BREAKING SURF
| Available Domain Name of the Week |
| How to Find a Web host |
| The Beauty of CSS Design, with Examples |
| Paul Allen's Latest Airventure |
| Spanning the Golden Gate |
| A Photo a Mile across the US |
| A German Photographs the New World |
| Toilets of the World |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Headlines in Historical Context |
| Calling All Phone Geeks |
| Dinosaur and Prehistoric Art |
| Home-Built Robots Encroach on the Foodservice Industry |
| Hard Drive Assault Cannon |
| Astronomy Learning and Games |
| Hymn: PlayFair Renamed |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was sparked by the release of pictures taken by soldiers in Iraq. While those photos are clearly in a class by themselves in grabbing world attention, the netsurfing public has generally paid little if any attention to other photos taken by coalition soldiers during the current war. Many merely assume mistakenly that few if any meaningful images make it through official channels and out of the war zone. This is far from the truth, as demonstrated by a slew of photoblogs maintained by American troops in Iraq. James Hong and Jim Young, the guys who started Hot or Not, have compiled a list of such photoblogs found at Yafro - which, not coincidentally, they also created. Yafro is worth visiting in and of itself. Hong and Young felt it would be worthwhile to bring these soldiers' (and Marines' and possibly airmen's and sailors') photos to people's attention. Many of these snapshots are quite mundane, but quite a few rival in quality anything a professional photojournalist can come up with. Worth browsing.Hong and Young: http://jhong.org/frontline.html
Yafro: http://www.yafro.com/
A team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has developed software that can reliably recognize faces in pictures. The potential application of such technology in security and law enforcement should be obvious. The project is particularly noteworthy to us because the researchers have placed their software on the Web. Choose an image from elsewhere on the Web and ask the software to recognize faces in it as a test. That segues into another reason to visit the site: its amazing archive of the hundreds of snapshots netsurfers have used to test the system over the past year. Sure, it almost takes a year to download just the list of links, but the range of shots in the gallery is astonishing. The images are stored in black and white and compose a gallery of eyecandy that ranges from random family photos to glamour fashion shots to Dilbert comic panels. Some folks have tested the algorithm with tricky images designed to fool the human eye into detecting faces in their composition. The whole archive just begs for exploration - heck, it begs to be turned into a screensaver. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has more background.
Robotics Institute: http://www.vasc.ri.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/demos/findface.cgi
Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04124/310169.stm
Memespread Project Analyzes Memespace
Sam Arbesman, university student, wondered how information spreads across the blogosphere so quickly, so he designed the Memespread Project to find out. He infected one blog with a URL - that of the project itself - and tracked its movement. Shortly after Kottke.org posted the link, the meme started to spread. When the meme hit the oft-visited Metafilter, it went ballistic. Bloggers who linked to the project page knew they were participating in a project, which probably influenced their behavior and renders any results moot but still worth analysis. A blind study may have produced different results, but the ripple effects outlined in this project nonetheless hold relevance for those interested in transmission patterns of data both benign and malevolent. A Wired article helps make sense of it all.Memespread Project: http://www.arbesman.net/meme.php
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63344,00.html
Founder Threatens to Shut Japan's Channel Two
Japan's Channel 2 has an audience that hits about 5.5 million a month - but it's not a TV station. Channel 2 is a Web site that affords guests a chance to discuss topics they would otherwise never dream of raising in a society steeped in nuance and privacy. In the five years since its inception, the site has grown into a cultural barometer. News companies and other large corporations routinely track the mood of the populace here. In the US and Europe, the Net fostered a somewhat communal atmosphere as it blossomed, but Japan entered the online world a bit later and Japanese Net culture largely emphasizes business (and anime, we suppose). Channel 2 filled a niche that was previously empty in the Japanese Net: a no-holds-barred mega bitchfest. As such, the site provides a look at those aspects of Japanese thought that have largely been hidden from view. The site owner, however, is bored with the site and thinks that a lot of the people who yack there are stupid. The opinion, like the site, is unconventional. A Japanese, seeing a success in action, would be more likely to simply turn it into a business. At least, if you can believe what you read. The New York Times reports the story.Channel 2: http://www.2ch.net/
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/international/asia/09toky.html
Google Blog, Image Ads, Groups2, and a Blogger Relaunch
