More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 33 Tuesday, August 23, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Found Einstein Manuscript Predicts Bose-Einstein Condensates In 2001, Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl Wieman won the Nobel prize in Physics for creating a Bose-Einstein condensate, a previously only theoretical state of matter. This week, Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics announced that it has discovered the early Einstein manuscript that predicted the existence of the Bose-Einstein condensates. The manuscript became a paper Einstein published in 1925, a paper many consider to be his last major contribution to quantum physics. The Lorentz Institute has put online images of the handwritten manuscript, "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas". In it, Einstein predicts the existence of gases at very low temperatures and very low energies, where all the particles clump together into a single quantum state. This idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, giving the phenomenon its name. The Bose-Einstein Condensate page presents a detailed yet accessible explanation of the phenomenon and why it is important.Lorentz Institute: http://www.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/history/Einstein_archive/ Bose-Einstein Condensate: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/ Guess what? Our Milky Way galaxy isn't a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy of the sort that science-fiction art has been using forever. Instead, recent data from the Spitzer Space Telescope leads astronomers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to postulate that the Milky Way has a long bar of stars at its center, surrounded by the traditional spiral. The university's press release has an excellent connection to visualizations of our newly re-interpreted home; the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) page has details on the project that discovered the revelations. The Spitzer Space Telescope is named for Lyman Spitzer Jr., the Princeton University astronomer who originally envisioned the Hubble Space Telescope shortly after World War II. NASA's About Spitzer page describes his contributions to astronomy. University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.news.wisc.edu/11405.html GLIMPSE: http://www.astro.wisc.edu/sirtf/ About Spitzer: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/about/spitzer.shtml The $1 Million Intelligent Design Challenge In NSD 11.25, we wrote about the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory of creation, the brainchild of Bob Henderson, who wanted to satirize the Kansas Board of Education's obsession with creationism. Henderson's own creation has taken on a life of its own. Adherents of Pastafarianism are plumped up to support him and his newly extruded faith. Xeni Jardin wrote about the subject on Boing Boing, prompting a provocative letter from a creationist. The letter noted that creationist and gadfly Kent Hovind offers $250,000 for anyone who can provide empirical evidence of evolution. Jardin and her blogger friends mulled that over and have issued a challenge of their own: to pay $250,000 to anyone who produces empirical evidence that proves Jesus was not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. After the offer showed up in Boing Boing, many folks wanted to chip in. Jardin et al were flooded with offers of cash and awards of "whisky and wenches" or "ho's 'n' blow". They decided to cap the purse at $1 million "in part because the number contains a lot of pretty, round zeroes that resemble holy meatballs."NSD 11.25: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.25.html#OC2 Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/19/boing_boings_250000_.html Flying Spaghetti Monster: http://www.venganza.org/ Google is digitizing whole libraries to let you search increasing numbers of texts with Google Print (see NSD 11.12). Some publishers, however, have decried the process and claim copyright infringement. Who's right in this increasingly noisy fracas? Although it ended with no clear winner, a debate between publisher Tim O'Reilly and privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein about the merits and pitfalls of the Google Print Library Project shed light on the topic in a highly useful and entertaining way. Read it at O'Reilly Radar. Along the way, you'll read some telling things about copyright and the future of publishing. Unexpectedly, O'Reilly sides with Google. If we had to pick a side, we'd go with him and agree that Google's work is fair use, serves the public good, and probably will benefit publishers and authors eventually. Like many who sell entertainment media, however, publishers want to stop the new technology until they can figure it out, but that's a prescription for stasis and no way to move fearlessly into the future. The debate on this complex and important issue is vigorous and lively, and is joined by others with stakes in the outcome. NSD 11.12: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.12.html#BS11 Google Print Library Project: http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html O'Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/google_library.html This is a bit of a tedious read due to formatting