A nice
poetic variant on
the usual 404 message. (They're not going to like me for
this, I suspect--but such is the price of creativity.)
A nice
poetic variant on
the usual 404 message. (They're not going to like me for
this, I suspect--but such is the price of creativity.)
The
Onion offers advice on
making
the most of your teenage pregnancy, including health tips
and what to say to well-meaning busybodies. It's too bad that the
Onion is "not intended for readers under 18 years of age."
Old enough to
vote,
Pioneer 10
is still doing astronomy: scientists have detected a new
Kuiper belt object by its gravitational effects on the spacecraft.
This is only the second body to be detected because of its gravity;
Neptune was the first.
The
plumbdesign
visual thesaurus
is the sort of Web application I tend to hate--everything bouncing
around the screen, appearance over meaning. This one is fun: it's
a Java-based application that lets you either type
or click on a word and
gives related concepts (connected by lines of different
lengths) which you can in turn click on--if
you can get them to stay put long enough. It treats alternate
spellings oddly, if logically: one of the related terms for
"cookie" is "cooky," and "judgment" points to "judgement."
("Cookie" does not point to any Web-related meanings, only to
other baked goods.)
I can't run this for more than a few minutes--it makes my head
hurt--but people without weird neurological problems could
probably play with it for hours.
Many people
are more familiar with Galileo the symbol than with Galileo's
actual work, so it makes a certain sort of sense that an
Italian museum has a
reliquary
containing one of Galileo's fingers.
Jon Carroll on
the
problem of atriums.
Chemical Elements.com
describes itself as an "online, interactive periodic table of the
elements"--click on a symbol and it gives you a variety of information
about the element in question, including its isotopes, chemical
structure, and uses, if any. The periodic table
display is configurable, to show
such things as name, atomic number, or date of discovery of all
the elements.
The
Europa-Vostok
Initiative is designing equipment for exploring Lake Vostok,
a freshwater lake under the Antarctic ice that may hold unique
lifeforms, and the probable ocean on the Jovian moon Europa.
The newest
strategy for
preventing malaria
is an old drug, atovaquone.
En español:
a dictionary
of Spanish slang, sorted by country. The section
labeled "EEUU + Spanglish"
is full of English-derived terms, from "marqueta" for "mercado" to
"jomboy" (yes, "homeboy"), confirming my suspicion that the
Spanish I'm picking up from signs and the like is not exactly
standard.
Nobody
actually needs this, but some may find it amusing:
the Encyclopedia
Morningtonia is a thorough--I dare not say "complete"--guide
to the game of Mornington Crescent as it has evolved over the
years, including variants of the rules and famous games.
For example: "Junkin's Progression: This opens the game
to suburban bidding and permits a lateral shift in two."
Cosmologists
keep refining their measurements of how far away things are, and
hence how old the universe is--but the
new
measurements disagree with the old. Specifically, the best
"standard candles," Cepheid variables, may be fainter and therefore
closer than they've thought--which would mean the universe is
younger than they've thought, and younger than many people are
comfortable with.
The only
Y2K compliance
statement you'll ever need.
If you
dislike animation on the Web, or just want to run faster:
WebWasher
is a browser add-on, free for non-commercial use, that filters
out advertising and lets you remove or limit animation. The only
difficulty I've noticed is that the Netscape shortcut of just
typing "hostname" instead of "www.hostname.com" no longer works--
for me it's worth it. [Thanks to Jakob Nielsen's
useit.com.]
A
Salon article uses an Internet
database
of children awaiting adoption to discuss a variety of related
issues, including the benefits and flaws of recent changes in US
foster care policy.
Those buses
parked outside parochial schools in New York City and labeled
mobile classrooms
have their own Web site, and the company would be happy to rent you
your very own "mobile instruction unit."
The
Fabulous Ruins of
Detroit is an illustrated tour of the ruins of a once-great
city, with a discussion of the reasons for its decline.
Marylaine
Block's column archive includes
channel-changing
roulette: "Football--we call it that because [] our lettuce
comes from [] Buffalo."
Don't follow this link if the people at the next
desk will think there's something wrong when you start laughing
at the non sequiturs.
Another
salvo in the argument on genetically modified foods: an article
pointing out that
non-GM
foods can also be dangerous.
These dangers have been known for a long time, of course, and
we know how to deal with them--and
GM foods also have new problems, notably the possibility of
new allergens and the effects of the "terminator" gene--but
it's worth remembering that the world has never been entirely safe.
Basement Full of Books,
created by Vonda N. McIntyre, enables authors to sell their own
out-of-print books directly to readers.
The Authors' Guild has a similar arrangement under the name Backinprint.com and is including on-demand printing as well as the authors' remaining stock of out-of-print books.
An excellent,
detailed photograph of a
dragonfly
by Raphael Carter; it's the current illustration on Raphael's
Honeyguide Web
Log.
Let's try
something a little different--instead of offering a nugget,
I'm asking for yours. Specifically, I'm looking for anything
beyond the obvious that might be useful in planning a week in Paris
in late November.
(I already have a plane ticket and a hotel room.) Send it to the
usual address:
vr@interport.net.
Not a
link, but a delightful quote: Sturgis's first law
states that "If you stare at any sentence long enough, it will
look wrong."
Reasons why
surprising
new theories published in prestigious journals are probably wrong.
Fortunately, as this piece points out, the paper that contains
these results was itself published in such a journal, and hence
is probably wrong. Paging Epimenides.
[via Arts and
Letters Daily]
With Floyd
having just passed through, it's as good a time as any to note
that, for all the destruction they cause--in fact, because of
it--even
hurricanes
have some benefits.
Not only do they seem to help maintain
species diversity, they can ameliorate some human-created problems,
like the low water levels in the Everglades.
This
culture
jamming page includes some excellent subversive images.
My favorite is the car ad. Remember, if you don't see the fnords,
they can't eat you.
Another
excellent
Astronomy
Picture of the Day,, this time a digitally enhanced composite
photo of the
solar
corona and the earthlit Moon during the recent eclipse.
Nitric oxide
makes male mice less aggressive--but without it female mice lack the
necessary aggressiveness to
defend
their infants.
Researchers were surprised by this result, after initial research
only on male mice, and I find myself wondering
how many other animal behavior studies only considered one sex of
animal.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.