Robot Wisdom WebLog for October 1998 (waxing)

TV 2nite: PBS Nova looks at the history of movie effects; Frontline looks at the diet industry

A Deja reply to the Voice on ecoterrorism (below, today): [Deja URL]

I spent most of my Hollywood Stock Exchange account on Besson's Joan of Arc, back when it was real cheap: [heavy graphics] http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/4388/JoanArc/images.html [AintItCool]

New Onion

Hate-Crime Bill Stalled By Pro-Hate Lobby

A great piece on 'Eurobabble': http://www.foxnews.com/news/international/1103/i_ap_1103_102.sml

Most people know them as sheep. Some European Union documents call them "grain eating units." What are generally known as buses, are "intermodal transport systems" for Eurocrats.

Joyceans may want to tune into the Guardian Millennial History for the next week or so, as Henry 2 makes his move on Ireland (Ulysses-Oxen and elsewhere): http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day78.html

In 1155 John of Salisbury, clerk to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, travelled to Italy. There he met the newly elected English-born Pope, Adrian IV, and was given the papal bull called Laudabiliter, sanctioning Henry to invade and take possession of Ireland.

Game-art that makes you go 'wow': Populous 3: [detail] http://www.gamespot.com/strategy/populou3/screen_cgw.html

New Village Voice includes a short Hentoff tribute to Duke Ellington: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9845/hentoff.shtml

"I heard a cat on the radio, and he was talking about 'modern' jazz. So he played a record to illustrate his point, and there were devices in that music I heard cats using in the 1920s. These large words like 'modern' don't mean anything! Everybody who's had anything to say in this music -- all the way back -- has been an individualist. ... I don't listen to terms like 'modern' jazz. I listen for those individualists. Like Charlie Parker was."

And workplace net.privacy (not): http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9845/goldberg.shtml

He relays the story of a woman who complained to the ACLU that her boss congratulated her on being pregnant, when she'd yet to tell anyone in the office that she was expecting. What had she done? She'd accessed from her office computer a variety of Web sites geared specifically toward mothers-to-be. "It's unbelievable how much an employer can learn about your personal life using Internet tracking software," says Gruber.

And a superb piece on bogus 'ecoterrorism' experts: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9845/hsiao.shtml

Indeed, in their catalogues of Green terrorism Clausen and Arnold -- who claims to have coined the term ecoterror -- cite demonstrators engaging in civil disobedience, graffiti sloganeers, and protesters who refused to climb down out of trees.

Slashdot has Eric Raymond asserting that the Wall St Journal told him Microsoft has confirmed this Halloween Document is genuine-- Microsoft quaking in their boots about the open-source threat. But I'm still looking for a mirror that fixes the GROTESQUE HTML: http://www.grfn.org/~grinch/halloween.html

Loosely applied to the vernacular of the software industry, a product/process is long-term credible if FUD [Fear Uncertainty Doubt] tactics can not be used to combat it.

Add autism to the possible links between the immune system and the mind: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981031181106.htm

The question of how exposure to measles virus occurs raises a controversial issue. Parents of children with autism often report that the children started showing signs of the disorder shortly after being immunized with measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) or diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) vaccine, but no scientific studies have shown a link between vaccines and autism.

Data point: Mind-It took at least five days to notice the change in Harper's Index (Thurs below). Maybe that means I'm the only person who's requested it?

Yikes: I just felt a surge of O.J. nostalgia!

Nifty: topical-archive popup menu at Whump weblog

If you liked Microsoft Bob, you'll wuv MS Arthur: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/9-29mates.htm [via OSRR]

Savvy, playful and priced at $109 (U.S.) each, the two new interactive dolls are likely to find themselves fending off more than a few pine needles this holiday season. Microsoft expects Arthur and D.W. to be just as popular with 4- to 8-year-olds as their plush purple predecessor was with the younger crowd.

Thanks to a 4-megabit ROM chip, the standalone dolls boast a vocabulary of 4,000 words each.

(Can you say, "General Protection Fault"? I knew you could!)

Hollywood's loveletter to AOL: http://www.sjmercury.com/ent/center/mail110398.htm [OSRR]

"This is the first film I've been involved with that treats computers and online for what they are: an important part of communications for real people in the modern world."

"(Director) Nora Ephron is an AOL member and wanted to make the film as realistic as possible. Warner Bros. came to us and said, `We want to update this film into the modern age and make it look real. Can you help?' And we were delighted."

Best art project of 1998-- haiku microbroadcasting: http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Nov/03/city/POET03.htm [OSRR]

Taking a low-power radio transmitter, Vecchio attached it to a text-to-speech synthesizer -- the computerized voice on the radio dial. He plugged a personal computer into the synthesizer, and loaded it with about 10 haikus that he wrote.

TidBits lauds HyperCard and warns that it's at risk: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-453.html#lnk3

Given these pressures, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had to make concessions to digital media developers - most of whom develop for both Windows and the Mac - to secure their support for QuickTime. One of those concessions may well have been a promise not to compete with QuickTime authoring and production software from third parties.

I scare myself (part deux): George Will asks hard questions about hate-crime theory: http://www.sacbee.com/voices/national/will/will_19981015.html [ALD]

Congress continually uses the criminal law as a moral pork barrel, for indignation gestures. Compassion is today's supreme political value, so politics is a sentiment competition. It is less about changing society than striking poses: Theatrical empathy trumps considerations of mere practicality.

Excellent morning for NASA Watch including this terrifying book-excerpt about the fire on Mir: http://www.msnbc.com/news/210871.asp

On Earth, someone who faints or is overcome by smoke will keel over, presumably hitting the ground and prompting those nearby to rush to the rescue. In microgravity, an unconscious person will simply float in space, motionless; unless someone is hovering alongside, you may never know that individual is in trouble.

And the full Nova transcript about Mir: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2513mir.html

And this actual eBay offer of a Russian shuttle for $99k: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=38320753

There are only TWO LEFT in existence! Boran-5 must find a HOME, college campus or museum. Please find him a big front yard. Must sell soon!

Don't miss: Forbes has posted their NYT-hackers coup: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211132a.htm

To penetrate the Times, Slut Puppy and Master Pimp employed what is called a remote root buffer overflow.

Markoff wasn't the only one to make it onto Hag's hit list. Carolyn P. Meinel of Cedar Crest, N.M. is its public enemy number one. Meinel is the author of The Happy Hacker, a kind of Hacking for Dummies volume chock-full of folksy golly-gee-isms interspersed with geek talk. The goal of the book is to teach "newbies" how to hack legally.

So, on Aug. 7 Slut Puppy and Master Pimp, entering Rt66's servers the same way they did in April, made off with the whole customer credit card file -- 1,749 card numbers in all.

There's also a funny look at Windows CE and the HP Jornada, by Stephen Manes: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211248a.htm

Microsoft's Web site says that CE doesn't represent "a single concept," but when the system debuted a couple of years ago on organizer-size devices with dim screens and hopeless keyboards, the concept "lame" sprang to mind.

Philip Greenspun abandons the Mac... for Windows NT?!? (mostly about file formats) http://photo.net/wtr/mac-to-pc-migration.html

If you insist on doing ambitious things like connecting your Macintosh to the Internet (a technology dating from 1968), there is only one procedure guaranteed to stop MacOS from crashing: [pix of gunwoman]

Hey, why didn't you convert to Linux instead? The correct and moral thing to do is to move from the Macintosh to Linux and ignore Bill Gates and his monopoly. The things that keep me from doing this are the following: 1) I like Adobe PhotoShop, which doesn't run on Linux...

This Day in Joyce History: In 1914 (pre-Portrait), a play at the Abbey parodied Joyce's youthful boasting-- "The Dream Physician" by Edward Martyn.

TV 2nite: Cats on PBS Great Performances; Harold Bloom on Charlie Rose. Chgo's other PBS station is rerunning the legendary "Fear and Favor in the Newsroom" http://www.newsreel.org/articles/fearrel.htm

Drudge captures ABC web-screwup: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

"Earlier tonight, during testing of the ABCNEWS.COM site, we inadvertently posted results and erroneous predictions on the outcomes of races. There was no bias intended by what we posted and the predictions do not reflect the reporting or news judgment of ABC NEWS. We sincerely apologize to all of our readers for any confusion. We are taking steps to ensure similar mistakes do not happen in the future."

New NY Review of Books and Laissez-Faire City Times

Circulation of the nation's 20 biggest papers: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1102/d_ap_1102_165.sml

Up: USA Today, LA Times, tabloids
Down: WSJ, NYT, WashPost, Chgo Trib

Looks like New Yorker content gets added Monday afternoon: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/ (The new links are screwed up, actually.)

Tenth anniversary (tomorrow) nostalgia for the Great Internet Worm: http://www.msnbc.com/news/209745.asp

The Morris Worm exploited some well-known flaws in the Unix operating system. One example: The mail program Sendmail, then used by most Internet servers, had a programming convenience that allowed remote users to issue a 'debug' command. The command opened up a program dialogue that effectively gave the Worm the ability to execute commands on a new machine.

Where RTM is now (from 15 June below): [Messy URL]

New Progressive Review includes the Clinton's-black-son rumor [Pic source]

My ideal radio format (31 Aug et seq below) is approached by Spinner's ModRockGrrls: [tinny Realaudio, not full songs!??] http://www.spinner.com/genres/themes/index.jhtml

MemeWatch: "The X formerly known as Y-not-Prince": [AV pattern]

AltaVista found about 51083 Web pages for you.

("Formerly known as Prince" gets a measly 3873.)

I can't tell what he's offering, but it sounds righteous: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/15938.html

Todd Rundgren launched TR-I in August and says the system will work for any artist who wants more control of his music. By January 1999, Patronet will be ready to push musicians who want to deliver directly to a Web audience of underwriters. The system will be designed to work well on a 28.8 modem and won't need sophisticated equipment for the end user to access the music, Rundgren said.

Here's a sample of the website-traffic analysis AC Nielsen will do for you: http://www.acnielsen.com.au/prodserv/internet/sample.htm

Top Paths Through Site: This section identifies the paths people most often follow when visiting your Web site. The path begins at the page of entry and shows the next six consecutive pages viewed.

More details on possible Clinton herpes: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

Any and all references to what Monica Lewinsky was told and possibly saw regarding President Clinton's health were redacted from public versions of information released with Ken Starr's impeachment referral.

(If you had sex with the President, you are strongly urged to consult a physician immediately!!! ;^)

Bleak new greenhouse predictions: http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_205000/205867.stm

They say that based on the temperature peaks of every year in the last millennium, 1998 is likely to end up as the UK's hottest year since 1106.

