Month: February 2001

Am I GOTH or NOT?. I’m not sure if this is meant to be a parody or a straight-ahead copy of Am I HOT or NOT?. I hope it’s a parody.

I feel it’s my duty to warn you of a grave danger: without your help, the universe may expand into a cold mirthless fog. Let Americans for a Closed Universe explain how you can save the universe from a terrible fate.

More amazing free content on the web: NurseryPhotos.com will dig up the baby picture of anyone you care to name. You, your mom, your aunt Agnes. Give it a try. I guarantee it will be worth your while. This link courtesy of my pal Mike. He’s one of the evil geniuses behind the MadSci Network at Wash U. Thanks, Mike!

My brother-in-law Craig is an artist and an author. Here is his own (online) version of The Three Little Pigs. Ever wonder where the hell that story comes from? Read carefully; what looks like the rehashing of an children’s story is actually a carefully researched deconstruction of the story’s origin and its subversion by economic forces.

Here’s some good news. The Coffee Czar has a web log of his own: Word from the Czar. Great used links, gathered from around the web and published on the cheap from the man who brought you The Ring and other classic tales.

I’ve enjoyed reading Clay Shirky’s writings in FEED for some time. Here is his website: Clay Shirky’s Internet Writings. This is the leverage that the net gives you. If you find a writer that you like, you can go straight to the source.

I was poking around in the all-but-defunct (but nevertheless still cool) Mappa Mundi magazine where I came across a review of the wonderwalker by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg. Martin Wattenberg is one of my heroes, plus I like the concept of wunderkammern, so off I went. The actual wonderwalker applet isn’t so impressive, but the motivation and ambition it shows are admirable. These are very good ideas that are going to work somewhere real soon.

Wunderkammern, or wonder-cabinets, are collections of oddities or, more ambitiously, concrete classifications of knowledge in compact form. They were popular in the Renaissance (see Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater) and they make an appealing metaphor for the web. For a modern wunderkammer, check out the

I like the Space.com website. I was reading a fun article there about supercavitating supersonic submarine submunitions (bullets that travel faster than sound underwater). Then I got sucked into The Mars Face, Eros’ Heart: The Real Story Behind Mysterious Space Photos. Remember the mysterious Mars Face? We went back with a Polaroid, and he’s much uglier than we thought.

Something like the Anoto pen is going to take off. There are a number of others out there. Between the “true” pen interface and much better voice recognition systems, I believe in the hype that it’s going to dramatically improve the value of any given computer.

I wrote a paper (PDF format) on a MATLAB Programming Contest that got accepted at CHI 2001 in Seattle. Maybe I’ll see you there.