October 2002 Archive Page

"Mid-terms have now stretched to basically 5 or 6 weeks (almost half the semester), and consist of little more than hell. And, on top of it all, we have to go class and try to keep up on our daily class work and readings. I am not super-man! I am not even She-ra! I am Barney on the Super-Hero-meter right now. I am nothing but a lowly student trying to finish my fourth year of school...and all I want to do is go to the bar!!!" Kirsten Schubert

--Hell Anyone? (Midterms)How Did I Get This Far Gone)

"When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly. All of this seems perfectly reasonable---I should know, since I have had these feelings myself! But it turns out to be a bad idea." Neal Stephenson --Why I am a Bad CorrespondentNeal Stephenson)

"Not only was there a halo around the Sun--the so-called '22° halo,' which sky watchers often see--but also there was an enormous ring of light running parallel to the horizon at the same altitude as the sun. It was like a giant angel's halo suspended above my town, interrupted every 120° by a brighter splash of light (more 'mock suns'). 'That's the complete parhelic circle!' I exclaimed aloud to the empty street." Trudy E. Bell --Rings Around the SunNASA)

"We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and managed to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural studies, Social Text. But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3 meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in the process!" John Baez

--Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax? Google News)

"But these 60-some full-color plates are, most likely, not the reason you'd want to own Clown Paintings. I mean, if you're like me, you spend a little too much time every day trying to avoid clowns, so why would you want to bring a bunch of pictures of them into your home? (Except maybe to frighten the neighborhood children.)" Jim Knipfel reviews Clown Paintings, edited by Diane Keaton --Clown PaintingsNY Press)

A small Swedish company posted its quarterly earnings on its website, without any password protection, but without publicizing the URL. A Reuters reporter guessed the URL and found the report before it was supposed to be released. Now the reporter is being sued for Hacking a URL, which is a fundamental navigation technique that many users employ every day. --Reuters Accused in Web Privacy CaseSalon)

"Techniques for managing information are the new critical 'meta-skills' needed to stay current (and hopefully sane). Gurus urging 'simplicity' and 'turn off technology' (while very sage advice) miss an important point: nothing is slowing down. What we need is simplicity in how we manage information, not simplicity by ignoring or turning off information." gsiemens --The Impact of "Too Much Information"ELearnSpace)

Follow-Up: A history professor 's controversial claims about the origins of gun culture -- and his inability to back up those claims using scholarly methiods accepted by his peers -- cost him his job. A passage from Emory's official investigative report (a PDF document) -- "Taking all this into account, we are led to conclude that, under Question 5, Professor Bellesiles did engage in "serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research." As to these matters, comprehending points (a) - (c) under Question 5, his scholarly integrity is seriously in question."

--Arming America Professor Resigns in Wake of InvestigationEmory)

"Star Trek originally got it right. In early episodes, when something exploded in outerspace, it made no sound. That's because there is no air in outerspace to transmit sound.... Yes, an explosion probably would create an expanding cloud of gases which would eventually impact a spaceship in its path. However, in the vacuum of space this expanding cloud of gas would have a very low density. When it hit a ship some distance from the explosion it would probably sound like a gust of wind blowing against the spacecraft." --Insultingly Stupid Movie Phyiscs: Outerspace ExplosionsIntuitor)

"When writing, don't try to edit as you go. Say what you want to say, unencumbered by the constant commentary from that fussy little editor swimming around inside your head. First, get it all down. Then, have at it, keeping what works and bug-zapping the rest. By separating writing and editing functions, you can convince yourself that you're just doing a first draft. This way, you often end up with better-than-expected material." Gareth Branwyn --Gar's Tips on Sucks-Less WritingStreetTech.com)

"If you persist, you are about to read a theoretically-inflected critique of what some people call 'codework.' Potentially codework is a term for literature which uses, addresses, and incorporates code: as underlying language-animating or language-generating programming, as a special type of language in itself, or as an intrinsic part of the new surface language or 'interface text,' as I call it, of writing in networked and programmable media." John Cayley --The Code is not the Text (Unless it is the Text)EBR)