But from 2050 onwards, vegetation dying under the impact of climate change will itself add about 2GtC a year to greenhouse emissions, further intensifying global warming. In a masterpiece of judicious understatement, the authors say: "This enhancement is not yet included in climate predictions."

Brain transplants on horizon: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981031181308.htm

Toomas Neuman, Ph.D., Director of Neurobiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Dr. Levesque are working together to culture a number of carefully targeted brain cells from a patient, stimulating growth and regeneration in a carefully regulated environment, and then re-introducing them into the patient, where the growth continues, and effects healing and repair to previously irreparably damaged brain tissue.

The net.music scene still baffles me, but here's another item: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1116/6211051a.htm

Customers log on to their site, www.goodnoise.com, call up the menu and click on the tunes they want. At 99 cents a song, the cost is about the same as a 15-song album purchased at a record store.

(I need a definitive overview!)

NASA Watchman praises Mir tell-all: http://www.reston.com/nasa/book.reviews/dragonfly.html

"Abbey is regarded by many as the J. Edgar Hoover of NASA, a mysterious figure shrouded in myth and legend. Astronauts whisper about the file he is said to keep on every center employee. A thick green binder he totes to meetings is regarded as a source of secrets on a par with Pandora's box. Among the astronauts and the hundreds who support them, it is axiomatic that it is Abbey who actually runs NASA, not the bubbly Administrator Daniel S. Goldin who spends his days in far-off Washington glad-handing politicians and flattering the poor, hapless Russians."

Today Iridium turns on: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/103098t.htm

Presidential herpes? http://www.drudgereport.com/

White House intern Monica Lewinsky told Linda Tripp that President Clinton would cancel dates with her when he was flared with blisters...

Pie update: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/11/2/30537.html

His teams yell "Gloop, gloop, gloop" as they launch their tarts. If they fail to strike, they eat the pies -- which they insist are top quality.

I guess this would be a 'thumbs down' from Ebert, then: http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1994/07/931635.html

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

Everything the Pentagon says is a lie, Agent Orange division: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/103198/health2_9757_noframes.html

A table in the second report showed Ranch Hand veterans by a ratio of 5-to-1 were "less well" than other veterans. But after a White House advisory panel reviewed the report, the table was omitted in the published report, and the lead scientist, Col. George Lathrop, deleted a sentence saying some of the findings were "of concern" and instead wrote the findings were "reassuring."

A pleasant profile of NPR's David Sedaris: http://www.calendarlive.com/HOME/CALENDARLIVE/SUNCAL/t000098985.html [OSRR]

"There are stories you can imagine Steven Spielberg reading and thinking, 'Hmmm,' in a very glowy, the-family-is-intact, people-are-loving-each-other sort of way," Glass says. "Even though the mother is sitting at the kitchen table smoking and drinking and with a cigarette in her hand, and the children are hanging on her every word, and the father is out of sight in the other room."

Beautifully executed web paper doll: http://www.DressTheBoss.com/frames.cgi [Whump]

PJ O'Rourke update: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/110198/enter30_11615_noframes.html

"We artsy types would have been shocked if anyone had told us that making money was creative. And we would have been truly shocked to learn that a fundamental principle of economics -- 'Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses' -- is the root of all creativity, be it artsy, IBMsy, or whatever."

He visited examples of capitalism and socialism, good and bad -- Wall Street, which is another country, Albania, Sweden and Cuba. It's left as an exercise for the student to identify which is which. Hong Kong (how to make everything from nothing); Tanzania (how to make nothing from everything); Shanghai (how to have the worst of both worlds) and Russia (which hasn't decided yet whether it's going to have a real economy).

His travels confirmed for him the principle that governments are no good at designing economic systems, or deciding who should be rich, and shouldn't try. People are good at figuring out what to do with their own money, and if they're wrong, at least they're not losing ours.

Blame it on Stockholm: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000099236.html

Friday's horror at the private disco party completes [?!?] what many Swedes see as their steady fall from grace since the late 1970s, when the country's serene image and widespread wealth made it the social model of the world.

French hubris dooms "Tres Grande Bibliotheque"? http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/110198/world23_25860.html

"The dream of creating a library of Babel that collects together humanity's writings is turning into a nightmare," wrote the left-leaning daily Liberation.

When I linked my hypertext timeline (Wed below) I didn't bother with a pullquote, but this morning I decided to extract the headings, for separate pondering: http://www.govtech.net:80/gtmag/1998/oct/untangling/history.shtm

3000 BCE - 1300: The Age of Writing (every book is handwritten, with an individual 'voice')
1455 - 1768: The Age of Printing (the illusion of an objective voice)
1837 - 1941: The Age of Electricity (exploring an infinitely impressionable medium)
1945 - 1968: The Era of Big Iron (allowing coarse projections of human reason)
1969 - 1976: The Network Era (a radically new dimension in human communication)
1977 - 1983: The Micro Era (personalized computing brings a burst of innovation)
1984 - 1986: The WYSIWYG Era (conflicting standards for esthetic computation)
1987 - 1991: The Hypertext Era (personal hypertext generates excitement)
1992 - 1994: The WWWeb Era (global hypertext with minimal imposed structure)
1995 - 1996: The Netscape Era (NHTML evolution driven largely by user-gee-whiz factor)

(1997 - 1998 has to be the Age of Hype, hopefully to be followed soon by an Age of Professionalism.)

I've been trying to tune back in to Jules Feiffer after several decades: http://www.uexpress.com/ups/opinion/cartoon/jf/index.html

NetSkink debunks stereotypes about women online: http://www.examiner.com/981101/1101skink.shtml

The Vanderbilt study focused on six myths:
-- The best way to attract women to the Net is through building relationships.
-- Women are uncomfortable with technology.
-- Women love to shop.
-- Women are most drawn to the Web by things like cosmetics and clothing.
-- Women don't use on-line financial services or products.
-- The Internet is for young people.

A very thorough HDTV story: http://www.channel2000.com/news/stories/news-981031-133015.html

"It is such a clear, crisp picture, it's almost 3-D like. Every time we've demonstrated this, we've had people come in the store and say, 'Oh my gosh, I want this.'"

Thomas Jefferson's adultery proved! http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1031/d_ap_1031_58.sml

It would make sense to see if the Y chromosome found in Jefferson descendants matched in its details with the Y chromosome in descendants of Sally Hemings' sons. But those descendants would have to be part of an unbroken male line of descent, and Jefferson's only son by his wife died in childhood. So, Foster turned to descendants of Field Jefferson, the president's paternal uncle, because their Y chromosomes should indicate what Thomas Jefferson's looked like.

A little too much democracy (for the corporate mouthpieces): http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1031/d_rt_1031_43.sml

"We banned the use of gill nets to protect dolphins in 1990," Stern said. "We also banned cable TV in 1964, but it was declared unconstitutional so it never went into effect." The initiative process in California -- tagged by some critics as "Democracy run amok" -- was introduced early this century by a state governor who wanted to curb the power of special interests in the state capitol.

They're starting to think about thesauri: [multipage] http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/10/30/feature/index.html [SN]

...as Web sites and intranets grow into large mission-critical information systems, we're seeing a rising need to employ online thesauri as tools to help users find what they're looking for quickly and effectively.

A major retrospective on the JFK assassination: [multipage] http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/1998/nov/extra/jfk.evidence.html [OSRR]

Sorry, no This is Hell this week either

Nielsen debunks Yahoo, mostly righteously: [piebald text-styling] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981101.html

In building a "mini-Yahoo"... Avoid Yahoo's mistakes: allocate editorial resources to maintain the site and keep it meticulously up-to-date, buy the best search you can find, and make sure to emphasize high-quality or recommended information. Finally, do the research to discover users' goals and design the service to support these goals and not the things you think users ought to want.

Less than half a cent per page view from an advertising-based service is fine if the service has as much traffic as Yahoo. But most other sites will not be able to survive on such low income.

I predict that clickthrough rates will continue to drop and be cut in half every year. Across the Web, the average clickthrough rate was about one percent last year and about half a percent this year.

And includes a clever algorithm for estimating a page's absolute popularity: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/relativeranking.html

In other words, data from your own server logs combined with freely available information from Yahoo's press releases are sufficient to give you a pretty good idea of how you rank relative to the other sites on the Web.

(The Elvis Index gives a different picture, I think:

yahoo:            4221298  1833 [why has this one alone dropped 60% this year???] 
microsoft:        3224824  1401
netscape:         2985884  1297
aol:              2693229  1170
java:             2067283  898
ibm:              1799967  702
linux:            1301319  565
hp:               1173449  510 (hewlett packard: 138%)

Nielsen's Zipf argument seems a little too miraculous: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html

Zipf distributions have been shown to characterize use of words in a natural language (like English) and the popularity of library books...

(My question: if I tightened my definition of 'distinct website name' I'd have to drop 'java' and 'linux', but the distance from 'yahoo' to 'hp' would stay the same...??? So Nielsen's curve must be idealised.)

Microsoft's Java-killer: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2154768,00.html

One of the things a universal virtual machine (UVM) would do is make several languages -- such as the object-oriented language Small Talk or Microsoft's Visual Basic -- cross-platform and mobile.

Executive Alzheimer's contagious? http://www.reston.com/nasa/congress/10.30.98.rohra.html [NASA Watch]

"Yesterday, Bill Clinton told Walter Cronkite and the American people on CNN that 'Our space program has been a great investment. It's had hardly any increases in funding since I became President, but we've gone from two launches to eight launches a year.'

"That's pure nonsense. Bill Clinton has cut NASA's budget in actual dollars every year he's been President, and slashed the real purchasing power by a third. In fact, this administration has cut $40 billion from NASA's outyear budget since he was first elected.

"Furthermore, there were eight Space Shuttle launches in 1992 - the last year of George Bush's Presidency - and only four this year. So in fact Bill Clinton has cut human space flight in half."

("...but at least he doesn't have herpes!" ;^)

This Day in Joyce History: In 1902, James got his BA from University College.

Okay detailed Tom Wolfe profile: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/31/30212.html

Wolfe occasionally wrote little poems at this time; under the pseudonym Jocko Thor, he wrote: "I shall Revolt I shall burst this placid pink shell I shall wake up slightly hungover, Favoured, adored, worshipped and clamoured for. I shall raise Hell and be a real Cut-up."

"Wolfe's articles," he says, "were such murderous inventions and such a brutal caricature of Mr Shawn that all of us at the New Yorker felt that the random violence of the city streets had suddenly entered our lives."

