__ _____ _ ___ __
\ \/ / | | / / | / /
\ / /| | | /| / / |/ /
/ / ___ | |/ |/ / /| /
/_/_/ |_|__/|__/_/ |_/http://www.acronymchile.com/yawn.html
2002-12-16
Inform all the troops that communications have
completely broken down.
##################### DO THE MATH #######################################
Interesting article about what is the true economic (as opposed to
monetary) cost of the food we eat. The argument can be applied to pretty
much anything consumed. It effectively highlights the shocking lack of
rationality in the systems we operate.
http://adbusters.org/magazine/44/articles/true_cost_groceries/
##################### SONIC ATTACK ######################################
Sonic Fridge:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2543085.stm
Were the fridge ever to crack open, the vast sounds generated within
would not escape because the intense noise can only be generated in the
pressurised gas locked inside the cooling system.
Good to know.
##################### SONIC ATTACK II ###################################
Maybe he just needs some rennies:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/South/12/08/noisy.neighbor.ap/index.html
Neighbours of Vice President Dick Cheney are being shaken and rattled at
least once a day by mysterious blasts on the grounds of the U.S. Naval
Observatory where Cheney lives. The Navy says the explosions are part
of a construction project that has been going on for several months
now, but won't say more because the project is classified.
Or maybe he's just using getting a couple of ice cold beers out of his new
fridge.
##################### MAC ATTACK ########################################
Ebay scam (another boingboing.net story). Amateur detective work and Mac
community solidarity saves the day:
http://www.remodern.com/caught.html
##################### JOY OF VIM ########################################
Set of articles with a nice intro, followed by the real basics of vi. Then
goes on through more advanced features. vi/vim is a text editor, and you
can get VIM for windows too you know!
http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200212/200212.htm%0A
Toward the end, there's a nice short piece about what makes GNU/Linux so
good to use. I thought the intro was particularly good:
My family bought a house when I was 7. My parents liked the
neighbourhood, the school system, and the house. I liked the wishing
well.
Of course it wasn't a real wishing well. It was just a 15 foot deep, 3
foot wide space between the garage and the fence. Densely overgrown
with thorny weeds, it inspired fear and curiosity. I went in, and kept
going in. Because every time I went in, I came out holding something
cool. A marble, a ball, whatever I wanted. Once I wished for a scooter,
and sure enough there it was, 10 feet back in a heretofore unexplored
section of the wishing well.
Any adult knows what happened. The last several owners had children,
each of whom left things behind. I was a teenager when we moved out of
that house. Surely the child of the new owner found the cool toys I
abandoned in that overgrown space.
Only a kid could think of it as a wishing well. A magical source of
found dreams. It was the magic of childhood, all too brief -- never
recaptured.
Until I found Linux.
...
From the day that Richard Stallman inked the GNU Manifesto and the GNU
General Public License, the wishing well has been our destiny. It's not
magic. It's simply another example that the pen is mightier than the
sword.
...
Challenge is good. Fairy tale wishing wells are welfare; real life
wishing wells are a triumph of the human spirit.
The wishing well with free software is a download away. Wonderful
software you've barely dared dream of. Software to ease your life and
boost your productivity. Software not encumbered by proprietary
license usage restrictions. Its real. Millions have already partaken,
but the wishing well's bounties are limitless and growing.
It's yours for the asking, if you dare to laugh at the thorns and go
on in.
-- Steve Litt
Sounds a bit like a cult! (the sort of cult you should join)
##################### SPAM ##############################################
Guy who has made a lot of money sending spam was bragging about it in a
newspaper interview:
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122.htm
This got people pretty angry, and they started signing him up for ad
campaigns and mailing lists, resulting in a flood of promotional literature
arriving on his doorstep:
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend6_20021206.htm
##################### IRIDIUM ###########################################
Iridium satellites redeployed.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=10050
##################### MRI ###############################################
Marketing using MRI scans instead of questionnaires: neuro-marketing
"That's exactly what neuro-marketers want to do -- strengthen our
emotional bonds with products."
http://cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/money/science_shopping
##################### CAREFUL, MIND HOW YOU GO ##########################
How an "out of office" autoresponder might compromise the security of your
house:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1137316
One good argument not to put your home address on a website (though a
telephone directory might even do it).
##################### INFO, FREE? #######################################
Written 10 years ago, but pretty on the ball about the whole information
economy thing:
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Sterling/Free_as_the_Air_Free_as_Water_Free_as_Knowledge.html
It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the ``Information
Economy.'' It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years
you may be able to carry the Library of Congress around in your hip
pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die
long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important
--- increasingly important --- is the process by which you figure out
what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics
of information. Not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has
the holdings. The crux here is access, not holdings. And not even
access itself, but the signposts that tell you what to access --- what
to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful
--- except attention.
##################### NOT GOOD ##########################################
Death by...
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=2&id=241683
A woman was arrested early Friday on suspicion of leaving her husband
to die in front of their house in Osaka's Yodogawa Ward by restraining
him with a dog collar, the police said.
