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2000	Oct 12	Rhetorica Professor Lanham's snazzy business. Good inspiration for Zairja.com.
2001	Apr 12	A Prisoner's Dictionary Prison words!
		A Theoretically Motivated Tool for Automatically Generating Command Aliases HCI/AI convergence - it figures out what you like to do, etc.
		ADWEEK.COM Big New Yorkish mag about my beloved, evil industry.
		ATT-Meta Project MENTAL METAPHOR DATABANK Metaphors of mind
		Adolf Hitler and Volkswagen Hitler designed the damn thing. Look and see.
		Adventure in Prolog The game “Adventure” written in Prolog - engine, logic, and NLP together.
		All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Spooky Richard Brautigan cyberpoem.
		Anal Piercing Experience How to get a stud up in that bad place.
		Argus Center for Information Architecture General site for IA.
		Aziz Gokdemir's Archive Aziz Gokdemir is a tremendous writer.
		Batik SVG Toolkit Batik, Java SVG engine from Apache that interfaces with FOP.
		Bookstores in New York City (Manhattan) Fairly definitive and frequently updated list of Manhattan bookstores. Dover Books!
		C-SPAN.org Cable's gift to the ignorant populace.
		Celestial Grammar 1.3 Pornographic grammar; easy to remember.
		Chapter 1: Ergodic Literature Ergodic = RPGs and suchlike.
		Chronology of Artificial Intelligence History of AI in little blurby text.
		CoreLex Extension to Wordnet; can't remember exactly what it does.
		Creating Informal Looking Interfaces Sketched/drawn interface development and effects of the same.
		Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia Overall reference for culture-jamming types and hoaxsters.
		Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - Chinese room Chinese Room defined.
		Disturbing Auctions Good for a laugh.
		Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Basic metadata framework for adding meta-information to Web pages; dc: namespace.
		Electronic Activist Advocating for the separation of Church and State.
		English Literature: Early 17th Century (1603-1660) Graphics heavy but good content.
		Episodic writing Theory of screen narratives and others by Michael Stutz.
		Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life Lit and culture 'zine I promise myself to check out later.
		FAQ for comp.lang.functional Introduction and overview, with language descriptions, related to functional programming.
		FBI - Freedom of Information Act - Frank Sinatra Sinatra's FBI file - 2038 pages of Frank!
		Famous Curves Index Beautiful curves, so many beautiful curves.
		Horowitz's Notepad: Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too Racist bullshit in its purest form.
		HotAIR - Rare and well-done tidbits from the Annals of Improbable Research Journal of Improbably Research
		Interconnected -I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons- Various topics, including the XMLish.
		Interfacing Annotea Via JavaScript JavaScript interface to JavaScript via W3C.
		Jason Hutchens Hutch! Behind Megahal, and then coworker at Ai. All-around Web/AI/Language fellow.
		LARRY HAUSER: Philosophy Resources, Etc. Hauser is very anti-Searle; neat stuff.
		LIBR.ORG Social-activist librarian's site.
		Left Business Observer Always interesting; one of those classic inside-print lefty zines from backwhen.
		Logical Pluralism \| Log Fascinating Weblog of research into logical pluralism, which I don't understand, but still, it's fascinating.
		MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System Cool CM system.
		Making a Moral Corporation: Artificial Morality Applied Info on creating a corporation that doesn't fuck people.
		Middle of Nowhere by Brad Cox Synthesis site from former academic.
		New Scientist Alas, poor Hal, I knew him.
		New York City Department Of Health - EHS Rats We're Working Together How to deal with rats in your apartment. Keep the baby up.
		New York City Documents Handy city docs of various stripes.
		Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics Useful advice from John Sowa.
		Orbis Romanus Atlas of the classical world.
		Part 4: Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence [565] Long bib of AI info.
		People with online papers in philosophy Many AI-related philosophical papers in the midst.
		Perl Contains the Lambda-Calculus Functional programming in Larry Wall's shitpile of language.
		Personal Ads: Flatulent British Gnome, Toothless, Not Seeking Romantic Sunsets Comparison between NYC and English personal ads.
		Pixbarn: Package Design, etc Odd trash bits and noise from the world of selling stuff, esp. food.
		Place and Zipcode file documentation Places and Zipcodes from the US census.
		Powers, Richard Richard Powers home page and caricature.
		Problems in Web Fiction Random thoughts on hypertext; old.
		Publications of David Mertz Pomo interpretations of tech, biology, and other factors.
		Re: xsl:key Handy advice for :key function.
		Richard Kennaway's Constructed Languages List Constructed languages, like Logsdsghhffu3-rh and Klurnggogn.
		SHOT Scholarship in the Humanities info.
		STS - The Society for Textual Scholarship Nothing could be uglier, visually, than this Web site.
		SWISH-E 2 So simple, so fast, so sweet. Indexes like a demon. What's not to like about SWISH?
		SemanticWeb.org General semantic Web stuff; biased towards business.
		Shielded from Justice: New York Problems with cops; plenty of evil included.
		Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric Nice rhetoric reference. Too bad language is so damn fuzzy. But still.
		Softpanorama: (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society Great, general mental flea market from Nikolai Bezroukov.
		Substructural Logics They're weaker than regular logic, but strong on their own. Whoo!
		TNR Online \| Automatic Writing by Keith Gessen Digital writing info.
		Textism Consistently good, I say, and put-up regular-like.
		The Morning News Snazzy blog/zine from a bunch of folks, some of whom seem to be Brooklynites.
		The New York Times: Movies NYTimes current film reviews and links to most current movies.
		The Oxford Text Archive The long-surviving OTA, with etexts galore.
		The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot Harnad - symbol grounding, etc.
		The Story Machine Scott McCloud's very own zairjat.
		The Third Rail Online Magazine Good for Subway info.
		User Interface Engineering Big on Flash and similar technologies.
		Welcome to RDFWeb Home of FOAF and other techs...
		Wizard's Gay slang dictionary Throrough Gay slang dict; British emphasis if I remember.
		Wordnet 1.6 - WordNet One of many Web interfaces to Wordnet, but probably the best.
		World New York Classic Blog; great links always, or at least often.
		WriteTheWeb: news for web users who write back Infrequently updated Web-content Weblog.
		Writing a Business Plan Instructions on crafting your biz plan.
		Writings and Musings Bob Frankston's articles and essays.
		XSLT FAQ Dave Pawson's de-facto XSLT FAQ.
		XSLT Standard Library Dates, times, expressions, all in li'l XSLT. Bad idea? Good?
		Xanalogical Structure: Now More Than Ever Ted Nelson's latest wackiness; more thorough and quite interesting stuff, but hard to implement with a sluggish processor.
		Yiddish/Hebrew words Yiddish/Hebrew word list with defs. Handy.
		[ -- nDroid -- ] Couldn't be any friggin' cuter, could it?
		agonizer.com Outstanding crank zine.
		development economics Economics related to developing/new economies.
		forensic-linguistics discussion list Forensic linguistics listserv.
		i C S - INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY Journal for data/culture dorks.
		sugar Holly's consistently funny blog.
		yourDictionary.com General words, thesaurus, etc.
	Oct 9	AlterNet -- All I Am Saying Is Give War a Chance Amusingly angry Michael Moore on American war in Afghanistan.
		Ted Nelson Interview w/BBC Crabby Ted Nelson Interview.
		The Anti-War Movement's Challenge Seems to sum up a big swath of the left.
	Oct 10	Bert in Bangladesh Bert of Bert and Ernie in a seriously weird, probably accidental media hack.
		Protege-2000: Home Page An ontology development tool in Java.
		RDF Interest Group IRC Scratchpad, last cranked at 2001-10-10 19:43 RDF interest group links, churned from IRC logs.
		The Foundation Center - Your gateway to philanthropy on the World Wide Web Getcher grants here.
		“get your war on” War Comix.
	Oct 11	An Informed Public Is the Greatest Weapon of Democracy Slightly boring article against secrecy.
		FOAF RDF Vocabulary: Schema version 0.1 Friend of a Friend RDF language
		PURL - Persistent URL Home Page Where URLS can stay safe forever.
		RDFWeb General Overview RDFWeb is a testbed initiative by some principal SemWeb folks.
		Red Rock Eater Digest - attack General Tech/Society links from 11 Oct 2001.
		Semantic Web Application Platform CWM home page from TBL.
		Uprizer Interesting Web company found on RDFig weblog.
	Oct 12	Even in the Ruins, Race Matters Looting, racism part of the WTC cleanup.
		Fop XSL formatting objects processor written in Java - can't handle turning all of Ftrain to PDF, though.
		Mark Twain on War and Imperialism Twain's writings against U.S. Imperialist policies. We should have listened.
		Summary of John W. Kaye's History of the War in Afghanistan by Frederick Engels Afghanistan and imperialism in the 1800s.
		US Department of State - Home Page The official word from the men in charge.
		USC/ISI - DAML WebScripter Project Integrating SemWeb stuff into spreadsheets, etc.
	Oct 13	A Real-Time CSound Orchestra Further work in RTSound manipulation by Csound.
		Mapping the Web Infome Making pretty maps of the Infobahn
		Schnackertronics Real time looping/phase shifter programmed in Csound (with interface).
		The war over the narrative Weird doublethink from the land of milk, honey, and men named Uzi.
		Waiting for the barbarians USA vs Roman Empire.
	Oct 14	Amazon.com: buying info: I Had a Frightmare! Pile-on on Bill Keane at Amazon.
		Cartoonists Struggle With Patriotism, Terror Attacks Aaron McGruder's been shackled by the man. (Unfair and stupid newspaper reaction.)
		DEVIN'S ART PAGE Devin Esch is a 5 year old girl with a rockin' Web site.
		Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. Cranky, cranky athiests. But dammit, they're right!
		How do we justify, sell, and measure IA and usability? A few things to think about re: selling the stuff; useful.
		Noise Between Stations weblog Neat blog by an IA; links to me, but I respect it anyway.
		Parsons Information Architecture course syllabus Information architecture course at Parsons.
		Strange Connections -- Information Architecture Archive of past articles by Peter Morville on this spanking new discipline. Spanking! Via Noise Between Stations.
	Oct 15	Aphthonius Progymnasmata Translation of a progymnasmata guidebook.
		Beyond the Web: Electronic Texts for the 21st Century Panel to discuss the future of text w/emphasis on humanities research.
		FIPA RDF Content Language Specification Intelligent Agent specifications in RDF.
		Ghurkas Screwed by the Man The legendary Ghurkas, an elite Nepalese fighting force who fight for Britain, receive crap wages and lousy benefits.
		High-Tech Cardboard Boxes Used In Afghan Food Airdrops The mechanics of dropping food from an airplane.
		IBN KHALDUN - His Life and Work Khaldun - nifty medieval social theorist, wrote the Prolegomena.
		Men loading 1000lb bombs Impressionistic image of men loading 1000 pound bombs onto planes on the USS Carl Vinson. Oddly, I've stood on the Vinson's flight deck.
		Mil. Photographer of Year Competition Winners of Military photo competition. Some lovely, some sad, some very normal.
		Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination Pictures of water fountains, hotels, and restaurants from America during the depression.
		R. Keith Sawyer's Home Page Academic researcher (but very readable) who is studying improvisation in social narratives from a cognitive perspective, among other things.
		The Journal of Mundane Behavior Fantastic scholarly journal of everyday life; articles on “The Improvisation of Everyday Life” among other topics.
		Umberto Eco: The Roots of Conflict Thoughtful Eco on the conflict, from Counterpunch.
		progymnasmata 14 classical writing exercises.
	Oct 16	Ken Alibek: For the Biodefense Today, Alibek works for antidotes to germ warfare at Hadron, Inc, but he used to work manufacturing germs for the Soviets.
		Loebner 2001 Photos The Loebner is over! A.L.I.C.E. won.
		The Suda On Line (SOL) Massive dictionary from the Byzantine era, now being translated to the Web.
	Oct 17	Inside.com and Brill's Content to Close -- This Time We Really Mean It Sheer bitterness. ``Thirty-eight people, including the author of this story, lost their jobs.''
	Oct 18	A Smarter Web Middling-quality overview of the SemWeb from Mark Frauenfelder.
		RDF Interest Group IRC Scratchpad Funny criticism of the Fraunfelder article, by epistemology rock star Bijan Parsia.
		Search Engine Positioning: Link popularity and the Bowtie Theory The Bowtie theory of Web site relevance.
		Thoughts on Total Coverage Jim Esch on ambiguous war emotions.
	Oct 21	The Fortyfour, Inc. Neat DIY folks in Jersey - bands, blogs, bits.
	Oct 24	Celebrity Magnet Jim Esch writes a great article on Martin Guitars, a company with at least a smattering of ethics.
		Emacs at Freshmeat New version of EMACS! A reason for joy in this Godless world.
	Oct 25	American Translators Association Translation Services Directory Search Find a translator (and a translator's Web site) by language.
		The Glenn Gould Archive A collection of Gould resources.
	Oct 26	Business Model for the Semnatic Web - Design Issues Tim Berners-Lee on the Business Possibilities of the Semantic Web.
	Oct 28	Colin Powell Not Smiling He's clearly not having a good enough time.
		IAwiki: DeliverablesAndArtifacts Wiki page describing Information Architecture deliverables.
	Oct 29	Sentient Computing Project Home Page ``What could we do if computer programs could see a model of the world? By acting within the world, we would be interacting with programs via the model. It would seem to us as though the whole world were a user interface.''
		VNC - Virtual Network Computing from AT&T Laboratories Cambridge Open-source tool that allows you to view any desktop from another - Mac, Windows, Unix.
	Oct 30	A Movie Theater Marquee Someone probably got fired for that...
	Oct 31	ICP : Games : Fact Party Fact Party! I want to play.
		Language Toy An online word-muncher.
		List of Prepositions Nice long list of prepositions.
		Stuttercut Stuttercut, if it comes back, will be sweet.
		Wiiski: User.WebHome Cool new Wiki approach; integrates chat and other features.
	Nov 1	After 8 Years, U.S. Economy Finally Falters ``The recession has begun,''
		The Devil and Sonny Liston Kendall Clark wants me to read this book. He says it's the sort of book Norman Mailer would write, if he could write.
	Nov 2	AROS: Analysis, Reasoning and Optimisation based on Semantics Interesting research lab in Denmark fiddling around with various semantic/logical strategies.
		Dismal Scientist Layoff Calculator Find out your chances of being fired. (Via Jim).
		Power Tower Jim Esch on his love for the Amiga, and the waiting and sadness entailed thereof.
	Nov 4	Stuttercut Stuttercut came back. Sweet!
	Nov 5	See the World, One Personal URL at a Time ``Personal Web sites have even evolved their own genre of writing: the rant.'' Please kill me.
	Nov 6	Brokentype Ali Handro has unique brilliance; the story of his lawn is told with style and wit.
	Nov 7	A List Apart: The Narrative Web Mark Bernstein on e-narrative.
	Nov 8	Jim Crow on Fraternity Row Fraternities in blackface. Completely disgusting. Meet the new south, same as the old south.
	Nov 12	Narrative Technologies Blog by Jeremy Bushnell.
	Nov 13	The Learning Machine Web Learning machines! Machines that learn! And think! And do!
	Nov 14	How Dare They - While we have our hands on our hearts, they're trying to pick our pockets! Overview and analysis of war profiteering by big conglomerates.
		net.narrative environments Net Narrative Environments. Sweet-seemin' 'blog.
	Nov 19	A Logical Mnemonic for Calendaring and Scheduling How to build calendars and schedules using var SemWeb techs.
		The RDF Query Language (RQL) SQL for RDF.
	Nov 20	The Foreign Policy Therapist Wallace Shawn writes the Foreign Policy Therapist, as America.
	Nov 25	The Jakarta Site - The Jakarta Project More and more it looks like Java is the way to go for building big Web sites - toolkits like JSP, Ant, Lucene, and Tomcat seem to hold together with fewer seems than comparable CGI solutions.
		lfs.nl A site to take to a desert island, filled with things that move when you touch them. There's much there, but overall it feels unfinished, which is wonderful - it gives you the sense of more to come, of gaps to be filled and new ideas to come in to round out the edges. Any Web site that feels complete and finished, I think, especially this early in the Web's history, has set its sights too low.
	Nov 26	A Model of the Semantic Web Value Chain Biz+SemWeb.
	Nov 30	U. of I. teaching assistants walk out Go grad students! Unionize! Unionize!
	Dec 2	Telling A Story John Udell of Byte.com on Web Narrative.
	Dec 4	Christopher G. Healey Neat data-visualization techs from NCSU professor. Your tax dollars at work!
		History Assisted Navigation Ways to sort and structure the Web-browser's “history” file to make it more accessible and useful.
		Semantic Web Conference Semantic Web conference is going to be held in 2002 in Sardinia, Italy, the hotbed of Semantic Web development.
		The Moral Life of Geeks A previously unseen Kendall Clark on the moral questions geeks face in choosing their work.
	Dec 5	Monkeyfist.com: Our Monkey, Your Fist Monkeyfist relaunches and it's lookin FINE.
	Dec 6	SWWS Final Report Semantic Web conference proceedings - scan down (12 meg PDF!)
	Dec 7	Open Lending Database Project Neat code for sharing information as to what you own, so that you might lend it to others.
	Dec 8	AlterNet -- Israel in 600 Words or Less Summary of how Israel goes.
		When Voice Recognition Leads to Bias Racism in action: sound Black on the realtor's answering machine, and they won't take your call. Sound white and they call back right away. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
	Dec 13	Art's Theremin Page Thereminmania!
		MCV1a Theremin Midi/CV Interface MIDI interface to Theramins.
	Dec 18	6 Year Old Girl Sjambokked to Death A sjambok is a kind of heavy whip.
	Dec 22	Genesis Prelude Jim Esch on Mike Rhombus' prog-rock attempts.
	Dec 24	Wasis Diop Senegalese/Parisian musician; looks worthy of some outlay for albums.