"A lot of people on the left said that I'd caused money to dry up," he says, "by mocking a famous and generous fund-raiser like Mr Bernstein. It was the greatest flak I ever got."

...The discussion soon got on to police repression, the Gestapo atmosphere, and such like. "What are you talking about?" Wolfe asked from the dais. "We're in the middle of a Happiness Explosion!" As if to prove the point, Wolfe once took Marshall McLuhan to a topless lunch in San Francisco. ..

"It bothers me more to be called reactionary than conservative," he says. "I mean, what is my agenda supposed to be? I just think the political arm of this country has bent over backwards to help the downtrodden. I believe what the blacks need is strong, bourgeois role models."

And a pleasant inquiry into Anna Wintour's power over fashion: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/31/30204.html

"That would never have happened with Grace Mirabella [Wintour's predecessor at Vogue]," says Jacobs. "It would have been stuffy old ladies in suits. Anna rocks - she turns up the volume."

"Anna demands that people be in love with her," says Truman. "She demands the respect and adulation of the entire industry of fashion." Those demands have not always been met. When she worked at British Vogue, she was dubbed Nuclear Wintour.

New Science News

Serious Atari nostalgia: [multipage] http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc981028.htm

Yet I'd spent hundreds of nights exploring what seemed a wide world of bits; I'd lived a thousand lives, died a thousand deaths, had been both God and acolyte inside a 2-D world all my own, a 48K universe that exists today in $39 disposable gadgets...

Tori's dad! http://cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Music/9810/30/tori.amos/index.html

"My dad likes my success," Amos says. "He enjoys it for a lot of reasons. Yes, he's proud of me and so is my mom, but I think that ... he likes it that I stir it up, because he has questioned a lot of the things that he preached about for so many years."

October Boardwatch is still in muti-multi-page mode: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/98/oct/fable.html

Let the metasearch wars begin: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15928.html

"One MetaCrawler means one entity to negotiate with, which is nice," Selberg said. "But a custom MetaCrawler on every desktop? Bad news."

Local catastrophe: a broken 24-inch gas main is burning like a giant blowtorch directed right at a senior citizens' highrise (at Halsted and Clybourn). They think the building was evacuated in time, but some pets were left inside. After 30 mins, the gas has finally been shut off. [First AP report]

NYC-centric view of the Pathfinder site breakup: http://www.atnewyork.com/viewpoin.htm

For the truth is this: Time Warner was not defeated by the market. It was beaten by a far more insidious enemy -- its own people. It is well documented how the myopic editors of Time's big titles refused to give credence, support, or even the time of day to the team of people charged with making Pathfinder a major media brand.

The best way to build community on netnews is to compile a FAQ: [Deja URL]

         Lynda J Barry/ Ernie Pook's Comeek FAQ
         alt.ernie-pook         30 October 1998

More reasons to hate Clinton: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,28110,00.html

The little-known provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, now law, promises to a shake up the Net radio business when the new licensing fees take effect in up to seven months. Under the provision, Webcasters at relatively nascent Net radio stations will owe a statutory license fee to the record companies -- a fee traditional broadcast radio stations don't have to pay.

New Lingua Franca includes a light intro to Bourbaki-math: http://www.linguafranca.com/9810/hypo.html

I myself was a victim of new math. The nuns who taught me in elementary school had been brainwashed into believing that arithmetic was not about numbers but about more abstract entities called "sets." Thus if you were asked to solve the equation x + 3 = 5, you didn't dare say "two." You said, "the set whose member is two." It was like being on Jeopardy, where the contestants have to phrase their answers in the form of a question.

And this shaggy dog tale of unlikely rivals: http://www.linguafranca.com/9810/ip.html

How, then, does Sherlock build his case? It goes like this: Sometime in 1904, Wittgenstein and Hitler befriend each other at the Realschule in Linz, drawn together by their mutual interests in Schopenhauer and music. The upper-class, assimilated Jew -- "forceful and used to commanding servants and expressing [himself] in High German" -- introduces his lower-middle-class buddy to Eastern mysticism, Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, and embryonic formulations of his masterwork on language. "For some unknown but historically crucial reason," Cornish explains, the friendship crumbles, and Hitler projects his hatred for "the apostate Jew" and his wealthy family onto the Jewish people.

It's been known for some time that Hitler and Wittgenstein overlapped one year at the Realschule.

Everything Microsoft says is a lie: http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,28136,00.html?st.ne.ni.pfv

WebTV shelved plans to develop a set-top box that supports Java not because of any nefarious meddling by its parent company, he added, but because Java requires more memory and is more expensive than WebTV resources allow. Meeting the memory requirements for Java would add 10 percent to the price of WebTV, Perlman asserted.

I think I read there's a risk of serious interference from this: http://www.variety.com/article.asp?articleID=1117487952

TV icon Milton Berle was on hand to push the button that officially launched KTLA's digital signal, a process carried out with much fanfare during KTLA's morning newscast. Tribune Broadcasting-owned KTLA is one of 42 major-market TV stations set to begin broadcasting a digital signal by Sunday, as mandated by the Federal Communications Commission.

Oliver Stone's next project, about football, sounds awful: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=2399

IRA STONE -- head coach of the Scorpions, is striking and intense. I believe Al Pacino is on board for this role. He loves the game, he loves what it's become, but mostly, he loves the history, heritage, and legends which have lent themselves to allow the sport to come to be what it is. His tragedy is that he has given everything of himself to this game which he loves so much. Devoted his life -- every waking moment to it. He's lost his wife and family for it.

Meta: MCS (this ISP) is forever blocking and unblocking various sites for smurf attacks. This is appparently why I couldn't get Nerve yesterday. If MCS blocks your site, it will look to you like MCS has vanished, even for email. A workaround is to use an anon relay: http://www.anonymizer.com/surf_free.shtml

Milton Friedman turns against IMF: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210053a.htm

"Businessmen should not have a free insurance policy every time they take a risk in global markets."

This Day in Joyce History: In 1921, James announced he had finished Ulysses. (He'd later cite the 31st as the final date.)

TV 2nite: Garbage on Letterman

Long decent Jakob Nielsen interview, imperfectly translated back into English: http://art-bin.com/art/anielsen.html (cool looking zine!)

If you want to open a window you doubleclick on an icon and it should jiggle a little bit before it opens, to give you the feeling that it will soon start doing something, then the window will open with a varied acceleration speed. Cartoon animation is actually the best way to communicate movement ...

My prediction is that the Internet will be ten thousand times as important in five years as it is now. This number comes from multiplying a factor of ten for technology improvements, a factor of ten for increased number of users, and a factor of a hundred for increased richness and number of services.

Now there is another problem, I do know how to design good web sites, but my clients won't allow me to do that. My clients will force me to design bad web sites, because they want a web site that looks glamorous when they give a demo to their vice president of marketing.

There is a huge patent bonanza coming on, as people figure out how to run networks and do business on the Net. In a store you can't patent the doors or something, but on the Net, if you design software to automate something you can patent it.

Basically I believe in micropayments, that are so small that if you sometime click by mistake it will not really hurt you. ...as long as the payment is very low, around one cent is the typical payment that we are talking about, then your monthly fee for using the Internet is going to be 10-20 dollars ...

(That's 100 per workday...?)

YAY!!! Lynda Barry's weekly comic is finally online: http://www.creativeloafing.com/savannah/newsstand/current/barry.html (aep)

New The Nation includes Erica Jong's 100 best women writers; and warns that the presidential primary season has been dangerously shortened: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981116/1116CADD.HTM

When Governor Pete Wilson signed the bill recently moving California's presidential primary to the first week in March, he guaranteed that the 2000 campaign for the White House will be over almost before it begins. California, along with New York and at least four other Eastern states, and probably many more, will now be voting on the heels of Iowa and New Hampshire. The bloated Super Tuesday, involving more than a dozen states, will follow a week later. This means a radically front-loaded presidential primary season that lasts barely a month.

NOW sees NASA's Glenn and raises them a Nobelist: http://www.now.org/press/10-98/10-28b98.html (Pacifica)

During the nearly four decades since she was booted from the space program, Cobb has dedicated herself to a career of flying humanitarian aid to people in remote areas of the Amazon. She is well-respected and highly decorated for her work, including a 1981 Nobel Peace Prize.

Forum Finder Results: There are 22 forums that match your search: "feeling vulnerable"

         confidence      forum name 
 
            +++++       alt.radio.talk.dr-laura
            +++--       alt.support.arthritis
            +++--       rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy
                        more

(Challenge to XML-boosters: Define the semantics of this log item, to validate the URL's unanticipated placement.)

Hmmm: Big jump in readership for this page yesterday. (Tell me it wasn't all Dr Laura fans?)

Obscure Store is lively today: http://www.obscurestore.com/

October Harper's Index stats are excellent: http://www.harpers.org/harpers-index/listing.html

Estimated number of Catholic priests accused of sexual assault in the U.S. since 1978 : 3,000
Estimated amount U.S. Roman Catholic dioceses have paid to victims of sexual assault since 1980 : $800,000,000
Total bad debt Japan estimates is held by its banks, expressed as a percentage of its GDP : 17.5
Total bad debt held by American S&Ls in 1988, expressed as a percentage of U.S. GDP that year : 3.2

Nerve seems to be offline this morning: http://www.nervemag.com/globe/globe.html

NASA Watch outdoes itself for curmudgeonliness today (Glenn, Triana, etc): http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html

Ted Hughes has died. This Salon review of his Plath-poems is far more sympathetic than most: [multipage] http://www.salonmagazine.com/mwt/feature/1998/02/06featureb.html

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy.
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.

TV 2nite: The local channel has a ninja movie written by Sayles and directed by Frankenheimer!?? [Messy IMDb query]

New Dr Laura nekkid: http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/Market/3291/ (asg)

Theories and stats about saleable web content: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2697.html

As a business model, subscription or pay-per-view Web sites require -- at minimum -- high-quality, targeted content. ... For instance:
- Investment information
- Product research
- Unique entertainment

For instance, the Disney Daily Blast claims to be adding 500 new subscribers per day at $6 per month.

(At that rate, you'd have something like $6 million after one year???)

Random acts of computer charity: [Messy URL]

All these are fine uses for an old computer. But none of them have the true blush value of giving a computer away to a total stranger. If you really want to stammer and blush, think about using your computer to change the life of a school kid.

