You know whether
you need this: a genuine, handmade
cuddly Cthulhu
doll, in your choice of colors--including plaid and paisley.
Needless to say, in this postmodern world, you can use a credit
card to buy "pure, unadulterated evil."
You know whether
you need this: a genuine, handmade
cuddly Cthulhu
doll, in your choice of colors--including plaid and paisley.
Needless to say, in this postmodern world, you can use a credit
card to buy "pure, unadulterated evil."
Great American
stars don't stop entertaining their public just because they've died:
the body of
Hsing-hsing, the National Zoo's much-loved panda, will be going on
display
at the Smithsonian Institution.
The
Gallery of Misused
Quotation Marks has some truly choice examples, such as
the Fresh "Squeezed" Orange Juice and
"Store" closed due to "Illness", which leads to all sorts
of speculation as to why they're really closed.
Molly Ivins
points out that while a third of the people on welfare always
moved off it quickly, and another third have gotten jobs in the
current tight labor market, that means we've effectively
abandoned
a third
of America's poor, specifically the third least able to fend for
themselves. If you think you already know this, go read the column:
these people are not abstractions, they have names, and ignoring
them doesn't make them go away.
The US Mint's
FAQ
on the new dollar coin is thorough, but not convincing. It
explains why they chose the spelling "Sacagawea" for the woman
on the obverse, and discusses Shoshone cradleboards, but omits
my questions, which I think are probably of more concern to the
average American than spelling:
Why do we need both a paper dollar and a dollar coin? and
Am I going to wind up with $20 in change weighing down my pockets,
as I did in Paris (where the largest common coin is 10 francs, worth
about $1.70 at current exhange rates)? I can all too easily
envision the same people who now give me nine one-dollar bills in
change giving me nine dollar coins a year from now.
[thanks to Lake
Effect]
The concept of a species is
outdated
if not badly flawed, but it's not at all clear what
to replace it with. The author suggests that the problem is trying
to use one set of categories for all purposes--does "what it will
breed with" really have to be the basis for biodiversity
studies, for example? The real problem seems to be that, the more
we learn, the more complex our models of the world need to be,
but we don't get any better at thinking in terms of complex and
overlapping categories.
I've been playing
with colors here, and coming to suspect that the monitor I'm
using to test the results doesn't have a very good color display.
Expect further changes, and please let me know if you find any of
the palettes I try confusing. Mail, as usual, to
vr @ redbird . org
An expert
on laughter claims that
human
speech arose as a byproduct of bipedalism. Walking upright, he
says, enabled our ancestors to separate their patterns of breathing
from walking, providing the flexibility necessary for speech. This
does not, of course, mean we should necessarily expect kangaroos
or ostriches to start chatting with us.
Half the joy of
science is that there's always something new. The final data from
the Galileo probe's plunge into Jupiter shows that the giant planet
either
didn't
form where we thought, or didn't form how we thought, or
possibly both. This brings into question theories about the
formation of the Solar System as a whole.
There is
one remaining
stone
carver working on the National Cathedral. The cathedral was
officially finished in 1990, but there may be as much as a century
of detail work left to be done.
David McKie on
diaries,
including the disadvantages of the page-a-day diaries sold at every
stationer's shop for people whose goal
is to write something of lasting or literary interest, and
why so many people, including himself, keep diaries of the mundane.
Political
science professor William Kreml is going to run in the South
Carolina Presidential primary next February in order to engage
in an
act of
civil disobedience with regard to the campaign finance laws,
as a protest against the trend toward oligarchy in the United States.
(This page is a bit ugly--someone didn't understand how special
characters would be translated by HTML--but worth a look.)
The Ukrainian
government has accused
scientists
studying bioluminescent plankton
of giving away state secrets. This isn't quite as off-base as it
seems: plankton can reveal the location of submarines, and the
government of Ukraine doesn't want foreigners knowing the habits
of Ukrainian plankton. There's no such thing as pure science.
The official
Etch-a-Sketch page doesn't
include the famous
FAQ,
but it does offer to sell you a
personalized Etch-a-Sketch and presents an impressive Etch-a-Sketch
art
gallery.
Does your
cat walk on the
keyboard? I haven't tried this software out, because my cat
only walks on my trackball, but it looks handy.
A few
frequently
misused words, with their correct meanings, courtesy of the
inimitable Jon Singer. Also from Jon, some discussion and
pictures of his work in
pottery,
including formulating some gorgeous glazes.
In a suspiciously
familiar format, Brains 4
Zombies offers to fulfill all your online brain needs, and
even provides a chat area to which you can post. Those who are not
undead are invited to click a special link--these are brains for
zombies, not scientific research.
The
sea ice on the Arctic Ocean has
thinned
dramatically over the last twenty to forty years.
The data so far don't tell us why so much ice has been lost: the
researchers suggest hypotheses about " the flow of
heat from the ocean itself, from the atmosphere, and from
shortwave radiation. Other avenues to be explored include the
amount of precipitation and snow cover in the region and
ice movement." The other important open question is whether this
is a low point in a recurring multi-decade cycle of changing ice
thickness, or the measurement of two points in a continuing
decline in the amount of ice.
Seeds that
fall to the ground in
rainforest
fragments are much less likely
to sprout, let alone thrive, than those that fall in larger rainforest
areas. Edge effects are well known in ecology: part of the problem
in this case is that the edges are too dry and bright for rainforest
plants.
