More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 25 Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Supreme Court Opens Door to P2P Business Liability The Supreme Court issued a ruling this week in the closely watched MGM v. Grokster case, which tested the legality of business ventures built on P2P file trading networks. The Court ruled that companies could be held liable for the illegal activities of their customers if they create and promote their business with "intent" of inducing consumers to infringe intellectual property rights. This is new legal ground, and sidesteps the issues raised in defense arguments which sought to get a clear ruling on whether the creation and distribution of P2P systems was legal. This is not quite the end of this particular case, since the Supreme Court basically said that the case of MGM v. Grokster could go to trial to determine intent. This trial will now take place. The ruling received a great deal of publicity, and there is a lot of coverage in the mainstream press - check Google News for a sample. If you want to see the source materials, including copies of the actual ruling and statements from the legal participants, the EFF has a very comprehensive collection of links.http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/ The Impact of Mercury Compounds in Vaccines The issue of mercury in vaccines and its possible link to autism is emotionally charged. Salon stokes the fire of concern to white-hot heat. It claims that transcripts of a conference held June 2000 reveal evidence that thimerosal, a mercury-containing antimicrobial compound used in vaccines, is linked to autism in children. According to the author, health organizations, drug companies, and politicians conspired to hide truths revealed in that conference from the public and to protect drug companies from legal action. Such wild and unlikely charges play into the hands of conspiracy theorists, of course. And critics of such claims worry about the catastrophic results if parents abandon vaccination for fear of mercury contamination. Unfortunately, the site that provides links to the actual conference transcript ignores that the science is far from definitive, as a calm reading clearly indicates. One major stumbling block is that mercury poisoning by itself mimics symptoms of autism. Although most major health organizations dismiss assertions of a link between autism and vaccines, parents are still left wondering. There's a lot to slog through, but if the issue concerns you, read the transcript, which reveals how top experts in a variety of fields responsibly wrestle with an extremely complex situation.Salon: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/16/thimerosal Transcript: http://www.autismhelpforyou.com?Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%Rico.htm Supercomputer Performance Advancing at Blistering Pace In the first edition of the Supercomputer Top 500 list, published in 1993, the top machine was a Thinking Machines supercomputer used for weapons simulations at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It came in with a LINPACK test score of 0.0597 teraflops per second (TFlop/s). This week, the IBM/Department of Energy BlueGene/L System at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the top spot with a LINPACK score of 136.8 TFlop/s. According to Top500, "The last system (#500) in June 2005 has about the same compute power as ALL 500 systems combined, when the list was first created 13 years ago in June 1993." BlueGene/L is likely to remain on top for several more years, since it is an extensible architecture and plans are afoot to double its size in the near future. The pace of innovation is blisteringly hot in supercomputers - half the machines on the list last November have been replaced with new installations and have dropped out of the top 500. The clear corporate leader is IBM, with half the machines on this year's list. If you're interested in how these machines work, check out the Overview of Recent Supercomputers at the site.Top500: http://www.top500.org/lists/2005/06/ Overview of Recent Supercomputers: http://www.top500.org/ORSC/2004/ Censorship, Registration, and Chinese Blogging Pity the poor Chinese blogger. Under a new law, anybody with a Web site in China, including bloggers, must by June 30 register with the government and submit their words to potential censorship. Chinese censorship is often haphazard or ineffective, mind you, but it is also occasionally draconian - blogging in China is a crapshoot, with a jail term if you lose. Online Journalism Review (OJR) rounds up recent stories of Chinese Internet restrictions, including accounts of Western companies that condone and enable the censorship. OJR tacks on an edited online roundtable of relevant participants: Andrea Leung, Chinese-Canadian blogger and Chinese blogging conference organizer; Julien Pain, a representative of Reporters Without Borders; Anne Stevenson-Yang, managing director of the Beijing United States Information Technology Office; and Xiao Qiang, founder of University of California-Berkeley's China Internet Project and human-rights activist. This is good background, beefed up with informed opinion.