The legal implications of the abortionist hitlist (Sun below): http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981027S0016

But the anti-abortion sites could get in trouble, he added, even if their creators do not directly threaten violence. For example, a successful legal action against the Christian Gallery could show the site identified specific targets -- doctors, identified by name and location -- to a limited audience, in this case, the extreme fringes of the anti-abortion movement.

ABC has a pic of Cleo's dad: http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/sphinx981028.html

A statement by the French institute said radio-carbon dating on wood samples put the age of the ship at between 90 BC and 130 AD. Artefacts found on it include rigging, ceramics, remains of food, glass shards and jewellery.

Giving the Voice another chance, I find this (previously missing) rave for Catherine O'Hara's stranger sister: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9844/sotc.shtml

She banged out a rhythm on her hip, she kept readjusting her blouse, her bra, her body, her being. You were watching an immensely sophisticated artist figuring out from scratch what it is to sing. When it all comes together -- the voice, the rhythm, the lyrics -- each time is the first time, and it's ecstasy

Excellent new New Scientist looks at Monsanto's pigheadedness: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981031/nmonsanto.html

...those contacted by New Scientist agree that the failure to segregate Roundup Ready soya was a setback. And the problems didn't end there, say some industry sources: a high-profile advertising campaign from Monsanto, designed to reassure European consumers, has if anything hardened negative public attitudes to agricultural biotechnology. "We're as fed up as some others with the Yankee-Doodle language that comes to our consumers," says de Greef of Novartis.

And some environmental pessimism wrt rainforests: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981031/nhotspots.html

Parts of the rainforests of the central Amazon Basin, Congo and New Guinea might be saved, however, and priority should be given to identifying and protecting areas of high biodiversity in these zones.

Don't miss: A brilliant day for the Progressive Review:

"The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer." -- Henry Kissinger

Here's the Norman Solomon piece on Pinochet in the US media that Sam references: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/981022.html

The Wall Street Journal went ballistic as it decried the injustice being done to Chile's "former strongman." The Washington Post also sounded quite distressed. "He did remove a democratically elected government and see to the killing of thousands and the detention of tens of thousands in 1973-1990," the Post noted, but "he also saw to the rescue of his country."

PC Mag's best-online-shopping survey winners: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/e-comm_sites98/edchoice.html

Web superstores: NetMarket
Computer hardware: NECX
Computer software: Chumbo.com
Books: Amazon.com
Music: CDnow

(They also like this free-stuff site:) http://www.freeshop.com/

Kerouac revisionism: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/102898/entert_7806_noframes.html

For Kerouac "Beat" was shorthand for "beatitude" and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, and he said the idea should be about art and spirituality, not politics. "Kerouac saw himself as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the avant-garde circus that was the Beat culture," Brinkley writes. When Kerouac was asked to be included in a Beat anthology, one of his letters reveals that he declined on the grounds that writers such as William Burroughs and other so-called beats had "never written about ordinary people with any love." They were mere "attention-seekers with nothing on their mind but rancor toward 'America' and the life of ordinary people," he wrote.

Even the myth that "On the Road" was written in one long 100-foot scroll during a three-week period is not correct. Excerpts from the writer's journals showed he had planned it two years in advance, Brinkley says, and used the outlines as a foundation for the eventual manuscript.

The historian plans to produce a multi-volume edition of the Kerouac diaries over the next few years and in 2002 a biography based on the new findings.

Year of the Day arrives late but lively: http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day71.html

In 1140 the greatest of early medieval philosophers, Peter Abelard, was condemned as a heretic on the word of the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard was literally dumbfounded: he had expected to confront Bernard in a learned theological exchange. Instead, when he was abruptly accused as a common criminal, he responded with contemptuous silence.

My cynical name for the John Glenn hype (based on Wolfe's "Right Stuff"):

Spam-in-a-Can Comes Back

I haven't checked in on Mozilla.org for ages, but it sounds like things are perking nicely: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html [Whump]

It's time to stop banging our heads on the old layout and FE codebase. We've pulled more useful miles out of those vehicles than anyone rightly expected. We now have a great new layout engine that can view hundreds of top websites. We have a convincing proof-of-concept for an XPFE. Why not use these two new projects in Mozilla, to solve a bunch of longstanding problems?

(Flaky binaries are available for many platforms, guaranteed to crash frequently.)

The response to Dr Laura nekkid was pretty impressive, so I'll keep an eye out for un-closed-down mirror sites: [xxx] http:/ /webhome.idirect.com/~funnyboy/ (asg) (too late again!)

Thoughtful doubts about Alexa/What's Related: http://www.interhack.net/pubs/whatsrelated/ [SN]

We want to stress that we aren't accusing anyone of malice. Both Netscape, the implementor of the technology, and Alexa, the provider of the technology, have reasonable privacy statements on their web sites. And we have absolutely no indication that the data being sent to the ``our shadow'' server is recorded, or even logged, in any way. However, we do find it more than a little bit disturbing that we found no documentation about the ``smart browsing'' feature on the Netscape web site as of the first release of this document, and there's no mention of how it is implemented anywhere, even in the READMEs included in the product distribution.

I wish I knew more what Woz means here: [SN]

Steve Wozniak: "It's clear that Netscape succeeded at replacing Windows. More of my computer usage nowdays involves network directives than OS directives. This is probably the general concept that Netscape wanted to follow to its golden end. It's just that IE came along to block it, not better versions of Windows."

Mind-It tells me the new Fast Company is up (looks good): http://www.fastcompany.com/online/19/index.html

Including this short interview with a futurologist: http://www.fastcompany.com/online/19/jdator.html

"The Net makes outsider status a badge of credibility. Conventional news outlets are losing mind share to renegades like the Drudge Report and Ain't It Cool News"

One of Drs. Neutopia's nemeses-- a 'Monster Truck Neutopian'-- teases her about her utopian diet dicta: [Deja URL]

I do not like green seaweed gook;
I do not like it, I-am-Kook.

How 'bout with some Spirulina,
Forced to by a court subpoena?

MacOS X apparently has so many emulation modes it inspired this mind-blowing fake screenshot: (143k GIF) http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/DBunker/ScreamShot.html [Slashdot]

April Oliver update: http://www.laweekly.com:80/ink/archives/98/48news4-lewis.shtml

Fortune magazine published an entire article on the debacle by a reporter who never deigned to contact Oliver or Smith; the Columbia Journalism Review ran a four-page article, "Ten Mistakes That Led to The Great CNN/Time Fiasco" by Neil Hickey, and failed to call Oliver to confirm a single fact. "And they're critiquing me for being biased," Oliver declares. "The hypocrisy in all this belly-aching and navel-gazing is really astonishing."

In the meantime, Oliver has heard that an edict has been handed down at CNN forbidding her close friends to help her in any way...

I think these guys asked permission to crib my timeline of hypertext history, for a handsome monthly zine called "Government Technology", but it's been so long I'm not totally sure: http://www.govtech.net:80/gtmag/1998/oct/untangling/history.shtm

This mention of Russia's biggest popstar: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/102798/enter3_461_noframes.html
led to this page of downloadable songs, the first of which sounds great to me (though the others don't): http://www.ekengren.com/default.asp?p1=1&p2=5 [non-streaming 1.5 meg RealAudio] [Pic source]

Yay! The Triana whole-earth cam proceeds apace: http://www.msnbc.com:80/news/144861.asp (URL swap)

Triana is a $75 million mission to be launched by December 2000 from the Space Shuttle cargo bay.

TV2nite: PBS Nova does Mir (rerun)

New Onion: http://www.theonion.com/

Fox News Channel Adds Laugh Track

Camille on Ayn Rand, Libby Dole, and the duty of suffrage: http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/1998/10/28pagl2.html

Citizens who don't vote, even in slow midterm elections, are political imbeciles. Democracy cannot function without an engaged electorate. Feminism was born in the century-long drive for woman suffrage; the voting rights of African-Americans were secured at terrible cost. Not voting (out of complacency, pessimism, pique or sloth) is an insult to every modern reform movement.

A nice thread about Joni's new album: [Deja thread]

The Tabloid Bible: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/28/29765.html

Other possibly offensive headlines included: "Jesus come home. He's probably bonkers, say relatives." "Jesus Pigs Out. Demon Infected Swine Do Lemming Impression."

Cringely's interesting comparison of Bill Gates and Qaddafi: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19981022.html [SN]

Major Jolloud was (and may still be for all I know) Libyan ruler Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi's top lieutenant. In an earlier life, I used to hang out in that part of the world, and ran into Major Jolloud and his boss on several occasions. The truth is that I not only got along with Qadhafi, but in some ways, I kind of liked him. But Major Jolloud gave me the creeps...

Tonight's Pacifica has a righteous piece about a group called Peace Action, that's brilliantly stealing the strategies of the Christian Coalition, in particular voter guides: http://www.webcom.com/peaceact/pv98.html

PEACE VOTER CAMPAIGN ENSURES THAT BUDGET PRIORITIES AND NATIONAL SECURITY ARE DEBATED IN NATION'S HOTTEST RACES

The East is Green! http://www.abcnews.com/sections/science/DailyNews/china_logging981027.html

The wake-up call came this summer in the form of floods that killed more than 3,650 people and left tens of millions of farmers homeless. Rainwater that would have been soaked up by thirsty tree roots instead coursed down stripped hillsides, washing millions of tons of soil into choking rivers. China's central government, overcoming its usual sensitivity to public criticism, has admitted environmental policy blunders and taken steps to rectify them...

New Consortium looks at Starr, Kohl, Gary Webb; and this detailed look at the declassified documents about Pinochet: http://www.consortiumnews.com/consor33.html

The highlights of "Project FUBELT" were cited in both the newly released CIA documents and in papers uncovered by the 1975 congressional inquiry. Covert funds were funnelled into Chilean congressional campaigns; CIA agents stayed close to disgruntled Chilean military officers; to keep the military on edge, the CIA planted false propaganda suggesting that the Chilean left planned to take control of the armed forces; and the CIA secretly poured $1.5 million into one of Chile's leading newspapers, El Mercurio.

I think I hate the new Village Voice design-- my usual strategy is to run down the ToC, opening one window for each promising article, and then go offline to read them. But this strategy resulted in many 'gotcha' pages with no content, which makes me far less likely to make the effort: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9844/

Here's a short Annie Sprinkle review: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9844/sightlines.shtml

You don't have home movies like this: Sprinkle xxxxxxxx with a toothbrush, xxxxxx a midget, xxxxxxx a pantomime horse, xxxxxx a drag queen, xxxxxxx fantasies -- well, maybe you do, but you're not showing them in public.

