More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, August 08, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 31 Monday, August 08, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF The Iraqi Economy and Business Opportunities (No, Really) So, what's going on with the Iraqi economy? The only readily available economic statistics online seem to come from the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI). In addition to recent currency exchange rates ($1 USD = 1,476 IQD), the bank has detailed budget information from 2004 (click on Statistics). This includes data like the number of checks cleared, which ministry spent how much, public debt by month, and so on. The CIA World Factbook offers broad estimates for 2004, but the CBI data is much more granular. Alas, Google did not turn up any data for the first six months of 2005. What about business opportunities? If you have the chutzpah to do business in the country, the US government has some online resources to help you. Both Export.gov and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) sites have pages dedicated to the topic. Not surprisingly, most of the opportunities are in reconstruction contracts, though there are Iraq-based business centers and organizations with Web presences. Exploring the Export.gov and CPA sites will hook you up with what may or may not be current business opportunities in Iraq. Good luck.CBI: http://www.cbiraq.org/cb1.htm CIA World Factbook: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html Export.gov: http://www.export.gov/iraq/market_ops/index.html CPA: http://www.iraqcoalition.org/business_center.html Cassini Encounters Encaladus and Mimas The Cassini space probe has returned data from its encounters with Saturn's moons Encaladus and Mimas. Both flybys produced a raft of new data about the moons, in particular about Encaladus. This large moon has a relatively dense atmosphere of mostly water vapor, probably produced when Saturn's tidal stresses heat up the moon's core, forcing interior gases to well up through the surface. This hypothesis is further bolstered by the surprising observation that the moon's poles are slightly warmer than its equator, which astronomers suspect is due to the release of interior heat in those locations. NASA offers movies of the Mimas flyby and a great zoom to the surface of Encaladus, and a pretty spectacular photo of aurora lights at Saturn's southern pole. Next on the agenda is flyby of the moon Titan later this month.http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm NASA has for years been studying options for the development of new launchers to replace the aging Space Shuttle. Part of the agency's problem is that it has to operate in a tight budgetary environment, so its goal is to re-use as much existing technology and infrastructure as possible. NASA will release its studies and conclusions to the public in the coming months, but meanwhile this article at SpaceRef provides a detailed account of the options the agency looked at. Most of the new launcher concepts are built around the reliable solid rocket boosters used on the Space Shuttle, either alone or mated to the shuttle's external tank. The article provides many details about the trade-offs studied and includes several graphics that depict the hypothetical launch configurations. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1055 Thank Hackers for Revelation of Latest Tenth Planet The discovery of a new planet in our solar system was announced in a hastily thrown together press conference on July 29, following the realization by its discoverers that somebody had hacked in to their servers to examine their logs, which predicted where in the sky the planet would next appear. Dumbfounded that somebody with such a high degree of astronomical knowledge would stoop to such tactics, the discoverers were forced to reveal their find considerably earlier than planned. The planet, like Pluto, is a member of the Kuiper belt, from which many comets appear to originate. The new planet is the largest known K-belt object, and is larger than Pluto - in fact, it's the largest object discovered in solar orbit since the discovery of Neptune way back in 1846. The new planet's Web page is replete with telescopic photos, artistic conceptions, orbital diagrams, and much more.http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/index.html Debunk Aging as Disease, Win $20,000 The most popular article in Technology Review (TR) this year has been "Do You Want to Live Forever", a piece on Aubrey de Grey, the quirky Cambridge University geneticist and computer scientist. De Grey believes that aging is a disease that can be cured and has put forward a seven-step proposal to treat it. The original TR article and an accompanying editorial expressed skepticism about de Grey's theses. In turn, the response to the article and editorial has overwhelmingly favored de Grey and criticized the magazine's attitude. In response, TR has initiated the SENS Challenge, an offer of $20,000 to the first legitimate researcher who convincingly explains the faults in de Grey's science. If nothing else, the original article by Sherwin Nuland makes clear that living forever might not be worth it if we have to live like de