More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 19 Tuesday, May 17, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF There's a lot more to the Cassini mission than the Huygens probe it launched toward Titan in January. The expensive spacecraft is on a grand tour of Saturn and its entourage, taking pictures and collecting data. Speaking of that entourage, Cassini has discovered a new moon of Saturn, one that orbits in the Keeler gap in the planet's A ring. Cassini spotted the tiny object as it maneuvered above Saturn's ring plane. The gravitational influence of the small satellite, which is some 7 km across, creates waves in the closest portions of the nearby rings. Astronomers expected a moon to be responsible for the ring gap and there it is. Saturn's complex ring system with its myriad attendant moons forms a useful field lab for developing ideas about planet formation, so another system is welcome fodder for eager scientists. The new moon, cataloged as S/2005 S1, is shown in a striking picture that clearly shows the undulating edges of the ring on either side. NASA offers video of S/2005 S1's transit as well.http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-051005.html An intriguing collaboration of modern technology and forensic reconstruction has revealed the face of King Tutankhamun. An Egyptian team led by archeologist Zahi Hawass undertook a complete 3-D CT scan of the 3,500-year-old mummified remains of King Tut. The Egyptians and National Geographic presented the resulting data to two separate forensic research groups, one French and one American, and asked them to develop a likeness of the young king's head. The reconstructions are strikingly similar. The CT examination has also quashed the long standing suspicion that the young king was murdered by a blow to the head. Not so, the images reveal, but he may have had a possibly fatal leg wound. There's a sharp contrast in styles between the hype, melodrama, and visual appeal of National Geographic and the more detailed, technical, and informative treatment from Hawass. National Geographic is airing a program about Tut, "King Tut's Final Secrets", and has a promotional preview available. National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0511_050511_kingtutface.html Hawass: http://www.guardians.net/hawass/press_release_tutankhamun_ct_scan_results.htm "King Tut's Final Secrets": http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/tut/ Microsoft's next game console will not be available until sometime before the 2005 holiday season, but the company set the marketing train in motion this week with a half-hour show on MTV that introduced the box to consumers. If you missed it, search for "Xbox" on your favorite BitTorrent tracker to download the show, although frankly it's mostly marketing puff. The launch was extensively covered in the media but game fans will probably appreciate GameSpot's in-depth coverage, which includes a preview of the hardware and capsule descriptions of the games being developed for the Xbox 360. As for the Xbox 360 itself, the next-generation console is an impressive piece of work under the hood, packing more graphic computing power than the room-sized supercomputers of 30 years ago. The Xbox360 is designed to show games on HDTV screens with almost photorealistic rendering quality. The quality of the gameplay, on the other hand, is likely to be as variable as ever. Xbox 360: http://www.xbox360.com/ Gamespot: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6124293/index.html Star Wars Episode III: "Revenge of the Sith" Over its lifetime, the Star Wars franchise has taken in somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion, making George Lucas worth about $3.5 billion today. On the eve of the release of the latest Star Wars installment, "Revenge of the Sith", Forbes breaks down how the various bits of the Star Wars empire contributed to the big money total. This includes the movies themselves, TV shows, sales of toys and games, and books and other print products. The official Star Wars Web site has lots of material, including the "Revenge of the Sith" movie trailer and videos of the TV ads. There's also a link where you can purchase the Episode III game for the Playstation 2. (But if you're going to buy, you'd rather send the commission our way through our link below, right?) The movie opens May 19.Forbes: http://forbes.com/business/2005/05/12/cx_ah_0512starwars.html "Revenge of the Sith": http://www.starwars.com/episode-iii/ Episode III game: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007SL1ZI/netsurferdigest The annual film festival in the south of France runs through May 22 and, as ever, is a showcase of both major studio epics and numerous independent films. The Festival de Cannes Web site has news of the daily happenings - most recently the screening of "Revenge of the Sith" - along with cast and crew interviews. The site also offers numerous video clips, of both the films being shown and the daily press conferences. Each film at the festival has a Web page with full credits, often links to a press kit, and some laughably short dialogue extracts. The festival will announce the winners of its various awards at its close. Netflix movie reviewer James Rocchi has a blog of his experiences at Cannes, while BBC reporter Caroline Briggs has somewhat terser but still informative coverage. Festival de Cannes: http://www.festival-cannes.fr/ Rocchi: http://rocchireport.netflix.com/ Briggs: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4510703.stm Schneier on Real ID and Rights The passage of the Real ID Act means that the US government will compel US states to thoroughly check residents' identities before issuing them a useful driver's license/ID card. Within four years all US residents will have to carry a common identification card issued as driver's license. Soon all US residents will essentially have to show papers before they get on an airplane or pay by check. What's been a secret is any actual debate on the issue. Bruce Schneier, the thinking person's security analyst, has a nice post on why this new card will fail to improve our security while it erodes civil rights. Even more interesting are the comments on the post, which give readers a sense of just how combustible this issue is.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5697111.html Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/real_id.html Google Halts Downloads of Google Web Accelerator Google has stopped distributing Google Web Accelerator, ostensibly because of "capacity" issues, but the software had other problems that may account for why Google really yanked it. The software was designed to speed up Web browsing through caching and intelligently serving Web pages to your browser. For example, in response to your click on a link, Google's responsive, fast cache would load either whole pages or only the parts of a page that were changed, if applicable. It was an admirable approach, but it failed in practice. Google Web Accelerator lacked privacy security as it logged users into online discussion forums with somebody else's accounts. Other technical problems arose on some sites that depend on JavaScript to control functionality (see NSD 11.18). CNET has the FAQ about Google Web Accelerator, and a story about Google putting the brakes on its distribution.Google Web Accelerator: http://webaccelerator.google.com/index.html NSD 11.18: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.18.html#BS2 CNET FAQ: http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5700776.html CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5702969.html Yahoo Music Earns Praise and Pans Yahoo is bidding to become a major player in the hot world of online music. With an introductory rate of $5 a month for a yearly contract and prices of $0.79 per rippable download for subscribers, the new service is competitive with Napster and iTunes Music Store. Yahoo Music claims to offer a million songs and 120 commercial-free radio stations. Ian Rogers, one of Yahoo's geek developers, posted some of the details and the Slashdot crowd had at them. He claims open architecture, although Yahoo Music is only available for Windows. The low price is definitely attractive, but Slashdotters point out that the cost is so low that Yahoo is either subsidizing it or prices will rise. The never-the-twain-shall-meet great divide between renting and owning is explored for the millionth time.Yahoo Music: http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/ Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/0114200 BBC Opens Developer Network, Encourages Applications The BBC has unveiled a new developer network. It provides tools and information feeds that allow users to build applications which use the BBC's content. The BBC is following in the footsteps of Amazon.com, Google, and eBay, all of which have successful projects that provide an application programming interface (API) to their content. In the BBC's case, the content is composed of RSS feeds divided into logical categories like Sports, Weather, TV Channels, and so on. The tools will be programming API's to search and access the content in various ways. The BBC has not yet published the APIs, but several prototypes already use BBC content in creative ways. For example, one prototype extracts name of people from the news and links to the news stories. Another extracts replies to complaints from the BBC Web site and creates an RSS feed. Several projects tag the feeds in various ways. The possiblities are nearly endless, and the BBC encourages you to share your ideas on their forums.http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ MPAA Goes after TV Torrent Distribution Sites The MPAA is again targeting torrent-tracking Web sites. This second round of legal assaults follows the MPAA's efforts of last December (see NSD 11.01). This time, the MPAA is targeting Web sites that specialize in hosting links to torrent files of TV shows. According to ZDNet, the MPAA is specifically targeting ShunTV, Zonatracker, BTEFnet, Scifi-Classics, CDDVDHeaven, and Bragginrights. The December campaign knocked out the most popular torrent hubs like SuprNova and LokiTorrent, but other sites took up the slack. BTEFnet in particular became a center for TV-show torrents. A simple Google search shows that there are still plenty of torrent trackers out there, and more torrents than existed before the MPAA's campaign started in December. Most torrent hubs offer links not only to torrents of TV shows, but of movies, music, and software, not all of it encumbered by restrictive copyrights by any means.NSD 11.01: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.01.html#BS8 ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5705142.html Social Networking in a Downturn A lot of money has been invested in social networking. How's that panning out? Well, when was the