Inaugural adresses of the presidents; a letter from Columbus, letters from a Civil War soldier from Iowa, and the letter of transmittal introducing the Constitution. This up-to-date site has an archive spanning from the Magna Carta (1215) to Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address. --US Historical DocumentsU of Oklahoma)

"Librarians have degrees. They go to graduate school for Information Science and become masters of data systems and human/computer interaction. Librarians can catalog anything from an onion to a dog's ear. They could catalog you. Librarians wield unfathomable power. With a flip of the wrist they can hide your dissertation behind piles of old Field and Stream magazines. They can find data for your term paper that you never knew existed. They may even point you toward new and appropriate subject headings." --Why You Should Fall to Your Knees and Worship a LibrarianLibrarianAvengers.com)

"Nerve activity in the teenaged brain is so intense that they find it hard to process basic information, researchers say, rendering the teenagers emotionally and socially inept... The team found the speed at which people could identify emotions dropped by up to 20 per cent at the age of 11. Reaction time gradually improved for each subsequent year, but only returned to normal at 18." --Teen Angst Rooted in Busy BrainNew Scientist)

"The Web site Arts & Letters Daily returns today, following its purchase by The Chronicle of Higher Education." --Arts & Letters Daily to Resume Publication After Purchase by The ChronicleChronicle)

"ANCHOR: Now, this breaking news. Something has reportedly happened. Details are sketchy, and we really don't have any idea of what it might be, but let's show these impressive aerial shots from our helicopter. Now let's go to our correspondent in the field to tell us that he doesn't know anything. Bob? " Howard Troxler --And Now, This Breaking News Report on SomethingSt. Petersburg Times)

"More than 30,000 employees at Indian call centers, among whom Radhika becomes Ruth and Satish becomes Steve, are told to adopt American names and say they are calling from a U.S. city in order to put their American customers at ease. Their training includes a smattering of U.S. history and geography, along with speech therapy so that they will sound 'American.' Some call centers are adorned with American flags to give a cultural feel to the place. Along the way, these employees are exposed to a way of life that can come into direct conflict with their conservative values and, sometimes, their sanity." Manu Joseph --Say Hello to Sanjeep, Er, Sam Wired)

"When the question period came, he started with the first of the four large men. 'You say the probate records show very few guns, and argue that this proves people in early America didn't have guns. But when my father died, there was nothing in his will about his guns... Are probate records really a good source of evidence on gun ownership?'

"Bellesiles answered, 'I'm sure you're right about your father's will, but wills in the eighteenth century were different. People didn't own very many things compared to today, and their wills contained a detailed list of everything they had, down to the knives and forks. There are other problems with probate records--they are biased in many ways. But I'm confident that if an eighteenth-century man owned a gun, it would be in his will. Remember that we're talking here about wills in the 1700s.'

"He called on the second large man. 'I want to ask about your use of probate records,' he said. 'You say probate records showed few guns, but my father owned several guns that did not appear in his will when he died....'

"Bellesiles paused and looked around the room, where students glanced at each other with stunned disbelief: So this is what it's like when you're the target of a campaign to destroy your work." --Fire at WillThe Nation)

"Google Inc has been sued by a search engine optimization company, which claims Google deliberately altered its ranking when it realized the SEO company was competing with it." --Google Sued by Search Optimism CompanyThe Register)

"Truly happy people live by the maxim 'Overrate thyself.' They are raised by loving parents who slather them with praise. They stride through life with a confidence built on an amazing overestimation of their own abilities. And they settle into an old age made comfortable by the warm glow of self-satisfaction. Each of these people is a god of self-esteem, dwelling on a private Olympus." David Brooks --The Superiority ComplexThe Atlantic)

"A newspaper reporter questioned the practicality of the Internet bookmobile. Wouldn't it be better to print materially more cheaply at a central location and then distribute them normally through book stores, online sales, or libraries? ... The bookmobile reminded me of an itinerant vegetable cart which is a now a rarity in the United States. Because Kahle is especially interested in providing materials for young people, perhaps it could be likened to an truck that roams a neighborhood selling frozen bars of ice cream, except the books are freely distributed." Steve Cisler --Letter from San Francisco: The Internet BookmobileFirst Monday)

