Category: Internet

Galileo wasn’t burned on a pyre, you argue. True, but the Galileo Orbiter, coming to the end of its mission exploring the Jovian satellites, will be de-orbited on September 21st and sent plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Slashdot has the usual geek chorus commenting on a thorough story in The New Yorker. (Sample level of detail: Galileo is being deliberately de-orbited and burnt up so that any microbes it may be carrying won’t contaminate Europa, its likely crash site, whose enormous frozen ocean may prove a fertile breeding ground for invading microbes.) Popular Science has a brief mention and a pointer to the crash countdown at JPL, which also hosts links to dozens of other facts gathered by Galileo in its epochal mission.

My mother-in-law has always been an avid learner, keeping her computer current (she’s now on her second iMac—the “Luxo Jr.” G4 plus LCD display model) and using email and the Web for all her organizational activities. She’s running into some problems now doing some of her work, in that some people to whom she sends attachments can’t open them.

I remember the same thing happening in some musical organizations that I was in. They tried to move to a model where the rehearsal schedules, driving directions, and other necessary bits of information were distributed via email and kept on websites, but inevitably there would be two or three (or five or six) members who couldn’t get to their email, who claimed that the director always sent mail to “their other account,” who couldn’t open the file format that was sent around, who couldn’t figure out how to use the Yahoo! group site to get the attachments. Result: the inexorable paper coming around at rehearsals again.

Can the death of paper only be achieved when all those who grew up without bits have passed on, too? Or will we always have information redundancy—storage on inefficient atoms created from living resources?

Via Scott Rosenberg and the New York Times, “Red wine ingredient makes yeast live longer” (registration required, or try the usual). Resveratrol, a polyphenol found in red wine, extends the lifespan of yeast cells by as much as 70% by boosting levels of the Sir2 enzyme, which is thought to stabilize DNA and thus extend life. The full abstract, with citations, is here. But I already have all the information I need. Cameriere, un’altra bottiglia di Barolo, per favore!

In the “Say It Ain’t So” department: the Julie/Julia Project has finished its year-long romp through the recipes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with a meal of kidneys and beef marrow (Rognons de Veau a la Bordelaise), sautéed potatoes with mayonnaise collée, and Reine de Saba for dessert. As I have already written, Julie has been one of the best, most original voices I’ve read yet on a weblog, and the scope and audacity of her project should shake all of us. I look forward to her next move.

William Gibson comments about his own blog’s message board: “…while I’ve sometimes been tempted to comment on more threads more directly, I continue to think that that would turn into exactly the sort of tar-baby timesink that keeps books unwritten, so I don’t. It’s really all about *you*, a conglommerate of mediated selves in your own right. Is it a Relevant Experiment? You decide.“

Gibson captures in a nutshell why communities around an Entity—whether an author, a cartoonist, or a software company—are only as strong as (a) their participants and heavy posters, and (b) their subjects’ capability for staying out of the way.

My heartfelt condolences to Doc Searls on the loss of his mother. From what he’s been writing about her, she sounds like she was a heckuva lady. But then, what can you expect for someone with connections in both the Jersey Shore and North Carolina?

I finally circled back to see what Clancy Ratliff was up to with her research on blogs and Creative Commons licenses. Turns out she will present the paper at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto in October. The rest of the program for the conference looks interesting, with several panels on blogging, a bunch of papers around the ethics of collecting data on line, and others.

…from looking at his blog today, but Craig just turned 30. Go wish him many happy returns.

Dave points to a review of Weblogger, my hosting service, in PC Magazine. Big, big shout out to Erin and his team for keeping this site up and running and happy since I cut over from my free site at Userland late last year.

In commemoration of the moment, I’m adding the button I should have had all advertising their services along the button list. Which just reminds me: I really need to clean up this site. The left nav wasn’t designed for all the crap I’m trying to cram into it.

It’s Fair and Balanced Day, as I mentioned yesterday. The best outcome for today would be if we could bump Fox News to the second or third result for Fair and Balanced in Google. Just remember: If Fox News can call themselves “Fair and Balanced,” so can anyone!

Julie: Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a Blackout. “With a flashlight wedged under my chin and candles everywhere, I sautéed rice in butter—would have used some onions there but I had none, or if I did they were lost in the dark refrigerator…”

Tin Man: “ I stood on the Hudson River promenade. I listened and looked at the water lapping against the rocks. I leaned against the railing and stared east at the Manhattan skyline. Most of it was dark, but much of Lower Manhattan had power. It was an eerie reversal from two years ago.

“It was like Lower Manhattan had suffered enough and was finally getting a respite.”

As you can see from my new tagline, I’m jumping on the “Fair and Balanced” bandwagon. After all, if Fox News can claim to be fair and balanced, just about anyone can. See this post from Neal Pollack about making August 15th Fair and Balanced Day on the Internet to protest Fox’s bogus suit against Al Franken’s new book for using the words “fair and balanced” in the title. And go pre-order a copy of Al’s book while you’re at it…

It isn’t a true keiretsu update because I don’t know all of these folks personally, but cut me a little slack:

• Greg is now licensed to practice law in DC, and his rant about walking and driving in the District reminds me of why I miss the Beltway environs—and why I left. For the record, Corner Bakery came in 1999, a year before we left; almost far enough away to keep me from gaining another ten pounds. Almost.
• At Justin’s Links, an hommage to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” I did a hyperlinked art project around the song a while ago, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion, which in light of everything else that has happened since seems uncomfortably prescient (even if some of the links have gone stale).
• Craig points to a great post with photos from BrickFest 2003, the Lego convention. I particularly like the Star Destroyer Speed Build competition—as I reported a while back, the Lego Star Destroyer kit is the largest (and most expensive) ever.
• It seems that on the same day I found out about the Star Destroyer kit, I discovered the Julie/Julia Project. Now, almost a year later, the project is nearing its end and the well deserved publicity is starting to roll in. Huge congrats to Julie Powell for her write-up in the New York Times Food Section, following close on the heels of her audio interview with Chris Lydon. I love the way the Times discusses her, um, sailor’s mouth: “Some of Ms. Powell’s language, in person and on her Web log, is very rough. Some of it is very funny. So that this report may be welcomed at breakfast tables and in classrooms, the word ‘cookie’ has replaced the occasional expletives.” —Incidentally, note the careful two-word, initial capped use of Web log. Can you imagine how long it took the guys who do the style guide for the Times to come to an agreement on that one?

There was a new high water mark at Weblogs.com on Wednesday: 4112 weblogs. My data record of the Weblogs.com high water marks has been updated to reflect the new mark.

This was good timing, coming as it did during the Great Weblogs.com Data Pull. Now I’ll be able to look at traffic trends before and after a high water mark, and see if there is any relationship between high water mark days and mean traffic levels on Weblogs.com.

From the keiretsu:

• Esta writes about the Episcopalian decision to ordain a gay bishop, and some subsequent fallout in that community: “The greater public sees a large proportion of believers being hateful, and the church wonders why its numbers are dwindling?” The interesting part of that process, in my opinion, is the way the allegations of child abuse and pornography sprung up in the eleventh hour, but were quickly defused. Makes you wonder…
• Got an IM from Greg this morning confirming the arrival of my birthday gift, the first CD I burned using this machine. If anyone else is curious, I posted the play order over at Art of the Mix.
• Flangy points out the one thing I didn’t in my update marathon last night: it rained here. Shortly after I put the sprinkler on our tomatoes. He also wishes for categorized RSS feeds. Unfortunately Manila doesn’t provide those out of the box, but there’s an RSS plugin available that I use to roll mine.