BREAKING SURF
| Jessica Cutler's Washington Sex Blog |
| Boing Boing Survey Results |
| Are You Vulnerable to Phishing? |
| Web-Page Plagiarism Checker |
| The Natural Arch and Bridge Society |
| North Korea Joins the Web |
| Cin-o-matic Movie Info |
| Drawing Cats |
| Project Tracks Spotlight Seekers and Avoiders |
| The Hit-Counter-Powered Jackhammer |
| One Person's Slides to Another Person's Music |
| Fun Little Art Gallery |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The Original "Alice's Adventures under Ground" |
| Children's Books Online |
| Don Martin Onomatopoeia Dictionary |
| Non-English Literature Translated Once a Month |
| UK Comedy News |
| The Science of Optical Illusions |
| How We Read |
| Sticks, Stones, and Moving Massive Loads |
| Nova Looks at Origins of Life |
| College Students Ride the Vomit Comet |
| I, Fish-Serving Robot |
| Sunbird: The Mozilla Calendar |
| The Julia Child Headline That Didn't Make It |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
The biggest Net-related story of the week has been the fairly successful debut of Google on the public stock market. The story has been extensively covered in the media - try searching for "Google IPO" at, say, Google News. We're betting that within a month or two, a quickie book about the whole process will be out and on bookstore shelves. At closing time Friday, the stock, ticket symbol GOOG, had a nice run $23 up from the IPO price of $85 per share. You can track the stock price at Yahoo Finance, along with all developing news. Playboy published an interview with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page before the IPO took place, and that still threatens to get Google in trouble with the SEC. Sadly, Playboy has not made the interview available online and you'll be forced to buy the September issue of the magazine to read it - for the article only, of course.Google News: http://news.google.com/
Yahoo Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog
Playboy: http://www.playboy.com/magazine/interview.html
Big Legal Win for P2P File Trading Software Firms
The influential Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals, which generally leads judicial opinion on technology matters in the US, this week handed a major victory to the makers of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading software. The entertainment industry - yeah, pretty much all the important players - sued Grokster and StreamCast Networks for contributory copyright infringement because people traded copyrighted files using their P2P software. The appeals court upheld the finding that there were substantial non-infringing uses of such software and that software makers could not be held liable for all uses of their products by customers. The key architectural point is that neither Grokster nor StreamCast's Morpheus P2P file-trading applications rely on central servers; remember that Napster's centralized music search service was ruled illegal. This is a big win for P2P software makers. SiliconValley.com and CNET have the story, and you can read the actual opinion at the EFF, as well as listen to the audio of the oral arguments.SiliconValley.com: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/9449460.htm
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5316570.html
EFF: http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/
John Perry Barlow on Life and Liberty
In contrast to many opinionated blowhards whose pretentious ideas deserve only scathing sarcasm, John Perry Barlow wears the mantel of sage deservedly. A one-time Grateful Dead lyricist and a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, his ideas are nuanced and sophisticated and, although hardly mainstream, are always worth hearing. Like many - and not just Americans - he wants President Bush out of office but is nervous of John Kerry. He is deeply mistrustful of the way measures justified by anti-terrorism have intruded on freedoms and how authorities often misuse their new broad powers. His early experience with the Grateful Dead, which allowed audience members to record concerts, persuaded him that copying is ultimately beneficial and deeply influences his views on copyright and fair use. He elaborates on these and other ideas in an entertaining and provocative interview at Reason. Amusing and with a delicious sense of the absurd, Barlow is also serious and thoughtful. His 1996 article, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", warned governments to keep their paws off the Internet. His thoughts on the need for unfettered access to ideas color his views on intellectual property. He is particularly animated about the current need to be politically engaged to counter authoritarian, intrusive government and to oppose the march of corporatism. Barlow is articulate and persuasive and occasionally admits even he doesn't have all the answers, which is refreshing. One doesn't even have to share the same intellectual space to find Barlow's ideas powerful and thought provoking.http://www.reason.com/0408/fe.bd.john.shtml
The Computer Files of al Qaeda
