More Signal, Less Noise
Sunday, November 13, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 39 Sunday, November 13, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF When Google announced plans to scan the full texts of books at several major libraries, reaction ranged from delight among booklovers to trembling fear among conservative publishers and authors. Lawsuits led Google to stop scanning for a time, but the company resumed efforts this month. Google wants to allow people to search the text inside books, and to make public-domain works available online. The first fruits of Google's work are now online at Google Print. Type in a search term and you get a listing of books which match, along with images of their covers. Click on the details and you can view book excerpts. In most cases, you'll need a Google account to view the text, a measure designed to control viewing of copyrighted works. Google Print also features a historical works section, a large selection of public-domain books from several major libraries. See the Google Blog for more on that. You can use the "date:" keyword to limit your search to a certain time span. Try, for example, a search for "difference engine" date:1500-1923.Google Print: http://print.google.com/ Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/preserving-public-domain-books.html This Forbes special is rich with content impossible to ignore. Among the topics in communication that caught our eye are: how to talk to aliens; chimp talk; and using DNA to code messages to last the ages. We also liked the intriguing article about the usefulness and desirability of judicious lying, in which we learn that depressed people are more candid about themselves than happy folk. The many interviews include the words of many key luminaries in the field, like Vint Cerf, Kurt Vonnegut, Desmond Morris, and many more. You'll keep coming back and dipping into this over and over. http://tinyurl.com/b6uu4 Scientists have discovered that male mice sing in the presence of female mice, or at least in the presence of their scent. PLoS Biology has the published article that reports the findings, complete with audio - but no karaoke tracks. You probably have never noticed mice crooning because they sing way above the limits of human hearing, in the ultrasonic register above 30 kHz. By phase-shifting the sounds to lower the octaves but retain the timing, you can listen to them and appreciate what they sound like. The authors show that the mouse sounds feature syllables and repeats characteristic of song. In their view, mouse music approaches bird songs in richness and complexity. There's plenty left for investigators to discover. How do mice learn songs? How do they vary as they mature? What is the auditory environment in which they develop? There's also the question of whether ultrasonic rodent deterrents actually work, but that's probably another project. http://tinyurl.com/7s3te Everybody's an expert on sleep, at least on their own lack of it. This special issue of Nature Insight is devoted to understanding sleep, both the why and the how. We were especially pleased to learn that the study of sleep disorders is having a profound effect on our understanding of mammalian sleep in general. Furthermore, it turns out that your brain is active all night long, regardless of whether or not you are in a REM state. Reading this won't cure your insomnia, but it will make you wish you could pay attention while you doze. http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/insights/sleep/index.html Suicides and the Golden Gate Bridge An average of 19 people each year commit suicide by jumping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Jumpers hit the water at roughly 75 mph and to date 1,218 people have died this particularly gruesome and painful death. This remarkable series from the SFGate chronicles not only the bridge's history as a literal jumping-off point for suicides, but also the debate over whether or not it should be equipped with a suicide barrier. The initial design for the Golden Gate bridge called for a five-and-a-half-foot guard rail, but for some reason the rail was dropped to four feet by the time it was built. Although the erection of a suicide barrier might seem an obvious move, this seven-part series explains just how difficult the obvious sometimes is to accomplish.http://www.sfgate.com/lethalbeauty/ Hidden Photos of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Robert Pledge, the curator of the Li Zhensheng exhibition, writes: "The Cultural Revolution unleashed the frustration and anger of a new generation eager to change the world, but the force was harnessed and used by those in power for a decidedly different purpose: its own complete domination." His introduction and the photographs from China's Cultural Revolution combine to deliver a brief but powerful glimpse into a world ruled by a godlike figure, by virtue of a propaganda campaign never equaled in scope. Li Zhensheng's "negative" negatives, carefully stored in individual paper envelopes and meticulously documented, were hidden under the floorboards of his one-room apartment even as he was harassed, hounded, and eventually sent with his wife to spend two years at hard labor in the Liuhe Gulag. In 1999, he delivered these envelopes, 30,000 of them, to Pledge's Contact Press