	Dec 27	The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster E.M. Forster techno-critical sci-fi short story from 1909.
	Dec 28	WordsEye WordsEye converts sentences to pictures. Type: “John stands on the floor and gives the tree to Mary.” WordsEye creates an image.
	Dec 29	CamRants: The I Have a Big Dick Awards Cameron Barrett says “go fuck yourself, Mr. Winer.”
2002	Jan 1	DIVIDE BY ZERO Cute and cool fonts from a young font designer, all free.
	Jan 2	Coliseum Books ...is closing. One of the best New York bookstores, soon to be gone.
	Jan 3	Quotes from Hollywood Squares with Paul Lynde Peter Marshall: The Atlantic Ocean is the major body of water on Africa's west coast. What major body lies off Africa's east coast? Paul Lynde: Ex-president Mobutu.
	Jan 4	A Little Parrot Humor A collection of bad parrot jokes.
		Buddy, Socks's Nemesis, Is Dead Buddy, the best thing about the Clinton administration, was hit by a car.
		Data and Reality [Excerpts] A programmer looks at the relationship between data the real world itself.
	Jan 10	Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction Interactive Fiction, looked upon all serious-like.
	Jan 16	whygodwhy/2001 08 20 “Acre for acre you're talking the same amount of zombies.”
	Jan 17	Song, by Ezra Pound Sing Goddamm! Goddamm!
	Jan 28	One Week Later Jim Esch is feeling under the weather in more ways than one, and does something fine with it.
		Statistics Every Writer Should Know Within a margin of error, what's a median mean?
	Jan 30	Julia A. Moore, “Sketch of Lord Byron's Life” I feel that this is perhaps the finest poem ever written in the English Language.
	Jan 31	Attorney General: “America Must Cease to be a Lurid Statuary of Deviant Sex” - WHITEHOUSE.ORG It's the picture that gets me.
	Feb 5	Fabulous Baker Boy Why Dean Baker is the best economics commentator out there, by a former economics professor. Dean Baker has a Terkel rating of .91.
		Lester Bangs on “Astral Weeks” Brilliant Bangs' meandering, implicitly Lorca-comparing essay on Astral Weeks, which is the best album on Sundays.
		Matewan Birthday Cake The Matewan Massacre of 1920: now in tasty cake form.
		Monkeyfist Celebrates Black History Month It's BHM over at MonkeyFist. How are you celebrating?
		To a Young Child, by Gerard Manley Hopkins It's bouncy hokum, but I love it.
	Feb 7	Armenian National Institute Resources on the Armenian Genocide.
	Feb 11	Dick Cheney on his way to meet with the GAO Or maybe it's something with a birthday cake.
		Jutes, Angles and Saxons Background on the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons.
	Feb 14	Author blasts firms for hostile practices Good article on Jill Fraser, who spoke in West Chester, PA critiquing corporate management practices. By Jim Esch.
	Feb 15	obscura: advice: 000529 I asked for advice in 2000, and received it. The images are beautiful.
	Feb 16	Otherkin FAQ v 4.0 Beta (1/6/01) “A good example is: Are all elves physically or energetically sensitive to metal/iron? No. But perhaps as much as 30% or so are. It certainly seems to be a trend.”
	Feb 18	18 Feb 2002 Poignant, strong personal narrative about a socially lost classmate, by Dervala Hanley.
		Humiliating Events 1 Ali Handro writes on love, frisbees, and dog shit, and the reader squirms and shivers.
		Humiliating Events 2 Ali Handro on a cabbage patch doll and a moment of terror. Excellent as usual.
		The time has come to talk of many things... Scroll to 09 January - “Tomorrow I go in front of the judge, again.” Excellent personal narrative about alcoholism. Recommended to me by Leslie./
	Feb 19	Cheap Zoo - Satisfaction Maybe An extremly inexpensive animal experience.
		Mike & Jill Mike and Jill are friends. Nothing naughty, just friends. They are also bears.
	Feb 20	The Pitt News - Hard-shelled A CMU student is living for 3 months in a house he built in silence dressed as a lobster attached to an umbilical cord doing exercises and blowing on a horn. See pictures.
		whygodwhy: “Things I would say to Paul Ford if he was the receptionist in my office.” Hmm. It's #6 that bugs me the most. Do I parry, or pretend not to have heard?
	Feb 21	The Bark Unleashed: The Bark Web Site Dog is my copilot! A Web site for people who have the dog problem. Like me. I have the dog problem.
	Feb 23	Angie With Santa A Boston Terrier with an amazing face. An unhappy-looking Santa.
		Literacy Assistance Center: How to get involved New York Literary Assistance center.
	Feb 24	Pundits on Fire in Hell A very kind reader recently sent me the audio file that went with this piece; I thought it was lost forever. Classic Ftrain Scott Rahin/Paul Ford interaction, resurrected from the digital graveyard, plus hardcore trombone fury.
		Stuff: Broken Jokes Jokes without the humor, for comic effect.
	Feb 25	pseudodictionary This site is epic and perfect; I discovered it because its founder sent me a poem for the Ftrain poetry anthology. Example: “dot-com boyfriend/girlfriend - A sexual or romantic partner who requires a high level of investment, on which you will never see any return.” Stunning fun for word goofs.
	Feb 27	Colours of Resistance Bringing together anti-racism and anti-globalization into a good package.
	Feb 28	ErnieFord.com! Load 16 tons and what do you get? I'm sure he sang other songs, but that was more than enough.
		My Home Town - Tom Lehrer “I remember Sam, he was the village idiot/And though it seems a pity, it/Was so/He loved to burn down houses just to /watch the glow/And nothing could be done/Because he was the mayor's son”
		National Brotherhood Week - Tom Lehrer “Oh, the white folks hate the black folks/And the black folks hate the white folks/To hate all but the right folks/Is an old established rule.” God in heaven, please send a new Tom Lehrer.
		Ryokan The story of Ryokan.
		Ryokan: Zen Poet Ryokan was a Zen monk. He wrote love poems to Teishin.
		You've Got To Be Carefully Taught Oscar and Hammerstein song. “You've got to be taught how to hate and fear.” Via Plurp.
	Mar 1	Alternatives to Corporate Globalization There's more than one way to do it. From Philly Indymedia.
		Princess Superstar's Lyrics for Princess Superstar Is It's “Bad Babysitter,” Without a question.
	Mar 4	Cybernetics and librarianship - a fifty year perspective on where we've been and where we're going Our own “chronological chauvinism” attributes the digital age we are living in today as the biggest technological change in the history of the world. And that may well turn out to be true, but the late 19th century was the greatest period of technological change to date in terms of things that affected huge numbers of people's lives in very fundamental ways.
		Reverse Chronological Snobbery? Belief and chronology.
		tremble - i did this. Actually, most female drummers are billed as “quiet and mysterious”, which is generally a polite way of saying “obese and surly.”
	Mar 5	The ZULU! Website “It is time to stop seeking excuses for the British defeat at Isandlwana, and to start instead to think of it as a Zulu victory.” Cool site on 1879 Anglo/Zulu war.
	Mar 7	Brouhaha at the crabshack “Lobster” performance artist has been attacked by fraternity members! “Three of the four arrested who could be reached denied damaging the property. The police report stated that mong the items damaged were a 250 lb. statue of a giraffe, ”an acrylic prop used for a play,“ and the building itself. One of the actors said a staircase may have collapsed while several of the participants were inside.”
		Dancing the Macarena for a talk with Lobster Boy Painful-to-read article about trying to interact with Lobster Boy.
		Hard-shelled, part 2 Lobster boy “explained” by CMU administration.
		Pedantical Graffitti A beautiful and honest web rant - Jim goes ballistic over a critic of Wordsworth. “It made my thumbs sweat.”
	Mar 10	Lincoln's Body Exhumed One last look at Abe Lincoln in 1901 before he was buried in several tons of concrete. He was still recognizable.
	Mar 11	making the wobble vision How to make a Wobble Vision. This was originally written up by my friend Steve Pav, but his copy is down for the time being.
		the Jer zone Riffing off Ftrain, a writer describes his own Wobblevision experiences.
	Mar 13	Access to Insight: Readings in Theravada Buddhism Excellent, well put-together Web site on Theravada Buddhism; a very strong editorial vision matched with a passion for the materials and a rarely seen diligence for editing and linking.
		The Arm in the Wall “The arm belongs to the boy's father. The uncle killed the father in this basement, and in doing so he maimed the father so horribly that even his ghost cannot show his face.”
	Mar 14	Van Alen Institute: East River Information Site Thorough site on the East River - politics, ecology, maps.
	Mar 17	Joey Skags NYC hoaxster - creator of the Cathouse for Dogs, troublemaker.
		Oral History Techniques Pamphlet Handy, straightforward oral history interviewing guidelines.
	Mar 18	Acuncompendium The story of Nathan Barley, all cut-up-like. Beautiful and profane.
		Michael Bader Interesting shrink.
		Sense of Place Bibliography A bibliography of books related to “A Sense of Place.”
	Mar 23	Fireland Fireland is on hiatus.
	May 14	FirstGov.gov search for “Semantic Web” Results for a search on “Semantic Web” for FirstGov.
		Managing external tables for SWI-Prolog External tables (text only) for SWI-Prolog.
		SWI-Prolog to SQL bridge. (ORACLE&ODBC) Connecting SWI-Prolog to SQL, allowing an SQL database to be used as a db of prolog facts and converting prolog statements to SQL queries.
		User evaluation of automatically generated semantic hypertext links in a heavily used procedural manual When a manual on the Web gets semantic links added automatically, everyone JUST GOES CRAZY. With subtitles.
		Voices From the Gaps: Octavia Butler Supergenius literary sci-fi. Not to be missed; beats the pants off your average cyberpunk-type. The Parable of the Talents, in particular, is a harrowing book.
	May 15	Reports from the Field Interview with yours truly about character and narrative on the Web, in which I sound kinda pretentious. But hey. Hey.
		Robot seal “could lift nursing home mood” “Our goal is to give joy and relief to people through interaction (with the robot),” Wada said.
		Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science A New Kind of Hype. Stephen Wolfram proclaims self genius again; writes big hoo-ha cellular automata book proclaiming to reinvent science, 99.9999999% of world responds with massive shrug, .0000001% of self-important cawing jackdaw science-types get all flustered and write reviews all over the Global Interweb and in New Scientist or whatever. King Bullshit assumes 1000-year throne. Why, why, WHY must I be programmed to listen and read the work of that .0000001%?
		The Rotter's Club Suggested by a friend; has a group of kids who form an art-rock band called “Gandalf's Pikestaff.”
	May 18	Lambda the Ultimate I never mentioned this site, but I love it dearly. All about programming, particularly functional programming, which is the kind of programming that people in academia, especially those who spend a lot of time writing papers that say “functional programming is actually better than [programming paradigm X]” while the (business) world ignores them, use. A fun and useful and consistently edifying site.
		Mondeca - Making your Business Content more Intelligent “Mondeca provides a software solution enabling enterprises to efficiently and intelligently organize business content.” All that and directed graphs. Whoo!
	May 19	Agent-Based Computational Economics (Tesfatsion) “Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. ACE is thus a specialization to economics of the basic complex adaptive systems paradigm.”
		Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network Using machines for good causes (like lowering recidivism, keeping people out of jail, etc).
		Paul Ford - www.ezboard.com Steve Burns fans discussing Ftrain in a Steve Burns context. Please share your own feelings.
	May 20	Colour Order Systems in Art and Science (English, French, German) 59 systems of color, richly linked and explained.
		WHY ACADEMIC BOYCOTT Tanya Reinhart on the proposed Academic Boycott of Israel (short version: Academics are just as political as everyone else, and an international academic boycott is a valid idea).
	May 22	Catching the Dreams Pat Hayes on different approaches to logic for the Web.
		SUO: Re: REQUEST: survey of available ontologies... Sowa on Semantic Web standards. Ouch.
		Spreadsheets Opinionated review of spreadsheet history and present state-of-the-art.
	May 23	Steven Beck's Direct Video Synthesizer & Video Weaver The ultimate Wobblevision.
	May 26	Sketching Device #1 Manipulated speakers generating random sketches. Ah!
	May 28	Concurrent Markup for XML Documents How to create overlapping hierarchies, which is something I often run into when building Ftrain. I know you don't care, not one bit. But I need overlapping hierarchies.
	May 29	Ramon Llull (Raymond Lull/Lully) resources Excellent Raymond Lull resource.
	Jun 3	JOHO Emergency Instructions Surviving a nuclear war: wear a hat.
		Nuclear War Survival Skills A handy guide, with a foreward by no less than pro-nuke loon Edward Teller.
	Jun 4	XML.com: Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful [May. 29, 2002] Walter Perry gets upset about standard data vocabularies.
	Jun 5	Alan W. Pollack's Notes on “You Never Give Me Your Money” A reminder that the Beatles are not a musical group, but a lifestyle choice.
		U.S. Will Seek to Fingerprint Visas' Holders An extraordinarily bad, stupid precedent to set.
	Jun 12	The Shins One of the best bands I've heard in a long, you might even say long-ass, time.
	Jun 15	The Rape Blog A weblog focused only on rape.
	Jun 16	9/11 Bridged the Racial Divide, New Yorkers Say, Gingerly Thoughtful, well-sourced article on racism in NYC post Sept-11.
	Jun 17	Quakers and the Political Process - Presidents Nixon and Hoover - Quakers!
	Jun 18	the eXile #137 - Feature Story - 911 Things To Hate About America 911 reasons to hate America.
	Jun 20	U.S. Vows to Prosecute on Iraq Sanctions; Sacks Says He Won't Pay Scary U.S. prosecution of man who violates Iraq sanctions (to give medicine to kids). Jesus.
	Jun 22	Africa Famine Relief (UMCOR) 12.8 million people are going to starve in Africa. I go to the gym to work off ice-cream pudge. Ergo, time to get out the credit card.
	Jun 24	Pics of Sheep and Lambs Pictures of sheep.
	Jun 25	Tonie's Kladblok - scrollen verplicht in naam der hyperlink Nothing beats having your work discussed in a language you can't understand. “Ik durf te wedden dat u Ftrain voor het eerst ziet,” indeed.
	Jun 26	The Nando Times: Crime, repression breed prolific video industry in Nigeria The thriving Nigerian film industry. Via RobotWisdom.
	Jun 27	Africa Daily - daily news and current events Broad portal filled with Africa news.
		Kenya Broadcasting Corporation: Man killed by giraffe!
		Social Sciences Weblog Useful-lookin' weblog about the Social Sciences; links to a wide range of sources. And, whoa, coincidence, it's obvious that Paul Nijjar reads the thing, go Paul Nijjar!
		Transnational Corporations Observatory Beautiful big site about corporate hoo-ha and transgenics and all the other stuff people do for themselves, hoping they don't get caught.
		VeeJay A tracker - ala SoundTracker - but for video. Any which way run the images until reels the mind.
		floating wreckage:jettisoned cargo A more or less perfect Weblog - news, organization, elegance, content. Yikes.
	Jun 28	Africa Links from the U.S. Military A large helping of links on Africa.
		Arab-Americans of New York City Featured in Museum Exhibit A good token effort.
		New Rose Hotel (1998) Somehow it happened that they made a movie of New Rose Hotel and I never, ever found out about it. Damn.
		The Village Voice: Film: Flop House by Amy Taubin A review of New Rose Hotel, the Movie. “Instead, what's on the screen is so dreadful that it inspires the ontological question 'What are films and why is this not one of them?'”
		William Gibson. New Rose hotel William Gibson's best short story, I think - transational tech, sex, and the redemptionless hollow ache of those who deserve no better.
	Jun 29	U.S. Treasury Sec. O'Neill Visits “Beachhead” Data-Processing Firm - State Dept. Information Programs Dumb even for a rock star: Bono said, “Anyone who's interested in investing in Ghana has only to look at these people, the smartest, hardest workers anywhere.” Referring to the notion that the corporate world exploits low wages, he said, “I think as long as the employees of such places and the governments are exploiting the corporate world in a sort of symbiotic relationship, I think that's fine.”
	Jul 1	Shocked and Angry: The Prophet Whose Warnings Over Wall Street Were Ignored At 93 J.K. Galbraith is still a cranky, excellent fellow, and past Dean Baker there aren't many other economists who seem to care about human beings at all. He's talking here about the various corporate disasters, careful as always not to pontificate - and thus seeming smarter than an entire cadre of finance pundits. (Via RobotWisdom)
	Jul 2	Miss Ghana Her name is Precious, she's studying biochemistry with the goal of being a neurosurgeon, and has a big, big basket on her head. The world is an interesting place filled with a variety of people, some of them who have baskets on their heads. I wish more potential neurosurgeons had baskets on their heads. I also wish I could balance a basket on my head like that. I would put a puppy in it and walk around Brooklyn.
	Jul 9	A History of the Mideast in the Humble Chickpea The argument between Israel and Palestine over the provenance of Falafel. Falafel Queens, which is mentioned in the article,IS the best falafel in Israel. I once walked 12 miles to go to Falafel Queens, to get the “green” falafel, and it was closed. That was a sad day.
		Beatrice: The Collected Interviews Collection of good, usually brief interviews with contemporary lit folks.
		Butter Sculpture Tibetan butter sculpture.
		Candace Bushnell The subject is a little icky, but the interviewer is a pretty amusing self-conscious Ftrain rider, and I feel an affinity for what she sees in Bushnell.
		Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art A large, important museum of Tibetan Art in in Staten Island, the hotbed of Tibetan culture.
		Steve's Web Page: Flaming Lips are more Beautiful than (some) Squirrels “Steve Burns,” or (so PARANOID) someone writing to impersonate Steve Burns (who COULD do such a TERRIBLE THING), describing a journey into FlamingLipsLand, a journey I shared.
