Friday, March 29, 2002
Want to burn some time from 1:30 to 2:30 Eastern? Drive the live baby rhino cam during baby rhino lunch time! [broadband fun via fark]
Thursday, March 28, 2002
Odin update is new.
Who do you pay for a swan song? Salon helps us understand web radio's last stand.
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
On a clear day ... Court upholds air quality regulations.
When less is good. Study says online personal data collection is down.
It's real! Disputed Van Gogh declared genuine.
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Heavily redacted energy policy papers released.
Ever-aware of what the people want, Playboy is planning a Women of Enron feature. Did they see our February entry on our most disturbing search request?
Librarians: Don't make us thought police!
Yet another really bad thing, brought to you by your government which is, of course, brought to you by big, big corporate dollars the cagily-named Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act calls for the installation of government-mandated copy protection technology in every digital device. That means the computer you're using now, your TV and forget about your iPod. Cell phone? Smoke detector? This legislation, which grew out of the more-aptly named Security Systems & Standards Certification Act, was drawn up at the behest of entertainment industry behemoths who say they stand to lose billions to digital piracy. It is expected to have a chilling effect on hardware and software development as well as the creation and distribution of non-behemoth content.
What to do? 1. Know More. Some great stuff has been written about this scary legislation. Read:
Michael Fraase's When Elephants Dance
Dan Gilmore's Bleak Future
Wired's Coverage: Anti-Copy Bill Slams Coders and What the Hollings Bill Would Do
For the fast-read run-down, visit stoppoliceware.org.
In his own spin: the text of Sen. Earnest (Fritz) Hollings' introduction of the CBDTPA.
What to do? 2. Contact your representatives before Monday, April 8, 2002. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation's CBDTPA Alert page for all the resources you need to get started. The EFF's factsheet, Contacting Congress (and other US Policymakers) is an outstanding resource for anyone who wants to communicate anything to thier representatives in government.
Monday, March 25, 2002
It's Gumby, dammit! He's 45 today! Get his story at this cool National Public Radio site.
Sunday, March 24, 2002
Guardian: Thumbs are new fingers for GameBoy generation. The use of electronic devices has made young thumbs the more muscled and dexterous digit.
More on the what-we-don't-know front Ridge still says he won't testify.
A textbook case of the ugly American. In a really sickening story, The Washington Post reports that during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US spent millions to supply Afghan scoolchildren with textbooks full of "violent images and militant Islamic teachings." Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines. The books featured drawings of guns, bullets, and soldiers and were so persuasive that the Taliban continued to use the books in its own schools, simply scratching out the depictions of human faces prohibited by its strict fundamentaist code.
Now we're back in the schoolbook biz and the books are in reprint, and despite regulations preventing the use of U.S. tax dollars to promote religious education, the new crop of books touted all week by George and Laura still includes Islamic instruction.
Odin Update is new.
More from the Nixon Tape-o-Rama As the Nixon tapes continue to be released by the National Archives, history's rich pageant unfolds. Most recently we heard what Dick and Billy really thought about the Jews. Now, the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten explores the "Weed Screed" and reveals Nixon's "nexus between drugs, homosexuality, communism and, of course, Jews."
Also: Alexander Cockburn on Graham's insidious Viet Nam war proposal.
And: Richard Reeves on The Bard, Nixon and the Jews.
Forget me not: Eric Altman on how Bush Administration secrecy is leaving presidential historians out in the cold. And, an earlier entry notes the Bush Administration efforts to ensure that we never know what the hell went on.
Friday, March 22, 2002
Now, we really are Borg. Reports say a controversial British robotics scientist became the first true cyborg when he had his nervous system wired up to a computer in an experiment he hopes will eventually help paralyzed people.
Thursday, March 21, 2002
PIMPALA 4UHOES The Smoking Gun shows us the goods on vanity plate hijinks. [via fark]
Man killed in Wal-Mart rage incident. [via nwd]
Wednesday, March 20, 2002
A picture of a fully functional virtual keyboard.
Gross, but still interesting and maybe edible. Scientists grow fish flesh in a vat of fetal bovine serum, then they fry it up to show it looks and smells like fish. No one's tasted it yet. Hey, let's give it to astronauts. Yeah, they'll try anything.
NWD also says and we couldn't agree more "don't do your copying at OfficeRat."
Middle East Newsline reports that the Saudis are using US-made tanks against civilians. [via New World Disorder love them]
Okay. There are irresistible spiders.
12,000 year-old Antarctic ice shelf - the size of Rhode Island and 650 feet thick collapses into the sea.
Take me to the river. The Talking Heads get a happy ending at the Hall of Fame induction. See a little of it on VH1 tonight at 9p EST.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
To the marketools, you are where you live.
