BREAKING SURF
| Minimally Multi-Player Online Games and Nomic Worlds |
| Weblogs.com Abruptly Shuts Down, Thousands of Blogs Lost |
| The Latest Netsurfer Books |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Bush/Zombie Reagan Ticket |
| Map of Media in New York |
| Filming No-Filming Warnings in Movie Theatres |
| Welcome to the Internet, Now Go Away |
| Movies Disney Would Make Today |
| One Bad Neighbor |
| Create a Band |
| New Yahoo Messenger and Upgraded Yahoo Mail |
| Mozilla Project Releases Thunderbird 0.7 and Firefox 0.9 |
| Pocket Tunes 3.0 |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
By now, you've probably heard of the infamous memo a team of Pentagon lawyers prepared on the legality of torture. The memo concluded that the President could legally order interrogators to torture people or even kill in the interest of national security, and could disregard international conventions that prohibit such conduct. Aside from its moral repugnance, this memo is egregiously bad legal advice, as many commentators have pointed out. The truly appalling thing is that a group of Americans, with spouses, with kids, with mortgages, with regular jobs, were willing to sit down in some bland government office and not only contemplate but justify the torture of human beings. Talk about the banality of evil. It is also impossible to ignore that the head of the group that prepared the memo, US Air Force General Counsel and Republican political appointee Mary L. Walker, is apparently a devout Christian and co-founded the Professional Women's Fellowship, a San Diego-based offshoot of the Campus Crusade for Christ. The Wall Street Journal has the PDF facsimile of the memo and Discourse.net critiques it from a legal perspective. iPriority has an interview with Walker, which the Whiskey Bar blog cuttingly compares to the memo.Journal: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/military_0604.pdf
Discourse.net: http://tinyurl.com/26kc3
iPriority: http://tinyurl.com/3d8a5
Whiskey Bar: http://billmon.org/archives/001518.html
Iraq Bloggers on Eve of Handover
With the nominal handover of sovereignty to Iraq looming, we thought it might be useful to point to several native Iraqi bloggers for some perspective on what the situation looks like from the inside. Iraq the Model is co-written by three brothers, is mostly political in content, and is generally pro-American. Nabil's Blog, in contrast, comes from the keyboard of a college student who's very much into soccer and is somewhat ambivalent about the war. "I think war has a good things and a bad things," Nabil writes in his slightly fractured English. He also wants to chat with you (nabil_rvd on Yahoo). Baghdad Burning is an infrequently updated blog that blends politics (the political situation is "a mess") with comments about everyday life (the roof is also "a mess"). All three blogs have links that will lead you further into Iraqi weblogging culture.Iraq the Model: http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
Nabil's Blog: http://nabilsblog.blogspot.com/
Baghdad Burning: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
In NSD 10.19, we reported on the last round of licensing changes to the popular Movable Type blogging software and the largely negative reaction of its user base. At that time, many users vowed to dump the widely admired package in favor of other blogging tools because they considered the Movable Type license too restrictive with regard to how many authors and blogs you could support per installation. After absorbing all the negative feedback, Six Apart, the company that publishes Movable Type, revised its licenses, removing many of the restrictions that so irritated its customers. In particular, people who purchase the less expensive personal licenses can now host an unlimited number of weblogs. Details can be found in Six Apart's announcement.
NSD 10.19: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.19.html#BS6
Six Apart: http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/06/announcing_pric.shtml
Monolith vs. Copyright, Digital vs. Analog
What defines copyright? That seems a simple question of law, but Jason Rohrer will soon have you in logical knots as he picks apart digital files to show that copyright is indeed quite elusive. Rohrer has designed Monolith, a software tool that can convert any digital file, which he calls an element file, into another, called the mono file, using a basis file to regulate the conversion. If you recombine the mono file with the basis file, you can reproduce the element file. Monolith began as an amusement, but it's also a clever way to trap unwary intellectual property lawyers. For example, Monolith could convert a copyrighted song into a file then placed into the public domain. Thereafter, anybody who has the basis file can convert that public-domain file back into the copyrighted song. Yet neither the basis file nor the mono file themselves violate copyright law. Feeling pretzeled yet? Rohrer's detailed analysis of the problem and of the differences between digital and analog files is an intellectual and thought-provoking tour de force, and munging looks a lot like a good summer's activity for geeks.http://monolith.sourceforge.net/
How do geeks find dates? Wired tells how three particular geeks use their tech smarts to find girls. Chau Vuong's Identification Coding System lets users translate their physical and personal characteristics into a code that can be posted on a Web site. The characteristics a user desires in a date can also be coded, then used to search for matches. Vuong likens it to DNA computing. Meanwhile, Christopher Filkins has concluded that the standard dating sites are useless. He thinks dating should resemble blogging, replacing centralized systems with distributed systems in which users share profiles. Kevin Burton goes in for wardating - he monitors instant-messaging feeds in coffee shops and sends messages to the women he's attracted to. Oddly, the women seem to find it a clever and sometimes endearing way to break the ice. The fourth geek in the Wired article is Jonathan Moore, who shows how hackers can easily exploit dating and networking sites like Friendster. Hackers can ferret out personal info like names, user IDs, and addresses with little difficulty. All's fair in love and war, n'est-ce pas?