No matter what it claims, al Qaeda is unquestionably part of the modern Western world, and they suffer its pitfalls, such as poor computer security practices. The Atlantic Monthly has an article by a journalist who found a hard drive used by the terrorist network. In one sense, the piece is somewhat amusing and reassuring - these guys have all the same problems other organizations have, including workers who spend money indiscriminately and refuse to provide receipts. Nevertheless, al Qaeda remains a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of thousands and the materials on the hard drive are absolutely chilling. The problem is that al Qaeda is like a broken clock - it gets things right once in a while and that is apparently all it really needs to be successful. Sadly, the magazine no longer offers the article for free online and Google no longer has it in their cache. However it was such a excellent and timely piece that we really feel we should bring it to your attention. Try to pick up a hardcopy of the magazine, or subscribe to the Atlantic online to read it.http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200409/cullison
BugMeNot.com Works on Distributed Solution after Being Kicked from Servers
For a brief time this week, the popular BugMeNot.com, which helps netsurfers bypass compulsory free registration at Web sites, was offline, prompting a collective wail of anguish from its many fans who resent the proliferation of registration screens on many news sites. The site is back up now at a new ISP and is still as wildly popular as ever. In a MozillaZine forum thread, BugMeNot.com's owner says the site has 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per day and uses 5-10 GB of bandwidth per month. The site provides access to more than 22,000 Web sites that hide free content behind pesky registration screens. It's unclear why the site's ISP kicked it offline, but BugMeNot.com users have noticed a rash of non-functional logins, perhaps indicating a crackdown by registration sites on the passwords BugMeNot.com provides - and perhaps these registration sites also pressured BugMeNot.com's ISP to drop the service. The episode has galvanized the developer community into working on a decentralized BugMeNot.com service that will be immune to such interference. The Internet routs around censorship yet again. MozillaZine's thread will take you through the timeline from the take-down to the resurrection and on to development work for an enhanced BugMeNot.com.BugMeNot.com: http://www.bugmenot.com/
MozillaZine: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=115086
Science fiction is in the midst of a crisis of confidence. That's the premise of this thoughtful Popular Science article about the direction of SF literature in a world that often changes more quickly than imagination can keep up. Much of modern science fiction does not reflect the typical enthusiastic to-the-stars ethos of the genre's first and Golden Age. Contemporary speculative fiction is infested with fear of technology and an inordinate number of elves and magical swords. Despite the trend, one particular branch of SF is perhaps more optimistic than others, though perhaps not in a way we'd find comfortable. Popular Science focuses on Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross, two authors who are the principal exponents of what we shall christen the new Singularity movement in SF. The Singularity is usually defined as that time when human change is so fast we can't imagine the outcome, a time when we become post-human. The new crop of SF writers are grappling with the implication of this concept, and are building on the work of philosophers and academics. Read the article for background on the SF take on the Singularity, and visit the Singularity Web site for many links to excellent non-fiction sources dealing with the concept.
Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,676265,00.html
Singularity: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/
Top SF Babes (and Hunks) in the Movies
Film Review magazine has named Jane Fonda's Barbarella the sexiest female SF character in the movies. And to think that Ted Turner just let her slide away. Plastic visitors have their own comments and, as might be expected, the women have volunteered male characters for the complementary list.http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/08/12/01103878;cmt=129
Wouldn't it be great to be able to watch a TV show when you want to instead of when the cable companies and TV networks want to broadcast it? You can - get a TiVo or (shudder!) a VCR. Both are old news, but the TV bigwigs are fighting this consumer empowerment. Like the recording and movie industries, the TV industry is fiercely resisting every technical advance. The TV folks opposed TiVo's proposal to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it let users send recorded shows to other machines via the Internet. The FCC gave TiVo a fairly restricted OK designed mainly to let users transfer program files from one machine to another owned by the same person. TV corporations are unhappy with the decision and see it as the beginning of a nightmare in which people freely trade TV shows across the Internet the way they do music. Haven't they heard of BitTorrent? It's happening already. Is such trading illegal? Almost certainly. Is it going to stop? Not likely. Salon's piece on the TV trading culture is informative and might just give you ideas.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/11/must_download_tv/index.html
Authorities Exaggerate Hack of South Pole Station
