More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, April 04, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 13 Monday, April 04, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Ioannes Paulus PP. II Karol Wojtyla 16.X.1978 - 2.IV.2005 Clearly the coverage of the Pope's death is all pervasive, and his legacy is already being dissected at length among the media and on the Internet. We suspect it will be some years before there is any consensus about his impact on the Catholic church. However, early themes seem to be his very successful appeal to the masses in Africa, South America, and much of the third world in general. At the same time many commentators are citing his alienation from the Catholic congregations in Western nations, congregations not always comfortable with the Pope's very traditional views on hot topic issues like marriage, sexuality, and the role of women in the church. Whatever the ultimate assessment of his historical impact he was clearly a man of great personal strength and conviction. He continued energetically doing his duty throughout his career often in the face of grave personal hardship, right up until the end. The Vatican web site has John Paul II's numerous writings. It seems most appropriate to close with the words of his last Apostolic Letter entitled "The Rapid Development" (January 24, 2005). There he specifically addresses the recent rapid technological progress in the area of communication media and its impact on the church and the world. John Paul II emphatically writes: "Do not be afraid of new technologies!".John Paul II: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ "The Rapid Development": http://tinyurl.com/3wwo8 Google is going into the smart-drink business. The Bush twins head for Iraq and the pages of Maxim. A computer virus spreads to humans. Oliver Stone is tapped to direct "Big Time Sensuality", a movie about Bjork. A new Internet RFC entitled "Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts" is published. Gmail increases mailbox space to 2 GB. No, wait - that last one is real. All the rest are April Fool's jokes pulled by a huge assortment of Web sites. Urgo has a list of links to this year's online pranks, a list that seemingly goes on forever. Anyone surfing Slashdot Apr. 1 knows what that feels like. Many of the jokes were far too obvious, but here and there lies the odd gem that could pass for truth. Sadly, Urgo's links show that a surprising number of sites pull their April Fool's jokes off the Net. We really wanted to see Cats-by-Mail. Looks like there's a job for the Internet Archive next year. http://urgo.org/aprilfools.html The Consumerpedia aims to be a consumer-information resource built collaboratively by the Internet community - in short, an encyclopedia of consumer items. It's a wiki, and like any wiki, lets anybody submit comments about any consumer item. A karma system rewards useful comments and users. Consumerpedia does not contain much content yet. It's a brand new effort, and in fact was publicized a little earlier than the developers had planned. Nevertheless, the basic outlines of what it could become are there. In many ways, you can think of it as the open-source, independent version of Amazon.com's comment system, not tied to any retail business. Search for a phrase like "Apple computer" and you'll see a few comments from users. If you want to add comments, or rate them, you'll need to set up a free account. If well executed, Consumerpedia has the potential to become at least as useful as Wikipedia and maybe the primary resource for consumer research. http://www.consumerpedia.org/ What do you say about a school shooting? It's a tragedy for those killed and wounded and for the communities in which they lived. Jeff Weise, the tortured young man who shot up a Minnesota high school Mar. 21, had a LiveJournal blog: "Thoughts of a Dreamer: Liberate your mind, bitch". Reading the blog's three posts with hindsight is depressing, but there's no excuse for some of the comments visitors added after the shootings. LiveJournal has turned off the comment feature after, as the San Francisco Chronicle makes clear, comments on the site grew vicious. Many people seemed to try to turn the tragedy into a sick comedy. The Smoking Gun has found a short cartoon that Weise animated last October - viewing it sent shivers down our spine. Thoughts of a Dreamer: http://www.livejournal.com/users/weise/ Chronicle: http://tinyurl.com/5fyv3 Smoking Gun: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0323051weise1.html Twenty years ago this month, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) bulletin board opened its doors. The WELL went on to become perhaps the best known and most influential of all the early Internet communities, and to this day hosts some of the most literate and intelligent