WiReD 4.05 (May ’96), “Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe),” on Yahoo[!]:
Starting with the ad hoc categories she inherited from Yang and Filo, Srinivasan began slowly and deliberately steering Yahoo!’s ontology toward completeness. Mainly, it’s been a matter of adding new categories and reorganizing hierarchies as the Web evolves from containing only specialized, technical information [...]
Slate’s Ray Fisman (“They Made a Killing,” 29 Oct ’08) reports that forensic economists have discovered that “the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders were using their privileged information to profit personally from [the] future coup” in Guatemala by gaming the stock market. What’ll they discover next? Zero?
Fortunately, the article is a pedestrian prologue to the [...]
Dan Froomkin (White House Watch column, “Bush Just Makes It Worse,” WP, 10 Oct ’08)
Although Bush didn’t announce it this morning, there are signs that he will eventually sign off on a radical, but at least theoretically effective, next move—even though it violates his core political principles and is exactly the approach his administration rejected [...]
Garet Garrett, Ouroboros, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (NYC: Dutton, 1926) labors to explain what a player piano means:
As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float into my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor truck stopped at his house and unloaded a [...]
The NYT offers a curious meditation on the historical parallels between the collapse of the USSR (when “shock therapy” was the order of the day) and the US’s current difficulties:
Just in time:
“The time of domination by one economy and one currency has been consigned to the past once and for all,” Medvedev said during a [...]
Photo: Julian Bleecker, Everyday Digital Money conf, UC Irvine, 18-19 Sept 2008.
(B***S***)
FT:
United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] United [...]
Martin Miller (“Is Campaigns’ Path to the Heart a Proper One?”, LAT [11 Aug ’00]), on Windy Smith’s cameo at the 2000 RNC:
“What the nation witnessed was the passing of the torch,” said JoAnn Simons, president of the Atlanta-based National Down Syndrome Congress. “Individuals with disabilities don’t necessarily need people to speak for them.”
More (“Tugging [...]
The first time it’s a tragedy, the second time a farce:
Those were the days, eh?
The text of Windy’s letter to Governor Shrub follows.
The NYT has an “interactive” piece—an aggro Flash thing that takes its inspiration from OSX’s Dock—about development of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present.
Three alternate/additional designs for the Mexico City ’68 torch can be found at the site of Olympic Museum. Here’s a clearer detail of Type B:
That is the considered opinion of the Société pour l’administration du droit de reproduction mécanique des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs (SDRM) on the subject of the USSR’s national anthem. SDRM just billed the filmmaker Jean-Christophe Soulageon a bill for EUR1000 because someone whistled seven seconds of the commie anthem “L’Internationale” in his 2004 film Insurrection [...]
Courtesy of FAS: Lazarus, Voorhees, Wells, and Worlton, “Computing at LASL [Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory] in the 1940s and 1950s,” LASL/USDoE, ’78 (2.1MB PDF).
The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:
In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology [...]
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initiation of full-scale armed conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.
National Peace Council of Sri Lanka:
Commemorating July 1983: Bridges that Continue to Hold
On July 23, 1983 law and order in Sri Lanka virtually collapsed as mobs went on a rampage, inciting anarchy and fear, uprooting Tamil [...]
Motoko Rich, “Conservative Authors Sue Publisher,” NYT (7 Nov ’07): “Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company” [...]
Mike Davis:
The London Society is the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth’s history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the “golden spikes” of [...]
Title: Fairchild/Silicon Valley Genealogy Chart
Author: Don Hoefler, Harry Smallwood, and James E. Vincler
Created: 1977
Publisher: SEMI
Donated By: James E. Vincler
Filename: doc-45ff3e214d9ea.pdf (Size: 656 KB)
Pages: 1
Description: The first published version of the Silicon Valley Genealogy chart that traced the lineage of 66 semiconductor companies founded between 1959 and 1976 back to Fairchild was prepared as part [...]
How the Ali G crew stage-manages an interview:
We were then kept waiting for an hour, a delay for which we were given a variety of production-related excuses. The interviewer disappeared. We had other engagements and were beginning to study our watches and complain. By the time the interview began, we were preoccupied with our scheduling [...]
Michael McClintock’s book Instruments of Statecraft: US Guerrilla Warfare, Countrinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940–1990 (NYC: Pantheon, 1992)—available in full on the web—provides the background for understanding the recently leaked Army field manual Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (FM 31-20-3; 1994, 2004).
In “Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?”, NYT’s David Pogue says his boilerplate response to poeple asking about PDF versions of his books reads:
Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and [...]
Rohit K. Singla, “Missed Opportunities: The Vaccine Act of 1813” (1998):
In February 1813 Congress handily passed and the President enthusiastically signed a piece of ground-breaking legislation which has been long overlooked by legal historians—An Act to Encourage Vaccination.[2] The Act established a national source for uncontaminated, smallpox vaccine. Without any textual basis in the Constitution, [...]
Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky”
Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game “Colossal Cave Adventure”, academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. “Adventure” was the first in a series of text-based games (“interactive [...]
From the letters to the editor (a/k/a “Rants and Raves”) for WiReD 1.02 (May/Jun 1993):
My copy is too wide for the top of my toilet. It’s hard to keep the lid up with Wired hanging over the edge. Steve Cisler - sac@apple.com