More Signal, Less Noise
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 37 Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF The 1918 flu pandemic killed some 50 million people, and now it's back - in the lab, and some people worry whether it will stay there. SARS has escaped at least three times from biosafety level-3 facilities in the past, so concerns that work with this virus should be carried out under level-4 conditions, which mandates full protective body suits, do not seem misplaced. Others downplay the security issue and claim that this virus is no longer as dangerous as it once was because human populations may now be mostly immune to it and modern antiviral drugs mostly knock it out. It's those conditional "may" and "might" parts that bother us. The researcher who completed the resequencing of the virus published the full genome of the virus as a condition of publishing his research. The genome actually differs from the 1918 agent in some of its junk DNA, but it sure kills mice good. Its available to anyone, which is another worry that has yet yo be addressed. There's no question that the research will prove valuable, but has the virus wrought its worst damage in the past or will it do it in the future? Nature has a special report on the issues and the full research paper.Nature special report: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051003/full/437794a.html Nature full paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7060/full/nature04230.html In a classic "Star Trek" episode, Spock tells Kirk that the aliens they have just encountered are to humans as humans are to the amoeba. Physicist Michio Kaku addresses that very distance in his thoughtful essay, "How advanced could they possibly be?" Kaku assumes the validity of our understanding of the universe's basic laws and concludes that an advanced galactic civilization would appear to us to be gods. Kaku cites "2001: A Space Odyssey" as his primary influence. In case you're still puzzled, the monolith in the book/film is an intelligence test that signaled when we primates had advanced sufficiently to travel to the moon. In the book/film's precursor, the short story "The Sentinel", author Arthur C. Clarke called the lunar artifact an intergalactic fire alarm; the story ended with the recognition that waiting for a response would be humanity's next task. Strangely, Kaku doesn't discuss Clarke's contention that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but if Kaku is right, there is magic in our future. For related speculation, check out Wikipedia's entry on Space Intelligences. Kaku: http://www.mkaku.org/articles/physics_of_alien_civs.shtml "The Sentinel": http://www.csun.edu/~pjs44945/364clarke.html Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Intelligences Iraq War Gore Porn Maven Charged Last issue (NSD 11.36), we wrote about a site that traded access to porn in return for pictures of Iraqi war dead. Authorities in Florida have arrested the man behind the Web site, former police officer Christopher Wilson, on obscenity charges. The prosecutors went to town on Wilson, throwing 300 obscenity-related charges at him. None of the charges have anything to do with the violent pictures soldiers have posted to his web site, which apparently are of investigatory interest to the Pentagon. According to the arresting sheriff, this is all about the porn, but that is clearly only a blunt excuse to shut down the site. As quoted in a story at the Detroit Free Press, the sheriff also disingenuously said that "his obscenity charges have nothing to do with the Army's interest in the case."NSD 11.36: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.36.html#BS5 Free Press: http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/pm6544_20051008.htm Myth Busters Take on Archimedes' Death Ray During the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, the notably smart Archimedes is aid to have constructed a device that used solar power to set enemy Roman warships on fire. Last year, the "Myth Busters" team tried to build a version of the Archimedes death ray, and declared it a myth after they failed to replicate the feat. This year, a group of MIT students decided to give it a try. With more than 100 small mirrors and some cooperation from a cloudless sky, they managed to set a replica of a ship on fire on campus - see their write-up for copious notes and pictures. "Myth Busters" invited the students to San Francisco to test their system on a real boat afloat in San Francisco Bay. Long story short, the students managed to get a small fire going, but only from the short distance of 75 feet. Taking all the variables into account, "Myth Busters" still deemed the Archimedes death ray story a myth. SF Gate has that part of the story.Myth Busters: http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html MIT: http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/lectures/10_ArchimedesResult.html SF Gate: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/10/22/state/n121443D54.DTL While the world focuses on the Nobel Prizes, a set of equally important awards goes on less noticed: the Ig Nobels. Ig Nobel honorees in 2005 included researchers who answered the long-standing scientific question of whether humans swim faster in water or syrup (Chemistry), a 78-year-old experiment showing the liquid