		Steve's Web Page: Squirrels are Beautiful The squirrel that sounds something like me has been singing about squirrel love again. Click HEARTHEIRNEXTSONG to hear the squirrel's voice crack painfully, and to hear the lines “I got the best nest in the old oak tree/So come on up and squirrel with me/In the dark.” Can you believe it was recorded in only one take? When you hear the Squirrel STRAIN to sing the word "fleas"? Arrgh.
		The Morning News - Letter from the Editor "I told him, 'I'm basically trying to sound like a pompous twit.' He laughed and slapped the table. Paul, a large man, nearly tipped the damn thing over." Rosecrans on being paranoid about being a twit. I don't think he's a twit. I think he's pretty.
		Units of Measurement There are Scottish units of measurement here. That includes the lippie, which is a quarter of the Scottish peck. The Web is full of marvels deep and wide.
	Jul 11	Latin-English Dictionary Nice, functional resource, clickity click.
		The Librarian Stereotype and the Movies Hair buns, timidity, shushing - vicious stereotypes and slander!
		eclectic : Closer to a fork? Detailed, informative, amusing weblog based on the fuss and budgetry on the XML-DEV mailing list.
	Jul 12	Crochet Skull It's a crocheted skull. The copy that leads to the link above read “You will love it because it's so awesome.” Excellent.
		Mission Statement of BLTC Research Self-conscious project to ensure happiness and well-being engineering for all creation.
		Modafinil ( Provigil ) Stay awake for 40 hours with no bad side-effects. Then sleep 8 hours and do it again.
		RDF for mail filtering: FOAF whitelists What you do is generate a checksum based on your mailbox ID. Then you distribute that checksum, and people create “whitelists” (but let's call 'em goodlists, instead, okay, and get that color thing out of there, time for a little accuracy in our semantics) with your checksums - NOT your email address, that can't be guessed by looking at the checksum. And you add a list of your own addresses, see, everyone shares “good” email addresses in a big database and that way mail that comes from the peoples, the good peoples, can be flagged higher, and mail that comes from spam folks gets flagged lower. There you have it, a real application of the Semantic Web, although it doesn't fully exist yet, but yep.
		The Pragmatic Web: semantics as if surfers mattered Fun read: Jorn on Topic Maps, a bit, and other stuff.
	Jul 14	Audrey Easley Audrey Easley is the flautist for the Polyphonic Spree, which is a musical group. She had a great energy. She has a PERFECT CRUSH NAME, as in back in 7th grade I was so in love with Audrey Easley, and your friend says, Audrey Easley? Did you make that up? And you say, no, we were in band together, and your friend says, oh, God, you were in band? and you have to defend concert band and explain how Mr. Carl helped you a whole lot when your Dad kind of vanished and Audrey Easley was the one girl who was always really nice to everyone and she could totally tell you had a crush on her but she never did anything mean even though you were so broke that you had to wear your Dad's old clothes, and 15 years later you wish you could find her and thank her for just being a decent human being back then. Of course, Audrey Easley is from Texas, and I'm from Pennsylvania, so this is just tomfoolery, and I don't know a thing about Audrey Easley except that her name sort of sounds like the sort of name that someone would have if they were nice, and she could play flute.
		RDF Rich Site Summary (RSS) Thorough list of RSS-related resources (RSS is a way to summarize Web sites so that other sites can use them. But not just Web sites, really. You could do all manner of stuff.)
		SCHEMAS: Forum for Metadata Schema Designers and Implementers European Metadata Craziness! Watch out! They'll put the meta back in your data. Whoo!
		The Polyphonic Spree Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Web site is kind of rough around the edges, all the edges really. The Polyphonic Spree was the #1 geek-out concert - trombones and everything, a big-tent revival complete with white robes - I've ever been to, and my face hurt from enjoying it so much, and you know you've done something good for yourself if your face hurts. Which means that they did something good for me, which was nice, so I bought their album.
		We The Sheeple A page about criminal justice. Pretty great. I love the word Sheeple. "We The Sheeple is a New York City based criminal justice bulletin board produced by individuals concerned about activities and changes within our judicial system. Our view is that professional misconduct is commonplace, and that fundamental constitutional and human rights are being steadily eroded in the names of law and order, the war on crime, and the war on drugs. We believe these cases and issues are rarely reported in media or language accessible to the average person. Our goal is to encourage criminal justice reform by describing select cases in plain English."
		[mind G u t t e r] Enjoyable, mostly-photo Web site.
		onegoodmove Dandy lefty blog.
		sheeple Usage example for the word “sheeple.”
		sheeple Pseudodictionary definition of “sheeple.”
	Jul 15	Introduction to Genre Theory How do we classify genres? I'm asking this question (and Daniel Chandler is trying to answer it) because I want to classify work on Ftrain by genre - essay, fiction, semi-autobiographical fiction, science fiction, bald lying, pseudojournalism. Fiction contains science fiction, though - so I need not a list, but a taxonomy of forms. No examples seem to exist.
		RSS1.0 Modules Extensions to RSS1.0; the threading is particularly useful.
	Jul 17	Christianity and the Space Program Oh, whoa. Whoa. WHOA.
	Jul 18	Better Living Through Software How to create a Weblog in XSLT. This is not how I do it (forget Make; I just do it all in XSLT), but interesting nonetheless. I don't agree with his conclusions; Ftrain is simple, if sloppily coded, and generates an interlinked 500,000 word site, 1000-page site with a weblog and RDF output in about 40 seconds every time I run it. Uploading it is a simple act of mirroring XML via rsync, takes about 15 seconds on a 56K modem.
		Better Living Through Software Feedback from Josh Allen to other feedback on Josh Allen's post on XSLT. I forgot to mention that the first post had a link to Josh Allen's piece on Weblogs, and that's another Josh Allen, that's the one we know, the one in Maine. Basically I don't agree all that much with the stuff going on here; XSLT is a great tool for blogging/calendaring. I'm using it right this minute from my Web browser. I need to release my code, but I'm so lazy, so tired, so busy, so wanting to write stories instead. Ah, ah, alas.
		Doing the lobster rock Lobsters have tiny violins that scare sharks. Really!
		Paintings by Anya Ulinich Anya is great. She lives in Cobble Hill and sees the oddness in the mundane. The Aliens (almost actual size) and Choking Hazards, painted on crib mattresses, are my favorites. Make contact, buy a canvas.
		The Norfolk Language Whose all em heehee? (Whose periwinkles are they?) Dem myse hee-hee. (They're mine.)
		Web Log Post Feedback to the post from Josh Allen (different Josh Allen than the Josh Allen we know best here) on XSLT - this person disagrees with his conclusions. XSLT is a harsh mistress. Deceptively simple and pure outside, evil inside. She'll bring you back again and again.
	Jul 19	True Porn Clerk Stories This site has some excellent personal writing. The story is simple: smart, thoughtful woman of about 30 takes job at video store with large porn selection. But what's amazing is her attempts to contextualize and sort what she's seeing (she has a background in anthropology), the way she names the customers and tries to make sense of her own experiences, and the end result is as good as anything you'll find - wistful, sad, probing, the voice of someone earnestly trying to make sense of human desire in the face of a good deal of ugliness and boredom.
	Jul 21	Debunking the Myths About C-SPAN Long transcribed speech by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN founder, giving the background of C-SPAN with a decent amount of detail, and answering questions about the channel.
		Ftrain.com From a blog that links to this site, which I'll leave unlinked: “Take that Ftrain site, for instance. Ninety percent of the time, I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.” Which makes me think, only 10% to go!
	Jul 22	A Wrench the Size of Delaware A story by Paul Ford about visiting a friend.
		CoolStop Ftrain, says Joe, is a cool site. Thanks, says Paul.
		blogs by subway line The people in the neighborhood with Web sites.
	Jul 23	locust eater Well-written, smart weblog focusing on U.S. politics from a Christian perspective. The man who writes Locust Eater - John Davis - appears to take the teachings of Jesus as a moral certainty and works out his ideas from there. It's an admirable approach and a pleasure to read.
	Jul 25	That Takes Ovaries! A review of a book, the title as in, “that takes balls,” but with ovaries in for the balls. Except it's got to be “oves.” Which would work at the gym. “Come on, show some oves!” Girl tells someone to go fuck himself, it's because she's got hard, hard oves. I'll say it. Someone says I do something and I've got a fine pair of oves, I'd be pleased. Give a little wink and flex my new arm muscles.
		The Memory Hole [rescuing knowledge, freeing information] They didn't WANT you to KNOW it!
		Zthes - Home Page Zthes is a protocol to allow you to search yourself some semantic thesauri using Z39.50 protocol returning XML. Fuck yeah!
		alan lomax collection site Alan Lomax Collection, official site. Sad to only learn about people like Lomax when they die.
	Jul 26	Business Model for the Semantic Web - Design Issues Not earth-shaking, a few ideas therein.
		Enabling Semantic Searching Semantic Web searching info.
		Google Labs passes Borges test Meaning that the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge is in there.
		Google Search: google semantic web Google and the Semantic Web, 2 tastes that will mess your mouth up BAD, leave you begging them to kill you, put you out of your misery.
		Google Sets Google builds a semantic connection device.
		Google Weblog All Google, all day.
		MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING (PG): ChildCare Action Project (CAP) Media Analysis Report MAR22044 CAPAlert (conservative Christian movie review sites) reviews My Big Fat Greek Wedding with this remarkable paragraph: “Now the physical aspects begin. To describe the progression of physical involvement between John and Toula, let me tell you about the old Ford Motor Company torque system. Before precision torque wrenches were developed to tighten bolts to precision tension so the bolt heads would not pop off due to heat expansion during full temperature operation, the FoMoCo developed the body measurement of torque to apply to bolts: finger tighten, full hand (with wrench), full hand and forearm, full arm, full arm and shoulder, full body. On their first date - during pottery class - when John dropped Toula off at her home, he gave her a ”finger tighten“ kiss. On the third or fourth date, it was a ”full hand“ kiss. It wasn't long before the kiss was ”full body.“ [Gal. 5:19, Eph. 5:5]”
		Making a Semantic Web Detailed, thoughtful, thorough.
		Monkeyfist.com: A simple, prima facie argument in favor of the Semantic Web Google is a Semantic Web app, kinda.
		Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp Google knows who you are. It definitley knows who I am. I need to go into hiding, I've got 1000 pages and X thousand inlinks pointing the way.
		O'Reilly Network: The Semantic Web: It's Whom You Know [Apr. 19, 2002] “If it's done right, the Semantic Web would be accompanied by widespread knowledge management.” One moving target accompanied by another?
		Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF A weblog all about the Semantic Web. Haven't looked at it much, but it's quite current.
		The Semantic Web (for Web Developers) Just like the title says. Procedural, here's the stuff, technical doc. Yep.
		katesippey.com Michael Sippey's kid is so cute it's unnerving.
	Jul 28	Biographical RDF A proposal for how IDs might be created for all people in history.
		More News Semantic Web weblog.
	Jul 30	F-Train Squarepusher is putting out a song, in October, called F-Train. Apparently, it's wandering the knob-twiddler's file-sharing Internet, in MP3 form, as we speak, but out of my low-bandwidth/Linux reach. The album notes, already transcribed by the Squarepusher faithful, contain the lyrics to F-train and a manifesto, which is pissed-off-academic in tone, but has the fun line: identity-cults can only be effectively generated from one dimensional personalities. The lyrics to F-train make no immediate sense, but do mention Fortran and C++, which is in their favor. I like Squarepusher quite a bit, even if he does noodle till my brain melts. Alas, rather than the Brooklyn-bound Ftrain, the mother of all means of transportation, which is rocking past my window, elevated, as I write, I'll bet he's referring to the Japanese F-Train (they have one, too) or maybe even F-train.com, the Japanese Future Train web site, if he's referring to anything I can think of at all. All it takes is an en-dash and you're somewhere else entirely. I think I deserve a free copy of the album as recompense for all the Squarepusher fans who will be writing in to ask if I know anything about Tom Jenkinson over the next few years. Which I don't!
	Jul 31	Cerebral's Web Page Matt has been my friend for 12 years. His discussions with coworkers on this page are, I'll bet, entirely true. He used to piss off the housefathers just as bad at Milton Hershey, confounding them until they were ready to physically beat him.
		xml-dev - Re: RE: [xml-dev] Semantic Web Criticism of my piece on Google and the Semantic Web.
	Aug 1	Gadgets for God A guide to all the Christian swag you'll ever need.
	Aug 2	The Salon Interview: Gore Vidal Interview with Vidal, talking about America and suchlike.
	Aug 4	=\/=Xirium \| Tech \| MUD-Shell A shell which is also an adventure game. Both a good idea, and a terrible one.
	Aug 5	A History of Jews in Sports “It goes way, way back.” Jews in sports.
		Bloodchild Thoughtful meta-review of Bloodchild, and Octavia Butler short story.
		Hoop Dream Hebrews Excellent and well-researched article on early Jewish sports leagues, particularly in Philly and New York. “'The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,' wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News in the 1930s, 'is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.' And then, later: ”The black players were not allowed to play in the all-white semipro leagues that started up and failed numerous times during this era. The encounters between the 'Yids' and the 'Niggers' were legendary. According to William 'Pop' Gates, the star of the Renaissance, in 1989 the SPHAs were renowned as a 'thinking' team, while the Rens were famous for their “quickness” -- stereotypes about Jews and blacks that endure today.“ Ain't nothin' like prejudice for staying power.
		NewBreed Librarian's Eric Miller Interview Interview with Eric Miller on the Semantic Web, by the departing (damn) New Breed Librarian web ste. Nice job.
	Aug 6	A Dying Voice Newspaper Columnists are fading fast: ”In past generations, says Carroll, columnists tapped into 'a certain idiom that was largely white ethnic European life in neighborhood bars and pubs. That was best captured by Breslin and Royko. That life has faded with the assimilation of these ethnic groups. I keep looking for a new idiom to come along.'“
		European Union Guide for Americans A guide written by the EU to help Americans understand governance, economics, etc.
		Was Lincoln gay? And did Booth kill him in a homophobic rage after being set up as a boy toy? Hmm.
	Aug 12	Penguin Sweaters Tiny penguins wearing tiny sweaters. For their own good.
	Aug 13	ArgMax.com - Economics News, Data, and Analysis Sweet-looking site from the fellow who used to run the excellent economics.about.com site, although now he's suing them and out on his own.
		Class Action Lawsuit Against Primedia Inc About.com and Scott Kurnit - Levinson et al v Primedia et al Writers are routinely asked to throw away their rights to their own work in exchange for a modicum of publicity, then screwed by their publishers. Web publishing is even worse than print. About.com folks are fighting back!
		Hunt and Peck Wanda Coleman beats up Maya Angelou's new book and gets shunned by parts of the Black literary community. A considered essay on the confusing racial politics of literary production.
		Wall Street Folllies - Diagrams Beautiful map of Wall Street corruption. Via TurksHeadReview.com.
	Aug 14	Bad Taste Is Its Own Reward John Waters keeps a place in the Village: ”I take the subway everywhere,“ he said. ”I ride in the first car, to look at the rats. You can see them jumping out of the way on certain lines. The F line's not bad for that.“
		BlogTree.com - Ftrain.com All the blogs that are influenced by Ftrain, which is not a blog but a site, but hey, I give up on that distinction, yaknow? Sorta neat idea.
		Economic Policy Institute Recent-content-drenched front page from a progressive economics thinktank.
		Joe Kenehan Center A trade-union-centric blog.
		MaxSpeak Weblog A weblog be a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Lots of content, crunchy.
		Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface A weblog about what happens when we get away from files and folders on the desktop and move into...well, who knows?
		Some Guy at the Mirror Project A bit bored....
		Uri Avnery: A Phone Call From Hell From CounterPunch - a Gush Shalom activist (Gush Shalom is one of the oldest and smartest peace organizations in the world) describes attempts at consciousness-raising about war crimes inside Israel. War crimes are committed there by the Israeli occupying army by routine. ”Of all the curses thrown at us, the most instructive was 'informers.' It belongs to the ghetto vocabulary. When Jews were a defenseless community, helplessly exposed to the cruelty of Gentile authorities, a Jew who denounced another Jew to the Goyim was considered the vilest of the vile. The fact that this word is used today, after 54 years of having our state, when we have one of the most powerful armies in the world, shows that many in our country still live in the world of the ghetto. Verily, it seems that it is easier to get the Jews out of the ghetto than to get the ghetto out of some Jews. The judges of the International Criminal Court look to them like a mob of drunken Cossacks intent on carrying out a pogrom.“
