More Signal, Less Noise
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 32 Wednesday, August 17, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Sept. 11 Records and Narratives Tapes of emergency dispatchers during the unfolding drama of Sept. 11, 2001 have been made public as a result of a lawsuit brought by the New York Times and the families of some of the emergency workers. The tapes cover the time between 8:46 and 11:50 on that fateful morning, when emergency workers were trying to deal with the initial fires spawned by the airliners that slammed into the World Trade Center towers and later with the collapse of the buildings. In addition to the tapes, the New York Times has assembled a collection of interviews with 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians who were on the scene. As part of the special section that presents this material, the Times also has the poignant accounts of that morning from tower survivors and from the relatives of those who died.http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/ Ever since Apple announced that it would switch to Intel processors next year, people have wondered how Apple would control the installation of its software on the ubiquitous Intel platforms out there. Ever since the company handed developers a version of OS X for Intel processors, people have wondered when it would be hacked to work on just about any PC hardware and make its way into the public arena. It didn't take long. The hackers aren't even very stealthy - OSx86 Project is an entire Web site dedicated to running OS X on x86 hardware. At the moment, there are two ways to run Mac OS X on Intel chips, either under VMware emulation or natively; the best method depends on your specific hardware. The system is apparently robust and in many cases OS X runs faster on PCs than it does on Apple hardware. It's not clear that the commercial release of OS X for Intel will be as easily hacked as was this developer release. Apple has the framework to hook OS X to Trusted Computing capabilities, which could complicate matters. The OSx86 Project also has a discussion forum, a wiki, and IRC channels. Neither they, nor we, will tell you how to find the pirated files. http://osx86project.org/ Study in Comparative Economics of Online and Printed Comics While traditional print publishers aren't quite going out of business just yet, the emergence of online content is forcing them to re-evaluate their business models. In this study, Todd Allen decided to focus on the comics-publishing industry as a microcosm of the kinds of issues publishers in general face as online content encroaches on the traditional dead-tree publishing. In his book, Allen first examines the economic fundamentals of print comic publishing before moving on to how online publishing models work and affect the print world. His study is full of actual revenue numbers, offering a detailed glimpse into the financial realities of the comics industry. Allen concludes with a series of lessons for online content providers, lessons that are applicable beyond the domain of comics. The result is a valuable case study of how e-commerce is changing the business models of an old industry. Allen has put his book online for free, but it's also available in paper, and he exhorts us to buy it if we tire of all that clicking.http://www.indignantonline.com/dojo/149/v.jsp?p=/comics-ecommerce/index Amazon.com Sales Rank and the Future The long tail is what separates Amazon.com from your local supersized bookstore. The long tail refers to Amazon.com sales of those works whose sales rank exceeds 100,000 - in other words, sales of books that can't be found in brick and mortar bookstores. In an article that is becoming a book, Wired editor Chris Anderson once argued that 57% of Amazon.com's sales came from works whose popularity falls below the top 100,000. Anderson revises his estimate to a range more or less centered on 30% and in this blog entry addresses a really basic question: just what do the Amazon.com sales ranks mean? The rank is not clearly decipherable and Amazon.com won't reveal how it computes the popularity. Hence, the scholarly community performs a significant amount of reverse-engineering to uncover how the bookseller's algorithms work. Anderson observes that we are interested in Amazon.com because in it we can see some aspects of the future in action. His is a sophisticated and thought-provoking essay, part of a stimulating blog in toto.http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/a_methodology_f.html Google is making news in ways it probably wishes it wouldn't, but it's its own fault. CNET used Google to dig up info on Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and used the results in an article on privacy and public information. In retaliation, Google informed CNET that it won't allow any of its staff to talk to any CNET journalist for a year. The restriction won't stop CNET from publishing stuff about Google, of course, and Wired shows how pointless a stance that is, one that makes the company look silly rather than principled, in the eyes of veteran public-affairs folk. Publishing details of a person's life may not be desirable, but it does point out the potential danger of making so much information available and raises concerns about privacy in the Google age. Some people think search engines should get serious about privacy rather than have snits. Wired stays even-handed and has links for anyone who wants to go a little deeper. ZDNet UK, a sister company of CNET, has a cutting editorial. Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68486,00.html ZDNet UK: http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020505,39212555,00.htm Imagine Harry Potter in a class of wizardry at Hogwarts run not by the usual teachers of spellcraft, but by a panel of invited lecturers. The subject: Wizardly Skepticism, a course in critical thinking. Even in a magical world, perhaps especially in a magical world, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing everything you see. But in the world of Harry Potter, as well as in the muggle world, we must be on guard, for we can be fooled by our senses and tricked by our beliefs. The framing device, a session at the Hogwarts wizardry school, leads to lectures from visitors, each represented by links to their writings elsewhere on the Web. The guest lecturers stress the need for critical thinking and healthy skepticism in everything from science to politics to, especially, religion and superstition that masquerades as science. The story is part of a larger periodic blog carnival called the Skeptic's Circle: every couple of weeks or so a different blog hosts a thematic collection of links. This is a clever presentation, if at times a bit forced, but you can't argue with the many great links. Wizardly Skepticism: http://www.lambic.co.uk/blog/archives/2005/08/wizardly-skepticism/ Skeptic's Circle: http://skepticscircle.blogspot.com/ All in All, It's Just Another Brit on the Wall Banksy is a British graffiti artist who has never seen a wall he couldn't improve. He believes Israel's 427-mile protective wall, which the country is building to protect its citizens from suicide bombers, has created the world's largest open-air prison. He has decided to use the wall as a canvas for his spray-painted irony and politics. His art seems to be too effective - one Palestinian has suggested that Banksy go home because his art was beginning to make the wall beautiful. A piece in the Guardian covers his efforts and links to pictures of his Middle East exhibit. The Wooster Collective also has some pics. Wired comments on Banksy's rather different views about art and its relation to the public.Banksy: http://www.banksy.co.uk/ Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1543171,00.html Wooster Collective: http://tinyurl.com/bm5qz Wired: http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/bansky.html What makes an interesting photo? Beats us. It's probably one of those "you know it when you see it" things, like porn. Such definitional difficulty, however, did not stop Flickr from trying to come up with an algorithmic method of choosing interesting photos from its vast archive of shared snapshots. Some things that Flickr uses to qualify a photo as interesting include where the clickthroughs originate, who comments on it and when, who marks it as a favorite, and many more changing factors. Flickr's new About Interestingness page seeks to help you to explore interesting photos using different criteria. By and large, the results are artistic. Whatever the exact algorithm, it clearly works well. It's a page not to be missed by photography and art buffs. http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/ Suggested Names for the Tenth Planet New Scientist asked readers to suggest names for the newly discovered tenth planet. The top choice of New Scientist readers is Persephone, but Rupert (check your "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") and Galileo also make the top ten. Looking beyond the most popular, the list contains plenty of other interesting ideas, including a cute one from a six-year-old who suggested R2D2 and mentioned that he wants to be the first man on Mars - watch for the name of Colton Harris in a couple of decades. We suppose Cold Enough to Freeze Balls off Brass Monkeys wouldn't cut it no matter how appropriate for a planet that orbits well beyond Pluto. In the end, the New Scientist exercise is probably all academic as the International Astronomical Union gets the honor of naming the planet and will probably pick the name suggested by Mike Brown, who discovered it, although both Brown and the union remain coy.http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7811 One of the problems with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for worst sentence is that its entries tend to be long. They also tend to have similar structure - a long meandering aside in the middle of the sentence and then the inevitable punch line. Adam Cadre has no taste for that sort of thing. To him, brevity is the soul of wit, and so he runs the Lyttle Lytton contest, which limits each author to a maximum of 25 words, divided into as many entries as the writers wish. The Lyttle Lytton entries are shorter, punchier, and frequently funnier than the Bulwer-Lytton submissions. Cadre also awards several specific prizes based on structure, self-reference, and horrible implication. Cadre has recently instituted the Byg Lytton contest, for the worst opening paragraph of a novel. Cadre's rollicking fun is a worthy rival to Bulwer-Lytton and we're surprised we hadn't heard of it earlier. Bulwer-Lytton: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ Lyttle Lytton: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html ONLINE CULTURE If you wanted to create an algorithm that would provide blog readers with a ranking system for blogs that was analogous to Google's PageRank, how would it work? This thoughtful post by Mary Hodder tackles this seemingly simple question and works out just how complex such an algorithm would have to be. Nobody has yet committed to bring it to fruition. The comments that follow Hodder's thesis are equally insightful. A post on Corante's Many 2 Many blog looks at the related issue