March 8 could have been a very different day. "Asteroid 2002 EM7 took us by surprise," said Benny Peiser, a European scientist who monitors the threat of Earth-asteroid collisions. We didn't see it coming because it came from the direction of the sun and it zipped by us with only 288,000 miles to spare.
Can we afford this anymore? The Britney Package faces the people beneath the streets of New York. Britney Underground. [via harrumph]
Monday, March 18, 2002
Saint frontrunner in the internet patron race is St. Isadore of Saville. Born in 560, Isadore is being called the creator of the first database his 20-volume Etymologies, in which he set out to catalog all the knowledge of his time. [via mempool]
Saveinternetradio.org: "America's fledgling internet radio industry continues to react in shock to the recent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel ("CARP") decision that Webcasters should pay 'performance rights' fees to record labels that are so high that they are currently more than 100% of most Webcasters' gross revenues!"
BBC: The Mutawwa'in Saudi religious police known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice prevented people from saving little girls in a school fire, saying it would be sinful to approach them since they were not wearing the abaya. The girls, who were locked inside the school to ensure full segregation of the sexes, were beaten back as they attempted to escape the blaze. Fifteen girls burned to death.
Sunday, March 17, 2002
Fortune asks the musical question: why aren't the Enronistas in jail? And offers a brief scumography of the last 80 years. [thanks, Mr. Mike!]
Odin now has his own web page. Find his latest update there.
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Make faces with this super-cool Flash-based suspect sketcher.
Polyglot me. In a kind of crazy ping pong, Lost in Translation uses clever Perl to shove phrases through a five-language, ten-step translation routine using BabelFish. Hilarity ensues. [via husband Val and some Sapient guys]
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Fans of Odin might like to keep a good thought. He's back in the hospital with weird head pain. He's been doing very well since his surgery, until Sunday when he started yelping when he moved his head in certain ways. Tomorrow morning he gets a new MRI to see what's going on inside that big melon of his. Tonight he's got a pain patch, lots of antibiotics and all our love. 
Adult stem cell studies cast doubt on previous research.
California Senate to subpoena Enron officials, including Skilling.
Bush 'plenty hot' about student visas issued to 9.11 hijackers months after the attack.
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Fight on, you Fighting Whities! Solomon Little Owl names his University of Northern Colorado intramural basketball team after the most ferocious creature ever to roam planet earth.
Radar flashlight lets cops see motion through walls. Didn't Ripley have one of these?
Newly-discovered comet will be visible to the naked eye.
Monday, March 11, 2002
The Ultimate Frequent Flier Award US Airways will send you to sub-orbital space!
Forked on the event horizon of the economy. I went to Wal-Mart yesterday. I know -- Wal-Mart on a warm, lazy California Spring Sunday is family fun land with free admission -- but I needed that cheap-chic flatware. And birdseed and Milk-Bones and a camera case and maybe a cute $7 shirt.
So I brought husband Val to the airport for his biztrip, cranked up Californication and dropped south on the 405 to The Great American Marketplace. And the place was packed. But I had a mission and no place else to be, so I screwed up my patience and waded in.
And it was as if all the nations of the world were represented. And the families of the world, with tiny newborns or teens or grandmothers in tow, browsed the small appliances, spin-tested office chairs, argued the virtues of household chemicals, tried on plastic shoes, stood tip-toe to poke the buttons of the new color TVs. And they put up a din, a big human sound in many languages.
I made the rounds, collecting my goods, landing at last at the rack of cute $7 shirts. And maybe it was because I'd reached a central location, or maybe it was a shift in my concentration, but suddenly I could clearly hear children in 5 different parts of the store screaming, "I WANT IT I WANT THIS THIS ONE MOMMY! I HAVE TO HAVE IT. GET ME THIS!"
There I was at the Event Horizon of The Economy, the infinitely dense point where paychecks become profits, and I had jacked into the sound of the great fusion engine of capitalism, where relentless advertising -- super-pressurized with fresh, clean, grasping little human brains -- yields that most precious of all wealth conversion machines: the brand-loyal consumer-citizen. And these freshly baked consumers, excited by the atmosphere of the marketplace, were literally wailing for PRODUCT!
Somewhere far from my Westminster Wal-Mart, Alan Greenspan is smiling. All those jobs in the jam-sticky fists of toddler-buyers. For a nano-second, I was scandalized. Deep inside me, the polite little southern-girl from a poor family was complaining that she was never allowed to point and demand anything at Woolworth's, back in the days of Five and Dime. Kids today.