"Virtually every encyclopedia or textbook etymology of the word 'robot' mentions the play R.U.R. Although the immediate worldwide success of the play immediately popularized the word (supplanting the earlier 'automaton'), it was actually not Karel Capek but his brother Josef, also a respected Czech writer, who coined the word. The Czech word robota means 'drudgery' or 'servitude'; a robotnik is a peasant or serf. Although the term today conjures up images of clanking metal contraptions, Capek's Robots (always capitalized) are more accurately the product of what we would now call genetic engineering. The play describes of 'kneading troughs' and 'vats' for processing a chemical substitute for protoplasm, and a 'stamping mill' for forming Robot bodies." Dennis G. Jerz --R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)UWEC/Seton Hill)

"The genesis of Churches ad hoc was the photograph I made of a cross that seemed to rise up out of a tree. The cross, located in a park overlooking Eugene, Oregon, created a controversy regarding the separation of church and state. Proponents of the cross called it a war memorial. Others saw it as a religious symbol. I titled the photograph 'Propagation on the Mount'. " Herman Krieger --Churches Ad Hoc: A Divine ComedyH. Krieger)

"Catholic church authorities were displeased by passages in Copernicus' text that seemed to contradict Scriptural teachings. But, the Inquisition decided not to ban De revolutionibus outright because its observations might be needed in the future to adjust the Gregorian calendar. Instead, a Papal decree in 1620 demanded alterations in ten specific places in the text. Those alterations emphasized that the heliocentric theory was hypothetical and not intended to be a real description of the physical world." --Harvard Science Historian Publishes Results of Unprecedented 30-Year Census of Copernican MasterpieceSpaceRef.com)

"Hi! I'm Sally, and I'm Johnny... Welcome to our website: Black People Love Us! We are well-liked by Black people so we're psyched (since lots of Black people don't like lots of White people)!! We thought it'd be cool to honor our exceptional status with a ROCKIN' domain name and a killer website!!" --Black People Love Us!!BlackPeopleLoveUs.com)

"You are a games theorist. Your object is to defend games (and yourself) from the imperialism of a thousand theories. Navigate the four levels of narratology, psychology, film theory, and pathology. Control the spaceship with your mouse." --Game LiberationJesper Juul)

"The toy area has its own distinct odor: sort of a musty, mildewy, plastic, sour-milk, baby-vomit, metallic, rotting-cloth smell... It isn't quite the smell of evil-just despair." --Goodwill Toy Section Most Depressing Thing EverOnion)

"Telemarketers make use of a telescript - a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance." Martijn Engelbregt --Anti-telemarketing ScriptEGBG)

"When cell phones started ringing during Peter Telep's classes at the University of Central Florida, the English instructor came up with an unusual solution: He gets to answer the call.... 'This is the English teacher, and we're busy right now.'" Amy L. Edwards --Cell Phones are no Class Act, Teachers SayOrlando Sentinel)

A fan of the multiplayer role-playing game EverQuest opines about a cheat in which players can create loads of in-game money: "I am not an economist, but if one person in a month can create as much as the ENTIRE economy can in a day, there is going to be huge, post WWI-like German inflation [in the game world]. Useful things will skyrocket in cost, making it virtually impossible for the relative neophyte to attain them in a reasonable amount of time, and things that are no longer deemed useful will be destroyed, or sold for next to nothing at all." Dugan --Un-Making the Game: Exploiting For Fun and Profit Player2Player.net)

"This program takes lessons learned from the classic I Love Lucy TV show and uses them as a discussion starter for small group study!" --"I Love Lucy" Bible Studyilovelucybiblestudy.com)

"Those pieces are short, rarely more than 200 words, and offer links to other Web sites or news reports. The discussions then can go on for hundreds and even thousands of postings by readers, offering comment, argument and further research. Those who want to post without using their names are allowed to, but the system automatically gives them the user name 'anonymous coward.'" John Schwartz --Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few BucksNY Times (registration))

"Last week I was with one of my summer interns in the lobby when a receptionist complained that her printer wasn't working. The intern horsed around with it and discovered a pen stuck inside the printer... So he grabs a piece of paper and starts scrawling on it..." See image: "Whitespace in Document Design: Why It Matters." --The Problem Printer. Evil Techie)