issues, but the upshot is this: earlier this month, Yahoo claimed to list a huge index of over 20 billion Web pages. A couple of days later, Google refuted that claim. In an effort to settle the matter, two students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) decided to test the two search-engine giants. They built a Perl script and spent 18 hours running random searches on both Google and Yahoo. In "A Comparison of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices", they announce that on average Yahoo returns around 37% of the results that Google does - and in many cases, even fewer results. The conclusion? Still up in the air, as criticism at Slashdot argues. A Comparison...": http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/15/1624212 The Well is one of the oldest online communities, bringing together an eclectic mix of techies, creatives, and observers who have participated in wide-ranging conversations on the Well's many forums for more than 20 years. Salon has put the Well up for sale because, it claims, it wants to focus on its core online-magazine assets. According to Salon, the Well brings in about $500,000 per year in revenue from about 4,000 members and advertising. Oddly enough, at press time, Salon itself had nothing on the proposed sale - the news apparently leaked out via an SEC filing. The BBC has some background, including speculation that the Well might become a non-profit, an idea that would certainly fit given its history. We could find no public (i.e. non-member) discussion about the sale on the Well's own site. The Well: http://www.well.com/ BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4165542.stm Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) differ from the basic video game in several important respects. MMOG publishers garner steady revenue from monthly subscriptions and sales of expansion packs, and they're largely driven by the social need of the players. Like video poker, this can spell serious trouble for some folks. It becomes an addiction, and addictions are almost always ruinous. Kuro5hin's brief but informative look at the rationale of MMOG publishers and the ultimate effects on hardcore MMOG players makes for gripping reading. Your dog wants you to get out of Mom's basement and get a real life. Before it's too late. Our editor refused to comment on the seven hours he spent in World War II Online last Thursday. Furthermore, our publisher refused to comment on the seven hours he spent playing Battlefield 2 last weekend. Kuro5hin: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/8/7/162558/7544 World War II Online: http://www.wwiionline.com/scripts/wwiionline/index.jsp Battlefield 2: http://www.eagames.com/official/battlefield/battlefield2/us/home.jsp The rapidly increasing popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) suggests to David Wong a day when virtual reality will become more compelling and meaningful than real life, for some people at least. Call it Reginald Barclay syndrome. In "A World of Warcraft World", he extrapolates current trends to imagine a day when real people might marry through avatars and engage in sizzling virtual sex more alluring and satisfying than the messy, sweaty tangible kind and without worry of disease or pregnancy. Maybe that goes too far, but there's no doubt that the ability to choose your body and equip yourself with skills and powers in an exciting, artificial world is seductive and deeply satisfying. While advances in technology are clearly delivering increasingly memorable online game experiences, there's something deeply decadent about the real world becoming merely an ugly, unwelcome, but necessary intrusion. One wonders what kind of society could support a population of players almost permanently jacked into virtual worlds, a way of life certainly unimaginable to migrant farm workers who break their backs to send money home. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are becoming increasingly compelling and stimulating, however, so read and ponder. Reginald Barclay: http://members.aol.com/immurdoc/a-team/schultz/barclay.htm "A World of Warcraft World": http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wowworld.html "'Chaos' is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel - a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it." Roger Ebert's review of the movie prompted the producer and director to write him a letter. In it, they argue that "Chaos" is so brutal because current events are so brutal, filled with news and easily accessed images of serial killers, terrorism, and war. The letter led Ebert to write a rebuttal, a terrific essay about evil in film. He notes that he does not oppose cruelty and evil in movies, but rather the purposeless nihilistic recording of evil. In other words, Ebert thinks that if you put evil in film, you'd better have a point. "Chaos" has no point. After savaging the film's philosophy, Ebert reflects on a narrative that "is like a movie of a man falling to his death, which can have no developments except that he continues to fall, and no ending except that he dies." He calls such pre-destination self-defeating. Ebert's thought-provoking, insightful essay further illustrates why he's so widely respected as a film critic. On many levels, he gets it. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050818/COMMENTARY/508190304 Law enforcement, psychologists, and psychiatrists are intimately familiar with psychopaths, individuals who have no empathy, lack a conscience, and have an inflated sense of self-worth. Because they lack any frame of behavioral reference, they frequently commit horrible crimes. According to Robert Hare, the man who invented the modern psychiatric tools used to diagnose psychopathy, an unrecognized population of psychopaths lurks in corporate boardrooms. Many psychopathic traits often provide an advantage in clawing your way to the top of the corporate ladder. This lengthy article in Fast Company gives several examples, drawing at least a couple from the recent WorldCom and Enron scandals. It discusses how the same tools that can diagnose psychopaths in prison can screen out psychopaths before they make CEO. At the same time, Fast Company points out that companies may not want to do that, since the ruthless individuals the tests may filter out are at times very good for a company's stock price. The piece includes an eight-question quiz that lets you score your own boss on the psychopath scale. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html Google's Latest Blogger Developments Google's Blogger blog-hosting service released several new features this week. Blogger for Word is an add-on toolbar to Microsoft Word for Windows which allows you to publish entries directly to your blog, save drafts, and edit your posts, all without leaving the domain of Word - surely a house with many haunted rooms, but we digress. Blogger has also taken a couple of steps to combat blog spam, a welcome development. Blogger has been one of the worst offenders of allowing spammers to pollute blog comments with impunity. Blogger introduced word verification, also known as a captcha (from "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"), for comments, which prevents automated comment spam. In addition, Blogger has added a feature already popular for years on Craigslist, a flag users can set to mark blog content as objectionable. If enough people flag a post, it will be delisted, meaning that it won't show up on pages like Recently Updated. The source blog won't be censored or altered in any way, and mechanisms prevent malicious users from flagging a blog to death. You can read about all those developments on the Blogger Buzz blog.Blogger for Word: http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html Blogger Buzz: http://buzz.blogger.com/ Does Technorati Have No Clothes? Technorati has long been considered the leader in tracking blogs and blog statistics. It claims to index 15.6 million blogs, all subject to search. It is the organization that introduced the innovative content tags and provides many other tools that let bloggers keep track of their link networks. But all is not well in Technorati-land, as Jason Kottke points out. Kottke remarks on several serious issues he has with the popular Technorati. Among other faults, he blames Technorati for the inability to return data for large result sets, slow performance, and lack of search results from some of the most popular blogs around. Technorati has grown at a phenomenal rate, and such problems are not uncommon for burgeoning dotcom ventures. Technorati may need to focus on the basic services for a while before spending resources on more clever gimmicks. While it may deserve Kottke's criticism, by and large Technorati has kept up with the amazingly expanding blogosphere.Technorati: http://www.technorati.com/ Kottke: http://www.kottke.org/05/08/so-long-technorati Librarians are among the workers most affected by the Web. Degrees in library science have become less pure, and are now probably more accurately called degrees in information science. Not that librarians are suffering. They have become avid and insightful bloggers, as this dense and sophisticated analysis makes clear. Many write daily on how they blend the Web with the world at their desks, and it makes for some interesting reading. Central to this paper, "Investigating the Biblioblogosphere", is the recurring idea that it is important to develop metrics to measure blogs and their effects. The metrics proposed here are neither self-evident nor simple, but the results are certainly of interest if only to provide you, and us, with some new blogs to survey. The author, by the way, hates the term "biblioblogosphere", but we love it. http://cites.boisestate.edu/v5i10b.htm Take-Two Interactive: Screw Accounting, the Market Likes a Winner If you thought the problems of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were limited to the Hot Coffee mod that revealed the game's hidden porn scenes (see NSD 11.27), you'd be wrong. According to this Fortune article, the game's most severe problem is that the company that made it, Take-Two Interactive Software, plays unfairly with its accounting, let alone its game content. If nothing else, this piece provides an inside view into Take-Two's shady past, and it wonders why Wall Street seems utterly unconcerned with the company's accounting issues. As one money manager observes, as long as the game sells, Take-Two's stock is going to continue to rise. Wow.NSD 11.27: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.27.html#OC3 Fortune: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1090767,00.html