last time you visited a social-networking site? Thought so. The social-networking fad skyrocketed in 2003-2004, but the skyrocket analogy seems apt for most of them: they burned a lot of cash into smoke and noise, shot up, then exploded. After the pretty pictures disappeared, all that was left was little pieces of debris. LinkedIn seems to be one of the few survivors, going from a novelty to a potentially more sustainable model in short order. LinkedIn has adapted, and is adaptable. By contrast, the Friendster model doesn't seem quite as nimble. That site claims to be in the black, but is it profitable enough to reassure investors who pumped around $13 million into it? This whole market is starting to look like a kung fu movie. CNET has more.http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5700008.html Existing E-Mail Network as Decentralized P2P Spam Filter Attempts to create collaborative spam-filtering networks have used a variety of approaches to identify spam and distribute information about spam to a base of users. Typically, those efforts involve the creation of new, trusted networks of information flow, usually organized around central servers that collect and distribute the spam data. Now, researchers propose a new approach in which the existing network of e-mail contacts can support a robust peer-to-peer (P2P) spam-filtering system with few of the drawbacks of centralized approaches. In particular, this approach uses an existing network of e-mail links without needing to create a new community of spam-filter users from scratch. It also taps into the implicit web of trust of such a network. Due to the scale-free nature of e-mail networks, such a system can use well understood percolation search algorithms to propagate spam data. Best of all, the system can be implemented right now, with plug-ins for common e-mail clients. The technical paper has details about this research and possible implementation.http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0504026 AOL Adds Free E-Mail to AIM Accounts AOL is aggressively expanding the reach of its AIM instant messaging service. After integrating a blog-hosting service with AIM (see NSD 11.18), now it is offering 2 GB of free e-mail space for users with an AIM screen name. AIM free e-mail addresses will consist of a user's screen name at the aim.com domain. The service includes all the usual webmail functions but also several features that closely integrate with AIM instant messaging. For example, you can send e-mail from your buddy list, check the status of your messages in AIM, and reply to e-mail with an instant message. You'll need the beta version of the new AIM client to sample all these features, currently available only for Windows.http://beta.aol.com/projects/aimmail/ Solipsis's alternative take on virtual worlds relies on no servers - it's based on the peer-to-peer (P2P) model. Solipsis allows a huge number of players, or users, to link their own machines to this virtual environment. Although it was released as an open-source P2P protocol for gaming, it isn't hard to imagine that the RIAA and MPAA will really come to hate the application. File sharing aside, Solipsis has even grander plans afoot: the Solipsis team would like it to become one of the first iterations of the Metaverse, as described in Neil Stephenson's groundbreaking "Snow Crash". Right now, the territory's wide open. Stake your Solipsis claim for free; sell for potentially millions. http://solipsis.netofpeers.net/wiki/HomePage/ You probably launched a GUI (graphic user interface) application through a GUI operating system to read this edition of Netsurfer Digest. This Ars Technica piece is a concise and useful history of the GUI from Vannevar Bush's Memex to OS X. The best part of the journey is the story of Douglas Engelbart's "mother of all demos" where he unveiled the mouse as well as his infamous chording keyboard. The rest of the Ars Technica piece is more a catalogue of the various GUIs many of us encountered in the '80s. What's striking is how much raw ingenuity and innovation has been brought to an area many think of as boring and worked over. Also, the time line is a great idea. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars/1 Twenty-Five Years of Pac-Mania Don't ever say to your spouse, "Has it only been 25 years? Wow! It seems like forever!" In the case of Pac-Man, however, the sentiment surely applies - although we advise even him not to bring it up with Ms. Pac-Man. Pac-Mania is going stronger than ever, now that the nostalgia thing is kicking in. Pong may have been the killer app of video games, but Pac-Man raked in more money - "$100 million one quarter at a time," CNN says (although we suspect someone's not counting cartridges for home play). And people still love the game. It's actually become sort of a religious experience for some folks. You wouldn't have bothered with looking past the headline if Pac-Man didn't have a hold on some part of you, so we'll provide links not only to the CNN story, but to a Flash version of the game at eBaum's World, as well as to homages found at the Pac-Page and the First Church of Pac-Man. As the next generation of game systems hits the market, chances are good that Pac-Man will be bundled in there somehow.CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/10/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/index.htm eBaum's World: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pacman.html