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050621glaser/ It's tempting to dismiss AOL's move to portalize itself as just another twitch in its prolonged death throes, a move of sheer desperation to stave off the inevitable. Still, AOL has a history of confounding its critics, and the company's plan to liberate many of the features that it previously made available only to members may provide new revenue and some competition for Yahoo. Among the features of AOL's new Web presence, now in beta, are e-mail, multimedia content, and RSS feeds. It plans to add instant-messaging functions later. AOL wants to hang on to its paying subscribers, however, and claims that those customers will have plenty of reasons to continue to pay up. This move may not do much to shore up AOL's stock price in the short term, but optimists may see it as a possible trigger for a turnaround. BetaNews reviews the goods. AOL: http://startpage.aol.com/beta.adp BetaNews: http://www.betanews.com/article/AOL_Preps_Image_Makeover_on_AOLcom/1119367834 Yahoo Closes User-Created Chat Rooms When some Yahoo advertisers learned their ads were appearing on user-created chat rooms that hosted discussions of sex with minors, they withdrew their ads. Yahoo was apparently astonished that such talk went on in chat rooms with titles like "Girls 13 and Under for Older Guys". Toss in a $10 million lawsuit over some explicit kid photos which showed up in Yahoo Groups years ago and the company did what it had to do. It shut down the users' ability to create their own chat rooms with potentially embarrassing names. We should note that it is still possible to use your browser or Yahoo Messenger to join Yahoo-created Yahoo Chat rooms. Presumably those are more stringently policed then the free-for-all user-created ones were. ZDNet has the story.Yahoo Chat: http://chat.yahoo.com/ ZDNet: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5759705.html More than 147 million people use eBay and it's likely that you've at least visited the place. While the site occasionally makes the news for weirdness such as the auction of a sandwich that looks like the Virgin Mary, eBay's press remains generally positive, masking a darker underbelly that's starting to turn off sellers. Too many of them and not enough buyers, increasing fraud, and rising fees are among the "features" that are combining to shift interest away from eBay. It's simple for shops to set up an independent online storefront, and advertising that store is dirt-cheap. As long as you stay away from spam and pop-ups, you can set up a place that brings in far more revenue than you'd get from using the auction site. At present, eBay is still a growing company, but its days may be numbered - its share value has fallen by 36% this year amid growing concerns, including the above-mentioned issues and poor customer relations. The Wall Street Journal has more. http://tinyurl.com/89jvh Machine Whupping Human Butt in Chess Match Man and computer are back at it, vying for chess supremacy. Eight years after Kasparov faced Deep Blue, Michael Adams, the UK's best chess player, is competing in a six-game tournament against Hydra, a computing cluster based in Abu Dhabi, for a prize of $150,000. Previously, Hydra has already lost 2-0 to Arno Nickel, a correspondence grandmaster, but Adams is having a much harder time of it against the aptly named system, having lost four games to the machine and drawn one. Hydra consists of 64 PCs powered by 3.06-GHz Xeon processors, although it is fighting with one arm tied behind its back and employing only 32 of those in the match. Even so, Hydra can calculate 200 million chess moves and select the best in one second, somewhat faster than your typical Sunday chess player. The official Hydra site offers each game played in a Java applet. We can't say that the fate of mankind rests on Adams's shoulders, but it would be nice for him to gain one win at least. Go, meat! CNET has a dated article.