Grey.TR: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/feature_aging.asp SENS Challenge: http://pontin.trblogs.com/archives/2005/07/the_sens_challe.html The Large Hadron Collider Data-Analysis Challenge At the best of times, theoretical physics is a challenge to those of us of the "I believe it when I can touch it" persuasion. The notion that everything in the universe consists of vibrating strings moving in ten dimensions is particularly daunting. At a recent meeting, string theoreticians excitedly babbled about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is two years, give or take, from operational status. The LHC may provide the first experimental evidence to support string theory and might also provide proof of supersymmetry. To prepare for the LHC's torrent of data, scientists at CERN have prepared the LHC Olympics, a set of simulated LHC results that trains theoreticians to deal with the real thing. If such talk quickens your pulse, you can read more about the conference, including the occasionally amusing asides and quips of panelists. The New York Times and a PDF paper, "From (Fundamental) Theory to Inclusive Signatures", provide background. The latter is aimed at interested non-experts but we suspect it will still be a bit of a stretch for some. No matter how bizarre, theories that purport to explain everything are naturally important - we're not stringing you along here, you know.LHC Olympics: http://wwwth.cern.ch/lhcOlympics/lhcolympics.html Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02stri.html Paper: http://tinyurl.com/dwvfn The Internet Meets "Mickey Meets the Air Pirates" One of our book recommendations in 2003 was "The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture". The book was about a group of Bay Area underground cartoonists in the early 1970s who called themselves the Air Pirates. They published a series of comic-book parodies with Disney cartoon characters, and the Mouse embroiled them in a long-running lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. This week, somebody by the handle of lesangfroid placed online scans of the very first issue of the underground series, "Mickey Meets the Air Pirates". The comic book is a loving tribute to the art of early Mickey Mouse cartoons, though with some decidedly non-Disney dialogue and action. You may want to snag it before it gets taken down, though we suspect copies are even now archived all over the Net and that your file-sharing network of choice will ably find it. It's truly a beautiful and historic piece of comic-book art.lesangfroid: http://img151.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=airpirates1013nw.jpg "The Pirates and the Mouse": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/156097530X/netsurferdigest For the first time ever, all the books nominated for the Best Novel Hugo Award were written by British authors. The significance of this can and will be debated, but the Brits have been dominating the SF market over the last few years, led by Iain Banks, China Mieville, Charles Stross, and Ian McDonald, and their inventive post-cyberpunk visions of the future. All four had Best Novel nominations, but compatriot Susannah Clarke walked away with the Hugo for her marvelous fantasy "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell". Worldcon 2005 UK lists all nominees and notes with delight that most of the short-fiction nominees are available free of charge. This year's Hugos also featured an award for Best Web Site, won by Ellen Datlow's SciFiction. Fellow nominee Emerald City was first with a list of all Hugo winners. Incidentally, kudos to this year's Worldcon organizers for a session titled "What the F*** is it About Cats?" (sic), which aimed to penetrate the weird connection between SF authors and cats. About time somebody addressed this burning issue. Worldcon 2005 UK: http://www.interaction.worldcon.org.uk/hugolink.htm SciFiction: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/ Emerald City: http://www.emcit.com/hugo_2005.shtml The Power of Ten: CNET Celebrates Tenth Anniversary Long-time readers of NSD know that we frequently point to stories at CNET, which for our purposes has pretty good wire-service type of coverage of the tech side of the Internet. CNET has existed for just over ten years. It started about a year after our own debut. As part of its ten-year anniversary, the news site has put together a number of features, the most prominent of which is a collection of top-10 lists compiled by its editors. They just added the "Top 10 dot-com flops", which joins the "Top 10 Web fads", "Top 10 downloads of the past 10 years", and several other such lists. In addition, the site presents a copy of the 1995 CNET home page and a huge collection of videos from the company's history. The CNET editors are also on tour, making personal appearances in CompUSA computer stores in, yes, ten cities. Finally, the company is also promoting its trade-in program for old tech gear, probably as a bit of a revenue ploy. The top-ten lists are fun, and it's amusing to watch the early CNET explain what a home page is on video.http://www.cnet.com/4520-11136_1-6247030-1.html Presenting the Randomly Generated Computer-Science Papers In NSD 11.15 we wrote about three MIT grad students who managed to get a randomly generated