Take-Two: http://www.take2games.com/ Weekend Craft Markets Go Online If you've ever visited those weekend flea markets where local craftspeople huddle under canopies to peddle their unique, one-of-a-kind, handmade wares, Etsy will have a familiar feel to you. It's the same concept, taken online. Just about anything you can't imagine is available for purchase, here - from grass wall-hangings to jewelry to beef jerky to much more. A headphone T-shirt? Yes. Really. It's craft shopping without all the weather, sun, and stinking patchouli.http://www.etsy.com/index.php ONLINE CULTURE The goal of this bit of artsy culture-jamming is to reshelve 1,984 copies of George Orwell's book "1984" in all 50 US states. The Avant Game blog encourages participants to go to bookstores and take copies of "1984" off the literature shelves and move them to creative categories like current events, history, or crime. Participants should also place bookmarks and notecards informing customers and bookstore workers of the effort, but the blog surprisingly does not recommend that the tokens contain the Ministry of Reshelving URL. Photos of the project are showing up in Flickr with the tag "reshelving". Once news of the effort spread, bookstore owners hammered the organizers with flak, and in an update, the blog now suggests that you may merely have a conversation with the bookstore staff about reshelving "1984". One of the organizers writes: "It is clear to me that many people do not feel that bookstores are a proper location for such play and intervention. I very much disagree, but I am learning much from their comments and reactions."http://avantgame.blogspot.com/2005/08/ministry-of-reshelving.html Memorably described as either "the best troll or the craziest person" on the Forumopolis message board, John Gobin Shaw a.k.a. Cyclotouriste just might be the angriest man on the Net, and that's saying something. He first comes to our attention with a post at the Thorn Tree board, where he seeks a female cycling companion for an extended world tour. Not long after he describes himself as "easy to get along with", the thread quickly deteriorates. In no time, he escalates to threats of physical assault, and this rollercoaster's just starting up. Before long, Cyclotouriste veers into an expletive-laden tirade in which he claims to have found out about the plans for the 9/11 attacks but kept it all under his hat because - um, well, just because. Links to more detailed rants and other material are thoughtfully provided; this guy's like a rash all over the Internet. As good as the Thorn Tree thread is, the commentary at Forumopolis makes it better. Forumopolis reset its forum, but Google retains the cache. Thorn Tree: http://tinyurl.com/dhtx9 Forumopolis: http://tinyurl.com/c5lx4 Slashdot Advice on Shopping Online You have to love Slashdot for its consistency, if nothing else. Every Slashdot thread, if left long enough, degenerates into some kind of a flame war. This thread started as a plea for advice on shopping online, but quickly descended into insults and capital letters, yet you can glean some handy info on the primary online shopping sources: Web sites for real stores (e.g. Best Buy); virtual stores (e.g. eCost.com); and price-comparison sites (e.g. Pricewatch). The pros and cons in the posts tend to balance, and as a result don't do you much good - it seems that for every bad review of one shop, there's a good review to counter it. We suggest you gather the URLs for shops discussed and run with them. The Slashdot thread is archived now, which means it's closed to new postings. If you want to flame someone for bad advice, you'll have to do it in a new subject thread.http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/04/1112243 ONLINE TRAVEL Proud of your city? It's time to check out just how hot it is. Does it have cool nightspots or trendy young socialites like New York City, Paris, and London? Or does it maybe make up for a lack of same with quirky artist quarters, free gigs, or simple attitude? You can find all that information, and lots more you've never thought of, in one spot, Gridskipper's World's Sexiest Cities page. You'll learn, for example, that Leeds is the UK's sexiest city, even sexier than London, a result sure to spark controversy. Rio is Gridskipper's choice for world's sexiest city, Houston is the straightest, and Seattle is the most lesbian-friendly. The determinations derive from surveys and research, and the results and comments are eye-opening, frank, and entertaining.http://www.gridskipper.com/travel/worlds-sexiest-cities/index.php Elaborate Hide and Seek on Toronto Transit Sytem Plotting anything on a public transportation system these days isn't such a good idea, even if it is only a game of hide and seek. In Toronto these days, folks are playing Live Action Scotland Yard (LASY), which is based on the old Scotland Yard board game (see BoardGameGeek for details). The players use the city's public transit system as their board - it looks like no one's been detained or stripsearched yet, which bodes well for future play. LASY is at its heart a giant game of hide and seek in which the target "may run, jump, deke out, hide or whatever is necessary, in order to avoid his captors." We assume they don't mean that literally - using whatever means necessary to avoid capture may