link-o-week
Some neato pictures of Student Projects in High-Speed Photography. Bullet going through a banana, shape of a tennis ball as it's being whacked, that kind of thing.
News/discussion boards on the Web are all over the place. They range from brilliant to banal, covering topics from one person's life to the future of computing. But lately I've enjoyed Plastic for its articles on war and peace, journalism, media, and society. Plus the regular (often amusing) commentators are few enough to keep track of.
Do you know a kid who learns "asynchronously"? Does your four-year-old pester you to play chess with her? Are you being left in the dust by your teenager's math skills or baffled by the insightful questions of a toddler? Intellectually gifted children are just like others in many ways, but at the same time completely different in ways you might not expect. A Pennsylvania mother named Carolyn has gathered war stories, book reviews, studies, essays, analysis, and even gift lists at her Hoagies' Gifted site.
I shouldn't be surprised that someone put together a website on noise pollution. I'm glad they did; probably the worst thing about living here on 34th and Archwood is putting up with isolated creeps--the ones who treat everyone else's living space as their own sound chamber. It's nice to have a resource for news updates, legal issues, and general-purpose activism tips.
I especially liked their gathering of noise ordinances around the US, including Cleveland's. A handy reference, much appreciated.
To make up for missing last week, here's the story of a kid in Tampa Bay whose treehouse is causing a national stir. I'm a big sap. Anything about kids with cancer pushes my sympathy button. What kind of deed restriction limits treehouses, anyway? (Update, Tuesday night: Just heard they worked something out and Brage keeps his treehouse. Cool.)
The last weekly link of 1999 is Jim Lilko's Youngstown Corruption site. Although Ken Fribush will try to trump these stories with something more extreme out of Miami, you have to give Youngstown some credit for its crookedness-to-population ratio. Consume and enjoy.
Yes, I know I'm behind. Blame Y2K.
This week we have the results of a study of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System. This was set up around 1992 as part of a school-funding lawsuit in that state (alert: relevance to Ohioans!) to help determine what types of assistance were really needed in the lesser-funded districts. The not-so-surprising results: teachers are important, middle school is a dive no matter where you go, and minority kids really can learn. The very surprising result: class size is not important.
Hmmm. Pretty interesting stuff, empirical as far as it goes, and directly relevant to what we're doing in Cleveland these days.
Oh dear. It turns out that Elmer's Glue is not Y2K compliant. What will I tell the kids?
Is your life run by Dead White European Males? Want to find some? Malcolm Rutherford, a (living) economist in Canada, has a collection of grave sites of dead economists. Smith, Marx, Keynes... now he has Henry George too.
Well, this is different. Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, a science-fiction author in her own right, writes about her relationship with Jim ("yes," she says, "that Jim"), and music, and paganism, and, well, a FAQ that talks a lot about Jim. Even if you're like me, and never could get interested in The Doors, you'll find the stories interesting.
This site was referred to me because of PKM's essay on what constitutes boasting over intelligence. It's actually not among the better elements of the FAQ though.
I'd like to add that the site is full of text and works reasonably well with Lynx; I'm told that there are a lot of inline images but you can use the site just as well without them. In that respect: good design.
Deafness is not just a disability. It's become a culture with its own languages, history, traditions, and sense of humor. Deaf World Web has everything from a sign language dictionary (incidentally the best use I've ever seen for animated .GIF files) and Q&A section to a long collection of "funniest Deaf story" responses. Are knock-knock jokes funny? Can you sign and drive at the same time? Why do you have to be careful signing "I'm hungry"? What is the fuss over those new cochlear implants? It's all there.
Enjoy this entertaining post from the somewhat offbeat alt.callahans newsgroup:
One of the other people at the station was a girl who looked to be about sixteen years old or so and was eight or nine months pregnant. She had just finished pumping her gas and was heading toward the building to pay for it when a middle aged woman from one of the other cars spotted her. The lady marched up to the girl and began to loudly condemn her...
Read it all for yourself. Wish I'd been there.
Enjoy math puzzles from Ed Pegg.
Link of the Week returns with a site called Hack the Planet from Wesley Felter, a guy in Austin who explains it this way:
When I tell you that I want to Hack the Planet, I do not mean merely the physical geography of earth. I want to hack technology. I want to hack the media. I want to hack the economy. I want to hack society. You name it, I want to hack it.