The fact that the computers of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station have been the subject of hacking attempts is not really much of a news story. Frankly, it would be a major miracle if such a prestigious target were not attacked. Apparently, certain FBI and Department of Justice authorities have blown up just such a routine hacker attempt at cyber-extortion into a full-fledged terrorist threat, dangerous to life and limb. Both the FBI chief of cybersecurity and a Justice Department report say the incident affected life-support systems and implied that the hack was a major cyberterrorist threat. The story must have been garbled between the Antarctic and Washington, D.C. because an internal assessment by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which runs the station, said nothing about terrorism or the danger of hacker-induced frostbite. The NSF considered the matter a typical criminal hack, local sysadmins tightened up their security even before the FBI got involved, and everybody got on with their lives. Which report will the generally techno-ignorant congresscritters believe?http://www.securityfocus.com/news/9356
Movable Type (MT) wasn't the first, but it is arguably the best tool for bloggers. That's the way Mena and Ben Trott wanted it when they rolled out the first version of the blogging software in October 2001. Everyone praised it now for its versatility and the sophistication and power to let bloggers customize their blogs to reflect their individuality, but the singing stopped abruptly May 13 this year when Six Apart, the company the Trotts established to promote MT, announced it would start charging for the software. Although the Trotts have tweaked the licensing plan substantially in response to a torrent of complaints - small-scale users still get it for free - many users feel betrayed by Six Apart's sudden lurch towards a corporate model. Salon explores that move and explains that MT is not aimed at push-button bloggers as the software requires a substantial set of IT smarts to install and make work properly. Visions of business applications now dance in the heads of the Trotts. One shining example is at Disney's cable operations, where technicians use MT to let each other know what they've done during their shift. The Trotts figure lawyers represent another big potential market. As MT evolves into a mainstream business application, it's bound to lose some fans, but there are plenty of other blogging tools to choose from.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/09/six_apart/index.html
Media Learn Lessons from Blogs
Who are you going to trust - the New York Times, the Washington Post, or a blogger? In a thoughtful Online Journalism Review story, you can read how traditional media are beginning to seriously examine the blogosphere. Part of it lies in the way big media sites conducted their pre-Gulf War II coverage; part of it lies in the way that successful bloggers stick to what they know and are up front about sources and methods. What matters is that traditional media workers are reading blogs and beginning to understand that the major differences don't revolve around the absence of professional editors and fact checkers. The difference lies in the way that individual authors constitute themselves as authoritative sources of information and opinion.http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1092267863.php
Online Publisher Cashing in on Downloadable Books
Want to make money publishing online? Adam Engst, publisher of the TidBITS Apple-focused mailing list, has stumbled upon a new publishing model that uses PDF files as a medium for downloadable books. These aren't e-books, meant for on-screen consumption, but are designed specifically to allow folks to print them on their own printers - although you can read them on-screen as well, of course. The books cost a few dollars. Wired gives all the details, particularly how Engst uses his captive TidBITS audience as a market for this "extreme publishing" that provides information of value to them. Incidentally, TidBITs is one of the oldest electronic newsletters on the Net, starting in 1990 as an email list. We first mentioned them back in 1995, in NSD 01.06.TidBITS: http://www.tidbits.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64563,00.html
NSD 01.06: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v01/nsd.95.01.04.html#TM4
Shirky on Freeing Radio Bandwidth
Some reasons Clay Shirky ranks among the most popular bloggers are that he's well-informed, he writes well, and he can render obscure topics - such as the potential opening of additional radio wavelengths to unlicensed use - intelligible to the casual reader. He could probably title things better, in which case this particular article would perhaps have been called "The Benefits of Free Allocation of Low-Frequency Electromagnetic Spectra in Relation to Wireless Networking". Of course, then you'd never read it. He may be onto something.... After you read his "The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good", you'll want to bookmark the site if you haven't yet.http://www.shirky.com/writings/spectrum_public_good.html
As we reported in NSD 10.32, eBay recently purchased a 25% stake in the wildly popular Craigslist. The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of and interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Why is it worth your time? Aside from the fact that everyone loves nerdy success stories, the interview hits a wide range of issues, such as First Amendment rights and online communities - Newmark and company have no problem booting abusers off the sites, and he explains that issue with aplomb.