"When the phone rings at Kennedy Space Center's public affairs office, the caller might just communicate with aliens. Or have psychic powers. Or see UFOs. Whether they're hiding in a phone booth from perceived pursuers or trying to sell a space rock, the callers want to talk to NASA, the space agency, the ultimate authority in all things cosmic." Chris Kridler --NASA's Incoming Calls to Public Affairs are Out of This WorldFlorida Today)

"He steadily brings us through the history, citing the magic squares of China, the first puzzle magazines in the 18th century, the 19th-century American crazes (when pros began to make a living at it), and the 200 million Rubik's Cubes sold in the 1980s. Enigmas, charades, riddles, anagrams, cryptograms, rebuses, duck-rabbit images, mathematical brain-crushers, Chinese tangrams - all get their moment of shrewd scrutiny." Carlin Romano reviews The Puzzle Instinct by Marcel Danesi --Why do we love puzzles? Professor fills in the blanksPhilly Inquirer)

"Now you hear a low hum, and over the horizon appears a flying machine. You press the button of a box near by and a radio signal flashes to the machine. The aircraft, looking oddly like a horizontal electric fan, drones toward you. When the pilot is directly overhead, all forward movement of the machine ceases and it descends vertically until the cabin door is within a foot of the ground. On the machine's gray side is painted Helicopter Express to New York." Igor Sikorsky's 1942 vision of the future (as told to Frederick C. Painton) --The Coming Air Age [of 1952]The Atlantic)

"This Web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways." Here's an example: technopolis, noun
The sum total of the technological infrastructure of a society. --Random WordsWord Spy)

A wire story consists of one voice pitched low and calm and full of institutional gravitas, blissfully unaware of its own biases or the gaping lacunae in its knowledge. Whereas blogs have a different format:

• Clever teaser headline that has little to do with the actual story, but sets the tone for this blog post.
• Breezy ad hominem slur containing the link to the entire story.
• Excerpt of said story, demonstrating its idiocy (or brilliance)
• Blogauthor's remarks, varying from dismissive sniffs to a Tolstoi-length rebuttal.
• Seven comments from people piling on, disagreeing, adding a link, acting stupid, preaching to the choir, accusing choir of being Nazis, etc.

James Lileks --Lileks on Blogs ("This is actually rather telling...")The Bleat)

"Any data that's public, and that Google can see, is hardly worth storing and organizing. We simply search for what we need, when we need it: just-in-time information management. But since we don't admit Google to our private data stores -- Intranets [1] and mailboxes, for example -- we're still like the shoemaker's barefoot children. Most of us can find all sorts of obscure things more easily than we can find the file that Tom sent Leslie last week." John Udell --Googling Your EmailO'Reilley Network)

"40 percent of the most frequent PC game players are 35 or older, according to the Interactive Digital Software Association, a game industry group.... Computer games have been around for about 25 years, and many younger baby boomers encountered them during their teen years." --Older Gamers Now the NormMostly AP)

"In 1929 James Thurber and E.B. White posed a deep question: Is sex necessary? Seven decades later, the answer remains shrouded in mystery. But thanks to the work of yesterday's Nobel laureates and others, we have gained some understanding of a related question: Is death necessary? The answer appears to be yes-because of sex." Jim Holt --Sex and Death: The awful existential significance of cellular suicide.Slate)

Somebody posts, on a website for freelance writers, an offer to pay $40 for someone to write a very specific essay that looks very much like an academic assignment. The student leaves his name, UWEC e-mail address, snail mail address, and telephone number. One of the freelancers who reads that message board decides to let a UWEC faculty member know about it. That UWEC faculty member passes on the URL. Legal note: the student is innocent until proven guilty.... let's hope he realizes what's at stake here, and decides to write the damn paper himself. (This is not an assignment for any of my classes, and I don't know the student.) --Essay: Posted by M--- N-----[slacker]@uwec.edu)

