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February 27, 2003
And on a slightly different
And on a slightly different note, John Barlow (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) has posted his thoughts on why Dick Cheney may be crazy like a fox, and how simulated drunkenness can help you avoid speeding Mexican bus drivers. Very insightful speculation.
Posted by John at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
“Listen Princess, I just got
“Listen Princess, I just got off the phone. Turns out Prince Charming’s horse just threw a shoe, so he’s gonna be a little late tonight. Now why don’t you stop showing everyone how miserable you are, put down that drink and come dance with me?” Bill Whittle has posted another great essay (if you missed his piece on the space shuttle Columbia, and you like this one, go back and read it too), this one on confidence, the wellspring from which our nation's long history of achievements has been driven. This one will get your blood flowing.
Posted by John at 01:16 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2003
Well, if you've been wondering
Well, if you've been wondering what the Department of Homeland Security has been up to lately, they've been busy putting together information resources for you in case of terrorist attack, and it's all right here on Ready.gov. Make a Kit! Make a Plan! Be Informed! After all, every true blue American should be able to name ten uses for duct tape without even stopping to think about it.
Posted by John at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2003
It's a oldie but a
It's a oldie but a goodie. It shows up in my Inbox from someone at least once a month, so there must be some underlying commonality and truth to the sentiments expressed in this email.
The Top 27 Things You Wish You Could Say At Work:
1. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of it.
2. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a flip.
3. How about "never"? Is "never" good for you?
4. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.
5. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.
6. Ahhh, I see the screw-up fairy has visited us again.
7. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.
8. I'm already visualising the duct tape over your mouth.
9. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
10. Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
11. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
12. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.
13. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
14. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
15. What am I? Flypaper for freaks?
16. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.
17. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.
18. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.
19. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
20. No, my powers can only be used for good.
21. I'm really easy to get along with once people learn to worship me.
22. That sounds reasonable. Time to up my medication.
23. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.
24. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
25. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.
26. Who me? I just wander from room to room.
27. My toys! My toys! I can't do this job without my toys!
Posted by John at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)
The Visual Thesaurus is an
The Visual Thesaurus is an amazing diagram of word linkages that shows how similar but different words are linked together through the thesaurus. Type in a word and click on the linked words and the nodes in the diagram that appears. Very cool.
Posted by John at 02:22 AM | Comments (0)
Reversible.org is an interesting concept,
Reversible.org is an interesting concept, but it makes my head hurt. Useful explanations on the "about" page include:
· Reversible watches its entire URL namespace for referrers, and links back to the
originating site.
· Reversible is a bit like a webring, in that sites that all think they belong to a given
category can join that category.
· Since the categories are named by its users and not imposed, Reversible is a bit like a
wiki except that while the namespace is inside Reversible, the content is distributed.
· And finally, because Reversible categories are TrackBackable, they also serve as
central pivot for TrackBack conversations. In this sense it is a bit like a newsgroup
and a bit like a thread.
OK, everybody clear on that?
Posted by John at 12:47 AM | Comments (0)
MetaFilter posted a link to
MetaFilter posted a link to www.politicalcompass.org, and has tracked the users' scores for an interesting scatterplot of all the MeFi visitors who bothered to take the test. More interesting for me, though was the fact that I linked that site here back on July 26, 2001, and my score came out strongly Libertarian, moderately right.
I just took it again after reading the thread on MeFi's sister site MetaTalk, and it came out slightly Libertarian, slightly left. So the operative question is, have they changed the questions on the test (some of them were not familiar, so that's a possibility), or has my political compass drifted in the last year and a half? Or maybe the question should be why am I creeping toward Fascism and sliding to the left? That doesn't seem right. So to speak.
On their web site, they've mapped some famous peoples' political compasses, and I align most closely with Robin Cook. By eerie coincidence, I also enjoy writing, am terrified of the lethality of genetically engineered viruses, find doctors and hospitals spooky, VHFs like Ebola and Lassa make my skin crawl, and I see eerie coincidences everywhere.