NSD 10.32: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.32.html#BS2
Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/15/NEWMARK.TMP
ONLINE CULTURE
Jessica Cutler's Washington Sex Blog
Jessica Cutler worked as a staff assistant for a Republican senator. Under the clunky pseudonym of Washingtonienne, she also kept a blog for her friends that detailed her devil-may-care approach to her job and, more to the point, her occasionally profitable sexual liaisons with various Washington politicos. For a time, nobody but Cutler's intended audience read her posts, but one day Wonkette, a Washington gossip blog, featured the Washingtonienne blog. Cutler, realizing that her blog could get her into trouble, raced to erase it but, alas, was too late. Although her employer found out about the blog and fired her, Cutler gained a measure of fame in cyberspace and the rest, as they say, is posed-for-Playboy history. While Cutler no longer keeps the Washingtonienne blog, another blogger has saved it "from the dustheap of history." Search the Wonkette blog for "Jessica Cutler" and "Washingtonienne" to get the relevant entries. The Washington Post relays Cutler's tale in tabloid style, a tenor that fits the story.Washingtonienne (restored): http://washingtoniennearchive.blogspot.com/
Wonkette: http://www.wonkette.com/
Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54736-2004Aug10
Boing Boing is one of the most popular blogs on the Net and recently it asked readers to fill out a survey. Given the nature of some of the questions, we can tell that Boing Boing is trying to use responses to help gauge the potential of including ads on the site. The results of the survey are obviously specific to the reader base of Boing Boing, but we think that they're not that far from an accurate representation of the general blog-reading audience. Some notable figures: roughly 50% of the readers are either on the East or West coast of the US; 52% are between 25-35 years old; 41% are employed in the tech/IT field; and 85% are male.
http://boingboing.net/survey.html
Are You Vulnerable to Phishing?
If you're not familiar with the term "phishing", it's about time you were. No, the term has nothing to do with the late band, Phish. Phishing is the luring of sensitive personal information such as a passwords by an online source, often an e-mail, that masquerades as legitimate. MailFrontier offers an online test of your ability to ferret out the phishing bait among real corporate e-mail. Do yourself a favor and find out how susceptible you might be. The short quiz only takes a few minutes to complete. The results may shock you and have your re-evaluating your online activities. One thing this survey does not allow you to do is compare the text of a link - usually written as a URL - with the actual coded link. Savvy netsurfers who use plain-text e-mail clients can use such a strategy. If you think you need help, check out the phishing alerts from Computerworld and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). MailFrontier: ttp://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/quiztest.htmlComputerworld: http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,89096,00.html
FTC: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/phishingalrt.htm
It's sad but true that plagiarism is a growth industry on the Web. Too many authors have seen their work show up under someone else's byline a short while after they post material to a web site. Copyscape, currently in beta test, takes a user-submitted URL and searches for the same or similar material elsewhere. It seems to also look for instances of the URL appearing on other pages. This version does a reasonable job, and will find out-and-out theft of work, but only looks at one page at a time rather than a site. Careful clips and paraphrasing may confuse it. An enhanced and more than likely pay version (the beta is free to use) promises better performance. Missing, but useful, would be the ability to take any text file and search the Web for the same material.
http://www.copyscape.com/index.php
ONLINE TRAVEL
The Natural Arch and Bridge Society
When erosion leaves behind a stone archway or bridge, the results are often more beautiful than geologically informative so it isn't surprising to find a society dedicated to the study and preservation of such natural features. What is surprising is how well the Natural Arch and Bridge Society (NABS) presents their aims online. They have a thriving e-newsletter wittily titled "Span" and their Web site has plenty of "bridges" to other, related sites. NABS's galleries capture some of the splendor of the arches in photographs by enthusiasts. You can take an online tour of the nine known arches that span more than 200 feet and if you feel inspired the site presents directions to the remote spots where most of these elegant curves are found. Just remember to be cautious about directions such as "The road gets a little rough in places." That might just really mean "The road to this arch has destroyed better vehicles than yours."http://www.naturalarches.org/
North Korea has previously shied away from the Web in any official capacity, but it has finally introduced an official Web presence, which brings a fine-looking interface together with some nice tunes on its opening page - well, at least when the power's on. Top news when we swung through: "Leader appreciates workers' patriotic deeds" and "Triplets in a farm village". You get the picture. The Democratic People's Republic presents other items to peruse here, as well. The site is full of eye-opening information. We didn't realize that "Korea is situated in the heart of east of Asian Continent. It shares borders with China and Russia in the north bounded by the Rivers Amnok and Tuman, and is bordered by seas on the east, west and south." We thought there was a little chunk of land called South Korea to the south, but we have apparently been misinformed. You may find the content a bit sparse, but there are links to other places.
