Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Stonehenge porn?

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Here’s a fun little story that dad pointed out, from the Discovery Channel — Female anatomy inspired Stonehenge?

The design of Stonehenge, the 4,800-year-old monument in southwestern England, was based on female sexual anatomy, according to a paper in the current Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[Anthony Perks] noticed how the inner stone trilithons were arranged in a more elliptical, or egg-shaped, pattern than a true circle. Comparing the layout with the shape of female sexual organs showed surprising parallels.

Perks believes the labia majora could be represented by the outer stone circle and possibly the outer mound, with the inner circle serving as the labia minora, the altar stone as the clitoris and the empty geometric center outlined by bluestones representing the birth canal.

It came from Outer Faith

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Dad sent me this great little quiz from Beliefnet — It came from Outer Faith.

Though no one’s yet written a book on how to convert aliens, some religions do accept the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. Find out how much you know about the intersection of faith and sci-fi.

I got seven out of ten when I took it, missing just questions five, seven, and eight. Not too bad, I think!

tail -f access_log

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A geek-fascinating look at traffic as a new weblog is discovered.

I’ve only ever run web sites on Apache or one of its ancestors, and this lineage of web servers has always written its statistics into a file named access_log. I think anyone who’s running a Web site, or who cares about the Web, ought to, on a regular basis, spend some time watching the access_log in real time.

Too often we get this image of the Web as a vast well-oiled machine, with glossy browser screens in front and masses of gleaming software in back. Watching the access_log is like a window into the side lobby of the legislature, or a tour of the fermentation vats at the brewery.

(Via Dave Winer)

Snowflake pictures

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A single snowflake

Gorgeous pictures of snowflakes at this site, along with more information than I ever thought there would be about the little buggers.

My parents have often teased me about how long it would take me to walk the three blocks to school when I was a kid, usually assuming that I had to examine every snowflake I saw to see if they were really all different. In normal Alaskan winters, of course, there are a lot of snowflakes. Even in only three blocks.

That said, though, I never got quite this into examining snow. Probably because the downside to examining snowflakes was being out in the cold, and at ten years old, I was a bit short of the capital it would take to build my own laboratory for experiments like this. Bummer!

(Via /.)

Dive! Dive! Dive!

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Interesting editorial over at Wired today: Go Deep! The US needs a NASA for exploring the oceans.

NASA has had its day. It’s given us technological marvels from cell phones to SETI screensavers. But we’re not mining the moon. We’re not terraforming Mars. And we’re certainly not finding any aliens. We’ve gotten completely off track: choosing to look for long-dead microbes 390 million miles away on Europa, while neglecting undiscovered life just miles off the coast of North America.

About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We’ve seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem – the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It’s home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.

This is something that’s been bouncing around my brain for quite a few years now. While I certainly don’t want to see space exploration stop (and I am excited about some of the new ideas being proposed), it’s amazed me that we’re basically ignoring such a huge expanse of unexplored territory, right here on the very planet we live on. Surely some of the advances made in our exploration of space could be adapted to serve in an underwater environment, since some of the same concepts apply (such as keeping a standard pressure environment stable in an environment with a vastly different pressure — much more, rather than much less).

What new technologies could be created as we explore the new problems? Or what current technologies could be adapted and improved? We’re already seeing more and more work in hydrogen-powered automobiles — why not incorporate some miniaturized desalinization plant with a hydrogen-powered engine, and then any submersible could have a nearly infinite supply of fuel (think of a Bussard Ramscoop for a sub)? The linked Wired article mentions some of the odd chemical processes that are ocurring naturally by undewater thermal vents — who knows what kind of chemical tricks we could learn by studying these?

I just think there’s a lot to be explored in a frontier very close to home, and it’s a real shame that so little has been done in this direction as yet. Yes, I still think we need to go up — but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be going down, either.

New WTC plan chosen

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Final plan for new WTC building

Well, it looks like the winning plan for the replacement complex for the WTC has been revealed. While it’s not the one I favored, maybe it’ll translate better into the real world than the pictures of it I’ve seen so far.

It’s interesting to me that the new tower will include a spire that will bring the total height to 1,776 feet — four hundred feet taller than the original WTC towers, and three hundred feet taller than the current tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia. Ego? Hubris? Penis envy?

Anyway, all carping aside, it’s good to see that they’re moving forward on this, and that they did manage to choose something that was neither specatularly ugly nor spectacularly insipid. From what I remember, it’ll take about ten years to get the building erected and finished. Maybe round about the time I’m turning 40 I’ll swing by New York to see the building, and find out what they came up with for a memorial. I’ve got a decade to plan my trip, I should be able to make it by the time they finish, right?

