BREAKING SURF
| A Hardware Hack a Day |
| Multimap.com's Brilliant Overlay Maps |
| They Love LA |
| An Orchard a Day |
| Surreal Scanner Art |
| The Art of Buddhism |
| Animal-Cyborg Contest Results |
| Graphic Design Creation and Analysis |
| Pitchfork Re-Pitches Worst Guitar Solos Piece |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| 101-Word Fiction |
| Query Eye for the Script Guy |
| Nursery-Rhyme Lyrics and Origins |
| Vocabulary Synaesthesia |
| Sun Releases Solaris 10 for Free |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Researchers Claim Irregular E-Voting Helped Bush in Florida
Researchers have examined the 2004 Presidential election results from Florida and concluded that irregularities in electronic voting gave president Bush 130,000 excess votes. The researchers used multiple regression statistical analysis to examine the Florida electorate and to find out what influenced support for Bush. Specifically, they looked at county statistics of things like the number of voters, median income, ethnicity, voter turnout, and support for past candidates. The conclusion: "When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush." That translates to 130,000 excess votes for Bush, and the only correlative variable is the use of electronic voting machines. The paper and supporting data are both online. Before you jump to any conclusions, this is far from a conclusive statistical analysis. Many more variables could account for these differences for perfectly legitimate reasons - and keep in mind that Bush won Florida by nearly 400,000 votes. Best consider this preliminary paper a jumping-off point for spirited political debate, not unlike the reasoned dialogue by the various parties in the Middle East.http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html
US News & World Report has uncovered thousands of pages of raw intelligence that suggest that Iran is the single greatest threat to the US in Iraq. Bogging the US down in Iraq suits Iran's strategy to be the most influential country in the region. Of course, Iran has a long history of supporting terrorist groups and a natural interest in what happens in neighboring Iraq given the countries' bloody eight-year war in the '80s. The intelligence motherlode estimates that thousands of Iranian agents crossed Iraq's porous border following the downfall of Saddam Hussein to pursue clandestine activities. These agents provide insurgents and terrorists with organization, infrastructure, and weapons. They teach insurgents to act cooperative and respectful while gathering information on US weaponry, activities, and support. The documents state that Iran offers insurgents bounties of $500 for each US soldier killed, $1,000 per tank destroyed, and $2,000 for each helicopter shot down. An especially troubling implication is that Iran can create far more trouble if it really wants to and may use this threat as part of the ongoing cat-and-mouse games it plays with respect to its nuclear ambitions.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/041122/usnews/22iran.htm
New Google Services: Keyhole, Scholar
Google continues on its path to world domination by introducing two new services. First, there is Keyhole, a company once purchased by Google. Keyhole provides satellite imagery, and the service now rates a link from the Google home page. So, can Keyhole let you see your house from space? Only if you live in one of the high-resolution image fields, which mostly lie in major metropolitan areas. The other new service from Google is Google Scholar (motto: "Stand on the shoulders of giants"), which allows you to search specifically in scholarly literature. This means peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from broad areas of research. Google Scholar does not have any ads, and frequently points only to abstracts of primary sources - often you'll need to subscribe to the journal to read the whole article since much scholarly literature is still offline.Keyhole: http://www.keyhole.com/index.html
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
How Journalism Needs to Approach Science
Balance is the ideological cornerstone of American journalism. Even the "fair and balanced" Fox claims that precious value. But is objective balance always warranted or proper? This thoughtful essay in Columbia Journalism Review examines balance in science journalism, especially in those technical areas with important ramifications. When reporting on issues like the evolution vs. intelligent design charade or the undoubtedly occurring global warming, the press feels compelled to seek out contrary points of view. In theory, that's fine, but what if the contrary point of view - in climate change, say - is promulgated by the very industries that benefit from greenhouse-gas emission? Does the public need to know the company line to make an informed decision? Should the public know that climate change is an extraordinarily accepted phenomenon within the scientific community and that critics fall almost entirely on the fringe? Do they know? This article reinforces another truth: that the level of scientific literacy in the US is much lower than it should be.http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp
The Paris Review Posts Author Interviews
Calling itself, with a tad of hyperbole, the DNA of literature, the Paris Review has posted many of its interviews of famous authors and promises more. The magazine has posted interviews from editions published in the '50s, and plans to add hundreds more over the next nine months. The National Endowment for the Arts provides support for this fascinating glimpse into the lives and ideas of a wide range of influential writers. You'll have to judge for yourself how representative of the very best these artists are, although it seems an impressive collection to our eyes. The site pre-lists all the writers to be included alphabetically, each with a thumbnail image and quote to tide you over until the interview appears in all its glory. The interviews are engaging and reveal the sort of thing that authors talk about when they submit to interviews by people who interview: how they write, influences, observations on life, and other literary flotsam. All in all, it's an enlightening collection.http://www.theparisreview.org/literature.php
Panic, the software company, was once a couple of coders who created Mac software from their apartment, and one day they released Audion. This MP3 application - a player and a whole lot more - was a hit and they kept improving it, prodded by competition with SoundJam. Back in those OS 9 days, few software companies paid any attention to music, but the trend was there and one day AOL called Panic to work out a deal. So did Apple. Audion went through an extended decline and Panic has finally put it out of its misery. Cabel Sasser, one of the Panic pair, relates his tale of amazing peaks, opportunities missed, and current directions. Maybe, if things had gone slightly differently, Audion might have become iTunes. As it was, Apple offered him and his partner jobs after they met with Steve Jobs. Ask yourself what you would have done - they chose to remain independent. This long but still fascinating first-person account serves as Audion's elegy and reveals much about the business of independent coding.
http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
Doug is a wealthy attorney. He's married to a former underwear model and has a couch to die for. But that's not enough. Doug has a quest. His goal? To obtain a digital copy of every song ever recorded. So far Doug has acquired 900,000 songs, a music collection that is at least on a par with that of most online music stores. Most of the collection is pirated music Doug has downloaded from file-sharing networks. His reason for collecting the music with his squadron of Mac G5s is a mission to save music from an apocalyptic end. Doug doesn't distribute his music; he won't even let his kids put his songs on their iPods. A MacNETv2 reporter melted into Doug's couch and interviewed the man, but didn't try to confirm the 900,000 figure. The e-zine has scheduled a second interview, but this one should hold you until then. It is, shall we say, arresting.
http://www.macnet2.com/more.php?id=536_0_10_0
So you want to work in video games? Go read this amazing description of life at Electronic Arts (EA), written by Randy Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who spent a semester at the company in order to understand how universities might better train students to work in the gaming industry. EA is a brutal meritocracy where evaluations are honest and critical. Teamwork is the basis of building a game, and any employees who fail to deliver a game on time better start polishing their resumes - compare this policy to how Valve approached its delayed Half-Life 2 (see next article). Pausch wants to help his students and EA, and although his report could have been a dry, technical text, he's lively and entertaining enough to keep a casual reader's attention. GameSpot has related news; EA employees are trying to launch a class-action suit against the company for unpaid overtime. Getting games out the door is far more contentious than you may have thought, but it sure can be lucrative.
Pausch: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/tshah/PauschAcademicsFieldGuideToEA.pdf
GameSpot: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/11/11/news_6112998.html
Pressure Cooks Valve and Half-Life 2