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-7337_3-5755445.html Hydra: http://tournament.hydrachess.com/ PartyGaming Gambles on Blockbuster IPO After it goes public later this month, PartyGaming may be worth as much as $9 billion. Aside from the obscene amount of money, what makes this particular IPO significant is that it is the first IPO of a major Internet gambling company. PartyGaming makes its money mainly from online poker and other gambling games. Based in Gibraltar for the gaming-friendly laws, the company is going public on the London Stock Exchange. The flotation is not without risks, the most obvious of which is that the company could run afoul of US gambling laws - worrying, since over 80% of PartyGaming's customers are in the US, and offering online gambling may or may not be against US law. Still, if the company can pull this off, it will obviously have the money to battle overseas legal challenges. The New York Times, BBC, and BusinessWeek all have stories about the impending stock sale.PartyGaming: http://www.partygaming.com/ Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/business/yourmoney/26poker.html BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4098900.stm BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_27/b3941046_mz011.htm Deal Delays Stringent Record-Keeping Rules for Some US Porn Sites The US Department of Justice (DOJ) was about to start enforcing a law that forces pornographers to keep records that prove their models are 18 years or older. The Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade group of the adult entertainment industry, agreed with US government prosecutors to put off enforcement until at least September, but only for FSC members. Until now, the government has targeted only major offline pornographers for investigation under that law. The DOJ was set to go after online porn sites, but the FSC has a hearing pending on the law's legality and brokered the deal with the government. The FSC saw a flurry of new memberships as webmasters of many small, explicit sites rushed to join up before a deadline. Wired reports how the threat of a crackdown cowed several sites, even non-porn publishers, into taking down nude photos in fear of the burdensome law. At press time, there was nary a boobie to be seen on RateMyBoobies.com. The FSC has a press release on the agreement.FSC: http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/ Wired: http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67991,00.html Tucked away in a remote corner of Google Labs is Google Ride Finder, which offers a glimpse of one kind of transportation future. Google Ride Finder couples Google Maps with information on the location of participating American taxis, limousines, and shuttles. You, a person who needs a ride, can take a look at the distribution of taxis and pick a company with a bunch of cars near you for your ride. It's not clear from the display whether all those cabs near you are actually available, and getting the dispatcher to get one to you in a timely manner may still be problematic, but it's only a matter of time before transportation companies routinely show the location and status of their vehicles online, possibly using the very technology Google is demonstrating here. At the moment you can find rides in 13 US cities. Have some fun looking at the vehicle distributions at different times of the day. http://labs.google.com/ridefinder Behind the Screens at DreamWorks DreamWorks is a studio to watch, even if your kids didn't love "Madagascar". Wired describes life at the studio, with particular attention to the roles of its famous founders - Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Steven Spielberg - and to the animation side of the operation, which often overlap. Katzenberg, the scourge of Disney's Michael Eisner, plays an active role in the studio's animation efforts. Also of interest is the incredible DreamWorks investment in editing technology, which drew Spielberg into the mix. Now, if there were only some pictures of Geffen's Boston terriers, the Wired piece would be irresistible.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/dreamworks.html You might have already read about the American Film Institute's (AFI) recent list of its choice of the top 100 movie quotes, but let us say that we were shocked, shocked to find that Mandy Patinkin's famous line from "The Princess Bride" - "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepeare to die." - didn't make the grade. True to our allusion, "Casablanca" sure did, with seven quotes, more than any other film - even if Captain Renault's mock expression of surprise did not. The AFI's site offers all 100 quotes, but neatly summarizes the stats in a few paragraphs at the bottom of the page. The top writer, quote-wise, is Billy Wilder; the top speaker, Humphrey Bogart - for evident statistical reasons. At the rest of the AFI site, movie lovers can paw through 100 years of great film stuff, from songs to laughs to tears. Don't expect movie files, though. http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/quotes.aspx NIST Suggests Revisions to Skyscraper Building Codes After the World Trade Center towers collapsed Sept. 11, 2001, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) launched an investigation of the structures and why they fell. The results led the NIST to suggest new construction codes for