	Aug 15	Emdros Excitement: ”The text database engine for linguistic analysis and research“
		NBS: Just Keep Trying Victor reminds people of what's exciting about technology and how it's hard at the beginning. He's right, dammit!
		Stars within 50 light years Stars, some with planets, within shouting distance.
		The Upsilon Andromedae Planetary System A star system with 3 planets.
	Aug 16	Golfing and Terrorism This is the worst president ever.
		MetaTalk \| Comments on 2472 Watch as the denizens of Metafilter miss sarcasm so obvious that if it was smeared with sarcasm glitter and had a 50,000,000 watt sarcasm-highlighting bulb shining on it from 4 inches away, it would still only be SLIGHTLY more obvious than it is in its native state.
	Aug 17	Vampiric Studies: Real Predators Beware...the Vampire impersonator will ruin your life.
	Aug 19	celebritize I thought I came up with it, but I'm at least #12 to coin ”celebritize.“
	Aug 20	Scorpion [OCLC Research - Software] A handy-appearing automatic classifier, now open-sourced.
		Resource Description Framework Good guide by Dave Pawson, who keeps the XSLT FAQ, on RDF.
		Linda Thompson: Fashionably Late Jim Esch gives Linda Thompson's new album the thumbs up.
	Aug 22	Singularity Watch The singularity is a'comin'! And these people are a-waitin'. The singularity is, well, here's what they say: "some 20 to 140 years from now—depending on which evolutionary or systems theorist, computer scientist, technology studies scholar, or futurist you happen to agree with—the rate of self-catalyzing, self-organizing, ever more autonomous (human-independent) technological change in our local environment will undergo a 'singularity,' becoming effectively instantaneous from the perspective of current biological humanity."
		Semantic Web Club You do not talk about Semantic Web club.
	Aug 23	Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self - Russel According to my pal Stacy, who is an adjunct English prof, autoethnography is the hot new trend in cultural studies. Basically, it seems to be the production of autobiographical texts as a means of studying your own culture. So far Google shows exactly ZERO hits for "autoethnography weblog," a situation I'm sure will be remedied, unecessarily, before long. If anyone out there in academia needs me to whip together a report on Ftrain as a self-supporting autoethnographic experiment, let me know. I'll include Walter Benjamin footnotes for free.
	Aug 25	William James Thorough Wm. James resource. Plenty of books and links.
	Aug 26	Puns Puns: the lowest form of wit
		Puns/Word Play in Ancient Literature Mesopotamian puns: a dog was the distilled essence of the dog, not a referent to a dog.
		The Absolutely Useless Dictionary - Jest for pun ! Pun dictionary. Horrid but compelling.
		Steve Brooks- Epic Puns There is a pun contest. This man won it.
		Funny Puns Jokes ending in puns. All. Really. Awful.
		The Pun FAQtory - Frequently Askewed Questions about Paronomasia An eggsalad racehorse for pun-interest.
		RV - 03 Probing Through McLuhan McLuhan and probes and puns.
	Aug 27	News on the Semantic Web Thoughtful feedback re: a Semantic Web idea.
		Daniel Keyes Homepage Web site for Daniel Keyes, author of Flowers for Algernon
	Aug 28	PeopleSoft Delivers Real-Time Infrastructure for Homeland Security Peoplesoft, Big Brother's ASP provider.
	Aug 29	LEO - a Literate Editor with Outline A very-unique and clever text editor, written in Python, for editing nested hierarchies of content, then turning them into things.
		Consumerism and Cultural Tourism in the Monkey Island games "I shall attempt to resolve the antagonisms that exist by analyzing the Monkey Island texts using the tools of Postmodernism and Cultural Materialism and suggesting where the strengths of one theory can be used to balance out the weaknesses of the other." Yikes.
		Web Term Document Frequency Millions (113,633,132) of terms on the web, ranked by frequency. 300 meg download. Whoosh.
		When Push Comes to Shove Rediscover the sheer ignorance and awfulness of PointCast and its CEO, back when "push" was going to be the dominant force on the Web.
		Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) Dozens and dozens of Chekhov works.
	Aug 30	Phil Ochs Meet the man who said, "A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit," and "And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara." Phil, why'd you have to knock yourself off in '76?
		Augustus Carp, Esq: by Himself I've just begun to read this amusing novel about an annoying man.
	Aug 31	Picture of Philippines Tarsiers In a search for more tarsier images, I found the source of my favorite. "The Tarsier can rotate its head almost all the way around and has adhesive pads on its limbs that allow it to cling to branches vertically or horizontally." I love you, tarsier. Will you live in a sandwich with the Tasty Kittens?
		On Lisa Rein's Radar I remember, in 1998, being so impressed with something Lisa Rein wrote for XML.com about XML and Vector Graphics that I wrote a fan letter to the people at XML.com to let them know. I'm embarrassed about that now. Anyway, via serindipitous clicking, I just found that she not only has a long list of published articles about XML, but she also has a weblog and writes songs about intellectual property issues. And other topics. I listened to two songs: one was folksy; another was straight-ahead rock. She sings with a slightly-growly voice that reminds me of Concrete Blonde. It's pleasing to see people who have the technical impulse and the creative impulse in conjunction. Now Edd Dumbill needs to start a band called Gandalf's Pikestaff. And how long before Kendall Grant Clark is covering Van Morrison?
		XSH - XML Editing Shell A shell, ala BASH, for editing XML. To add an @id to every title in your document, you could write: foreach //chapter/title { add attribute "id='t$i'" into .; $i=$i+1 }. Sweet.
	Sep 2	Using Computers in Linguistics A book from 1998 (which means many of the particulars are beginning to go stale) on linguistics & programming.
		Two Techniques for the Identification of Phrases in Full Text I'm reading this and thinking, I need to learn more about mutual information statistic. It's 3AM, and I won't be able to sleep until I learn exactly how you can pull noun phrases from a corpus.
		Research at Microsoft The sheer number of research projects in play at Microsoft is skull-jarring. The number going on in Beijing is surprising. Lots of linguistics and applied statistics work.
		RSTTool A tool for adding explicit Rhetorical Structure to text.
		Part-of-Speech Taggers DMOZ POS taggers.
		NLP: Tell me about yourself Overview of MindNet, Microsoft's expansion on the semantic network concept. We've been hearing about MindNet for years and seeing very little evidence that it's so great, whereas the free WordNet, designed with similar intent, is something I use every day.
		RASTA, the Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer Paper on Microsoft's Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer, "a system for automatic discourse analysis" which "reliably identifies rhetorical relations" in text. It is now 4AM.
		RASTA 2 - The Awakening A thesis on the Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer.
		N-gram Statistics Package / Ngram / Bigram Find all the NGrams in your text, in Perl, open-sourced. Whoo!
		ACL Anthology "A Digital Archive of Research Papers in Computational Linguistics"
		Kea Sweet-looking automatic keyword extractor.
		Animal Pictures Archive Animal snapshots galore.
		Weka 3 Data Mining with Open Source Machine Learning Software in Java.
		Ted Pedersen - Personal Home Page Ted Pederson is an interesting researcher into computational linguistics at UMN.
	Sep 3	AHA: a Generic Adaptive Hypermedia System This is a useful article about a "generic" hypertext system, which includes a fairly complete version of the two things I'm working on for Ftrain: conditionals and page-tracking. It's very specific, and doesn't connect to any other metadata sources. But there it is.
		Peter Brusilovsky Researcher into adaptive hypermedia.
		Springer LINK: Lecture Notes in Computer Science Book on adaptive hypertext, articles in PDF.
		Divas - The Site / Society Divas Campy stories of society divas.
	Sep 9	RSS 2.0 A new format proposed by some guy. What's interesting is how the format numbering goes from .9X to 2.0. It's as if there was a 1.0 format in there somewhere. But it's not mentioned. Just a big jump, like that. I'll have to go out and see if I can find the 1.0. Maybe there's a coverup.
		Burningbird: Myths about RDF/RSS People want to take the RDF out of RSS. Ftrain navigation and metadata is now increasingly being built on RDF/RSS, and I expect to be able to do dozens of cool things because I used an RDF framework. Canning RDF in RSS would be supreme stubborn ignorance.
		Why I am saddened, but not threatened, by those who want to muck with RSS 1.x Edd Dumbill's thoughtful thoughts on the recent RSS fork.
	Sep 10	50states.com - States and Capitals General info on all 50 United States. Need Oregon's motto in Latin? Here, go ahead, find it. (All right - it's - as if you don't know already, but humor me, "Alis volat Propriis," which means "She flies with her own wings." Much nicer than New York's motto, which is Forget the Latin, We Own Everything.
		The History of the Devil "This massive work on the history of evil, particularly as symbolized by the Christian devil, was written on the cusp of the 20th century by Paul Carus, who wrote such other books as 'Buddha, the Gospel'"
	Sep 11	The Other Pushkin Pushkin was of African descent! No one told me this. Actually, my friend Ken did tonight at the gym, when I told him I'd watched the opera of Eugene Onegin over the weekend. Pushkin was working on a novel called "The Negro of Peter the Great" when he died, about his great-grandfather. It's a big world.
		Two - Headed Turtle Found Does the headline not say enough? No picture, though.
		anne galloway's purse lip square jaw This comes highly recommended by a most-favored Ftrain correspondent, who writes of the site: "She strikes me as a person who ingurgitates new ideas and can intellectually feel them out, offering much in return." At first glance, it looks great, with an emphasis on intelligent textiles.
	Sep 12	About Euthanising Pets If you must put down your dog, whisper the names of the buddhas into its ears, and other advice for buddhists who own animals.
	Sep 13	Milton Hershey School ...is a residential school offering free education, housing, clothing, meals, medical/dental care and recreational activities.
		About Bunnies A book about bunnies for wee ones.
	Sep 16	The Cranberry Farming Shrink A therapist who farms cranberries offers his thoughts on how to avoid getting bogged down by criticism. Bogged down. Criticism. Bogged. Yeah. 'Kay.
		Logtalk home page Nift: Prolog + OO + other stuff.
	Sep 18	Foundation ontology - Wikipedia A foundation ontology purports to describe "what exists." You know?
	Sep 19	Where Are They Now? Whatever happened to Jack and Diane? By the author.
		The Ancient Bells Good poem from Jim Esch, a different feeling from his other works.
		Tyco Birthday Party 40th birthday party of the Chairman's wife, on the corporate dime, complete with a Michaelangelo's David sculpted from ice spewing vodka from its cock.
		Smalltalk at 30 Nice overview of Smalltalk in its various forms and incarnations.
		Understanding HTTP Cookie Here is simple code for handling cookie with simple CGI. CGI is written in C. Because C is for cookie! That good enough for me.
	Sep 20	flrt Flat, a design shop (oh... pardon .... a design BOUTIQUE or COLLECTIVE) seeks to create a design for the New Left with a series of PSA. The pretzel that choked George Bush is pretty good.
	Sep 23	Narrative Time Essay by Paul Ricouer.
		<nettime> Database as a Symbolic Form 1/3 The database as symbolic form.
	Sep 25	Official Lojban Home Page Lojban is an invented language, like Esperanto, but with more rules and based on predicate logic. Remember, "when specifying a concept that is not found among the gismu, a Lojbanist generally attempts to express the concept as a tanru."
		Bauk jos uvijek kruzi Zizek's intro to the Comm. Manifesto, on its 150th anniversary.
	Sep 26	Kayley Kevin Fanning and Sam Brown collaborate on a kid's story about super-powers.
		The Worst Toilet in New York See it at the bottom of the page. See it! Face it! Aaaaaa!
		El Gatos Malo Japan Style Kittens in traditional Japanese costume, some with motorcycles. Watch out.
	Oct 2	AlterNet: War on Iraq Regularly updated weblog on the proposed war with Iraq.
		Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web The "Well Formed Web" as a replacement for the Semantic Web. It's a good idea, but I think the idea proposed is just a stopgap way to get to the Semantic Web - that is, you need some way to sort and structure information, and that way is going to look a lot like ontologies. But maybe what the whole RSS debacle, as well as this idea, are saying is that the Semantic Web, by being a grafting of classic AI technologies onto hard-to-fathom data structures expressed, primarily, in XML, is not going to get to prime time until it's packaged and contextualized. Which is why I need to go to grad school right now, and someone needs to give me an assistantship, and I shouldn't have to take the GREs and I should be visited by magic academic leprachauns who will make everything really easy for me. That aside, did you know that probity means uprightness? It's one of the 10,000,000 words likely to occur on the GRE.
		Bayard Rustin's Mug Shot Bayard Rustin's mug shot for refusing to comply with selective service, from The Smoking Gun. Poke around for other mug shots - Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner are there, too, for their various unamerican activities.
		Children's Books Online Rapidly expanding collection of scanned children's books, from the turn of last century.
		Stories of Red Hanrahan A collection of stories by Yeats. "'That is true,' said another of the men. 'I knew a woman went wandering like that through the length of seven years; she came back after, and she told her friends she had often been glad enough to eat the food that was put in the pig's trough. And it is best for you to go to the priest now,' he said, 'and let him take off you whatever may have been put upon you.'"
		MIT Biology Hypertextbook Full textbook on molecular biology, if you have a few spare moments and a desire to understand deep cell mojo.
		dive into mark/October 1, 2002 I like this Mark Pilgrim. He links to Ftrain, which makes me feel goofy linking back to him today, (the first rule of Web Site Club is that you don't link back to people who link to you) but he asked his readers with sites to link to him on the anniversary of his receiving a royal screwing by an employer because Mark published personal content on the web, and I'm glad to do so. I'm glad he put things together after getting a raw deal from his employer: Mark seems like a real good skate, someone with a lot of ideas who keeps his focus on his interests, shares content and code, and, even though my logs show me he can drive a lot of traffic - and thus has many hundreds or thousands of readers - he's avoided becoming another webceleb-pundit. He speaks his mind, not from on high, for which the reader is always grateful.
	Oct 6	Google News Search: java Okay, yeah, the folks at Google think we should do better text analysis, forget the Semantic Web, but this news search for "java" at Google News shows what a car crash text-only databases can be.
		A Mystery Novel With an Inexcusable Title Right. So the story is about a guy from Michigan who lives in a New York and falls in love with another fellow, who turns out to be well-heeled European royalty. What is this novel called? "Going Down for the Count." For. The Count. Jesus.
	Oct 7	This is the spaceship This is the spaceship that follows me wherever I go, and appears constantly in my dreams. Finally someone has captured an image, which I can show to my friends. Look! I will say. I am not mad. I am not the only one chased by this device.
	Oct 9	Assholes in Academia Umm, a site about people in Academia who misbehave, it seems. Yikouch.
		ARGUMENTS WITH THE THOUGHT POLICE Neat collection of essays by John Bart Gerald, drawings by Julie Maas - Nonviolence, Schweitzer, Neruda, and the U.N. Declaration on Genocide, well-written and packaged simply for the web (available in a nice print edition, if you have a spare US$35.00).
	Oct 13	Protest in Abu Dis A joint Iraeli-Palestinian protest - Bryan Atinsky documents a protest which leads to violent police action, in addition to nonviolent protesters being outright refused the freedom of assembly. I (meaning me) paid for the camera used to take these pictures, which makes me proud, proud, proud.
		The Semantic Web... in Haiku A really nice intro to RDF and related technology, entirely in haiku.
		The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum She hates hipsters, and with good reason.
	Oct 14	Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research Full text of articles from the JAIR, in PDF.
	Oct 15	R.O. LENKIEWICZ Brilliant, recently deceased artist, among whose effects was found the embalmed body of a homeless man.
		I really want to do it with Dave Matthews! I love Dave Matthews so much no other man will suffice!
	Oct 16	Hacking Food Kendall writes about preparing good things to eat. Ahhh!
		Hussein elected with 100% of all votes Iraqis should demand the votes be sent to Florida for a recount.
	Oct 19	Baltimore's Pissed-off Mayor After the death of 4 children in a fire allegedly set by drug dealers, talk radio hosts called Baltimore's mayor Martin O'Malley a nitwit and uncaring. O'Malley drove immediately to the station and began arguing with the hosts. "O'Malley didn't take it well. 'On that note, that probably is a good way to exit,' he said. 'And gentlemen, if you enjoyed that, come outside after the show, and I'll kick your ass.'"
	Oct 21	Autojot Autojot indexes every web page you look at and lets you search them later.
		Peaceworks Computer Consulting Developer focused on creating free code for good causes.
	Oct 25	Funes, his Mail Archive Search Software An email search engine to help you "search your memories" - a pain to install, though.
		email constellations Look at your friends, as little dots interacting, after your email is chewed and swallowed by a computer.