http://www.kcckp.net/external_e/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Cin-o-matic claims to be "a tool to help people decide what movies to go see or rent." Frankly, that's modest, and a bit misleading. Cin-o-matic is a master index of movie information and while it collates critical rankings of running movies and recent DVD releases and theater screening times and places, it does not recommend movies based on any preferences you might submit. It should do that, though. Cin-o-matic supports your own custom personalized watch-list of movies. The site will also send you e-mail that tells you where and when a suggested movie is playing locally (in the US only). The amount of movie info is impressive: it numerically scores films based on what various critics think of it; it summarizes films; it links to the official sites, trailers, IMDB entries, and box-office takes. In short, this is a great specialized database that tells you all the vital facts about a movie at a glance, presented with excellence and originality.http://www.cin-o-matic.com/
Sometimes, personal sites lack brilliance but compensate with passion. In this case, single-minded obsession works just fine. Once upon a time, a drunk guy called Tim drew a doodle of a cat. Tim and his mates then challenged the rest of the bar to do the same. Now, Tim says, he can't leave his flat without bringing a pen and paper and trying to find new cat artists. He posts the doodles he collects in an online gallery. Doodle quality varies. The drawings aren't cropped to fit, most lack color, and the backdrop is a deliberately splotched and bescribbled page but somehow this simple site is much more entertaining for the simple but charming design. You can send in your own cat doodle but first try to get any cat to sit still while you draw it. See? It's not that easy.
http://www.tiddles.co.uk/
Project Tracks Spotlight Seekers and Avoiders
Whether we love it or loathe it, we're all aware of reality TV at this point. The Access art project appropriately investigates how this surveillance culture influences our behavior. The public art installation lets Web users track individuals with a spotlight and acoustic beam. The light automatically follows the person while the acoustic beam projects audio that only the target can hear. It sounds slightly scary to us but it does serve the purpose of prompting debate over the ethics of surveillance and the modern fascination with knowing every detail of life in the celebrity lane. Perhaps the next installation should allow the target to track the watcher for a day in return.http://www.accessproject.net/
The Hit-Counter-Powered Jackhammer
We're a little late on the uptake on this one, but the concept is still cool. Jonah Brucker-Cohen created an art installation at Dublin's City Arts Centre that consisted of a jackhammer triggered whenever a hit counter recorded a visitor at the City Arts Centre Web site. Basically, the physical presence was being destroyed by the online one. Using jackhammers can't be good for your ears or terribly good for your body, so we think we should demolish all buildings with this set-up in the future. All we have to do is hook up the hit counter to some free porn site, et voila.http://www.coin-operated.com/projects/alertinginfrastructure
One Person's Slides to Another Person's Music
You know how when you see an old discarded photo in an antiques shop, your brain starts making up stories about the people in the picture? No? Never mind. The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players don't just make up such stories, they set them to music and turn the music and images into an audio-visual experience worthy of the best elementary-school filmstrip-turner's memories. The band takes other peoples' memories and puts them on display for all to see. If you're curious about the whole experience, you'll find tour dates listed on the site.http://www.slideshowplayers.com/
If you're an artist looking to make a little extra coin from your masterpieces, or you're a purveyor of unusual art, BlauGallery is for you. Artists allow BlauGallery to print their art with a unique textile-mounting process and sell it through the online portal. While the artist reaps only 20% of the selling price, the innovative mounting is sure to attract collectors of fine art and garner exposure for the artist. The BlauGallery site lets you browse and purchase artwork and provides a more in-depth look at the mounting process. The art itself leans to digital compositions and the female form and sometimes both.