We're going to toss together a bunch of this week's Google-related news. The company has launched the experimental Google Blog, authored by various Google employees, to provide "Insight into the news, technology, and culture of Google". Google also announced it is testing service of image ads as part of its AdSense program, which until now has been limited to short text ads. Another recent Google innovation is Groups 2, a newsgroup service that lets anyone create an e-mail and archive-based group, much like Usenet but hosted by Google instead of a distributed network of servers. Gmail users can play with Groups 2, which makes the service resemble Yahoo Groups, but presumably Google will add a powerful search function. Finally, Blogger, the popular weblog host Google purchased last year, has undertaken a major redesign of its user interface. New features include support for comments, e-mail blogging, the ability to place each entry on a new Web page, and more. Blogger has more details. Image Ads: https://www.google.com/adsense/newGoogle Blog: http://www.google.com/googleblog/
Groups2: http://groups-beta.google.com/
Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/05/great-blogger-relaunch.pyra
Movable Type 3.0 Pricing Announced
Six Apart's Movable Type may be the most popular software package for publishing and managing blogs, so the package's new pricing scheme is a fairly big deal in the weblogging community. Movable Type users greeted the new price structure for Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition with almost universal disapproval. Few people seem to object to Six Apart making money, but many object to specific new license terms. Most detractors focus on the stringent limitations on the number of simultaneous authors and blogs each pricing level supports. Others complain that the pricing levels rise too steeply and that the software still lacks a number of widely requested features. The negative reaction is a big blow to what has been generally regarded as an excellent product, and has raised a storm of comments all over the blogosphere - see, for example, the trackbacks at Mena's Corner (Mena Trott is a Six Apart founder) and comments at Metafilter.Six Apart: http://secure.sixapart.com/
Mena's Corner: http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml
Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/33072
The storied MP3.com, now owned by CNET Networks, has relaunched. Unlike the original, this version offers no free music to download - CNET wants you to try its new Download.com Music instead. What you will find at MP3.com are musical technology guides, music reviews and forums, explorations of musical genres, and more. One spiffy addition is Musicvine, a visual search engine that helps you find bands related to a specific artist's style. It's not easy to read, though, and could use more intuitive scrolling. MP3.com has the inevitable links to paid music services where you can download songs or buy CDs. So, what's MP3.com good for? Think of it as a giant music metasearch engine for commercial music and a repository for technical information about digital music. It's also a good place to download cover art for CDs you rip yourself. But will MP3.com fill any needs not already met by your commercial music service of choice? Hard to say, but for the moment, it's worth a visit even if just to play around with Musicvine.
MP3.com: http://www.mp3.com/
Music at Download.com: http://music.download.com/
FreeCache: Free Distributed Web-Caching System
The folks at the Internet Archive are testing a free, demand-driven distributed caching system for the Web. FreeCache works much like the commercial caching services in that it helps reduce the bandwidth needed to distribute large or popular files. FreeCache sites share data among members - the data doesn't reside solely on the originating Web server but can be found on a server closer to a given user, whose browser therefore requires less bandwidth to download the files. Unlike cooperative caching systems like BitTorrent, FreeCache nodes are permanent and less popular files don't risk being flushed out of the system. The process is transparent to the user. A browser visits the FreeCache Web site with a simple URL format and is automatically redirected to the nearest cache. The service is still a beta and slow. It's more a proof of concept at this stage, but still worth checking out as an alternative to BitTorrent and its ilk.http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php
Accomplished journalist J.D. Lasica is writing a book to be titled "Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television", and he wants your help. He has a wiki that invites readers to provide comments and corrections. So far, Lasica has written an introduction and four chapters. Read his stuff and you realize that he believes that participatory collaboration is the future. If that's your cup of tea and you contribute something useful, Lasica promises to include you in his acknowledgements and buy you a drink next time you meet up. Frankly, we're skeptical that this sort of interaction will become mainstream. We also wonder if the author's thirst for interaction is genuine or merely a clever marketing ploy intended to draw participants in the hope they'll all want to buy the book. Come the revolution, maybe those simple vacation paperbacks - no interaction and very little brain needed - could be things of the past, replaced by wirelessly networked interactive gizmos. Even if so, we bet it will be porn that drives the industry.
