Links

Things I run across that I find to be interesting, but might not have the time or inclination to craft a fuller post around it. Generally, short little “go here, look at this, isn’t it neat?” posts.

News, not propaganda

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Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: “We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media.”

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media’s reaction to France and Germany’s intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called ‘respectable’ press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical — one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as “Hitler’s children”.

Mr Dennis said: \”American visitors are telling us they are unable to find the breadth of opinion we have on our web site anywhere else because we report across the political spectrum rather than from just one perspective.

This surprises me not at all. Many of the links I’ve either found or have been pointed to over the last months that actually contained information have come from overseas, where they’re not filtered through US economic and political interests. The ‘net really is changing the way we as Americans see both the world and ourselves, and I’m quite glad to be around for the shift. Maybe, eventually, we’ll be able to see ourselves as a global culture — I think things like this are the beginning step.

Beginning blogging

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Eric Barzeski over at NSLog(); has an excellent list of tips for anyone just getting started in the weblogging world. I’ve discovered all of these at one point or another over the years, but things definitely might have been simpler if I’d had this available back when I started. Of course, back when I started (further back than my archives go, unfortunately), we didn’t have things like MovableType to help us out…

(Via Jeremy Hedley)

Tom Tomorrow

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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Tom Tomorow really should be on your reading list. He should be on everyone’s reading list. I end up wanting to point people over to his site with nearly every post some days. So, failing either that, I’ll just point you to his site (again).

tw@

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Following up (again) on the the text messaging as writing thread, the BBC has a page where they’re asking for user submissions of classic works in ‘abbreviated’ format.

Reading some of these produces an interesting dichotomy — I’m impressed by the creativity of some of these, while simultaneously cringing at what’s being done to such classic literature!

4scr + 7a ugo r 4fthrs brt 4th on this cn10nt a nu nAshn cnCvd in lbRT + ddc8d 2 th prop tht (evRE1) r crE8d =

aka: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Amusingly, though, in the comments to the post at Green Fairy where I found this (no permalink available, unfortunately — her post was on March 3^rd^ if you want to search for it), someone suggested the abbreviation ‘tw@‘.

I like that one.

Star Trek personality test

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Wil pointed to a Star Trek Personality Test based on the Myers-Briggs system. I wasn’t sure what to expect for an answer, but apparently the author did a surprisingly good job of translating the Myers-Briggs questions to a Star Trek format, as I ended up scoring as an ISFP — the same result as when I took an online version of the actual Myers-Briggs test!

Anyway, here’s what the Star Trek test said about me…

Read more

ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

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Following up on an issue from last September, a teacher in London is reported as having received an essay that they couldn’t read, because of the student’s use of text messaging acronyms.

The teenager’s essay which caused the problem began:

“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :-O kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”

In translation:

“My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It’s a great place.”

Zeno's Paradox

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Ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, I’ve had the paradox postulated by Zeno of Elea (c. 450 B.C.) bouncing around in my head. To summarize the paradox:

Zeno’s Paradox may be rephrased as follows. Suppose I wish to cross the room. First, of course, I must cover half the distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then I must cover half the remaining distance…and so on forever. The consequence is that I can never get to the other side of the room.

What this actually does is to make all motion impossible, for before I can cover half the distance I must cover half of half the distance, and before I can do that I must cover half of half of half of the distance, and so on, so that in reality I can never move any distance at all, because doing so involves moving an infinite number of small intermediate distances first.

I knew there must be a solution, as we all do manage to move around quite handily, I just never knew what it was. Luckily enough, I managed to stumble across an explanation of the paradox and its solution today. Nifty!

(Via Jason Kottke)

Welcome to Earth, meet the leaders

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An e-mail from a Newsday reporter who spent a week in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum:

The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive — especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally — better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

(Via Daypop)

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 /.)

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)