Who knew video-game development was so exciting? GameSpot has an amazing story that follows the five-year development of Valve's Half-Life 2. Geoff Keighley has packed his article with nearly as much action as is in the game. What is striking about the article is the centrality of the fans in Valve chief Gabe Newell's vision of the game. The desire to produce a game that would set new standards for the genre is Valve's overriding goal. Given that Valve's publisher, Vivendi Universal, had sued the company for not pursuing Half-Life 2 in a diligent fashion, the game's final release is all the more remarkable. Slashdot has a great discussion of Vivendi's role in slowing the release, and the GameSpot article makes it clear that Vivendi's suit is without merit. You are going to be as tired as the Valve designers when you finish the article, and you are going to want to play Half-Life 2 immediately.http://www.gamespot.com/features/6112889/index.html
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/14/0511228
Concrete Illustration of the RSS Bandwidth-Sucking Problem
One of the little appreciated changes in the operation of the World Wide Web is the fact that RSS news aggregators now account for a significant fraction of Internet bandwidth use. It's not unusual for those popular Web sites that provide RSS feeds to expend a significant portion of their bandwidth budget on feeding automated RSS readers. One case in point is Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News weblog. Fleishman analyzed the situation and provides graphs of bandwidth usage - the RSS newsreaders hitting his Web site sucked an astonishing 400 MB per day during a recent week, representing roughly 25% of all traffic to his site. Fleishman also breaks down which RSS software sucks how much bandwidth; lwp-trivial, a Perl-based HTTP query system, appears to be responsible for over 10% of his RSS bandwidth. What does it all mean? Well, mostly it means that the RSS distribution network is badly broken, since the incessant polling that those programs do, often hourly, is utterly unnecessary and wasteful of Net resources. And it's the content providers who pay the price, in cold, hard cash.Wi-Fi Networking News: http://wifinetnews.com/
Fleishman: http://blog.glennf.com/mtarchives/004445.html
Fill a File System, Boil the World's Oceans
This week, Sun released their Solaris 10 operating system for free download (q.v.). Solaris 10 includes the new ZFS file system, whose claim to fame is that it is based on 128-bit addressing technology. What does that mean? It means that you can have really, really, really large data sets. Sun reasons that, given the current environment in which users already have databases a petabyte in size, within about a decade people are going to hit a limit in the size of file systems that can be created with today's 64-bit technology. How big is a 128-bit file system? Sun's Jeff Bonwick says, according to some basic thermodynamic calculations, "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans." That's a lot of archived porn, isn't it? Seriously though, people who need large data sets - like scientists and three letter agencies - should check out ZFS and its first-rate modern file system features.ZFS: http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/
Bonwick: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bonwick?catname=ZFS
The Buddy-List File-Sharing Proposal
Downhill Battle, best known for their activism in support of more permissive music copyright laws, has proposed a new type of open-source, secure file-sharing software. The Downhill Battle gang is known for its dislike of the music industry's rather draconian attitude toward file sharing. Downhill Battle sums up its attitude thusly: "Jail for filesharers is ridiculous. We need to stop it." Like many before, the group proposes the development of software to enable you to trade files with a small set of trusted friends. This is an ancient (in Internet years) idea that dates back to the underground member-only FTP servers and BBSs of 20 years ago. Downhill Battle's innovation is having the software scan a pre-existing list of trusted contacts - your instant-messaging buddy list. Specifically, it would like to see the development of a plug-in for the popular open-source instant-messaging client Gaim, a plugin which would make secure file sharing with your buddies as easy as clicking a button. At press time, Downhill Battle has raised some $1,300 in donations for the project, which will be paid out as bounties for programmers who help to implement the proposed Gaim plugin.http://downhillbattle.org/labs/gaim_filesharing_plugin/
As Internet advertising kicks into high gear, boasting an astonishing $2.7 billion in sales for the second quarter of 2004, several of the companies benefiting from the upshift are for sale. What's up with that? Buyers once-bitten by the dotcom bubble burst and all those who learned from those experiences are wary, but sellers are looking to hawk their wares in a positive market. After seven quarters of increasing ad sales, the buyers and sellers are cozying up to each other, and a lot of big names are getting nibbles - if not outright swallows - CBS MarketWatch and Slate, for two.