skyscrapers that will fuel heated debate for a while. The recommendations include paying extensive attention to the realities of evacuating a modern skyscraper. The details are voluminous, but are you going to want to work in a new high rise whose design doesn't reflect the many lessons of 9/11?http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_briefing_june2305.htm A First Look at Macs with Intel Inside Apple's next generation of Macs will be powered with Intel CPUs, as you've read, and the company has sent out examples of the technology to developers. The current hardware configuration includes a gigabyte of RAM and a 3.6-GHz P4 processor with 2 MB of L2 cache, married to an 800-MHz bus. If any of that makes sense to you, ThinkSecret's very brief look at the Apple Development Platform will pique your interest.http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0506intelmac.html The keyboard is the primary writing device of the modern age, and yet for such an important tool, it has seen surprisingly little innovation. We have the Dvorak keyboard, some slightly different ergonomic shapes of the classic key layout, and that neat butterfly keyboard from IBM, but that's about it for major innovations. Enter the new Ergodex DX1 keyboard, which lets you place the individual keys exactly where you want on a special pad. The sticky keys stay wherever you put them, and the keyboard comes with capable software that can assign all sorts of actions and macros to the keys. You can also print graphics to serve as custom key labels. The keyboard is clearly aimed at gamers who want to optimize key placement, and reviews at Tom's Hardware and GameSpot both look at the DX1 from that point of view. However, it's clear that the keyboard can also help people with limited hand mobility or can even make a more comfortable keyboard for people with large hands. Ergodex has plenty of pictures of the $150 device. Ergodex: http://www.ergodex.com/mainpage.htm Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050308/index.html GameSpot: http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-16045-1849-x-x-x Cheap J. Lo jokes aside, you may have noticed that the moon seems to blot out more of the sky when near the horizon than when it's high. The illusion was in effect during the most recent full moon and the BBC took note with an article that looked at the phenomenon. Nobody seems to really know why the moon seems so large, but it's easy to prove that the apparently huger moon is just an optical illusion. Hold a reference like a coin or ruler up to the moon and you can ascertain that it stays the same size, low or high. Whatever the real cause of the illusion, you can be sure that it is an illusion, no matter how real it looks. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4619063.stm Word in Londontown is that Queen Elizabeth II is the proud owner of a new silver 6-GB iPod mini. Naturally, everybody's dying to find out what she's got on it. In the absence of real information, San Francisco Chronicle music critic Aidin Vaziri has some speculation, proving yet again that deep down, Americans really miss not having royalty to obsess over or hack. Vaziri actually makes some decent song suggestions. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/24/DDGM1DD4N112.DTL Going to London? If so, you must check out this live version of Monopoly you can play with select London taxis. Our experience is that, unlike those navigating certain US cities, these cabbies always know where they are going. With this game you might even make some real money if you choose the right destination. Check out the site for all the details. http://www.monopolylive.co.uk/ ONLINE CULTURE A trivial post on Bruce Schneier's security blog opened a can of worms on everybody's favorite topic, at least among car-obsessed Americans: speeding. Schneier pointed out a Web site with analysis of and advice on radar detectors. The topic apparently hit a nerve; numerous readers jumped into the subsequent comment threads with strongly held opinions. The comments run the gamut, with debate on: the relative merits of radar detectors; situational awareness (those flight sims come in handy!); the sanity of speeding laws and drivers across the US and beyond; and so on. The threads are a fair snapshot of public sentiment on speeding - or perhaps we ought to say they are a fair snapshot of what educated males interested in security think of the issue. We're pretty sure some comment or other will push your button, which in our book makes the page hugely entertaining.http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/licenseplate_in.html The Flying-Spaghetti-Monster Theory of Creation In response to the Kansas Board of Eduction's heavy flirtation - nay, passionate love affair with the theory of intelligent design, Bob Henderson requests equal time for his Flying Spaghetti Monster theory of creation. This open letter to the Kansas board makes his case, an eloquent plea for the well rounded education of our schoolchildren. After an apparently enthusiastic public response to the letter, Janet Waugh, a member of the Kansas board, has come out for the idea but notes that she is in the minority. Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirts are available for purchase, as is a mug that "holds coffee AND pisses off Jesus." Before you write - it's his site, not ours.http://www.venganza.org/ A Dictionary of Windows Processes Some Windows users find them as familiar as the backs of their hands while others approach them with trepidation, as if they were unexpected knocks on the door at midnight. We're talking those processes in your Task Manager you see sucking up your resources - svchost.exe, alg.exe, and - what's this? - backweb.exe? Who installed that? What's it doing? You can answer your questions with ProcessLibrary.com, a resource that can identify all those seemingly autonomic programs your operating system runs in the background. What's in it for Uniblue, which provides this free service? It's banking on the fact that informed consumers may want to purchase their WinTasks product to help clean up their infected boxes. Checking the library is a win-win situation if you ask us.http://www.processlibrary.com/ Any hard-core eBay addict knows that one of the most onerous tasks of winning on eBay is figuring out what to leave as feedback. If that's actually holding you back from bidding on, say, 50 pounds of Victorinox-style Swiss pocket knives that the NTSA confiscated at airports, then the Surrealist has good news for you: the automatic eBay Feedback Generator. The automatic feedback is no more inane than the stuff you probably leave already, for example, "Item is of outstanding quality! Delivery was remarkably speedy. Great packaging." Of course, the bad news is you could have thought of that yourself, couldn't you? And that doesn't fit within eBay's stringent limit on allotted characters. There's much more of this kind of word and phrase generation at the Surrealist, including such must-haves as "What's Your Spammer Name?" and the Infinite Teen Slang Dictionary. http://thesurrealist.co.uk/ ONLINE TRAVEL Photography of Indigenous Peoples Earth Pilgrim features the breathtakingly beautiful photography of Sacha Dean Biyan, a self-described gypsy fluent in five languages. With his camera, Biyan has traveled to the farthest reaches of our globe. His photography emphasizes portraits of indigenous peoples, although his Web site also includes a number of stunning landscapes. Perhaps his greatest strength as a photographer is that he approaches his subjects with a tremendous degree of respect and humility. Accordingly, the native people he captures in pixels radiate a dignity firmly rooted in our common humanity.http://www.sachabiyan.com/ Ancient Astronomy in the Americas There are many sites with material about Chaco Canyon, in the Four Corners region of the American southwest. We've featured a few before. This one, Traditions of the Sun, sponsored in part by NASA, is among the most comprehensive we've seen - and yet, that's only half the site. Traditions of the Sun takes the same in-depth approach to Mayan civilization, the link being how both cultures spent resources on astronomy, which explains NASA's interest as well. The site offers impressive QuickTime VR panoramas, like one of the 700-room Pueblo Bonito structure at Chaco. In addition to the panoramas, ground-based and satellite photography, and movies, this rich site also offers descriptive text that explains exactly what you're seeing. It's entirely possible that, following a virtual trip through here, visits to Chaco and the Yucatan will creep into your travel itinerary.http://www.traditionsofthesun.org/ The unsuccessful launch of Cosmic 1 at sea means that there are no easily recoverable remnants. Heck, even a successful launch would have left bupkus. When Russia launches rockets from the land-locked Baikonur space facility in Kazakhstan, however, the expended fuel tanks and booster stages fall on the surrounding country. People living under the flight path have to contend with flaming wreckage in their back yards, and scrap-metal dealers enrich themselves pursuing and hawking the titanium-alloy debris. EurasiaNet has a photo-essay with a lead photo that pays ironic homage to Khazakstan's cultural version of "American Gothic". The slide show depicts this rocket debris in pastoral settings - although we're not quite sure how the dead cows enter the picture. http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/articles/eav041902.shtml The Museum of Sex aspires to record the sexual histories and views of everyday Americans with its Mapping Sex in America site. A quick browse reveals submitted