http://wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/dating.html
Proof of Concept: Social Networking Theory Reveals Weapons Programs
Social networking is all the rage these days, mostly in connection with - what else? - hooking up with other people. Then there are the military applications. Scientists at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology have found a way to use social-networking technology to sniff out possibly illegal military research. For example, by analyzing the pattern of citations in scientific papers produced by a biotech lab, the technique can discover whether the lab tells the truth about what it really researches. The technique was tested on historical data from a Soviet weapons lab that claimed it had been working on infectious diseases during the early 1980s. In fact, the lab was working on bioweapons and the application of some social-networking theory to the lab's scientific papers - which did not overtly reveal their bioweapon work - revealed clear indications that the lab was not doing what it said it was. Nature has the story.http://www.nature.com/nsu/040531/040531-1.html
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced a collaborative project to find prior art for some particularly outrageous software patents and to get them invalidated. The first task for the new initiative is to decide upon the ten stupidest patents to target. The EFF does not have enough resources to chase after every silly patent, so it must winnow the field and pick its battles. The EFF is specifically interested in "patents that target tools of free expression, such as streaming media, blogging tools, and voice over IP (VoIP) technology. Most importantly, the patent-holder must be aggressively enforcing its patent and suing (or threatening to sue) alleged infringers." The EFF is also "particularly interested in cases where the patent-holder is trying to force small businesses, individuals, nonprofits, and consumers to pay licensing fees." You have until June 23 to submit your candidates for patent demolition.
http://www.eff.org/patent/contest/
Was 24 Hour Dotcom a legitimate enterprise, a way of calling attention to the folks behind it, or an exploitation of the gullible? This project, run by two students, aimed to build a dotcom in a day. Within 24 hours, Dozomo was up and running, with what purports to be a new wrinkle on searching. Dozomo is an uncluttered metasearch engine with downloadable plug-ins for browsers. Dozomo has added precisely nothing to Internet searching except a gimmick - but that's the point. In the dotcom tradition, the company - code, Web site, name, everything - went up for auction on eBay. The three-day sale concluded with a winning bid of $2,026. The 24 Hour Dotcom site has a log of the proceedings. One thing's for sure - this is no way to get rich.
24hdc: http://dozomo.com/ Dozomo: http://dozomo.com/
Web-Site Traffic Analysis Uses Avatars
How do you figure out who is visiting your web site? If you are a huge corporation, you purchase enterprise-level analysis tools, but that route is too expensive for small personal sites, not to mention nearly incomprehensible. Maybe try VisitorVille, a neat piece of software that transforms your site into a city and each page into a building. VisitorVille represents page hits with buildings - those pages that get more hits get taller buildings with more lights on inside them. The software shows visitors as avatars, some of which arrive on buses named after the search engines that direct them to your site. Robert Savage designed this software to make understanding Web site traffic more intuitive while retaining all the traditional types of analysis. It is an excellent demonstration of how visual thinking can take a problem and redefine it to make it accessible to anyone. The software and service start at $30 a month. Even your mom, who won't do e-mail, is going to understand it. Wired has more.VisitorVille: http://www.visitorville.com/
Wired: http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63767,00.html
Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame Opens Portal
Paul Allen's latest contribution to the arts is the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which recently opened in Seattle. Currently, exhibits include a number of items from Allen's personal collection, such as the captain's chair from the original "Star Trek" (no, you can't sit in it). If you can't make the trip just yet, there's a nice online sampler to occupy your time. The site's got a lot of well presented content, and you may well find yourself looking for ways to get to the museum itself. Not only does it have cool content, it has cool events as well, like a discussion on the physics of "Star Trek". When you consider that much of what was fiction a few decades ago is now reality, it seems clear that this is a place to bookmark.http://sfhomeworld.org/index.asp
Are you wondering why your European friends aren't returning your calls or e-mail? Don't worry, it isn't what you think. No, its time for Euro 2004, the biggest European football tournament and all your friends are probably wondering why you keep calling it soccer. Both the BBC and ESPN have sites dedicated to the tournament and both are best viewed over a broadband connection. You can even listen to games over the BBC site. ESPN and the official site also have direct links so you can surprise your friends with a David Beckham jersey. Mind you, as Americans we only know about him from the movies.
