More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, July 04, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 26 Monday, July 04, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Out-of-this-World Fireworks on the Fourth of July The Deep Impact comet probe successfully penetrated the Tempel 1 comet early July 4 (EDT). Its 385-kg copper projectile threw up a cloud of cometary debris, which the stand-off, flyby spacecraft photographed and analyzed with on-board instruments. Subsequently, the flyby craft traveled through the debris cloud, approaching as close as 500 kilometers to the comet's body. NASA continues to download data, and already has plenty of details and pictures at the mission Web site.http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/?skipIntro=1 The 125 Most Important Questions Facing Science To celebrate its 125th anniversary, Science magazine put together a special series of articles that look at the top 125 scientific questions of our time. The content is mostly a collection of essays which consider the big questions facing science over the next quarter century or so. In addition to the articles, Science invites readers to discuss the selections and perhaps suggest their own in an online forum. Other essays and slide shows provide global perspectives on the practice of science as they highlight scientific research from around the world. Registered users of the Web site can also take a look at the first two issues of Science, published in 1880.http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/125th/ Cassini Anniversary Photo Contest To celebrate the first anniversary of Cassini at Saturn, NASA is running a contest to choose the most popular photo of all returned by the probe. The Web site presents 15 great images for you to vote on. The winner will be announced "in early July", so hurry.http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/poll/index.cfm Cosmos 1 Solar-Sail Failure Analyses The Cosmos 1 mission to test a solar sail, backed by the Planetary Society, failed. Something went wrong with the launch vehicle, the Russian submarine-launched Volna rocket apparently suffered an early-burn shutdown. Evidence in the form of weak radio signals may indicate that the spacecraft achieved a low orbit which subsequently decayed and sent the vehicle plunging into the sea. The Planetary Society has several reports and analyses of the launch and of the aftermath, when everybody scrambled in attempts to find out what happened from the rather tight-lipped Russians. The Cosmos 1 site also has videos of the launch that show the Volna taking off from the submarine Borisoglebsk.http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/ US Supreme Court: Governments Can Expropriate Private Land "Live free or die", reads New Hampshire's state motto. As a direct result of the recent US Supreme Court decision that allows governments to seize private property for private development if it's in the public good - "including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue", said the court - life could soon get more interesting for Justice David Souter. Souter ruled with the Supreme Court's majority on the case. A private developer has applied to build a hotel on property that at present is Souter's home. As outgoing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her stinging dissent, "Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random." It appears that she may have been deliciously prescient. If the hopeful developer of the future Lost Liberty Hotel can demonstrate that the project would provide appreciable benefits to the community, Souter may soon be house-hunting. Read the Lost Liberty Hotel press release for giggles, and the Supreme Court decision at FindLaw for tears. There's also CNN's take on the decision.Lost Liberty Hotel: http://www.freestarmedia.com/hotellostliberty2.html FindLaw: http://tinyurl.com/aeq2w CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/23/scotus.property.ap/ The Latest World Trade Center Towers Replacement If you count the antenna on the top, New York City's replacement for the World Trade Center towers, dubbed the Freedom Tower, will reach exactly 1,776 feet. Coincidental with the year of American independence? We think not. Discarding Daniel Libeskind's previous design, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has opted for a single monolithic tower. Touted for its environmentally friendly design, which includes using rainwater for cooling and irrigation, the design finds itself nonetheless subject to scathing review by those fun-loving folks at the New York Times. Using descriptions like "a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top", the Times picks up a head of indignant steam. The embodiment of a world shaped by fear, as The Times would have it - or a new "beacon of freedom", as the architects spin it out? Take a look at the pictures and what the politicos have to say, then spin through the Times editorial (registration required, but free).LMDC: http://tinyurl.com/74czb Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/arts/30appraisal.htm? Suck