(Via WebWord)

This isn't helping

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A few days ago, Robert Scoble asked what we think Microsoft should do in the future, both with technology and to improve their public persona. I haven’t done much for coming up with a list of what they should do, but here’s a hint to Micosoft: this is something you really shouldn’t do:

Anti-spam activists and a state attorney have argued against a proposal pushed by Microsoft that would weaken Washingtons tough law against unwanted e-mail.

In one way, Senate Bill 5734 would expand the states Commercial Electronic Mail Act by requiring that unsolicited commercial e-mail must include “ADV:” as the first four characters in the subject line, to make filtering out such messages easier.

But it would also carve out a broad exemption in the law for mail sent by companies the recipient has done business with, and completely exempt Internet service providers — including Microsoft.

Microsoft is one of the worlds largest providers of Internet service, and a company that has an existing business relationship with virtually every computer user.

“The way its written, it exempts them from the whole thing,” said Jim Kendall, president of Telebyte Northwest in Silverdale, a small Internet service provider.

(Via /.)

Caring for your Introvert

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Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. “Introverts…are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don’t outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness.” Just so.

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books — written, no doubt, by extroverts — regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”

— from a wonderful article in The Atlantic entitled Caring for your Introvert (via Jason Kottke) I’m almost tempted to keep copies of this article around to hand out to a few people I know.

Catching up, part three

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Again, in no particular order, bits and pieces from my ‘technology’ grouping in NetNewsWire…

  • Mark Pilgrim’s online magnetic poetry generator is one of the coolest online wastes of time I’ve seen yet. It randomly grabs words from a webpage and turns them into ‘magnetic poetry’ to play with. Click the link and have fun.

  • I used to use some of the free fonts from Dinc when I was making flyers for the clubs I worked at. Now all of their fonts are free. Good stuff there. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • A veritable corucopia of excellent free fonts can also be found at The Lab (warning: loud embedded audio). Lots of drool-worth text toys here…now I’m wishing I was still doing flyer work. Maybe I’ll just start playing at some point. (Via ScriptyGoddess)

  • ESPN has become the second major site that I know of (but then, I’m not really tracking these things) to move to an all-CSS layout. Good work, too — seeing sites like that remind me why I’m not a designer. (Also via Jeffrey Zeldman)

  • Phil Ulrich pointed to someone’s experiment with shoehorning a G4 and a PC into a single box, calling it the “world’s first schizophrenic computer”. To that, I humbly present the circa-1994 PowerMac 6100 PC Compatible, with both a 60Mhz PowerPC 601 and a 66Mhz 486DX/2 processor! Rather bizarre machines to play with, actually.

  • Phil’s also released EspressoBlog 2.1.1, a very nice weblog posting program that I use for posting to this weblog. As a bonus, he managed to implement every single idea I tossed his way in an e-mail conversation last week, even a couple that I wasn’t sure would be possible. Damn cool. And I love the hat.

  • Aaron paints an optimistic — and very plausible — picture of the wireless future. One of these days I’ll have to jump on the wireless bandwagon. All things with time, though.

  • The 10 habits of highly annoying bloggers. Eight of these I think I’m safe on, but numbers 2 and 8 (each of which can be summarized as “not enough really original content”) I’m still working on. Too much of this blog is of the link/comment style, and I keep meaning to do add more originality. Even I like it when I do manage to come up with something, so I should do it more often.

  • A good caveat regarding Amazon Associate links from Jason Kottke. I know that there’s quite a few of my links that fall into the ‘won’t work’ category — maybe it’s a good thing that nobody every buys anything from my Amazon links!

  • MovableType 2.63 is released, soon to be installed here.

  • Ready.gov gets Fark’ed (warning: image heavy, broadband recommended). Hilarious. (Via Phil Ulrich)

Playing catchup

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I’m skimming over a lot of stuff in my newsreader (758 new items after being out of touch for a week!), but in no particular order, here’s some of the stuff that caught my eye…

  • Snowmen are good, but snowwomen — at least those with breasts — are bad! (Via Jodi)

  • Bush: “Thanks for letting me kill your husband — mind if I make sure your kid is an idiot, too?” Apparently, children of military families don’t need a good education, according to the powers that be. (Via Paul Hoffman)

  • Heaven forbid someone not agree with the U.S.! Since Germany has expressed a dissenting opinion about the push for war with Iraq, the U.S. is planning (at the behest of Rumsfeld) to withdraw all American troops and bases from German in order to “harm the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ‘treachery’.” (Also via Paul Hoffman)

And that’s it for now, I’ve gotta head to work. More tonight, I’m sure.