Lasica: http://www.newmediamusings.com/
Darknet: http://tinyurl.com/3g7ro
Anonymizer Service Aimed at Iranians Needs Some Fine Tuning
The US government doesn't maintain official relations with Iran but, through the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), it directly affects Iranian netsurfers. Iran censors the country's Net feed, blocking anything that smacks of pornography or anti-government ideology. To circumvent the Iranian ban on non-porn information, the IBB set up an Anonymizer service to let Iranian netsurfers access blocked sites - at least, that was the plan. As the OpenNet Initiative reports, porn filters in the IBB Anonymizer service can block innocuous sites, leaving Iranian netsurfers with overlapping black-outs. The porn filters block URLs with naughty keywords like 'ass' and "breast" and do so indiscriminately. For example, any site with "embassy" in the address is unavailable because of those three letters: "ass". Even worse for the Iranian netsurfing public, Iranian ISPs and the Iranian government can easily trace users. The authorities can immediately recognize that a user has accessed the IBB Anonymizer site. Revealing dissidents may not be the best way to help reformers in Iran.http://www.opennetinitiative.net/advisories/001/
What happens to newswires online? This thoughtful Online Journalism Review (OJR) article tackles this messy issue in a clear and cogent fashion. Wire services have basically two choices: reduce their distribution to other outlets and attempt to move readers to their own Web sites to preserve themselves as brands or spread themselves over a variety of sites and become more like a commodity. The latter choice seems popular. Never mind portals - regularly, we will read an Associated Press piece at both CNN and FOXNews.com, then see it word-for-word in the next morning's local newspaper. That strikes us as cheap, unnecessary duplication. OJR discusses substantive issues, not least of which is how the news itself is being redesigned as the Web becomes more integrated into everyday life.
http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1083716199.php
The Trouble with Online Newspapers
Who subscribes to the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times online editions, and why? Oh, they're a bit less expensive than the print editions, and the PDF format reproduces the newspapers sort of well, but, as Jack Shafer notes at Slate, reading the PDF version is like reading a broadsheet through a six-pane window with five of the panes blacked out. This well written piece hits this and other issues related to e-publishing dead on. Consider that you can subscribe to the online New York Times for "only" $300 a year - half the cost of the national print edition subscription. For the $300 savings, you give up the ability to scan or photocopy a column from the print edition and have your way with it, although there are workarounds that let you copy PDFs. The big difference is the comfort factor. Reading a screen just isn't as comfortable or as tactilely satisfying as spreading out newsprint. Technology hasn't found a way to address this seemingly trivial yet oh-so-important aspect of news delivery.http://slate.msn.com/id/2100012
In Game Economies, It's Having Fun That Counts
The virtual economies of online games fascinate economists and gamers alike. A report from Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) on the economy of its virtual world triggered a story in Wired and extensive online discussion at the Terra Nova blog. The SWG post is intriguing and informative, complete with colorful graphs and telling comments. It describes an economy in which, just like in real life, a few own most of the wealth, although the online game seems even more skewed to the few with the most. SWG analysis revealed that the game world was taking in more cash than it let out, without the expected economic costs. The SWG team hunted for a bug that would let counterfeiters thrive, found it, and fixed it. One big difference between virtual worlds and the real one is that you can kick people out of online games and adjust the rules arbitrarily. Another seems to be that games are (supposed to be) just entertainment and so long as players are amused, a game economy doesn't much matter. Still, human economic interaction is as hard to predict and control in a game environment as it is in real life.SWG: http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Astromech%20Stats%20Economy
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63363,00.html