was new, Suck was brash, Suck was geeky and it all began a decade ago. This is Matt Sharkey's story of how Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff put together Suck, which we in NSD 1.38 called "Worth checking out for that superior snigger." Sharkey's detailed slice of nostalgia dramatically underscores how far we've come - and that ain't all good - since those early days when anything seemed possible. It started as a side project amid the free and easy early days of HotWired, online offspring of Wired magazine, with Steadman and Anuff and later others working insane hours. Suck's creators were exasperated by how the bosses at Wired and the offline media just didn't get the new worldwide Web. They bought their own server, hooked up to the company T1, and basically lived on the premises. They succeeded brilliantly, attracting a lot of attention. Suck made nobody rich, and in the end, Wired, in deep financial doodoo, pulled the plug. Today, Steadman is keeper of the flame, preserving the Suck archives and providing a classic column a day. Sharkey: http://www.keepgoing.org/issue20_giant/the_big_fish.html NSD 1.38: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v01/nsd.95.12.07.html#BEZ1 We, for One, Welcome Our Google Earth Overlords If you have a broadband connection and Windows, you must immediately try to download the new, and free, Google Earth application. Google has stopped offering the beta software, at least temporarily, but it's not exaggerating to say that Google Earth is going to change the way you view your very planet, let alone any travel destination. This new Google service allows you to use satellite imagery, a by-product of Google's Keyhole acquisition, to fly to any location on Earth and view your destination from a virtual altitude of about 3,000 feet above the ground, at least to start. Check out your house, or the capital of your country. It really is amazing and best seen rather than described, although SearchEngineWatch manages a pretty good approximation. Google promises support for other platforms is coming.Google Earth: http://earth.google.com/ SearchEngineWatch: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3516001 Yahoo is publicly beta-testing its My Web 2.0 service, which lets users save not just Web links but actual content in a cache provided by Yahoo. You can tag the content, search it, and make it available to your My Web contacts via e-mail, instant messaging, or RSS. Since the content is saved on Yahoo's computers, you can access it from anywhere. The service seems similar to Google's My Search History, except Google doesn't offer the abilities to share or annotate. The collaborative end result is essentially a community-run search engine. In theory, this is cool; in practice, we weren't all that impressed. We're also curious about the sites My Web allegedly imported, since we're pretty sure they are not all in our bookmarks. Still, why not take the new service out for a click or two? http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/default The BBC has announced that on July 15 it will kill Cult, its site dedicated to cult TV, and the action has been met with disbelief by fans. Cult offers features, images, and video of all sorts of fringe and not-so-fringe TV shows, some contemporary, others classic. It has material on everything from "The Simpsons" to classics like "Dr. Who" and "The Prisoner", to obscure BBC shows like "Star Cops" and Spike Milligan's surreal comedy series, "Q". The site apparently placed second in audience popularity in a recent BBC survey. Money is at the root of the closure; the UK government has cut the BBC budget. In comments that followed the BBC's announcement that Cult would close, fans are incredulous that such a cool resource would be so blithely tossed. In its response, the BBC noted that much of the content is available elsewhere and that it chose to close those sites "which we felt did not offer sufficient distinctive public value for the investment required." Sounds like something you'd hear on "Yes, Minister". BBC Cult: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ Announcement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/cult/2005/06/24/20186.shtml BBC Response: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/news/2005/06/29/20281.shtml "Yes, Minister": http://tinyurl.com/349ey Trent Reznor Releases More Music for Fan Remixes The recent release of the Nine Inch Nails single "The Hand That Feeds" in Apple's GarageBand format was such a hit that Trent Reznor decided to do it again. This time, he's releasing the single "Only", but in even more formats. You can download the "Only" music files in GarageBand, Sony Acid Xpress, DigiDesign Pro Tools, and Ableton Live formats. This gives you plenty of options should you decide to mix your own version of the song, on Windows and Linux as well as Mac OS X. You can find the "The Hand That Feeds" remixes at the The Hand That Feeds Remixes site."Only": http://nin.com/access/only/ The Hand That Feeds Remixes: http://www.thtffanremixes.cjb.net/ iTunes Begat iPods, and iPods Begat Podcasts As we released last issue to the wild, our speculation that Apple would release podcast support for iTunes was coming true. iTunes offers an enormous selection of free podcasts as part of the iTunes Music Store, so you won't get bored anytime soon. In a press release, Apple boasts that iTunes users downloaded more than a million podcasts in the first two days the company made them available. And you can even upload your own if you so desire. Apple's page on podcasting will help get you into the swing of things, but you need iTunes to get the goods. Apple's list of most popular downloads provides a glimpse into the podcast preferences of the iTunes user base. In the US, the top three podcasts were for the iTunes new-music feed, "The Al Franken Show", and Rebotcast, a synthesized computer voice reading news from the BBC. Speaking of iThings, Fast Company has lent design mavens some space to argue over the design of the iPod. Some of it reads like sour grapes, especially the Archos designer who claims that the iPod isn't an example of good design because its internal technology isn't cool enough. And how many of us have ever seen an Archos player for comparison?Apple Podcasting: http://www.apple.com/podcasting/ Apple press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/30podcast.html Fast Company : http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/fast-talk-extra.html Slingbox Routes Your TV Feed over the Net, Anywhere TiVo gave us the ability to time-shift our television feed. The Slingbox from Sling Media now gives us the ability to shift our feed in space. This simple little video gadget lets you channel your TV connection through a router and out into the Internet. You can then watch your own TV feed from anywhere you can find a broadband connection. Hook up your cable/satellite/TiVo video output to the Slingbox, install the software (Windows only at the moment), and take your laptop to the nearest cafe with WiFi. Order a latte, start up the video stream, and you can watch your Mexican novellas. You hog the bandwidth from other customers, but never mind - you're obviously way cooler than they are. You have full control of your TV feed - with a clip-on infrared emitter, you can control everything that you can with your remote control at home. The quality is variable, and obviously depends on the quality of your broadband connection. Still, this is revolutionary. For $250, you can basically take your TiVo anywhere you can take your laptop. Think about that for a while. LiveDigitally has a review that explains it all. Sling Media has links to other reviews.Sling Media: http://www.slingmedia.com/ LiveDigitally: http://www.livedigitally.com/?p=288 If you're in the market for a new ISP, PC World's survey of over 6,000 readers can help you winnow your choices. Unsurprisingly, broadband users are happier than dial-up customers with their ISPs, and it doesn't matter much whether the broadband is delivered by cable or DSL. Dial-up users still abound in the US, however, and their clear favorite was AT&T Worldnet. AOL was at the other end of that list. The big stumbling block among most ISPs? Customer support. Regardless of what you're looking for or what you already have, the PC World article has some good tips for maximizing the value of your dollar. http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120341,pg,1,00.asp Internet Posts Record Number of New Hosts The monthly Netcraft host survey shows record growth in the number of new hostnames. In the last month alone, the number of hostnames grew by 2.76 million to a record 67,571,581. This is the largest monthly gain since March 2003, when the number of hostnames increased by 3.3 million in a spurt of growth that is still going strong - and at a record pace this year. Netcraft attributes the surge to several factors: increasing use of the Net by small businesses; the explosive growth of blogs, which snap up new domains; and strong online ad sales, which support blogs and domain-parking businesses. Netcraft has a graph of hostname population, along with graphs for the server software that runs all those domains - it boils down to Apache (70%) and Microsoft IIS (20%).http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/01/july_2005_web_server_survey.html NARA Plans for Preserving US Government Archives In the good old days, when text records were purely paper, it was relatively easy to gather the memos, correspondence, log books, and other records generated by government activity and to create lasting archives for safe storage and retrieval. Ironically, now that we are bound more tightly than ever before by communications of all kinds, it is much harder to capture those scratches of history because most of them are electronic. Electronic records pose many new problems for archivists, like the sheer plethora of different data formats and the impermanence of digital media. There's much more stuff to save these days and it's not easy to sift the good stuff from the dross. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is responsible for meeting these challenges. Working with science and industry, NARA is preparing for an onslaught of records from a host of departments. Technology Review looks at the difficulties NARA faces and how it plans to overcome them.http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/feature_memory.asp Open CRS Hosts Public Congressional Research Service Reports The Congressional Research Service (CRS), part of the Federation of American Scientists, is a taxpayer-supported organization that provides Congress with reports on countless issues, from North Korea to the nation's agricultural price-support system. Alas, it is nearly impossible to get access to CRS reports, and not just for the public - even the White House has a problem getting the reports. Open CRS is an attempt to build an inventory of CRS reports in the public domain for anyone to view. A CRS report only enters the public domain once a member of Congress releases it, so to help the project grow all Americans have to do is request reports from their representatives.CRS: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/index.html Open CRS: http://www.opencrs.com/ ONLINE CULTURE An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating Researchers from the University of Chicago and MIT have analyzed data obtained from an unnamed major online dating service to try to uncover how the online dating market works. The data followed all activities for 23,000 users in Boston and San Diego on the dating service for three-and-a-half months in 2003. The researchers wanted to compare the experience of the online daters to existing economic models of mate selection and mate preference. After much crunching of data, they conclude that both sexes care strongly about the physical appearance of potential mates and that a woman's choice depends strongly on the income and education of the men. Obvious, yes... - but now backed up by actual online behavior! The paper, which came out last fall, is fairly scholarly, but the New York Times has a recent story based on the research. Co-author Ali Hortacsu has an impressive collection of other papers, many dealing with the economics of online auctions. Worth browsing.Paper: http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/kilts/research/qme/papers/hitsch.pdf Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/technology/30scene.html Hortacsu: http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/paperscons.htm
SURFING SITES The folks behind Independent World Television (IWT) are sick and tired of big media, and they aren't going to take it any more, but rather than raise the window and holler into the streets, they're building their own global news channel. IWT is cobbling together broadcast-style news from Web and freelancer components. It's a huge and admirable attempt, being built from the ground up without corporate or governmental sponsorship. One of the things IWT plans to do is bring depth to the reporting, which some complain is lacking in American broadcast news. IWT doesn't have much news available at the moment, but it's still worth a visit for the 15-minute "Birth of a Network" video, for starters.http://www.iwtnews.com/ Derren Brown's Hypnotic Video-Game Trick There's something slightly discomfiting about watching a hypnotist. Maybe it's because hypnotism is demonstrably real, unlike mentalism or fortune-telling. It may be thinking, as someone else goes under, "That could be me." Watching Derren Brown, the UK magician-hypnotist, prowl London streets a la David Blaine and work his "magic" on people is at turns surreal and at other times ridiculous. He's infamous for a Russian roulette trick on TV (spoiler: he didn't shoot himself), but we like him because he seems to follow those magicians, like Penn and Teller or James Randi, who take issue with scam artists. In fact, he often explains how his tricks work. Wikipedia's article on Brown relates some of his efforts to this end. That's why we're loath to believe Brown's tricks rely on creative video editing, even this amazing "Real Zombies" clip from one of his shows. He sends a video gamer into a trance with light pulses, transports the kid to a set that mimics the video-game setting, and wakes him. Again mimicking the game, actors dressed as zombies relentlessly surround the kid, who freaks. Once brought back to the video version and revived, the gamer tells his friends, "It was good, weren't it? Wicked! The game's so real, it's like you're actually in it." Wicked, indeed. Channel 4 offers more Brown delights.Brown: http://www.derrenbrown.co.uk/ Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown "Real Zombies": http://www.kontraband.com/show/show.asp?ID=2349 Channel 4: http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/M/mindcontrol/video/ As if they didn't have enough problems through history, now Jews have to apologize to the world for Kenny G and Barry Manilow. Kidding aside, while the Jewish people are known for their contributions in many cultural arenas, rock 'n roll probably wouldn't be the first