to round out your collection. It's a must-see for the athletic supporter with a long attention span.
http://www.jockbio.com/
The AIT Times is the official news site of the world-renowned Academy of Intellectual Topologists. Please note that the AIT Times strictly prohibits readers with humor impairment. Recent news stories include the details of a daring Viking raid on the campus and the claiming of the prize of world's funniest joke by a 12-year-old AIT student at the Laughlab. Most of the stories parody real news events of recent months - for example, a scandal blossomed at the AIT Super Bowl when an Italian pop star exposed his left nipple. AIT has apparently been asked to host the Olympics instead of Athens and AIT scientists have recently discovered planet XXX and confirmed that it is teeming with life. The humor here isn't going to crack you up, but it is off-kilter enough to make you wonder. And it sure beats the real news for entertainment value.
http://aittimes.mithuro.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Tornadoes are bad, mmmk? But supertornadoes are worse. Now, as tornado season gets under way across the US, we recommend a visit to Hunt for the Supertwister, the companion site to Nova's TV program of the same name, which aired Mar. 30. Scientists chase black monsters of the sky to better understand them and to improve prediction, and as a result computer models and tracking equipment are getting better. Still, you may not want to chase tornadoes yourself. Supertwisters blow faster than 200 mph. Consider the May 1999 supertwister that blasted a path of destruction near Oklahoma City, Okla. One of the mobile trackers on the Nova program clocked its winds at 316 mph: "These were the strongest winds ever documented in nature and capable of wreaking havoc that can only be compared to the effects on the fringes of a nuclear explosion." The interviews and articles at Hunt for the Supertwister will take on special meaning to builders, insurers, safety officials, and others with more than a passing fascination with sudden atmospheric terror.http://www.pbs.org/nova/tornado/
Spelling Viagra 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 Ways
There are something like 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 ways to spell Viagra in a spam message. That's actually an outside limit, as determined by Rob Cockerham, who did some math on how various character substitutions could be used in different ways to spell the word. That's a rather daunting number if you're thinking of writing a general expression to catch all that stiff-penis spam before it reaches your mailbox. (That last sentence is totally unnecessary to the story, but allowed us to include the phrase "stiff penis" in this issue. Twice, apparently.) While you're at Cockerham's (and we assume that is his real name) most excellent Web site don't forget to visit How Much Is Inside, his fascinating series of meticulously documented scientific experiments investigating the quantitative qualities of common everyday objects.Viagra: http://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html
How Much Is Inside: http://cockeyed.com/inside/howmuchinside.html
Everything you wanted to know about the history and origin of food is available at the Food Timeline, a site dedicated to exploring culinary delights down through the ages. Begin with a look at prehistoric diets that included shellfish and eggs. Next, travel through the beginning of agriculture and explore the history of beer, soup, and beans. Further study takes you on a journey with several ancient societies including Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. More recent developments include cuisine such as processed and packaged foods. Links on the timeline direct you to other Web sites that contain bushels of historical information on the item selected. In addition, some links provide visitors with a chance to hone ancient culinary practices in their own kitchens. This site is an excellent resource for educators in social studies, aspiring chefs, or anyone interested in how the food in your cupboard came to be.
http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/food.html
Combining tasteful design and complete dedication, Droplet is a loving amateur's guide to the miniature universe that is found in each drop of water. This online illustrated field manual covers the protozoa: the tremendously varied single-celled creatures, such as amoebas, ciliates, flagellates, and sporozoans. Piotr Rotkiewicz, the site's creator, has done a bang-up job. You can browse the gallery or, even better, use the clickable collage - which conveniently illustrates the relative sizes of the little critters - to view the thumbnail photos and get the taxonomy of every species. Other features include a glossary, a links collection, an illustrated bibliography, and a handy page on microscopes.
http://www.pirx.com/droplet/index.shtml
Computer-driven 3-D modeling meets marine biology in this online collection of images, animations, and movies of the tiny marine organisms known as copepods. Copepods, in case you were wondering, are a class of crustacean, most of which are plankton that live their entire lives afloat. Celeste Fowler and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography created this project in order to afford the public a better understanding of copepod appearance and behavior and the results speak for themselves. While these tiny creatures aren't exactly warm and fuzzy, one has to be impressed with the detail of their morphology and the mechanics of their actions, now available thanks to the technology of computer imaging. The site also links to other copepod Web sites and a bibliography.
http://jaffeweb.ucsd.edu/pages/celeste/copepods.html
When Gene Roddenberry imagined communications in his vision of 23rd-century "Star Trek", he made a huge leap. Communications were wireless as a matter of course. Displays could be huge, and mounted imperceptibly on walls. Access to data could be virtually instantaneous. Roddenberry thought all this up 40 years ago, imagined it 300 years in the future, and we live it today. Part of why this is so is because his vision has inspired designers. The PalmOS user interface can trace its roots directly to "Star Trek", and so can many other innovations. That cell-phone with the flip-up cover? That came from Captain Kirk talking to Chief Engineer Scotty on a communicator. Some people hated "Star Trek", but a lot of the designers of the tools you use every day took inspiration from it. The San Francisco Chronicle took an arresting look at how one oddball television program influenced an entire generation of consumer electronics design and implementation.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/15/BUGO35EG1T83.DTL
SOFTWARE
PlayFair: Stripping Apple's AAC Music Encryption
An anonymous programmer put together some existing libraries and created PlayFair, a tool that strips encrypted digital-rights management from Apple's iTunes Music Store songs. It lets you remove the encryption and back up your music beyond the unlimited CDs, unlimited iPods, and three computers Apple allows. Apple's digital-rights management framework is called FairPlay - whence PlayFair. After the PlayFair code showed up on SourceForge, Apple issued the expected order to cease and desist, under the authority of the DMCA. By the notification, the code was already all over the Net, and within a day a Web site in India, Sarovar.org, was hosting it. At press time, it looks like that, too, is gone. With some effort, you can find the PlayFair code on the usual file-trading networks but as a few folks point out in threads at MacSlash, it's not like PlayFair lets you do anything you can't do without it.MacSlash 1: http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/04/1434240
MacSlash 2: http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/09/1057246
Sarovar.org: http://sarovar.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=474
CORRECTIONS
Faithful reader Kristy Milland caught us on an error of fact. In last issue's "Blythe, the Hydroencephalic Barbie Counterpart", we called Blythe, well, hydroencephalic. She wrotes: "...I don't think it is the medical term you're seeking - hydrocephalus is too much cerebrospinal fluid in the head, which does cause it to swell but certainly not to the point of the size of those doll's heads - it would be fatal if it got to that disproportionate a size. Macrocephaly, an unusually large head, is the medical term I think better suits the doll." We are humbled. Milland even sent along links to the Birth Disorder Information Directory (BDID). Now, that's service.NSD 10.14: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.14.html#SS12
BDID Hydrocephaly: http://www.bdid.com/hydrocephaly.htm
BDID Macrocephaly: http://www.bdid.com/macrocephaly.htm