"Technology pioneers typically get steamrollered, then look on helplessly from the sidelines as a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies make billions. First movers, the theory goes, are too smart for their own good, churning out gizmos that are too expensive or too complex for the average consumer's taste." Brendan I. Koerner --TiVo, We Hardly Knew Ye: Sorry fans, but it's destined for the ash heap of historySlate)

"As a longtime [Volkswagon] Bug devotee, I knew the car's origins, but the depth of Hitler's involvement in the design detailed here gave me pause. And Patton explains the strange paradox of why Americans were so ready to accept a product from their sworn enemy: VW's innovative Jewish ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, was willing to sell the cars, so Americans were willing - eager - to buy them." Eric C. Evarts reviews BUG: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile by Phil Patton --Beep Beep! Hitler Lost the War, but His Cute Little Car Conquered the World AnywayCS Monitor)

"I still can understand people like Pete Seeger joining the Party back in the 30's during the Depression, when it looked like unregulated capitalism had cruelly immiserated America, when racism and lynchings reigned down South and it looked (looked, I said) as if the Soviet Union was the only force willing to stand up to Hitler. But to cling to Marxism now, after all we've learned in the past 50 years-not just about the Soviet Union, but China and Cambodia -- ?" Ron Rosembaum --Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to FleeObserver)

"For some reason, everyone seemed to know that Disney is the one company you don't want to cross. Even if the person you're consulting can't point to specific cases, he or she has heard things. Scary things. Severed horse head on the bed pillow, that kind of thing." --Careful What You Wish Upon a Star Forcheshiredave.com)

"The exchange of love letters was central to the courtship of my grandparents (who were separated by the First World War) and of my parents (who were separated by my father's service after the Second World War). By the time that my wife and I were courting, we handed our love letters back and forth in person and read them aloud to each other....The love letter was a residual form-though we still have a box of yellowing letters we periodically reread with misty-eyed nostalgia. Sarah and Henry's romantic communications might seem, at first, more transient, bytes passing from computer to computer." Henry Jenkins --Love Online Technology Review)

"Standing on the Earth at the base of this 'beanstalk' it would look unusual but simple, a cable attached to the ground and going straight up out of sight. Now even the youngest of you reading this manuscript will know that a rope can not simply hang in mid-air, it will fall. This is true in all of our everyday situations; however, a 60,000-mile long cable sticking up into space is not an everyday occurrence." Bradley C. Edwards --The Space Elevatoreurekasci.com)

NASA's description of the stunning video is hardly enticing. "For the first time, a camera mounted to the space shuttle's External Tank offered a view of the ride to orbit. In this video, the first two minutes of ascent show Space Shuttle Atlantis' nose and belly, with one Solid Rocket Booster on the extreme left of the frame." --Space Shuttle Launch VideosNASA)

"For decades, responsible journalists refused even to cover public-opinion polls. Then, in a turnaround, they began to conduct them and treat their findings as hard news. Now the process has come full circle: Journalists appear to be using polls to generate the conclusions they want and to validate their own pre-existing theses and hypotheses." Dick Morris --The Times' Push PollNY Post)

"Astronomers announced today the discovery of the largest object in the solar system since Pluto was named the ninth planet in 1930. The object is half the size of Pluto, composed primarily of rock and ice, and circles the sun once every 288 years. " --800-Mile-Wide "Object" Found in Solar SystemNat'l Geo)

"Last year Wooten founded The Disciples of Bob Barker in an effort to spread the joy of the beloved game show 'The Price is Right.' Since then, the club has gained official status [at U.Va.]. 'I can't believe it either,' Club President Wooten remarked... 'and you can quote me on that.'" --All About Bob [Barker]Cavalier Daily)

"The magazine Lingua Franca and its parent company University Business LLC filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.... We understand that the assets of University Business, including this Website, are to be auctioned in New York City on October 24, 2002. For further information, we suggest contacting the Trustee." --RIP Arts & Letters DailyA & L Daily)

"America's Army and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down are the 'Why We Fight' for the digital generation. Though not explicitly doctrinaire in an ideological sense, by showing the very young how we fight, applying the moral application of lethal force on behalf of liberal values, these games create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now. One hopes they'll inspire the best gamers to consider a career of military service, while preparing them for the battles to come." Wagner James Au --Weapons of Mass DistractionSalon)