What's a hack? Who hacks? The list is long, but it includes anyone who creatively aims to change things for the better. Wesley Felter updates the site every day. It's fun, it loads quickly, and you learn things. Check it out; it only takes a minute to get immersed.
This house thing has been just too tiring. I haven't felt like updating a link-of-the-week for, well, weeks now. Real soon now, though.
John McCarthy, a computer science professor at Stanford since before I was born (he originated the Lisp programming language!) has just a whole bunch of interesting stuff on his site. How can he not? In any case, the thing that got my attention this week was his 1970s-era essay on the computer-controlled cars.
Make sure you follow the upward links to his overview of human control of the future.
I'm still getting over the idea that there was such a thing as a CS professorship back in 1962. Even at Stanford.
I found references to QuackWatch on a health-related mailing list I read daily. I find its advice to be rather extreme in the opposite direction from that of the diet artifacts and miracle cures it attacks; QW's authors pooh-pooh any connection between diet and disease, for example, which strikes me as foolhardy and slackminded. But its critiques of the range of quack remedies, from wonder vitamins to shark cartilage, are great. There's a fairly complete section on questionable cancer therapies, a favorite topic here.
Speaking of cancer therapies, you could also do worse than to check up on my little e-friend who is working on her bone marrow transplant right now. She has a rare condition called Aplastic Anemia, which really isn't a kind of cancer but is treated similarly in some ways. This kid has been living on blood transfusions for a year and a half.
Anyway, Katy's a sweetie and her mom is pretty entertaining. I don't usually link to Geocities or graphics-heavy sites because of the annoyance factor, but I think this one merited an exception.
20 September 1999 update: Katy's finally home from the transplant after more than three months. She's doing well and actually feels like eating now.
You might have read it in one of those "amazing facts" books. You might have been told by your science teacher in eighth grade. Maybe it was on a talk show.
It's still not true. Glass is a solid, not a liquid. And glass does not flow like a liquid either. Thanks to Florin Neumann for the article.
I took a break from the keyboard last week. You should too. Check out Brad Appleton's detailed document on stretching for advice on prevention of repetitive-stress disorders and general musculoskeletal health.
A designer in the Netherlands named J.H.Crawford has obviously given much thought to how Carfree Cities would work. He's determined that private automobiles have destroyed much of what is good about cities and presents a way that large urban areas could be planned in a way that does not require car use at all.
The urban automobile can only be supplanted if a better alternative is available. What would happen if we designed a city to work without any cars? Would anyone want to live in such a city? Does it make social, economic, and esthetic sense? Is it possible to be free of the automobile while keeping the rapid and convenient mobility it once offered?
It ties in nicely to a recent Cleveland Pages topic where I address how city design in the United States is influenced by racism.
You can always count on Link of the Week to be current and topical. Tune into the banned station Radio B92, which still "broadcasts" daily with continuous updates on the web. They're the best ongoing source of news on current events in Kosovo, even though they admit that their own correspondents are now unable to report directly. You might need to go through a few menus or search the recent "archives" for less current information.
Friday night update: The Serb-controlled government of Yugoslavia has shut down the Internet operations of B92. Their latest articles are still on the website, which happens to be safely hosted in the Netherlands, but there will be no updates for the time being. Still, check out the site. It's fascinating.
A deconstruction of nonsense surrounding popular "multi-level marketing" opportunities is provided by the Cagey Consumer website. Too bad it's on GeoCities, with those annoying little ads and trailers--but other than that, the site is full of content and easily navigated. Fun too!
For BOFHs, or those who aspire to BOFHood, see the Excuse of the Day website at a British magazine called Network Week.
What's a BOFH? It's a family page; you'll have to follow the link to find out.
Have you seen the infamous "Nancy Markle" email chain letter about the supposed dangers of aspartame? If so, check out an actual third-party debunking of the scaremail.
This week we look at urban ecology with an attitude, at one of those how-did-I-miss-this-before sites. A thing called Living Room has periodically updated essays on city life, the human relationship to the environment, and sustainable living practices of all kinds. My favorite article there is, naturally, How the Suburbs Rob the Cities, starting with this gem:
If you live in the city, right now there's a soccer mom holding the cold metal tailpipe of her minivan to your head. And she's going to fire it up! What does she want? To start with, she wants your money--and she wants it now. But not only that, she wants your mental and physical health, your children's safety, and your grandchildren's future. She needs it all to help support her habit. And the cops are on her side, and so is the mayor, and so is the governor. One false move, and you're history, pal. What do you do now? Surrender? Struggle? Or reason with her?