Euro 2004: http://www.euro2004.com/
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/default.stm
ESPN: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/euro2004/
The Electras Featuring John Kerry
Move over, Carmen - the other Electras are in town. In 1961, seven men formed a band and called themselves the Electras. Current Presidential candidate John Kerry played bass. The band cut a record, which has just been re-released on CD. You can hear a few short clips for free at both the official The Electras Rock & Roll Band site and the unabashedly supportive and more informative KerryRocks.com. The latter site has cool stuff like a photo of Kerry with John Lennon and links to profiles from MTV and Rolling Stone. The official site is shamelessly profit-oriented - they want to sell you the CD. The music is typical of its time, rock 'n' roll with overtones of surf. We can't recall anything like this in US Presidential politics before.Electras: http://www.electrasrockandrollband.com/theband.htm
KerryRocks.com: http://kerryrocks.com/
Spam Wars: Fake PGP Signatures Showing up in Spam
Many people set their spam filters to let through messages signed with cryptographic PGP keys. This seems like a reasonable strategy because anybody who signs their e-mail with a PGP key probably has a clue and is unlikely to be the source of spam. Alas, this strategy may no longer offer much protection from spam. It looks like spammers have begun to steal PGP signature text from mailing-list messages and to use it to get their spam through the filters. Of course, if you verify the signatures against the message you'll find they're fake, but to do that, the message has to get through your spam filters in the first place. Gadi Evron, a security researcher, explains how this works, and how spammers used his PGP signature from, ironically, an anti-spam mailing list message. Spam warriors and knowledgeable spam filter users should read this.http://www.math.org.il/PGP-JoeJob.txt
Project Puts Free Wi-Fi into Austin
There's yet another reason to make Austin your favorite city in Texas - the Austin City Wireless Project (ACWP). Unlike Starbucks, which wants you to pay $13 a month to access its wireless networks, the ACWP is busy hooking up free Wi-Fi access points throughout the city's coffee shops and public spaces. This Austin Chronicle profile of Richard MacKinnon, the driving force behind the project, lays out the arguments for free Wi-Fi and how it actually brings money into establishments. More striking is how this incredibly idealistic project is already creating new users and new forms of public life in Austin.http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-06-11/screens_feature.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Minimally Multi-Player Online Games and Nomic Worlds
Clay Shirky begins this essay by noting that one of the guiding principles of multiplayer games is that users are the state, meaning that, to some extent, users are in control of the in-game society and its laws. Shirky then asks the deceptively simple questions: "How far can we go in that direction?" and "What if you created a game world where you maximize the amount of user control?" Shirky discusses some known tensions between individual behavior and the formation of groups, and proposes a thought experiment. Imagine a game world - one he calls "Fork World" for the purpose of example - where gamers vote on how to run the game, and every time they vote, the game community splits in two according to voters' preferences. Eventually, you arrive at a series of new, smaller game worlds - Shirky calls these minimally multiplayer online games - tailored exactly to every user's taste. Another example of social game space and user control is the Nomic world, where changing the rules of the game is part of the game. There are other examples of how you can organize user control in game worlds - in-game government, in other words - and Shirky goes on to explore the social implications of such game structures. This is a great think piece.http://ernie.webservepro.com/pipermail/nec/2004-May/000030.html
Weblogs.com Abruptly Shuts Down, Thousands of Blogs Lost
Weblogs.com is owned by Dave Winer, a notoriously cantankerous leader in the blogosphere. Winer is also founder of UserLand, a blogging software company, though he no longer works there. Not too long ago, the current UserLand management asked him to remove the many weblogs he was hosting for free at the weblogs.com domain, but which physically resided on UserLand servers. Winer complied and started hosting the Weblogs.com blogs himself. Blog-hosting consumes bandwidth, which Winer can no longer afford to pay for. Furthermore, he's fed up with trying to maintain the Windows servers that power the domain. June 13, he finally chucked it and closed the site - without notice, leaving thousands of people with a lifetime (in Internet years) of diary entries at Weblogs.com twisting slowly in the wind. As you can imagine, the blogosphere went ballistic. Netcraft and Wired have the story pretty well covered.Netcraft: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/15/sudden_closure_of_weblogscom_strands_bloggers.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00.html
The latest issue features a book about Scotland as the Editor's Choice, and if that's not a reason to give it a quick browse we don't know what is. There's more, of course, including network security hacks, popular delusions, Philip K. Dick, a panda with a gun, and far more imaginary places then usual - in the non-fiction section no less. Go ahead, take a look. And remember, if you buy through the links you send a tiny bit of money our way. Thanks in advance.