My freshman, or perhaps junior high, English teacher made us read [The Outsiders] for class. She evidently thought this was a 'hip' book to read because she could then show us the movie afterwards. Guess what book she chose not to require us to read. Catcher in the Rye, which of course we would have liked more. We didn't read it, however, because there was no corresponding movie. Now that I think about it, we didn't read a single book that didn't have a movie adaptation. And the day after the test of the book, we would all have to sit and watch the movie. I swear I didn't learn a thing in my English classes. I have to make up for it now." Jessica Crispin --...what teens are readingBookSlut.com)

"With so many 'real' languages in the world, why would anybody make up another one? ...Many authors create a language, or part of one at least, to flesh out their books and make them more realistic... The Star Trek series alone has spawned at least six languages: An'Dorian, Borg, Darmok, Ferengi, Vulcan (more Vulcan here), and the extremely popular Klingon. There are also political and social reasons for creating languages." April Chase --Say What? Created Langauges of the WorldChickLit)

Among the excesses of the French Revolution: "Churches were re-consecrated as 'Temples of Reason', and so-called 'revolutionary marriages' were presided over, where priests and nuns were tied together naked, and drowned. Few of these allegedly egalitarian initiatives lasted far into the nineteenth century. By a long chalk the most durable among them was the creation of the metre." Robert MacFarlane reviews The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World by Ken Adler --A Measure to TreasureGuardian)

"Just what do you do with [a] huge mass of reject Flubber??? The obvious answer was to send it to the local dump to be incinerated. This sounded like a good idea until Hasbro President Merrill Hassenfeld received a call the very next day after they hauled it away. The call was from the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island claiming that there was a huge black cloud hovering over the dump. Apparently, the Flubber would not burn properly in the city's incinerator." --The Flubber FiascoUseless Information)

Asphalt... lipstick... licorice... new car smell... Silly Putty. Where do they come from? --What's That Stuff?Chem & Eng News)

"Some forms of money are completely unfamiliar. They may look weird and wonderful to our eyes. Or, like the axe, they might look quite familiar, but it simply would not occur to us that they could have been used as money. " --What Is Money?British Museum)

"[T]he current epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes is very likely the result of low fat/high carbohydrate diets vigorously promoted by governmental health authorities over the past few decades. Under any circumstances it is abundantly clear that existing dietary recommendations have failed miserably and should be carefully reexamined in the light of these developments, if not consequences. " --Medical McCarthyism: Experts Dispute Opposition to Dietary FatBloxword.ca)

"'Monty Python' was full of smart and funny bits, and 'Life of Brian' is no exception. But the film's core assumption is that Christianity is a vast joke conceived and fostered by muddling dupes--a notion entirely at one with the group's bemusedly contemptuous view of human life. The Pythons were cynics, not satirists, a band of comic Hamlets pondering the empty absurdity of life beside poor Yorick's grave." Brian Murray reviews A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s --Fawlty Humour: The Limits of British SatireStandard)

"In a move that has millions across the Internet community frowning, Despair, Inc. today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had awarded them a registered trademark for the 'frowny' emoticon which serves as their logo. " --Despair, Inc. Secures Official Trademark Registration for ":-("Despair, Inc.)

"But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools. They help orient users in your architecture, and can suggest whether other options are available." Jesse James Garrett --User-Centered URL DesignAdaptivePath.com)

"An Australian study on bellybutton lint, a dog-to-person translation device and an inquiry into what arouses ostriches have been recognised with Ig Nobel prizes for dubious contributions to science. The Ig Nobels, awarded annually at Harvard University as a spoof of the Nobels, recognise achievements that 'cannot or should not be reproduced'." Jay Lindsay --Navel Gazing Wins an Ig NobelThe Age)

"Better-written technical documents enable people to work with greater speed, recall, accuracy, and comfort. These qualities, when taken together, make up the usability factor. Caution: simply gathering opinions is not usability testing -- you must arrange an experiment that measures a subject's ability to use your document." Dennis G. Jerz --Usability Testing: What is It?UWEC)