properties of congealed black tar (Physics), and the extraordinary series of short stories produced by the Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria (Literature). The Peace Prize was awarded to British scientists who electrically monitored the activity of a brain cell in a locust while it watched selected highlights from "Star Wars". Check out the site for a complete list of awards. http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2005 The $2-million challenge to have a car autonomously navigate a 132-mile desert course is over. A Stanford team's "Stanley" won the race in 6:53:58. Four other teams completed the course, a huge step forward from last year when no car managed more than eight miles from the start line. Stanley is a diesel-powered, modestly ruggedized Volkswagen Touareg R5 smartened up with six Pentium M computers. The challenge, backed by the US Department of Defense, has proven a huge success not only for the military, which would like to deploy fleets of autonomous vehicles in the next decade, but also for taxpayers. By the standard of Pentagon spending, the expense of the $2-million prize plus administrative costs is a military bargain for the development of a complex system that didn't exist a year ago. Expect to see more competitions sponsored by all sorts of government agencies. The Grand Challenge site has a great deal of information about all competing teams and the race, including video. The Stanford Racing site is rather frustrating in that it offers few deep technical details about its winning system. DARPA Grand Challenge: http://www.grandchallenge.org/ Stanford Racing: http://www.stanfordracing.org/ State of the Art in Exoskeletons DARPA's interest in robotics is not confined to autonomous cars. The agency is also involved in the development of robotic exoskeletons. The US military wants soldiers to carry heavy loads and battle swarms of extraterrestrial bugs (we assume), but such artificial exoskeletons also have civilian applications in areas such as medical rehabilitation and construction. This article in IEEE Spectrum surveys the state of the art in exoskeleton design. A second generation of these systems is up and running, and the article profiles concerned teams in Japan, in Utah, and at UC-Berkeley. All these teams have demonstrated that wearers of their machines can easily control the gear and can lift and carry heavy loads. The article also has links to several scientific papers on the subject and other Web resources.http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct05/1901 Blue Marble: the Next Generation NASA has been observing the Earth for many years, producing many spectacular photographs of our planet. One of NASA's most influential images was a snapshot of the blue Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts. This image and others led NASA to establish the Blue Marble Web site back in 2002, where it presented detailed true-color images of the Earth. NASA has updated Blue Marble with stunning new images that show the color of the Earth's surface for each month of 2004 at very high resolution, up to 500 meters/pixel. These new photo sets provide more detailed coverage than the original and span a longer period of time - a full year - so that you can now follow seasonal changes in the landscape. The images and animations are composites of many pictures with cloud cover algorithmically removed, so virtually every pixel shows the planet's actual surface. You can only get the very highest resolution images if you ask for them; NASA wants to limit bandwidth consumption, and clearly needs an introduction to BitTorrent. All in all, these images are further confirmation that Earth sure is a beautiful planet.Apollo 17 Photo: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=4573 Blue Marble: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/ Cassini, NASA's successful Saturn probe, will have flown by Dione, another of Saturn's moons, by the time you read this. Cassini will approach within 310 miles of Dione to closely examine its magnificent white streaks. The Cassini-Huygens mission Web site is a treasure trove of information and spectacular media, including video of earlier mission flybys, notably to the moons Tethys and Hyperion. Words fail to capture the sheer wonder elicited by the images - which is why we keep pointing you there. Cassini-Huygens: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/ Tethys and Hyperion Flyby: http://tinyurl.com/78er6 Latest Videos: http://tinyurl.com/7qmkj Visions of Science Photographic Awards 2005 This annual competition rewards the best scientific photography. The competition features ten categories, including two for young photographers. This year's winners include stunning images of shrimp cleaning the teeth of a lizard fish, extreme close-ups of a crystal of salt and a peppercorn, an illustration of the idea of panspermia using eggs, a paperclip-on-water analogy for the gravitational bending of light, and a painting of visual symptoms by a migraine sufferer. Past years provide even more award-winning eye candy.http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/index.html The Sordid History of the Harvard Admissions Process Malcolm Gladwell, who reached his own tipping point to become an author du jour, contrasts for the New Yorker the simplicity of his own