you'd think of. Not necessarily so after you visit Jewsrock.org, a virtual shrine to the Jewish stars of modern popular music. Start with the Challah Fame, an eye-opening encyclopedia of rockers, whose members include Gene Simmons (ne Chaim Witz), Beck (by birth, anyway), Lou Reed and many more. Before we ruin it for you, the first thing to check out at the site is the quiz; when you're finished that, check out the Shul of Rock for insightful articles on Jewish rockers, Jewish influence on rock, and related topics, such as how Sammy Davis Jr. came to convert. We especially liked "Dropping the Baum: The Real Names of Jewish Rockers". Other features include photos of the stars and thumbnails of Jewishly-themed tattoos - forbidden, by the way, under Torah law. A search feature would be nice but there's plenty of material here to help you impress your friends the next time you go to shul. http://www.jewsrock.org/ What Do You Want to Do in Life? We've all known for years that the best way to get things done is to make a list. So why don't we get around to listing our life's goals? 43 Things helps folks answer that question with their lists of things - 124,851 things for 34,271 people at press time, to be precise, but each individual gets to list 43 (there's considerable overlap). Start by browsing the site's most popular goals and then create your own list. You'll spend hours reading other inspiring lists and learning about goals you've never even thought of. You can even find members near you with similar goals and form your own support group. Make a public commitment with your list, post a photo, share your progress, or cheer others on to their goals.http://www.43things.com/ The Less than Eloquent Mayor of Boston One of our reviewers has had the odd experience of going to Boston and being mistaken for that city's mayor, Tom Menino. He apparently even sort of sounds like him. This never really bothered him (the free sandwich at Patsy's was nice) until we asked him to check out this Tom Menino site, which goes to lengths to explain the mayor's nickname, "Mumbles". The site features a large number of audio clips, most of which involve "Mumbles" Menino mangling the language. Menino doesn't explore the edges of English in the way Yogi Berra does, but he's in the running. Our reviewer claims that while he looks the part and almost sounds the part (too Brooklynese, he claims), he does at least write better. Menino has been the mayor of Boston for so long that he must be doing something right. Can the Presidency be far behind?http://www.mumblesmenino.us/mumbling.htm If you think air travel is unpleasant as a passenger, try doing it for a living. Professional airline pilot Joe d'Eon is kind enough to share his and other airline employees' experiences in the air and on the ground in this series of quarter-hour-or-so-long "Fly With Me" audio clips. Some of the stories wax nostalgic from days of yore when air travel and glamor weren't mutually exclusive and Pan Am served prime rib cooked to order, at least in first class. The stories get a lot less appetizing when employees relate tales of woe and degradation at the hands of passengers and other crew members. Airplane geeks will appreciate the snippets of bona fide pilot chatter, which help fill those long, dull hours 31,000 feet over the Pacific. If you fly often, whether for business or for your vacations, take a couple of hours to understand how the industry looks from the cockpit or behind the galley curtain. http://joepodcaster.libsyn.com/ Flash Paper-Airplane Tutorials Does your cubicle farm need a new diversion? Are you a teenager trolling the Web to find a quick science project? Are you trying to entertain a bored six-year-old? Christian Lowe promises to solve all your problems with his Flash animations of the process of folding paper airplanes. Choose one of five models or run them all while you fold the paper. Stop the animation, reverse it, or rotate the finished product to view its hidden details. Design testing is up to you. When you're done, check out Lowe's cool home page with its subway-train interface.http://www.lowe-tech.com/portfolio/paperplanes.asp Psssst! Wanna score some gadgets? Woot's got the goods for you: home theatre systems, computers, spy cameras... care for a robot lawnmower? Got it, man. You might even consider the ultimate prize for the humanoid that's got it all: a bag of crap. A bag of crap! And everything is available at extreme bargain prices! Curiosity aroused? There's a gimmick, however, and it may not be the gimmick you suspect. The bargains are real, but the items are limited in stock and are only available until sold out. Frequently, that means for only minutes. You may find yourself clicking here often - not to find new offers, because the RSS-savvy will beat you to them, but for the breezy and subversive product descriptions and "Woot?" FAQ. These pages come from a keyboard manned by someone whose sense of humor and English-language skills appear to fire on all available cylinders. http://www.woot.com/ The problem with dieting is wading through all