	Oct 26	Krugman on Economic Disparity Useful, lengthy article by Paul Krugman on growing economic disparity. (Via RobotWisdom.)
	Oct 27	Letter from Tolstoy A letter from Tolstoy about Indian rights, to the editor of Free Hindustan magazine. The letter was edited by Gandhi.
		Preparedness: The Road to Universal Slaughter An essay by Emma Goldman about getting ready for war, which always comes before war. "The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter."
	Oct 28	Basingstoke Canal News Recent events related to England's Basingstoke Canal - yobs lobbing bricks, a fraudulent bailiff, and a single dad swan.
		Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor Depressed, rejected by critics, exploited by publishers, and receiving an in-person scathing from Tolstoy (followed by more depression), Rachmaninoff was brought back to composing by a friendly hypnotist - with the great Concerto #2 as the result.
		Fractals for Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 "I know it isn't very practical, but the idea is to examine each image as the appropriate movement is playing. It is the music which connects the images into a series, not the gradient nor the form nor the math nor the lines nor an idea. The music."
		Yamaha Artist Spotlight: Helene Grimaud Helene Grimaud is a Westchester, New York-based classical pianist (who apparently did a fine version of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2). Now 30, she has two interesting traits: one, she practices on a Yamaha. Two, she lives with wolves.
		Helene Grimaud and Her Wolves Photos of Helene Grimaud, renowned classical pianist and wolf-hugger.
		Marty Moskowitz's Bio Moskowitz is the Borough President of Brooklyn, and an old-school, social-services Democrat. He's also "Brooklyn Chair of the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin."
		CCC and the National Park Service The story of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Parks. (Of course, every time you enjoy a CCC park, you're enjoying SOCIALISM.)
		Dictionary of Victorian London An interesting idea - take several primary sources and index them collectively to create an overall index of Victorian English life.
	Oct 31	Man arrested for smuggling pygmy monkeys in his pants He had them shoved into his pants the entire flight from Thailand to L.A. They were apparently well behaved.
	Nov 3	Polanski's new movie about the Krakow ghetto Long, solid article about Polanski's relationship between the personal - Krakow, Tate - and creative, and how that plays out in his new film, The Pianist.
		Toilets that pop up Robot pop-up toilets in London, available after 7PM.
	Nov 4	Judge acquits Bush protester, scolds police The protester was a polite 65-year old man, and his sign said, "The Bush family must surely love the poor — they've made so many of them."
		An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning Article in IBM's systems journal expressing a variety of ways to approach computer reasoning. Written by a host of heavy-hitting AI/Knowledge Base types: J. McCarthy, M. Minsky, A. Sloman, L. Gong, T. Lau, L. Morgenstern, E. T. Mueller, D. Riecken, M. Singh, and P. Singh.
		Erik T. Mueller Home site of the person who created Thought Treasure; he's a neat, hard-working AI researcher.
		Mark Twain Meets DSM-III-R According to the DSM, Huck and Tom have mental disorders!
	Nov 5	quarlo - photos of new york city Simply great photo site - New York looks like this.
	Nov 12	International Society for Bayesian Analysis All your Bayes needs, met right here.
	Nov 13	Metacrap A really doofy anti-metadata rant, still making the rounds. The points are correct at the extreme, but it's a lot of straw-men arguments. Most metadata and Semantic Web folks just want data to be cool and manageable for the peoples; only some want to control reality.
	Nov 17	Sex in a Spreadsheet A story about the human side of data processing.
	Nov 20	Tarzan's Tripes Forever, and Other Feghoots "The Web's First Shaggy Dog Story Archive." History, examples, abuse your friends.
	Dec 30	Twisted Matrix Laboratories Useful-looking framework, in Python, for data sharing across a network inside of various applications.
		Does Santa Claus Exist? Opinions on Santa from the Morning News, including some by your author.
	Dec 31	Mug Shot Archive The Smoking Gun's best mug shots of 2002 - not celebrities, but real folks, including Bambi, the K-Mart employee in trouble. It's wrong to laugh, but also, it's very funny.
		Bright's Old English Glossary Longish, simple one-page glossary of OE terms, attached to an OE reader.
		Mark Pilgrim vs. the Semantic Web Mark has some thought-out criticism of the Semantic Web: "Look, semantics is hard. Forget the social problems of implementation and the technical problems of the current generation of syntax. Semantics all by itself is just fundamentally hard....In many respects, I believe we're now following in the footsteps of 18th and 19th-century philosophers. I see otherwise intelligent people falling into the same traps that intelligent people fell into 100 years ago." I disagree - more later, you know - but Mark of all the critics of the SemWeb seems to have his head well-wrapped around the issues involved. I think there are real benefits to be gained from a fairly large framework that uses existing knowledge rep concepts and extends them to the web, and I think issues of trust and other metrics can be managed collectively at least as well as, say, eBay manages them now. And the emphasis is on collectively. But, ferchrissakes, more later. & the SemWeb is lucky to receive thoughtful criticism, but I also think the Doctorow piece linked in Mark's essay, though, is really more pop-info trashing of the metadata concept than thoughtful crit.
		The Semantopic Map An interesting topic-map application showing various things around the Semantic Web.
2003	Jan 1	Screenplays Lots of screenplays in English, including the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Seventh Seal, and Triumph of the Will.
	Jan 4	evacuate & flush Always nice to see what's up at the Evacuate & Flush weblog.
		Internet Alchemy A+ web site covering XML and Semantic Web topics.
		Companies in U.S. Sing Blues as Europe Reprises 50's Hits New York Times article about the dread influx of copyright-free music from Europe, most of it recorded by dead people, which will flood the market with legal, high-quality, medium-priced Callas recordings, etc. The music industry, as a whole, needs to shut the fuck up forever.
		Orion's Arm A collaborative science fiction world, written en masse.
	Jan 6	Coding an artificial neural network (ANN) in PHP Nifty article about building a simple ANN that can be called for Web toys; the technique should work in most languages.
		Chris McKinstry: master hoaxster? Lengthy RW timeline the net-life of an AI researcher with a crazy CV and several severe emotional problems (armed standoffs in Winnipeg).
		openDemocracy Nice-looking lefty pub out of London, with a fairly well-defined strategy for what they wish to achieve and how they want to use the Web; i.e. it's a true Web pub, not a print magazine dressed up in HTML.
		Tram Spark Weblog mostly in smart, enjoyable blank verse.
	Jan 7	pat freestone's head Pat is the best blogger, and a huge fan of video games. Pan down for his list of the things he'd prefer hearing instead of Billy Joel's "Piano Man." Number 6 is, "the phrase, 'Congratulations, President DiCaprio'.
	Jan 8	EAT SHIT. (v2.00001) According to this, I'm an example of "how certain select members of the 'web development community' hide behind the idea of 'accessability' to dangle their dom/css/xhtml DICKS in YOUR FACE" and, if I just wrote and worked on hot graphics, instead of doing all that CSS coding, the world would be a beautiful place. This guy is outstanding.
	Jan 9	The Smoking Gun: Archive There is one commander in chief, and all other commander in chiefs must be eliminated!
		KAIROS: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy All good stuff - a lot of the usual suspects, very academic in tone, but some of the articles are solid and almost all are well-researched.
		Review of Bolter and Grusin's Remediation Critical assessment of Bolter and Grusin's remediation, calling for a focus on tools akin to Foucault's genealogical method - absolutely right.
		Literary Theory and Computer Games Interesting article, criticle of Aarspeth.
	Jan 10	Rate my Kitten I gave them all 10s.
	Jan 12	More fun with DMCA: hands off my, uh, toner? A chip in a toner cartridge keeps you from using a competitor's cartridge - unless they emulate the chip. Which is what happened, and Lexmark's suing. But I love the idea: I pay you to put a chip in the toner that keeps me fron having options as to how I refill the toner in my printer. The answer is simply to never buy LexMark, who don't exactly make top-notch printers anyway, which is likely why they need to scavenge for revenue at the bottom of the barrel, cretinously, like vampire leech-eels.
		Class Struggle! The board game. Bertell Ollman's 1978 board game: Monopoly meets Marx! Rules available in PDF.
		Robert Horn Interesting thinker with a technique of "information mapping" for technical communication.
	Jan 16	Beautiful Minds David and Gregory Chudnovsky's patent lawyer reflects on the brothers, who built a supercomputer called m zero to calculate pi in their apartment.
		Dow - A Chemical Company on the Global Playground Did you know Dow was responsible for the global environment movement? Excellent, subversive, hoax.
		0format: 100 Thrilling Updates in a Day Dennis Mahoney shines as he reaches hits wits end (around #30) in order to update his Web site 100 times in a single day.
	Jan 20	Cinemaware Cinemaware is resurrected with Defender of the Crown for the Playstation 2.
		Creative Comments: On the Uses and Abuses of Markup [Jan. 15, 2003] A critical article on the Creative Commons ' use of XML by Kendall, with solid advice for improvements.
		An Enemy of Nixon and Baraka by Nat Hentoff An article on Bayard Rustin, essential pacifist civil rights leader who came from my home town.
	Jan 21	The Operating Systems Handbook Meaty overview of different OSes - VMS, MVS, Unix - from 1994. Good for computer genealogical research.
		Choke! Jim Esch on Philly and the Eagles: "This city is best known for its chokers. When the chips are down, and the game is on the line, you choke. You fail. You give up the homerun. You fall down and the other guy scores. You flub the routine save. You have the open look with the shot clock at zero and you miss the net. It's part of our character. We know it's going to happen. We dream that it won't happen again. We visualize alternative futures where it can't be allowed to happen, where God in His infinite mercy will let us off the hook. Then it happens. The big choke again."
		Fireland In January, 2003, Josh Allen has been updating Fireland frequently, parsing his (narrator's) teen memories, sampling brand names, and looping his reminisces into a rare, unique collage of language that matches its form exactly.
		Bayard Rustin Texts Small collection of articles and interviews by Bayard Rustin.
		Sea Oak Great sci-fi-ish short story from George Saunders, a new writing hero.
		U.S. Schools Resegregating, Study Says Simply, bad news.
	Jan 23	LifeWay: Biblical Solutions for Life Like shackles, just prettier: "This beautiful sterling silver stretch bracelet can be a beautiful symbol of a teenage girl's pledge to sexual purity."
		ESP: Electronic Scholarly Publishing Great online pub site, plenty of books on genetics and other sciences, as well as the essays of Francis Bacon entire.
		Dante and the Bowery, by Theodore Roosevelt "What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting."
	Jan 24	The Lovable Cat: Mimicry Strikes Again Enjoyable William Calvin essay on how cats mimic infants, which is, he suggests, why we love them.
	Jan 27	Reagan and Aziz "Ronald Reagan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz meet at the White House on November 26, 1984, as the U.S. and Iraq restore diplomatic relations."
		Science, Technology and the CIA Dozens of documents making up a huge book on the CIA's use of technology, from satellites to psychics.
	Jan 28	Mr. Roboto - Lyrics and Interpretation "The time has come at last/To throw away this mask/So everyone can see/My true identity.../I'm Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy!" Styx's "Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto," one of the worst ideas ever committed to vinyl, carefully explicated.
		THE Key to User-Friendly Computers? Jeff Raskin reinvents EMACS on the way to greater things.
	Jan 29	Have You Read This Movie? Neat list of books upon which recent films are based, with summaries.
		Beginnings and Endings A collection of the opening and closing sentences of a few famous works.
		pat freestone's head Pat Freestone, in order to improve his videogame skills, dopes his blood, slams heroin, and has a problem at the mall.
		Japanese Fringe Groups Right wingers, anti-Giants, Hikikomori, Otaku, and Ganjuro. "After a political cartoon making fun of right-wing leader Shusuke Nomura was published, he came to the Asahi offices to receive an apology, and committed suicide by shooting himself, shouting 'Asahi and I will die together!', in order to embarrass them. "
		Japanese Vending Machines Yeah, there's the panties, but how about "catch your own lobster?" And the fresh vegetables....
		Interview with Ellen Ullman Ellen Ullman is a programmer who writes about the way programming fucks with your mind. She's a neat person with big ideas.
		Techno-culture ala Ellen Ullman Output from a truly weird search engine/auto-classifier.
		THEMATICS WEBLOG "An informal 'Weblog' on: WEB FILTERING BY CONTEXT AND CONCEPT." Yikes. Intense, a little hard to parse. Seems to be arguing for Semantic Web concepts from a different angle.
		The dumbing-down of programming Ellen Ullman on installing Linux, with a dab of archeology.
	Jan 30	A Patron Saint for Hopeless Clickers Washington Post: "The patron saint hunt is a subset of a boom in saint recognition under John Paul II's reign. These days, saints aren't so much marching as flooding in. During the past quarter century, John Paul has presided over 465 canonizations, the formal declarations that recognize full-fledged saints, and 1,297 beatifications, the designation of "blesseds" who stand on a rung just below sainthood. That compares with 447 canonizations and 1,310 beatifications during the preceding 400 years.... In one day, John Paul beatified 233 nuns, priests and lay people killed by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War.
	Jan 31	The Rhetorica Network: Analysis of Rhetoric, Propaganda, and Spin in Politics and Journalism Snazzy weblog focusing on the rhetoric of current political speech.
	Feb 2	IMPEACH BUSH Call for impeachment, written by a law prof.
	Feb 4	INFRANGIBLE v3.1 Beautiful site - a mix of still life and portrait photography with great music (needs Quicktime). Slow over my dial-up, but still worth it.
	Feb 5	Circuits of Change Great piece of fiction about the total lack of corporate cultural resonsibility.
	Feb 10	Studs Terkel: Conversations with America Massive and wonderful "official" Studs Terkel site.
	Feb 11	ProfQuotes Goofball quotes from professors.
	Feb 14	Place: Sense of Place A bibliography on the concept of "A sense of place."
	Feb 18	Images from Science Dozens of pictures from a gallery show at RIT. Flies and intestines galore.
	Feb 22	A Genuinely Small Piano A remarkably tiny Flash-based piano.
	Mar 3	The Hyperion Yacht Jim Clark was a founder of Netscape, made a mint, and created this monument to his own folly: a monstrish yacht filled with bleeping Silicon Graphics computers and massive sailing masts. A floating emblem of moral and technological obsolescence.
		Pirate Riddles for Sophisticates Q: What's a pirate's favorite aspect of computational linguistics? A: PARRRsing sentences. It sort of tapers off after that.
		Prejudice Unveiled Prejudice unveiled and other poems, by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, from Boston, 1907.
	Mar 4	The case against Conrad Chinua Achebe on Heart of Darkness: "Yes, you will notice that the European traders have 'tainted' souls, Marlow has a 'pure' soul, but I am to accept that mine is 'rudimentary'?" He shakes his head. "Towards the end of the 19th century, there was a very short-lived period of ambivalence about the certainty of this colonising mission, and Heart of Darkness falls into this period. But you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems."
		The Horror of Blimps A classic example of the ancient struggle of man man vs. blimp.
	Mar 5	Gnusto Play Z-machine IF games inside of Mozilla. Whoot!
		Adverdate "She had gone to Princeton, and she had this strange and unidentifiable patrician accent that made me feel inferior. In a good way, I mean -- like a favored student."
	Mar 6	Esther Dyson's Vision of 2023 Microchip pills, Steve Ballmer, and Moldovan newspapers.
	Mar 18	TAMS Home Page Text Analysis Markup Software - application for marking up documents for ethnographic research.
		Fifteen Times Scarier than Saddam 15 things that we should worry about more than Hussein, from XML star Tim Bray.
		NPR Ombudsman NPR has an ombudsman who answers your criticism about whether the network is doing its job. In this case, the question is "is NPR pro-America/anti-war enough?"
	Mar 19	Marines Hold Strong Man Contest How far can you push a humvee through the desert? The prize is a half-eaten package of cookies.
		Postal service offers tips for mail to Kuwait To cut down on Anthrax, the zip codes for Kuwait are unlisted.
		Bryan Adams brings girl out of coma A comatose girl, brought to a Bryan Adams concert in Munich, regains partial consciousness.
		Girl writes English essay in phone text shorthand The teenager's essay began: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." Translation: "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it's a great place."
		Pensioner's 'Do Not Resuscitate' tattoo 85-year-old woman has death wish tattooed on her chest.
		'Prophet' opens theme park for our alien heritage Daniken, author of "Chariots of the Gods" etc, opens Swatch and Coca-Cola-backed bazillion dollar horseshit theme park.
		The Salt Lake Tribune -- Mitchell's Father Asks for Leniency Unsettling profile of Shirl Mitchell, father of Brian Mitchell, the man who abducted Elizabeth Smart, in which Shirl admits to raping his wife: "Shirl Mitchell denies allegations that he physically abused his wife, but said, 'I forced the issue of sex once in a while,' prompting her to leave a poster in the master bedroom accusing him of rape."