http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/sub/v06/nsb.06.06.html
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For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Cosplay Girls: Japan's Live Animation Heroines
The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase SalesSURFING SITES
US Civil Rights Movements Past and Present
The civil rights movement in the US left a lasting impression both on the country and on the world at large. Voices of Civil Rights celebrates the movement and the ordinary people who took a stand, in the past and in the present. The site offers the typical history-site timeline but more importantly lets everyday people tell their stories in their own voices - for example, a homosexual librarian who struggles for equality in his workplace, a lawyer who was denied a third-grade education when a county board closed public schools rather than open them to all races, and a Mexican-American teacher who despite fighting bigotry all his life now works with his pupils to encourage tolerance. The site asks for story submissions and points out civil rights campaigns that are still being fought.http://www.voicesofcivilrights.org/
"History," wrote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Never was this more apt than in the 20th century. Both an aid for history students and just a handy way to keep track of the bloodiest century, the Nobel e-Museum's Conflict Map provides an overview of the wars both civil and otherwise that have graced and disgraced the last hundred years. Have your Shockwave warmed up and ready. The map itself can be zoomed and moved, while a sliding timeline displays ten-year increments of your choice. Placing the cursor on the icons opens a brief - perhaps too brief - explanation of the war in question, including the number of fatalities. This isn't history in depth, but rather a useful tool for sketching the proliferation of organized violence in the world. The map also keeps track of the number of Nobel Peace Prize nominations and awards by continent over the years.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/educational/conflictmap/
First contact with alien species always seemed to be a letdown, claims one of the pages at Tales of Future Past. The site's Life on Other Worlds pages looks at SF of the '20s and '30s, and concludes that because extraterrestrial life seemed possible but not fanciful, depictions of alien life were, frankly, a little dull. Tales of Future Past looks at SF of the past, and what it thought of the futures of its times. The future looked very different to artists of the past, who presented cities as massive conglomerations of steel and other materials that would rise miles into the sky as aircars swarmed about - completely forgetting that cities have roots. Traveling through the visions of the 1920s and 1930s and comparing them with present reality can be thought-provoking and hilarious, as you'll note when you beam in.
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
The Guide to Springfield USA site is an online map and list of physical features, districts, landmarks, shops, restaurants, offices, schools, public buildings, and private residences in Homer Simpson and family's hometown. Mapping began in 2001 when cartoon cartographers Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan realized that no adequate map of Springfield existed online or in print. The map recently won a place in the Harvard Map Collection. Hardcore fans probably know this already, but we found out that Springfield Junior High School is right next to Springfield Psychiatric Center, the Girls, Girls, Girls strip club and Moe's. This is all great fun, but we want to know how this map squares with the episode where we find out that after an hour's drive in rush-hour traffic, Homer's spot in the power station parking lot is adjacent to his own backyard.