university applications in Canada with Harvard's draconian admissions procedure. You may be surprised at the origin of today's nearly universal, complex admissions procedures. If, naively, you thought the process was all about marks, guess again. Harvard established its admissions policy pure and simply to limit the number of Jewish students. Once the school accepted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as admissions criteria in 1905, the floodgates opened. By 1922, Jews made up more than a fifth of new students, so Harvard, and most Ivy league schools, cleverly instituted a thick overburden of intrusive personal questions and interviews designed to ferret out origin, character, and personality - and to camouflage racism. This system has proven a useful way to limit any class of student, such as Asians, without appearing overtly prejudiced. Suffused with the well articulated if quantitatively vague notion of the Harvard man, the system is now self-perpetuating and probably too well entrenched and defended to attack successfully. Fortunately for the able students denied admission to Harvard because of what they are, they flourish wherever they go.http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051010crat_atlarge Web 2.0 is a concept that lately has been floating around the blogosphere and to a lesser extent around the technical press. Google returns nearly 10 million hits for the phrase, but its meaning is ill-defined. It's one of those buzzwords everybody uses but which nobody has quite pinned down. Tim O'Reilly was to some extent responsible for coining the Web 2.0 meme, which originated in a brainstorming session between him and Dale Dougherty. That origin led to the O'Reilly-sponsored Web 2.0 conference, but despite that concrete devotion to the idea, Web 2.0 remains a term for a vague bunch of technologies and philosophies. Tim O'Reilly seeks to remedy the problem with a more rigorous definition in this lengthy column. Concepts such as the Web as a platform, collective intelligence, data-centric thinking, and the end of the software release cycle all figure into it. Food for thought, especially if you're thinking of starting your own Internet venture. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html The Spikey Landscape of the Long Tail in a Flat World Thomas Friedman's recent book "The World Is Flat" compellingly postulated that globalization and ubiquitous communications have erased physical barriers to conducting business and pursuing innovation. Recently, Richard Florida critiqued Friedman's viewpoint in an Atlantic Monthly article titled "The World Is Spikey". Florida specifically focused on the flatness hypothesis, and argued that the world is in fact extremely spikey. Good examples of this are the concentration of economic power in a disproportionately small number of cities, and the concentration of computer talent in Silicon Valley. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, in turn attacked Florida's argument. Anderson suggests that Florida's idea is "akin to measuring culture in terms of hits". The debate embodied in Friedman's book, Florida's article, and Anderson's lengthy blog entry are all worthwhile reading for anyone interested in how the structure of our society is changing in an age of mass connectivity.The World is Flat: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374292884/netsurferdigest The World is Spikey: http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/TheWorldIsSpiky.pdf Anderson: http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/10/richard_florida.html PBS recently presented a documentary of interest to Bob Dylan fans, but if you missed the broadcast, you can pick up a feel for the content at the program Web site. Martin Scorcese developed the material, which is uniformly good. Those who can may remember Bob Dylan raunching and rheuming through speakers strung in the trees at a Hell's Angels hideout, but Scorsese does a great job of fleshing out a larger picture. Yeah, Dylan's raspy voice and pounding guitar are signature styles, but the lyrics he came up with set him apart. "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" focuses on the singer-songwriter's life and music from 1961-66, and includes previously unseen footage. This is history, and an excellent look at it. Meanwhile do check out Bob Dylan's own home page, for a great design and plenty of his music. PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/dylan/ Bob Dylan: http://www.bobdylan.com/index.html Yahoo Enters Book-Scanning Game It's so nice to see folks squabbling over which books to make searchable. It turns out that Yahoo wants to scan books, just like those young upstarts Google and Amazon.com. Unlike Google, and it's kind of a big difference, Yahoo plans to scan only works in the public domain, and you will not only be able to search the books but download them as well. The battle of book search is heating up. Who knew that library-building could create such rivalry? Slashdot has links and comments.http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/03/1756203.shtml In a Time of New Macs: The Life and Times of the Apple Lisa Apple released a flurry of products over the last month: Video iPods; dual-core Power Macs; improved PowerBooks; and a professional photo application. It's an impressive series of