Bifurcated Rivets

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25 June 1999

All about armed robbery. (via BeNiceToBears)

The Netomat might be worth checking out when it appears (8PM New York Time today) I shall look on Monday.

Springfield Telescope makers. (No, not that Springfield) Some nice astro images. I particularly like this Hale-Bopp and cactus picture.(via pigdog)

Hubris Magazine? Good name, nothing there!

Pictures of buses, well after clicking through a lot of pages you get pictures of buses. All organised by coach number and location. And a page for school bus fans too.

The Encyclopedia Mythica is a great resource. (via memepool)

I want an Accu-cut bread slicer. And don't forget to check out Slicer World. Slicer Controls sell a large beige box that seems to run Windows - lets hope this is nothing mission critical then. You can see inside the box...

Minnie Pearl's house sells for 1.1 million. (via julienne.com) Not a lot I suppose for 5 acres and a big house. The most telling part of the article is the comment at the end from the estate's lawyer about several scholarships that Ms Pearl wanted set up:

"It remains to be seen" whether there will be enough money left to fund those scholarships.

iTulip has a very sensbile view of the stock market.

I liked this, from the Devil's DP Dictionary:

"Computing Center [n] In a University, that organization whose functions are 1) To impede wherever possible the development and usefulness of computing on the campus, 2) To gain the lion's share of funding, spend it largely on obolete and otherwise inappropriate Solutions, and convince the campuse(s) wherever possible to expend their meager funds on the same, and 3) to oppose vigorously any new, useful and popular technology for ten years or more until nearly everyone on the campus(es) and elsewhere in the world is using it, then to adopt that technology and immediately attempt to gain complete and sole control of it [see MS-DOS, UNIX, ETHERNET, INTERNET]."

24 June 1999

Bill Gates mugshots.

I just set up the RISKS digest so that it can be tracked by my.userland.com. The idea seems good, but it is terribly slow so it isn't particularly useful at least from this side of the Atlantic.

PigDog is a sort of weblog.

Jesus of the week. (via dirk of all places) And check out "It crawled from the bins". Fantastic.

DIRK looks interesting - I found it at the weblog entry of dmoz.org. Not sure yet what it is all about though. Ooh, metadirk is fun - you can add connections and stuff.

Yeah! Grow Fins just arrived. The enhanced CD stuff is superb - Electricty live on the beach at Cannes in 1968. Wow. The mothership's the one!!

Omniscience looks nice. It's a design company site. (via gordo)

Take an eye test on-line. (thanks frank)

Ugh, I feel crap today. Sore wrists and sore head.

23 June 1999

Read the Manifesto of the Futurist Programmers. It seems to be from 1991 and, like most manifestos, it is long on blame and short on ideas. Of course as a member of the Computing Science establishment they would say that I would say that (but they do say a lot of stuff that I agree with quite strongly).

I found the Free Site via the Free Find service web page. I found that via Devil Shat....

This is an unusal and attractive site.

Here's another product with an unfortunate name for the UK. Sounds like a good chair though.

I hope this company doesn't decide to start marketing in the UK! They might get some unusual phone calls. It links to this nice Slinky site. Whoo, I want one of the brass ones! (Though the Miss America pom-poms must be a consideration too.)

I'd really like to own this 24 CD Duke Ellington Centennial set. Sadly at that price it is unlikely.

Christians v Rock Musicians. The conclusions are seriously flawed, but it is a great list of dead rock musicians.

Went to see Notting Hill last night. It was funny and there was some good camera work in it too (the very high dollying crane shot was quite spectacular as was the weather changing sequence, though this was perhaps a little overdone.) I am not sure about Julia Roberts though. Too many teeth for a start.

Have your prayers said for you by computer... Different religions catered for.

22 June 1999

He must be a communist! (Real Video) (via Michael of the Loot, pity about his poor taste in Operating systems :-) )

Beyond Belief by Liam Fay  UK , about religion in Ireland, looks most entertaining and informative.

Internet resources about constructed languages. You might want these symbols to protect you.

Non-constant speed of light? And also here.

Loads of good Y2K stuff. The collected predictions are interesting... Somewhere on this site there is an article that says that Henry Kissinger plans to take all his money out of the bank system at the ned of this year.

Proposition of the day: "It's been estimated that, by the year 2002, the number of web pages will exceed the number of stars in our galaxy" This site hosts Saucer Smear which is "dedicated to the highest principles of ufological journalism".