Posted by John at 12:42 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2003
The 68th Cold Spring Harbor
The 68th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium which will address The Genome of Homo Sapiens. This historic symposium, beginning May 28 and ending June 2, will celebrate both the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA as well as the expected completion of the Human Genome Project. [via an excellent article on Wired]
I was fortunate to have been taught genetics my freshman and sophomore year (27 years ago!) by none other than Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer with James Watson of the DNA double helix structure. I've had an abiding interest in the Human Genome Project and bioethics as a result. Take a minute and read the seminal paper from 1953 that started it all. It's one of the best pieces of scientific writing I've ever seen. So understated... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
From the Where Are They Now? files, Watson has been a director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for 35 years, president for the past nine years, so this event is happening on his home turf. Crick is now a director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego.
Funny this story should break a week after Dolly, the first cloned sheep, had to be put down because of a lung infection with complications. All the dire warnings in the world won't stop stupid scientists from experimenting. As this article suggets, human cloning will happen.
I put together a cloning news page if you want an easy way to watch development in the space: Cloning News.
Posted by John at 01:40 AM | Comments (0)
Random thought: it would be
Random thought: it would be interesting to chart the volume of detailed genetic encoding information specific to a particular individual's DNA that has been gathered over the last few years against progress in digital storage media. I hope it's still possible to fit yourself on a disk. I'm picturing a little side business where you send me a hair sample and I ship you a DVD with a copy of you on it for, say, $999.99. Forget cryogenics -- it's messy, it's expensive, it's cold! Three easy payments of $333.33 and we pay the shipping!!! I bet I could sell those by the boxcar-load.
Posted by John at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2003
Checking out recent visitors to
Checking out recent visitors to the Keelhauling shrine, we had a little visit from NameProtect. They tout themselves as a "digital brand asset management" company. (???) Following the link to the site I came across a disclaimer about their web-crawling robot that had visited my site. To wit:
You are most likely visiting this page because you noticed an entry in your web server log file that references this page. NPBot is the NameProtect Inc. web crawler. As a Digital Brand Asset Management company, NameProtect engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our clients.
Well, isn't that nice? It's like the government's Total Information Awareness program, but without the threat of terrorist attacks to excuse their snooping. Purely commercial snooping, that's what it is. They just kind of poke their head in, uninvited, and take a look around. Well, I'm sure they didn't find anything of interest here. This isn't the kind of place you would go if you were looking for FREE BEATLESTM MP3's, ATTACK OF THE CLONESTM VIDEOS, DISNEYWORLDTM MEMORABILIA, TOYS-R-USTM MERCHANDISE, FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGTM T-SHIRTS or BRITNEY SPEARSTM NUDE PICTURES. Gee, good luck guys, and thanks for keeping an eye out for us! I sure am glad you won't have to waste any time here!
Posted by John at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2003
Johnny Cash covers a Nine
Johnny Cash covers a Nine Inch Nails song. JC's been red-hot since his 1994 comeback with the solo acoustic American Recordings CD. He's covered rock/pop songwriters like Louden Wainwright, Nick Lowe, Tom Petty, and U2 [sidebar: Bono of U2 still has the best quote on Johnny Cash I've heard, from his interview in Rolling Stone magazine: "Big John sings like the thief who was crucified beside Christ, whose humble entreaties had Jesus promising that night he would see paradise"], but in his latest release "American Recordings IV", he's moved into a more alternative vein, with covers of Sting and Depeche Mode in addition to the Nail's "Hurt".
Every album in his AR series (AR, Unchained, AR III and AR IV) has been sparingly produced by Rick Rubin (yes, the same RR who produced The Beastie Boys), bringing Cash's deep, gravelly voice to the forefront and letting him do what he does best, tell stories. At age 70, facing a degenerative illness (autonomic neuropathy), the Man in Black is singing "I Won't Back Down". You've got to admire that. [Johnny Cash trivia answer: He is the only person to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.]
Posted by John at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
France versus world. Chirac on
France versus world. Chirac on the ropes. The scene: The grand European Council dining room. The cast, 15 European leaders. Jacques Chirac stands up to defend the French position, and finds himself all alone. I like articles like this that give you a little of the interpersonal flavor of what is unfolding, something other than the carefully worded diplomatic statements optimized for broadcast soundbite digestibility.
And lines like this are pure gold: Tony Blair … told them bluntly: "There is no intelligence agency of any government around this table that does not know that the government of Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." For those of us who are frustrated with the EU and the UN as they execute their delicate little political dances, it's reassuring to know that behind the scenes there's some recognition of the scope of the real problem.