I have to laugh and blush too at this. Even though we live right off big bad West 25th Street, we, um, have a minivan. A close second, reminding me of my days as "Editor of the People's Art" at the Hartford Courant (yeah, I was the kid who scrubbed graffiti off the vending machines, and I made the title up myself), was this essay on graffiti as a social need. The whole Living Room site is Lynx-friendly except for a very few non-inlined images, which would work okay anyway with the right viewer add-in. The site is cleanly designed and extremely simple to navigate. High recommended.
The Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles is a longstanding (well, it has parts with a 1996 copyright date) repository of interesting puzzles and essays about math. Recommended for mathophiles and mathophobes.
Sigh.
It's another cluelessly gushing mass-media article about the Internet. This time, the mother of Brittany Williams, a Girl Scout in the Fort Worth area, had this great idea to sell Girl Scout cookies via "spam"--mass emailing of unsolicited advertisements.
Not only is spam unviable as a long-term business model (as people just stop reading their email while it fills with junk), it's a classic case of what economists call the "tragedy of the commons." Just a few people taking unfair advantage of an apparently "free" resource can ruin it for everyone.
"As you can easily imagine, calculating pi to a billion and more and more digits is completely senseles." Good grief, these people even have an annual Pi Day celebration--on the 14th of March, no less. (Get it? 3/14?)
You can't join the club as a full member unless you can recite the first hundred digits of Pi from memory, "with respect, fluency, and smoothness."
Ohio political activists and junkies will love the updated Ohio state legislature website. From here you can track news-of-the-day, bills by number, bills by sponsor, bills by keyword... hey, this can be fun. I wish the city of Cleveland would get its act together and do something like this for the Council.
Sorry, no new link this week.
Geoffrey Bennett of Australia shares his story of how he got Toshiba to refund the cost of Windows 95 that was pre-installed on his new laptop. He had read the license agreement carefully and found that he was legally entitled to get his money back, for the OS only, since he was not willing to use it. (Of course he wanted to run Linux instead.) It's interesting legal reading, and a nice example of a well-written complaint letter.
Variations on standard chess for people who have the basic game all figured out. I think I'll try these out with Adele next time we hit the coffeehouse. My favorite so far? Cruise Pawns --it lets you use your pawns like missiles.
Enjoy Patrick Combs's $95,000 Adventure--it's the true story of how he cashed one of those "fake" advertising checks you get in the junk mail all the time. The outfit sending these checks out didn't realize that what they'd been mailing were indeed legally negotiable instruments. You'll have to read through to the end to find out what happened though.
Now since that's an old story (it happened in 1995 and was all over the mass media at the time), I'll give you as a bonus another Windows horror story from Paul Somerson at PC Computing. Bottom line, people want reliable computers before they want fancy ones.
Eric Raymond, one of the more visible personalities in the Open Source Software movement, made up this document on the conspiracy of Unix manglers named Eric who have moustaches. Good clean fun here.
Make sure you check out the other documents on Eric's site. Most are pretty interesting, and all are well written.
Yes, it's late; and no, it's not Christmas-related at all, but this just came through on the newsgroups. Kirrily Robert, a regular over on comp.infosystems.www.site-design, put together a nice introductory document for non-technical people who want to hire a Web person. The article is short, interesting, competently done, and just pretty useful overall. Definitely recommended for the target audience.
Ever wonder what makes a Furby go? Some sicko did an autopsy on a Furby to find out. Good grief, don't let my boys see this. They'll be scarred for life.
Jakob Nielsen's biweekly column appears on useit.com. If you design Web pages for a living, or even if you just spend a lot of time working on the Internet, this is a timely and useful resource. Make sure you check out the links near the top of the page including "Why frames suck" and "How people read on the Web."
Requiem is definitely not the feel-good site of the week, but I had to give you something to balance all the recent cutesy and happy-talk Links of the Week. I'm all for reality.
Tabatha Holtz introduces her site this way:
I was tired of seeing big business with tons-o-bucks dominating the web, thus I began "this time it's PERSONAL". Here I'll feature people's personal sites and personal sites only! The criteria of getting on this site is to be creative with your own home site, not just have tons of links to other people's sites.