	Mar 21	Zabibah and the King Add copyright violation to the list of Saddam's crimes against humanity.
	Mar 27	War Journal: March 24, 2003 Jim Esch knocks one out of the park on the US/Iraq war.
	Apr 10	Melting in the Dark Rhetoric - and rational argument - as a past art.
	Apr 11	Iraqis not all that excited about the statue Unfortunately, it looks suspiciously like a big photo-op.
		You can only read this if you're in Australia! Texts with expired Australian copyrights, but illegal to read, in this public domain form in the U.S. Leacock, Keynes, Woolf. And lots of Orwell.
		Team Techno Not war related: Team Techno ("we chose the name because it was the most annoying possible thing we could come up with") has an album online in the handy MP3 format. Newark, Delaware has never sounded so good.
		The Most Dangerous President Ever That George W. Bush is trouble, man.
	Apr 15	Obstacle Course A well-considered article by Kate Guay, a friend of this site, on the representation of the handicapped in Canadian media.
		Terrible Tales The collected works of Timmy and Jenny, including the compact, elegantly told "No more p-p bathes tonight!," the dark and revealing "Someone Called the Cops," the remarkable, uplifting, and joyful "It takes a steady hand," and the newly released, potently surreal drama of childhood choices, "Horse of Darkness."
		In Broken Baghdad, Photo Negatives (washingtonpost.com) The meaning of images of war, of a looted museum and an armless boy.
		Dana Gioia's Rhyme and Reasoning Not very revealing, but still engaging profile of NEA-chair Dana Gioia.
	Apr 16	Fuzz Acid & Flowers An "extensive guide to U.S. psych and garage music 1964 - 1972," with 5,400 US acts. I was tracking down an old Coven album which features a 13 minute recording of a black mass where a man screams "kiss the goat!" in the middle, and this is the only place on the Internet that seems to list it.
		Still missing Solid editorial about media coverage of the Laci Peterson case, from the reporter's POV.
		DJBorg In Python, runs on Windows: "DJBorg turns your MP3 playlist into a personalized radio station, adding randomly-generated DJ banter between tracks. Song information (based on ID3 tags), news, weather, and headlines are announced via a text-to-speech engine."
	Apr 18	Brokentype Alex continues to shine brightly, weighing in on the potential cuts in the NYC zoo funding: "Have you ever seen an Orangutan begging for money on a subway platform, soaked in its own urine? Have you watched the mighty gazelle hustling for tricks under the 59th street Bridge? It’s not good for anyone." And pan down for the "Warblog."
	Apr 21	XML Pipeline Definition Language Version 1.0 Great Caesar's ghost, a new standard--and from the World Wide Web Consortium! This one is XML related and pretty good; it doesn't really touch webloggers, so there won't be the moronic hooting there was over RSS, but it does actually gets in the same territory as Cocoon and Ant, that is, the definition of series of transformations of XML documents into other documents using a set of rules.
		Man bites dog Had to happen.
		States, Facing Budget Shortfalls, Cut the Major and the Mundane Ugly news for state spending, especially in the face of tax cuts.
		All the prosperity in China While the Western economies move ever slower, China hits 9% growth annually.
	Apr 24	Library of Congress Overseas Offices "Since 1962 the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog, preserve, and distribute library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods."
	Apr 28	Letter-by-Letter Word Games FAQ Impressive list of word-guessing games (i.e. crosswords, hangman).
		A Spell to free oneself from Excessive Computer Enchantment Majickal rebooting.
	May 6	Uraniborg Tycho Brahe's legendary observatory, with blueprints.
	May 7	Is You Wicked? Ali G takes on Baker, Scowcroft, and others.
	May 15	The Veblenite: Thorsten Veblen. Writings - Startpage A veritable orgy of high-quality Veblen.
	May 16	Hugo A verdant green, with weimeraners.
	May 21	Extreme Ironing Only for truly hardcore ironers.
	May 25	Alex Golub Read the intro, then LOOK at that picture.
	May 26	The Dominion Great-looking lefty Canadian paper edited by Dru Oja Jay.
		Plushie Forest Remarkable animals.
	Jun 8	Nice Cup of Tea and A Sit Down This community site discusses, primarily, biscuits. Its mission statement in entirety: "Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely."
	Jun 12	Bruce Cockburn - Albums - You've Never Seen Everything (2003) What a weird coincidence that the non-North-American distribution cover of the album would find and use the same 1"x1" piece of clip art at the top right corner of a back page of a German encyclopedia republished by Dover.
		We really don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go ”And the reason? Much as it pains a feminist such as myself to say so, Beckham has been grotesquely, massively, pussy-whipped by his talentless, ambition-hound of a wife.“
	Aug 7	All Things Considered All Things Considered is a nightly radio program that mixes ”news, interviews, commentaries, reviews, and offbeat features,” broadcast in The United States of America. From time to time, they broadcast commentaries by Paul Ford.»
		Web Standards A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
	Aug 11	A New Technology for Emergent Democracy Nova Spivack proposes a collaborative group-thinking system, like a community-driven version of flash mobs: “Members of ThePeople.net agree to give 15 minutes of their time each week to do whatever ThePeople.net as a whole decides to do that week. So, for example, if the community decides that this week everyone will give $5 to a homeless person, that's what you do.”
		Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad From Hollandaise (1 day) to peanut butter (4 months), all the way to Tabasco (2-4 years).»
	Aug 12	Minding the Planet The weblog of Nova Spivack, entrepreneur, Semantic Web thinker and re-thinker, and occasional employer of Paul Ford.»
		StevesWebPage.com The official web site of Steve Burns. »
		Songs for Dust Mites Songs For Dust Mites , an album of sweet-sounding songs about science and love by Steve Burns, was released today, August 12, 2003. »
	Aug 13	The Turing Test Doesn't Work “The Turing Test is really not a measure of consciousness -- nor does it actually measure anything about the computer being evaluated, in fact, if anything, the Turing Test is actually a measure of the intelligence of the human who is evaluating the computer.” By Nova Spivack.»
		Is Consciousness as Fundamental as Space, Time and Energy? “I have a hunch that nobody ever creates consciousness, rather it can simply be channeled using the appropriate type of 'circuit.'” By Nova Spivack.»
		Are We Living in a Simulated Reality? “No amount of fancy programming can magically create self-awareness. Because even if a machine is wired up so as to be able to sense and react to its own state, nothing about that results in it having any inner experience of itself.” By Nova Spivack.»
	Aug 14	A Book from the Sky “A Book from The Sky took the artist over three years to complete. The installation is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand characters individually 'invented', designed and cut into wood-blocks by the artist. The result is a set of four hand-printed books, ceiling and wall scrolls that carry a huge body of text that resembles Chinese characters but is in fact unintelligible.”»
	Aug 15	Grant Barrett's Blackout “Many people did not know how to get back from Manhattan to their Brooklyn homes without the subway and had to ask for directions from passersby and police.”»
		Josh Allen's Blackout “And then that stupid guy who dragged out his generator and deafened the neighborhood so he could keep ESPN2 up and running. When the time comes, you will be the first I hunt for food, I thought, siphoning gas out of the Le Sabre next door.”»
		On Making Connections By M. Ellis Conroy. “It's funny how the concept of artificial intelligence — something we generally associate with a future of robots, talking computers and other staples of science fiction — connects so seamlessly with present-day linguistics, the philosophy of language, and in turn mankind's apparently innate capacity for intercommunication.”»
		The subways: a special hell (New York Daily News) “The TA said its first priority was getting to trains in underwater tunnels and on bridges. All Metro-North and Long Island commuter train service was halted. Access to Grand Central was shut and large crowds gathered outside in the heat.”»
	Aug 18	The Straight Dope: The story of Schroedinger's cat (an epic poem) Shine light on electrons—you'll cause them to swerve. The act of observing disturbs the observed— Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing To see if a particle's moving or resting Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor! We know probability—certainty, never.' »
		The Well-Intended, But Not Quite Interactive Schrödinger's Cat: A Rather Silly Experiment in Quantum Mechanics. “Note to PETA: This is only a theoretical experiment...and it's okay, anyhow, because I ate the cat when I was done.”»
		Jim Esch's Blackout “Size matters. The biggest power outage in North American history is like having a monster cock. My blackout is bigger than your blackout. And California? Bunch of pussies with their wimpy rolling blackouts. Even Arnold the Terminator must be feeling a little bit of wattage envy. New York has this claim on Godzilla sized disasters like no other place. It's all fifties sci-fi panic, millions pouring into the streets, their hair on fire, screaming about terrorism and destruction and besides that their cell phones that won't work. Makes good visuals. The reality is different, though. In real NYC, where the truly horrific isn't just a movie or dream but a memory, the people are dealing, just as any of us nobodies in flyover territory would. They turn festive, maybe even self-indulgent. Maybe they imagine that if the power went out in Topeka that the people would sob and mope. I don't know. I think everyone finds a way to iron the wrinkles out. It's a good thing to deal. You make do and try to be patient until the machines give you your life back. Inconvenient? Sure. Gee, life is inconvenient when you think about it. Life without light bulbs and freon, gas pumps and trains for a day is kink for sure. A disaster? Doubt it.”»
	Aug 19	The First Honest Gay Personal Ad “If we actually become boyfriends, my anarcho-feminist mega-lesbian mom will fly in from Oakland and rip your politics apart until you're crying on the floor like Trent Lott at Farrakhan's house.”[1]
		New York's Sixth Borough: Rikers Island “Rikers is a massive secret waystation in the midst of the towering Gotham of wealth and privilege.”
	Aug 29	Pat Freestone's Love Life “Another perfectly good relationship destroyed by a hole in the rubber. “I'm assuming it was a hole—if not a complete rupture—in one of the methamphetamine-filled balloons resting somewhere in my colon that allowed a hefty bump of speed to seep out into my bloodstream at the most inopportune time and give old Pat Freestone a wakeup call from the front desk of the Heartbreak Hotel.” Scroll down and read backwards for chronological order, to learn about: Pat's rohypnol-fueled love life (with Pat taking the rohypnol), his proposed subtitled tattoo, his trip to Toronto to pick up metaamphetamines....
	Sep 2	Processing Processing is a small computer language used to make pretty, clickable things.»
	Sep 4	Justin Timberlake Live at Roseland Ballroom, NYC, 8/29/03 A review of a Justin Timberlake show by Anil Dash. Dash Knows Pop, and the review is as much about marketing as it is about musicianship and stagecraft.
		An Interview with Steve Burns from Entertainment Weekly Any more kid stuff in your future? My best friend Paul Ford and I are working on a rock opera for children about a squirrel and a rat who become friends. It's potentially the best thing I've ever been involved in. But Paul, who runs ftrain.com and is a commentator on NPR, is a lazy and terrible person who just won't work on it. And now he's going to be terribly angry with me.
	Sep 15	A Theory of Time A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
		Be Proud of Guilty Pleasures A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
	Sep 17	The Morning News party, September 20, 2003 At the Royal Oak, 594 Union Avenue, Brooklyn NY. Buy me a drink.
	Oct 9	Schwarzenegger, Lover Tell-all on Schwarzenegger, the gubernatorial lothario with a pig-valve heart. Say it with me: "eating is not cheating."
		Schwarzenegger Anecdotes Fun Schwarzenegger anecdotes, including the time he smashed pie into a 12-year-old girl's face.
		Schwarzenegger, Rimmer She said [Schwarzenegger] then whispered in her ear: "Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your [anus]?"
		Orrin Hatch, Who Pisses on the Constitution to Help His Friends, Shitty Musician, Worse Politician Orrin Hatch wants to change the constitution so Schwarzenegger can be president. Related: Heal Our Land, the 7th album by Orrin Hatch and Janice Kapp Perry.
		A tenuous connection to me A strong, straightforward piece of writing about looking for your biological parents: “I was proof of something ugly to him, maybe the same way the divorce was proof of something ugly. But he didn't want to talk about that.”
		Obsessively Tracking Down Jeff Mangum Journalist tries to track down the man behind Neutral Milk Hotel. Mangum doesn't want to hear about it, wants to be left alone, and the author says: "He's wrong, of course. It's not just his story....It's mine, too." Which is plain wrong. Jeff Mangum is not obligated to do a damn thing for anyone, thanks.
	Oct 16	Venture Capital Failures “Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.”
	Oct 23	Scaling the Heights of Celebrity Alanis, Picasso, Britney, Madonna, Elizabeth Regina: 5'4"; Krushchev, Gandhi, Voltaire: 5'3"; Prince: 5'2 1/2"; Keats:5' 3/4"
		Seppuku: Practical Guide A loose kimono should be worn. As soon as the Sambo tray with the knife is placed before you, allow the kimono to fall open, reach forward, pull the tray toward you, pick up the knife and cut from left to right. The "jumonji", the crosswise cut, may be omitted by colonials but gentlemen will know better.
	Oct 28	How to Put a Finger on Motherhood "Look at this baby!" she broadcast through her snide remarks. "This came right out of me - I made this! There is no finer use of the human vessel. I am holding a future President of The United States, made from semen and glue and God's twinkly tears and hatched right from between my blessed legs. And look at your cat, you selfish woman. If I had a stroller big enough, I'd drive it right over your pet caddy like the main event at a Monster Truck Rally, just to show you how great this work called 'man' is." Of course, she said none of this but it was all there in her haircut.
	Oct 29	How I Thank Them A young woman is trapped by her drunken father. An absolutely outstanding piece of writing.
		They Explain, You Decide I've received some emails from paranoid fellow-citizens wondering how long it would be before the feds show up at my door to question me. For the inquiring federal officer, I think this brief piece by Aaron Schutzengel regarding “Flash” might provide some context.»
	Nov 3	The Media History Project Timeline So much media, so much time. A chronology of media, from cave paintings to weblogs.
		Art for the Cosmos A riff on Flash. "Its no secret, though little remarked on, that before 2001, most New Yorkers hated the World Trade Center. Although useful as a way to determine which way was south below 23rd St., they were largely seen as ugly, imposing structures that loomed menacingly over the rest of the city, lacking the grace and style that the rest of the city has."»
		Rx4RDF "Rx4RDF is a specification and reference implementation for querying, transforming and updating W3C's RDF by specifying a deterministic mapping of the RDF model to the XML data model defined by XPath." All in Python—shows some truly nice thinking.
	Nov 4	Memex Simulator Hypertext like Vannevar Bush wanted it: a MacOSX Memex simulator.
		Wayne Coyne's Philosophy I think the Flaming Lips are proof that without skill, talent, money and good recording gear, you can make good records. Shadow animals aren't as easy to do as they look. The music business hasn't changed. It has always been about getting some Christ-like figure who has a lot of sex and money and looks good in pictures, and then exploiting him for money. Which is great!
		The XML Book Business ...is in trouble. By Kendall Grant Clark.
		Jack Rusher's Triple Store “A random triple can be retrieved, on a cold cache, in around sixty milliseconds. Organic workloads perform very well because the system attempts to place data together on disk so that, for instance, the string table for OWL Lite can be stored in one data page that is kept in cache by frequent accesses.”
	Nov 5	The Beard and Moustache Contest So amazing, so beautiful.
	Nov 12	No topless pictures of Jessica Lynch It turns out that Hustler magazine will not run tit-shots of sort-of-POW Jessica Lynch after all, which means that the American press, instead of lamenting over the exposure of Jessica's pert little nipples as an awful symbol of our lost national innocence in an insolent, amoral age, will actually have to cover the war in Iraq. Q: What do you call masturbating to naked Jessica Lynch pictures? A: Dishonorable discharge!
		Scott David Herman Scott David Herman's site, a portal for his many projects, is chock marvelous.
	Nov 15	Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion Peter Van Dijck does a wonderful job breaking down the argument over the Semantic Web that took place last week, cartoon-style. I (Paul) am represented by a picture from 1999 taken with several plastic bags stuffed in my mouth (c.f. My Busy Day). So cool.
	Nov 25	Decoding the Money Puzzle A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
2004	Jan 7	New York Stories A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
	Jan 14	What is Literature? Jim Esch on what makes lit lit.»
		Bumper Stickers ...and Howard Dean, violence, and orcs.
		At Night For now I see the universe outspread Within my vision, as with close-shut lids One may read clear the history of the dead And stand with Pharaohs by the Pyramids, Or sit within some rare Athenian home; Yes, as the words and deeds of men are brought Into the widening circle of my thought, The stars grow real to me like deathless Rome.
		Images of Hamlet In his many forms.
