“Rightly or wrongly, record companies are detested by politicians (for corrupting youth), by webcasters (for demanding royalties), and by their customers (for inflating prices). Musicians and songwriters are famous for loathing the labels… Radio and MTV aren’t in the industry’s corner… And the electronics industry’s attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple…
“Doctors had never seen such injuries. It almost didn’t matter that he had a broken clavicle, pelvis, tailbone and ribs. They were stunned to learn of the injury to his neck that technically ripped off his head.” —Doctors Reattach Teen’s Head after Car WreckABC News) While this makes interesting reading, the article seems to be…
“This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of ‘filter, then publish’ is giving way to ‘publish, then filter.’ There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not…
“Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ), a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development…. Wikipedia is a public WikiWikiWeb, a website where anyone can edit any article at any time. Users build upon each other’s edits, and vandalized articles are quickly repaired by…
“I went on a mission of etymological research. In this article you’ll learn how the term, born of canned ham, moved into BBSs and MUDS and then was applied to USENET postings and E-mail. I’ve put in a short history of the earliest big spams, including a special page about the first E-mail spam from…
“My first cartoon short, Steamboat Willie, was a direct parody of Keaton’s movie Steamboat Bill, Jr. On the very first page of the script, it says, ‘Orchestra starts playing opening verses of Steamboat Bill.’ I remember what Eldred’s lawyer Lawrence Lessig said when he read that: ‘Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney,…
“To be the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing endowed one with a special cachet. To find the word ‘Nina,’ the name of his daughter, hidden several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of ‘Ninas’ in his drawings, creating…
“30 August 2001 was the 100th anniversary of Hubert Cecil Booth’s patent of the first working vacuum cleaner. To celebrate, explore our Potted History of the Vacuum Cleaner, or find out more Fascinating Vacuum Facts, all illustrated with historic cleaners from the Science Museum’s collections.” —A Century of SuckingScience Museum [UK])
Interesting Photo Caption…Yahoo News) Wow… that must have been some slideshow.
“I think it’s possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write…
“It happens to everyone – you accidentally cut someone off or do something bone-headed unintentionally… wouldn’t it be nice to have a conciliatory tone to indicate that you’re aware that you screwed up, and are willing to admit it?” jzb —One Tone Isn’t EnoughDissociated Presszilla)
“Not so many decades ago, you couldn’t buy or legitimately connect your own phone or other telecom equipment to the public telephone network in the United States…. Virtually everything related to telephone communications had to be leased from the local monopoly phone company, which also performed all installations and maintenance. Remarkably, it was even prohibited…
Minimally Invasive Education: “This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley.” Sugata Mitra put a computer with a high-seed…
On 18th January 1903 Marconi sent a wireless transatlantic message from U.S. President Theordore Roosevelt to England’s Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting the system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American People most cordial greetings and good…
“Walt Disney understood the value of the public domain, and used it precisely as other great artists had done. He updated an out-of-copyright character to create Mickey Mouse, for example, and launched an empire. The company he founded later used writer Victor Hugo’s work, which was also no longer owned by anyone, to create a…
“The public water system is somewhat unpleasant to think about. Basically, the stuff you flush down the toilet gets sent through a filtering system. That system ‘treats’ the sewage until what remains is sufficiently pure to send back to you as drinking water. As content intermediaries, publishers perform an analogous function. Individual software writers, authors,…
Cranky avant-garde novelist Kurt Vonnegut on George W. Bush: “He’s in the same business I’m in. He’s telling stories. It turns out this is the simplest of all stories to tell. I mean, I want to hold attention when I write something. What he wants to be is interesting. And revenge is interesting. I’ve said…
“Almost all the varieties of banana grown today are cuttings – clones, in effect – of naturally mutant wild bananas discovered by early farmers as much as 10,000 years ago. The rare mutation caused wild bananas to grow sterile, without seeds. Those ancient farmers took cuttings of the mutants, then cuttings of the cuttings.” James…
“I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men’s room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly…If they had put big circular targets, and arrows with a little printed message “pee here!” (like it…
On Jan 17, 1998, maverick webmaster Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story on his weblog. (Actually, Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” only a few weeks earlier, so I doubt anybody used that term for Drudge’s website back then.) Drudge has posted an understandbly self-congratulatory piece about his website. To refresh your memory, here’s…