It's not updated super-frequently, but what's there is usually pretty interesting. Try it out at http://tabatha.hasc.com/personal.html.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid she's still missing the point of Cascading Style Sheets. "These pages will only look good using Netscape 4.0 and higher and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0." No, no, no. If you use CSS the right way it won't matter what browser other people use.
Quibbling aside, I enjoy coming back again and again to see what other people have done with their personal pages. Corporate sites get boring quickly.
This is old news to some, but even non-hackers who love irony will enjoy the story of how the volume of paperwork involved with Bill Gates's new house forced the town of Medina, Washington to adopt a Linux-based document management system. The consultant who supplied the system found that the Linux-based system cost one tenth of a similarly capable Windows NT system.
I've been having intermittent problems with the server the last couple of days. Please be patient while I replace or repair the hard drive.
This week's link is not just for Linux nerds. It's the now-famous Halloween Memos that were recently leaked from Microsoft. These memos, and the commentaries on them, explain Microsoft's perspective on the powerful Open Source software movement. Two of Bill Gates's highest-up advisors (among his executive committee of eight) knew about these documents and gave feedback on them, and Microsoft has acknowledged their authenticity. So the company doesn't have any crazy Oliver North excuse to the effect that the higher-ups didn't know what the underlings were up to.
Content-wise, the memos have something to offer everyone. For people who have been watching Redmond for years and are already alarmed at the company's marketing tactics, here's your "smoking gun." The first memo even describes the germ of a plan to use patents and restrictive licensing in a way that supposedly will make it impossible for Linux to evolve. (Of course that's based on the premise that all the good ideas are already patented, which shows you something about Microsoft's approach to innovation.)
If you're new to Microsoft-watching, look for the signs that elements there want to eliminate open-source alternatives by using "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." You'll also see an explanation of their tactic of "embrace and extend" as applied to open protocols; the idea is to "embrace" something universal, such as the Web metaphor and its implementation in HTML, and then to "extend" it to something that they can control, such as the FrontPage server product.
I wouldn't go so far as to call this stuff "scary," because it really just confirms what we knew all along. Microsoft makes software much more complicated than necessary, just to maintain and extend its market share.
Check out the art of Howard Finster. A regular poster to one of my favorite parent-type mailing list describes meeting Howard this way:
Well, there he was, on the porch, playing his banjo for a Polish woman, her mother and her disgruntled American husband, who was not a fan.
I approached the artist, and explained why we'd come, that it was for my son, a big fan, to meet him. Howard called to him, scooted over on his porch swing, to make room, and handed him the guitar, commanding that he play. "Oh, no, I can't play any instruments", my son protested, "I'm just here to talk about your art".
Nothing doing. Howard Finster sat with him and taught him to play, and told him to get a banjo so he could learn his multiplication tables, and showed him how. After the first few minutes he looked up at me, and said "Ma'am, your boy's got some real brilliance." (he did not mean musically!) He said this very earnestly; not as a complement, more urgently than that.
It kills me how noone in schools can see these children, yet five minutes into a conversation with a stranger, and there you have it. Perhaps Finster recognized some of himself in my son's spirit. Certainly S. had recognized him, in his work. They seem to think alike, and both of them get visions in clouds. They see people as angels. Although their religious views are different, their spiritual ones apparently are the same. Many of Howards relatives were hanging around, and they too had this extraordinary kindness, and intelligence, though I don't think any of the ones I met have had more than a rudimentary education.
Well, they got on like a house afire. Somehow S. had intuitively known that this was someone who thinks just like him. They were all over the place, on a hundred different subjects, (except art, which Howard refused to discuss). His Paradise Gardens too, were a jumble of bicycle parts and earnest quotes a la Finster, and by the time we left I felt like I was seeing my own boy in 70 years. Same cluttered mind, same cluttered landscape. Same points of view, same concerns. If you are familiar with Howard Finster's work, you know he is as likely to do paintings of Elvis or Einstein, both of whom he admired (S, also has some weird Elvis attraction).
Whenever I hear someone talking about peers, as if it is an age thing, I think "you haven't a clue what you're talking about." Boy, if this wasn't example A for peer connection. A strange little boy just starting to find his way in the world, and a famous old man. Noone would think to put them together, yet there they are, playing like kindred spirits, the one breathing life, and the other passing wisdom, but mostly just the two connecting.