computer-science paper accepted to a conference. The paper was the result of research into context-free grammars, which can generate plausible-sounding random text. While the conference withdrew the invitation when the paper was exposed as non-sensical, we're happy to report that thanks to generous donations the trio made the trip and held their own session in the same place as the conference. The randomly generated session title was "The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information". Three random papers were presented. The whole thing was videotaped, and you can download the video on the students' SCIgen Web page.NSD 11.15: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.15.html#BS9 SCIgen: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks Cisco Vulnerabilities: Michael Lynn Interview, Web Site Bug As related in NSD 11.30, security researcher Michael Lynn discovered serious problems in Cisco router software, problems that if exploited could devastate the core Internet infrastructure. In a Wired interview, Lynn explains his perspective on how the episode played out. This is an important story not only for the security aspect, but also because it illustrates the complicated relationships among tech companies and the vendors who cooperate and compete with them. In this case, Cisco failed to furnish ISS, Lynn's employer, with details of a security problem, which prompted Lynn to reverse-engineer Cisco's code - and led him to find an even worse problem. Although Lynn tried to be responsible with the really sensitive information, a lot of lawyers billed a lot of hours over this. Lynn's insider glimpse into the complex politics behind security policies and vulnerability reports is something to keep in mind when you try to maintain your own systems. This was a bad week for Cisco - the company also had to break the bad news that its Web site was vulnerable and that logins and passwords may have been stolen. See CNET.NSD 11.30: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.30.html#BS2 Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,68365,00.html CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-5816809.html Information Technology and the Modern Soldier's Letter Home The current war in Iraq differs from previous US wars in several ways, but the different sources of information available to the public represent the most important. difference. We no longer learn about the war exclusively from the news media, but hear directly from the soldiers themselves who blog and film their daily activities. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke largely because digital photos of the abuse circulated among the troops. This Wired article explores the new world of military blogging and reveals that all is not well in the armed forces. How long soldiers will be able to blog remains an open question, but it is remarkable to watch as the services begin to approach e-mail and information technology as a new enemy rather than as tools to better integrate the military into American life.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/milblogs.html One of the perennial putdowns Apple-bashers aim at the company is that, after all these years, Apple designs still didn't take a multi-button mouse into account, despite the obvious benefits and popularity of such devices. Instead, Apple has peddled the same one-button mice - albeit with some styling and technical evolution - it introduced with its original Macintosh way back in 1984. Mac users have long used third-party multi-button mice and Apple has finally caught up to the crowd with the first fundamentally new mouse in the Mac's long history. It has... no buttons. That's right, Apple's new Mighty Mouse has a smooth shell that appears to lack buttons. It uses pressure-sensitive pads and a small embedded trackball - it functions like a four-button mouse, with vertical, horizontal, and (poor) diagonal scrolling. Most of all, it just looks cool, so chalk up another design win for Apple. Ars Technica has a review. Mighty Mouse: http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/ Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/mightymouse.ars EFF Asks for Help Investigating Printer ID Secrets Lurking on every page of every document printed by a color printer or copier are secret marks, often yellow dots, that identify the make, model, and serial number of the printer that produced them. By matching the information provided by these secret marks with the manufacturer's customer database, authorities can identify who owns the machine that created a particular page. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fears the printer ID information, meant to nab counterfeiters, may be misused, particularly by governments who could employ it as an instrument of repression. Since little is known about this technology or whether agencies other than the US Secret Service use it, the EFF wants to illuminate the subject to help educate legislators about the potential for invasion of privacy and to deter its abuse. Although the EFF has conducted its own tests, it needs much information if it hopes to unscramble the identification code. It's calling for public help - all you need do is print eight test pages according to the specifications at its Web site. If everyone contributes, some of the mystery and potential for misuse might be removed from this secret coding practice.http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/wp.php If you couldn't make DefCon 13, this year's version of the annual hacking contest, don't despair. Make magazine has a great site with nearly complete coverage of the sessions, the vendors, and the Cisco controversy (see above). There's more stuff here than you can listen to or read in a day, but if you want to know more about why Cisco objected to one presentation or learn more about lock-picking, you'll find it here somewhere. Also cool is the new Wi-Fi distance record of 125 miles - we might be able to use that. http://makezine.com/defcon13/ One way Technorati keeps its blog search-engine edge is by keeping tabs on the state of the blogosphere. The latest analysis in an ongoing series by chief Technorat Dave Sifry reveals that tagging is growing fast, going from none to a third of all blog posts in a little more than seven months. He also compares professional information classification schemes with informal tagging. Sifry's series (travel back through them via the link at the bottom of the page) reveals that about 80,000 blogs a day, or one a second, pop into existence. Posting volume has been doubling rapidly to the current 900,000 daily posts, although earthshaking events like the July 7 London bombings trigger outbursts of posting. Even as the blogosphere expands, however, the percentage of active blogs has remained stable at 55%. The many easy-to-use tools for creating and posting to blogs contribute to the fad's increasing popularity. The highlight of Sifry's series is a video that gives a vivid impression of the growth of tags in blogs. It's not for the bandwidth deprived, however. http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/08/37.html The Bias, or Not, of Product Reviews Many online shoppers look at product reviews by customers like themselves to educate themselves before they make informed purchasing decisions. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that there are some downsides to this approach: many retailers extensively edit the reviews, or even simply reject them out of hand. While we can understand the rejection of reviews that contain profanity or that hold forth on issues not specifically related to the product in question, willfully skewing reviews toward the positive, as Newegg and others have been accused of doing, is certainly an egregious abuse of customer trust. Unsurprisingly, many Slashdotters seem to share this perspective.WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112311985732004654.html Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/05/08/04/1349201.shtml Doom 3, the latest entry in the Doom first-person shooter franchise, earned only lukewarm reviews despite its awesome graphics. Nevertheless, the "Doom" movie marches ahead. The Doom-themed film has plenty of fans excited, although we caution them to consider Hollywood's excellent record in turning bestselling games into bottom-of-the-barrel movies. A trailer for the movie is now available at IGN. The movie's only saving grace may be the participation of effects wizard Stan Winston ("Alien", "Predator", and many others). One can also hope that the lighting effects in the film are a bit brighter than those in Doom 3, so that we can actually see the special-effects monsters in all their hellish glory. IGN: http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/636/636398p1.html Doom 3: http://www.doom3.com/ Yahoo Releases Audio Search Engine This new experimental search engine from Yahoo allows you to search for music files, podcasts, sound effects, and other audio content. The site is geared to make money and puts commercial results up front. For example, the result of a search for "Stairway to Heaven" returns links to versions of the song by the O'Jays and Dolly Parton at various music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody, and MSN Music. You have to hit the unobtrusive Other Audio link at the top of the page to find the Led Zeppelin original in various private and presumably illegal online files. An audio search engine is a great idea, and Yahoo makes it easy to include your own audio content in its search index - just submit a feed in Media RSS format. As for "Stairway to Heaven", give the Dolly Parton version a try - it's rather haunting.http://audio.search.yahoo.com/ Competitors Copy Google Ad Strategies On the heels of Google's AdSense ad program for small-scale Web publishers, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves are diving into a potentially lucrative pool with benefits both to publishers and, of course, to advertisers - online advertising is expected to garner $8 billion in revenue this year, according to PC Magazine. Yahoo Publisher Network is expanding to include small Web sites; its Context Match service appears roughly analogous to Google's AdSense in that Yahoo will serve member Web sites with contextually relevant ads and share revenue. Yahoo also plans to add RSS feeds, which it touts as a benefit to publishers of all sizes. Ask Jeeves, meanwhile, appears to be hammering away at its own imitation of Google AdWords to sell ads linked to specific search