those low-something products and hyped claims - unless you just decide to eat sensible non-processed foods, but who does that? Even scientific studies are suspect when they're funded by the very industry they benefit. Fortunately, Tanya Taylor's I.Ate.A.Pie.Net site hosts user reviews of such foods. She's a PhD candidate in food science at Auburn University and has a passion for accuracy and good taste. Her taste-testers rate foods marketed as light, fat-free, low-carb, and anything else meant to appeal to dieters. Users rate foods on a five-star scale and readers can add their own comments. Taylor's database is packed, and she also links to sites with nutrition data, weight-loss plans, relevant warnings, and several different calculators. One of the best features is the "Top 5 Fast Food Choices" article; Whoppers didn't make the list. The advice seems to work - site staffer Jon Clarke has lost 58 pounds without giving up his Southern cooking. http://www.iateapie.net/ Chile-Head is a place chile-heads are gonna love. In addition to being a lovely little shrine to 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide (otherwise known as capsaicin), Chile-Head offers great tips for germinating and growing peppers. As well, the recipe database holds more than 1,000 takes on chili - sometimes made with chiles, sometimes in Chile. The site also reviews a range of hot snacks, from "ass kickin'" peanuts and jellybeans to chili beer to chocolate and chili ice cream (is there nothing they won't make ice cream out of?). And although it may feel different to you, there is no evidence that hot pepper consumption causes ulcers nor hemorrhoids, so feel free to eat them with, um, relish. http://www.g6csy.net/chile/ Beatles Philosophy is "dedicated to the exegesis and deconstruction of Fab-four-philosophy." Said exegesis places random snippets of Beatles lyrics under the magnifying lens of philosophical thought. A word of caution: this page requires at least a passing acquaintance with the creatures that inhabit the philosophical jungle. Otherwise, expect a "Hard Day's Night" while trying to extract either insight, nuance, or humor from the musings contained therein. Which is another way of saying that this page is, first and foremost, an academic philosophy in-joke. And that John, Paul, George and Ringo are merely visiting this particular planet. Still interested? Give it a go: visitors are encouraged to add their own nickel's worth - if, indeed, they are "fellow Beatles scholars". Obladi oblada, indeedy. http://weka.ucdavis.edu/%7Eahwiki/bin/view/Main/BeatlesPhilosophy After the mysterious disappearance of Andrew Baio's Infocom bots (we suspect Dr. Lucky in the Cube Farm with the Airzooka; see NSD 10.12), you may be jonesing for your retro text-adventure fix. If so, go to Play Infocom Adventures Online (PIAO), as long as you can load an applet. Set aside a day this weekend to finally complete Suspended - the grass keeps growing, whether you mow it or not. Satisfy your craving to find out what exactly was involved in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. (See, you didn't even remember that until we brought it up, did you? We're all about surfacing repressed memories here.) Explain the order of the grate, the towel, the hook, and the Babelfish to your kid who's just seen the movie version of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". PIAO: http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Epot/infocom/ NSD 10.12: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.12.html#SS12 Launch browser. Go to site. Verbose. Read "A History of 'Adventure'". Reminisce over simpler times. Yes, we know we do not have the "simpler times". Work with us in the way that the rigorous linguistic structure of early text games could not. This is all you need to know and then some about Colossal Cave Adventure, more frequently known as simply Adventure. Annotated Adventure lets you play, and supplies a commentary as you go. The games origins and the history article we cited above await you at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page. History of Adventure: http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/ Annotated Adventure: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/adventure/index.html Sudoku comes from the Japanese words "su" and "doku", meaning "single" and "number". Sudoku puzzles are like numeric crossword puzzles, and they've taken Japan, Australia, and the UK by storm. The concept is simple: a nine-by-nine square is subdivided into nine three-by-three squares. Arrange nine sets of the numbers one through nine so that each number appears only once in each row, column, and three-by-three square. Complicate the effort slightly by establishing a few numbers before you begin, and you have a sudoku puzzle. It's easier to understand when you see it, for example at Rules of Sudoku or the Australian Sudoku site. Some think sudoku is poised to take off in North America, but we're skeptical. Although, if it does, someone will turn it into cheesy reality TV and Oprah Winfrey will eventually have