Meanwhile, it looks like the war effort is progressing well in the psych ops dept. Fearing a coup attempt, Saddam has had to place his defense minister under house arrrest. Looks like somebody's been reading those leaflets we've been dropping.
Posted by John at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
How Good a Manager Are
How Good a Manager Are You? This little Flash game requires you to keep your production and sales in balance, properly equip your staff with IT infrastructure and make sure the manager/employee ratio is keeping everybody productive, all while watching the bottom line. This is similar to Lemonade Stand, (a "Best Of" games page listing, in that it is an elapsed-time game where you make constant tweaks and adjustments along the way. You have five years to build an empire in this game.) My first effort crashed and burned after three years when a recession hit, 180 people out of work in a classic dot-com meltdown. I played it a little more conservatively the second time, and wound up after five years with 237 emplyees and £2,249,726 in the bank. Sounds real enough to me.... (BTW, as of today it takes £5,898,803 to get on the "top 100" high scores list - the top players got over £17M.)
Update 2/18/03: Keelhauling is currently ranked #89 on the all time high scores list with £6,120,314! I got yer management right here, bub.
Posted by John at 02:50 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2003
Google bought Pyra Labs, commencing
Google bought Pyra Labs, commencing the evolution / conversion of two of the most exciting techno-tools of the Internet. Keelhauling.com is powered by Pyra's Blogger software, and I'm excited at the prospect of seeing the typical Google innovation impetus behind it. Not to mention the fact that Blogger, while I have nothing but good things to say about the service, has had its share of problems. Mostly, atypically, a result of its own astonishingly rapid success. Blogger currently is the front-end for over a million weblogs, with over 90,000,000 posts.
While there's clearly some risk -- users of LiveJournal and RadioLand and Movable Type are probably (rightly) concerned about competitive positioning if Google actively starts integrating some of its other technologies (as they did when they bought DejaNews, an acquisition which has worked quite well) -- there's also tremendous opportunity in data-mining all that non-corporate news and opinion, in organizing it for targeted consumption. Much discussion ensues.... MetaFilter thread here. Slashdot thread here.
Posted by John at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2003
Remember that article posted on
Remember that article posted on Feb. 3 about how Google is changing our lives, and how anyone can Google you and find out about your past, or perhaps -- as in the case of the scorned woman who built a web site featuring her ex-boyfriend -- what others are saying about you? Well, where there's a need, there ought to be a service, and there is! Googlert (not affiliated with Google) is an experimental free service that keeps track of YOU on the Internet. It performs daily scans of your name, and emails you when new information shows up. Sort of like one of those credit-monitoring services for your online self.
Posted by John at 01:23 AM | Comments (0)
You go to the link
You go to the link and you think the site is down, because it looks like the standard "404" page, then you notice the title, "These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed". Some countries require 128 thousand troops to liberate them. Click the Panic menu and then click About US foreign policy to determine what regime they will install.
Posted by John at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)
Here's some interesting perspective on
Here's some interesting perspective on Google as Big Brother. Did you know they record all your search requests? And keep them indefinitely? And are actively marketing their aggregated information to the FBI, CIA, NSA? Shades of Robot Exclusion Protocol!
Posted by John at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)
Afghani-who? Bush's budget approves total
Afghani-who? Bush's budget approves total funding for rebuilding Afghanistan of $0.00. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Despite rhetoric about putting together a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, they just, um, forgot. "Oops", says the administration, we promise we won't do it again.
Posted by John at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2003
Vito Fossella (R-NY) writing for
Vito Fossella (R-NY) writing for the Washington Times on what's wrong with the United Nations. From Libya being appointed to head the Conference on Human Rights (!) to Iraq assuming the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament (!!), to the coalition of France, Germany and Belgium refusing to back a resolution to defend Turkey, a staunch NATO ally whose country has served as the staging ground for every recent middle eastern initiative, it's a mess. And boy, wouldn't all that downtown waterfront real estate be useful with the twin towers gone?