Terra Nova: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/05/swg_economic_da.html
When you give away something, you've got to expect some people will try to trick the system. In India, our old friend the click-through ad payment is under assault. Some Indian businesses are gaming that game, hiring clickers to click on ads regardless of ad content - all that counts is revenue per click. Clickers find the tedium a good way to earn $100-$200 a month. The Times of India has a short piece on the growing practice. Intermediaries teach neophytes how to earn money this way. Some provide special Web sites and e-mail with ads to click and act as middle men, collecting the click-through payments in dollars, paying clickers in rupees, and keeping a hefty commission. This is not what advertisers want to pay for, so sponsors may eventually find ways to screen out such practices, but in the meantime it's a growing cottage industry. The people doing it admit they're interested only in the money, not the content, and patiently wait the necessary 60 to 90 seconds to maximize the take. They also admit it's boring - at $0.18 to $0.25 an ad, it takes a lot of clicks to make any significant amount of money - but at least it's easy work. It sure beats putting out a subscription e-zine.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-654822,curpg-1.cms
While some of the 2004 Webby winners could have been predicted even by one-time IBM chairman Thomas Watson Sr. - iTunes Music Store won the Commerce award, and Google won Webbies for Best Practices and for Services - it's nice to see some lesser known Web sites honored as well. Wikipedia won the Community category, "Fog of War" (a great movie, by the way) won Film, and San Francisco's Exploratorium won for Science. Map24 won Technical Achievement, and the inimitable Car Stuck Girls won the Weird category. There's first-rate netsurfing galore here.
Watson: http://www.amusingquotes.com/h/1/439.htm
Webby Awards: http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/nominees.html
You Surf Like a Woman, My Lord
If you want to know what women want from the online world, don't ask a group of marketers. In an article that is more humorous than intended, Salon notes that contemporary marketers find the online behavior of females confusing and incomprehensible. If the behavior doesn't fit into one of eight pre-defined personae, it is off the marketing radar screen. Even worse, marketers at firms like Proctor & Gamble don't seem to realize that focus group members in their 20s and 30s already understand marketing as well as the professionals. Rachel, a focus-group member, has been doing focus groups for so long that she remembers when she was paid in candy.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/05/just_ask_a_woman/index_np.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Available Domain Name of the Week
Most nerdy sites require thinking, but Splorp demands only the minimum. Aside from the expected blog, the site serves up tasty amuse-bouches of pages, of which the top two are a critique of spiral logos and a page that features an available domain name of the week. It's fun finding out what's up for grabs. How about snagging interfacetious.com, grumpler.com, or statusbarn.com? "Grumpler.com" would sound great in a radio ad. What about statusbarn.com, rural realtors? If the one page of selected offerings tickles you, try the archives, which reach back to 1999. Five years of neglect have yet to tarnish fatbaldmen.com, emptyboot.com, and unsortable.com. Our reviewer favors 2001, which features clinkclankclunk.com (a potential bonanza for talkshow hosts or car dealers), fluffism.com (taken by now!), and creamless.com (still a fine choice for a variety of pursuits). Other no-longer-available past choices include bureaucrazy.com and screamingedge.com. Hopespringseternal.com, nosehole.com, and kioskology.com still await owners. Blow some dough. Take the plunge. Splorp has gems you could use to earn millions with creativity and incredible luck.http://www.splorp.com/domain/
When your Web site bursts beyond whatever meager confines your ISP offers as part of your account, it's time to find a Web hosting service. There are thousands of these around, all offering different feature sets at different costs. The List of Web Hosts lets you search for one with every possible criterion. Even specifying the most outrageous feature sets will usually produces at least one hosting services to choose. Vetting the services is up to you, but the site will give you lots of choices. It's best to know what you're looking for before you get here.