"On the past June 15th, 2002, the US Congress officially recognized that the italian inventor Antonio Meucci is to be credited for the invention of the telephone, and not Alexander G. Bell, as so far claimed.... a poor italian immigrant in New York sold the prototypes of his invention to a Telegraph company, that later gave them to Alexander G. Bell, who in turn patented the invention of the phone." --Official: Antonio Meucci was the Real Inventor of TelephonyPopular-Science.net)

"WAAABOOOOM!!! A flash of light followed by a concussion of air shook the RPG fence in front of me and the safe house windows behind me. 'Holy Schmidt (or words to that effect), that was close' I thought to myself and ran to roust my buddies inside - Yeah right, as if they didn't hear that!" --America's Army WeblogAmericasArmy.com)

"A lot of people in the weblog world are asking 'How can we make money doing this?' The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity." --Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of PublishingShirky)

See sportscar. See owner take sportscar to garage. See mechanic take sportscar for joyride. See mechanic brag about joyride on bulletin board. See owner read bulletin board. See mechanic's ass get fired. --...MAKE SURE THAT NO 'PUNK' DRIVES HER CARMustang Message Board)

"Every morning, between 8 and 8:30, an elderly couple take their morning walk, he in the same lightweight gray suit, she in layers of bright colorful wrappings; he in the lead, she always walking at least four feet back. Always crossing the road in the exact same spot, never speaking." Shelley "Bb" --Morning RitualBurningbird)

"Say these two words to the next person you see: 'Krispy Kreme.' They'll respond one of two ways. You might get a blank and puzzled stare...Or they'll smile and start telling you a story about when they last had one of nature's most divine foods: the hot glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut." Stewart Deck --Krispy Kreme: The Doughnuts That Keep on Givingtaquitos.net)

"On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to be objective, will remain an important aspect of web searching for the foreseeable future. " Daniel Brandt --PageRank: Google's Original SinGoogleWatch)

"Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Well then, now that that is settled. What would you like to discuss?"

What is truth?
What is justice?
What is courage?
What is beauty? --Socratic Argument ClinicM.F. Patton)

"I PROPOSE to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. " Aristotlle --Poeticseserver.org)

"I have anguished over the embarrassment my speech-writing process has brought to our community. Ultimately, I concluded that it is in Hamilton's best interest that I step down as president." -- Eugene M. Tobin --Hamilton College President Resigns -- Plagiarized Welcoming Speech to FreshmenHamilton College)

> N
You cannot go that way.
> S
You cannot go that way.
> E
You cannot go that way.
> W
You cannot go that way.
> NE
You cannot go that way.
> NW
You cannot go that way.
> SE
You cannot go that way.
> SW
You cannot go that way.
> U
You cannot go that way.
> D
You cannot go that way.
> Quit
Okay, I'm just kidding, you can go North now. -- Mark Arenz -->N You cannot go that way.Ridiculopathy)

"Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program 'Good Morning America,' and on Saturday by CNN. There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject." Lawrence K. Altman --Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After AllNY Times--registration req'd)

"All you need to do is download the games, play them, and rate them. Although you are honor-bound to play and vote on as many games as possible, you may still vote as long as you have played five or more games. You may play each game for up to two hours before voting. If, after two hours have passed, you are still playing a game, you must record your vote before continuing play. You may not change that vote later. Rate each game on an integer scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. (The final score for each game will be the average of all scores submitted for that game.)" --Interactive Fiction Competition 2002IF Comp)

"To be sure, writers and artists need and deserve continued copyright protection. But Eldred's legions of backers maintain that the framers of our constitution never intended to extend that protection to the grandchildren of writers and artists. They add that it's also pretty unlikely that struggling artists would decide not to create something today because their heirs 100 or more years in the future won't be able to keep selling it. What's really happened, they say, is that corporations that outlive artists and creators have won legal protections that are hurting everyone else." Hal Plotkin --Free MickeySF Gate)

"In a celebration of the Public Domain, starting September 30, 2002, the Internet Archive's Bookmobile will be coming to a town near you, bringing with it the ability to access, download, and print one of the almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online." --Internet Archive BookmobileInternet Archive)