The Internet
may or may not give us paperless office, but it's
burning
a lot of fuel to generate the power to keep all those
chips whirring along.
The Internet
may or may not give us paperless office, but it's
burning
a lot of fuel to generate the power to keep all those
chips whirring along.
For all of
us fans of the old Dejanews interface, before they decided to
rename themselves as Deja.com on the theory that what the
people who look at ads want is a chance to rate breeds of dog,
someone has set up
an interface
that makes DejaNews work the way it used to--simple, text-based
searching of Usenet.
Contrary to
what people who line their hats with tinfoil suspect, a preliminary
study suggests that a focused magnetic field can actually
turn
off the voices in schizophrenics' heads.
Amazon.com
boasts of the size of its collection, and people I respect have
praised it for making backlist and obscure titles easily available.
At the moment, though, there's at least
one exception:
you cannot order John Atack's expose of Scientology,
A Piece of Blue Sky, from Amazon.
Amazon claims unspecified legal reasons for
not carrying the book, but it's completely legal to distribute
in the US, and Books.com and
barnesandnoble.com will
be happy to supply you with a copy. (If you're in the UK, there's
one paragraph you're not supposed to read.)
Update, 14 June: after much online attention and pressure,
Amazon has decided to carry this book, without ever admitting that
the pressure and publicity affected their choice.
There's been
quite a bit of fuss about whether genetically modified crops are
a good or a bad idea. A report in this week's Nature
shows that
genetically
modified corn pollen can kill monarch butterfly caterpillars.
The genes don't have to escape to do the damage--they just have
to do their job, namely make insecticides in the plants. This
could be a major problem for the butterflies, because milkweed
grows next to corn fields, and one eighth of US cornfields are
now planted with corn containing the gene to make the
insecticide Bt.
The Tasmanian
tiger, or thylacine, has been listed as extinct since 1937 (despite
occasional sightings since). Now an Australian scientist suggests
bringing
the species back using cloning. He found a specimen of a
baby thylacine, preserved in alcohol; apparently DNA lasts better
in alcohol than in the more usual preservative, formalin. Other
scientists are skeptical, both of the preservation quality and
of whether there's a suitable close relative to supply a host
egg, but it's an intriguing thought.
Lucy
Huntzinger keeps a quiet, reflective online diary. In
the
latest entry, Lucy visits an anteater, and reflects on
living in, and near, San Francisco, and what animals she'd
have in her ideal zoo.
An article
in Nature tries to explain the
popularity
of herbal medicines. The tone is somewhat condescending,
looking for psychological reasons for why people are choosing
to do what the author thinks is clearly the wrong thing (I
agree with her, but insulting your readers rarely helps). But
even people who will be irritated by this approach could benefit
from the warnings about interactions with more conventional
medication and the unreliability of dosages in many
"nutritional supplements."
Two doctors
think they may have found the
causes,
and a possible cure, of nearsightedness: babies who sleep
with a light on--even a night-light--are more likely to grow
up near-sighted than those who get at least a few hours of
darkness every night.
This is still a first study, but it can't hurt to turn the
light off when you leave the room and the baby is asleep.
The background at the end of the article mentions that the
rate of myopia has been increasing for the past two centuries,
as more people moved to cities.
The
Strunkenwhite
virus warning has been circulating in unattributed
email since Bob Hirschfeld published it in his column in
The Washington Post. The virus, we are told,
returns email that has grammatical or spelling errors, and
"is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate
America." The virus has also "left government e-mail systems
in disarray," because it objects to the style of federal
regulations.
Tucked away
among the adventures of
Herb Urban,
a friend of a friend, is the charming parable of
the
cricket and the quarter.
If you already
have enough coasters, here are instructions on
how to cook
a CD-ROM, including safety notes and a
picture of the
result.
Avram Grumer
defends
Doom and other first-person shooter video games, in a letter
the New York Times probably won't print, but should.
A
2.3-million-year-old
tool factory has been discovered in the Rift Valley
in northern Kenya. The site includes flakes--the actual tools,
perhaps used to cut up meat--and the rock cores from which they
were chipped, as well as rocks that had clearly been discarded
as unsuitable. There are no associated hominid fossils, but someone
was making stone tools earlier than we'd previously realized;
the discoverers are suggesting that it was either Homo habilis
or a species of Australopithecus.
In the
course of a long thread about the Littleton, Colo., school
shootings on rec.arts.sf.fandom,
Avedon Carol has posted an excellent discussion of the
tendency
to define "crime" as something that those people do.
Who "they" are varies, but this approach is not only an
excuse not to do anything to address the causes of crime,
it lets us excuse our own misdeeds because we're good people,
not "criminals."
The
World Wide Web Consortium, W3C,
has issued a list of
guidelines
for accessible Web site design.
If you aren't designing Web pages, you can probably ignore
this, and if you've been thinking about accessible design,
you're probably already doing most of it, but they're a useful
overview, and having W3C behind them may get a bit more
attention for this issue.
The point isn't to avoid using sound, color, movies,
and so on--it's to set up pages that provide equivalent
information to people who can't use
those features, whether because of disabilities or their
working conditions. (At the risk of stating the obvious, audio
content on Web pages is a problem in cube farms and public
libraries.)
For
mobile Americans, there's now an online source of
regional
foods. This site specifies the brandname--it's for
people who specifically want Moxie, or Br'er Rabbit Dark
Molasses, or Salada tea, or Sechler's candied sweet
dill chuck pickles, because the brands they can get in
their new homes don't quite taste right. On the other hand,
if you never knew it was possible to buy canned fiddleheads
or corn cob jelly at all, now you can. Colleen Chapin, who
runs the company, will add products if people ask for them and
they're still available; the list of things that are no longer
available adds a homey flavor to the site, though it may be
disappointing if you've been looking for Bite Size Oreos or
Willie Wonkah Oompahs. "Regional" turns out to be more
complicated than I'd realized--Moxie is notoriously a
New England specialty, chili with spaghetti a Cincinnati one,
but it never would have occurred to me that Count Chocula was
available in some parts of the US and not others.
Because
it's possible, and because it sounds like an oxymoron,
Hans Scharstein, Werner Krotz-Vogel, and Daniel Scharstein
have designed and built a digital
sundial with no moving parts.
This Web site includes the text of the US and German
The first month
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net
If you like this, you might also like my home page.