keywords. If a user searches for "wicker", an ad for "Bob and Jerry's World of Wicker" may appear as the top sponsored ad - assuming that store had placed the highest bid for that particular keyword. It's not as though Google is sitting on its collective hands, however, and Microsoft is also rumored to be ready to jump into the market. PC Magazine has more on all of this.Yahoo Publisher Network: http://publisher.yahoo.com/ Ask Jeeves: http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/ PC Magazine 1: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1843320,00.asp PC Magazine 2: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1842277,00.asp It's Easy to Uncover Anonymous Internet Sensors Many computer-security organizations deploy sensors on the Internet in order to keep track of virus, worm, and other malicious activity. Typically, such sensors are computers that emulate vulnerable machines, gather TCP/IP traffic data, or serve as spam and phishing honeypots. Keeping the identity of such nodes secret is important to their operation, but this may be harder than it seems. Security researchers at the recent Usenix conference presented a paper that explains it's possible to discover the identity of such anonymous sensor nodes with relatively little effort. The paper outlines weaknesses in several current anonymity schemes and discusses potential countermeasures.http://www.usenix.org/events/sec05/tech/bethencourt.html ONLINE CULTURE Video Games' Social Impact Varies with Generation The recent furor over sexual content buried in Grand Theft Auto (see NSD 11.27) prompted politicians and lobbyists to score easy points with certain audiences, to bash video games for inciting young minds to riot and moral decay. Of course, the situation is actually far more complex. A surprisingly balanced and insightful article in the Economist examines the issue and notes that your age strongly influences what you think about video games. Video games will soon or already do equal movies in terms of their influence in popular culture. Just as movie content evolved as audiences matured, so it will be and is with video games. Critics who would call video games a force for moral decay are clearly at odds with the experience of movies and TV, which as nascent media were similarly denounced for leading to violence and the corruption of youth. Somehow, society survived. In recent years, crime rates have dropped as video game use has climbed. As the Economist concludes: "Critics of gaming do not just have the facts against them; they have history against them, too."NSD 11.27: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.27.html#OC3 Economist: http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4246109 ONLINE TRAVEL Korea Teaches Kids to Hate Japan There's a whole lotta hate in the world, and few places illustrate the problem better than this forum thread. South Korea and Japan dispute ownership of a small island group in the sea between them. Rights to the islands mean rights to the local fishing grounds, and the area may even have reserves of natural gas. The beef over the islands goes back to at least 1693, and Korea and Japan have a long, bitter history, but none of that explains why South Korea chooses to have its teachers incite hatred in grade-school kids over an issue that is unlikely ever to affect them. This thread features posters drawn by grade-school South Koreans, kids whose education has brainwashed them into hating Japan. Illustration after illustration depicts Korea pounding, burning, or otherwise dumping on Japan. Ironically, even the Japanese Sailor Moon appears to hate Japan. Note that the forum the thread appeared in is based in Japan.http://uqmgp.hp.infoseek.co.jp/ Sprol Maps Environmental Damage Feeling good about yourself? About your place in the bigger picture? This might be the perfect time to visit Sprol, which endeavors to exhibit the macroscopic effects on landscapes of human decisions and behavior. Sprol looks at the bigger picture - satellite pictures, in fact, courtesy of Google Maps. It accompanies said bird's-eye views with environmentally themed commentary from various contributors. Name your poison, it's here: feedlots; open-pit mining; penitentiaries; and the list goes on. Though the writing is uneven and, on occasion, factually suspect, Sprol does provide a necessary and sobering view of environmental damage at the hands of corporate and political interests. Keep the Prozac handy when you visit.http://www.sprol.com/ It may not surprise you, but 90% of all applicants for a taxi license in New York City are immigrants. They're following the American Dream, and PBS has followed them, making a documentary on the way. The companion Web site to "Taxi Dreams" adds interviews with the cabbies, trivia, and a 360-degree panorama of a New York City taxi for those of us who have never experienced that yellow-cab buzz. Passengers also get to speak out on the cabbies. There are good and bad tales here - for example, did you know that the first American to die in an automobile accident was hit by a taxi? The Big Apple contains more than 12,000 cabs. The stories at this site hint at the challenging working lives of the drivers as well as the frustrations of passengers snarled in traffic or struggling to give directions. This will give you something to discuss with your driver the next time you're stuck at a red. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/taxidreams/ In the age of Google Maps, Cheap Gas is a logical extension of the type of site made famous by GasBuddy or GasPriceWatch, where fellow consumers log in to inform the community of the gas prices they see on their daily commutes. Cheap Gas uses a Google Maps interface (like every other new Web page these days) and data from GasBuddy itself. Cheap Gas is more a demonstration of AJAX programming than a real cheap-gas tracking site - there's no way to add new fuel finds at Cheap Gas, for example - but it does graphically demonstrate how spotty the info is at this kind of viewer-maintained site. It looks as though no one in Chicago has input gas prices from any further than five miles from the nearest interstate. In Anchorage, Alaska, Old Seward Highway looks like Old Discount Gas Station Road. And in Toronto, don't leave the 401 if you're looking for cheap gas. Also, while the site doesn't make it clear - the prices in Canada are not really in dollars per gallon. It's cents per liter - and those are Canadian cents. There are no results for Quebec, because there, whenever anybody sees the price of gasoline, they die from shock. Cheap Gas: http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ GasBuddy: http://www.gasbuddy.com/ GasPriceWatch: http://www.gaspricewatch.com/new/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT "Troops" Sequel Evolves into Feature, Part One Available The fine folks at Black Sheep Productions originally intended "I.M.P.S. The Relentless" as a sequel to "Troops", their famous Star Wars stormtrooper/"Cops" hybrid, but it morphed into an entity of its own during the writing/conceptual stages. The project is now slated to become a feature-length film; the gang responsible plan to shoot and release individual chapters on an ongoing basis. Chapter one and an additional teaser segment are currently available for download. Further goodies up for grabs include script, storyboards, production stills, design sketches and various other informational enticements.http://impstherelentless.com/ Computer modding has met the iPod. ZapWizard, a member of the Austin Modders, decided that his lust for wood-cased computers might as well extend to his 20-gigabyte iPod. His tool is a Dremel, and he's clearly a master with it. He carved a new iPod faceplate out of a hardwood called padauk to a scant two milimeters' thickness. The results are astoundingly attractive. No one really needs a wood-cased iPod, but potential rather than need is the point of modding. The photos come in both low and high resolutions - if your connection is fast enough, take the time to look at the hi-res shots and keep telling yourself that it was done with a Dremel tool. Beautiful. http://www.austinmodders.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=275 Statler and Waldorf at the Movies If you learned to laugh with "The Muppet Show", Movies.com is banking that you're still looking for a pair of movie critics to rely on. You might eventually find them, but until then, Muppets Statler and Waldorf can keep you company "From the Balcony". The loveable old hecklers are at it again, although the puppeteering seems a little stale. While the pair were once known for really bad jokes and references to pop icons of their youth, the humor's been brought up to date, with mixed reviews - it's a little cheesy to hear Statler make a Viagra joke. Clever netsurfers will note that Movies.com is an appendage of Disney - and we see no Disney films in the duo's crosshairs. Sneaky marketing ploys aside, the old boys are good for a few chuckles.http://movies.go.com/moviesdynamic/muppets/index BOOKS & E-ZINES
BrickJournal: Pro-Quality Lego E-Zine BrickJournal is a quarterly e-zine for the adult fans of Lego (AFOL) community, a large and talented group. The first issue is 64 pages (plus covers) of fascinating articles. We were of course taken with the cover projects: a 17-foot bridge and the spaceships of "2001: A Space Odyssey". The rest of articles matched these in quality. The artwork is clear and sharp throughout, the production values fully professional. The only problem we noticed was that when viewed in a Web browser, some of the type was too small to read comfortably and there was no way to easily enlarge it. The solution is to view BrickJournal in a free Acrobat Reader. When you do so, zoom in and take a good look at the art in the "The Little Armory" article on page 57. They're accessories, but still fascinating.http://www.legofan.org/brickjournal/ Toothpaste for Dinner and Comics for Dessert "Fun Fact: did you know that the sound most people call silence is actually the sound that mountain lions make when they walk around outside your house?" Such are the wry and occasionally subversive musings that dot Toothpaste for Dinner, which features the drawings, music, and merchandise of a talented creature called Drew from Ohio. Drew, incidentally, appears to be somewhat prickly about his privacy - but why the heck shouldn't he be? His not-quite-stick-figure ruminations are charming, absurd, and consistently out in left field - and guaranteed to tickle the funny bone of even the grouchiest