	Jan 15	Why I don't like RDF Simon St. Laurent delivers an accurate list of the problems with RDF, many of which are truly crazy-making (and which many people implementing RDF-like solutions, including me, continually hack around, coming up with custom XML schemas so that they might leverage hierarchy and do basic transformations). The URI as magic fairy dust appraisal is also spot on.
		The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema
		Ad Banner Given this context, one might ask whether economics approves of advertising? Since the primary concern of economics is efficient allocation of scarce resources, the question should be restated as follows: does advertising promote efficiency?
		My First Voodoo Curse As I was considering that things were only likely to get worse, I remembered then that I had, in my little red backpack, a decommissioned Second World War hand grenade; the kind that looks like a big metal pineapple.
	Jan 16	A Rap Beef in Israel “The lyrics are we should never be divided again, only together will we survive and maintain Israel. What is so wrong with that?” Shimoni says in an interview, wearing a rhinestone Star of David pendant.
	Jan 26	Israeli Rabbis Hope to Search Vatican Israel's chief rabbis, who will meet the pope Friday, said they hope to get permission to search Vatican storerooms for artifacts such as the huge golden menorah that stood in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.
	Jan 27	In The Margins of The Past Marginalia in the manuscripts of the Vatican library, some by Petrarch.
	Feb 1	Historical animals »
		Brooklyn neighborhoods »
		Intelligence agencies »
		Technologies »
		Corporate assets »
		Librarians »
		Electronic music genres »
		Knots »
		Unusual place names »
		Emotions »
		Controversial issues »
		Ologies »
		Trade unions »
		Specific demons and types of demons »
		Wars »
		Famous Suicides »
		Latin phrases »
		People known as “the Great” »
		Lists »
	Mar 15	Unnamed foreigners! “I noticed recently that Senator Kerry has been making some observations about foreign policy,” Mr. Cheney said a moment later. “He's been telling people that his ideas have gained strong support, at least among unnamed foreigners he's been spending time with.”
		List of fictional characters Yog Sogoth, Zorglub, and Buu.
		John Sayles and Roger Corman Sayles wrote Alligator and Piranha?
		Shock Sites Goatse.cx and other foul sites.
		Heavy metal umlaut Behind the dots.
		The Slashdot Trolling Phenomenon “A link to the original image of the penis bird is given below.”
		Wikis can't resolve arguments “Which brings me to my next point: Wikis work because they don't have a final state.”
		Passion opens firehose of horseshit NBC orders a pilot for “a new series about a nun and a skeptical scientist who begin to believe in the Bible as the events of Armageddon begin to happen.”
		Kibitzing with Kerry Loves nature, Harley.
		The Majority Leader A poem by my father, on Counterpunch.
		Blimp A massive mind-control orbital laser blimp, from the defence agency that brought you the Internet.
		The Passion of 1870 Reactions to the passion play of Obbergamerau in 1870, at the outset of the Franco-Prussian war.
	Mar 24	Nanniebot breakdown Nanniebot - a chatbot designed to catch pedophiles, and it apparently passes the Turing test. Nanniebot's creator - a holocaust denier, but please note also a pet lover. The Register says: "Wightman doesn't want to sell his software or turn his technology into a business. However he would welcome financial support for government-run child protection bodies so that he can expand his system beyond four servers at his work." AI history gets another nut.
	Mar 27	The Passive Voice A lengthy and detailed explanation of the passive voice in English speech.
		Guide to Grammar and Writing Exhaustive, topic-organized grammar guide.
		The Ly Detector Flag nefarious adverbs!
	Mar 29	F Train Spotting The F train illustrated by Danny Gregory.
		Genetic Sexual Attraction Long-lost sons, daughters, and siblings turn each other on. “One male talked of his need to be sexual with his brother but, not being homosexual, they shared a woman.”
		Involuntary parks To create a nature preserve, plant landmines.
		The Trial A remarkable short photo-story in 4 panels.
		Trapped by unded, need help The blog of two men trying to survive zombie attacks. “That's not very funny. That's not what I need right now. I don't need to be called retarded when I've got a million frickin zombies trying to kill me.”
		Spongebob in blackface A Pantone tragedy.
	Mar 31	Shaolin Monks in Politics Ninja fever!
		Restaurant Review Ire “A spoon? A fucking spoon? Really? Wow. A real spoon? One of those stick things with a little bowl-shaped thing on the end? One of them? A "spoon"? Fuck me. Who'd have thought, eh? A spoon.”
		Analysis Paralysis “Analysis Paralysis is a term given to the situation where a team of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning analysts enter into a phase of analysis that only ends when the project is cancelled.”
		Don Delillo in Gnooks People who like Don Delillo might also like these writers. But they might hate touchgraphs.
		The People in my Neighborhood Danny Gregory draws Williamsburg blind.
		News Designer Newpaper layout and front page approaches examined in detail.
		Copy Massage A young copy editor explains things.
		Discussion of the TeX hyphenation algorithm Just beautiful code--not actually by Knuth, but by Liang.
		APN Records “The era of selling reproducible content is dead.”
		Hyperworlds Website of a Xanalogical true believer.
		Hydra is a 3D XML Viewer Now you're cruising in STANDARDS-COMPLIANT CYBERSPACE.
		Tiny Apps for PC An appreciative collection of small, elegant PC applications.
		Excerpt from “Jubilate Agno” The great cat poem of Christopher Smart, written while insane. “For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.”
		Found at Starbucks... ...Rumsfeld's talking points: “Everything we say is always true.”
	Apr 1	Hoax site for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Marketing, but it's fun.
		Putin with his shirt off Finally.
		ID cards for conservatives Blah.
		Goth fashion library Take the corset quiz.
		Amazon World Amazing reviews.
		The Dreadnought Hoax of 1910 “Virginia Woolf is the bearded figure on the far left.”
		William Horace de Vere Cole History's greatest hoaxster.
		Hoaxes at Wikipedia
		RSS in Government
	Apr 2	Project MassiveOffshoringClusterfuck “I'd like to introduce you to Layne. She's here to take Project MassiveOffshoringClusterfuck to the next level of massive offshore clusterfucking.”
	Apr 4	The New Guineau Singing Dogs But no sound files.
		Dogs in Elk Dogs living inside an elk, with followup.
		List of Historical Dogs A dog named Robot discovered the cave paintings at Lascaux.
		Index of Famous Dogs All good boys and girls.
		Dog Island at Snopes But if it was real...
		Dog Island Send your dog to Dog Island! With different islands for big, medium, and tiny dogs.
		Balto the Sled Dog Memorialized in Central Park
		Wolf Nurses in India “He still prefers raw flesh, and when a bullock dies and the skin is removed, he attacks and eats the body, in company with the village dogs.”
		Chinese Dog Farms “A series of bloody puddles beneath a crossbeam affixed to a line of weeping willow trees.”
	Apr 7	Problems in Nauru A serious axe to grind.
		Ethnomathematics Not all numbers.
		The Full Brice Taylor Story Bob Hope's mind controlled sex puppet; Henry Kissinger's human filing system.
		Movie Budgets Scroll down for the worst failures. Donny Darko is one of the worst bombs ever.
		PETA Timeline Timeline of PETA projects: pro-beer campaign, Timothy McVeigh, etc.
		Roy Horn Catnip Doll With picture of adorable kitten.
	Apr 8	Well, one more. Okay. Done now.
		Okay. That's all
		Anil Dash Microcontent Movable Type Upskirt Piks Flash Movie with Kittens and CSS Help Bookmarklet Awesome upskirt shots of Anil working at Movable Type, releasing software, and going to business meetings where MENA TROTT HAS BECOME A ZOMBIE AND EATS HIS BRAIN.
		Movable Type 4 Pre-release Download With TypeKey integration and a robot that does your laundry, and total integration with everything ever, including the ability to natively blog from your brain just by thinking, until YOUR BRAIN IS EATEN BY ZOMBIES. Only available if you click that link.
		How to modify Quicktime movies with CSS Yes! With CSS3 you can change the look of entire films by applying only a few tiny selector rules. Works on Safari 3883.3881 only! Also modifies ZOMBIES.
		An Amusing Flash Movie This flash movie is great. The way that it fades in and out and whatever. Also the clicking. Lots of clicking. I'm going to post it to Metafilter, but I thought I'd show all of you first. Go ahead and check it out. Actually, a link to that zombie book again.
		Adorable Kitten Archive Terabytes of Kittens! Playful and interactive. The web needs more kittens! Includes KITTEN ZOMBIES! SCIENCE DIET IS NOT ENOUGH! THEY MUST HAVE BRAINS!
		Monster Island Goddammit Rosecrans, back off. Everyone! Read this novel about zombies! Read it! And give me the one thing I truly want, which is to have the eating of my brain by the undead thoroughly described.
		Hey! Rosecrans! Kottke! Don't you go taking this zombie link for your wildly popular sites and blowing my chances of being a character in this novel. This link is mine until I get 200 referers and am turned into a character in a zombie novel. Newsdesigner, sure, that was fine, but I AM CLAIMING THIS ZOMBIE LINK. HANDS OFF!
		Monster Island: Chapter 4 BRAINS! BRAINS! BRAINS! BRAINS!
		Monster Island: Chapter 3 I want to be fictionally eaten by New York zombies.
		Monster Island: Chapter 2 This is important to me.
		Monster Island: Chapter 1 Read it, because it has zombies, and if 200 of you click through, I get to be a character in the novel, and possibly eaten.
		Monster Island A serialized New York City zombie apocalypse novel written by David Wellington, and explained by Alex at Brokentype.
		Age of X A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
		Tilting for iTunes A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
		Early Periodicals Go Online A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
	Apr 12	Mark comes around to OpenOffice Be one of us! Be one of us! I use OpenOffice constantly, and save hundreds of dollars by doing so and am happier in the bargain (some tiny MSWord incompatibilities aside). Don't forget the extraordinarily well-documented XML schema for each document type. Never forget!
		National Emergency
		American Concentration Camps
	Apr 13	Neologism Flagger Based on The Passivator
		Cyberkinetics, Inc. “Turning thought into action.”
		Tiny Brain Implants Once there's an emacs mode and Eclipse plugin for this, I'm down.
		DNA from the beginning
		DNA interactive
		Handy Javascript Weblog
		Gary Benchley: State of Train Wayne Coyne: Now I'm going to ascend into heaven in a golden chariot, lifted by a huge flock of doves, and throw confetti over the chariot's side.
		The English in India "The governors appointed by the Crown were powerless for good. The practical exercise of power was in the hands of the servants of a soulless corporation on the opposite side of the globe, whose predominant feeling was contempt for the people over whom they were placed."
	Apr 14	Ornament and Cryptography “My tenet of ornament is therefore its renewal through computational means, a method of bringing ornament back into the cultural vocabulary as a visual container for information.” Serious consideration of design from Christian Marc Schmidt.
		Fractals in Flash
		Falluja Up-to-the-day Wikipedia entry
	Apr 15	The world's tallest virtual building All floors not created equal.
		Sweetly designed site
		Famous Scientologists past and present Leonard Cohen, Darby Crash, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Hayes, Chaka Khan, Juliette Lewis (and Brad Pitt when they were dating), Charles Manson, J.D. Salinger, Jerry Seinfeld.
		Web justification woes The problem is in the hyphens.
		The Apple Icon Garden Vomit
	Apr 16	Book detective Someone make a movie.
		Panoramas Piles and piles of Quicktime panoramic shots from around the globe. New York, Jerusalem, and Everest.
		Famous Scientologists Past and Present Leonard Cohen, Darby Crash, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Hayes, Chaka Khan, Juliette Lewis (and Brad Pitt when they were dating), Charles Manson, J.D. Salinger, Jerry Seinfeld.
	Apr 19	Obsolescence: the Killer App A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
		The characters of Dickens Hundreds of them.
		Brookings is Beautiful God, that's a nice-looking, well-organized website.
		The Thin Dark Boy A lo-fi, and pretty, tune by Jack Rusher & Michi Wiancko
		I Don't Feel Well Scribbles
		The Society of the Spectacle
	Apr 21	The Doomsday Canticle, Part I In which the protagonist is introduced, mad and raving, terrified of the contents of his own mind, and yet begins to recollect....»
		Mocoloco.com Expensive pretty things for spoiled people.
		SAP Ventures Venture capital shenanigans.
	Aug 27	Interview with Cathy Hannan
		Photographs from the first gulf war Excellent photos, 90% utterly insane comments written by morans (sic).
		Nightmares, illustrated A creepy Worth1000 contest
		Daily News talks to insane man About his love for the man McGreevey loves.
		Schoenberg in MIDI Rock the party.
		Ancient Suck Slashdot Parody I'm kind of glad that the Suck era of the Internet is dead.
		Orgone Box RNC protests in Brooklyn Phew.
		Choire Sicha quotes You know how in those mystery books, they're always telling you that the corpse was gay because of trauma to the anus? I love that shit.
	Aug 31	A Tour of the George W. Bush Presidential Library I wrote this short piece for The Morning News, only to realize afterwards that others had done the same.
		A collection of poetic posters from Tacoma
		WikiQuotes from Comedians
		The Civil Liberties Blimp And in other news, "The camera on board the airship is so powerful that it can read the newspaper over your shoulder from 1,000 feet," Bruce Renny of the Lightship Group said.
	Sep 6	Space Moose creator Adam Thrasher's new gig I am ashamed that Space Moose made me laugh.
		A hosting provider for planet-wide applications For those planning global domination.
		Review of a drive-in church
		All the neighborhoods in NYC
		Viggo Mortensen runs his own press ...and did a CD with Buckethead, dedicated to Chomsky.
		Barney the White House Dog video Why do they hate America?
		DivX videos of Amiga demos "Demos" are animated works of art where pushing the limits of the computer you're using is part of the art. This would be an ideal set of .torrent files. God, I sound like Andy Baio....
		Mandonna Videos are worth watching.
		Brokentype RNC roundup The best write-up of the RNC you'll find in any major or minor medium.
	Sep 8	Profile of Spongebob Squarepants
		Knob Goblins Knob Goblins are cat toys that hang off a door. Someone should be fired, or promoted, at Great American Pet Co.
		Cocktail Hour You know that scene in Do the Right Thing where Mookie throws the trash can through the window? It's like that, but for five straight minutes, in the dark, with molotov cocktails and a marching band, and over a dozen screaming people leaping on a flaming police car.
		Fox develops creative writers
		Origin of the "Get a Brain, Morans" photo?
		Margaret Leng Tan on John Cage
		The History of the Chipmunks
		Google's guide for gold-digging socialites
	Sep 14	The World's Best Bathrooms
		The Presidential Prayer Team
		Google's modest beginnings
		Hundreds of Government-produced United States maps Lots of pelican migration.
		Amiga/Warhol
	Sep 16	Library Signs "The FBI has not been here."
		Giuliani vs O'Malley From more pleasant times: O'Malley and Giuliani face off over who'll win the 2001 in a series of ads. Highlight is O'Malley's whisper: "Raaa-vens"
		The Works of Lovecraft
		Sex Wiki
	Oct 4	Magical robot book machine Scan whole books
		Birdwatchers Against Bush Worth two in the Bush.
		Biro-web NY Diary
		Edison recordings
		Mechanical Pong
		Sex Tetris Foam blocks for shenanigans. Careful, nekkid!
		Gee-whiz awesome flashy whutwhut
		The Banana Junior 6000 Series Fully Portable Personal Computer
	Oct 27	Christian Retail “It looks like Santa puked.”
		Top 100 American Speeches
		World Music MP3 Blog
		Russian Vonnegut Club not Succeeding "In America, it's only white trash who upgrade,"
		Documentaries about poor people and pentecostals
		Death star costume
		Woman's bitchin' Gimli costume
		Asian Classical Music in MP3
		Puzzling Music
		It Can't Happen Here
		History of a failed music project
		Hal Lindsey Oracle Cartoons
2005	Nov 16	The Music of Nell James This woman is 16 or 17 and does indie-inflected Yes/Steve Howe covers (plus one original) in which she plays all of the instruments herself. You want to listen to her cover of South Side of the Sky. Plus she builds websites for Steven Drozd side projects. It's a relief to know she's out there because now none of us have to pretend to be cool any more, as basically this person is much, much more awesome than anyone currently alive.
2007	Jan 7	Using the Semantic Web to prove the girl is a witch “# :GIRL a :WITCH .”
		Centiara, a Semantic Wiki “[[capital of::Germany]]” “[[population:=3,396,990]]”
		Lefty Media: Influenced by Skull & Bones and Trilateral Commission? Finally—the Amy Goodman/CIA connection is made clear (scroll down for essential chart).
		Will Durant writes to H.L. Mencken about Charlie Chaplin at Theodore Dreiser's Funeral “Dreiser looked handsomer in death than in life; his face expressed a repose and an acceptance which his pugnacious idealism had seldom permitted him before.”
	Jan 8	Jack Explains Money Making sense of the Barley Standard.
	Jan 10	Memory and the Virtual World A commentary with audio created by Paul Ford for NPR's All Things Considered.»
	Jan 16	Supercar: Be I've watched this video sixty times. Translated lyrics are here (out of order--read bottom to top). Pet turtle gonna learn its lesson.
	Jan 21	Gawker shuffles, Choire Sicha returns It's so good when people put their love back into pure web after being away. I like reading Choire because's he's a human being in an industry without any. Then this excellence from Andrew Krucoff on the switch: “I guess blogging's all grown up when it's imitating the bullshit habits of old media, huh?” So promising.
		Office 2007 “We had some options in there,” said product manager Paul Coleman, “that literally did nothing,”
	Jan 31	The sounds children make in different languages No pig noises in Saudi Arabia?