http://webhosts.thelist.com/
The Beauty of CSS Design, with Examples
The CSS Zen Garden is devoted to exploring the great use of cascading style sheets (CSS) in HTML design. CSS has been around for a while, but has never achieved the promise of its birth. Part of the reason is technical: browsers have been slow to implement CSS, even slower to adopt a universal standard, and some implementations have been awful. CSS also suffers from an unfair reputation of being somewhat difficult to learn. The excellent CSS Zen Garden shows what CSS can accomplish. Just choose a CSS design from the list to the right of the page and it's implemented. The site also invites graphic artists and designers to submit their own design and improvements, using CSS naturally, for possible inclusion on the site.http://www.csszengarden.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Paul Allen's Latest Airventure
Paul Allen doesn't seem to receive nearly as much fear and loathing as his long-time partner, Bill Gates, generates, probably because Allen cashed in and split the scene. He pumped some of his money into a number of new endeavors - sports teams, media, museums, SETI.... Among Allen's hobbies is the collection and restoration of vintage aircraft. In 1998, Allen began buying and restoring aircraft from the World War II and Cold War eras. Until now, he kept his efforts somewhat withdrawn from the public eye, but the Flying Heritage Collection (FHC) is now accepting visitors. Unlike most museums, the FHC doesn't stop at static display. Its babies are restored to full airworthy status. The FHC site's movies alone will grab your attention. Yeah, you'll need Windows Media Player to view them. The collection is unusually extensive, with rarely seen models like the Polikarpov I-16 and the astonishing Fiesler Storch flying alongside standards like the P-51D and a Spitfire. Aircraft buffs eagerly await the in-progress Bf 109, FW 190, and Shturmovik - despite the huge numbers built, flying models of these aircraft are extremely rare today. You can tour the Arlington, Wash. museum by appointment only, but the Web site is a nice Plan B.Allen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen
FHC: http://www.flyingheritage.com/
Magnet for countless photographers, filmmakers, and tourists, the Golden Gate Bridge is as iconic a symbol as any. For many, it's the height of architectural beauty. Joseph Strauss, who would lead the drive to build a bridge across the entrance to San Francisco Bay, fell in love with bridges while recovering from a failed attempt to make the University of Cincinnati football team. He became a drawbridge engineer and fought environmentalists, city administrators, and other engineers to get a bridge across the Golden Gate. PBS has summarized the history of the Depression-era feat with biographies and backgrounders at the companion site for a recent "American Experience" broadcast. For a quick overview, check either the timeline, which spans 1849 to 1930, or the gallery of construction photos. How desolate the Bay looks without a bridge - like a scene from a post-apocalyptic film. The site offers a guide for teachers of civics, geography, history, and economics. In the Special Features and People & Events sections, students will find nuggets for discussion - including details about production of the documentary, during which two cameras were thrown off the bridge - along with links to pertinent sites.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldengate/
In the category of better late than never, we're reviewing Kodak's Taken in the Road: American Mile Markers. Matt Frondorf drove across the country with a camera literally linked to his odometer which clicked a picture every mile. You can view the results as QuickTime slide shows. The site is proof that unique content is timeless; the site was put online in November 1999. The design, nearly five years old, looks like it was created yesterday, which proves how cutting edge the design firm Second Story must be. Sidetracked to its site by the link at the bottom of the page, we recognized several of its creations as past topics of review in NSD. Although Second Story seems to specialize in museum and gallery presentations, Taken in the Road, which should be drawing Social Security by Internet standards, doesn't look a day over a day old.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/onTheRoad/home/index.shtml