discussions of any online forum. After years of independent existence, first as a BBS and later as a Web forum, the WELL was acquired by Salon in 1999. Since then, it has continued to be a gathering place for an eclectic mix of techies, artists, and writers. To mark the 20th anniversary, author Howard Rheingold and Cliff Figallo, WELL director in the 1980s, are hosting a lively discussion thread about the early days of the WELL, specifically, and about the future of online communities in general. This thread is free to view and post, but the WELL itself survives today as a subscription service. It costs $10 or $15 per month, depending on the features you want, and you get a Salon subscription with that. As part of the anniversary celebrations, the WELL is offering a trial subscription at $2 for two months - a great bargain. You can find links to the Rheingold and Figallo thread and to a press release atop the WELL home page. You'll find the trial offer at the WELL Turns Twenty page. The WELL: http://www.well.com/index.html The WELL Turns Twenty: http://www.well.com/twenty/ It's been only days since the PlayStation Portable (PSP) game console landed in North America and already there are a bunch of English-language hacks available for the device. The hacks range from a proof-of-concept Web browser to instructions on how to use your Mac to play PSP games over the Web. Engadget has links to a representative collection of recent PSP hacks. Given this kind of instant hacker reaction, we wonder why hardware companies have not caught on to what game retailers know all too well. When you ship a new product, ship tools that let users modify it. Almost every major game today ships with a modding kit, because it helps sales. Why shouldn't every new piece of hardware? http://gaming.engadget.com/entry/1234000720038308/ A9 Trumpets OpenSearch Standards Someone besides Google is doing something innovative in search. A9, Amazon.com's Google-powered search engine, has proposed OpenSearch, a set of open search standards that will allow sites to produce results in a universal, open format. The goal is to use this open standard to make search an investigative equivalent of RSS for individual sites. The examples A9 has posted at its See How It Works page (link in left-hand column) are interesting but leave us with the impression that while this might be a nice feature, it doesn't improve anything. Maybe we need a clearer explanation. In the meantime, if you are designing a site with a search function, take a look at the OpenSearch specifications and see if you want to use it.http://opensearch.a9.com/ When we first heard of Grafedia, we thought it was an amazing new technology: take a photo of a word with your camera phone and it turns into a clickable link. The truth is more mundane, although you wouldn't guess that from the hype. The word does indicate an e-mail account - e.g. word@grafedia.net - but the picture-taking is superfluous. All Grafedia really is is a mailserver whose e-mail accounts return files to anyone who e-mails. The "twist" is that the person who creates the account has to upload a file and then tattoo, spraypaint, or engrave the word out in the wild. It's more like an invitation to urban blight than an honest-to-goodness new medium. John Geraci, who dreamed this up, sees it as an extension of the Internet. He and at least one Grafedia fan Wired interviewed claim that they don't advocate vandalism. Meanwhile, we wait for software that can read words from photos and turn them into links. Grafedia: http://www.grafedia.net/ Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66992,00.html The Mac Virus-Writing Contest That Never Was Symantec, in its Internet Security Threat Report (see last issue), announced the blindingly obvious: that as the number of Macs rises - and they are growing more popular - the Mac is an increasingly attractive target for malicious hackers. DVForge takes the view that Mac OS X is simply secure by design, and offered a challenge: the first person to infect two of its Macs would win $25,000. DVForge wanted to lay to rest the precept that the reason no virus, worm, etc. has ever widely infected Mac OS X is that too few OS X users exist to make the effort to create the malware worthwhile. Such a contest is not a bad idea; competitions like this on other platforms have revealed security holes that needed to be closed. Alas, the contest was not to be. The CEO of DVForge heard from his lawyers and many Mac users and developers. The legal risks proved too much for DVForge, which cancelled the contest. It's a pity, since it could have been useful. We hope someone picks up the mantle. ZDNet Australia reported on the contest, ZDNet on the cancellation.DVForge: http://www.dvforge.com/virus.shtml ZDNet Australia: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39185387,00.htm ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5646719.html E-Mail Newsletters Alive and Well Remember when people claimed that e-mail was dead, drowned by spam? Well, the reports of e-mail's death were a bit premature. As the Online Journalism Review makes clear, newspapers both real and virtual remain big users of e-mail newsletters. Although RSS feeds are slowly gaining on newsletters, the latter cut through inbox clutter because of their authoritative addresses. Not all is wine and roses, however. While newspapers can generate some revenue from newsletters, the biggest moneymakers in the format are electronic versions of ad circulars which subscribers opt to receive. Examples include a restaurant's mailing list or notices of sales online or off.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050317thompson/ Pablo Martinez-Almeida Gonzalez set up a Blogger (owned by Google) blog to forward every post to his Gmail (owned by Google) account. He in turn set up his Gmail account to post every e-mail to his Blogger blog. One human-generated post later, he achieved perpetual Google loop. Well, maybe it wasn't perpetual. The cycle ground to a halt after some 400 copies of that message zipped back and forth between the two Google services. Gonzalez created a not quite diabolically clever waste of both space and broadband. He writes about it in another Google Loop blog entry and the blogosphere chimes in. Google Loop: http://googleloop.blogspot.com/2005_03_26_googleloop_archive.html Commentary: http://googleloop.blogspot.com/2005/03/publishing-loop.html Illustrating Wikipedia Content Data Flow Visualizing document revisions through history may sound boring, but if you use Wikipedia or computer programs, a means of tracing the evolution of content may become a little more meaningful to you. IBM researchers present History Flow, a visualization technology that illustrates document revision. It's a Java 1.4 application that takes a different approach to the depiction of data along a timeline. The How It Works page demonstrates the analysis of a wiki as progressive revisions are added. If you'd like to run some analysis on your own, you can download the application from the IBM alphaWorks.History Flow: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/ IBM alphaWorks: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/historyflow The UK made a clean sweep of nominations in the Hugo's Best Novel category this year. The nominations are further proof that this is a golden age for British SF, with writers like Iain Banks, China Mieville, Charles Stross, Susanna Clarke, and Ian McDonald all winning major accolades, gaining legions of fans, and racking up sales in bookstores. In addition to a nomination for his "Iron Sunrise" book, Charlie Stross had another two works nominated for Best Novella. We're not sure what is going on in the UK that has helped produce this great surge in SF talent over the recent years, but we're not going to look a gift rocket in the nozzle. Attendees and supporters of the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention - in Glasgow, Aug. 4-8, 2005 - will vote on winners and the Hugos will be awarded during the convention. We'll let you know how it turns out. http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/pressr31.htm David Byrne has launched his own little online music stream. You can listen to what the former head Talking Head likes these days - if you have the bandwidth, that is. If so, you have access to some real treats. Byrne's playlists are sweet but definitely not fodder for puny laptop speakers. Crank up the sound and roll with the flow. You may want to check out the other stuff at Byrne's site while you listen. The music is at the Radio link, his journal - please don't call it a blog - is at the Journal link, etc. If you want to know what's up with Tina Weymouth, you'd be better off heading to Talking-Heads.net. Byrne: http://davidbyrne.com/ Talking-Heads.net: http://www.talking-heads.net/ Will Artists Seek Collective Retirement Benefits? Wired presents a new take on retirement accounts - these set up for starving artists. The concept is simple: artists should have funds available to carry them through the trials of old age. The method, conceived by dotcom millionaire Moti Shniberg, boils down to a collectivist approach to art sales. Artists sign on with a trust to which they contribute their artwork. The trust subsequently sells off the art, and puts the income into a managed fund. It's not exactly communist, but the intent is to spread among the group the artists' risk of financial failure - fairly high - and the rare successes. According to Shniberg's own analysis, the scheme only works if he admits promising artists who can already sell pieces for a few thousand dollars and who have the talent to hit the jackpot. It's