If
you spend any time on Usenet, you might enjoy the
Godwin's
law FAQ, which includes a number of other (numbered)
Usenet rules.
If
you spend any time on Usenet, you might enjoy the
Godwin's
law FAQ, which includes a number of other (numbered)
Usenet rules.
Quote of
the day (just because): "Mommy, a naked American man stole
my balloons!" (An American Werewolf in London)
Neanderthal
music? This bone flute is a replica, though the bone is
a 45,000-year-old bear femur, but it's a careful replica of
something almost as old as the bone it's made from.
An incomplete,
but possibly useful (or at least amusing) selection of
Tom
Lehrer lyrics, including some I've never seen elsewhere.
Maybe
life on Earth
came
from carbon dioxide, water, and rock.
With those ingredients, at 350° C and ten atmospheres,
you can brew acetic acid and ethanol. Never mind tide pools, we
may be the children of deep-ocean hydrothermal vents.
A new method of
using
algae to produce hydrogen might be good enough to be a
reasonable source of fuel. No genetic engineering involved.
[via Robot Wisdom]
In response to a widely publicized study which found that people
who spend a lot of time on the Internet spend less time talking to
their friends on the phone, Wired reports that
dog-owners
spend a lot of time on dog-related activities, which
interferes with socializing with humans.
They walk their dogs, play with them, train them, speak gibberish to them, comparison-shop for dog food, and read up on them to the point that it detracts from actually interacting with other human beings, obscure researchers have concluded.
Salon's fine
portrait
of Edward Gorey doesn't explain his works--as if anything
could--but I recommend it highly to other fans of his work,
especially those who are curious about his life as well as his art.
The Navaho Nation
was cheated out of its proper mineral royalties by a dishonest
Secretary of the Interior: but the judge ruling in the case
couldn't
find a way to give them the money that both justice and the
treaties they signed with the US entitle them to.
Jon Carroll
celebrates
his sump pump, with a detour to black holes:
"I mean, get a grip. Your socks are dry. What more is there?
A little too cute, maybe:
Personal
Cat (PC) Specifications and Operating Instructions.
The
quantum
ravioli page explores what would happen if you fired a can of
ravioli really fast out of a railgun. "At low speeds (REAL
low) the ravioli will simply flow over the surface, yielding a
space-cruiser with a distinctly Italian paint job." At high
speeds, it gets more interesting: we're taken from supersonic
punch-a-hole-in-the-object effects through Cerenkov
radiation to speeds at which "Thermonuclear reactions...may take
place in the tomato sauce." [thanks to Hacksaw for this one]
The Web really does contain everything:
17
and yellow pigs.
This site brings back all sorts of memories: fractals (before
anyone had heard of them) and fresh apple cider, Rubik's cube,
group theory, going barefoot for days at a time, picking
blueberries to mix with dining hall yogurt for breakfast,
topology, a very sensible lights-out policy....I wouldn't want
to be 16 again, but that was a good summer.
DoubleClick
has announced a change in their tracking policy, but
privacy
advocates are not satisfied: it still tracks people by name
unless they explicitly opt out.
Brian Goodwin's choice for today's most important unreported
story is quality
pigs: untrained observers generally agree on whether a
particular pig is happy, which suggests that objective measurement
of whether people are happy--not just how many cars they have
or whether they see a doctor regularly, which generally stand
in for quality of life in current economic analyses--are possible.
The
FAQ
for one of my favorite comic strips, For Better and For
Worse, includes everything from how to reach Lynn Johnston
to some notes on how Ontario differs from the rest of Canada.
The
Intergalactic
Explorer Personality Test states that it is "neither valid nor
reliable," which puts it ahead of most of its ilk. Have fun!
What to eat in a
British
prison. The author, a lifer, recommends the beansprout salad.
The
Mavens'
Word of the Day usually talks about meanings
and etymologies, but today's entry discusses
pronunciation
drift, specifically the use of /s/ in words like "negotiate" and
"species" where most of us expect /sh/.
It does make one wonder. Do people have a sense that "sh" is somehow a vulgar sound? Does that come from an aversion to "sh" as an assimilated sound for "s"+"y" across word boundaries (e.g., miss you pronounced as "MISH-oo" or "MISH-yoo")? Is there some subconscious association of "sh" with sitcom drunk routines? (Shay, whusha doin' shtandin in the shtreet?) It's hard to pin down a cause when you're smack in the middle of what may be a real pronunciation shift.
Along with
the usual selection of a Word of the Year, the
American Dialect Society
has selected words of the decade, century, and millennium. The
word of the millennium is "she."
A reusable spacecraft with a new kind of
reentry
shield has been successfully tested, the Russians say: now they
just need to find it and see exactly what condition it's in.
In the meantime,
the radar trace looks good, and they have recovered the test payload.
Both patients and doctors in the US are increasingly unhappy
with the way medicine is being run here. Sometimes, doctors are
breaking
the rules to treat their patients. And sometimes they resort
to threats: if the HMO won't approve treatment of a psychiatric
patient, the doctor says, he'll send her to their office.
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.