Pac-Page: http://www.classicgaming.com/pac-man/ First Church of Pac-Man: http://www.flamingmayo.com/firstchurchofpacman/ Bullshit is among the hottest philosophical topics, right up there with vagueness. In this delightful apercu on bullshit and design, Michael Bierut in Design Observer employs a wonderful definition of bullshit: "not designed primarily to give its audience a false belief about whatever state of affairs may be the topic, but that its primary intention is rather to give its audience a false impression concerning what is going on in the mind of the speaker." That definition actually comes from Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", but in Bierut's hands it is the jumping off point for a delightful explanation of the centrality of bullshit in design. We won't ruin the rest for you, just go read it. Design Observer: http://www.designobserver.com/archives/002559.html "On Bullshit": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691122946/netsurferdigest BC Bloggers Must Register with Election Authorities The agency responsible for regulating elections in British Columbia has ruled that blogs qualify as political advertisments and thus must register with the government. In a brief CBC story, an official of Election BC says that the volume of sites that might qualify is overwhelming and that the agency may request a change in the election law which seems to mandate this type of registration. For the moment, Canadian bloggers are mostly confused. A few point out the ridiculous implications of such a rule. A good cross-section of the reaction can be found on Darren Barefoot's blog. The rule itself was drawn up in order to track and regulate political advertising spending.CBC: http://vancouver.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=bc_election-blog20050512 Barefoot: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/002643.html You can now get movie reviews and show times directly from Google with its new "movie:" keyword tag. Add the title of the movie you want to see and Google will ask you for your ZIP code. Enter it and you'll get the movie times. It's for the US only, for now. http://www.google.com/ ONLINE CULTURE Funny Firefox Promotional Campaign, Security Update The European branch of the Mozilla Foundation has launched a new promotional campaign for the browser. It features three funny videos of people's reactions to discovering Firefox. According to ZDNet UK, the campaign is spreading in viral fashion with over half a million hits within days of launch. Since the foundation has only limited funds but a huge fan base, the campaign is encouraging people to use e-mail to spread word of and links to the videos at Funnyfox. Meanwhile, a new version 1.0.4 of Firefox is available, featuring fixes to several recently found security vulnerabilities.ZDNet UK: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39198100,00.htm Funnyfox: http://funnyfox.org/ Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ ONLINE TRAVEL A Sightseer's Guide to Engineering Professionals are justly proud of their achievements. The National Society of Professional Engineers is showcasing a guide to those tourist sights in the US that show off the ingenuity of engineers. Select from the handy and, may we say, attractive map the state you intend to visit and the site will list unusual sights for you to browse online or visit in person. From lighthouses to nuclear reactors to a giant steel archway with a tram inside it, the featured sights cover quite a range of feats - although we look dubiously upon the decision to include the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory. The site presents each sight with a short explanation of its technical achievements, directions to the place, and a fun fact. All are open to the public and most would inspire any youngster to consider engineering as a career option. The site is as well constructed as some of the exhibits, with searches by keyword, engineering discipline, and category. If you're planning a road trip, drop by.http://www.engineeringsights.org/ In yet another quest to make the Internet relevant to people who don't know why the Internet is relevant, Beans-Around-The-World encourages people to take a can of beans with them on vacation, and then send back photos of where the beans have gone on holiday, along with some explanatory text to accompany the photos. There's humor here, certainly, but haven't we done this in enough strange ways? The answer, friends, is a hearty "pshaw!" If it weren't for sites like this, the Internet would just be a fancy way to go to school. Skip class and live a little. http://www.beans-around-the-world.com/beanshome.html ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Some of the best movies are those based on true stories. As good as any such movie might be, historical purists tend to try to pick the dramatic nits from the glorious coiffure of history. Now we - er, they can head to Movie-O to examine the fascinating real-life tales behind many of those films. Any historical film buff will love reading interview snippets with the real Erin Brockovich and learning about Ed Gein, who has probably inspired more horror flicks than anyone else. Anyone who cheered Oscar Schindler or the charitable women of the more recent "Calendar Girls" will love reading about the real heroes of those stories. The true tales have been garnered from various sources and the site presents them well. That's not all Movie-O has, however. We liked its section on book adaptations, and the little essay on the three actors who played the original Darth Vader (James Earl Jones did the voice, David Prowse the body, and Sebastian Shaw the unmasked face) in the Umasked (sic) section. Here's a movie site that will add significantly to the movie lore already on the Web at the IMDb.http://www.chasingthefrog.com/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