Villains.co.uk claims to
be your one-stop shop for world domination, complete with personal
ads, news stories, and interesting gadgets for sale. [Via
Need to Know, so you may have
seen it already.]
Too good to
be true? While massive alcohol consumption is bad for the liver,
rats given a little alcohol
repaired
their livers more effectively
than those given only water. This study cries out for replication.
It's no
surprise that medical researchers are more likely to publish
studies that show that a treatment works than that it doesn't.
Researchers often blame editors for this, but the editor say they
can't publish papers that aren't submitted to them.
More disturbingly, the Journal of the AMA has a new
study showing that some researchers
publish
the same data more than once, without saying so, which makes
a drug look more effective than it is. Worse still, drug researchers,
funded by drug companies. sometimes rig studies
so the drug they're
"testing" will look better than an older drug. For example,
one study of two antifungal drugs administered the comparison drug
orally--even though it's known not to work unless given
intravenously--and unsurprisingly found that the new drug was better.
[Registration required]
Something a little
different: a Quicktime animation of an
Io
volcano, from the viewpoint of a spaceship flying by. Oddly, it looks
rather like a terrestrial fountain.
A nice
FAQ on crows
and ravens, from the
American Society of
Crows and Ravens, which is of course a society of humans interested
in these birds, not an organization for the birds to join.
Lynne Segal
responds to some dismissive media evaluations of feminism
with a reminder of
what
feminism is for. She notes that many of the remaining problems
feminists have to deal with have more to do with the widening
economic differences between classes than with the success or failure
of feminism so far.
Molly Ivins
is thinking out loud about
football,
prayers, and Habitat for Humanity.
Dave Barry
is concerned about a plague of
caffeine-swilling frogs.
A
celebration
of the semicolon, addressed to sixth graders:
"The experts, if there were any, would agree that there has
not been much semicolonic progress in the last generation or two;"
[registration required]
This is
pretty psychoceramic: based on extremely dubious physics, the
man behind the "Face on Mars" foofaraw is predicting that
three
"objects" will strike the Earth on November 7, and
that they are under human control. The source for this is an
anonymous phone call, supported by similarities to the
movie Deep Impact. I am not making this up; I will
check back on November 8 and see if the site has been changed to
reflect events on the seventh.
[via Need to Know.]
No links, just
a brief local rant. If you don't want it, skip down to the next
entry, which is a genuine Weblog link to a science article.
Okay, good, they're gone.
Over on rec.arts.sf.fandom, one of the occasional throwaway lines, if someone says something that indicates a rather...different...grasp on reality, is "welcome to our timeline." At the moment, I feel as though I'm the one who's fallen through to another timeline. Oh, the material structure is the same--I'm sitting in my office, with the usual people around, and the occasional wrong number on the phone--but there are these odd...leakages. Two in particular. Yahoo! is highlighting live coverage of the murder trial of a 13-year-old. Do I really want to get my directory service from a company that thinks I'll find this appealing?
I can cope with that, though. Sensationalism sells, and ads pay the bills, and all that sort of thing. Okay, fine, I don't have to click. What's really done it is a couple of bags of candy someone left around the corner in the accounting department. One of them says "watermelon licorice" and the other says "piña colada licorice." The editorial part of my brain is demanding a noun to go with these strings of flavors--watermelon-and-licorice what? The deep animal brain is trying to figure out how anyone could imagine that this is a reasonable combination of flavors. Between the two, I want to run home to my Mom--who is thousands of miles away, as usual.
A tiny,
obscure parasitic insect known as a strepsipteran has a
visual
system not found in any other living creature. Instead of the
compound eyes of most insects, it has 100 separate eyes,
and devotes 75 percent of its brain to visual processing. The
only other place this sort of eye has been found is in some
trilobite fossils.
The Hubble
telescope has taken a gorgeous photograph of
two
entwined spiral galaxies.
The
dangers
of reading the news: many people know that, statistically,
flying is safer than driving, but you wouldn't guess that from the
almost obsessive coverage of the recent EgyptAir crash. Barry
Glassner, quoted here, estimates that the coverage of
the 1996 ValuJet crash has cost 200 lives per year in the time since.
[registration required]
Reasons to
be cheerful, part 3: most Russians
aren't
worried about Y2K bugs because they're already living with
food shortages and unreliable electricity and telephones.
Today's
science fiction moment is a British scientist who is taking some
early steps toward
becoming
a cyborg, specifically giving a computer control of one of
his arms. The really odd part is that he says he's doing it to
point up the dangers of such work, not because he thinks it's
potentially useful (say, for people with neurological disorders)
or even just interesting in its own right.
Evidence
that
agriculture
was independently invented in what is now the eastern United States
long before corn and beans were introduced from the south.
Much of the research
described here consisted of looking in museum drawers and being
willing to doubt experts who insisted that there were no native
wild squashes in this area. The cultivated plants included squash,
sunflower, marsh elder, and chenopod. The author suggests that
their lack of importance in the current American diet, especially
when compared to corn and beans, is part of why this separate
development of agriculture has been overlooked.
More fun with
Epinions: I've written a short piece promoting
the
Moon as a vacation site.
Depression
is a feminist issue: researchers have known for years that women
are more likely to be depressed than men, and this study argues
that it's largely because we work harder, are paid less, have
less control over our lives, and get less respect from our
partners than men. Also, "ruminating," or spending time thinking
about depressive symptoms and other problems, seems to increase
depression. No surprise there--people who solve their problems feel
better than those who brood about them.
Extreme
miniaturization may bring back
the
vacuum-tube computer.
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 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.