Images, and over the course of the next three years, these images formed the foundation of an unprecedented exhibition and book, titled "Red-Color News Soldier".Li Zhensheng: http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/index.html "Red-Color News Soldier": http://tinyurl.com/9lu2b Search Process Automatically Generates Knowledge Suppose you have a list only of names of historic British politicians. With a modest knowledge of history, a person can imply a lot from this simple list. Can you automatically extract that knowledge and make it explicit? With the resources available on the Web, you can automatically - and that's the key idea here - extract a surprising amount of information from such a list with little effort. Matt Biddulp, who until recently worked for the BBC on just such problems, writes up his approach. First, he turned the list into a reference to Internet resources through Yahoo's search engine. This gave him a list of URLs that point to the Wikipedia entries for each politician. In addition to the obvious knowledge sitting in Wikipedia, this approach also provides non-obvious data. For example, you can run the URL through Bloglines Citation Search to gather Web zeitgeist on a particular politician. Biddulp also fed the Wikipedia articles to Yahoo's Term Extraction service. This produced terms that led back to other members of the list, which let Biddulp generate a diagram of interconnections between all members. The possibilities for automatic knowledge extraction boggle the mind.http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000070.html Before computers entered the picture, people who needed work done got other people to do it for them, if they had either the resources to pay for it or the power to demand it. Then came computers, and human beings established the tasks that computers would undertake and provide the results for. Amazon.com longs for the good ol' days. It knows that there are some things even kids can do better and faster than the most powerful computer systems, and so it has developed the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a program similar to Google Answers, but Google doesn't have the cool slogan "artificial artificial intelligence". A buyer, a.k.a. a requester, submits a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) through an API and researchers undertake to answer it for cash. The service demands no up-front fees; Amazon.com instead takes a 10% commission. http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Apple has aggressively targeted the education market ever since it was selling the popular Apple II. A visit to most campus book stores will reveal a healthy Apple section. So it's not really a surprise that Stanford University, which after all is not that far from Apple, should open its own iTunes store. To call it a store is really a misnomer, because all the public content is free. The vast majority of material is podcasts of lectures and seminars given by Stanford faculty and invited guests. There's a section with Stanford Sports broadcasts, and even a collection of Stanford-associated music, also free. The lectures, speeches, and interviews clearly comprise the heart of the collection. Stanford on iTunes gives listeners access to the cultural resources of a large university no matter where they live. We can only hope that other institutions follow Stanford's lead with indecent haste. http://itunes.stanford.edu/ Microsoft last week launched its new Windows Live service, a collection of experimental services designed as a testbed for moving key applications off the computer and onto the Web. The site is a response to the competitive pressure Microsoft feels as Google aggressively rolls out Web-centric services such as Gmail and Blogger. So what's on Windows Live? The main site offers you "your homepage the way you want it", with a view of your favorite news feeds, an e-mail inbox preview, and links to other online services. Windows Live includes a new version of the MSN Messenger client, search services for mobile devices, and access to "an automatically self-updating PC health service that runs quietly in the background" and protects you from viruses and hackers. Check out the Ideas section for details. Microsoft's ultimate goal is to provide an online version of Windows Office and other mainstream applications. MSNBC has a brief story on the initiative. Windows Live: http://www.live.com/ Ideas: http://ideas.live.com/ MSNBC: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9886941/ Every year, Americans spend 3.5 billion hours struggling with a tax code so festooned with exemptions, special deductions, and loopholes that it's almost impossible to understand. It's a rite of spring that everyone but tax accountants hates. What would a better tax system look like? The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform (PAPFTR) has ably answered that question in its recent final report. Aiming for a simple, fair, and economically stimulative plan, the panel recommends two options: a simplified income-tax plan and an investment-tax plan that builds on it and extends its investment-friendly aspects. The plan collapses a plethora of special exemptions to just a few and replaces tax deductions with tax credits, which are more equitable. Although such a tax scheme might be good for the