Posted by John at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2003
X-Ray glasses are one step
X-Ray glasses are one step closer to reality. They still can't seem to get my flying car off the ground, but at least some of my dreams of youth are coming true. Open up the back cover of any comic book in the 1960's or 70's, and you would find that entire page filled with tiny little squares of ads from the Johnson Smith company (selling novelty items since 1914!). They're still in business, BTW, operating as "Things You Never Knew Existed" out of Bradenton, Florida. I still get their catalogs. Their whoopee cushions, pepper chewing gum, joy buzzers, sea monkeys and various magic tricks were the stuff of dreams as a kid. I actually ordered a few things from them and they were pure junk, but it was all about the anticipation, waiting each and every single day for the mail to arrive.
Nowadays, of course, kids are too sophisticated to fall for that kind of false advertising. Caveat emptor indeed.
Posted by John at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
I have to post Crab
I have to post Crab vs. Pipe just to log the link to this short movie, as it's been sent to me three times today. Over a mile underwater, a robotic arm is wielding a saw which is cutting into a pipe. The external pressure is 1.3 tons per square inch, inside the pipe is near vacuum. A crab wanders by just as the 10mm-wide saw blade breaks through the pipe. The crab is introduced to the concept of a pressure gradient.
Posted by John at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
If you took a guess
If you took a guess at the "Brand of the Year", I bet you'd miss it. Not Coca-Cola or Starbucks, Apple or Nike. No, this year it's Google. A company that does no advertising!
Posted by John at 07:23 PM | Comments (0)
Stereotypes. If you don't have
Stereotypes. If you don't have enough already in your repertoire, here's a tool that lets you create some new ones. Click around on the photos.
Posted by John at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)
On the new, free, value-added
On the new, free, value-added services front, MusicBrainz is worth a mention. This is the newer, smarter version of the old CD Index. It provides information about your digital music - track title, time, album, date and artist, to facilitate populating your MP3 entries with information. The nifty thing about it is that it recognizes songs (in multiple formats, at any bitrate) by the sound patterns of the songs and looks them up automatically. This virtually ensures correct information -- or at least association of the data with the correct song.
Data quality is ensured as this is an "information commons" -- the users create the content, and any changes to the database are subject to peer review. This ought to result in much higher quality than Gracenote's CDDB service, which is notoriously spotty and error-prone.
Posted by John at 01:54 AM | Comments (0)
Welcome to Free World Dialup
Welcome to Free World Dialup (FWD)! Come Join The Free WorldTM The International Telecommunications Union has allocated an entire country-code to Internet VoIP services, creating a virtual, global Internet "country." Pulver.com has already announced a service that uses the Internet country-code for VoIP numbers, so that calls from and to Internetland are not considered long-distance. [via BoingBoing]
For those of you who aren't clear on the implications, that means free phone service, worldwide, any time. I'm already registered. You can use certain hardware based solutions (that plug into your existing broadband connection and a telephone) or software-based phones that reside on your PC. I like the "always on" nature of a dedicated device like an actual telephone, but I'm happy to test it out with a softphone. Time to go compare all the compatible freeware!!
Posted by John at 01:43 AM | Comments (0)
Aye, lass, if it's a
Aye, lass, if it's a wee bit o' the Scottish brogue you're after, ya wouldn't be the first. Scottish accents are reported here as the most appealing, but I have to point out two factors about this interesting little factoid. (1) It's reported on Scotsman.com (no conflict of interest there, eh?), and (2) The Scots invented golf and called it a game; they think music is what comes out of a bagpipe. Caveat emptor.
Posted by John at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2003
Nooooooo! The freaky Total Information
Nooooooo! The freaky Total Information Awareness logo is now showing up on merchandise! The TIA lunchbox is pretty cool, but the thong is just weird, like they are watching or something.
Posted by John at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)
The Flash Mind Reader is
The Flash Mind Reader is pretty fun. I figured it out in about five seconds, but it's still fun to trip people up with it.
Posted by John at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)
13.7 Billion Years Old. In
13.7 Billion Years Old. In case anyone asks, that's the confirmed age of our universe, plus or minus an astoundingly low 1%. Today, NASA scientists released a cosmic photo capturing the afterglow of the Big Bang -- the cosmic microwave background -- taken by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) over the past twelve months. [via Metafilter]
The contents of the Universe include 4% atoms (ordinary matter), 23% of an unknown type of dark matter, and 73% of a mysterious dark energy. The new measurements even shed light on the nature of the dark energy, which acts as a sort of an anti-gravity. "These numbers represent a milestone in how we view our Universe," said Dr. Anne Kinney, NASA director for astronomy and physics. "This is a true turning point for cosmology."
