Yet Another Web Log

A clipping service without portfolio, compiled and annotated by Vicki Rosenzweig since March 1999

31 August 2000

A nickel's worth of rant: If you want to use JavaScript, okay. I'll assume you have a reason for doing so, and if I agree with your reasons, I'll turn it on to look at your page. But be honest about it. "This interactive application uses Java and JavaScript" is a fine message, as is "Either you have JavaScript turned off or your browser does not support it, which means you will not see some features of this site." Silent failure when JavaScript is turned off is irritating. "You need to upgrade to Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4" is worse, especially since I know I am running Netscape 4. Never mind that it's condescending, anyone who has JavaScript turned off is probably concerned about security, and is not going to be reassured by a site whose "browser detect" script reports Netscape 4.7 as pre-Netscape 4.0.

Science fiction, or urban legend, but this time it appears to be real: two Thai doctors face murder charges for transplanting organs from patients who were still alive. The transplant recipients paid around $25,000 for the organs, which in itself is illegal in most places, including Thailand.

29 August 2000

Invading species are everywhere. If you garden, even casually, you've probably heard how good earthworms are for the soil. But if you live in northern North America--north of an irregular line from New Jersey to Washington state--every earthworm you'll see is a European transplant. The line tracks the last glaciation, more or less: worms spread, but 10 meters a year is fast for an earthworm population.

In a wooded area with worms, the ground is covered by a thin layer of the previous year's fallen leaves. Below that is a potting-soil-like mixture left behind by worms that have eaten those leaves and passed finely broken down organic matter. But in worm-free zones, like those in Michigan or Minnesota, that layer of leaf litter is much deeper.

28 August 2000

The Annals of Improbable Research offers a practical, fun physics exercise: analyze what happens when a millipede crosses a train track.

"The police robot is not there to create disorder, it is there to maintain disorder": the Thailand Research Fund has sponsored the creation of armed security robots that can be controlled remotely via the Internet. Password security is notoriously iffy--and anyone who gets the password, anywhere on the planet, could start the robot shooting at passersby. Human police are notoriously imperfect (see the previous entry), but they aren't in the habit of letting a stranger a thousand miles away tell them to kill someone.

25 August 2000

In 1997 the Los Angeles Police Department promised to stop harassing whistle-blowers. In 1999, the city passed a law to protect employees who file complaints. Now the LAPD is being sued by 41 current and former police officers:

Plaintiffs include officers who contend they were victims of retaliation for reporting incidents of excessive force, hostile work environment issues and other forms of police misconduct. Many of the plaintiffs said they were forced out of the LAPD because they reported police abuses to their supervisors.

New data on global warming suggest that

other heat-trapping chemicals -- methane, chlorofluorocarbons, particulate matter like coal soot, plus other smog-creating chemicals -- are probably more responsible for the trend than carbon dioxide.

Alas, the universe of facts is not a democracy. If it were, I'd vote for fried pork rinds as a health food.

Our guarantee: Many people will miss the point of this column, and prove it.

24 August 2000

It's time once again for Mister Language Person.

It's probably illegal, and it certainly casts doubt on the organizers' grasp of the English language: since the Supreme Court has pointed out that organized prayer at high school football games is an illegal establishment of religion, these people are trying to arrange "spontaneous" prayers. If you get together beforehand and agree that you're all going to do something at the same time, that's as far from spontaneous as an event can get.

Okay, so they flunk civics, and they flunk English. They also claim to be doing this as Christians, which I think means they flunk religion. Fortunately for them, an understanding of the basics of one's own religion is not a requirement for graduating from public school in the United States, though it might be useful in the wider world.

Rhenium is a rare and useful mineral, but will that make it worth mining an active volcano?

23 August 2000

The all-purpose horoscope for any given day might be funny even to people who believe in that stuff:

It's also a bad idea to try to perform a tracheotomy with a plastic spoon.

22 August 2000

This list of the Top 5 investing mistakes cats make looks awfully familiar. No wonder I'm not rich!

This introduction to "primary colors", color vision, and color printing doesn't explain why I can't get a really good purple out of any of those six-digit hex codes for color in HTML, but read it anyway: there's more to life, and vision, than the net.

The Republicans and their pet pundits continue to accuse anyone who notices the systematic transfer of resources to the rich of promoting "class warfare". Molly Ivins puts it well:

Why in the world is Gore trying to incite "class warfare"?

The plump comfortable commentators pulling down $1 million or more a year cannot understand why Gore would spout populism when everyone is doing so well. Absolutely everyone they know.

21 August 2000

Piracy sounds a lot more romantic when it's two centuries in the past, and the men killed by the pirates would have been long dead anyway. (As a side note, flags of convenience may have their advantages, but the US Navy isn't going to come to your defense if your ship is registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and St. Vincent really can't do much to help you.)

The miracle material of the near future may be goat silk: biologists have inserted spider silk genes into goats, and are hoping the silk will come out in the next generation's milk.

There is something new under the Sun: open water at the North Pole, with ivory gulls circling above it. [via rc3.org]

18 August 2000

Electrons are generally believed to be indivisible: there's no such thing as half an electron. Humphrey Maris argues that, under certain circumstances, it is possible to split an electron in two. Specifically, he considers electrons immersed in liquid helium at 1 degree above absolute zero.

Previous experiments have shown that an electron in helium becomes trapped in a bubble approximately 100-billionths of an inch in diameter. The bubble drifts through the liquid with the wave function of the electron confined inside it.

Maris shows that when the bubble is illuminated with infrared light, the bubble can divide into two smaller bubbles each containing a part of the wave function of the electron. These two bubbles can then move independently through the liquid and become separated from each other.

Jon Carroll got nasty email from a reader--which, he notes, comes with the territory--and started thinking about the problems in our public discourse.

16 August 2000

It's not exactly haute cuisine, but you have to start somewhere: a captive chimp in Madrid has invented applesauce, and now she and most of her companions are pureeing their apples, carrots, and citrus fruit. Sometimes it seems that culture is the result of having plenty of spare time: the great thing about intelligence, of course, is that it provides spare time. Or can. We seem to have missed the point, somewhere along the way.

This thoughtful review of a history of tattooing considers the different purposes and meanings of tattoos in varying Western cultures. It was a pleasant surprise to read an article on tattooing that got past both enthusiasm and "oh, they're weird!" [My loyal readers inform me that this link now points to something completely unrelated. *sigh*]

Now that the Swiss banks are publishing details of accounts that belonged to Holocaust victims, there is increasing pressure on Israeli banks to pay up as well. In both countries, standards of proof were set unreasonably high; Bank Leumi also opened thousands of safe deposit boxes, keeping no record of the contents.

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Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.

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