country, count on a host of special interests to resist change fiercely - it's unlikely any plan as straightforward as this will be adopted. You'll want to dig into the full report, but BusinessWeek provides an admirably succinct overview that keys in on where resistance is likely to be greatest. PAPFTR: http://www.taxreformpanel.gov/final-report/ BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov2005/nf2005112_2498_db016.htm Last week, a grand jury indicted the US Vice-President's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on perjury charges related to a long-running investigation into who leaked a CIA operative's name to the media. Libby's indictment, available in PDF form from the Justice Department, is not the most noteworthy document in the case, however. No, for the real juicy bits of the Libby affair we must turn to his steamy novel, "The Apprentice" (2002). Libby follows in a long line of conservative novelists who write erotic fiction. An amusing New Yorker review of the book focuses on the bits that everybody wants to know about. After all, what's a good political scandal without a dash of ursine sex? Indictment: http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/documents/libby_indictment_28102005.pdf "The Apprentice": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312284535/netsurferdigest New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051107ta_talk_collins You know you have a serious bug in your software if it kills people accidentally. It has happened - software embedded in medical devices has gone awry and killed patients. In one instance, a bug deliberately introduced by the Cold War-era CIA into code stolen by the Soviets caused a huge pipeline explosion. Grace Hopper discovered the first ever bug in Relay #70, Panel F of the Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator way back in 1945. It was a moth. Ever since then, software and hardware bugs have been eating holes in the fabric of our computing machines with distressing regularity. Wired put together a list of what it thinks are the worst-ever software bugs, including several actual killers. If you're interested in this kind of thing, pay attention as we plug one of our favorite mailing lists, Peter Neumann's Risks Digest, which has been chronicling computing mishaps for some 20 years. First Computer Bug: http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1996/hopper/bug.htm Wired: http://wired.com/news/technology/bugs/0,2924,69355,00.html Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks Renaissance of Online Ads and Media Online Journalism Review (OJR) asks whether or not online media is back to bubbling. Venture capitalists and other deep pockets are again eyeing blogs and high-traffic content sites. Media mergers and purchases have heated up during the past year: the New York Times bought About.com; the Washington Post acquired Slate; and VeriSign took in Weblogs.com, among many examples. Studies that demonstrate that ad money is increasingly heading online help fuel the frenzy. Nobody wants to be left behind, and traditional media companies fret that their traditional business models just don't cut the mustard anymore. Companies are not dumping money willy-nilly, however - their focus seems geared toward acquiring sites that offer tools, such as news aggregators and blog readers. OJR looks into the future and sees that newspapers in particular will move toward a blended model in which some content is offered free online while other content, such as columns and local features, sits behind a pay-subscription wall. In any case, expect more online ads.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051101glaser/ The popularity of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" made a spin-off almost inevitable. One, "The Colbert Report", recently made its debut. It features one of the parent show's more popular regulars, Stephen Colbert. His new show is a razor-sharp parody of the right-wing talk shows that clutter the more tedious corners of our television landscape. Colbert uses his white male reactionary persona to skewer the propaganda spewed by political talking heads. Of course, the show has a Web presence - two Web sites, in fact. Host network Comedy Central's site offers standard content such as broadcast schedule and downloadable Colbert iconography, but more fun is the official unofficial Colbert Nation fan site. The main thrust of the latter is a blog on the events of every show, humor-wise a hit or miss affair. You're far better off clicking to the Fan Fiction and reading the encounter between Stephen and Gandalf in Romulus Fang's "Betwixt Lorien and Rivendell". Now that's comedy. "Colbert Report": http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_report/index.jhtml Colbert Nation: http://www.colbertnation.com/colbertnation/ WantedList.com sounds like a sure thing, sounds like an instant money machine, but Wired makes clear that it is not such a slam dunk. People treat and view porn differently than regular films - no great surprise - and the rental market for porn DVDs isn't nearly as large as WantedList.com's founders expected. Will the service make it? Wired reaches no conclusions on their chance for success, but the article is revealing about both the porn industry and the two young men who see their fortune therein. Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/porn.html WantedList.com: http://wantedlist.com/ ONLINE CULTURE The author of Greatest Internet Moments, a broad survey of Internet milestones, claims that it was inspired by the tenth-anniversary Yahoo Netrospective, of the top 100 moments of the Web. Whereas Yahoo's take on Internet history brimmed with milestones like the founding of eBay and the demise of Napster, this collection includes events which, while far less significant, are far more entertaining. We're talking about old mega-memes such as the Jennycam, the Mojave phone booth, and the regularly recurring cult of Family Circus. It's a fun trip back, particularly if you've been paying attention to NSD's own chronicles of the more oddball corners of cyberspace over the years.Yahoo Netrospective: http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/ Greatest Internet Moments by Me: http://www.aolwatch.org/100/
SURFING SITES The largest, bloodiest armed conflict in human history, World War II, featured an Eastern Front that so exceeded other theaters in scale and ferocity that it is considered a military history specialty of its own. The enormous number of casualties left an indelible scar on Eastern Europe's soul. Called by the Russians "The Great Patriotic War" - the 25 million civilian and military dead gives them the right to separate their struggle from the rest of World War II - its size and complexity is not easily comprehended but now, thanks to this superb interactive atlas of the Russian Front, non-specialists can get a sense of what went on over the course of the three-year struggle. Pobediteli (which means "Victors") is dedicated to locating living veterans, but the general reader will want to start with its multimedia map. The site closely covers various campaigns, and supplies an endless series of period media, personal accounts, translated documents, and other items that provide in-depth knowledge. You can either watch the whole presentation from beginning to end - an hour or two, depending on the speed of your connection - or you can use the clickable timeline to find a specific event. Note that while the story is told from an unabashedly Russian point of view, this is not cheap propaganda. It is the story of a life-and-death struggle from the perspective of a combatant that nearly perished and then paid a terrible price to win.http://english.pobediteli.ru/ Gordo Cimoli is a US Army helicopter pilot who spent 2003 in Iraq flying Blackhawk helicopters on search-and-rescue missions. He kept a journal, which he is now posting as a blog, two-plus years later. Although he enjoyed flying during his second combat tour in Iraq, he never exactly felt that it was great to be back. Each day was dull routine: mission planning; maintenance; and heat, sand, and bugs. The helicopter flights brought hours of monotony of a different kind, punctuated by sheer panic in night-vision goggles over hostile fire. His off-duty time was filled with exercise, bureaucracy, and attempts to complete phone calls to his family. Movies and video games were plentiful, as was the food, but that didn't make up for the living conditions. Simple pleasures like hearing his kids' voices or sleeping in an air-conditioned tent became memorable events. Post #40, "Questions and Answers", provides the best insight into Cimoli's life in a combat zone. http://www.cimoli.com/blog/cimoli_blog Masaru "Tochy" Tochibayashi, is a cartoonist, but he's also built the best 3-D computer models we've ever seen. He uses LightWave3D to produce stunning images and animations. His work brings World War II aircraft to incredibly realistic life. The animations showcase his models with smooth motion, backgrounds, lighting, and shading worthy of Hollywood's best special effects. Take a look at "Merlins" and gape. His Web site also presents several SF animations and detailed images of their characters. Another section steps through the Lightwave instructions to create a 3-D fighter plane object out of a 2-D blueprint. Even if you're not planning to build one of your own, the tutorial is a fascinating insight into assembling small objects to bring the aircraft to life. (The rest of the animation is up to you.) The pictures and animations tell the story, but if you can't read the kanji and want to, try the Google translation below. Tochy: http://www.angel.ne.jp/~tochy/ Translation: http://tinyurl.com/cy83h About two decades ago, American authorities began to build and use supermax prisons, facilities designed to stuff hardcore criminals into isolation units, break them down, and have them start over, hopefully as decent people. It is an interesting concept, but has it worked or do supermax prisons foster even more violence? According to this report from American RadioWorks, supermax prisons function as headquarters for some of the most violent gangs, with effects that extend far beyond the prison walls. It's a scary look at role reversal - in many cases, sentence to a supermax facility is taken as a badge of honor. If you're in supermax, you're the baddest of the bad. Rather than viewing such imprisonment as punishment for antisocial behavior, the inhabitants - and their networks of affiliates - view such incarceration as a form of validation. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prisongangs/index.html Blackboards or chalkboards are by their very nature designed to be used and wiped clean. If you want permanent notes, we advise you to use a notebook, pad, or backed-up laptop. Museums tend to archive permanent objects even if they do host temporary exhibitions now and then, so why would the University of Oxford's Museum of the History of Science house a display of blackboards? The answer is relative. When Albert Einstein visited Oxford in 1931 to lecture, one of the blackboards he used was preserved and became a scientific relic. Now the museum is marking the centenary of Einstein's Theory of Relativity with a commissioned selection of boards by well known Brits ranging from actress/politician Glenda Jackson to newsreader Jon Snow to soccer legend Bobby Robson. They cover topics that range from our duty to vote and protect the world from climate change through to the influence of Arabic music throughout the world. Sometimes boards deserve to remain unwiped. http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/blackboard/ When Simone Signoret remarked that "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be," we're pretty sure she hadn't yet seen Nostalgia Central, a vast online tribute to what was going on in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. All you Baby Boomers out there can refresh your memories and bore your children with details of popular culture that you lived through and forgot already. You'll find plenty of facts and photos of your favorite or not-so-favorite bands, TV shows, etc. arranged by topic, or you can browse the year-by-year feature of major and minor events of the decade in question. The site tries to be more than a stroll down memory lane as it traces political and social trends of English-speaking countries - but with a decidedly left-leaning point of view. If your nostalgia extends to Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you need to remember why exactly you loved "The Brady Bunch", this is a good place to start. The sheer amount of material will keep the nostalgic entertained for a good long while. http://www.nostalgiacentral.com/ Search for Degrees of Knowledge Separation Remember the party game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"? Omnipelagos would win every round. It uses a path-finding algorithm to plot the fewest links between two concepts in a database of over 500,000 Wikipedia entries. Enter any two terms in the input boxes at the top of the page and click the Search button. After a few seconds the server will display relationship chains ranked by path length, popularity, or other heuristics. You can even tweak the ranking system for different links. Use it for fun, research, or brainstorming. It's simple and intuitive, but its answers will surprise you.http://www.omnipelagos.com/ StripGenerator is a kind of virtual Colorform tool that lets you build your own comic strips. The Flash application features nearly 100 characters you can use to populate your strip and just about as many objects for them to interact with. Artists have a choice of speech bubbles to hold their clever dialogue. The tool comes from the mind of Sigmund, a Slovenian college student. The character names are mostly Slovenian, but that adds to the atmosphere. Winner of the Magadalena 2005 Gold Medal for Best Web Game (there should be a better category match for this), StripGenerator is addictive, especially if you think you're funny. Of course, the online gallery reveals that 99% of the strips are not in fact funny. Can you beat the odds? The activity reminds us of a visual version of any music loop program, where you take someone else's creativity and try to twist it into something wholly new, and wholly entertaining. StripGenerator: http://www.thirdframestudios.com/adgame/stripgen/ Magadelena 2005: http://www.magdalena.org/gallery/photo/magdalena_2005/ Han Hoogerbrugge is creating a unique body of art. Most of it is in his own image, and he makes his image do some unnatural things in a way that's safe for kids. Hoogerbrugge is an animator. His Web site showcases his current project, "Nails". His earlier work is probably more familiar to Europeans in the graphic arts. He rotoscopes himself - he takes video of himself, reduce frames in the video to line art, and modifies the line art. The resulting animations show his animated self deal with an exploding head, dance strangely like a certain dwarf from "Twin Peaks", only much faster, or a number of other odd activities. He does it all, not only the animation but also the accompanying soundtracks, which are entertaining on their hauntingly bubbly own. http://www.hoogerbrugge.com/ The average person thinks of bunnies as cute little critters. The wiggly noses, lengthy ears, and fluffy tails plus a range of cartoon characters from Jessica Rabbit to Bugs Bunny have convinced us to love them. Bunny Suicides, however, has uncovered the sad and little-known downside to rabbitdom. Those of us who suspected that rabbit roadkills were less "Watership Down" clashes with motorcars and more "I can't handle life in the burrow anymore" were perhaps right. These bunnies are killing themselves, often in hilarious ways, in these dark cartoons. They attack large creatures without hope of survival, use corkscrews in novel ways, jump under guillotines and into jet engines. These bunnies have no fear, the cartoonist