products, one which has its ultimate origin in what was a commercial flop. The ancestor of all modern Macs and all that grew out of them was the Apple Lisa, an ill-fated $10,000 computer released in 1983. Though the Lisa died in the marketplace, mostly due to its high price, it was a revolutionary machine, the first serious commercial implementation of the experimental user interface pioneered at the legendary Xerox PARC labs. While we contemplate the elegant and powerful Apple products of today, why not check out Low End Mac's history of the Lisa.Apple: http://www.apple.com/ Low End Mac: http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/1005.html African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth leads the Ubuntu Linux distribution project. He also flew on a Soyuz to the ISS in 2002. In this wiki, he talks about the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and more specifically about his own approach to it. Not surprisingly, he's fiercely in favor of open source and vows never to have commercial versions of Ubuntu, license fees, or royalties. His view of business is far from naive but is idealistic and optimistic. In the far ranging wiki, Shuttleworth discusses a whole host of things, including why brown is Ubuntu's default desktop color (more human), the hoary issue of binary compatibility, and why he chose to start Ubuntu rather than put the money into Debian. He slays the question dragons pretty neatly. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarkShuttleworth Marc Andreessen's latest thing is Ning. Ning is a tool with which enterprising folks can build social networking apps. It is to social networking what Blogger is to blogs. Currently, only registered beta testers can ning up their own Ning pages, but the Ningers hope to open up their toy to all as soon as feasible. It's free. If you read the Ning Blog, you'll find that most of the Ningers are pretty jazzed about it. It is handy, but whether Ning is worth the effort depends entirely on what users build with it - again, just like Blogger or any other blogware. At present, unless you're a Bay Area hiker, the selection is a bit underwhelming. http://www.ning.com/ Nielsen's Worst in Web Design 2005 Jakob Nielsen is back with another year's worth of Web-design annoyances. We think these are basic mistakes, but it turns out that legibility issues top his list in 2005. All the designers reading this ought to read his simple list. Put your mouse down and step away from the Flash, please.http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html ONLINE CULTURE Moodgrapher Tracks Blogger Emotions Moodgrapher tracks the "mood" of the Internet like some intelligent online mood ring. It scrapes LiveJournal mood data - LiveJournal bloggers can select a mood designation when they post. Moodgrapher tracks around 100,000 posts a day to determine how people claim they feel. According to LiveJournal's statistics, the subjects are predominantly American females with an average age of 18. Objective stats aside, these are also people who have the means and the time to tell the world what they're doing and thinking. For more details on how Moodgrapher selects its data, check out the Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts paper on the Moodteller page. Despite all the caveats, Moodgrapher is fundamentally a fun way to track how the blogger community feels at a specific time. More of them feel drunk on the weekends. We said it was fun....http://ilps.science.uva.nl/cgi-bin/livejournal/mood L33tspeak and Slang Translator Here's that all-in-one online translator parents have been looking for. If you've been shoulder-surfing your kids while they IM with their friends, you've no doubt pondered what "p.o.s." or "paw" means. The No Slang translator will let you know they mean "parent over shoulder" or "parents are watching". Doesn't that make you feel better? No? Want to know more? Run any text through its easy input form and you can see wtf your evasive brats have been typing. Internet newbies may want to keep a browser window permanently tuned to No Slang while they try their hardest to impress that phat chick (or dude) with their l33tspeak. If nothing else, you can learn new acronyms like "rotflmaofaktd", which besides being long enough to be the name of a town in Wales, conjures up a pretty funny image.http://www.noslang.com/index.php ONLINE TRAVEL Evolution of New York City in Photos New York Changing is a project of the Museum of the City of New York. Using carefully paired photos, generally taken about 60 years apart, the site shows visitors how much Manhattan has changed in the intervening years. While in some cases the city is dramatically different, the real shocker is how little many areas have changed. In one of the opening pairs, the Upper Bay and Battery area is seen from the same high-floor viewpoint. The buildings are essentially the same. The only real difference is the amount of water-borne traffic. While it's always possible to have an agenda and pick photos to support that agenda, the feeling we get is that physical change advances slowly in Manhattan. The site offers many pairs of black-and-white photos of uniformly high quality. If you care at all about the city, be prepared to spend quite a bit of time at this site.http://newyorkchanging.com/index.html Noah Kalina (who, unfortunately, doesn't