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jelerma/springfield/index.html
Imagine it - you're going to your first Star Wars convention and you're going to wow the attendees with your Imperial stormtrooper outfit. You have the black one-piece spandex undersuit, the chemical gloves, the white-dyed hard-soled Chelsea boots, and your body armor is gleaming. You get there feeling a million dollars only to have your bubble burst by laughing Darth Vaders, Boba Fetts, and wookies who sneeringly point out that your tacky $50 mass-produced helmet doesn't have the correct green bubble eye lenses and that it sucks. It's a fate worse than being cast into the Pit of Carkoon, and one you could have avoided if you had checked out the Star Wars Helmet Archive. It has everything a Star Wars helmet collector or enthusiast could possibly need, with a veritable galaxy of photographs of original, licensed, and fan-made helmets, links to other resources, and instructions on how to make your own gear, including the tricky business of chrome-plating your own C3PO head.
http://www.starwarshelmets.com/
The Single Man's Guide to TV Dinners
Life for the modern day bachelor is tough. After you work hard all day, slog through the rush-hour traffic, spend several hours watching TV, playing computer games, and surfing the Net, there's precious little time left for cooking a nutritious meal. No wonder that more and more single young men are turning to pre-prepared store-bought meals, or TV dinners. But how do you decide which ones to buy when you're faced with a whole supermarket freezer aisle of them? Well, help is on hand in the form of the Single Man's Guide to TV Dinners, a site devoted to reviewing these culinary lifesavers. Each meal is briefly described and rated from "Ohh..Yeah!!" for the tastiest to "Ughh! I think I'm gonna puke!!!" for the sort of meal that makes you consider marrying the first person you meet who can cook. In addition to commenting on the meal itself, the reviewer sometimes points out some of the more ridiculous things on its packaging, such as the three-panel photo-montages showing hardworking men's men transported to ecstasy by a beef enchilada or pork riblet.http://www.yarayara.com/tv/
With golf-club membership fees skyrocketing, some folks look for alternatives to consider. Urban golf might not have little electric buggies and the landscaping won't always be up to par, but there's definitely a challenge involved. The goal of the player of urban golf is to use a variety of clubs to propel a tennis ball toward a target such as a building or bar a few streets away. The course is usually laid out in a non-residential area of a city. The fluid rules depend on the players involved, but regardless of the ground rules, the game doesn't need grass and doesn't cost an arm and a leg in greens fees. To get an idea of how informal a game this is, check out UrbanGolf.org's gallery of cheerful duffers in hoodies and trainers. Urban golf brings golf to the masses in a fun way and for that it should be applauded. How long until the Urban Golf Low Ryder Cup?
http://urbangolf.org/
What do you get when you tape a lightweight camcorder to the top of a small red remote-controlled car? No, not a bird, not a plane, it's Carcam! You can see the Carcam escapades in Windows Media format online, although they do take a while to download. The star of the show is the inventor's West Highland puppy, who is chased around by the demented remote-control videographer. This is a creative response to the "I've bought a camcorder and now don't have anything unusual enough to bother recording" conundrum. The videos are well edited and the concept is strongly reminiscent of the ground's-eye-view used in the Stuart Little movies. When Carcam films a cut-down version of "The Italian Job", we'll really be impressed.
http://www.robertsondex.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
Reality TV is a plague upon us all. Is there no end to talentless wannabes who would whore themselves onscreen in pursuit of an unlikely media career? Hopes that reality TV was just a temporary blip have been cruelly dashed. Many have suggested that reality shows are about as interesting as watching paint dry, but one British TV company, UKTV Style, has decided to test that assessment literally. The company is billing "Watching Paint Dry" as a new reality show and is streaming it daily for eight weeks. Each day, a different color paint is applied to a wall and a live video stream shows the consequent drying action via the Internet. Netsurfers can vote for their favorite color. Every Friday in a special "Emulsion Show", the paint that receives the fewest votes will be dumped from the show. No tantrums, no nudity, and no irritating exhibitionists - this is all good clean family fun and perhaps the best that reality TV can possibly achieve.
http://uktvstyle.co.uk/WhatsOn/WatchingPaintDry.cfm
Who's Your Pick for Canadian PM?