MS baseball sim review: http://www.gamespot.com/sports/msbase3d/review_cgw.html

On-screen characters are purely polygonal, texture-mapped (in some cases) with the digitized face of the actual MLB player. Where no specific likeness is available, a generic face fits the bill. It's wonderfully surreal, if not downright creepy, to see the disembodied face of your favorite baseball star stretched like some rubber skin onto the angular torso of a computerized character. Digital art has entered a truly bizarre new realm: synthetic, genetic sculpting. [Pic source]

Lots of juicy stuff at the Progressive Review:

Latest DC city outrage: a provision in the new federal budget bill that outlawed the city spending any money on the medical marijuana initiative currently slated for the November ballot. This is the only known time that the federal government has attempted to cancel an election.

Dutch drug policy revised: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/102798/world33_549.html

The rules of the game are simple. The addict promises total obedience and in return he is promised a job, a house, a social network and a guarantee that his creditors will back off for the time it takes for him to get back on an even keel.

Meta: A reader reported that FoxNews links didn't work if you had Javascript turned off, so I'm trying a modified format-- let me know if they stop working for you.

Nekkid Dr Laura pix (likely to be removed soon... already gone): http:/ /www.arizonadj.com/lester/a102798b.html (asg)

Here's a face comparison, with the current look on the right taken from this anti-Laura site: http://either.or.com/~chansen/least-fav/dr-laura-watch.html

I've gotten an outpouring of e-mail both applauding my efforts and assassinating my character for daring to criticize such a sacred cow. This page is dedicated to countering the unquestioned and undeserved praise of Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Combining cliches yields wit: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Oct/redjedi.html

And you might be a Redneck Jedi if:

- You ever heard the phrase, "May the force be with y'all."
- Your Jedi robe is a camouflage color.
- You have ever used your light saber to open a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill.
- You can easily describe the taste of an Ewok.
- Your father has ever said to you, "Shoot, son come on over to the darkside...it'll be a hoot."

USDA definition of 'organic' food is actually improving: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/102698/health22_11115_noframes.html

The department said it wants more feedback on three subjects of "intense interest:" animal confinement, animal medications and procedures for producer certification.

The genetics of patriarchy? http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1027/d_ap_1027_11.sml

A new study suggests that women have done better than men at spreading their genes around the globe. For the most part, researchers say, the explanation is fairly mundane: Women through history moved to their mates' communities to start families. Over thousands of years, these short migrations apparently enabled women's genes get around more than men's, researcher Mark Seielstad said.

Hammer's genetic evidence agrees that women may have migrated more than men within continents. But between continents, it appears that occasional long-distance migrations by men have let them spread their genes more than women, he said.

Conrad Black's new daily has a website... er, a webpage: http://www.nationalpost.com/

Yay! Raphael is back: http://www.chaparraltree.com/honeyguide/

Legendary folkie Michael Hurley is somehow associated with this site selling arrowheads etc, so I'll vouch for it: [multipage] http://www.webpackrats.com/artifacts.html

Breaking news: [Deja URL]

Around 2:00am Doctress Neutopia was in a car accident which destroyed the car she was driving. Air bags went off breaking the windshield. No one was hurt in the accident.

Drudge has been busy: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm

According to case intelligence, Defense Secretary William Cohen may have lied when he told news reporters that Pentagon aide Clifford Bernath decided "on his own" to release damaging information from Tripp's confidential personnel file to Jane Mayer, a gossip columnist for the NEW YORKER. Bernath, in a sworn deposition, said that his boss, Ken Bacon told him to release the Tripp dirt and insisted that Mayer's request receive 'priority' attention. In sworn testimony, Bacon has explained that he authorized the file dump and that Cohen knew all about it!

Japan puts the tv blanking intervals to work: http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/page/cyber.html

In September, Fuji Television Network Inc. began a data-broadcasting show in bit-cast mode that transmits to PCs performer-specific data, such as photos, a schedule of activities, fan-club information and quizzes. Normally, a program dedicated to one star is reserved for certified superstars. But data broadcasting has the attraction of being low-cost and also enjoys high potential as a promotional vehicle...

Update on S Korea's Hangul anti-Microsoft word processor campaign (2 and 20 July below): http://www.nikkei.co.jp:80/enews/TNW/page/cypage0044.html

Kim Jae-min, the president of Microsoft's unit in South Korea, said he's not worried about losing business to Hancom. "They may do well in the short term by appealing to national pride, but it won't last long."

A good update on Michael Moore: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/27/29481.html

His preferred target is corporate power, and he'd love a crack at "Satan's playthings" - the pharmaceutical companies.

He voted Green last time, but has been called a traitor for recommending Americans to vote Democrat to avoid the Starr 'coup d'etat' he says is now being sprung by the Republicans.

"My curse is that early in life I saw that just involving myself a bit in the things I believed in resulted in significant changes." He became one of the first American students to sit on a school board and had a hated head teacher and his deputy sacked. "People are scared of taking on power. But you can't stop the bully by being his friend, only by standing up against him."

Channel 4 has commissioned Moore to do an uncensored 12-part series for next spring... It'll be set again in America (more's the pity), but designed for a British audience.

Dvorak scoffs at net.addiction: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

Go to a chat room, start a timer, and then log on to a chat. When the chat is over, check the timer and look at the chat log. If you count the number of words and calculate the bits per second based on the time, you'll find something like 20 to 30 bps. A voice call where two people talk to each other verbally runs at about 500 or more bps...

(Afterthoughts: The words from a 30-min Politically Incorrect transcript amount to 20k bytes, which is effectively 90 bps-- and still way too slow for me. I can read a 2k page of a novel in one minute, which is 267 bps. Reading on the Web would be slightly slower... or a lot slower if you include load-times. But 500 bps sounds too high for speech ...except in bursts?)

Chomsky's scabrous 1994 take on Nixon, Kissinger, and Chile: http://www.worldmedia.com/archive/sld/sld-3-02.html

Our ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, who was a Kennedy liberal type, was given the job of implementing the "soft line" (in Nixon's words, to "make the economy scream"). Here's how he described his task: "to do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty."

Kissinger said he was concerned that the success of social democracy in Chile would be contagious. It would infect southern Europe -- southern Italy, for example -- and would lead to the possible success of what was then called Eurocommunism (meaning that Communist parties would hook up with social democratic parties in a united front). ...He was worried that successful economic development, where the economy produces benefits for the general population -- not just profits for private corporations -- would have a contagious effect.

Chile was a very vibrant, lively, democratic society for many, many years -- into the early 1970s. Then, through a reign of fascist terror, it was essentially depoliticized.

Lynda Barry's nouveau jump-rope rhymes: [Deja URL]

Dear little froggy!
What's the matter dear?
With two heads you look so queer,
One back leg and 17 eyes
Was it the pesticide we sprayed on the flies?

Reminder: Deja URLs can take a few hours to register... and sometimes never arrive.

Pacifica just reported how Earth First blockaded the logging site after David 'Gypsy' Chain was killed, and how the cops later dispersed them: [multipage] http://amaterasu.besler.org/headwaters/gypsy.html

EARTH FIRST! DECLARES GYPSY MOUNTAIN FREE STATE!!

Bikers rule over British Columbia pot kingdom: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/vogel1022/index.html [AAN]

Finally we head for the nest, what Furac considers the drug world's local control center: the Hells Angels clubhouse.

He complains that the average Joe romanticizes them -- the women, the open road -- as the last free-wheelers in a society of conformists. And their neighbors love them: "Do you know that when they have parties, they pay for their neighbors to go away for the weekend? They pay for their holidays."

He points to the disparity between staunch US policies and lax Canadian laws as the culprit. "For a commercial operation, one that has 150 plants with a set-up and no prior convictions, the person is looking at a period of probation ranging from one to three years, plus a $15,000 or $20,000 fine. The chance of getting time is less than 20 percent. And if they get any time at all, it would be around 60 days, which in Canada means about a weekend. It's not quite like the zero tolerance policy in the states."

Police are fond of pointing out to reformed hippies that while 1960s weed may have been 3 percent to 4 percent THC, today's lovingly tended BC marijuana is 15 percent to 20 percent THC.

(Like Finnegans Wake, apparently, there's no apostrophe in Hells Angels!?)

I like this story: http://www.foxnews.com/news/national/1026/d_rt_1026_29.sml

Pederson dressed the rigid corpse in leather gear, boots, a helmet and dark sunglasses and walked it out of the hospital. Then he strapped the body to the seat of his Harley Davidson with elastic straps and drove around metropolitan Copenhagen for three hours, visiting his father's favorite spots.

Pedersen said he had taken the last ride with his father to have a chat with him and that he felt good about it afterwards.

Another evil of Iridium: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15806.html

When Iridium technicians flip the switch to turn on their global satellite-phone service a week from now, the radio-astronomy community will experience the most dramatic limits to date on its ability to view the universe.

Radio astronomers use the part from 1610.6 MHz. to 1613.8 MHz. to pick up emissions of hydroxide molecules. But Iridium requested the neighboring band, from 1613.8 MHz. to 1626.5 MHz. for its satellite-to-Earth transmissions. When Iridium tested its downlinks with radio astronomers, the scientists found the noise generated by out-of-band emissions to be deafening, McKinnon said.

Limited webpage 'parsing': [Messy URL]

InterMute also can prevent referrals, in which two Web sites share information about how you got from point A to point B. For example, if I am surfing at Widgets.com and decide I want to click over to Grommets.org, Grommets can learn from a referral that I was just at Widgets.

Mind-boggling new strategy for the archeology of diet: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/10/981026064209.htm

Macko has recently analyzed hair clippings from the Neolithic Ice Man of the Oetztaler Alps; the Coptics of Egypt; the Late Middle Kingdom mummies of Egypt; and the Chinchorro mummies of Chile. He has found that the Ice Man -- thought by some to be a hunter -- was probably a very strict vegetarian at the time of his death.

"I've had some students say they are strict vegetarians, but after analyzing their fingernails, we found evidence of eggs, fish, dairy or even meat consumption. Then they admit, they're not living only on vegetables. Our data was telling the truth."

Musing: In the long run, isn't the most important fact of any election what the voters learned this time around?

Musing: It would be nice if a website tracked numbers of deaths worldwide in various categories, compared to column inches of press coverage of those deaths.