http://ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1100038964.php
There She Is, Miss Digital World
Miss Digital World is a contest to crown the most beautiful computer-generated model in the world. It's the brainchild of Franz Cerami, who hopes to build the world's premier, and only, talent agency of virtual models. The winners of this beauty pageant would in reality be the creators of the digital goddesses, who would, through Cerami, license their ageless beauties for magazine covers, movies, and a host of other placements. Wired looks at five technically stunning contenders for the title.Miss Digital World: http://www.missdigitalworld.com/MDWContest/showpage/16
Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/virtual.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Ever wanted to run Mac OS X on your Xbox? Maybe you'd just like to add Bluetooth support to your iBook, or perhaps making a ramjet engine will feed your hankering for tinkering. Hack a Day gathers hacks for computers, PDAs, cameras, and much more into one easily accessed site. With photos and stepwise instructions, and occasional commentary, the site is the perfect resource for, say, cooling your overclocked system with a car radiator. Do read the comments, as they can really help flesh out a potentially unstable hack.http://www.hackaday.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Multimap.com's Brilliant Overlay Maps
Multimap.com is fantastic map source. Like at any other map site, you can start with a tiny outline map of the world and within a few clicks zoom in to the street where you live. As a basic map source, Multimap.com is at least the equal of anything on the Internet. Where it exceeds its competitors is right now limited to the UK, where the site is based. For virtually all of England, much of Wales, and the Edinburgh and Glasgow metropoli of Scotland, a click on the Aerial Photo button in the tool bar atop Multimap.com's outline map loads a detailed aerial photo of the area. Now, that's cool enough, but when you pull your cursor over the aerial photo, you get a translucent mouse-over window of the outline map you just left. We find this feature works best at 1:10,000 scale. Not only is the site useful, but using it is an extraordinary experience that blends the real and graphic worlds together.http://www.multimap.com/
If you love Los Angeles and worship Hollywood then you've got to pay a visit to LAist. It's a well crafted blog review of anything vaguely LA related. The LAist crew is just as likely to be discussing joyriding teenagers as dissecting some starlet's latest boy disaster but regardless of topic the writing stays sharp, well researched, and engaging. LAist even manages to include enough relevant links without leaving readers with overload. The contributors appear to have their well manicured fingers on the pulse of a city they obviously all love. They rant about the fortunes of the local sports teams, lament the demise of favorite eateries, praise the simple pleasures of non-trendy coffee spots, and interview anyone from the rich down to the outright bizarre. All of LA is here sooner or later - can you afford to miss it?
http://www.laist.com/
It's too late for most North Americans to pick apples this year, but they might want to visit the Orchard Trail to plan next year's day trip. The site is for anyone who wants to taste an apple picked right off a tree or who wants to find out how we get applesauce. Cooks and gardeners, too, might find it helpful if they are particular about apples. The site is basically a directory of family-run apple orchards in the US and a handful of other countries, including the UK and New Zealand. The pages provide contact information, with links where applicable. Supporting resources include 11 pages of recipes for apple puddings, cakes, and other goodies, along with variety lists for shoppers and connoisseurs. A warning on the advice page: "The listings here may not be always completely accurate. Please call ahead before driving out. Orchards are turning into golf courses and condominiums at an alarming rate, and we can't always keep up with that." Many of us no longer know where the nearest orchard may be, so you might visit this site first if you plan a drive into the country.
http://www.applejournal.com/trail.htm
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Maggie Taylor sees things differently. That's a useful habit for an artist. Where we see a scanner for turning photos of our kids into digital images to send to grandparents, she sees a tool akin to the palette and canvas of Monet. She has taken what is essentially a modern form of the Victorian art of decoupage to a whole new level. She creates new pictures from cut-up images and uses the humble scanner to form montages which are a hundred miles away from the kindergarten collages of our youth. Her reconstructed images aren't just simple colorful pictures, though; she's got a point to make, several in fact, and her surreal art makes them well. If you feel like challenging your eye and your mind, we suggest you give them a viewing. We loved her unique and bravely unlabelled navigation icons too.http://www.maggietaylor.com/
Are you ready for the path to enlightenment? The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, Calif. brings us Visions of Enlightenment: Understanding the Art of Buddhism, which offers a series of modules that display the rich aesthetic heritage of that faith. Drawing on Buddhism's 2,000-year history and the various artistic traditions of the many lands to which it has spread, this online gallery and textbook is a multicultural journey. The images and artifacts are not only beautiful but interactive, with enhancements such as historical explanations, soundtracks of sacred music, and other features. Aside from the museum pieces, one can view photo essays on Buddhism in modern times (including a fascinating look at the role of Buddhism in Hollywood), enjoy a tour of Buddhist holy places across Asia, and learn about the sacred objects and symbols of the Path. One shouldn't overlook the various educational aids, such as the map and timeline and teachers' guide, as well. More than just a visual treat, this is an outstanding introduction to the deep and vast cultural history of one of the world's great religions.
http://www.pacificasiamuseum.org/buddhism/
There's an amazing amount of image-manipulating talent out there on the wild, wild Web. Worth 1000 runs Photoshop contests that invariably attract dozens of high-quality entries from the online public. The brief for its Cybergenics 5 contest was to take a picture of an animal and mock it up with mechanical parts to create a cyborg-like creature. The standard of entries was incredibly high, and the submissions that garnered the most votes were just breathtaking. We can't argue with the winner, Baluga, a robotic whale that could quite easily have come straight out of Dreamworks SKG rather than a Photoshop enthusiast's hard drive, and the rest aren't bad either.