of blogger sex and links. Although the findings derive from just a small informal sample of blogs, it is striking how blog links break down along male/female lines. We leave it for you to see if you accept the patterns found by the author, but they do lend some credence to the old New Yorker cartoon, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."Hodder: http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000513.html Many 2 Many: http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/08/08/the_biases_of_links.php National Lampoon Takes on Adult Swim Adult Swim is a lineup on the Cartoon Network (CN) that features cartoons aimed squarely at an older, more tolerant crowd. It features shows such as "Futurama", "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", various obscure Anime shows, and more, the content of which ranges from sophisticated to surreal to downright rude. CN fills small segments between the shows with bumps, flashes of text and dialogue that are sometimes clever, sometime obscure, and often understandable only to Adult Swim regulars. National Lampoon (NL) created its own satirical Adult Swim bumps, and Adult Swim struck back. The Porplemontage blog hopped on that wagon, again and again and again, on both sides. It recreates Adult Swim's response (#3) and adds more parody bumps of its own. The game is vastly amusing, as is this recent irresistible headline from the Adult Swim site: "What if we made colossal naked robot versions of your favorite characters and then let them kick each other in the crotch?"Adult Swim: http://www.adultswim.com/ NL: http://nationallampoon.com/nl/08_features/adult_swim/Adult_Swim.asp Porplemontage: http://adultswim.porplemontage.com/
SURFING SITES DTV: Participatory Online Television There seems to be no end to the neat things you can do online to avoid life: browse; blog; swap files; and much more. Here's a new one called DTV. It's free software that lets you watch or broadcast video, in essentially the same manner as you'd follow podcasts. As with blogging, you don't need to create your own videos to start a channel, you just gotta know how to tie together material and videos from elsewhere in the Internet and call it original. There's also a channel guide that shows what's on for download, and which updates automatically. For some reason, we keep going back to Rocketboom, although Amanda Congdon could use a better writer for her broadcasts (yes, that's a hint). So far, DTV works only on Mac OS X, but the site promises a Windows version is set to appear in a few weeks. DTV uses QuickTime 7 and downloads files through the Web and BitTorrent.http://participatoryculture.org/download.php If you pitted a shark against an octopus, which would win? It sounds like one of those barroom discussions about pirates vs. ninjas or something, but in this case, we have actual film to pretty conclusively settle the shark vs. octopus debate. The Seattle Aquarium moved a giant octopus into a large tank with many species, including some small sharks. Then, the sharks started disappearing. This video clip is part of the Web companion to the Nature documentary, "The Octopus Show". The site has this and other clips, as well as photos (including desktop wallpaper) of exotic octopus species. The Resources section offers a good selection of links and book references on the many species of octopus. If you missed the show on PBS, you can buy the video here as well. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/octopus/ In the UK, the Royal Mail jealously guards its database of postcodes. If you want to relate a postal code to its geographical location, you need to pay through the nose for the privilege to access to the Royal Mail's database. In the US, the ZIP code/geocode data is freely available to all, for example through the TIGER system at the US Census Bureau. Free the Postcode is a British effort that seeks to create an independent database in the public domain that maps British postcodes to latitude and longitude. The web site encourages contributors to submit their own GPS measurements matched to the postcode for that specific location. The data must be original to avoid sticky copyright problems. The effort is off to a slow start; only nine entries have been submitted as of press time. A little publicity may go a long way, so we're doing our part to spread the word. Free the Postcode: http://www.freethepostcode.org/ TIGER: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ How the Civil War Made America The hardest part of history is getting your hands on primary sources. The University of Michigan and Cornell University haven't completely solved that problem, but their Making of America (MoA) project is the next best thing. The project has digitized over a quarter million pages from nearly 2,500 journals published between 1850 and 1877. The result is a gigantic online archive of 19th-century life and history. The MoA's next step is the conversion of these images into searchable, indexed text, but you can browse the journals now. This is a great time to catch up on your reading of old magazines like Vanity Fair, Garden and Forest, and the ever popular Ladies Repository. In November 1841, the Ladies Repository editors bemoaned the sad state of the country's educational system. Plus ca change.... Each of the participant universities has its own MoA portal.MoA Michigan: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ MoA Cornell: http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/moa/ Canadian Reality TV to Relive World War I The CBC's "The Great War" project blows all other "so you wanna be a soldier" TV shows out of the