When I follow my child's lead, I end up in awe of him, every time. How did he know, to pick this man as his hero?
Howard Finster: he's your classic folk artist, but that doesn't keep him from having a website... check him out.
Linux Weekly News is another well-written net periodical covering the world of open-source software. I particularly like their current issue's analysis of Oracle's motivations for doing the Linux port of their high-end Unix database servers.
Are you a geek, or a nerd? Are they the same thing or what? Take pride in your geek identity at NerdHerd. [broken link] Put up by junior scientists fed up with their own experiences of anti-nerd prejudice, NerdHerd has sections on "Fight geek oppression!!!" and "being labeled a gifted kid and living to tell about it."
Since I skipped last week (something to do with overwork and running out of coffee), here's another one: The Microsoft Monitor. The NetAction organization has been updating the site every few weeks or so for a year and a half now. It's about what you might expect from the title and the hip little dollar sign, but it's particularly well researched and (at least based on my own reading) breaks significant new journalistic ground with original analysis and some pretty sharp news reporting. Most recently, you'll find "Microsoft Goes to College: The Education Software Market and Microsoft's Expanding Monopoly," exploring the strategies Microsoft is using to get its software hooks into the maximum number of college students possible.
20 September 1999 Update: The Microsoft Monitor is still there but the volunteers maintaining it have moved on to other priorities as of July 1999.
From Toronto, we have a critique of plans to host the Olympics there. It's familiar reading to fans of the Cleveland Pages: overblown promises, deficit financing, sports fetishes, unrealistic economic impact figures... this foolishness happens on both sides of the border.
Dude named Trent Fisher at Portland State University has a fair number of interesting links but this one caught my eye. I liked the simplicity and common sense of the career advice he's passing on. I think it's time to print this out and stick it on a few cubicle walls.
Most people have heard the saying, "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." For years I've followed that with, "...and a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested."
A very interesting fellow named Keith Lynch served 19 months in Virginia state penal institutions for two burglaries he did not commit. (While I don't have firsthand knowledge of the events, his explanation of how this came to be is rather convincing. I believe it.)
Lynch's story has a tidy summary but I urge you to read the "long" version. Lynch is an honest and very intelligent man. But youth and inexperience, lack of money for a decent private attorney (leading to a horribly ineffective public defender), a poor choice of roommates, and an unfavorable police situation combined to pressure him into a plea bargain.
I found Lynch's descriptions of prison life and the criminal justice processes fascinating. Do make sure you read it all.
Field of Schemes is subtitled How the Great Stadium Swindle turns public money into private profit. It's a book, and also a website, and as it turns out you can buy the book at the website. The book is reviewed by the Progress Report; it's all about the drain on public funds for the dubious economic advantage of hosting professional sports teams.
The site is worth seeing on its own, though, as it is updated about every week with news, conversation, and a list of cities currently undergoing pressure to fund new sports venue projects.
Field of Schemes is a must-visit for anyone who pays taxes to a sports team. These days, that's about half the population of North America.
We've never repeated a Link of the Week before, so you know this must be special. I found the funniest hacker/phreak story at John Draper's site. Draper claims he discovered an (obviously unpublished) 800 number at the US Central Intelligence Agency in Washington and used it to reach waaaaaaaaay out. Read about the White House Toilet Paper Crisis!
For something a bit more serious, find out about yet another serious security flaw in Windows NT. Honestly, why on Earth do people run this stuff on production servers? You would think stability and security count for something.
Inflight Safety by a British Airways flight attendant named Anna is a quick and painless summary of important information for airline passengers. It will take about ten minutes to read before your next flight. Do it.
Diana M. Fessler, a state school board member from New Carlisle, Ohio, offers documents and links about the federal School-to-Work program, which is tied in somehow to the controversial Goals 2000 education initiative. Fessler objects to "School-to-Work" on the grounds that it is driven primarily by Washington instead of local needs, and that it attempts to turn public education into a mere apprenticeship program for the labor needs of business.
For the first time, Link of the Week is suggested by the Plain Dealer, actually Kevin O'Brien's column. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, eh?
The College Board has a Question of the Day from the SAT college admissions test. Fun!
Bad Astronomy debunks myths and misinformation about the bigger world we live in. Fella at the Goddard Space Flight Center put the page together, and comments, "As television and movies have become better and better at shaping our views of the world, it is becoming more and more important that we understand what it means to be scientific."