A German Photographs the New World
Torsten Migge is clearly a better travel photographer than he is a multilinguist, but don't let poor or nonexistent skills in German keep you away from his fine collection, Fotos: Urlaubs- und Reisebilder (Photos: Vacation and Travel Pictures). Migge introduces his three main sections in English and Spanish, sort of, as well as German. Despite the awkward translations, you'll catch the intention. In his travel photos, Migge tries to capture local atmosphere rather than art stipends or awards. He focuses on buildings, crowds, and vehicles in Colombia and the US. Migge's aerial shots of New York City make us wish he had more of them. His section on the American West will likely appeal most to Europeans who have yet to visit the Grand Canyon and San Francisco. Los Angelenos may want to peruse his LA pages to see what he chose to shoot. We saw Migge's outstanding Iraq photos back when they were online, but bandwidth costs have forced him to take down the pages. It's a pity. We hope he finds financial support, and maybe a beneficent translator.http://www.fotos.geschichtsthemen.de/
Most people who travel to distant and exotic lands capture photographs of the landscape, the architecture, and the people. Bob Cromwell snaps images of a different calling, one from nature. Visitors to his site can view his photos of toilets from around the globe. An avid traveler, Cromwell has embarked on a mission to photograph toilets from all the places he has visited. At his site, you can view restrooms from four continents. From modern to ancient, the toilets depicted provide guests with a historical look at how societies have cared for the need to relieve. Cromwell even treats us to a photo of himself on the john. If you're planning a trip to a foreign land, be sure to check out this site to prepare yourself for what you may encounter when you ask for directions to the bathroom.
http://www.cromwell-intl.com/toilet/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Exploring Comics Style in Theory and Practice
Think of Exercises in Style as graphic-arts homage to Raymond Queneau, whose "Exercises de Style" tells the banal story of a man on a bus in 99 different literary styles. Comic artist and teacher Matt Madden's Exercises in Style site takes a brief, mundane scene and proceeds to change, refit, and portray it in as many comic-strip mutations as possible. In addition to his own diverse efforts, Madden has invited the contributions of guest artists, some of whom, it should be said, are more talented than he is. The results are humorous, disturbing, and occasionally head-scratchingly obscure, but there's something for everyone. Budding comic-book artists should take note: if all this can be done with a guy going downstairs to get something out of the fridge, what are the possibilities for, say, an alien invasion or a super-hero battle?http://www.exercisesinstyle.com/
"The Exorcist", in 30 Seconds, by Bunnies
The shooting of William Friedkin's 1973 classic "The Exorcist" was plagued by inexplicable problems that added to the genuinely unsettling sense of evil that permeates the film. Ellen Bursten plays the mother of a young girl (Linda Blair) who is possessed by an evil spirit, and can only watch, horrified, as her daughter becomes a depraved vessel of demonic possession. Jason Miller and Max von Sydow are perfectly cast as the two priests who must risk their sanity and their lives as they perform a gruesome exorcism. No wonder so many consider the film to be the scariest ever made. Strip it down to 30 seconds and replace the cast with cartoon rabbits, however, and it's a totally different story. You might want to check out "The Shining in 30 Seconds", too.http://www.angryalien.com/
You hear a catchy tune in a commercial, but you're not sure who performs it. What do you do? Why, visit Adtunes.com, of course! But wait! there's more! At the Adtunes.com blog, you can search for music used in television, movies, video games, and more. You can search the archives by date or category. And that's not all! The Forums section of the site allows a visitor to obtain a specific answer to the question, "Who sings that?" The Links area of the site provides even more resources for locating a tune used in your favorite film or commercial. Whenever you find a song stuck in your head, but you just can't seem to recall who sang it, visit this site to free your mind of the persistent melody. Act now!