Eggcorns and Other Errors of English If you liked "Eats, Shoots & Leaves", last year's grammar book about the panda, you're going to love the Eggcorn Database. For everybody out there who cringes each time they see poor spelling, eggcorns must be the worst. An eggcorn, the site defines, is a word that's spelled correctly but just wrong, so wrong. For example, the phrase "free rein" means allowing someone self-control; it has its roots in horsemanship. "Free reign", although it appears to be correct, is not, so not. This site gathers such usages and explains why these are wrong. You just know that your pernickety English teacher would have adored this site, but it is compulsive reading nonetheless, at times hilarious, at times heartbreaking. Since the February launch, the site has recorded 244 such eggcorns. Check out its Nearly Mainstream category to see some eggcorns (the term comes from the use of "eggcorn" instead of "acorn") you'll be surprised you didn't know about. You can subscribe via RSS to get updates as they go live.http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/ Peter Thomas has two passions: making books and playing the ukulele. Some unnatural extension of his thought process has led to the creation of the ukulele book - a book made out of or into a still-playable ukulele. He and wife Donna have created 23 of these masterpieces so far, and it appears more are on the way. We may have to explain that headline, though. "Tip on" is the attachment along the folded edge of endsheets to the front and back of the textblock at the shoulder by means of a narrow strip of adhesive along the folded edge. Now, rejoice in our cleverness! http://www.baymoon.com/~ukulelebooks/ SURFING SCIENCE Check out RatLab for some quirky and cool science fun. RatLab is an online not-for-profit resource that showcases the hipper side of science to the public. You can learn why asparagus makes your urine smell, why beans make you fart, how to extract DNA, and even some stuff that has nothing at all to do with bodily fluids. Read some articles on topics such as stem-cell research, how to choose a PhD program, and tuberculosis. Even better, the site offers cool home experiments. This isn't just stuff like color changes - well, some of it is. But the better experiments show you how to turn pennies different colors, the aforementioned DNA extraction, and how to make your own mini-rocket using Alka Seltzer. Once you've ruined the kitchen, take a look at some strange but true facts like why corn comes out more or less the same as it goes in. If you still haven't had your fix of science madness at RatLab, visit the links page for more science fun, albeit with less gastrointestinal content.http://www.ratlab.co.uk/ We don't know how old films are colorized - and we can't be bothered to find out - but we assume it's process intensive in time and labor. A group at Hebrew University has created an easy way to colorize, and the results are amazing. The researchers presented their work at last year's SIGGRAPH. All the user has to do is scribble colors with a pencil or paintbrush tool on the image to be colorized. It works for stills or video. For video, the user needs to mark only a small set of frames - the process fills in the rest of them like magic. In photos, the result is an image in muted tones that recall the hand-tinted photos of the early 20th century, but the tool shines in video clips. The technology can also be used to change color of an object in pre-existing color images. Check out the samples on the site. http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/ Making Things and the Things That Make Them The name of the Center for Bits and Atoms seems to promise a lot about the little. It focuses on making things, and making things that can make things. You get an eclectic mix at the site and while the material could use an organizational reconstruction, it's still worth poking around. Learn how to use a laser cutter here, or how to build an almost perfect antenna. Need to refresh your 3-D printing knowledge? You'll find out that it comes in many forms, but it looks as though fused deposition modeling and powder-binding printing rank among the top contenders at present. While not mentioned in the article, the technology may have applications that exceed circuit printing.http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ And on the Eighth Day, They Danced When you get 34 MIT students in a cramped space with pizza and chocolate, bizarre things are bound to happen. Witness the First East Disco Dance Floor, a Lexan surface over a frame of 1,536 computer-controlled LEDs. If you can't go to Las Vegas and look up at the Freemont Street Experience, you can go to Cambridge, Mass. and look down at the First East Disco Experience. Well, actually, it's not open to the public (the students have to study some time), but you can see it in action on their Web site.http://web.mit.edu/storborg/ddf/index.html |
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