tales that range from funny to erotic to touching to occasionally what appears to be strictly wishful thinking. Many of the experiences read like good old Penthouse Forum, without the literary polish and with fewer students at large midwestern universities than you'd expect. There are two ways to enjoy the museum. Most people, we guess, will be content to remain strictly vicarious, tickled and informed by the sexual peccadilloes of others. The bold among us will get active, spill the beans, put their hometowns on the sexual map of the US. For once and for all. http://www.museumofsex.com/USAmap/ It's just a way to get you to visit the British Airways (BA) Web site, but the airline has an ingenious bit of Flash coding that presents a small selection of London slang and translates it into American English. While it's worth a squiz, there are more complete collections of British slang on the Web, including a good bit of space devoted to the inscrutable Cockney rhyming slang, which has pretty much become a cliche by now. For one of the better explanations of rhyming slang, head to the scrutably titled Cockney Rhyming Slang site. There you can find out why "Nelson Mandela" is slang for beer and why "Ned Kelly" is short for television. More colorful, mainly because of the richer variety of slang for being drunk (bolloxed, langered, locked, motherless, mouldy, twisted, and so on) is the collection of Irish slang at IrishAbroad. What is it with the world? Where have all the spaces between words gone? BA: http://london.ba.com/index.asp?word=know Cockney Rhyming Slang: http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/ IrishAbroad: http://www.irishabroad.com/Culture/Slang/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Intertitle-o-Rama contains a blast from the distant past when what we currently refer to as silent films were known as photo plays. The site features an archive of screenplays that date from October 1912 to January 1931. Some choice titles include Shakespeare-based "The Life and Death of King Richard III", "Uncle Tom's Cabin", "Tom Sawyer", and about four different selections with "Oz" in the title - which about proves that Hollywood's penchant for plundering source material from the literary world isn't exactly a recent phenomenon. Of interest to film buffs and cultural historians is the controversial "The Birth of a Nation", which was the all-time top box-office winner in its day and which revitalized the extinct Ku Klux Klan. Intertitle-o-Rama also contains several links dedicated to silent film and is a likely source of pleasure to anyone interested in the dinosaur days of Hollywood.http://geocities.com/emruf5/ Joyce Shelby, artist, likes to mix things up a bit. Altered Books and ATC Projects - ATC is short, we think, for "art trading cards" - are two of the hottest things to hit paper since the invention of moveable type. Both are displayed on her Web site along with other non-traditional takes on collage, including the use of puzzle pieces and paint cans. http://www.vaguelyartistic.com/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.hitchensweb.com/ In 1925, E. Franklin Phillips, a professor of apiculture at Cornell, decided to establish a library to support the study of beekeeping. He convinced hundreds of beekeepers in New York State to donate to the library up to $50 in profit from one of their hives. Today, the E. F. Phillips Beekeeping Collection at the Mann Library is one of the world's major repositories of apiculture books, pamphlets and other scholarly publications. The library has digitized a small selection of its collection and placed it online. A panel of scholars chose the ten books to put online for "their historic importance and usefulness to beekeepers today." Some of the books date back to the middle of the 19th century, but all of them are presented with multiple search options, fully reproduced illustrations, and the complete text. If you are or if you are thinking about going into the beekeeping business, if you're a student of apiculture, or if the raising of honeybees is a skill you'd like to know more about, this collection is a treasure trove. http://bees.library.cornell.edu/ Cultural, Technological, and Financial Evolution Since 1642 How the heck did we get here? Would you like to read about it in a free book? Former venture capitalist Andy Kessler, the author of "Wall Street Meat" and "Running Money", casts his usual irreverent and slightly jaundiced eye on more than four centuries of alleged evolution in the partnership between invention and cash, ending with today's Silicon Valley and Wall Street, in his latest, "How We Got Here". It's a primer on the ways in which new technologies develop from unprofitable curiosities to essential investments. A work of this caliber and subject matter requires an innovative high-tech marketing trick, so Pragmatic