all a delicately balanced mobile.http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/pension.html Moan Tones, and You'll Never Think of "Hamlet" the Same Way Again Consider this scenario: you're sitting in a theatre watching the latest production of "Hamlet" when suddenly the air is pierced by the sound of porn star Ron "Hedgehog" Jeremy during the climax of his performance. What's this? Another avant garde staging of the Bard's classic, starring the irrepressible Hedgehog? Nope, it's just another idiot who forgot to turn off his cell phone before the show. Yes, that's right - Jeremy is now selling his singular climactic vocal talents as cell-phone ring tones. He's not the first porn star to do so. Pneumatic porn starlet Jenna Jameson came before him, selling "moan tones" as part of a media stream for the sum of $4.99 per package. Naturally, there's other content, such as wallpaper and video for your phone. Somehow, we doubt that those tiny cell phone screens can possibly do justice either to Jameson's bosom or Jeremy's manly attributes. As for Jeremy starring in "Hamlet" - hmmmm, we may just have something there.Jeremy: http://www.rjmobile.com/ Jameson: http://www.mobego.com/jennalive/about.html On Mar. 28, Indonesia was again the epicenter of a major earthquake. Although it did not produce a tsunami or kill as many people as last December's quake of similar strength and location, the magnitude 8.7 quake is still a major disaster, and has killed many people. The USGS has details. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/usweax.htm ONLINE CULTURE WordPress Developer in Trouble over Google Spam Links, Apologizes When the Web site of WordPress, a popular blogging package, was caught hosting content meant to game Google's Adwords ad system, key developer Matt Mullenweg felt he had to apologize for signing up with what he claimed is an unscrupulous advertising outfit. Mullenweg was paid by a company called Hot Nacho to put up thousands of articles on his popular Web site. The spurious content boosted Hot Nacho's page rank on Google, but was hidden with some clever CSS code so that users visiting WordPress Web pages never noticed the stuff there. Google's spiders spotted it, though, and thus boosted the page rank of the sites linked from this mess. This is called "cloaking" and Google explicitly forbids the practice. The user community found out about it, Google briefly banned the WordPress Web site, and vehement criticism buried Mullenweg, even as a number of others sympathized with his need to earn some money. Ultimately, he removed the content, and publicly apologized. Moral: pay attention to third-party content you put on your site lest you royally piss off your fans. Slashdot has a thread with the story and user reaction.WordPress: http://wordpress.org/ Mullenweg: http://photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/ Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/196220 A recent, typically rude "South Park" episode featured a high-pitched Asian singer named Wing. Wing is, as anyone familiar with NSD 9.48 would know, a real person with a rather, let us say, unusual style of singing that alone would qualify her as worthy of a small cult following. But it took all of five seconds for Wing to become a cult superstar thanks to the flashing of her (newer) URL at the end of the "South Park" episode. Wing is an attractive middle-aged Chinese lady in New Zealand who at last report was inundated with orders for her CDs. At her WingTunes.com, you can find free samples of her music, a collection that runs the gamut of karaoke standards - Abba, "Phantom of the Opera", Christmas carols, etc. - worked over in the indescribable Wing style. The South Park Studios BBS (SPS BBS) has adoring fan reaction to Wing's appearance on the show. NSD 9.48: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.48.html#AO3 WingTunes.com: http://www.wingtunes.com/ SPS BBS: http://www.southparkstudios.com/fans/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=11055 What Hitchhikes on File-Sharing Installations Thinking of climbing on to the file-sharing bandwagon? Maybe you just want to try out a new network. Hold up a minute. As you may know, some file-sharing software comes bundled with little surprises. Ben Edelman spent some time installing and analyzing the installations of file-sharing software. He's been a busy boy - oh, what details!. Find out what he uncovered about that file-sharing app you might just have downloaded. This is the motherlode, if you want to know what really happens when you install Kazaa or Morpheus, and it isn't pretty. The report is, though, as it includes lovely little thumbnails and bigger screenshots of the installation processes.http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/p2p/ ONLINE TRAVEL 90-Year-Old Sydney Streetwalker