Politics Watch, which keeps its virtual eye on Canadian politics and the upcoming June 28 national election, has a neat quiz called VoteSelector to help Canadians match their opinions against the leaders of the country's federal parties. The site gauges your 19 responses against the political views of the four major leaders: Stephen Harper (Conservative Party); Paul Martin (Liberal Party); Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Quebecois); and Jack Layton (New Democratic Party). While the site can help you choose the candidate whose views most closely resemble your own, Canada's parliamentary system does not allow citizens to vote directly for a leader. Still, with questions on hot-button issues like taxes, military spending and same-sex marriage, the quiz does differentiate between party philosophies. Each page of results has a brief biography of your most matchworthy leader, along with contact information. VoteSelector has posted no statistics on how many surfers are using it or which candidate has a majority of matches.http://www.politicswatch.com/VoteSelectorQuiz2004.html
The Internet is no stranger to parodies. The highly popular Am I Hot or Not site spawned countless satires. Another popular site, Friendster, has inspired several spoofs of its own, including Political Friendster. Developed by Doug McCune for a Stanford University class, Political Friendster aims to create key connections among political figures. This site depends on user involvement and implements a voting system to keep or delete submitted connections. You must register to act, but you can browse in glorious anonymity. Some people may argue that some of these figures simply don't belong in this virtual pyramid of political chaos - Ozzy Osbourne, for example. The one connection to politics for him is through a link to "cocaine", which interestingly is also connected to George W. Bush and the CIA. Who'd have thought that Bush and Osbourne could be so closely linked? Then again, all these connections start with one individual's perception. Although this site does provide food for thought, take it with a grain of salt.
http://politicalfriendster.stanford.edu/
In 1990, British Prime Minister John Major spoke of effecting social change to bring about a classless society in the UK. Fourteen years later, you'd think there's still no sign of that change if you look at ChavScum. Chavs - or neds, townies, kevs and ratboys, to give some of their other names - are members of the peasant underclass, the British equivalent of American trailer trash, and this is a site devoted to them. It tells you how to spot a chav, which is pretty simple, really - just look for branded sportswear, chunky jewellery, pay-as-you-go mobile phones, bull terriers, more branded sportswear, and more chunky jewellery. Chav culture is covered, too, and you'll learn that chavs like nothing better than driving around in a "gypped-up" (extensively modified) rust-bucket with some rap, R&B, or dance music blaring out of a stadium-concert-quality sound system that would have cost five times as much as the car were it not stolen. Also don't forget to check out the photos in the Chav of the Month section, and witness British class-based snobbery 21st-century style in the forums.
http://www.chavscum.co.uk/
Popularly known as the Mossad, the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations is Israel's equivalent of the CIA and collects information on foreign threats to the country and the worldwide Jewish community. Small countries with powerful and aggressive neighbors tend to excel at intelligence, and the Mossad is probably, pound for pound, the best spy agency on Earth. Its Web site includes a short history of the organization that cites the capture of Adolf Eichmann and the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry - obviously, the really interesting modern coups won't be listed here. Indeed, the site itself is pretty dry and sparse; perhaps they should add a catchy slogan like "Don't Jive with the Chosen Tribe!" It does, however, offer an online application form to anyone who feels they have what it takes to aid Israel's spying and covert operations efforts. Our advice is, no matter how much you may admire their work, or how much you may want to advance your double agent career, to leave it to the pros. (For the record, this is not a paid recruiting advertisement. We're just kind of intrigued by spook web sites - A)
http://www.mossad.gov.il/Mohr/MohrTopNav/MohrEnglish/MohrAboutUs/
Every sport has jargon. Baseball is full of it, as five minutes of listening to a broadcast will suggest. The lingo can bewilder people who don't follow sports, those whose native language is not English, and those whose pastime is something other than the Grand Old Game. It's easy for many to figure out what "cellar" means in the context of league standings, but what about "chin music" or "tater"? If you need a handy dictionary of ballpark slang, try the Baseball Basics: Lingo page from Major League Baseball. It's short, alas - just a taste of what you might hear from veteran radio announcers, who love to pull out synonyms and metaphors specific to this sport - but it's a start, an easy, private start for, say, a date. Who knows? This alphabetical list for young and rookie fans alike may help you get past first base.