http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=2944
Graphic Design Creation and Analysis
Netdiver is a high-quality e-zine devoted to the best of the leading edge in Web design. The site's founder is female and the site emphasizes the work of women, but considering Netdiver only a female-leaning site might cause you to miss the not so minor fact that Netdiver is a superb design e-zine regardless of gender bias. It's filled with useful sections including merchandising online, interviews, and user forums. It should come as no surprise that navigation is great, and readability is very high.http://www.netdiver.net/
Pitchfork Re-Pitches Worst Guitar Solos Piece
We didn't need Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" to tell us that people, men especially, just love musical lists. Perhaps it's the opportunity for conflict that's so appealing - after all, one man's Meatloaf is another man's Poison. When Pitchfork first ran Michael Sandlin's feature "The Top 50 Worst Guitar Solos of the Millennium" in 1998, it received hundreds of pieces of hate-mail from rock fans the world over. This was hardly surprising, as even affirmed status as guitar legend was no guarantee against inclusion. Eric Clapton, in fact, earned the top slot (beating the "impotent three-pronged hillbilly guitar attack" in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird") for his "lackluster" 17-minute live solo in "Let it Rain", which Sandlin calls "unconscionable crap". Perhaps to stir up the hornet's nest again, Pitchfork has re-run the article in the full knowledge that some of the 50 entries would make it to many people's greatest-solos lists, and presumably expects another red-hot mailbag.http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/solos/
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/ |
Chronicles, Vol. 1
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Andre de Dienes, Marilyn
Knoppix Hackshttp://xorph.com/anacrusis/
A movie producer receives a query letter with this logline: "When push comes to shove, who does a mother save - herself or her aborted but live infant child?" Does the producer rush to cut a deal? Probably not. More likely, he sends it to Managerguy, the anonymous poster and Hollywood insider in charge of Query Letters I Love, a blog that pillories absurd, real query letters. You'll find hooters here. Managerguy gives an often cursory opinion by means of a header - in the above case, "Great Date Movie". Visitors will have fun reading and can post their own comments, too. This site should be mandatory reading for students of screenwriting. Don't submit something like this, from an archived entry from Oct. 21: "Log Line: A group of college guys are throwing a party on Halloween in their old neighborhood while a European terrorist cell's detonator files on a zip drive ends up at the party in a bottle of granulated onion. Unbeknownst to the college guys, the terrorist cell crashes the party in costume to retrieve the drive, and good and evil collide." Laughable, pathetic - you decide.
http://queryletters.blogspot.com/
Nursery-Rhyme Lyrics and Origins
You may not know it, but you might have sung your children to sleep with a rhyme about the grim instruments of torture used in Queen Mary's persecution of Protestants and how the graveyards in 16th-century England were filled with her victims. Hey, whatever works for you. Many nursery rhymes have a grounding in historical and sometimes gruesome fact. In times gone by, outright dissent against the monarchy or other authority figures was extremely dangerous, and what are today seemingly innocent children's nursery rhymes were once safely subtle political parody. This site has the words of many of your favorite nursery rhymes and gives explanations of their now obscure meanings. Just don't tell the kids the stories behind the rhymes.http://www.rhymes.org.uk/
Some people get creative with four-letter words. Others literally create with four-letter words. Base26 is a project that maps over 1,600 four-letter English words in four dimensions (one for each letter) and displays them on 3-D grids, one for each starting letter in the words. It's a surreal way to experience language. The only better way to experience this would be to load it into a virtual reality simulator and let the user reach out to the words as they float by.
http://toxi.co.uk/p5/base26/index.htm
SURFING SCIENCE
A trio of British museums have collaborated on a masterpiece of encyclopedic browsing. The result, Ingenious, offers more than 30,000 images, audio files and other resources in illustration of the myriad bonds between science and culture. It's called Ingenious with good reason. The four main navigational sections - Read, Debate, See, and Create - invite you to get interactive right away. Click Debate, for example, and you're confronted with controversy like "Should the state pay to make ugly people beautiful?" or "Are we slaves to the concept of the Ideal Home?" the Read section invites you to read anything from the beauty and utility of math to artificial limbs; the See section offers anything from sex to flying machines. We chose the former (sex sells) and spent the next half-hour exploring a wealth of images, all in good taste. There's so much to read we can't begin to cover it all, except to say the concise entry for each subject is enriched with cross-disciplinary study. In the Create section, you can personalize the site by saving images, sending e-cards, and creating galleries. The upper-right corner of each page has a link to the site map, which will quickly clue you into the Ingenious ambition and enormity.http://www.ingenious.org.uk/
Birds on the Web Are Worth... Anybody? Anybody?