guests who are trying to kick their sudoku addiction and reconnect with their families, while the rest of the world moves on to bigger sudokus that include numbers and letters. Rules of Sudoku: http://www.puzzle.jp/letsplay/sudokuruleflash-e.html Sudoku: http://www.sudoku.com.au/ Now and then, disco divas will exhort us to shake our booties, but have you considered shaking your face instead? Shakeskin promotes the shaking of faces so as to perturb the loose skin on your face and capture a random facial distortion through snapshot. Once accomplished, send your masterpiece to the site for inclusion in the gallery of shaken faces. We particularly loved Shakeskin's FAQ, which answers all kinds of questions as well as the expected "How do I upload my photo?" The animated How to section is pretty good, too. Sometimes we all have to do something a little crazy and shaking your face definitely falls into that category. http://www.shakeskin.com/ FLOTSAM & JETSAM "From Stettin in the Baltic..." Churchill's famous 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech, given at Westminster College in Missouri, comes to life in this Flash presentation. The 44-minute speech is at times amusing, at times stirring, and given the politics of our times, disarmingly frank in assessing the immediate post-war world status.http://www.churchillspeeches.com/index.htm The God of Thunder uses his hammer to good effect as he rolls a joint. The subsequent trip is hilarious, but one wonders what becomes of the giant chicken given the munchie-inducing properties of weed. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoned-thor/sets/274424/show/ Rachel Stevens Wants You to Fondle Your Testicles Brit singer Rachel Stevens has some advice for guys that involves firm, round fruit. Possibly unsafe for work, though it really is a public service message. Really.http://www.rachelgetsfruity.com/flash.html Freaky Rag-Doll Woman in String Bikini Take a girl in a string bikini. Add some spheres. Animate. Freak out because this is not at all what they expect. Let her freefall or click on her and drag her. Kind of disturbing, don't you think?http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/tetka.html We call this the art of the pathetic mugshot. These guys are all caught either soliciting or being prostitutes in Chicago. As they say on Cops: "These individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law." But that doesn't stop the Chicago Police Department from exhibiting them on the Web. http://www.chicagopolice.org/ps/list.aspx If you're a guy who travels, you'll have noticed a vast variety of urinal designs. Most of them are aggressively utilitarian and boring. Not so these creations from Clark Sorensen, which make Nature's Call - the title of his exhibit - a downright aesthetic experience. Prices range from $3,500 to $9,500. http://www.clarkmade.com/ This Web site boasts that 254,932 people have yawned because of Emilie. See if you can be one of the hold-outs. We warn you, though: it's tough. http://emilie.halgatewood.com/yawn.html An aerocar pile-up clogs the troposphere, leather-clad nomads take power in Australia, and the long-lost Stanley Cup is unearthed at last. Those are just a few of the headlines from the Onion's funny take on the news from 2056. http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/index_b.php SOFTWARE Google Maps Releases Programming Interface Google has released the application programming interface (API) for its Google Maps service. Rather than scrape the Google Maps site to create Google Maps-driven applications - such as, for example, HousingMaps - developers can use officially approved interfaces to fetch and manipulate the data behind the scenes. As is typical with this kind of service, you have to obtain a crypto key from Google before you can dig in. In addition to technical documentation, the Google Maps API pages have a link to a discussion group about the service, which is already quite lively with developer questions and comments.Google Maps API: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ HousingMaps: http://www.housingmaps.com/ NVu: Major Open-Source Web-Design Application Nvu (pronounced "en-view", for "new view"), is an open-source application that claims to be a complete Web authoring system for Linux, Windows, and Mac users, one that rivals Web-design packages like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. The program has been under development for some time, and is an outgrowth of the Mozilla Composer code base. It combines WYSIWYG designing with Web file management, making it easy for non-technical users to create attractive Web pages. Nvu unabashedly borrows the best features from professional Web-design programs and primarily targets the Linux desktop - but one of the advantages of open source is that other coders build versions for other platforms and it will run on Windows and Mac OS X. It's worth trying out, even for Web design pros who want to save time creating good-looking Web pages.http://www.nvu.com/ |
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