If you're in a hurry, but still want to learn something, try the Bite-sized Astronomy feature there.
As a bonus, and in keeping with this week's scientific theme, consider the views of John D. Stone on the ideal of an excellent liberal-arts college. My alma mater approaches that ideal in many but not all ways.
City of the Silent is a collection of witty, inspiring, or just weird gravestone markings. (The site's author really needs to think about how hard it is to read without graphics though, all those paragraphs run together with no <p> tags.) Here's one favorite:
Harry Edsel Smith Albany New York Born 1903 Died 1942 Looked up the elevator shaft to see if the car was on the way down. It was.
Guy who called himself NO NUKES, born Stephen Howard Willard, died last December. No Nukes had a brain tumor that his friends blamed on exposure to radioactive dust in the immediate area of the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada where he protested from time to time.
No Nukes grew up in my "original" hometown of Wethersfield, Connecticut; we just missed each other in high school as he graduated three years ahead of me. My sister knew most of the Willards, who are one of the Very Old Yankee Families there, but Steve was not particularly close to us at the time.
His tumor was diagnosed just three weeks before Adele's leukemia. Imagine the war stories the two of them could have traded. I missed knowing such an intense personality by that much.
Funny the way relationships and coincidences come and go like that.
Showtime at the Apollo is a terrific late-night variety show (broadcast in Cleveland on WKYC Channel 3 at 1:00 a.m. on Sundays) and not a bad website either. The show offers an enjoyable look at African-American popular culture from slam poetry and Hip-Hop, through Gospel and Motown, dance and comedy, to Reggae and Funk. The website has a message board where viewers can comment on the previous week's Amateur Night acts. There's also a periodic "Apollo Legends" feature that illuminates the career of a performer or group who first made it big at this landmark theatre in Harlem.
The free software movement was energized recently by the release of Netscape's web browser source code. Eric Raymond's essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is credited for helping motivate Netscape's decision to make this historic change. "Cathedral" is not so hard to follow even if you know nothing about software, and it can help crystallize the thoughts of the old free-software diehards.
Good stuff. Check it out.
This week, meet John Draper, the Captain Crunch of phone phreaking phame. Draper tells the stories of how he learned about the "blue box" and ways of manipulating the AT&T long-distance network using only a simple touch-tone phone and a toy whistle from a cereal box. Amazing, exciting, and fun stuff. And no, the whistle trick doesn't work now that AT&T uses only out-of-band control signaling.
Web designer David Siegel admits that The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It. It's funny, informative, and even a little bit historical now that the book he talks about starting work on is already out there in the remainder bins at CompUSA.
Wipe off that milk moustache and read about the lawsuit against WTVT Channel 13 in Tampa. Investigative reporters were harrassed and fired for working on a story that exposed health concerns related to the use of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) in dairy cows.
Artificial use of BGH causes a cow's metabolism to speed up, causing her to consume more food and produce more milk. It also appears to shorten her life and increase her incidence of bacterial infections. Big problem: cows injected with BGH need more antibiotics, which can end up in the milk, thereby increasing the background level of antibiotics that children are already taking in excessive amounts.
And that can be deadly. Already we are hearing of new bacterial strains that resist Vancomycin, the most powerful antibiotic we have. (I've heard nurses say several times while Deli was on treatment, "We don't know what it is, but with her white counts the Vanco' had better do it.")
Furthermore, BGH-treated cows produce increased levels of another hormone called IGF-1. (This isn't denied by the BGH vendor--it's what the product is for.) But IGF-1 is already associated with increased risk of breast and colon cancer in humans.
The science is well detailed in this issue of Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly. To cut to the important points on the lawsuit, go right to the story as WTVT lawyers rewrote it under pressure from Monsanto.
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" is what you'll find at slashdot.org, a free daily online journal for, well, nerds. Slashdot is interested in the whole world of computing but runs a lot of articles on Linux and open-source software.
Some articles from today's issue:
You get the idea. If you like computers you'll enjoy slashdot.
Here's a pretty good Internet-based war strategy game: Metal Knights. You download the game itself, join a match or two, and check back every once in a while to play your turn. The game is complex enough to be entertaining in the long term, but simple enough to grasp in a few moves. Both Daddy and Deli like this one a lot.
This week, why not take this twenty-minute European IQ test? It's one of the interesting links you can find on The Hoagies' Gifted Education Page.