http://www.adtunes.com/
The Sarabande was a Spanish dance of Moorish origin traceable to around the 12th century. It was a group dance performed mainly by women and was considered "wild in manner" and highly sexual, "with undulations of the body, massive hip movements, flirtations, indecent song lyrics and women using castanets." In fact, the Sarabande was so scandalously sexy that at one time, people who dared even just sing the tune were punished with the lash or even exile. We often wish we could do the same to admirers of the Macarena, Chicken Dancers, and Achy Breaky cowboy fakies. The Sarabande info nuggets were just some of the facts we learned while browsing the addictively browseable Dance History Archive, a massive resource on practically everything you might want to know about dance, from Ancient Greek Mime to to Zapateadeo, a type of Flamenco. In fact, the only thing we didn't learn was where we might find a good Sarabande club to hang out at.
http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/d5index.htm
Classic Rock Bands and Their Music
If you're writing a school paper on the personnel changes in Blood, Sweat and Tears; if you need to settle a bet on what was the number one hit of 1959; if you're a baby boomer feeling musically nostalgic - this is the place to go. Covering the bands of rock 'n' roll's pre-punk golden era, ClassicBands.com is an online archive of the bands and stars of the late '50s through the '70s. Featuring well written and lengthy biographies of over 100 groups, the site also includes a list of rock stars' real names, a history of banned rock, the top 40 songs of the years 1956-80, and plenty more besides. We just wish the site had more graphics and lyrics, but no matter. More than just a where-are-they-now, ClassicBands.com is rather a superb what-they-were-then.http://www.classicbands.com/index.htm
Searchlights over Dublin (and Lyon and Mexico City)
Vectorial Elevation is a project involving city squares, searchlights, and interactivity. Most recently, Dublin hosted 22 searchlights, all hooked up to the Internet to let netsurfers program patterns to be displayed across the city's night sky. The Dublin exhibition ended May 3, but the site offers cool movies of all past installations and explains the technology involved in splashing your creative impulse across the sky. Searchlights are so old-tech, though. We suspect that laser beams, coupled with foggers and maybe a few swarms of bats, could generate much cooler effects.http://www.alzado.net/
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/ |
Airborn
The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw
City of HeroesHeadlines in Historical Context
The History News Network (HNN), a service of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, is an insightful look at both history in the news and the news in history. It's a necessary guide for the perplexed on the news of the day in historical context (a.k.a. we've seen it all before) that helps explain just what the heck is going on in our crazy world. Hundreds of articles by notable historians probe, dissect, and offer precedents of today's headline news. HNN's site is vast, and it's worth taking your time here. Other features include Web sites that deal with history of places and issues of contemporary importance and articles on the historical correctness of current films and books, plus a slew of features for the professional historian, such as items from the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Oh, and there are intelligent and sagacious blogs and an e-mail newsletter, as well.http://hnn.us/
Mobile-phone geeks, we've found another great drain for your time. That you can download free ringtones at GSMArena.com goes without saying, but if you want headlines like "Siemens M65 pictures leaked" and "Samsung announcements galore", you'll be virtually in heaven. You'll also find specs on cellphone models from major players. In fact, that staple of informational sites, the lefthand navigation menu, has been replaced by a stack of linked names of manufacturers. You might say the manufacturer is the message. You might, but we probably ought to avoid it. In case no one calls you today and you have some spare time, spend it on the many opportunities for discussion in GSMArena.com forums. The site FAQ states that the site exists to help you to choose a phone, and its Phone Finder will help you narrow your search with 19 criteria such as weight, camera, and infrared port. Once you have the bug, you'll be back, and at the speed of change in mobile technology, sooner than you think.
