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Wednesday, 1999 November 10
BubbleBoy virusIt only attacks Microsoft Outlook - what is special about it is that it doesn't involve an attachment. When you open the email, a piece of embedded Visual Basic script sends the email to everyone in your address book, then changes your name to BubbleBoy and your organization to "Vandelay Industries." Not dangerous, they say, but "the reason we are all very interested in this is because it is a proof of concept." Admiral Nelson on Embedded Markup Ted Nelson (of Xanadu fame) has written his objections to HTML and even SGML. It is pure moonshine, the sort of thing that dissolves the more you think about it.
Tuesday, 1999 November 10
Aks me no questions
Geo W. Bush still bristling after Boston TV reporter Andy Hiller quizzed him on foreign leaders' names. And did you know that Bush was nearly taken out of the race by a garbage truck? No joke. The real Mahir Quite nice letter from the real "I kiss you" Mahir. Read the whole thing. Someone played a trick on him, taking his home page and changing it. "I was an ordinary person living an ordinary life.... I'm too happy that I made lots of people laugh and for a minute I could take them away from their private problems. But I want you to think about the realities of the world...."
Monday, 1999 November 8
Eugene Debs bio blasted
"If there is anything extraordinary about [this new biography] it is that such an incoherent and interminable book was published at all." The review on the other hand, is a pretty concise and interesting read. "Properly understood, Debs should rank as a national hero similar to Thos. Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King..." Debs "virtually invented... industrial unions, ... and first proposed ... collective bargaining, Social Security, the minimum wage, and workers' compensation...."
Friday, 1999 November 5
The John Jones Dollar
How compound interest nearly destroyed civilization. A story by Harry Keeler. Harry Keeler The funniest book review I ever read - about a bizarre mystery writer from the earlier half of this century. Snippet from a plot summary of one of his stories (The Aeronautic Baby Strangler Case): "Childlike footprints are found near the corpse, but they don't reach the end of the lawn - as if their maker had vanished into thin air! ... The only witness is a blind man who heard [the victim] shout, 'It's the babe from hell!'" The borg professor A very brief interview with Kevin Warwick, about the implant in his arm, how he got into the cybernetics, and the mark of the beast. Best part is his advice to those interested in biotech and cybernetics. "Cybernetics... is pushing back the boundaries of science fiction, never mind science." Spice Girls to stay together I know we can all sleep a little better knowing that our Fab 4 are still intact.
Thursday, 1999 November 4
Still hope for understanding neural nets?
I had to give up on the tutorial I mentioned last week; I got hopelessly lost in mathematics. Isn't there a simple explanation? How in the world do neural nodes learn? How can just pumping information through something get it to change its behavior? I haven't given up on trying to understand this; I just have to find the right place to start. Molecule memory This has got to be the most insane news: "We've demonstrated a memory element the size of a single molecule." Now all we need "is a reversible single molecule switch." What that means is that incredibly tiny computer components could be built - if only they could figure out how to flip the molecules at will. The resulting computer could make a PC seem monstrously large.
Wednesday, 1999 November 3
Housing more important than Wall Street
Alan Greenspan explains that home prices are a more significant economic indicator than the stock market. If a rich person has capital gains, they don't spend more, Greenspan explains, but the average person (translation: middle class), sells a home, they are apt to spend some of the money they realize. Of course, this repudiates Reagan's silly trickle-down theory. I doubt that anyone took that idea seriously anyway. You need a free account to read this.
Tuesday, 1999 November 2
London calling? hang up.
An ISP in New Jersey blocks the whole co.uk domain because of spamming, not realizing that it is England's commercial domain. "To block all commercial traffic from a major industrialised nation sounds clueless to me." Rebol in a nutshell I've tried Rebol - haven't had much time to put into learning all the things I want to learn, but this is a very small language that tries to make networking and internet programming simple. It was created by the same guy who created Amiga's kernel. Fear of e-books Julian Dibble (author of My Tiny Life) quails before the prospect of the e-book. Afraid that libraries will disappear. What is the big deal? Made me remember how, in my tiny life, Dibble printed out everything he had to read. Why all this arguing against convenience? My only gripe(s) about e-books is that they're backlit, like TVs or computer terminals, and they cost too much. But if they were cheap enough, and the books I wanted were available, I'd put up with the lighting problem. |