I also liked, in a similar vein, Is It a Cheetah?--describing the misconceptions surrounding the identification of highly gifted children. This is a fairly quick and fun article. Take five minutes.
This is the week Daddy gets concerned about his career when he reads Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage. The author provides significant evidence supporting his conclusion that there is not a shortage of programmers in the US, just a shortage of low-paid ones. Recent graduates and new workers on H-1B visa are the desireable (cheap) hires now. Americans aged 35 and over, according to the report, face great difficulty in finding work as programmers unless they have current paid work experience (not just training) on "hot new technologies" such as Java programming.
Gripe of the week: I had to use the quotes there because it's such a hype phrase. Vendors like to call every new product a "technology" as if they've invented something really profoundly different when they rearrange the menu structure of a word processor.
Papa et liens de Deli de la semaine
C'est si frais. Vous juste devez le voir pour vous-même! Le traducteur d' "Babelfish" traduit le texte, ou le contenu d'un URL de votre choix, parmi les Anglais, de Français, d'Espagnol, de Portugeuse, d'Allemand, et d'Italien. Les traductions ne sont pas mauvaises pour le temps et effort. Contrôlez-le dehors!
(Maintenant en anglais:)
This is so cool. You just have to see it for yourself! The "Babelfish" translator translates text, or the contents of a URL of your choice, among English, French, Spanish, Portugeuse, German, and Italian. The translations are not bad for the time and effort. Check it out!
Deli says to check out Carlos's Coloring Book.
Daddy's macabre mood suggests the brief history of hanging in Britain, which is actually pretty compelling reading. Sponsored by a group that opposes the death penalty in the US, it offers tidbits such as
When everything was ready the horses were whipped the away leaving the prisoners suspended. They would only have a few inches of drop and thus most of them would slowly strangle to death. The hangman, his assistants and sometimes the prisoners' relatives might pull on the prisoners' legs to hasten their end. After half an hour or so the bodies were cut down and claimed by friends and relatives or sent for dissection at Surgeons' Hall.
Gross? You bet. But I come by it honestly. My mother's favorite checkout from the local library was Harlem Book of the Dead. I found a description of the post-mortem daguerrotype that described Mom's old favorite this way:
The post-mortem photography best known today is James Van Der Zee's work from 1920 on, published as _The Harlem Book of the Dead_. Today, these popular nineteenth century and early twentieth century genre photographs are little known and "there is no culturally normative response to postmortem photographs."
Deli says to check out Carlos's Coloring Book.
The juxtaposition is just too weird this week. But at least I found a way to make three generations of Link-of-the-Week for the first time ever!
Daddy likes Diane's Web Rant. A good way to improve your WWW pages is to ask yourself why you do them and why anyone else should care. Start here!
Daddy likes the new Bastard Operator From Hell series appearing in the UK's Network Week.
Deli is still having too much fun thinking about school to offer a link this week.
Daddy says you should read Personal Area Networks: Near-field intrabody communication, an IBM Systems Journal article about "exchang[ing] digital information by capacitively coupling picoamp currents through the body." PAN devices can be programmed so their users can exchange "business card" data in a handshake. They say it really works.
Deli is still having too much fun thinking about school to offer a link this week.
Daddy says to check out the Myths and Consequences of government regulation put out by the Right-To-Know Network. It's a single, long document, all text, that debunks some of the popular "Federal bureaucrats run amok" stories you read about. Sometimes the truth is not as strange as fiction.
Deli is still having too much fun thinking about school to offer a link this week.
Daddy offers Patty Feists's Childhood Leukemia resource page. This is new, all new. It has good pointers, not just gobs of links from Yahoo. It's pretty interesting even if you're not a cancer parent.
Adele wants you to try Word Rescue, a great reading and action game by Apogee Software. She and Ben both enjoy playing it as well as its partner game Math Rescue. Six thumbs up!
This week, Daddy urges you to check out Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly, a weekly update on "news and resources for environmental justice." Some people will find REHW's tone too intensely anti-corporate. That's okay. Rachel's writers provide the facts, you go make your own judgements. Very highly recommended.
One site-design note: I would like it if they'd put the current issue right out on the "home" page. As it is, you always have to go to the top of the "index" page. No big whoop though.
Adele wants you to try Billy Bear's Playground. (Again, it has one of those "best viewed with Netscape" things that Daddy loathes, but Adele gets to pick what goes here.)
