I tend to assume my readers are looking at other Web logs,
but in case you haven't heard that DoubleClick is now tracking
people by name--or, for the suspicious, is now admitting that
it does so--here's the
Privacy
Forum that discusses it.
Doubleclick's Web page,
incidentally, bills it as "The Global Internet Advertising Solutions
Company, but it seems pretty clear that they are, in fact,
a large part of the problem.
The
Kansas City Star reports that Catholic priests
in the US are
dying
of AIDS at four times the rate of the general population. The
summary picked up by the AP made the statistic look dubious--it
focused on a survey of how many priests knew a priest who had
AIDS--but the Star looked at actual death rates among
priests and in the population as a whole. Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
says part of the problem is that
Gay priests and heterosexual priests didn't know how to handle their sexuality, their sexual drive. And so they would handle it in ways that were not healthy.How to be celibate and to be gay at the same time, and how to be celibate and heterosexual at the same time, that's what we were never really taught how to do. And that was a major failing.
We may soon be
planting
crabgrass in contaminated soil, not because there's no other use
for the land but because the crabgrass helps clean it up.
Anti-Slavery is working
to end slavery throughout the world.
The
Big Monster gives four interpretations of "Jabberwocky," from
a straightforward prose version to some odd reductive poetry. I
can't accept his rendering of "brillig" as "summer"--that's one of
the few terms from the poem defined explicitly in Through
the Looking Glass, and it means late afternoon--but I like
these pieces anyway.
In the booming
service economy, the city of New York is sending
former welfare recipients to work as
telephone
psychics.
Those interested are asked to call Business Link, a division of the city's Human Resources Administration that finds and trains workers from the welfare rolls, and to sign up for a group screening session.[registration required.]"What if I'm not a psychic?" a caller to Business Link asked.
"They'll train you," the city employee who answered the telephone replied.
If there's
life on Europa, it may live on
formaldehyde
produced by the impact of charged particles from Jupiter.
I don't
know what to call this, but I want to share it:
Andrew Plotkin posted a delightful
improvisation
about color to rec.arts.sf.fandom.
(Really, it's not that poetic a newsgroup: these are just the
pieces I've been pulling out lately, in part because they work
outside the context of the continuing conversations.)
Luc Sante's
"Lines
to be Engraved on the Pedestal of the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier."
Georgie Binks's Salon article on
the
joys of anorexia sounds as though she's trying to convince
herself: she talks about the euphoria of starvation, but she also
mentions concentration camp victims and defines herself as one of
the lucky few who can starve herself without, she claims,
becoming addicted to the habit. About her daughter, she writes
I don't want her to start because I'm concerned if she ever finds out how good it feels, she won't be able to quit. It is that kind of thing. If you can control it, it is a great dieting tool, but once it controls you, you're in real trouble.
Regrettoinform.org,
a site connected to the documentary "Regret to Inform,"
includes some
quotes
from Vietnam War widows, including the ones Americans
are all too ready to forget: the Vietnamese.
Oceanographer William Sager suggests that
true
polar wander, rather than plate tectonics, may be the cause of
a major movement of landmasses 84 million years ago. He also thinks
this may be connected to magnetic field changes, volcanic eruptions,
and changes in plate motion at around the same time.
For
the first time, researchers have identified the
protein
that serves as a receptor for one of the basic taste sensations.
Sweet, salt, sour, and bitter are still unknowns--the cloned receptor
is for umami, a flavor better known to most English-speakers
as MSG.
The actual facts about the notorious
McDonalds'
coffee scalding case, including that the victim, who was
hospitalized for eight days and had skin grafts for her
third-degree burns, originally offered to settle for $20,000, but
McDonalds' refused. Make a note of this for the next time
someone claims that this case is evidence that US courts have
gotten out of hand.
[via Memepool.]
Not all
snowflakes
have six sides.
Irvington
High School, in California, has an assortment of social clubs.
It also recently got its first, and so far only, political club: the
Anarchist
Student Union. Projects so far include explaining what
anarchy is, and looking into whether the company that makes the
school's graduation caps and gowns is using sweatshop labor.
[via the Obscure
Store and Reading Room.]
Prions,
which can be deadly in human and cattle,
may
be beneficial in some other species, by giving them greater
flexibility. The research reported here studied yeast, but the
authors discuss implications for the rest of us.
I missed the recent lunar eclipse because of a snowstorm,
so I was delighted to find Erik V. Olson's
photos.
Erik also includes some notes on what he will
do to get better pictures next time.
It's time to
relax, donate those spare MREs to the food bank, and start enjoying
the
Century of the Iguana.
Tell me why, I don't like Mondays: more people
die
from heart disease on Monday than any other day of the week
Arianna Huffington
proves that people can and do change, calling on Americans to
remember,
and help, the poor. She also suggests that putting a Republican
in the White House might be good for the poor,
"because it might inspire the champions of the Left to reunite
with their estranged consciences and regain their voices."
The Glass Museum of New Zealand
has an attractive illustrated history of
opalescent
glass.
Why
Random House includes
offensive
words in their dictionaries.
The
origins
of copyright? Includes a very broad disclaimer.
Why are
most butterflies active during the day?
Apparently, it's
to
avoid bats--and a few nocturnal butterflies have ears on their
wings that are specialized to detect bat ultrasound.
How
small
can a living organism be?
A collection of
molecules
with silly names, from
megaphone to curious chloride.
The
nailgun
engineering FAQ claims to be the most useful FAQ ever,
and is probably the only FAQ to define a nailgun and
discuss the relation of true love to birdhouses.
Some Ghanaians have made a Dutch man
king
of the Ewe, because they believe him to be the reincarnation
of his wife's grandfather. [via
Rebecca's pocket]
This
artificial
eye doesn't come close to good natural vision,
but does provide enough information to be useful.
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course. Stale links are in the nature of such a project, but please let me know if any new links appear broken. Note: dates given here are when I add an item to the log; items are added when I notice them, not necessarily when they first reach the Web.
YAWL is updated most weekdays (sometimes more than once a day) and occasionally on weekends. (For some reason, less of the material I'm interested in is posted on weekends.) However, this is purely an amateur project. If there are no updates for a few days, that might mean I'm traveling or otherwise busy, and not surfing the Web, or just that I haven't come across anything that seems to belong here.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.