All the Web is a fast new
Web search engine. It's not clear how many sites it currently
indexes--it claims 80 million as of May 1999, with a goal of
more than 200 million for "summer of 1999"--but I did a few
test searches and it seems worth bookmarking.
Transparent
women--okay, models--in museums all over the United States, with
images, and some speculation on the lack of transparent men.
A West Belfast
tourist board has issued a map showing graveyards, political murals,
and other sites
related
to the Troubles.
New
high-resolution
images of Titan from the Keck Telescope suggest the possibility
of either an oily ocean, or solid hydrocarbons lying on the
surface. Also, "The bright region shaped somewhat like a
rubber duck seems to be made of a mixture of rock and ice."
A permanent
hobo jungle, complete
with showers and easy access to railroad tracks--and a no-alcohol
policy.
The
Dead Sea
is shrinking: In 40 years, the sea's length has dwindled from
80 kilometers to 50. As with the Aral Sea, most of the water loss is
because of diversion to irrigation projects; unlike the Aral,
the Dead Sea is also suffering from evaporation pools, which
extract minerals for industry and for "natural" beauty products.
A near-Earth
asteroid belt? Oxford astronomers think so, based on
simulations that show such orbits would be stable--but if it's
there, it's pretty sparse and the rocks are probably small.
Researchers
at the University of Kentucky are investigating nicotine and related
chemicals for possible
medical
use--in particular, to treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
diseases.
Don't
let your pet lizard eat fireflies.
An interview
with Scottish science fiction writer
Ken
MacLeod covers Marxism, libertarianism, cyberpunk, and the Internet,
as well as MacLeod's personal history and his novels.
Fractals are
a common motif in
African
culture, found in places as diverse as architecture, fabric
design, and hair weaving.
Jan Curtis's
collection of
aurora
photographs.
Chimpanzee
culture discusses what culture is, whether chimps and other
non-human species have or can have cultures, and how we can tell.
A peer-reviewed paper on the subject can be downloaded from
this site.
John Light
was murdered by anti-gay terrorists. Now, the British government
is denying his surviving companion death benefits--the Home Office
claims that the law
limits
those benefits to heterosexuals.
Skipping isn't just fun--it can
also be good exercise. Since it's exercise, it might be a good idea
to wear good cross-training shoes and stretch before skipping.
A bureaucratic
form
for dealing with Viking raids, ending one piece of
good advice. (Link stolen from
Robot wisdom.)
Times
Square as corporate theme park.
If you suffer
from Seasonal Affective Disorder, St. John's wort may be a good
idea. So may sunlight. Unfortunately,
the
combination may lead to cataracts.
Loggerhead
turtles
migrate between nesting grounds in Japan and feeding grounds in
Baja California, a distance of 10,000 kilometers each way.
Update:
the director of Brookhaven National Lab assures us that there
is
"no chance" that a planned experiment could create a
dangerous black hole.
Submit
your site, or any site you're curious about, to a
filter that
will predict whether it will be banned under the
new Australian net censorship law. Nothing is definite yet, but
it looks like this Weblog will be illegal in Oz,
not only for the entry immediately below this, but for the physics--
filters are stupid, and "black hole" contains the filtering term
"hole."
Everyone's favorite
homicidal lesbian terrorist, Hothead Paisan.
When you're ready to scream with rage, Hothead is right there with you..
Thirty years
ago today,
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon.
Brookhaven
Labs has a shiny new particle accelerator, but they're not going
to start using it until they've investigated the small but
scary
possibility
that it could destroy the Earth by creating weird new particles
or a black hole.
I'll refrain
from quoting large pieces of
Tom Lehrer
lyrics in this Web log; most if not all of them are on Tim
Newsome's Lehrer page, along with biographical and musicological
information about Lehrer and his songs.
It used to be
a joke: thanks to modern medicine,
infertility
is now hereditary. Specifically, men can pass it on to
their sons.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.