water. In 1914, with a population barely more than seven million, Canada was still considered a young country. Yet 620,000 of its citizens mobilized for war, of which 418,000 shipped overseas to fight. More than half were killed or wounded. The experience transformed Canada into a world nation. Although the first lesson you learn in the military is never to volunteer, the CBC is looking for 300 eager descendants of Canadian World War I veterans. These lucky people will don uniforms and go through the same type of boot camp experienced by their great-grandparents. They'll learn all about discipline, mud, and trench warfare. Accompanied by historians and Canadian military officers, they'll visit battlefields and slog into vivid recreations of key Canadian conflicts. The resulting four-hour program will weave family stories into a tapestry of dramatic living history. Even if you're not eligible to enlist, you can enjoy the site and its exhibits. The site's "Finding ancestors" link will help you learn if you qualify.http://www.greatwar.ca/preview_poster_content.html FAS's Military Analysis Network The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was one of the first organizations to dedicate itself to avoiding the use of nuclear weapons. Given the mission, it's a little surprising to see from FAS such an unbiased, comprehensive, and free reference of worldwide military weapon systems and doctrine as Military Analysis Network (MAN). If you're opposed to warfare, this is a great place to learn about the enemy. FAS's MAN (what's military info without abbreviations?) introduces military hardware and procedures with links to primary document sources and training manuals. Ship and aircraft information includes hyperlinked tables that show which platform can carry which weapons for what reasons. The Joint Doctrine Encyclopedia is a bit dated but essential for decrypting typical abbreviations and jargon. FAS has also done the research required to link to military bases, program offices, defense contractors, and other peripherally related entities.http://www.fas.org/man/index.html Ever find an abandoned shopping list in a shopping cart? We have, and yes, curiosity conquered good manners and we read it. It's a snapshot of a stranger's priorities - perhaps cosmetics outweigh fruit and vegetables, or all the goods are gluten-free, or somebody survives on frozen meals. The Shopping List Compendium has gathered those lists written on the backs of envelopes, carefully crafted on special notepads, or merely scrawled hastily on a bus ticket. The site scans them, loads them online, and interprets their contents. Most of the shopping lists come from the UK. The operation is slightly intrusive but is anonymous and too compelling in a voyeuristic way - which helps explain the popularity of reality TV. We don't get to match a face to these lists, but we do get to walk in their shopping shoes for a few moments and imagine their lives. At the very least, check out the unusual personal abbreviations which puzzle the site's list-decipherers. http://www.redhotscott.co.uk/shoppinglists/ It's easy to think you're an expert on something, but then you run into a Web site like WarrantyVoid and its incredible list of electronic noisemakers. We know them as cheap electronic keyboards or drum machines, but Christian Oliver Windler calls them "tablehooters", and they are his passion. Windler claims less than modestly that he has collected and documented one of every classic small and mid-sized keyboard. His collection is extensive, we admit, and so detailed, with samples, features, and even hand-drawn schematics. His description is detailed enough that we won't mock Windler for feeling it necessary to warn would-be eBay auctioneers against plagiarizing his words for their listings. Windler's site is worth a visit - the pages will humble anyone who thinks they're a collector of anything, let alone tablehooters. http://users.informatik.haw-hamburg.de/~windle_c/TableHooters/index.html Cleverly Named Site for Clever Manhole Covers Choosing a domain name can be a challenging task. You want something distinctive and easy to recall without being too odd or cheesy (usually). We think this manhole-cover site has achieved the right balance: Drainspotting is simple and a neat pun on a certain well known movie. Name aside, the concept is simplicity itself. Look down at the curb and see what lies beneath your feet. Have you never noticed a well made, elegantly engineered and cast manhole cover? This site offers you a chance to. Designers worldwide put in more effort than you would expect to enhance something which is trodden on and driven over heedlessly each day. Drainspotting showcases the clean lines and innovative designs of these metal lids - prepare to be surprised by their beauty. Sure, some manhole covers appear functional only, but others strive to include swirls to amaze, landscapes to entertain, and geometric patterns to bewitch the eye.http://www.drainspotting.com/ Wondering who's running Kazakhstan today? Need a quick list of US presidents? Researching a non-governmental organization? Are you a budding tyrant looking for a new job opening? The simply titled Rulers site has done the heavy lifting for you (except for that new job). The site lists world rulers and their reigns since 1700 in a huge database with several different ways to get at your answers. Countries can be searched by name or linked maps. Rulers can be searched by index or country. The site even displays major rulership changes since 1996 and offers a Recent Events section. Other details include international organizations, foreign ministers, religious