has no qualms, and bunny-haters everywhere will shed no tears. Just don't let impressionable young rabbit-fans view these images - the damage could be irreparable. http://people.freenet.de/schnubelken/bunnys/ When you let Norwegian developers of weapons software loose in an average office, you get OfficeGuns, a primer on building projectile weapons out of desk fodder. Each one takes less than a minute to assemble, consists purely of standard office equipment such as clips and pencils, and is designed to hurt and scare your co-workers or less satisfying inanimate targets. You have to admire the sheer ingenuity of these modern-day Vikings. They offer construction notes on each weapon along with details of velocity, loading time, and test data from precision and penetration tests - they are professionals, after all. Since the inadvertent and serendipitous first launch of their Double Maul gun (made from two alligator clips) at a neverending meeting, the OfficeGuns office has eradicated long-winded speeches and boring presentations. Should they be nominated for a productivity award or escorted quietly away from the supply cupboard? http://www.officeguns.com/ Surveillance Camera Art Installation Is this site really what it claims to be? Laura is allegedly a security guard in Vancouver who has patched her surveillance camera into a Web feed. That she has managed to keep this project going for more than five months indicates to us that this is either an interactive art installation or one slick ad for a security company. Whatever it is, we decided that it is a live cam, and it is Vancouver. Allow us a little sleuthing.... We panned the camera to find two landmarks. The cross street near the camera is Georgia St. and beyond the Georgia St. intersection is a Four Seasons Hotel. A map of downtown Vancouver reveals that the intersection in view could be Georgia and Howe St. That same map shows that the camera is mighty close, even on top of, attraction 16, the Vancouver Art Gallery. A second camera pan revealed a signpost by the plaza - the camera is indeed mounted on the art gallery. A WHOIS check reveals that the domain name belongs to Janet Cardiff, and Web search on her name tells us she's an artist. Mystery solved.Surveillance camera: http://www.eyesoflaura.org/index3.php?bandwidth=hi Map: http://www.cmmt.ubc.ca/hgm2000/pdf_forms/downtownmap.pdf WHOIS: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml FLOTSAM & JETSAM Time Magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo think these are the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Before you ask, 1923 was the year Time Magazine was born. In a sidebar, Richard Lacayo has an account of the painful process by which the books were chosen.http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html A Few Thousand Science Fiction Covers This clever Flash application allows you to view the covers of several thousand science-fiction magazines. As you move your mouse over the rainbow mosaic, details about each magazine and artwork pop up. It's a neat use of Flash in an artistic user interface.http://www.krazydad.com/visco/ Flying Spaghetti Monster Grilled Cheese What were the odds that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) would manifest itself on a grilled cheese sandwich? On the other hand, it was certain that this sacred relic would end up on eBay. The true mystery is why someone would shell out $41 for it, but the FSM works in mysterious ways. Scroll down and read the comments.http://tinyurl.com/dnql7 No, Google Maps isn't at risk, but Risk the game can be played on Google Maps. You know, where you push armies around the map trying to dominate the globe. Somebody hacked Google Maps to serve as the boardgame. Neat. Slow, and painful to play, but neat. http://www.ashotoforangejuice.com/gmrisk.html This is a parody of one of those extremely wordy medical drug advertisements you might see in, say, TV Guide. Complete with important information for squirrels. http://www.panexa.com/ If you've ever played any massively multiplayer first-person shooters, you'll blow yourself up laughing at this astonishing simulation of World War II via in-game chat and host messages. http://www.4guysfromviewpoint.com/?p=76 What if spam messages were sober, responsible, sensible messages which gave good advice and really thought through the consequences of the offer? Take a look at McSweeney's for some funny examples. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/10/28bartlett.html HowStuffWorks looks at the Death Star inside and out, disclosing what really happens when you blow up a planet. http://science.howstuffworks.com/death-star.htm These QuickTime VR panoramas from the world of Quake IV are a cheap way to see what the interior of the game looks like without having to download the very large preview movies. http://vrway.com/vr_q4/ Want to share files? Edit photos online? Send large files to friends? Set up a to-do list? This eclectic collection of useful online tools, conveniently cataloged on one Web page, is the first place to look. http://www.philb.com/iwantto.htm It's all there, from the tongue all the way down to the extremely lower colon - in realistic color, too. Hmmm... a replacement for the Christmas stocking? http://www.strangebuttrewe.com/knitgi.htm |
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