hail from No' Carolina) photo-documents restaurants in the New York City area for AOL Cityguide, and he posts his work almost daily at Noah Kalina Interiors. His photos capture the grace and elegance of diner counters, ice cream parlors, and by-invitation-only-and-we-don't-mean-you establishments. They reveal fresh and classic takes on the atmosphere of consumption. The site is a great place to spur design ideas. Want new carpet? Opt instead for sod like Casa La Femme! Looking for a sculpture you can get rid of when you tire of it? How about an ice Buddha like the one at Megu? Wackiness aside, the interior design at most of these places is cutting edge, designed to draw and hold a hip clientele. The most recent photos are always on the front page. http://www.noahkalina.com/interiors/ Babylon, of course, is now known as Iraq, and English speakers who have time to kill there have hobbies just like the rest of us. Birding Babylon is a Web site devoted to birding, and more, in Iraq. People of a naturalist ken run across fascinating fauna even in war, and those of us safe at home can share some of the experiences once they go online. A desert monitor lizard, for one, can make an exciting entrance when it falls into your foxhole. Growing to more than four feet in length, they're one of Iraq's largest lizards. The Marsh Sandpiper is a beautiful bird, as you can readily see here. Birders have identified some 90 species that hang out in the war zone. While this blog isn't particularly pretty nor all that well assembled, it offers cool finds here for folks interested in local fauna. http://birdingbabylon.blogspot.com/ Fans of international rugby's most famous team, New Zealand's All Blacks, and anyone with an interest in indigenous cultures will love this site on that country's best known cultural export (Peter Jackson notwithstanding), the Haka. Adopted by New Zealand's rugby players as a display of pre-game intimidation, this dance has origins in the rich culture of the Maoris, New Zealand's Polynesian indigens. Tourism New Zealand's Web site touts New Zealand tourism, but also has a superb Flash-enhanced Haka feature that gives the dance's historical background, various rituals and protocols, and role in the modern renaissance of Maori culture. You can also watch dancers perform Ka Mate, the most famous haka, and an online lesson will teach you the basic steps if you'd like to try your hand, feet, eyes, and tongue. Try teaching this to your little league team; it will definitely unsettle their opponents. http://www.newzealand.com/travel/about-nz/culture/haka-feature/haka.cfm When Geoff Davis decided, as an exercise in Web tech, to create a searchable database of news items from the Korean Central News Agency, he may have expected only modest results. Instead, his NK News site has become one of the WWW's most popular memes. The Korean Central News Agency is North Korea's official and only source of "news" - "propaganda" is a more accurate term. You can use the STatistical Analyzer of Language In North Korean Propaganda (STALIN) search feature to find a particular topic or take advantage of the amusing suggested searches for a genuine taste of North Korean news media. Best of all is the Random Insult Generator, which serves up an endless selection of socialist-realist putdowns. True, mocking North Korea and its propaganda is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it's still enjoyable. http://www.nk-news.net/ Flash-Based Zoomable Map of Earth You can view this Flash-based map of our planet based on data from Google Maps or from MSN Virtual Earth. You can pan and zoom, and such. Not only is it pretty eye candy and a potentially wonderful research tool, it's also a good example of a how valuable an interactive Flash application can be.http://www.flashearth.com/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Most of Edward Burtynsky's photography involves bleak and largely industrial landscapes, but the mark of a great photographer is the ability to condense into one shot that which would take writers and poets an entire book to convey less eloquently. Burtynsky qualifies. His Web site presents a few samples of his noteworthy photography. Many of the photos at the site come from China, which has a distinctly non-conservationist approach to industrial expansion. Have an antacid handy; this isn't for the faint of stomach.http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ Hiroshi Homma's site is a place of great beauty, whether or not you happen to be into photography, as he is. He focuses on people, generally, to produce photographs that are sometimes haunting, sometimes whimsical, sometimes simply ethereal. His site offers several movies as well, although these are distressingly short. Largely an eye-fest, the Web site occasionally features a beat. You'll need broadband and QuickTime for best results. http://www.h-homma.com/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