Weblog Dishonor Roll: For borrowing links, and not even acknowledging requests for shared credit:

Arts and Letters Daily
Feed Magazine

A good day for Forbes includes an okay look at interactive tv, with this bunch of not-entirely-convincing stats about netlag: http://www.forbes.com:80/tool/html/98/oct/1026/side1.htm

In order to keep the picture composed, and to keep the audio synchronized, the entire latency in the system cannot get above 70 ms before a viewer will notice any degradation in the image. However, there is no way that this kind of throughput can be achieved with today's fastest modems, ISDN lines, T-1, or even Ethernet connections to the web. According to their research, getting anything that looks good requires at least T-3, or 155 megabits per second of throughput.

(What if you buffer 5 seconds worth on your home drive? Or buffer five minutes worth at your ISP?)

And how customer-profiling will imply more elaborate preferred-customer discount schemes: [short sidebar on 2nd page] http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210082a.htm

It makes sense to discriminate wherever fixed costs are high and variable costs low. You need some high-ticket customers to cover your fixed costs; having done that, you take whatever you can get from the remaining customers.

The common practice of soaking wealthy parents more for college tuition is described, euphemistically, as a scholarship plan for middle-class students.

And will the EC strike a blow at capitalism? http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210114a.htm

"The euro has a lot in common with the idea, which we've just seen fail disastrously in Asia, that you need to fix exchange rates. Fixing exchange rates is anticapitalist. And within the European Union, there is a reaction against the capitalist world we've been living in for the past 10 to 15 years."

"The core, France and Germany, and the periphery -- Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Finland -- are on very different cycles. The periphery is growing much more strongly than the core."

"By the end of this year Irish interest rates will have to come down by almost 300 basis points to meet German rates. ... In these circumstances, a loosening of monetary policy is crazy. Ireland will have a fevered bubble economy. The boom will go bust, and the Irish economy will head southward in a couple of years time. If a worldwide depression doesn't do it sooner. "

And the seven states with the lowest ratio of teachers to administrators: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210060a.htm

Vermont, New Mexico, Florida, Mississippi, Indiana, Oklahoma, and (worst) Michigan

And what Compaq is doing to make its Digital buyout pay: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210094a.htm

Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard picked off Digital's customers by the hundreds after Compaq announced the takeover. Competitors are still capitalizing on concerns that Compaq won't support Digital's VMS and Unix operating systems much longer.

Question: Do people really care about John Glenn today, or is this hype entirely media-created?

Matt McIrvin replying to Kibo:

>Fun fact:  Macs have a country code assigned to "Ancient
>Greek". I am hoping they localize Mac OS to Ancient Greek soon 
>to prove that the Mac OS is up-to-date.

They just did that in the hope of getting a product placement on one of the "Hercules" spin-offs.

Abortionist hitlist (Slepian is the latest 'strikethru'): http://www.christiangallery.com/atrocity/aborts.html

Legend:
Black font (working);
Greyed-out Name (wounded);
Strikethrough (fatality)

How often do you hear people voicing their moral qualms about their jobs? [Messy URL] [OSRR]

"There's a part of me that likes being creative and imaginative and I get paid three times as much as in my other job," says the Christian phone-sex lady.

"I can't do that, but she can," she says, glancing down at the photo of the young, blond woman lifting her skirt up, the photo she sends to callers. It's her, her phone persona, who's actually on the line, she says. That's the way she protects her real self from the bad calls.

PBS has a great two-parter on micro-credit, in Asia, Africa, South America, and the USA: (too bad they hid it on Sunday afternoon) http://www.pbs.org/toourcredit/

(This pic shows Muhammed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in Bengladesh, with some beneficiaries of microloans. In most all the programs, there's a great emphasis on small groups sharing the responsibility/ oversight.)

Don't miss: WPost does The Onion (amazingly righteous): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/25/063l-102598-idx.html [OSRR]

It publishes editions in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Denver (for a total of 360,000 readers) and also uses the World Wide Web (220,000 weekly visits to www.theonion.com) to widely disseminate its edgy absurdity -- the kind that makes its readers teary-eyed with laughter while its writers cry in recognition of the crushing banality and hypocrisy of life.

Real headlines from papers such as USA Today adorn desks as reminders that inane journalists will always trump the Onion: "Prolonged pounding may increase damage"; "'Fantasy Island' helps make Saturday nights fun again."

The Onion's style -- with its reliance on the power of concise, biting headlines -- is ideally suited to the Web. "You can go there for a second and get a good joke," says Keck. "It's a model that no one else besides the porn industry has really understood."

(I'm one of those who think their headlines are brilliant, but the stories themselves are always an anticlimax... I guess I should start linking to the headlines anyway, though.)

My usual Doonesbury link has been stalled this morning, so I switched it: http://www.theadvocate.com/comics/default.asp

My radar missed this LA Times update on Julia Butterfly: [Deja URL]

Access to the tree is controlled by Earth First! It allows only experienced climbers, accompanied by one of its experts, to scale the tree. Others are restricted to the ground. They send their cameras up on ropes for Hill to photograph herself and they interview her by phone. The spectacle exasperates Mary Bullwinkel, spokeswoman for Pacific Lumber, in whose tree Hill is living.

A friendlier source includes this message from Julia: http://www.econet.apc.org:80/igc/en/hl/98102220391/hl2.html

"Everyone has their own 'personal tree' to sit in. Life's circumstances sometimes seem overwhelming, but we must remember the amazing power of love. Just as the ripples in the ocean shape and form the land - from the cliffs to the tiny grains of sand - so do our actions, words, and thoughts shape and form our reality. Even more, ripples joining one another form tidal waves that change the planet. If we make sure that our every thought, word, and action are based in love then the ripples we create will bring about positive change for a positive future."

8000 year old Anatolian graffiti: [Deja URL]

Most of them show human figures; the men are commonly long, narrow bars with short extremities, the head appears to be contained in the bar symbolizing the body, i.e. there is no neck; but they have M-like items on their head which are interpreted to be sheep horns. Female figures are distinguished by enormous bottoms which make them look as disproportionate as an ant queen. They do not have breasts, but wear these sheep horns, too.

German booze bottles in 1870 Nevada saloon? [Deja URL]

They appear to be stoneware, 28 - 30 cm tall (hard to gauge as we have few intact specimens), cylindrical, about 9 cm outside diameter. We assume a cork seal - having one sample with the remnants of a cork in place. Exterior is of an orangey-brown glaze, interior is normally unglazed. The original colour may have differed, as the saloon burned.

Dali's dark side: http://washingtonpost.com:80/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-10/25/151l-102598-idx.html

From that moment on, Dali's story becomes increasingly distasteful, as he and Gala, Paul Eluard's witch of a wife who became Dali's accomplice in his lust for attention and money, enter a life of glittering but singularly empty wanderings among what can only be called degenerates and petty crooks. He was still being celebrated in America, and Gibson includes some amusing details, such as Dali's present to Harpo Marx of a harp with barbed-wire strings to which Harpo replied with a photograph of himself with bandaged fingers.

I've started keeping half-an-eye on the Astronomy Pic of the Day: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap951119.html

This tantalizingly clear photo of New York City at night was taken by the astronauts during the Space Radar Laboratory mission of the Space Shuttle Endeavor in March of 1990.

TV 2nite: Ben Stiller and Alanis M on SNL

New London Times Book Review: [multipage] http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/stiboocon01001.html?1334425

Mel Gibson in OED biopic?!? http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/enter/102498/enter21_14782_noframes.html

"The Professor and the Madman" not only has made The New York Times best-seller list, but has attracted the attention of both Mel Gibson and "La Femme Nikita" director Luc Besson for a possible film adaptation. The HarperCollins publication is even being used in a joint advertisement with the Oxford University Press, with both biography and dictionary (the former selling at $20, the latter at $995) promoted under the tabloid slogan: "Madman Special."

(Mel Gibson is William Minor, Danny Glover is James Murray, in... "Lethal Weapon V: The Lexicographers"! You'll never call them 'harmless drudges' again!!! Wacky dialog (via IMDb:

Murray: "Have you ever met anybody you didn't kill?"
Minor: "I haven't killed you, have I?"

No This is Hell this week

Another witty review of the Pocket Canons: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Saturday-Times/timbooboo01003.html?1334425

If Churchill had been alive today, no doubt the editors of The Pocket Canons would have approached him to write an introduction to one of the books of the Bible. His pristine ignorance of the text and endearingly laddish appreciation of the Almighty in His more capricious Old Testament moments would appear to qualify him perfectly.

And an interesting synopsis of a new Shakespeare bio: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Thursday-Times/timbooboo01008.html?1334425

Computer evidence suggests that William Shakespeare appeared on stage at the beginning of his plays -- accompanied by "a drum-roll or trumpet-flourish" -- in order to deliver their first words.

(In these URLs, 'timboo' must mean Times Books... but why 'booBOO'?)

Monument to a Russian poet of drunkenness: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/102498/world26_29850.html

The plaster monument to Venechka, holding a suitcase full of bottles, was ceremonially washed in vodka. Vodka producers Kristall funded the monument and the ceremony, which ended with a train journey to Petushki. Passengers were treated to free vodka and food.

Some quotes from the poem: http://www.spb.ru/othr_spb/hangover.html

O ephemerality!
O most powerless and most shameful time in the life of my people -
The time between dawn and the opening of the shops!

Lisa Pea is on the job market: [Deja URL]

...the cool fairy follows me around and makes my cool stuff magically appear for me! Sort of like the pornography fairy when you are about twelve starts hiding Penthouses and Leg Shows in fields and hollowed out logs and alleys so that you can find them.

TrendWatch: Whoopi and Stipe bought them too: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1024/fea24.html

He gave the painting to Sylvester Stallone. The film star's appreciation of it, Knuttel's selfpublicising abilities and his highly stylised work served to put him up as a kind of "artist to the stars". Now his sometimes unsettling, colourful pictures fetch up to $100,000 in the US and are being snapped up by collectors from Paris to Hong Kong. [Pix]

And a lovely meditation on modern motherhood: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1024/fea20.html

As I walked across Sloane Square to do something amazing such as buying a colander at Peter Jones, on a Wednesday morning in Michelmas term, when my daughter was in the bosom of Cranborne School, it came as a fair shock to see -- lo! -- that same daughter, all 5 foot 10 inches of her, masses of flaming pre-Raphaelite hair gummed into spikes, eyes Gothicised, legging it in fishnets across the said Square.