http://www.blaugallery.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/ |
Cloud Atlas: A Novel
A Man, a Can, a Microwave: 50 Tasty Meals You Can Nuke in No Time
Internet Art
Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some CapacityThe Original "Alice's Adventures under Ground"
Fans of the classic "Alice in Wonderland" will be delighted with these online images of Lewis Carroll's precursor, "Alice's Adventures under Ground". This antique book has been scanned and archived in an online collection of bedtime stories. Visitors will be treated to the original Carroll story and illustrations. Links at the end of the story allow guests to obtain a more thorough look at the history of "Alice in Wonderland". This delightful bit of history is sure to please fans of this beloved childhood tale. After your trip down the rabbit hole, embark on an adventure with the other and, we must admit, lesser whimsical children's stories offered up at the Bedtime Story site. While the collection is still in its infancy, it's sure to enchant with stories of yore and classic tales that endure.http://www.the-office.com/bedtime-story/aliceunderground.htm
Children's Books Online is a huge, free online library of antique illustrated children's books that comprises over 10,000 pages and growing. The pages of the books are all scanned so you can see not only the original words but the pictures. Most of the stories are translated into various languages to achieve the project's aim of reaching out to children across the globe. The library is growing all the time and the site's creators are actively soliciting further contributions of books in any language, and looking for translation help from volunteers. You can access the books online, or, rather usefully, download a compressed file of an entire book at once so you can read a bedtime story with your children on your laptop.
http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/
Don Martin Onomatopoeia Dictionary
Doug Gilford has obviously been a bit more influenced by Mad magazine than most Americans males older than say 10 and under 70. (Yes, we know girls sometimes read Mad, but it was and is mostly a guy thing.) Not much more influenced, mind you, but a bit more influenced. Gilford's Web site of all things Mad includes a wonderful and useful dictionary of every onomatopoeic sound that has ever been used in the extremely significantly oeuvre of the major American artist, Don Martin. In the Don Martin Dictionary, each sound is both defined and cross-referenced to the relevant Mad issue and page. This is an important work of American scholarship. You can see some of the cartoons poorly scanned at the Don Martin Shrine.Dictionary: http://www.collectmad.com/madcoversite/dmd-alphabetical.html
Shrine: http://www.nachshon.org.il/~itzs/Html/dm_index.htm
Non-English Literature Translated Once a Month
The concept behind Words without Borders goes something like this: English-speaking culture exports an awful lot of literature but imports very little foreign-language writing. English speakers miss out on all sorts of concepts and ideas that might flourish in another culture but which might lack the right preconditions to be thought-up in an English-based mind. The Words without Borders e-zine translates literature from various languages and presents collections of works that share a central theme. If nothing catches your eye one month, come back the next for a fresh batch of translations to pique your interest in the outside.http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/
Why did the chicken cross the road? To find out what was going to happen next in its uncertain yet humorous life at Chortle, the comedy news site. If you live in the UK and are a fan of comedy, this site is a must. It tracks all the news of new shows, copyright battles over jokes, interviews with famous comics and writers, and all the inside gossip from the Perrier Awards and the Edinburgh Fringe. If you're looking for a good laugh you can search their listings for a stand-up venue near you. We liked their show rating guide in the review section, instead of five stars, the maximum score is five Groucho Marxes. You won't find many gags here but if you follow the scene or want to break in, this has got to be a great introduction to the laugh-production industry.
http://www.chortle.co.uk/
SURFING SCIENCE
The Science of Optical Illusions
It's so fascinating when our perception fails us because it reveals the underlying complexity of the human brain and body. The first thing most curious geeks do when someone sends them a digital optical illusion based on color perception is run to Photoshop and do a point sample to be sure their eyes aren't fooling them. The Lightness Demonstrations series of shade-perception illusions use the Flash format to eliminate that need. These Flash movies present the optical illusion along with the extraction of the underlying data all in one neat little package. You can read more technical explanations of the illusions at Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions, written by Edward Adelson, a neuroscientist at MIT.Lightness Demonstrations: http://web.mit.edu/persci/gaz/gaz-teaching/index.html
Adelson: http://persci.mit.edu/people/adelson/publications/gazzan.dir/gazzan.htm
This paper from a Microsoft researcher debunks what is a popular belief in typographic circles, that human beings recognize words in print by the outline of the word, called the bouma. Instead, Kevin Larson says that it is the letters within a word which lead you to recognize it. Larson pages through some 20 years of cognitive research and presents several leading models of word recognition before summarizing his understanding of the data. Along the way, he touches on many topics of interest to typographers, cognitive scientists, and, of course, interested readers. Read this paper and think about how you recognize the words therein.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx
Sticks, Stones, and Moving Massive Loads
W.T. Wallington, a retired carpenter, working without wheels or pulleys, finds ways to move massive weights by himself. Result: a little Stonehenge, made of 2,400-pound blocks of cement. As a follow-up, Wallington and his son move a 15-ton pole barn across 200 feet of muddy field in 40 man-hours without resort to any advanced technological aid. It's kind of amazing what a smaller guy can accomplish with nothing more than sticks and stones. With photos to document the work and some cocktail-napkin notes on the physics involved, Wallington conclusively demonstrates that space aliens didn't need to be involved in order to explain such wonders as the pyramids. Don't try this at home, though; sticks and stones really can break your bones.http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/
Nova, as it so often does, appears to have come up with yet another winning series. Due to air in September, "Origins" explores the beginning of life, the essential necessity of water, and what this all portends in terms of interplanetary exploration. As expected, the exploration moves far beyond that. The shows look at the importance of galaxies in brewing up the building blocks of life, the transition from non-life to alive, and the development of life as a necessary skin for the planet we happen to occupy. What are the odds that Earth creatures are the only intelligent creatures in the universe? It looks pretty slim. Odds of ever making contact with extraterrestrials? Slimmer yet. Don't look for ET to be phoning us anytime soon. The site has some great interactive material, and you're going to learn something whether you want to or not. We bet you didn't know that there are living stalactites that can eat through steel - and that's just for starters. Plan to spend some time here.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/
College Students Ride the Vomit Comet
NASA runs a program for college undergrads that inspires future astronauts and scientists to new heights, literally. The Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program gives them "a unique academic experience ... to successfully propose, design, fabricate, fly and evaluate a reduced gravity experiment." The reduced gravity is not achieved in orbit, but in a KC-135A (a military Boeing 707) that flies a parabolic descent and is affectionately known as the Vomit Comet. members of one of these teams, at Duke University, have maintained a blog about their pre-flight, flight, and post-flight experiences. Their excitement is palpable in their entries as their moment grew closer. It's reassuring that kids who use words like "osteoblastic" and "microgravity" in a sentence brought a big ol' stuffed Cookie Monster in Duke colors aboard with them.http://vomitcomet.pratt.duke.edu/
1. A robot may not harm an elephant fish, or, through inaction, allow an elephant fish to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by the elephant fish, except... - sorry, we seem to be getting a little carried away with this cool experiment/art installation. "Fish, Plant, Rack" was commissioned for an exhibition in Madrid and explores the interaction between the virtually blind elephant fish, Gnathonemus petersi, and a robot. The fish navigates using a pulse of audible clicks. The robot detects the clicks, processes them, and interprets the patterns of clicks as parameters for action. These actions relate to the care of the plants within the aquarium. One way of looking at it is that the fish is instructing the robot to perform tasks. It seems the installation is not yet fully functional at the exhibition but you can read about it and see movie files of the fish and its robot slave in action online.
http://www.hostprods.net/fishplantrack.html
SOFTWARE
One of the many projects undertaken by the Mozilla Foundation is Sunbird, whose goal is to produce a cross-platform stand-alone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL user-interface language. The project is still in its infancy, but this week released version 0.2. Calendars are such a vital part of modern online workspace that the effort of so major an open-source project as Mozilla is newsworthy. This is part of a trend that spells the eventual doom of proprietary office applications - meaning, of course, the end of Microsoft's reign in that domain. The Sunbird application comes in two flavors: one is a plug-in for Mozilla browsers and the Thunderbird e-mail client while the other is a stand-alone app. As is typical with such early code, it's rather rough and best installed by people who want to help test and improve the project.http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html
ADMINISTRIVIA
The Julia Child Headline That Didn't Make It
At NSD HQ, we're not just all sprightly words, pretty faces, and hot, smokin' Olympian bodies. We also think, and hold profound philosophical debates in our coterie. Last week, we wrote an obituary notice for Julia Child, and the headline our editor originally wrote was "Julia Child Roasts in Peace". Now, he meant this with all due respect and was surprised when the NSD copy editor pointed out that the headline could be taken to mean that Child was roasting in Hell, when he was focused on the "peace". After a brief discussion, our editor deferred, 'cuz he ain't getting any anywhere else. Further discussion here has led us to reveal this to you, so that you may gain keen insight into the well oiled machine that is the NSD creative process. (Short version: Our peerless copy editor Elvi, who happens to be Laurie's "hot, smokin'" wife, objected to the headline, he wussed out and when I heard about it I mocked his ass and asked him tell the true story. - A).