North America's wired birdwatchers will surely want to check out this fine online birding guide from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO). The site features an introduction to birding, including sections on how to identify birds, tips on where to find good spots for spotting feathered friends, and how and where to report your findings. If you've decided to take up this rewarding pastime, check out the Gear Guide for the latest in binoculars and scopes. Of course, you'll need to bring your wireless laptop into the field so that you can use the superlative Bird Guide with its range maps, photographs (both male and female, of course), downloadable bird calls, and other relevant information on hundreds of North American species. You'll need to know your least grebe from your northern bobwhite. You can also learn how to attract birds, about bird conservation, and how to deepen your ornithological knowledge from CLO's own site as well as other Web resources. This is a terrific educational tool, even if you never leave your desk.http://www.birds.cornell.edu/programs/AllAboutBirds/
The Reality of Running Away from Stuff
We wish Hollywood would take note of this cleverly named page, so that we might be spared at least a few preposterous getaways that stretch the laws of physics and common sense. Writer Idris Hsi doesn't mention where he gets his statistics, and the maximum speed of the walking dead, at least, is obviously conjectural. Most of the rest - top speeds of certain animals, shockwaves, swarms of killer bees, and other nasties of the silver screen - strike us as believable if perhaps difficult to verify. You probably won't think of this page the next time you watch an action flick, but it might instill a bit of innate skepticism. It would be neat to see a documentary filmmaker with a sense of humor use these bare ostensible facts to flesh out a believe-it-or-not hour-long feature for Discovery Channel or someplace.http://tinyurl.com/2k7p5
Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature
Biologists are finding new things all the time: new species; new genes; new things you can't even imagine and don't want to. One of the real perks of the profession is you get to name what you discover. Sure, there are tedious rules, but the rules have lots of bend in them. Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature is a complete compendium of the funny, the awkward, and the just plain odd names that have been assigned to various bits and pieces of the biological world. The page also teaches the casual visitor a lot about the science of naming or taxonomy. It's short, but provides plenty of links for the curious.http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/taxonomy.html
NASA is all about space and planets, so it's natural that the agency brings you information about all known bodies orbiting the sun. The site's called Solar System Dynamics and if you want to check out the small body known as Nemesis, you can look it up right here. Near-Earth comet approaches? The site's got the data on that, too. Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492, but the comet of 1491 came pretty darned close to slamming into his planet, from the look of things. This feature-laden site may merit a bookmark. As a brief flyby, it will only whet your appetite.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/
NASA's QuakeSim Takes First Steps to Earthquake Prediction
NASA has developed an earthquake early-warning system. It's not yet the sort of system that can tell you that the big one is going to hit next Tuesday, but it can predict where and, in a general sense, when. QuakeSim reveals locations in central and southern California likely to experience seismic activity by 2010. If you're in one of the predicted locations, you probably don't want to brace yourself - you'd definitely get a muscle cramp before things start shaking. The technology is definitely a step in the right direction, though.http://quakesim.jpl.nasa.gov/
SOFTWARE
Sun Releases Solaris 10 for Free
After spending a reported $500 million over the years developing their flagship operating system, Sun Microsystems has set the software free this week. The code is available for download and will be released in source-code form under an open-software license. Bug fixes and security updates are available for an annual subscription fee. In addition to running on Sun hardware, the code also runs on the Intel PC architecture. This is a major gamble on Sun's part, clearly an effort to increase acceptance of Solaris as an alternative to Linux and BSD Unix variants in the corporate space. Solaris has a lot going for it - it is an extremely mature operating system, tailor-made for large enterprise installations. If only Sun would learn how to present its Solaris 10 information on the Web in some sort of coherent and easily digestible format, as opposed to the tragically fluffy Flash and HTML marketing brochure style, more people would take them seriously as a clueful contender in the Unix server market. Worth looking at for hardcore sysadmins.http://www.sun.com/nc/04q4/