5 Star weirdness at http://www.alexchiu.com/. The author has this to say (amongst lots of other 100% weird stuff):

"Attention. Eternal Life Device is already patented and is proven by many people to be working. Teleportation is not. The reason why I wrote this page is because we need teleportation very badly since everyone now lives forever."

<HOBBYHORSE>
Apart from being clearly peculiar, he is another of these people who think that Edison invented the incandescent light bulb! The Incandescent light bulb was invented by Joseph Swan of Newcastle upon Tyne when Edison was a small child. Edison certainly improved it, but he did not invent it.
</HOBBYHORSE>

I just discovered that Candle in the Wind 1997 has just dropped out of the Canadian Top 10 after 19 months. Good grief.

Axel Zwingenberger's site is rather attractive. He's a German boogie piano player. At boogiewoogie.com you can find these 7 tips for aspiring boogie pianists - a tad trite but definitely true.

I just picked up Sharon Shannon's first album - and very good it is too. There is a wonderful error in the sleeve notes where the authorship of Jean's Reel (a fine tune and tough to play, at least on the mandolin) is attributed to Bobby McFerrin rather than Bobby McLeod (who is not sold by Amazon). I suspect an in-joke of some kind. Also bought and playing is Ben Folds Five which is also excellent. On loan I have Café Oran by Maurice el Médioni - a fantastic album of piano music that crosses boogie, North African, Cuban, Kletzmer and all kinds of stuff - the label says File under: World/Oriental/Jewish/Piano, so they didn't know either! Very strange and definitely essential listening.

One-line - trying to link the world with one line. Wont work for me because it uses java. (via Peterme) Seems to work on my Mac though...spoke too soon, no it doesn't. Reboot time.

An article on procrastination. Read it tomorrow. (via virulent memes)

Symbols.com has a useful dictionary of western symbols. (via Surfdiary)

It's my 20th wedding anniversary today. Traditionally this is china, but AskJeeves - says that the modern gift is platinum of all things. Can anyone explain what was wrong with the “traditional” gifts? I mean, whoever heard of an appliance wedding anniversary!!! (First off I didn't ask Jeeves - I asked my mother, a much more reliable source of information don't you think?)

21 June 1999

Tales of Old Shanghai. Interesting.

Some Chinese Political Posters . And some more. I used to have an enormous poster of Mao but it is inot illustrated here.

Sex your forthcoming child. It claims to be 93% accurate no less.

"According to the data presented above, the greatest odds for conceiving a boy occur when the mother conceives in July when she is 18, 20, 30, and 42. The best odds for conceiving a girl occur when the mother conceives in April when she is 21, 22, and 29. According to the chart above, males are 54% more likely to be born than females."

New Fortean Times - lots of interesting URLs.

I like this Piaget story:

Jean Piaget, who may be safely called the most important researcher on child psychology this century (if not ever), was asked in an interview to tell his methods for creative scientific work. He said he employed three methods: (1) Don't read anything in your field of work (2) Read as much as you can in related fields, and (3) Always have something to attack (like a notion you regard as false). He went on to explain that method (1) ensures you can have your own fresh look at things, whereas method (2) enriches your thought with ideas from other fields and disciplines.

(via this article, via Camworld)

A nice looking watercolour of a globe artichoke, though I don't think that it is $450 nice. I love artichokes. I bet you didn't know that Marilyn Monroe was the first Castroville Artichoke Queen.

Statutory Tape is a strange site. I haven't quite fathomed it out yet.

Click on "Enroll Online" at this webpage and then select title.. Which one are you today?

Unusual publications - cheat on your resumé, vanish, other useful stuff :-)

I still haven't worked out what the June 18th thing was all about.

RIP Guru Hannuman - Indian wrestling coach and killed in a car accident at the age of 99.

There was a nice interview with Ricky Jay in the Observer yesterday. He is simply one of the finest card magicians ever. I can't find a canonical webpage for him - lots of interviews though.)

The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture by J. Mordaunt Crook UK has been well reviewed in several places and sounds excellent. Also sounding tasty and just out in paperback is The Man Who Ate Everything : And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes and Pleasurable Pursuits by Jeffrey Steingarten  UK  USA - essays about food. The man hates lard I gather.

The Factoid Project sounds a little like Mik Lamming's Human memory Prosthesis work. This kind of thing always sounds like a good idea until you start to go into it in a bit more detail when it turns scary. (Via the new Risks)

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