But kids today are exactly as we grow them. We grow them into ravenous little gimmie-bots so daddy and mommy can keep their jobs and keep the money moving from one mega entity to another in an infinite and ever-expanding loop. We send the kids clear messages that it is actually patriotic to buy things, that magic, strength, cool and beauty can be bought. And blissfully ignorant of consequence, they have plenty of consumer confidence -- they are confident they WANT that plastic piece of future landfill, those compressed chicken nuggets, that box of breakfast sugar.
Somewhere Alan Greenspan is thanking his God for the children of America and the french-fry scented aisles of Wal-Mart. I picked a cute $7 shirt from the rack, and feeling strangely complicit -- though I don't have children -- I had a flush of guilt. There's no stopping now. The world economy needs them to be just as they have been crafted. Does my 401K hold Disney? I picked a second cute shirt, and decided that it was time to check out.
Saturday, March 9, 2002
Nasty Netscape "phones home" to log your search requests. Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number. [via new world disorder]
Maybe it's the season. Sometimes doing the taxes becomes spring cleaning, becomes painting the living room, becomes the biggest painting you ever worked on. Take my word for it.
It's 11:53. Do you know where your nukes are pointed? The Los Angeles Times reports on a secret policy review of the nations nuclear strategy that "puts forth chilling new contingencies for nuclear war" including the possibility for the use of nukes in an Arab-Israeli conflict, a ChinaTaiwan flare-up, or as some kind of satanic shovel for digging out hardened bunkers full of evil-doers. China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria are named in the report as ready targets for a proposed arsenal containing new tactical as well as silo-based mega-missiles.
They're not just for doomsday anymore. In his commentary: defense analyst and Times contributor William Arkin who obtained the still-classified report says:
In recent months, when Bush administration officials talked about the implications of Sept. 11 for long-term military policy, they have often focused on "homeland defense" and the need for an anti-missile shield. In truth, what has evolved since last year's terror attacks is an integrated, significantly expanded planning doctrine for nuclear wars.
Wednesday, March 6, 2002
Jack Valenti, Michael Eisner and the poison apple of Alan Turing. Here's an open letter in response to Eisner's recent congressional testimony and Valenti's idiotic (yet Washington Post published) assertions that 1) 56K modems are enough for the little people, 2) the Net is essentially a text-only experience and 3) web sites that have great content, must have stolen it. [via husband Val and shifted librarian]
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
Kung Fulicious Bruce Lee in the Ultra-interactive Kung Fu Remixer! [right offa MeFi](A billion times more fun than doing your taxes, which is what I am supposed to be doing today.) Plus, Bonus Kung Fu link of the day: Odin is Bruce's biggest rottweiler fan!
Tabletop fusion report elicits mixed reaction.
Monday, March 4, 2002
The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick. I caught Blade Runner on the SciFi channel tonight. Reminded me of this strange graphic biography. You will never wonder why he writes about identity and reality again. [via MeFi]
Sunday, March 3, 2002
Bush/Cheney Alaska drilling plan is dead. The pro-bore Rebulicans don't have the votes in the Senate. Daschle says raising federal mileage standards for automobiles would save more oil than drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could produce.
State courts Cheney's daughter with job created just for her. She takes them up on the kind offer. [via fark]
Saturday, March 2, 2002
Spacious. Collected news from The Void:
Washington Post: Beautiful! NASA reaches across 7.4 billion miles to contact Pioneer 10 on the 30th anniversary of its launch.
Merc: Mars spacecraft sniffs hidden ice. Pictures from the Jet Propulsion Labs.
CNN: Galileo probe "wakes up" after 62-mile near miss with Io.
Washington Post: Astronaut repair crew to fix Hubble, despite "clogged plumbing" in their ship.
I love to ride the FTrain from here to here to here. [via textism and Tom]
Friday, March 1, 2002
For your desktopping pleasure. Leda, painted in 1999, gets a new gig as desktop art. Also available: Green Apples and BluShoes. Click here to take one home today!
In Afghanistan, US-backed barbarian warlords rape Pashtun women and girls for revenge, demoralization and domination. [via new world disorder]
Enron antics today. You know, I can hardly stand to watch anymore.
The Smoking Gun: Enron ethics handbook.
Nando: Skilling declares he wasn't responsible, saying CEOs don't "go and close out the cash drawers" of big companies. See the interview tonight on Larry King Live, CNN 9p and 12 a EST.
LAT: A win in a private lawsuit brought by Judical Watch forces the Energy Department to release notes on Cheney's Energy Task Force. The president says he doesn't care, but the GAO can still go to hell.
New cells take hold in old brains.
Smartass Ari-Bob forced to issue an apology for claiming (twice) that the current violence in the Middle East is the fault of the Clinton Administration.
Bureaucrats in bunkers. Think an Al Queda nuclear attack will get you out of paying the taxman? Think again. Since 9.11, the "Continuity of Operations Plan," has been in effect.