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop just like that, in snow.
End of the line - Smooth drifts, where did she go?
Back on her tracks of course, then took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

I love this movie. It's like a poster child for Fast Company. http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=empirer&list

The hidden New Yorker archive includes a chunk of Hersh on Khartoum: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981012-001.html

No American official would be quoted by name about the extent of disarray inside the government. But the lack of trust shown toward the Clinton White House by the military and intelligence communities goes well beyond the usual bureaucratic backbiting over a failed military action, and is far more corrosive. The Tomahawk missions are seen as very expensive failures: the nearly eighty missiles deployed, which cost roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars apiece, did not kill bin Laden and his associates in Afghanistan, and the target in Sudan may not have been what the C.I.A. said it was. Those failures were a by-product of the secrecy that marked all of the White House's planning for the Tomahawk raids -- a secrecy that prevented decision-makers from knowing everything they needed to know.

And "Anonymous" himself praising the Bush boys: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/981019-001.html

They spend a surprising amount of time discussing the very sorts of issues -- education, children's services, economic development -- that their father never seemed much interested in as President.

And fashion boutiques are empty in Russia: http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/new_yorker/archive/980921-001.html

The conversation continued in a casual, friendly fashion, but the mood abruptly changed when I asked, "Do you think a revolution is likely?" "Of course it is," another said. "I'm talking not as a boutique representative but as a woman and as a mother. Anything can be expected in this country. And nobody trusts this country. Over the past year and a half or two years, nobody has trusted Russia."

(I think I read somewhere that zines that signed on for the Electronic Newsstand before the Web took off-- eg the NYer-- got screwed into contracts that limit their rights to create their own sites...?)

Shortly after humans conquered fire, humans devastated nature: http://www.discover.com/science_news/index.html (new content detected by Mind-It)

"For most of that time period, you can explain all of the wet and dry periods by monitoring the intensity of the Australian summer monsoon," says Miller. "It is controlled by the Milankovitch effect, which controls most of the other monsoons on the planet" -- including those that bring summer rains to India, Africa, and the southwestern United States. Around 10,000 years ago, all those systems intensified, again in sync with the Milankovitch cycle. But Australia remained dry.

More on the secret eco-village: http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/hi/english/uk/newsid_199000/199778.stm

The 12 adults and 10 children in the community are mainly vegetarian and live off the land, growing their own crops.

New Science News

The new Paris fashion shows are mostly up: [multipage] http://www.worldmedia.fr/fashion/catwalk/pap/99eppar/whosshow/calendar.html

Moynihan decries secrecy: http://www.cnn.com/books/reviews/9810/22/secrecy.cnn/index.html

If the federal government had revealed all it knew about Soviet espionage activities in the United States during and after World War Two, there might have been no McCarthy era. If the U.S. intelligence community had heeded its own analysis of the Soviet economy in the aftermath of World War Two, there might have been no Cold War. Those are two of the stunning conclusions Daniel Patrick Moynihan draws from his study of the way America keeps its secrets.

The wages of downloads is death: http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/t000096118.html

Nighbert is the fourth person to commit suicide of the 34 Americans either charged or somehow suspected in the case.

He said a dozen people accused of being pedophiles killed themselves during a big Internet porn sweep two years ago in Belgium and France.

Update on the futurists discussed in Kleiner's "Age of Heretics" (8 April below): http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210076a.htm

From such efforts evolve "500-year business plans" for an impressive roster of blue-chip clients. For example, Watts Wacker is telling British Petroleum to learn to live with environmentalism; indeed, he's even advising the firm to set up a blind trust to fund Greenpeace...

And consumers are eager for "downward nobility," yearning for more status-seekers' perks. For this reason, Wacker advised Marriott to treat arriving hotel guests like celebrities.

Quote of the day, from the Progressive Review:

"I can hire half the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould

(A totally excellent issue today-- don't miss!)

More on the Pocket Canons (4 Oct below): http://www.canoe.ca:80/JamBooks/oct20_bible.html

In contrast to Self's hostility to Revelation, some writers were enthusiastic about their texts. Australian rock musician Nick Cave raved about Mark, saying its depiction of Jesus "had a ringing intensity about Him that I could not resist. Christ spoke to me through His isolation, through the burden of His death, through His rage at the mundane, through His sorrow."

Madonna Badger, avante ad exec: http://www2.nando.net:80/newsroom/ntn/enter/102298/enter27_26020_noframes.html

The 5S store opened in SoHo in May. Customers can sit at "mingle tables" and experiment with products. (The 5S senses are energizing, purifying, calming, adoring and nurturing. For each sense, the colors and formulations of the products were paired to elicit the particular result desired.)

This poem-of-the-day page would do me, if it weren't for the GeoCities 'interstitial windows': http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7086/pod.htm

10/05/98 "I will forget you presently..." by Edna St. Vincent Millay
10/02/98 "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens
10/01/98 "I Shall Not Die for Thee" by Douglas Hyde

This very-long fanpage for Kurt Russell has a lot of interesting interviews, etc: [NOT multipage] http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/1633/Interviews.html

John Carpenter, who has directed Russell in horror films ("The Thing"), comedies ("Big Trouble in Little China") and action films like the "Escape From . . ." duo, notes, "Kurt is the only actor who can play a convincing action hero and at the same time undermine the seriousness of the genre, make you laugh at it. I think he's the best leading actor in movies right now. Critical reaction will catch up to this..."

"I was a Republican, and I was brought up as a Republican, but when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn't much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a Libertarian."

"I look at all those scenarios through Snake," Russell says. "He is so true to himself that he is incorruptible. He doesn't care about anybody but himself. Everybody else is corruptible because of their ideals and their agenda. They are extensions of us in society."

New Hubble pix: http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm

John Huston's suppressed WW2 documentaries: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/23/28602.html

The US government ordered their withdrawal because it thought they would demoralise the troops. San Pietro was shot in Italy, was the first time the carnage of infantry combat, involving Americans, had ever been seen on the screen.

New The Nation lauds the arrest of Pinochet: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981109/1109EDT1.HTM

The end of this story remains to be written. But whoever thought we would get this far? At least temporarily, let the tyrants tremble.

And hems and haws about bioterrorism: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981109/1109PRIN.HTM

In hearings before Congress in 1995 the CIA admitted that its terrorism intelligence desk somehow missed the 1994 sarin gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in Matsumoto, which killed seven people -- although the event had been reported in the Japanese and European press and even in the US-owned International Herald Tribune.

And asks whether the media can beat their own swords into ploughshares: http://www.thenation.com/issue/981109/1109SCHE.HTM

Argues Galtung, "Journalism does not only legitimize violence but is violent in and of itself" by its continuing failure to pay attention to people's grievances or strategies for peaceful outcomes. Bombings are reported vividly; peace processes, particularly among nonstate players, are ignored.

...Participants then attempted to show how the same story could be reworked. Separate teams came up with new scripts and voiceovers -- all under "deadline" pressure. A truck with edit gear arrived, permitting producers and would-be "correspondents" to re-edit, making tapes that demonstrated how easily a more thoughtful approach could lead to more informative, peace-oriented reporting.

The strangest sentence of the day (from a book review about S&M and the religious right): http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/ga102698

She considered starting a lesbian branch of the Promise Keepers.

And a scabrously cynical interpretation of Greenspan's recent moves: http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/mt102698

Questions need to be asked. What did Alan know about Long-Term and when did he know it? I think we should be told. The world economic situation called for a U.S. interest-rate reduction some months ago, but such a reduction might have sent a signal that would have promoted divergence in interest-rate markets at precisely the time Mr. Meriwether and company desperately needed convergence to make good on their bets...

Start with the appalling statistic that the 225 richest people in the world own more wealth than the poorest 47 percent. To get a picture of what this means, imagine a single sitting of fat-cats inside a fancy restaurant enjoying a Christmas dinner with all the Cristal-Petrossian-Baccarat trimmings while outside, starving and freezing, huddle 4 billion people!

The Guardian's archive of sites-of-the-day is nicely annotated, for a change: http://www.guardian.co.uk/webguide/siteswelike.html

Damn. The evil that is W3C turns out to be TimBL alone: http://www.techreview.com/articles/nov98/garfinkel.htm [Slashdot]

Cargill says he thinks companies have stopped sending people to meetings because they realize that the General Assembly's Advisory Council Committee merely rubber-stamps what Berners-Lee wants to do.

(Eg, my anti-structure rant can be traced entirely to him.)

Why links should never open new windows: Anybody who wants a new window can do it easily. Most sites don't do it, so it violates expectations. And it removes control from the user.

The Progressive Review's got a brand new URL: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm

"Rather than explode, the depleted-uranium penetrator will fragment and burn on impact, melting the metal surface and producing a smoke cloud with high concentrations of toxic DU particles."

Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women... turns me on! [multipage] http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/mostpowerful/index.html [OSRR]

1 Carly Fiorina; Group President, Global Service Provider Business; Lucent Technologies
2 Oprah Winfrey; Chairman and CEO; Harpo Entertainment Group

Fox pushes envelope: http://www.bergen.com:80/yourtime/hidden199810218.htm

Unlike such programs, "World's Nastiest Neighbors" graduated from "caught on tape" video to staging events and then taping the reaction to them -- what Raney characterized as a "Candid Camera"-type scenario.

Several funnily appalling items in Risks Digest: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.04.html

British Aerobics instructor Liz Seymour thought she might have overdrawn her bank account when she returned from vacation, but her bank statement claimed she was 121 billion pounds (British) overdrawn. That's 121 trillion pounds by American counting, because the British billion is a million million. The bank also notified her she would be charged 2.5 (British) billion pounds per day in interest. When questioned, the bank chalked it up to a typing error.

Kitsch magnate: http://www.forbes.com:80/forbes/98/1102/6210222a.htm

It now has more than 140 galleries in shopping malls around the country selling Thomas Kinkade prints and limited editions. Prices for these reproductions range from $50 for a tabletop print to $15,000 for a lithograph on canvas with original highlights by the "painter of light," as Kinkade, 40, calls himself. He never sells his originals. [Pix source]

From political theater to theatrical politics: http://www.irish-times.com/irish-times/paper/1998/1022/fea3.html

Imagine going out to a play one evening, where the plot unfolds, characters develop and a crisis is presented and resolved. The show doesn't end there however, as the audience is offered a chance to think up a different end to the play. The solutions cannot be offered from the comfort of an audience seat, but require the spectator to come on stage, replace actors and direct the action. This style, pioneered by Boal, became known as "Forum theatre" and has transformed a rarefied art with little connection to the masses into a powerful tool for change in the hands of workers and peasants. Boal calls it "the rehearsal of revolution", as the acting out of an attempt to organise a strike becomes the organising of a strike.

"I ran on the condition that we planned to lose," explained Boal, who woke up after the fiesta with a headache, a parliamentary seat, a mandate for popular theatre and a budget to act on it.