Programmers is standing by to provide your personalized PDF corollary of the book. Instructions await at Kessler's page. The cloyingly cute yet compelling attraction of a personalized copy is, judging from the server's slow response, extremely popular.http://andykessler.com/hwgh.html If you sprinkle your conversation with words everyone else has to look up, you seem smarter, or possibly dumber. If you use really cool new buzzwords, however, you look cooler. And if your chosen ultramodern words aren't even in the dictionary yet, you get ginormous cool points. Woot! The trick is not only finding these neat words, but knowing the current hottest words. Nothing is so yesterday as last year's buzzwords. Some of them are even in the dictionary already. Merriam-Webster Online is your guide to literate geek chic. Chillax and visit its report on its audience's favorite words that aren't in the dictionary. Don't stop with the top ten favorites, but peruse a mini-dictionary of previous entries to avoid confuzzling your audience. It's easy. http://m-w.com/info/favorite.htm We all judge books by their covers no matter how much we claim to rely on reviews and good writing. If we didn't judge books that way, buying them would take hours. Instead, we spot a quirky image or pleasing font on the cover and we're lured into picking it up. We sample a few pages and... - bingo, the money is in the register. Now, imagine a strange world where the bad book covers go to die. You know the ones, the ones on books you find in flea markets, shoved down the side of cardboard boxes of items that simply never sell. They're cheap and look tacky and are often stuck firmly in a retro era that taste has simply forgotten. Luckily for those sad books, one enthusiast has begun collecting them for the sheer comedy value of their exteriors. Each one is scanned, posted online, and carefully mocked. Go see just how bad it can get when kitsch meets paper. http://punkrockpenguin.net/waste/amuse/badcovers/ Three sites are vying for the title of IMDb of comic books. It's no small feat, especially considering the IMDb was created entirely by fans and the market for comic books is far smaller than the market for movies. Of course, by the same token, comic book fans tend to be a bit... obsessive, which is always good for populating a database. The Comic Characters Data Base (CCDB) focuses on fleshing out the stories of over 2,300 unique characters in comic books. The Comic Book Database (CBDB) seems to fall somewhere between that and the Grand Comic-Book Database (GCD), which we covered in NSD 11.01. The GCD specializes in covers and to date has more than 80,000 online. It's difficult to choose a best among these three sites, since the most appropriate resource depends on what you're looking for. If only they could combine their powers for good.... CCDB: http://pc59te.dte.uma.es/cdb/index.htm CBDB: http://www.cbdb.com/ NSD 11.01: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.01.html#BEZ9 SURFING SCIENCE Causes of Color seeks to find out why things are colored. It uses a variety of techniques from chemistry, physics, and even philosophy to solve the mystery. The online exhibit is probably aimed at teenagers and adults, particularly those parents trying to learn why the sky is blue for their inquisitive five-year-olds. At least you'll understand why and recognize the bits where you're stretching the truth because your kid hasn't yet grasped the concept of atmosphere. The interactive exhibits, such as the ones on colorblindness, are particularly well executed.http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/ SOFTWARE BadApple Plug-in for iTunes Podcasts At some point, Apple is going to add explicit support for podcasts to iTunes. Podcasts are really only long, often dull sound files, the 21st century equivalent of talk radio on cassette. Still, it's a fad, and since iTunes lets you look you for streaming broadcasts, why not podcasts, too? At least, so think the anonymous folks behind BadFruit, an outfit that just released the BadApple iTunes plug-in, ironically for the Windows version of iTunes only. The plug-in adds another link, called Podcasts, to the main iTunes window. Click on the link and you get a list of podcast categories. Drill down to download specific podcasts in iTunes and use them as you would any other iTunes sound file. BadApple claims to be pre-emptive insurance against any potential limitations Apple may place on the podcasts it may offer in future versions of iTunes. CNET speculates that MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, who now has a new site called MP3Tunes.com, is the anonymous author of BadFruit.BadFruit: http://www.badfruit.com/ CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5754227.html MP3Tunes.com: http://www.mp3tunes.com/ |
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