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Tuesday, August 29 2000

Cool poetry

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art. Not sure I would like it so much if it was just text on a page.

Friday, August 25 2000

Obligatory Survivor Links

I watched about 1.5 of the 2 hours of Survivor finale on Wednesday night. Then, saddened by my ability to waste hours watching crap TV, I called up my cable company and told them to cancel my cable service. (No more Farscape or The Awful Truth. Oh well.)

Richard won. Which, at least at first, I was fine with. As Sean said (as well as I can remember it) in reference to Ricky's nude walkabout and shot at the million, "Richard's FNF - fat naked faggot - idea was funny. But a fat naked faggot winning a million dollars is hilarious." (I'm guessing Richard referred to himself as such at some point.)
But - Kelly. Her former alliance members had been trying to vote her off the island for weeks. But by winning 4 immunity challenges (mental and physical contests) in a row, she managed to make it all the way to the final two. She made it due to her own physical and mental abilities. Richard made it to the end by manipulating other people. Which makes his win kinda suck.

Links:

• Washington Post article on Richard as an "Evil Queen." Very funny.
  
• Salon on why Richard deserved to win and also why he didn't deserve it.
  
• Salon gets pissed off at Richard about talking about his son to the press a few days after they (among other press venues) published a wire story about him and his son.
  
• Survivor Sucks has their own take on the whole show
  
• The Smoking Gun has documents illustrating tangles with the law on the parts of Kelly and Sean and Richard.
  
• not Survivor, but: how CBS's other "reality" show, Big Brother, is really heavily scripted and filtered for the public
  

Monday, August 21 2000

Used CDs Online

New York Times article talks about used CD stores online. Includes links to a couple.

Saturday, August 19 2000

The Question of Time

Month-old article at Feed Mag about the theories in Dr. Julian Barbour's book The End of Time. The book basically says there is no time - just a series of disconnected instants, which we perceive as flowing from one to the other. (Or something like that.)

Friday, August 18 2000

Bored With CBS' Big Brother?

Big Brother UK is still going on (and they'll prob. be awake when the US cast is asleep), and Big Brother Sweden has video archives of its group.

Thursday, August 17 2000

Napstered Needlework

For the knitters out there: a diatribe against copyright infringement as impacts needlework patterns, courtesy of people sharing the patterns on the Internet.

Wednesday, August 16 2000

Salon articles on Nader

1. Apparently, I don't read enough Gore Vidal. Salon has an interview with him, post-Shadow Convention. Quote:

"My mother is a Gore... I can't imagine any Bush outdoing any Gore at anything. The Bushes are incompetent people. You can tell when they try to make a speech, father and son. Barbara has a nice bite to her, but she isn't running for anything."

Iuma, Jr.

The Internet Underground Music Archive (which is no longer really underground) is having a "contest": the first 10 babies born over the next few months who their parents name "Iuma" (as shown on a copy of the birth certificate) will receive $5000. 4 winners (pending verification) so far.

Tuesday, August 15 2000

PHP article on ahref.com...

I've (finally) written another article for ahref.com, this one about incompatibilities between PHP 3 and 4. There's a list of such incompatibilities at the PHP website, but my article goes into extra detail on a bunch of them.

Monday, August 14 2000

Married "Friends"

Over the weekend, I had the urge to look up biographies on the cast members of Friends and compare my age/marital status with theirs. The cast ranges in age from 31 (Jennifer Aniston) to 37 (Lisa Kudrow). The three female actors are married; the three men are not.

Sunday, August 13 2000

Richard Feynman Links

Courtesy of Zyvex (a nanotech company): links to talks and books by, and web pages about, Richard Feynman, maverick physicist.

Friday, August 11 2000

Indie site Beatthief has an article about the West Memphis Three, three teenagers in Arkansas who were convicted of killing three young kids in 1993; the prosecution's theory was that the black-clothes-wearing, Metallica-listening, fingernail-painting boys did it as part of a Satanic ritual to gain occult powers (or greater occult powers than they already apparently had). (It probably didn't help that one of the defendants claimed to practice "white magic.")
Salon has an article focusing on the supposed ringleader of the group.

Wednesday, August 9 2000

Music Labels, Retailers Being Sued for CD Price-Fixing

28 states are suing a bunch of music industry corps for price-fixing. The allegation: when discount retailers started dropping the prices of CDs - bringing the average cost of a CD to $10 - the major labels colluded in requiring retailers to advertise their CDs at minimum prices set by the labels, or lose millions of dollars in advertising subsidies. As a result, CD prices climbed again, up to about $15/each.

Stereotypes and Voice Modulation as Sales Tools

A few quotes from an article about Stanford students who investigated how to get people to trust virtual people:

• "research subjects reacted more positively to virtual male voices than to virtual female voices in several experiments"
  
• "American male subjects -- Stanford students -- were willing to disclose more personal information to user interfaces that spoke in a female, foreign-accented voice -- in this case, Swedish. American females, on the other hand, revealed more personal data to an American-accented female voice"
  
• "Research subjects liked happy news or movie reviews better when read by a happy voice and bad news and reviews better when read by a sad voice, but they gave more credibility to the report when the voice didn't match the content"
  
• "They found that a synthetic face coupled with a human-sounding voice decreased people's willingness to respond 'yes' to such invasive questions as 'Do you sometimes tell lies if you have to?' Research subjects disclosed the most to text interfaces."
  

Tuesday, August 8 2000

Philly Protest Stuff from Salon

John Sellers, Ruckus Society director, was being held on $1 million bail for various misdemeanors associated with the Republican Convention till a judge reduced the amount to $100,000, says Salon; his compatriots say he's being held to keep him out of the Democratic Convention in LA and send a message to other high-profile protesters. (They also say he's innocent of any crime.)

Hijacking an Entire Country's Domain

A foreign national (who happens to be South African) was given "possession" of the top-level domain name for Malawi (.mw) when he lived in the country; now the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (Macra) wants it back.

(Sayeth the article: "Malawi is technologically backward - under the late President Banda even television was outlawed.")

Sunday, August 6 2000

Rapster (Napster-like software for the Mac)

If, like Steve Wozniak (and me) you use a Mac and can't get Macster to download music from the Napster "community," try Rapster. (The main site for it is actually in Brazil, but the site's not always up.) (Rapster includes a built-in MP3 player.)

Friday, August 4 2000

You were right, Pete W.

Pete, you were right: I must have been hallucinating when I thought that our Coke machine took dollars.

Wednesday, August 2 2000

Handgun Waiting Periods Haven't Neccesarily Caused Decline in Homicides

Washington Post article refers to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association about a study which showed that states affected by the 1994 Brady Law (imposing waiting periods and background checks on many handgun purchasers) had the same decline in homicides over the next 5 years as those where the conditions of the Brady Law were already in effect. Gun rights advocates say this means such gun control measures are ineffective at preventing crime. Gun control advocates say there's no difference seen because the nationwide decline in gun violence is partially due to a resulting decline in illegal interstate gun trade.

Fungus on Mir

From Bob Park's What's New column at the American Physical Society: "rapidly mutating" fungi and bacteria are causing problems on space station Mir, munching through electrical insulation and such. Yuk.

Tuesday, August 1 2000

What I've Been Working On: Fed2U

The subsite I've been working on for the past few months isn't up yet for various reasons, but I've been contracting with Fed2U, a website that specializes in providing information from the federal government in a more useful way than the government can. If the site loads too slowly for you, email webmaster@fed2u.com and tell them to trim their HTML...

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...