Turning the Pages: British Library Releases Great Book Images The British Library has published Turning the Pages, an online gallery that allows you to examine in exquisite detail the pages of several historic books. Among the masterpieces available are Andreas Vesalius's 16th-century anatomical "De Humani Corporis Fabrica", Lewis Carroll's original "Alice's Adventures under Ground", and the oldest known printed book, the Diamond Sutra, printed in China in 868. The user interface, implemented via Flash, offers commentary and translations in text and audio. The library also offers Turning the Pages on CD, and encourages other museums and libraries to obtain the technology and apply it to their own collections. Click on the links at bottom of the page to learn more.http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html Comic strips are just for amusement. We can all agree on that, can't we? Joshua Fruhlinger can't. At his Comics Curmudgeon blog, current daily and weekly ("Opus") strips come in for trenchant and often witty comment. Some of us outgrow our childhood interest in the comics, others don't - our reviewer still starts his day reading two dozen strips on the Internet. Some of us just want a laugh; others look for the deeper story. This site is for those of us who think that truth and humor make a fine pair. Fruhlinger covers a wide range of strips and he exposes his faithful readers to strips they might not see locally - although virtually all can be found, sometimes delayed, on the Net. Beyond his own posts, read the comments, and the exposure to new strips is priceless. Curmudgeon, bah. http://www.joshreads.com/ SURFING SCIENCE Presumably in the interest of higher education, Eric Chaisson has put together a massive Web site that records current theories on the evolution of the cosmos. It's a digitization of his textbooks, although we hate to explain it that way because that sounds like he scanned in his text and hit "upload". Packed with over 300 MB of high-resolution companion video (also available in low-res format), the site is an educational masterpiece. Aimed mostly at high-school and young college students, we think, the site will engage even younger visitors interested in space, and older ones will enjoy the refresher course and possibly even learn something new.http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/ News About and for Higher Primates The Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University offers a superb page of anthropology news. The citations cover the gamut, from culture to archeology to human evolution and simian research. The page extracts most of the articles from popular sources like CNN or the New York Times rather than scholarly journals. The page is fairly straightforward in providing links to stories on other sites, classified by headline in chronological order, all in one easy-to-navigate package. It's so link-rich that if you choose to visit, we suggest ordering out for dinner.http://anthropology.tamu.edu/news.htm Free Evolutionary Psychology Journal Evolutionary psychology is a new offshoot. It combines basic Jungian work with a solid infusion of Darwinism. In other words, human behaviors can be described by standard protocols but they also evolve and adapt. The theory now has its own open-access, peer-reviewed online journal. The current issue contains ten original articles, three book reviews, and an essay. None of it is lightweight reading. This is professional grade work. Don't let that scare you away, though. The article entitled "Evolutionary Explanations for Societal Differences in Single Parenthood" is accessible and gives a good introduction to this field. The article on flower-growing and why humans garden is equally interesting and well written. While the site will appeal most to professionals in psychology, anyone looking for new behavioral thoughts will enjoy a visit.http://human-nature.com/ep/ Once upon a time, civic organizations built and maintained museums and corporations sponsored the exhibits within. Today, corporations cut to the chase and create their own museums, virtual and tangible. Intel uses its museums, virtual and tangible, to showcase its microprocessor and memory-chip history. While this is valuable stuff, the Microprocessor Hall of Fame at the Intel Museum leads the visitor to consider the big problem with corporate museums: here, for example, the only microprocessors in the Microprocessor Hall of Fame come from Intel. http://www.intel.com/museum/ Modern elevators - the real kind, with cables, not the hydraulic fakes - are controlled by computers. That's reasonable, for in high-rises, computer programs can make elevators extremely efficient. They can take traffic patterns into account and calculate on the fly how to best serve waiting passengers on all floors. On the other hand, computers can be hacked, and the folks who design the elevators have to build back-ends into the code for testing and, possibly, for fun. Here's a simple hack that will turn your next elevator ride into an express trip that will skip waiting passengers on other floors as it whisks you to your destination. http://thedamnblog.com/index.php?y=2005&m=07&d=31 SOFTWARE Google has released a spiffy RSS subscription service that allows you to find and subscribe to RSS feeds. The service is a model of simplicity. Enter a search topic and Google returns a list of related RSS feeds. You can then hit a button to subscribe to choices, and optionally add your own label to the feed. After you construct your reading list, you can navigate it, sort it in various ways, and keep track of items you've read. You'll need a Gmail account to use it.http://reader.google.com/ |
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