This Day in Joyce History: In 1901, "Day of the Rabblement" was published.

No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself...

New theory of cosmic rays: http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/nyu-nyuppnt.html

This seeming violation of the cutoff, combined with the absence of deflection en route from the quasar source which protons would experience due to intergalactic magnetic fields, has led Farrar to theorize that high-energy cosmic rays are not made of protons. Instead, she argues that such cosmic rays are made principally of a new subatomic particle. According to Farrar, this could be the SO, a neutral particle made up of three quarks (up, down and strange) bound together with a gluino.

Arthur Koestler unmasked: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/22/28511.html

He seems to have run his various affairs and three marriages in parallel and as well as being drunk and violent on dozens of occasions, he forced Elizabeth Jane Howard to have an abortion and he raped Jill Craigie, film-maker wife of Michael Foot.

Great issue of New Scientist includes spider mites getting nano-whirled: http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981024/nspin.html

The researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were demonstrating the size of a microscopic gear wheel when they found that the ultra-low friction component -- part of the world's smallest combination lock -- can spin at an undreamt of 350 000 revolutions per minute.

Great long piece on music-enhancing algorithms: http://aan.org/display_story.phtml?ARTICLE_ID=173 [AAN]

"No real singer worth their salt would ever get near such a thing. This is an advanced karaoke box," Greenberg says. "The Milli Vanilli syndrome is the tip of the iceberg. You have Mick Jagger stuffing a roll of socks in their crotch. Everyone's getting silicone implants. It's part of the same continuum."

Object-oriented online education: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15738.html

IMS will specify standards for searchable HTML meta-data, as well as the e-commerce guidelines that would allow the material to be traded and sold online.

New LBJ tapes: http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/national/1021/d_ap_1021_121.sml

On Dec. 7, 1963, two weeks after the assassination, Johnson called Mrs. Kennedy because "I wanted to flirt with you a little bit." ... "Give Caroline and John-John a hug for me," the president concluded that call. "Tell them I'd like to be their daddy."

Yay! A leetle free PR: http://www.guardian.co.uk/webguide/ (But it's Jorn not John.)

A well-maintained news meta-site claims NewsBot now allows custom profiles: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/newscenter.htm

And its multimedia page says the Pacifica archives are complete back to 1996: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/audio.htm [Coppersky]

This Day in Joyce History: In 1904, James and Nora arrived in Trieste, where James was promptly thrown in jail with some drunken sailors.

TV 2nite: Jennifer Jason Leigh on Letterman (chickened out!)

I disapprove of skeptics, but this dictionary is brilliantly executed: http://skepdic.com/contents.html [Spike]

the Cabala | the Cardiff Giant | "Carlos" | cartomancy | cattle mutilations | EdgarCayce | The Celestine Prophecy | cellular memory | chakras | charms | chelation therapy | Ch'i Kung (QiGong) | channeling | chiromancy | chiropractic | chupacabras ...

The CIA tells war stories... from 1776! [multipage] http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/warindep/intellopos.html#6 [OLB]

To offset British superiority in firepower and number of troops, General Washington made frequent use of deception operations. He allowed fabricated documents to fall into the hands of enemy agents or be discussed in their presence. He allowed his couriers -- carrying bogus information -- to be "captured" by the British, and inserted forged documents in intercepted British pouches that were then permitted to go on to their destination. He had army procurement officers make false purchases of large quantities of supplies in places picked to convince the British that a sizeable Continental force was massing. Washington even had fake military facilities built. He managed to make the British believe that his three-thousand-man army outside Philadelphia was forty thousand strong!

A wet-blanket of facts against the Myst-obit (7 Oct below): http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/10/21feature2.html

These are perfectly respectable numbers; they're not enough to set the world on fire, but they are enough to keep this category chugging along very nicely, assuming you're not stupid enough to throw a $6 million development budget at an adventure game. (Most computer game titles have budgets in the $1 million - $2 million range.)

...according to received wisdom, 94 percent of all computer games lose money. (I have no idea where that figure comes from, but it's been quoted all over the place -- and it's reasonable, given that 2,000 titles are published annually and maybe 100 top 100,000 units in sales.)

...Then suddenly, AOL doesn't want to pay you by the hour, because it isn't getting paid by the hour. Instead, it wants to discourage service usage, because it gets the same $10 a month regardless of how long people stay online. Gaming stops being a big source of revenue for AOL and becomes a cost sink.

The backlash begins? http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_197000/197238.stm

Labour MP Derek Wyatt, a former BSkyB executive, pressed Sir Christopher to justify the cost of BBC Online, which Mr Wyatt put at £30m.

Pinochet and the CIA: http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/21/28379.html

Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist in Latin America when he was elected president in November 1970, presented an ideological and economic affront to the Nixon regime. The answer was to pump $8 million and 400 'special advisers' into destabilising the unruly brat in America's backyard over the next three years.

Revised rabbi-manual includes post-abortion ritual: http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/nation/102098/nation31_2814_noframes.html

In wording that can be adapted to the reasons for a specific abortion, the rabbi says: "You made a choice, choosing life for (mother's name), for the two of you as a couple, for your family, for the well-being of children yet to come into your lives. We grieve with you over the loss of this seed of life, and we affirm your essence as people gifted with the ability to nurture other life."

Millennial history looks at the rise of Venice (etc): http://www.guardian.co.uk/millennium/day64.html

In 1126 the great Persian polymath Omar Khayyam died. He was a mathematician and astrologer, whose lasting legacy was a vast collection of rubaiyats, or quatrains celebrating the pleasures of life.

A good day for the Progressive Review:

The "Jim Lehrer Show," a favorite cliche cache for the American establishment, ran a lengthy, waffling piece on Pinochet that never once mentioned the crucial role of the American government -- and specifically the CIA -- in bringing Pinochet to power. Ironically, the segment was followed by a panel moderated by the ever-tedious Terance Smith examining bias among talk show legal experts.

A long, well-informed discussion of flamewars, newsgroups, and mailing lists: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/supplements/TheNet/98/10/MODERATED.html [AAN]

The Net's public spaces are powerful because they are public, allowing anyone a chance to step up on a soapbox and contribute. But when a forum's best and brightest take their act elsewhere, the original forum's usefulness is greatly diminished.

Redesigned Village Voice includes more stuff about MP3 audio: http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9843/bunn.shtml

The stats on this underground music market are sketchy, but Cyveillance, an Internet surveillance company that tracks piracy, speculates there are over a thousand sites that contain some hundred thousand MP3 files.

And movie reviews on Lennie Bruce and Warhol/Sedgwick: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9843/taubin.shtml

Weide has got his hands on amazing footage: Bruce's 1964 appearance on the Steve Allen Show that was censored by the network and supposedly lost for 30 years; a TV gig with Nat Hentoff where Bruce, stoned on bennies, falls to the floor and bashes away at the piano with his feet; a fragment from an unfinished biker movie directed by Bruce in the '50s which looks like Kenneth Anger gone hetero; and news footage of Bruce's corpse, sprawled naked and face down in a doorway of his dilapidated Hollywood Hills home.

And Jowitt reviews an excellent intro-to-ballet book, plus Bourne's Swan Lake: http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/9843/jowitt.shtml

More than a portable survey course, the book's a walk through ballet history and conventions guided by a fastidious eye and an encyclopedic memory.

Dvorak has a short, funny rant-with-research on search engines: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/insites/dvorak/jd.htm

The number one hit for John C. Dvorak at Yahoo! is the Scott St. John Home Page, and the number three hit is for Sutton Place Gourmet, a recipe site that has no reference to a John, a "C," or a Dvorak. Does this kind of mistake bother anyone at the search companies?

Is Diana in Hell? http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/highlights/where_diana/index.html [ALD]

Consequently, hell looms as the most plausible spot for the princess's soul.

The Reject FilmFest: http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/98/Oct/18/front_page/REJ18.htm [OSRR]

Only 37 made the cut. The rest got a form letter that began, "I'm not going to sugarcoat this. You've been rejected from the Reject FilmFest," and ended with a series of "numbers of people who care," including a suicide-prevention hotline.

Greil Marcus looks at New Folk: [multipage, RealAudio] http://www.addict.com:80/html/lofi/Columns/Days_Between_Stations/410/

Dan Bern isn't obvious about the fact that he belongs in this company; for that matter, he comes on as a sort of folkie John Belushi. A Midwesterner who knows he's going to be pegged as a New Dylan and figures he'll live through it, he wears his sense of humor on his sleeve.

A nice Australian meditation on the new 'ethics': http://www.theage.com.au:80/daily/981018/news/news23.html

It is encouraging, in this context, to hear the high priest of speculative capitalism, George Soros, offer his own judgment. He said: "Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society."

A strange exploration of French fries and the global crisis: http://www.oregonlive.com:80/todaysnews/9810/st101816.html

But the 1997 crop would face challenges unusual even in this risky business. The Hutterite fries would head into the teeth of revolution and economic turmoil that threaten the economy of the Northwest and the nation.

Lo-tech movie rebels: http://www.bergen.com:80/yourtime/vinter19199810183.htm

He is a founding member of Dogme 95, a group of Danish film directors that took a pledge three years ago to forgo Hollywood-style use of big budgets, special effects, and lavish sets. The directors vowed that their films would be shot on location, without props, using hand-held cameras, and in color. Special lighting, lenses, and filters were also forbidden, as were genre plot devices (no murders, no guns).

The rules were drawn up partly out of boredom, partly in jest, Vinterberg said. But the group, which includes Lars von Trier, one of the current reigning masters of European film, was serious in its goal to make better films.

Mir trainer fire sale, just $3 million (other space relics, too): [multipage] http://www.spacehardware.com/ [NASA Watch]

This is a complete Mir Space Station, similar to the one that is currently in space. It was one of three constructed for the same purpose but has never been in space.

An interesting case study on idealistic power-plant privatisers: http://www.forbes.com:80/Forbes/98/1102/6210174a.htm

Created only in 1981, AES of Arlington, Va. has already become the world's largest privately owned generator of electricity. It operates 100 plants in 19 countries, producing 31,000 megawatts -- the equivalent of lighting half the U.K.

It embraced four principles: The company would always be a fun place to work, meaning it would entrust even minor employees with significant responsibility (see sidebars); it would put social responsibility ahead of making money; it would always act with integrity; and all people with whom it dealt would be treated with fairness.

AES bought an antiquated Soviet power plant. Not surprisingly, the government reneged on its contract to pay for the output.