prompt Toronto transit security and/or police to ride out on their moose and harass the players. If the game sounds vaguely familiar, you might be remembering PacManhattan, a hide-and-public-transportation-seek game we brought you in NSD 10.20.LASY: http://www.culturehole.com/blog_commento.asp?blog_id=14 BoardGameGeek: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/438 NSD 10.20: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.20.html#FJ2 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT What pops into the heads of some of us at NSD HQ when we think of children's albums is Sir Peter Ustinov's narration of "Peter and the Wolf" in the crackly age of diamond on vinyl. That 1960 album won a Grammy and is justly famous, but there's a whole stack of children's albums that we've either forgotten or never heard of. Kiddie Records Weekly is passing 2005 with a focus on one children's album a week. The site offers the full audio content of each featured LP along with additional materials - "Bugs Bunny in Storyland", for example, comes with a storybook. The audio is available in streaming format, MP3s, or BitTorrent files. Don't worry about piracy issues too much, the files are hosted on legit servers like the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound project. Most of the albums time under 15 minutes and might make the perfect bedtime story.http://www.kiddierecords.com/ The Art and Architecture of Subways Few people think of municipal subway lines as hotbeds of architectural innovation, but this collection of images just may inspire that notion. While many people are aware that Moscow's subway stations are beautifully decorated, who knew that Lisbon, Teheran, and even that icon of public transport innovation and use, Los Angeles, offer to residents the fruit of attention to design elements? Not only are such designs pleasing to the eye, but according to Metro Arts and Architecture, there's evidence that appealing stations suffer less vandalism as taggers treat them with the respect due huge works of art.http://mic-ro.com/metro/metroart.html BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.science-spirit.org/ Ladybird Books on How Computers Worked in the '70s Versions of the Ladybird Books title "How It Works: The Computer" from 1971 and 1979 are both available in full scanned glory. It's fascinating how far technology can progress in eight years, let alone 34. The 1971 edition often refers to reel-to-reel tape and magnetic drums, whereas the later version leans toward discs. Input moves from punch cards to keyboard, and kids today will find it hard to fathom that in 1971 the concept of displaying the output of a process on a screen was a fresh idea not widely embraced. Interestingly, the 1979 edition seems to address Luddites directly, whereas the earlier edition avoids that concern. Could the popularization of computing capabilities in the '70s have caused uncertainty about job displacement that needed to be addressed? Perhaps with the advent of the keyboard as an input device, lots of card feeders foresaw their usefulness outside a casino waning.http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/ SURFING SCIENCE Nova and Physicists Explain Einstein One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, a clerk in a Swiss patent office, longed for the distraction of a computer attached to the Internet so he could idly surf for hours looking for the next Big Idea, or possibly for porn. He probably would have settled for a good game of Minesweeper. At a loss, Einstein instead used his time productively - back when people in patent offices did that sort of thing - and came up with the famous equation E=MCC (we're too lazy to deal with superscripts). That short equation would become the cornerstone for the foundation of hundreds of thousands of other Big Ideas, including atomic weaponry and power. Anyone who has grappled with understanding how the equation forms this groundwork will appreciate the companion Web site to the upcoming Nova special "Einstein's Big Idea". Here you'll find resources for everyone. The site has video clips and descriptions of the entire history of Einstein's breakthrough hypothesis. It's still a little troublesome that Nova had to collect a full ten top physicists to put together an explanation of the equation for laypeople. The special airs Oct. 11, 2005 on PBS.http://www.pbs.org/nova/einstein A redundant array of independent disks (RAID) can, depending on the configuration, improve fault tolerance in computer systems by permitting data to be written across multiple hard drives. In English, that means that your data is written multiple times on multiple drives. The disadvantages are hard-drive space and cost - you have to pay for more hard drives than you'd otherwise need. The advantages far outweigh the impositions, however. The multiple copies read and load data more quickly and serve as an automated back-up. The how and why of RAIDs is explained with a minimum of geekspeak in this brief article at BTX. Learn about the required hardware, matching, and more. As inexpensive as hard drives and RAID controllers are at this point, redundancy can save you a lot of heartbreak without breaking your budget. http://www.btxformfactor.info/index.php?file=Article%207%20Page%201 |
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