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On the night of Mr. Melvyn’s murder is a hypertext murder mystery, the sort of thing people got very excited about at the dawn of the HTML age. I remember very clearly there was a strong current of belief that hypertext fictional webs had the potential to be as rich and widespread a medium as the novel. Instead they became a novelty, and Mr. Melvyn’s murder illustrates why. The “story” is a complicated thread that winds through perhaps a few dozen character pages, including fictional creeps like Moe and Mr. Earl as well as cameos by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and
Elton John. Each page has a portrait of one character and their part of the story. The story is convoluted, but the artwork is very good, so I clicked and clicked in an absent-minded sort of way, watching the pictures go by until I found Mr. Melvyn at the end of the maze. That by itself didn’t reveal the mystery, but I wasn’t motivated enough to go back and unravel it.

Serendipity brought me, in less than two week’s time, to a different web of pages in much the same format: the Manson Girl Info Center. The gruesome backstory of creeps linked together by murder is nonfiction this time, but the shape of the site is very similar to Mr. Melvyn’s. Despite this similarity, I was extremely compelled to read my way through the Manson Girl site. Why was Susan Atkins called Sadie? Did Squeaky Fromme really intend to kill President Ford? Why were these women so infamously dedicated to Charles Manson?

The hypertext format works well with facts, because the world is endless and complicated. But when it comes to stories, you long for a single burning fuse. The point here is not so much the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The point is that I know the basic story of the Manson murders and am curious to learn about the context, whereas I don’t know why I should care that Mr. Melvyn was murdered, and so the labyrinth of background information is merely wearying.

I just bought a TiVo (and paid up front for the service that goes along with it), so I sure hope this doesn’t come true. Nevertheless, things going the way they are with the economy makes it plausible. This is from Slate: TiVo, We Hardly Knew Ye – Sorry fans, but it’s destined for the ash heap of history

I always enjoyed the book Science Made Stupid, a parody science book. The writing is hit-and-miss, mostly relying on goofy sound-alike puns (the three kinds of rock are ignominious, sedentary, and metaphoric). Enough of the writing hits the target to make you believe the author, Tom Weller, is truly (or was trained as) a scientist. I liked the throwaway reference to the Devil’s Grant Proposal National Wasteland in Wyoming. But the artwork is superb and lifts it far above lamer low-end parodies. Here’s a typical explanation, reminiscent of the explanations of Calvin’s dad in Calvin and Hobbes.

We sometimes speak of the tides causing the oceans to rise or fall. Of course, this is a fallacy. Actually, it is the land that rises and falls.
As the Earth rotates, the moon’s gravitational attraction is greatest first on one side, then the other. Land masses, being rigid, are pulled up or down accordingly. Oceans, being liquid, are free to flow back to their normal level. (see diagram).

This site is based in Austria; I have no idea if the author approves of the material appearing online like this. If Amazon is any indication, the book is out of print, so enjoy the website.

My old pal Rob the Coffee Czar sent me a good link this morning: check out the animated timepiece at Industrious Clock at yugop.com, which appears to be related to the Japanese design firm MONO*crafts. I haven’t even had time to check out all the mesmerizing Flash demos they have up, but the ones I’ve looked at so far are really impressive. The Industrious Clock reminds me of another handwritten clock called the Human Clock. The Human Clock is much slower, but really seems to have succeeded as a social phenomenon. When I first saw it some time ago, every minute seemed to show someone from Portland, Oregon. But they seem to have succeeded to the extent that you’re as likely to find someone from New South Wales as from Oregon.

The web is a wonderful place for the LEGO-obsessed. LEGO fanatics seem to have the right genes for crafting detailed sites devoted to their love. Consider the inimitable LUGNET (LEGO User’s Group Network), an extraordinary community site dedicated to lovers of the plastic brick. And take a look at Escher’s “Ascending and Descending” in LEGO, part of a series of Escher prints rendered in you-know-what.

Ned Lud was a real person who smashed a knitting frame and was thereafter celebrated for striking a blow against the job-sucking engines of the Industrial Revolution. From that seed grew the mythical figure General Ludd, a shadowy figure credited with organizing the anti-technology Luddites. My little graphic notwithstanding, I did find several references on the web to a site called http://www.luddites.com. It has since gone off line…

That headline is no joke. This story is about the world’s funniest joke. I was absolutely certain that it was a bait-and-switch kind of a story about the psychology of jokes, but they did not disappoint. Follow the link, and there is a real joke there. As far as being the world’s funniest, I don’t know, but their rationale was: across genders, across many possible cultures, nations, religions, age groups, and languages, which joke, of a given list, ranked the highest? I was sorry to see the winner did not begin with So this guy walks into a bar, and …. But I’m getting ahead of myself. See for yourself. Here’s another related story at CNN.com from partway through the study: Europe’s funniest nation revealed (surprise! it’s Germany). Incidentally, Dave Barry had a good joke on the joke scientists:

The American data proved to be somewhat strange. Dave Barry is a well known humourist whose columns are syndicated in many American newspapers. In January 2002 he kindly devoted an entire column to LaughLab. At the end of the column he urged readers to submit jokes that simply ended with the punch line:
‘There’s a weasel chomping on my privates.’ Within just a few days we had received over 1500 ‘weasel chomping’ jokes.

The Houston Chronicle has a story this week about football players who can’t get enough. When they’re not playing it on the gridiron, they’re playing onscreen: Texans addicted as anybody else to video-game craze. NFL players have the benefit of seeing themselves playing in the computer game. As you can imagine, they take great interest in how well their virtual proxies do. My favorite quote was this one from the Electronic Arts PR firm that publishes Madden 2002 NFL Football.

The first thing players look at is what their rating is… If they see John Madden during the season they’ll ask him, “How come I’m not faster?” They take it real seriously.

I’m not surprised. The faithfulness of the simulations that can be achieved these days is really breathtaking, from the creases in the uniforms to the stadium lights to the end zone dances. Take a look at one of the promotional videos from the Madden site. If Virtual You kept chucking interceptions, you’d be pissed too. I spotted this on Boing Boing; read Cory Doctorow’s riff on the same topic.

My latest issue of The Atlantic came in the mail. James Fallows has a thoughtful piece on what would happen in Iraq after we won a war. That, in itself, is interesting, but not surprising. The surprising thing about my new issue of The Atlantic is this: I never subscribed to The Atlantic. If anyone out there can help clear up the mystery of where my subscription came from, I would most obliged. This is from Fallows.

“My nightmare scenario,” Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force chief of staff, told me, “is that we jump people in, seize the airport, bring in the 101st [Airborne Division]—and we can’t find Saddam Hussein. Then we’ve got Osama and Saddam Hussein out there, both of them achieving mythical heroic status in the Arab world just by surviving. It’s not a trivial problem to actually grab the guy, and it ain’t over until you’ve got him in handcuffs.”

Where is Manuel Noriega today? You don’t remember and you don’t care because we put him in jail. Or maybe it was because he was really boring in the first place. I can’t remember…