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/official_info/baseball_basics/lingo.jsp
According to the Candy Wrapper Museum, you can only keep candy about 20 years before it starts to decompose. That's why it's not the Candy Museum. Anyway, the Web site relies on unusual candy wrappers, and divides them into categories. A classic or two does slip in, but usually only in vintage dress. Of particular curiosity are the hard-to-find candy wrappers from sugary delights that made only a brief appearance in the world market. Celebrities jumped on the sugar-train too, with endorsements peddling peculiarly sweet wares. Can you think of a kitschier gimmick than Mr. T's gold-chain bubble gum? Of course, Popeye candy cigarettes now have a more politically correct name. GI Stogies and Meiji Mushrooms were also around, but these marketing mishaps never penetrated the North American market to the same degree as candy cigarettes. The Candy Wrapper Museum is a fun and nostalgic tour of sweeter days when penny-candy really cost a penny.
http://www.candywrappermuseum.com/
You may remember that in NSD 7.04, we reported on some Harvard boys doing some research into what they subtitled "A new approach to rodent performance evaluation". Basically, they fished for squirrels, using peanuts attached to string as bait. The goal, there, was to see if they could actually haul one off the ground. Chicken Fishing takes the format a step further. For one thing, this angler is going for chickens. And he's in full fishing regalia. And he's much more technical in his approach. We'd be a lot more impressed if he successfully applied the technique on a small hippo, but it appears he's not that confident quite yet.
NSD 7.04: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.04.html#SS7
Chicken Fishing: http://www.conknet.com/%7Eb_bull/special/chickenfishing.html
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Just because Ronald Reagan is dead does not mean that he would not make a compelling running mate for President Bush this November.http://www.bush-zombiereagan.com/
A map of locations of all the major media outlet buildings in New York. Just cries out for an art project, don't you think?
http://www.publicityclub.org/mediacapital.htm
Filming No-Filming Warnings in Movie Theatres
Many film theatres these days warn on the screen that photography and video capture of the flick is forbidden. So what's the first thing people do? Why, they take photos, of course, and post them on the Web.http://austria.yumyum.net/mono/pics/copyfight/
Welcome to the Internet, Now Go Away
As coherent a statement of the anarchic state of the Internet and rules for its enjoyment as we've ever found, even if it is from a decidedly geek perspective. Credited to Robert "redpaw" Jung. Refreshingly offensive, and yet amazingly practical.http://members.ams.chello.nl/jvane/welcome.htm
Movies Disney Would Make Today
These movie posters from the Photoshopsters who frequent Fark might make Walt Disney's frozen head acquire a large amount of angular momentum. It's a bandwidth-sucker of a page though.http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments-avantgo.pl?IDLink=987481
If you think that having a neighbor whose kids are learning the violin or one who keeps Rottweilers is a pain, check this winner out. Not for the weak of stomach.
http://www.mostemailed.com/images/misc/badNeighbour/
If you've always wanted to start your own band, here's your chance. You choose the musicians, the sound, the lights, and the background. You'll need Flash to play this groovy game.
http://www.createbands.com/
SOFTWARE
New Yahoo Messenger and Upgraded Yahoo Mail
Yahoo has released a new version of its instant-messaging software and has revamped its Web based e-mail interface, raising the storage limit to 100 MB. The new Yahoo Messenger (YM) client introduces a redesigned look and a couple of audio features. Specifically, you can now use YM to listen to audio streams as you chat. You can also send people "talking animated characters to say hello, goodbye, flirt or taunt your opponent during a game", which is simply appalling for chat purists. The new YM integrates better with Yahoo Games, provides more customization options, and allows you to do conference chats. The Yahoo Mail upgrade seems mostly cosmetic, with the big news being the increased mailbox limit for the free account.YM: http://messenger.yahoo.com/
Yahoo Mail: http://mail.yahoo.com/
Mozilla Project Releases Thunderbird 0.7 and Firefox 0.9
Mozilla has released the next generations of its standalone mail client and Web browser. New features include smaller downloads, faster operation, better update and migration features, and new themes. Both releases are called "technology previews" on the road to the 1.0 release milestones, but both programs have been quite usable and stable for some time.Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
So, you want to play music files on your Palm OS 5 PDA. This'll come in handy. Pocket Tunes is an astonishingly capable music-playing software package, which will only set you back $15 (or $28 for the deluxe version). Not only can you play tunes (in WMA, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 formats) stored on your Palm PDA, but if you have a wireless connection you can listen to streamed online radio stations. It's a cheap way to get an MP3 player if you are already running around with a Palm. Of course, there's never enough memory for all your tunes, so you'll probably have to buy a larger memory card.
http://www.pocket-tunes.com/