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About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit things, and help people launch online publications. (LinkedIn). I wrote a novel. I was an editor at Harper's Magazine for five years; then I was a Contributing Editor; now I am a free agent. I was also on NPR's All Things Considered for a while. I still write for The Morning News, and some other places.

If you have any questions for me, I am very accessible by email. You can email me at ford@ftrain.com and ask me things and I will try to answer. Especially if you want to clarify something or write something critical. I am glad to clarify things so that you can disagree more effectively.

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Recent

@20, by Paul Ford. Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either. (October 15)

Recent Offsite Work: Code and Prose. As a hobby I write. (January 14)

Rotary Dial. (August 21)

10 Timeframes. (June 20)

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. (April 10)

Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley. (April 7)

Welcome to the Company. (September 21)

“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”. Forgot to tell you about this. (July 20)

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. An essay for TheMorningNews.org. (July 11)

Woods+. People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately. (July 10)

Reading Tonight. Reading! (May 25)

Recorded Entertainment #2, by Paul Ford. (May 18)

Recorded Entertainment #1, by Paul Ford. (May 17)

Nanolaw with Daughter. Why privacy mattered. (May 16)

0h30m w/Photoshop, by Paul Ford. It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so that I can get a rhythm and know what I'm doing. One thing that works for me are time limits; pencils up, pencils down. So: Fridays, write for 30 minutes; edit for 20 minutes max; and go whip up some images if necessary, like the big crappy hand below that's all meaningful and evocative because it's retro and zoomed-in. Post it, and leave it alone. Can I do that every Friday? Yes! Will I? Maybe! But I crave that simple continuity. For today, for absolutely no reason other than that it came unbidden into my brain, the subject will be Photoshop. (Do we have a process? We have a process. It is 11:39 and...) (May 13)

That Shaggy Feeling. Soon, orphans. (May 12)

Antilunchism, by Paul Ford. Snack trams. (May 11)

Tickler File Forever, by Paul Ford. I'll have no one to blame but future me. (May 10)

Time's Inverted Index, by Paul Ford. (1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and the historical fallacy. (May 9)

Bantha Tracks. (May 5)

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