##################### EMAIL #############################################
Study debunks e-mail overload myth Time saver
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28474.html
##################### FORBIDDEN #########################################
A bit childish but...
http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/kissinger-nose.htm
##################### STATS #############################################
Making rational decisions on computer security. How to interpret
statistics meaningfully and, alternatively, how to make a fool of yourself.
Nice, short, well-written and cogent article.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/12/09/021209opsource.xml%0A
##################### CAROL VORDERMAN ###################################
Kids getting in serious trouble for pirating software:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28508.html
##################### NOT SURE WHAT IT IS ###############################
Does this link work?
http://caq.com/caq61/CAQ61manual.html
##################### LOOK ##############################################
Review of a new video card from ATI. Seriously high powered! Sounds more
like a PC than a video card: 325MHz, 256 MBytes RAM. Price is EUR950,
which the reviewer reckons is "just twice what you might expect to pay for
a good consumer adapter". I suppose it depends on what you mean by good,
but I'd consider anything over EUR125 an expensive graphics card (goes to
show what I know!).
http://www.linux-magazine.com/OnlineExclusive/ATI/OnlineExclusive/ATI/ATI
##################### TOOL ##############################################
A nice tip from Danny O'Brien's weblog:
http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2002/12/11#1039673040
In mozilla bookmark the following link, and give it a shortcut, like "gn"
http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:%s
Then, if you're reading a news story, and want to find out more about it,
replace the bit before the domain name with "gn " and it will turn up all
the related stories Google News knows about. Neat!
e.g. "gn www.yahoo.com/story/index.htm"
Also from O'Brien, this piece in the New Yorker on what P. K. Dick would
make of the office of total information awareness recently established in
the US:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_hertzberg
##################### ASIDE #############################################
Unfortunate juxtaposition on google news. Top two stories under Sci/Tech
heading are:
Backup Teacher for Doomed '86 Flight Is Finally Set for Space
AND
NASA finds crack in space shuttle's engine
Are the computers trying to tell us something/
##################### POWER TO THE PEOPLE ###############################
The Guardian reports on the ramifications of open source software:
"This boom in internet and e-commerce in the developing world
is thanks, in no small part, to Linus Torvalds. Nearly a third
of the world's internet servers run on the open source Linux
software he helped create..."
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/comment/0,7496,858528,00.html
##################### OUCH ##############################################
Thought this was a very strange banner ad:
http://m.doubleclick.net/viewad/421314/adc_pca_stove.gif
##################### DR ################################################
Where he's been
http://www.rushkoff.com/blog.html
##################### WEIRD SCI #########################################
black holes:
appeared on incunabula.org/blog
http://www.incunabula.org/blog/archive/2002_12_13_index.html#90050102
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/12/10/40645.html
Also on Incunabula:
http://www.incunabula.org/blog/archive/2002_12_12_index.html#90044336
http://cultdeadcow.blogspot.com/2002_12_08_cultdeadcow_archive.html#90039609
http://www.earthtrust.org/delrings.html
The young dolphin gives a quick flip of her head, and an undulating
silver ring appears--as if by magic--in front of her. The ring is a
solid, toroidal bubble two feet across--and yet it does not rise to
the surface! It stands erect in the water like the rim of a magic
mirror, or the doorway to an unseen dimension. For long seconds the
dolphin regards its creation, from varying aspects and angles, with
its vision and sonar. Seemingly making a judgement, the dolphin
then quickly pulls a small silver donut from the larger structure,
which collapses into small bubbles. She then "pushes" the donut,
which stays just inches ahead of her rostrum, perhaps 20 feet over
a period of up to 10 seconds. Then, stopping again, she regards the
twisting ring for a last time and bites it--causing it to collapse
into a thousand tiny bubbles which head--as they should--for the
water's surface. After a few moments of reflection, she creates
another.
##################### WEIRD MAGNETS #####################################
Have a look. I don't know if this is offensive or not. Deeply
personalised fridge magnets...
http://www.cloneyourbone.com/myskit.htm
##################### WEIRD WEATHER #####################################
Record melt on Greenland
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2558319.stm
##################### WEIRD HAIR ########################################
Facial Hair Styles
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jec3/FacialHair/FacialHair.htm
##################### WEIRD HATS ########################################
Balloon hats found on boingboing.net:
http://www.balloonhat.com/atlas.html
##################### LOVE IS ###########################################
Also from boingboing.net, using Google to find out what old/prospective
significant-others have been up to:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/844175.asp?0cv=KB10
A Nobel Prize awaits the theorist who determines a formula that
calculates the number of minutes one can use Google before excavating
the wreckage of sunken relationships.
##################### SWISH #############################################
Thought this was a nice passage in an OK article:
My junior prom dress was perfect. Bright pink satin, almost crimson,
with a full skirt and three-quarter sleeves. It had a flounce
underneath that was edged in satin, and it swished when I walked.
Swished, I tell you. It was exactly what every sixteen-year-old wants,
a dress that is different, distinctive, and indisputably normal all at
once.
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/chagrin_and_men_i_have_loved.shtml
##################### STOP ##############################################