Category: Uncategorized

New Yorker article on why and how the towers fell when they did.

Mixed Messages on the Newsweek site is an entertaining piece by an Iranian-American visiting Tehran. He gives an account of the anti-American museum housed in the former US embassy, including games such as a “carnival strength meter where you pound Uncle Sam on the head to score points and hear feedback like, ‘Wow, you pack quite a wallop.'”

Philip Greenspun’s home page

MazeWorks – Java Games and Puzzles

Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics: semiconductor physics, Edge Emitting Lasers and VCSELs

Salman Rushdie writes Yes, This Is About Islam in the NY Times. He says, “The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern.” This brief essay and a piece by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek (“The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” which you have to pay to see online) have sharpened my own views on the topic. I also found “What Terrorists Want” by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker to be good reading. The essential question is this: are they crazy or rational? If they are rational, what do they want?

Use Alexa’s Wayback Machine to view old Star Chamber pages (going as far back as December 1996). These guys have a lot of chutzpah: they want to archive the entire web, and keep on doing forever. And amazingly enough, they can actually turn the clock back on a lot of material.

A friend turned me onto Salon’s Everything you wanted to know about “Memento” article. I was still pretty confused by the time the movie ended, but entertained nevertheless. This article is the skeleton key that lets you in on the secrets.

Read all about how the world changed from the point of view of the people that index the world at Google. The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine and Google’s zeitgeist page.

I like blogdex, but it troubles me because whenever I find something I like there and blog it, I know I’m just piling on the old internet bandwagon. Self-fulfilling memes. Oh well. I absolve myself.