http://gsmarena.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
While some may argue that AOL itself is a dinosaur, it hosts a splendid gallery of paintings and prints devoted to the flesh and blood kind: The Dinosaur Art of Joe Tucciarone. Long an artist of astronomy, Tucciarone has an impressive list of clients that includes major encyclopedias, the US Department of the Interior, and a variety of collectors and museums. You'll understand why wealthy patrons want his work the moment you enter any of his image galleries. "Thunder Lizard", for example, in Sauropods, depicts the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus with a lightning-storm backdrop. "Lords of the Sky", in Pterosaurs, also illustrates the artist's power of conception, with wide wings that echo the mountains in the background and rows of ready teeth. This dramatic combination of science and art is the kind of stuff a lot of kids eat up. Kids under ten, say, will probably enjoy the small galleries of dinosaur cartoons and drawings of ancient mammals, especially the sabertooth cat and woolly mammoth (rendered in a fantastic way you have likely never seen). Tucciarone makes a popular subject even more fascinating with devotion, expertise, and vision.http://members.aol.com/Dinoplanet/joe.html
Home-Built Robots Encroach on the Foodservice Industry
Brian Pietrodangelo and Kevin Phillipson from the University of Florida's Machine Intelligence Lab have one-upped the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. They've created a refrigerated robot that brings beverages and food on command. The idea is generally cool, in the same way those old Finger applications let you know how many packs of M&Ms were left in a Net-connected vending machine or what temperature the Coke was in Ohio. Geeks are benefiting from this and you get to watch with impunity. Even though Koolio, as the robot fridge is called, "has numerous sensors to accommodate even the trickiest environments," much like a Dalek it appears to be outwitted by a flight of stairs. Jamie Hyneman, of the "MythBusters" TV show, has Koolio - and stairs - beat with his off-roading 7-Up vending machine, but the 7-Up vending tank would have a hard time navigating between university library carrels. Trade-offs are a bitch.Koolio: http://www.mil.ufl.edu/~brian/Koolio/Koolio.htm
Vending tank: http://www.m5industries.com/
Here's a tip: if you can afford to kill a hard drive to build as a cannon, use one of the new 15,000-rpm drives. Rotational speed translates rather well to muzzle velocity. Muzzle velocity, as you know, impacts range and hitting power in a rather direct way. Ammo is cheap; popcorn kernels are ideal, but paper twists and other soft, small, regular objects are fine. Peppercorns could be the ultimate chemical weapon. The Hard Drive Assault Cannon site specializes in showing results. It's not a great how-to site, although after watching a few of the QuickTime movies, you'll realize the science here isn't rocket science. There are some neat touches in the newest units, however. Some small subset of our readers may leave the site wondering what the whole point is, but most of you won't need to ask. The big guns are awesome! These are very big files and either broadband or Ghandi-esque levels of patience are mandatory.
http://hddcannon.kicks-ass.net/
Astronomy can be dry and incomprehensible, but Cal Tech's Cool Cosmos goes out of its way to avoid that reputation. Its starship-style console and nifty menu-controlling cog are well designed, but the key is the content, which is clearly tailored for younger readers. The Cosmic Classroom section explains how infrared works and provides FAQs answered by real astronomers. Cosmic Kids explains how people glow in the dark and interviews the planets. The Image Gallery includes infrared images of the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. There's even a games section with space-themed hide and seek, hangman, and slider games for those who prefer to play and learn. Because of the graphic intensive nature of the site, be prepared to wait for some pages to load, but it's worth the wait if you have a space-mad kid in your house.
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/
SOFTWARE
NSD 10.15 discussed the release of the PlayFair software that strips digital-rights-management encryption from the AAC files sold at Apple's iTunes Music Store. Apple changed its encryption as a result, but the new scheme was cracked within hours (NSD 10.17). After a rewrite, PlayFair has a new name: Hymn, an acronym derived from "Hear Your Music aNywhere". Hymn's command-line and GUI programs will convert encrypted AAC files into files that any modern MP3 player will play. Hymn's author states that the software is not designed to encourage piracy - in fact, it preserves your Apple iTunes user ID in the files - but rather in order to allow people to play their legally purchased music on equipment other than that which Apple sanctions. Read the Hymn documentation before you use it, since there are some quirks for using Hymn on non-Windows systems (e.g. you need to have an iPod connected to your machine).NSD 10.15: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.15.html#SW1
NSD 10.17: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.17.html#BS4
Hymn: http://hymn-project.org/