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.
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.")
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."Now they have to decide what to do with the metal instead.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Galapagos iguanas (
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jon Carroll
offers an
image
that "encapsulates the essential
whatever that marked the vital grebistan of the
furpwallow that we call the 20th Century."
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.
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.