critters out there. Indeed, there are plenty of contributors to the WWW upon whom the privilege of bandwidth is utterly wasted; Drew ain't one of them. A contract for greeting cards is in his future.http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/ Romance Comics of the '50s and '60s If you like Anne Taintor's witty typed sayings pasted upon 1950s images of women from advertising, you'll enjoy Jenny Miller's collection of romance comics. Those printed before the Comics Code of 1954 are particularly kitschy. In those printed after, you won't have to worry about excessive slang, werewolves, or zombies sullying up your pages. It's as much pablum as you can handle in one sitting. Jump back to the pre-Code section every once in a while for perspective.Taintor: http://www.annetaintor.com/ Miller: http://www.jennymiller.com/romancecomics/ Neil Gaiman notes, "Every profession has its pitfalls." For zoo keepers, the questions are always the same: "Did you want to work with animals from the time you were a child?" "How can you stand the smell?" Gaiman doesn't have a clue about zookeeping, so he doesn't attempt to answer those pressing questions. For writers, it's always "How do you do it?" "Where do you get your ideas?" As a successful writer, he offers up a succinct summary of the milieu in which he works. It may not be breaking news, but worth a quick read just the same. http://www.neilgaiman.com/exclusive/essay03.asp Capital Hill Blue pretty much states its bias in its name. The site is based on well selected and well done news pieces. There's ample space for reader response and flaming. If you lean toward the blue, liberal end of the political spectrum, this is a delightful site. It's by no means extreme in its outlook and it is consistent. Several groups have recently decided that their biases trump Capital Hill Blue's right to free speech, and they've attempted to send the site so much e-mail that it couldn't function. We can't imagine a higher compliment. http://www.capitolhillblue.com/ SURFING SCIENCE NERO Trains Virtual Soldiers for Battle NERO (an acronym of Neuro Evolving Robotic Operatives) sports a spiffy site design and an even spiffier idea: in a game environment, the player becomes a trainer, teaching a team of artificially intelligent agents the ins and outs of successful battle. Once they're trained, players turn them loose to test the skills of their agents against those of others. The coolness factor here overfloweth; these bots learn just like animals do, through a system of incentive and disincentive. It reminds us of norns. You just know there are going to be real-world military applications for this approach in the not-too-distant future. The NERO software, free to download, will work only on Windows XP at present, although the site promises that Linux and Mac versions are coming soon. A research article that described the NERO concept won this year's IEEE Best Paper award in the Computational Intelligence and Games class.http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/NERO/index.php If plants are your thing or even if you're a serious landscaper or botanist, the University of British Columbia's Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research has a treat in store for you. Its Botany Photo of the Day is a collection that's better than most of beautiful pictures of various plant species. With hyperlinked commentary by botanists to aid the uninitiated into the floral mysteries, the site really ought to call the feature "Botany Species of the Day". Once you've finished gaping at the fine photography, you may notice that the Web site is a treasure trove of resources and other useful features for those who work with plants, including botanical news, forums, and much more. Put down your trowel, wash your hands, and check it out. http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/potd/ Jorn Olsen has captured some amazing pictures of an atmospheric phenomenon called mammatus clouds. Slow down, pardner - they're called mammatus clouds because they resemble mammary glands - breasts, boobs, jugs - got it? Now that ought to whet your curiosity. While there is no dearth of boob photography on the Net, there are certainly few pictures anywhere as striking as these. Olsen was lucky enough to be in Hastings, Nebr. on the night this occurred, and we're lucky that he had his camera with him. The images are beautiful enough to have graced the cover of the Journal of Meteorology in December 2004, and they're available for purchase, of course, suitable for framing. Olsen: http://www.jornolsen.com/ Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammatus Any blog dedicated to "pimping the hoo-ha out of the iPod shuffle" has got to pique your curiosity. Ok, maybe it doesn't have to - but it's as good an excuse as any to drop by, so we used it. The site is The Shufflehacks and while it doesn't offer the most intuitive interface we've ever seen, it does have links to do-it-yourself iPod shuffle projects like an Altoids-case battery pack and to stuff you can buy from other do-it-yourselfer types. This is a work in progress, but the comments can be really funny, as folks get hacked over what is or is not a hack. http://shufflehacks.blogspot.com/ |
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