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Simon Schama’s essay in the Guardian. “… the best, the only revenge, when you’re fighting a cult that fetishises death, is life.”

MATLAB Programming contest rankings – mastermind

Read this and see if it annoys you as much as it annoyed me: Seumas Milne write in the Guardian They can’t see why they are hated. It’s good to read stuff like this, but that shouldn’t keep you from detesting it. I wonder if Mr. Milne thinks that the English simply don’t get why they are so disliked in Northern Ireland? Found via kottke.org.

I was reading a column in Fortune.com and came across a reference to William Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech. I read it. I felt better.

WebReview.com: August 24, 2001: This Old Blog: Home Improvement for the New Home Page

Walter Mossberg from The Wall Street Journal writes about GoToMyPC.com, a useful-sounding remote control service for running your home PC from any terminal in the world. Yet another cool service that is both valuable and extremely dangerous from the point of view of security. Incidentally, I keep up with Mossberg’s columns with Spyonit.com. It’s a great service.

Send your name to Mars. NASA will put your name on Mars for free. No catch. But it’s a pretty cerebral kind of stunt. Your name will be data-compressed and encoded on a CD-ROM that then gets mailed to Mars. Catch this snazzy marketing line: “Everyone on Earth who has ever dreamed of being an explorer on an alien planet will want to go along for the ride as we explore the surface of Mars” invites Dr. Ed Weiler, Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Science. That’s seems like a stretch, but then again, it’s a pretty irresistible gimmick. Hats off to the Mars minders.

I am fascinated by the image of the wild-n-free communes in the 60s. On the one hand, it seems like such a cool concept. On the other hand, it seems so hopeless, ridiculous, and filthy. I recently rented Easy Rider, which offers an excellent viewpoint from the middle of the era in question. Recently, there were some good articles on Salon about this topic too. Salon.com Life | Curse of the hippie parents. “Sometimes,” says the author, “your mind can be so open, your brain falls out.”

Also in the same mini-section on Salon there were some reviews of books on the same topic. The consensus? These communes were mostly hopeless, ridiculous, and filthy. Communes that work, and they exist, are not wild-n-free.

The relationship between Dionysus and civilized society is captivating. You can’t be rid of him, but you can’t get too close to him either. It is, by definition almost, the object of desire that cannot be grasped. Check out R. H. Albright’s Apollo and Dionysus bookstore for some background reading.

TracerLock is a company that filters the web while you sleep and emails you the results. Very similar to Spyonit.com (which I use on this site and like an awful lot) and somewhat similar to the Opencola.com concept.

Martin Wattenberg’s treemap implementation taken to the Smithsonian: HistoryWired: A few of our favorite things. Very nice, and a glimpse of things to come, I’m sure. This interface is getting heavy press, which is a pretty cool concept in itself.