Alan Waddell decided to walk all the streets in Sydney after his beloved bush-walking partner and wife died in 2002. Since then, the 90-year-old has covered more than 2,000 km of the city in 80-minute chunks despite his advanced years. He puts many younger people to shame. His friendly site details his walks and any unusual sights he has found while out and about. Highlights include a secret waterfall, tree archways, and a maze of lush gardens only meters from the airport. Residents of Sydney and prospective tourists should check out local walks here in the neatly archived photo galleries arranged by suburb, while those that live further away can allow themselves to be inspired by a man who ventures forth every day. We also liked the weekly geography trivia quiz and the Surprises section, which offers glimpses of odd features Waddell has found during his perambulations. Most of the photos here come with comments that reveal what we suspect is Waddell's good humor. We think he's the kind of walking companion anybody would enjoy.http://www.walksydneystreets.net/index.htm Signs of Urban Life in Pittsburgh Urban dwellers live among signs, and we don't mean burning bushes. Look around and you can probably spot advertising, traffic signage, street names, and other signs that once had a purpose before they rusted to the spot. In most cities, we barely notice the signs unless they're particularly brash, but Pittsburgh residents can celebrate theirs as democratic art and an economic indicator through the Pittsburgh Signs Project. Anybody with an appropriate digital image can submit it to the site. The site editors have done an exemplary job of gathering the images of past glories and current garish neon and arranging them by area of the city. Sadly, not all images come with a photographer's comment, but where they do, they are enlightening and show pride in the city and its city's signs. These people love their home.http://www.pittsburghsigns.org/ You don't need to speak French to appreciate the photo archive pages of la Mediatheque de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, but it helps. Fortunately, photos speak all languages, and some of these are riveting. A few, less so. But as you spend hours wandering around historical France, you're bound to find something that'll hold your attention. Pack a picnic lunch, or plan a series of shorter jaunts. http://www.mediatheque-patrimoine.culture.gouv.fr/fr/archives_photo/index.html ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT This stunning video comes from the opening ceremonies of the 2003 Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival. It shows a live performance by Ferenc Cako. Using his hands and sand, Cako creates a visual masterpiece of real-time animation. The accompanying music enhances the overall performance as Cako's hands seem to flow with the tempo. The WMV video is just over nine minutes long and is well worth the wait to download. While you're waiting, dig in to the rest of Cako's Sandanimation site.Video: http://www.sandanimation.com/Cako%20sandanimation%20in%20seoul%202003.wmv Sandanimation: http://www.sandanimation.com Bookmark the 365 Days Project and return each day for a listen to a daily MP3. The 365 MP3s are probably unlike anything you've heard before. The stories of the artists behind the songs, jingles, and poetry are stories unto themselves and will entice you to listen. Originally created in 2003, the site is well designed, easy to navigate and a joy to browse. We're fairly sure you won't find any Grammy winners among the MP3s, and it's also likely that many of the clips will have you laughing out loud or possibly cringing. Any way, you won't be able to deny the passion for their craft that many of these artists possess. It's the kind of passion that makes dreams reality and the nameless famous. Yes, famous. How many thousands of netsurfers have stumbled in here to listen to the Central High School Cafeteria Band or Harry and Hugo? http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/ Who said you can't improve on genius? Whoever did can't be on Aunt Joan's Christmas list. Year after year, Aunt Joan sent Justin Jorgensen a calendar of Claude Monet's impressionist masterpieces for Christmas. She grew tired of the repetition, but instead of moving on to cubism or Renaissance art or even - shock, horror - beyond art calendars, she was inspired to improve upon Monet's work with carefully placed stickers. She added washing lines to one of the "Houses of Parliament" series, yellow duckies float by the "Boat at Giverny", and even added squirrels to "Woman with Parasol". Art critics everywhere groaned in their espressos, but we'd like to think that old Claude would have enjoyed Joan's joke; at the very least, he would have appreciated her brave use of color. Let's hope Joan doesn't venture