leaders, and unpopular politicians who are still forces to be reckoned with. American readers will appreciate how small a part the US plays in the hustle and bustle of world events. Parents, bookmark this one for your kid's next research project. http://rulers.org/ Because we're all about the latest in technology and the questionable in taste, we bring you HYDESim, the High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator. You can use its integration with Google Maps to imagine the effects of a nuclear explosion over any place you have the latitude and longitude for. Just enter your location, decide on the strength of the blast, and hit the chart button on HYDESim's interface to determine the concentric rings of effect. We originally thought the chart button led to a chart of common nuclear devices and tonnage; for that sort of information, check the Wikipedia entry for "Megaton", specifically the "Relative Explosive Sizes" section. HYDESim: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaton FLOTSAM & JETSAM Lowercase "a" is "feminine, and extremely sexy, but sometimes the bowl causes problems." "Excitable" lowercase "b" was obviously "designed by a man", while the uppercase "B" is "buxom and pregnant". Marian Bantjes critiques the design of all varieties of English's 26 letters. An amusing satire - or is it?http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002383.html Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said, "Don't quote me on that?" It's difficult to remember - apparently Oscar Wilde said a great many things we would never have suspected. The Uncyclopedia has a lengthy list. http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Making_up_Oscar_Wilde_quotes Discovery Astronaut Self-Portrait Astronaut Steve Robinson spacewalked under the Space Shuttle Discovery this week to remove bits of insulation that poked out between heat-shield tiles. While there, he snapped this neat self-portrait.http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_380.html Cat lovers will forward this link in perpetuity. However, even if you permanently ban the e-mail addresses of people who forward this kind of stuff, the site is worth a quick visit simply because the cats in flight are a surprisingly surreal sight. http://www.bruneistudent.com/board/blog/omfgwtf/index.php?cmd=showentry&eid=34 Prepared Statements for Loss of Apollo 11 Space Shuttle Discovery is back safely, but Presidents must be prepared to comment should disaster strike. In advance of the first moon landing, William Safire prepared memos for President Nixon in case Apollo 11 and its crew were lost. The Smoking Gun has them.http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0808051apollo1.html Try this simple exercise. Read the New York Times and replace every male pronoun with a female one. You might be in for a shock. Our expectations are so strongly geared to expect the male gender in so much of what we read. Regender is a simple Web app that regenders any page on the Web. Dare we say it's nirvana for radical feminists? We do dare. http://regender.com/index.html 425 Degrees of Bacon, Bake until Plump This blog's tagline sums up its delicious salty purpose: "One bacon recipe per day, every day, forever." At press time, Spinach Salad with Apples, Avocado, and Bacon was the latest, but Baked Oysters in Jackets with Bacon Cognac Butter may be our favorite. (Note our painfully achieved restraint in not mentioning a certain actor even once.)http://baconshow.blogspot.com/ This is what happens when the software you use to print your counterfeit jean labels breaks. And yes, Microsoft software is involved. Delicious irony would be served if it were pirated Microsoft software, don't you think? http://www.flickr.com/photos/judgmentalist/4216355/ Titling a children's book and designing a cover can be a tricky thing. Check out these images to find out exactly how tricky it can be. http://flickr.com/photos/61035561@N00/sets/685314/@N00/sets/685314/ The Linux version of Doom has been ported to the iPod. You can play the famous first-person shooter on your iPod screen; the click wheel controls your character. The hack supports Doom I Shareware, Doom II Shareware, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, and Doom II. http://www.ipodlinux.org/Doom What better way to fritter away a few minutes of your precious time? Go ahead, pick a site; either site. It won't hurt a bit. Depending on your level of masochism and your desire for self-inflicted abuse, you may even have fun! Be forewarned, the second site does employ pop-up ads. Are you a Computer Geek?: http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_cg.php The True Geek Test: http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=750711297364726891 SOFTWARE Free Open-Source Competitor for Illustrator and CorelDraw Everybody's heard of Netscape, but what about Inkscape? Inkscape is an open-source graphics editor that may affect stand-bys like CorelDraw and Illustrator in much the same way that Netscape affected the browsing experience. While admittedly not yet a replacement for the more fully featured commercial software that costs hundreds of dollars, Inkscape is only a couple of years along in development. A primary Inkscape application involves vector drawing for logos, posters, and icons, and it's cross-platform - running under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. While you're here, be sure to look at some of the great clip art that's already been created with the program. Stable release 0.42 is out now, and it's a free download.http://www.inkscape.org/index.php |
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