Wow.
Posted by John at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)
''The quiet that envelops space
''The quiet that envelops space makes the beauty even more powerful. And I only hope that the quiet can one day spread to my country.'' - Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who died on the Columbia.
Posted by John at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
We were talking about digitizing
We were talking about digitizing music collections yesterday and Richard pointed me at Pandora, a company that is focused on building digital music servers. These are not quite the same thing as home theatre PCs (HTPCs), as the focus is exclusively on storage. Lots of storage. Multiple terabyte storage. PCs that run silently, have RAID arrays of hot-swappable disks, and are housed in boxes with extra-powerful fans and dual power supplies. Very cool, and exactly what I'm looking for, although a bit of overkill for where I am right now in the process. Apparently the guys who run the company made a killing in Netscape and aren't out to make a lot of money on this venture (they tout their unbeatable low prices), but the scope of the "solutions" they've put together is large enough to make them quite expensive. Still, I got a lot of good ideas from their site.
Posted by John at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2003
John Kohnen of boat-links.com has
John Kohnen of boat-links.com has extended his excellent Nautical and Boatbuilding page to include The Mother of All Maritime Links, a directory of boating resources that is second to none. It's like having an online library of all things nautical!
Posted by John at 10:49 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2003
Ad-Aware 6 is released. Go
Ad-Aware 6 is released. Go get it!
Posted by John at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
"And these children that you
that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware
of what they're going through..."
- David Bowie
In fact, if you ask them, they'll tell you. And they'll be right. The stereotypes of the 80's have become the archetypes of the 00's.
Posted by John at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2003
If you were going to
If you were going to design a clock that would let you keep track of time over a 10,000 year period, what would it look like? Put your thinking cap on and expand your temporal horizons.
This bad boy looks pretty impressive, but I'm not sure Julie's going to let me put it in the foyer. It's 9 feet tall. Plus there's the whole issue of trying to interpret the clock face. We'd have to learn to tell time all over again. Check out the pictures of the prototype, which is on display at the Science Museum in London. If you're a gadget-lover, this will overload all your systems.
Posted by John at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)
There's only one Jay Mack
There's only one Jay Mack in Scotland, so obviously he's the guilty motorist being ticketed for speeding. Right? [via Paxtonland] If this doesn't give you a chuckle, go have your funnybone examined.
Posted by John at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)
From the milky way down
From the milky way down to the quark, increasing the zoom by powers of ten each time.
Posted by John at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)
Just a reminder, the annual
Just a reminder, the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest symbolic deadline is approaching. This contest of bad fiction writing sposored by San Jose State University challenges you to come up with the worst opening line of a novel you can. They're incredibly bad, and many -- maybe even most -- are hilarious. What's a symbolic deadline, you ask? From the website: "The symbolic deadline is April 15 (a date Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories), but we accept entries right up until we announce the final results, i.e., late June."
Posted by John at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2003
John Snyder, president or Artist
John Snyder, president or Artist House Records, says Embrace File-Sharing or Die to the music industry. In light of the 3 billion downloads in November 2002, a confrontation with reality is in order. Snyder mainly recaps the arguments you've heard here and elsewhere, but he does it well, and coming from a record company executive it shines like a beacon of reason in the darkness.
Posted by John at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)
It's Jack Chick (of the
It's Jack Chick (of the Chick tracts fame) versus The Pope, in a knock-down, drag-out winner-take-all occult-o-rama! What do you think? Harry Potter, a valuable educational series of books that helps teach children how to distinguish between good and evil, or a how-to manual for witchcraft and other occult practices that lures children into eternal condemnation? Rest assured, whichever side you're on, you can find plenty of people to back you up!
Posted by John at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)
After the destruction of the
After the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia and the loss of seven astronauts Saturday morning, it didn't take long for the hate-mongers, luddites, nutballs, armchair astronauts and conspiracy theorists to start coming out of the woodwork.
Posted by John at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
Interesting article on how Google
Interesting article on how Google is changing our lives, for better and - occasionally - for worse. An unanticipated effect of Google's comprehensive, rapid and accurate record-keeping is that Google changed our concept of time. It has helped make our past - or oddly refracted shards of it - present and permanent. All your sins remembered. And digitally archived, accessible in 1/10th of a second.
Posted by John at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