into the Louvre with her sticker book or we'll be viewing the "Mona Taco" and a "Venus de Milo" with arms curiously like tropical fish. http://www.justinspace.com/joansmonets/joansmonetsintro.html A Word is Worth 1,000 Pictures Typography is cool again as the online world tips the hat to its print predecessor. A few hip tools let the online worship the word in print. The first, Robotype, isn't a lot different from the basic text elements of a graphical editing program like Photoshop, although the gallery will give you some ideas about clever ways to display words in order to evoke their meanings. typoGenerator, on the other hand, is the killer app in the field. By combining images from a Google search with colors, fonts, and effects, the user creates instant art out of words without having to be a linguistic savant.Robotype: http://www.robotype.net/ typoGenerator: http://www.typogenerator.net/index.php The World of Mr. Gibson appears to have lain fallow for quite some time, but it is a joy that it has been preserved, as it were, in the amber of the Internet. There are a lot of fine things in Mr. Gibson's world: showbiz; humor; and, above all, art. If we had to pick just one word to describe the essence of Mr. Gibson's art then that word would be "naivete". Sure, his celebrity portraits may at first sight seem uncultured and perhaps not even recognizable to the untrained eye without their labels and commentary, but they are clearly the products of both reverence and love. First and foremost, however, Mr. Gibson is a man of the people, and the high point of the site is the Non-Celebrity Portrait Gallery. Joe Public would send him a photograph and he would turn it into a distinctive work of art. Alas, perhaps no more.... http://www.mrgibson.net/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/ SURFING SCIENCE Saturn's Moons and the Ringed Giant The Cassini probe recently discovered that the Saturnian moon Enceladus has a significant atmosphere. Since the moon does not have enough gravity to hold on to any primordial atmosphere, the gases that envelop it may be generated by volcanism or gases escaping from the surface. The moon's volcanos deposit icy particles on its surface, which might account for the striking fact that Enceladus is the most reflective object in the solar system, reflecting about 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it. The Cassini probe also recently captured a beautiful photograph of the moon Janus against Saturn's rings. The Cassini Imaging team's site has a neat animation of the moon Mimas as it occulted Janus. Of course, Saturn itself is the star of the show and the imaging team offers two especially cool photos. One shows the planet with rings and moons in profile. The other, possibly the greatest Saturn portrait yet taken, is a natural-color view of the planet composed of 126 images taken over two hours from 6.3 million km out. This is what you would see if you were there.Enceladus: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=553 Janus: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1445 Mimas and Janus: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/ Rings and Moons: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=786 Greatest Saturn Portrait: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=483 Primordial Inflation Might Explain Why Universe Accelerates Scientists have known since the early 20th century that the universe is expanding and they mostly understand why. It's all due to the inflation of space shortly after the Big Bang. Only recently, however, did astronomers discover that the rate of expansion is accelerating. Nobody quite knows what is causing this and to explain the phenomenon, scientists have invoked all sorts of exotic ideas, such as some unknown dark energy or the presence of strange new dimensions of space. Now, a quartet of scientists, Kolb, Matarrese, Notari, and Riotto (KMNR), think they have an explanation that does not require any exotic new ideas. They argue that random quantum fluctuations during the early inflation phase may be responsible for our view of an expanding universe. To simplify, they claim that ripples in the structure of space, ripples with wavelengths larger than the current observable universe, could make our local patch of universe look like it's undergoing accelerated expansion. The original KMNR paper is heavy on math and jargon, but Sean Carroll, a skeptical physicist (and not the Sean Carroll who wrote "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" which we recommended above), has an excellent plain language summary.KMNR: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0503117 Carroll: http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_preposterousuniverse_archive.html#111155024666490546 |
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