“A recently leaked trailer for The Return of the King has Tolkien fans outraged over the apparent addition of a new character – Jar-Jaromir. The scene depicted in the trailer shows Jar-Jaromir shouting, ‘Gondora gonna fallsa’; he then trips over a corpse and knocks down a couple of Uruk-hai.” Brian Biggs —Fans Outraged at New…
“2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year’s major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world.” Top 5 gaining Google queries from 2002: spiderman shakira winter olympics world cup avril lavigne Top 5 declining Google queries from…
“Creating imaginary worlds while trying to do it in a personal style to at least be able to retain some originality in my work, was always an enjoyable challenge for me and my favorite thing while drawing Fantasy themes.” Luis Peres —Fantasy Illustration by Luis Peresworld4mysheep.com)
“The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if…
Bjorn Lomborg – the director of Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute and a leading would-be debunker of mainstream scientific opinion on issues like global warming and overuse of natural resources – has been found guilty by a Danish government committee of ‘scientific dishonesty’. —Paul Brown —Anti-green Author Dishonest, Says Scientific Panel (Guardian) This is the peer-review process…
“Apparently Jennifer Lopez is coming out with a new ‘fragrance’ (which is what they call perfume these days, I guess) called Glow by J-Lo. Here’s some others that will follow on its heels. Mince by Prince This Is How You Should Smell by Martha Stewart Texas Tea by G.W.B. Free For The Taking by Winona…
“Welcome to Google Village. This is part of a wider project exploring, analyzing, detailing and educating people on the issues to do with the new skills required to communicate now and in the next century. Literacy is no longer the key attribute to desire, work for and acquire in this world of electronic language (where…
“The speed of gravity has been measured for the first time. The landmark experiment shows that it travels at the speed of light, meaning that Einstein’s general theory of relativity has passed another test with flying colours.” Hazel Muir —First Speed of Gravity Measurement Revealed New Scientist)
“There may well be people who abandon Neuromancer on the grounds that it’s riddled with sentence-fragments, but, in a sense, the sentence-fragments are there to scare off readers who aren’t ready for that, and to encourage those who want to see the envelope of language pushed even further, the pedal taken even closer to the…
“The MetroCard Vending Machines in New York’s subways are a classical case of programmer-directed hierarchical menu hell, forcing the user to make choices without knowing the consequences, and throwing the user off altogether at the smallest problem. With a little careful thought, we are able to improve the interaction considerably, while at the same time…
“This is the story of the revival of York Mystery Plays from the Festival of Britain in 1951 to the present day told by the many individuals who have been involved with the Plays – whether as actors, stage hands or front of house – through their personal memories, photographs and press cuttings.” —York Mystery…
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.1 I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife . . . . gave me…
“The high-tech industry plans to launch a sophisticated new lobbying campaign later this month to strike back against Hollywood in a battle to shape rules of the road for new digital technologies. The Business Software Alliance and Computer Systems Policy Project….hope to convince Congress that strict copy-protection legislation that sets technological mandates would stifle innovation,…
“Clonaid, linked with a group that believes life on Earth was originally cloned by aliens, said two women had given birth to babies it had cloned. It at first said it would present DNA evidence but has delayed doing so.” —A Name for Clone Babies: ‘Hoax’ Wired) More news from the department of “duh”: the…
“Big media barons are routinely accused of dominating markets, dumbing down the news to plump up the bottom line, and forcing U.S. content on world audiences. But these companies are not as big, bad, dominant, or American as critics claim. And company size is largely irrelevant to many of the problems facing today’s Fourth Estate.”…
“I heard of the play when it opened in Paris. But I am ashamed to say I did not see it. I had no idea that it would shortly dominate my life….My 16-year-old daughter was baffled by the programme material detailing the play’s controversial history. ‘What on earth is there to understand?’ she said. ‘It’s…
“In 1811 the Herr von Reisswitz, the Prussian War Counselor at Breslau invented an innovative wargame. First, he constructed a table with a model actual terrain. He then represented units by blocks. Each side would give their orders to an umpire who was required to update the terrain table, resolve combat and tell each sides…
“In what will surely be regarded as one of the best science-fiction ‘fan film’ projects of all time, a pair of ‘Star Trek’ fanatics have created a new episode in exacting 1960s style using their own actors, sets and props.” Julio Ojeda-Zapata —“Star Trek” Reborn in Online EpisodePioneer Press) Sigh. I am such a Trek…
“You find technology virgins everywhere: Teachers who insist on getting detailed training for every new piece of technology that shows up; librarians who refuse to figure out the Internet text searching tools; doctors who won’t use computer technology because it is beneath them; managers who deny their employees access to the Internet. Common to them…
“Proposal. Develop a false website and organization concentrating on the newest national concern: videogame addiction and violence. This organization is called Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence (MAVAV, www.mavav.org). There is a great amount of stereotypes about people who play videogames (anti-social, depressed, unintelligent) and a lot of videogame violence bashing and blame (scapegoat) by…