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Hart Scientific, an instrumentation company, put up a great Unofficial Y2K Statement last year at the height of the Y2K hysteria. Now they've posted an equally funny followup.
Added Monday, January 17, 2000
Atomicangel pointed me to a thoughtful, if biased (it was written by an independent bookseller) commentary on the effects of e-commerce on local communities. Personally, I prefer to shop locally (unless I have a particular reason to shop online) for a number of reasons, most of which are discussed in the article. Besides, I am a browser of books by nature. Just the same, I wonder if it's really a healthy thing if our communities are defined primarily by commerce and consumerism, as this seems to suggest.
Added Monday, January 17, 2000
Ars Technica has posted the best technical overview of the new Mac OS X GUI I've seen so far. Odd; they make it seem as though there's more to the interface than "lickable" candylike buttons. Go figure.
Added Monday, January 17, 2000
Been trying to track down this link for a couple of weeks; looks like maybe it's found a permanent home. Anyway, what would your name be if you were a member of the Wu-Tang Clan? Give this page your name and find out. Why, as a white boy who has never even heard anything by the Clan, do I care? My Wu Name is "Contagious Specialist". My /. user name is "Industrial Disease" (an old Dire Straits song). This can not be coincidence.
Added Sunday, January 16, 2000
Pleconaril is a new antiviral drug currently in testing. There are very few effective antivial medications available; this one looks like it may cure a wide range of viruses, from the common cold to viral meningitis. What's really interesting is the development process that researchers use to find new drugs now. Until recently, they had to essentially stumble across something effective, now they can design drugs from the molecular level up.
Added Saturday, January 15, 2000
Wish I'd found this before the Biggest Non-Event of the Millenium: A poem to explain to children why Mommy and Daddy are preparing for the end of the world. This is only part of a "FEMA for Kids" section of the Federal Emergency Management Agency website. According to some of the goofier conspiracy kooks, FEMA is more concerned with preparing for domestic insurrection than natural disasters or technological breakdowns; if this is true, I want to see the poem they must have written to explain to the little ones why their parents had to go to the concentration camp.
Added Friday, January 14, 2000
WindowBlinds is a program that allows Windows users to customize the appearance of Windows using "skins" to alter the user interface. Someone has now created a skin based on the new "Aqua" interface for Apple's Mac OS X. Apple's reation: its usual "look and feel" lawsuit. I think Apple is doing itself a great disservice with its lawsuit, placing the emphasis on the outward appearance of its user interface at the expense of ignoring the other, less visible improvements. Also, if this is the fixed appearance of the Aqua interface, Apple is missing a great opportunity. Their designers did a great job with this interface, but there's always a chance that allowing more customization (possibly even "skinning" tools for OS X) could allow an independent designer to come up with something even better.
Added Friday, January 14, 2000
I was disappointed to hear this morning that General Motors is discontinuing the EV-1, its first mass-production electric car. Still, they claim to have learned a lot from the EV-1 that they can apply to the production of fuel-efficient hybrid electric/combustion cars. More encouraging is the news that Ballard Power Systems has produced a fuel cell small enough to power a car. Fuel cells use hydrogen or methane fuel to generate electricity more directly and more efficiently than by burning them and harnessing the heat or gas pressure. Hopefully, by the time I use up my Cavalier, I'll have good alternatives to a pure internal combustion vehicle.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
In an episode of the wonderful (but short-lived) old Max Headroom science fiction series, Bryce (the show's resident geek) used video editing software to turn the wooden horse in an old Trojan War flick into a live sheep. Later in the episode, he used the same technology to put words in the mouth of a politician in an on-the-air interview. At the time, such real-time video editing was the stuff of science fiction. Today, the technology is much closer to realization, and CBS has the closest thing yet. During Dan Rather's live New Year's Eve broadcast from Times Square, CBS digitally replaced some of the advertisements in the background (including one for a rival network) with a virtual billboard for CBS. When questioned, CBS executives could not see anything unethical about this video editing. This technology has some good uses, such as showing the first down line in broadcast football games, but the potential for abuse is enormous. This isn't the networks' first attempt at altering video reality; in an incedent a few years ago, ABC used chroma-key (a.k.a. "blue screen") technology to place their stars (hard to call them reporters any more) in "location" shots from the comfort of the studio for. I don't see how anyone can be assured of the reality of anything they see on the news any more.
Note: I have corrected this comment a few times from its original version. I've also changed the main link since the original link I was using was moved.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
An Anonymous Coward from /. has provided me with a link I've been seeking for months: a graph of the relationships between Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. The Discworld series is a sprawling series of comic fantasy novels, set in a world where things are (hope I'm remembering correctly) "less as they really are, and more like people believe them to be." Over twenty-five novels so far, and still funny, the series has developed such a complex cast of characters and in-jokes that it can be difficult for the newcomer to find a starting point that won't leave him completely lost. This graph shows which books happen after other books, which follow a given group of characters, etc. When in doubt, though, a newbie should pick up Small Gods; perhaps not the best starting point overall, but it stands alone better than most of the series, and is still generally available in the U.S.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
I could curse The Register for making it excessively difficult to link to an internal page, but I'm just too happy with them at the moment. They've engineered the return of the Bastard Operator from Hell! Simon Travaglia has found a new home for new adventures of his system administration anti-hero. And there was much rejoicing (yaay).
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Poor little John C. Dvorak is getting his feelings hurt by all the nasty people flaming him, so he's decided to complain about it in his column. Personally, I tend to side with the "you've lost it" camp, even though I don't believe I've ever posted a flame to that effect (until now, at least). He states that, "Worse, too many people with too much time on their hands are looking for the most obscure things to complain about." Have a mirror handy, John?
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Cliff "The Cuckoo's Egg" Stoll is now selling Klein bottles, or at least the closest possible 3-D equivalent. For those of you who aren't familiar with a particularly weird branch of mathematics called topology, a Klein bottle, like a Mobius strip, has only one surface. Therefore, it has no inside. Or no outside. Or the inside and the outside are the same. Or something; darn it, I used to know this stuff. Anyway, they look cool.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
This is something I've been hoping somebody would develop for a long time now: Cargill and Dow Chemical have come up with a new type of plastic made from common plants rather than petrochemicals. Supposedly, this will produce plastic with fewer pollutants, and lessen our dependency on foreign oil. Personally, I'm just glad to see a formula that doesn't consume non-renewable resources.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
The merger of America Online and Time/Warner, announced Monday, is just the latest in a long string of media and telecommunications mergers. One of my favorite tech columnists, Dan Gillmor, has written a better piece than I could about why this merger may not be good for anyone outside of those companies.
Added Wednesday, January 12, 2000
I'm a serious Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and Willow, the nerdy but cute witch, has become my favorite character. One episode last season showed a vampiric Willow from an alternate universe, who seemed sexually interested in the original Willow. While this may have had as much to do with narcissism as lesbianism, I've suspected ever since that Willow was going to show a lesbian side sooner or later (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That). When she and another female witch joined their powers by holding hands in the recent episode "Hush", it only renewed my suspicion. Just the same, I find the tone of Donna Minkowitz's article in Salon irritating. Maybe it's because I think that's where Joss Whedon is going, and will tell that story in its own time. Maybe it's because I don't really expect the WB to take too many dramatic risks after last season's "Earshot" and "Ascension" debacles. Most of all, though, I think it's that I am growing tired of people who believe that they should act like TV characters, or that TV characters should act like them. I could probably come up with a decent rant on people trying to define their identities (esp. their sexual identities) in terms of popular media. Soon, maybe.
Added Tuesday, January 11, 2000
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