Daddy says to check out the free Economics course offered by the Henry George Instutite. The bottom line:
In accordance with the philosophy of Henry George, the Henry George Institute holds that all persons have a right to the use of the earth and that all have a right to the fruits of their labor. To implement these rights it is proposed that the rent of land be taken by the community as public revenue, and that all taxes on labor and the fruits of labor be abolished.
It's a fascinating theory, one which I've been addressing in my Cleveland Pages here. Read, think, and enjoy.
Deli wants to show you BONUS.COM, which bills itself as "the SuperSite for kids." She and Ben can spend hours playing games, printing out coloring pages, and just poking around. Educational value: questionable. Fun value: two big toes up!
Warning from Daddy: BONUS.COM is all full of frames, Javascript, Java applets, and (probably) tons of nonstandard HTML. If your browser isn't a current or nearly current release of one of the big two, well, good luck. Normally I would skip over such a site, but this is Deli's section, and she likes it a lot.
This week, Adele offers Berit's Best Sites for Children. Berit's has a carefully selected and categorized set of links to all of the best WWW sites for curious kids. It's been our jumping-off point for JavaScript games, Windows shareware, and lots of reading. Highly recommended.
Daddy has evidence of the disgusting mismanagement of Cleveland public schools (to which, thank goodness, Adele is not subject). An article (which used to be at http://www.freetimes.com/1997/nov19.97/public2.html) by Jeff Harwood of the Cleveland Free Times brings to light the abandonment of valuable, sentimental, and useful property along with the closing of several Cleveland public school buildings in 1995.
Interestingly, this story hit the local TV news only a few days after its publication in the Free Times, a weekly. Jerry Strothers, the freelance investigator who did the initial leg work on this story, tells it in his own words. Strothers has a few direct comments on the local news establishment in regard to their handling of this and other stories. Mostly accurate, I'd say.
If this guy can clean up his HTML (centering a full-width horizontal rule? eh? and those FONTS!) and take some writing cues from Roldo, I'm going to like the prospects for decent news coverage in Cleveland.
4 April 1999 update: Unfortunately, a lot of the content on Strothers's site isn't accessible without an obscure viewer now.
Starting this week, Links of the Week includes my favorite links (as always) plus one from Adele's bookmark list.
This week, we continue the cancer topic with Adele's list of things she particularly enjoyed about having leukemia: "So much fun all the kids will want it!".
To stay on topic, I offer a data sheet on Neupogen, a wonderful medical concoction that cancer patients use to help regenerate their white blood cells more quickly after chemotherapy. (It's the product that they're talking about on those TV ads for the NASDAQ stock market, pitching Amgen as this amazing, forward-looking company.)
Adele says it hurts like heck going in (administered as a subcutaneous injection) but Neupogen took weeks off the length of time she spent in a neutropenic (low white cell counts) condition, thus cutting way down on the chances for serious infections while in treatment. Fantastic stuff, worth the big bucks our insurance company paid for it!
This week's bonus link is to the W3C page on Web Style Sheets. Now that the major browser vendors are suporting the CSS1 standard, web "designers" are running out of excuses for those whiny little "best viewed with" tags. CSS1 makes it easy to make documents work well in any standards-compliant browser and lets you influence layout for the jazziest possible look. It's win-win. If you work at all seriously on Web documents, check this out!
My net.pal Patty Feist offers information and ideas for kids with cancer and the people who care for them. Her son James has leukemia, as does (did?) my daughter Adele. Especially interesting--and potentially life-saving--is Patty's Signs of Childhood Cancer.
I just found an interview with Harvey Pekar, author of the American Splendor comic book series. I've followed American Splendor for years; it's funny, contrary, boring, silly, insightful, and very Cleveland. Usually you can find a few issues at The Bookstore On West 25th Street, just a short holler up the street from the West Side Market. Check it out. Tell Mike I sent you.
Last validated 5 January 2002:
This page was last updated on 5 January 2002.
Most links were checked on 4 April 1999, and futhermore the links
previous to November 1998 were checked again on 20 September 1999. I
still need to fix a few instances of linkrot.
Of course this is all copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, Mark W. Schumann, all rights reserved;
nobody but I am responsible for this content.
Now it looks great with style sheets too!
You can email comments on this page to me at catfood@underflap.com