Yet Another Web Log

A clipping service without portfolio*, compiled and annotated by Vicki Rosenzweig

18 January 2000

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.

13 January 2000

If you live in the United States, your tax money is paying for script approval on network television shows. In the name of the War on Some Drugs, they're paying the networks to insert anti-drug messages into the plots of television shows. In return for its money, which started as normal ad money, the government gets to look at scripts, decide whether it will pay for this program, and sometimes "suggest" changes to the characters or plot. Most of the writers and producers, even those who were asked for anti-drug episodes of their shows, didn't realize the government was involved: the networks are taking the money and asking for, or making, the changes.

A discussion of sexism in the Harry Potter books, by a reader who wanted to overlook it and found she couldn't. She suggests that the subject has been ignored because nobody wants to burst the bubble of pleasure with the books; I suspect it may be because it's so much the same old stereotypes about women, and focus on boys as doing all the important things, that we see in all too many books, and we're trained to ignore it. When we talk about books, we talk about what's different about them, not about what--good or bad--they have in common with the last six things we read.

A. E. Housman wrote a "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy." One of my teachers read it to us, and I'm glad to have a Web link for it. (I suspect the humor in this is directly proportional to the reader's familiarity with classical literature, but the last couplet works even without that context.)

Kevin Wald seeks the present tense of fraught, in rhyme. (This is the same Kevin Wald who wrote "Heroine Barbarian" to the tune of "Modern Major General.")

12 January 2000

Update: No nuclear forks: the U.S. government is dropping the plan to recycle radioactive nickel into ordinary consumer goods.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said "The public had a lot of questions. There was a perception problem that this was not safe. The Congress had a lot of questions. I had a lot of questions."

The Onion is back online, with an analysis of why there is no seven-headed dragon rising in the East. An analyst is quoted as saying "This flies in the face of virtually everything we know about end-of-the-century world politics."

11 January 2000

New local content: instructions for good, easy hot chocolate, requiring three ingredients and a microwave oven.

My response to someone who asserted that he wouldn't trust a doctor who smoked.

I don't actually need these, but who could resist: Biotoy is selling glow-in-the-dark squirt guns, alien crystals, and a kit to make your tapwater glow. Better yet, the profits fund research into bioluminescence. [via Rebecca's Pocket]

Molly Ivins is worried that we don't have our paranoia priorities worked out: "Now is the winter of our discontent, so I think we ought to coordinate our paranoias." Black helicopters, Russians, terrorists, the media conspiracy, and global warming all have people convinced that they are the real danger. The problem with global warming is that there's something unsatisfying about a threat that you can't shoot at.

10 January 2000

Since Pluto and its moon Charon are tidally locked, and Pluto's axis is tilted 95 degrees, the phases of Charon, as seen from Pluto, are unusual: at most times of the year, the moon never quite reaches full, and from half of Pluto you can never see Charon at all.

Maureen Kincaid Speller paints an exquisite winter morning in Folkestone, England.

9 January 2000

Jumping the gun: the Mars Society has designed a flag for the Mars Arctic Research Station, a red, green, and blue banner, after Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I love the books, but can't go along with the CNN headline, which refers to it as the "Official 'Mars flag.'" When there are Martians, they'll pick their own flag.

6 January 2000

Galapagos iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) can shrink during el Niño years, then regain their length when food is more plentiful. An iguana that shrinks by one centimeter in hard times increases its chance of survival by ten percent. Having gotten over their shock and disbelief of the results, the researchers would love to know how the iguanas regrow their bones, which humans can't do.

Most conservation strategies focus on protecting the center of an endangered species range. This is based largely on studies of species that are doing well: the center of the range is generally the most favorable area for a species. Endangered species, however, often hang on at the edges of their historic ranges, in remote mountain ranges or other places that humans don't find as appealing.

Chimps look more intelligent all the time: a 23-year-old named Ai can not only count, she can remember the order of five random numbers. Sure, you can do that too, but that's part of the point: we can do this and more, chimps can do this, most other animals can't.

Jon Carroll explains why and how all married people are nuts, and that's okay.

5 January 2000

I'm generally in favor of recycling, but do we really want to recycle radioactive nickel into the ordinary steel supply? The steel industry is opposed, because they don't want to lose consumer confidence in ordinary things like forks. The company behind this idea defends it by pointing to a radioactive salt substitute; this does not increase my confidence.

4 January 2000

A team of Japanese scientists has grown frog eyes and ears from embryonic cells in a test tube. In what is described as "an earlier, simple procedure" they have also grown and transplanted frog kidneys; the transplant recipients lived for a month with the lab-grown kidneys.

Translation as the world's oldest profession.

A few thoughts on Y2K preparedness, disguised as an epinion for no good reason.

3 January 2000

Trivial, but amusing: a Mad-Libs style fill-in-the-blank finding of fact in the Microsoft antitrust case.

Novelist Carolyn Chute's kitchen militia may be the only militia conceived at an art colony.

The New York City subway stations are being ornamented with everything from mosaic eyes (at Chambers Street on the A, C, and E) to stained glass windows (on the #7 line). The TA's official site presenting the artwork is incomplete--I went there looking for a description of the mosaic in the elevator shaft at 207th on the A, and found nothing about the station--but nicely designed, except for the use of blinking "under construction" notes as you scan down some lines.

31 December 1999

Jon Carroll offers an image that "encapsulates the essential whatever that marked the vital grebistan of the furpwallow that we call the 20th Century."

30 December 1999

Ali Abunimah compares the common American perception of terrorism with the statistics on the subject as published by the US State Department. Few Americans are killed by terrorism, and most of those few deaths have nothing to do with either the Middle East or Muslims: you wouldn't guess this from government pronouncements or most newspaper reports. In 1998, twelve Americans were killed by terrorists in 1998; that's twelve too many, but an American's risk of being killed by terrorists is less than his or her risk of dying of bubonic plague.

Samuel Delany speculates on the future of New York City, and of cities in general, as well as nanotech, possible social progress, and the difficulty of understanding what may come.

As much of a city lover as I am, I still suspect that, whatever brings its end about, the Great City as we have it today--an enclave of two million to 10 million inhabitants embroiled in culture, commerce, and capital--just can't hang together for an entire thousand years. It's too large and unwieldy, too likely to break up after a few centuries or so and disperse in general sprawl or what sociologists call "edge cities." Consider: There were no cities of more than a million inhabitants before 1800. In 1850 the population of Manhattan was only 500 thousand people with another 200 thousand scattered among the other four boroughs. The population passed the million mark only around 1875. The mega-population center is entirely the result of 19th century industrialization. Only with the advent of steam, iron, glass, electricity, and concomitant transportation advances could those river-and-market communities that had attracted folks around them into a growing township import enough food and materials for life and manufacture and export its growing number of goods--and get rid of a million or so people's garbage. The really big city may just be a 200-to-500-year historical flash-in-the-pan.

Things are pretty slow right now, so I'm going to use this space for a Public Service Announcement:

When did you last back up your hard disk? If you don't remember, do it now. Today. Not because this is the end of the world as we know it, but because computers fail every day, and you probably have something on that machine that you don't want to lose.