After concerns raised by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), the New York Times changes its tune: NYT October 30: “drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers’, forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers.” NYT October 27: the “thousands” of demonstrators were “fewer people… than organizers had said they hoped for.”
Armed with a digital camera and inkjet printer, San Francisco artist Michael Koller is in the process of producing a unique photographic study. He has taken thousands of sequential photographs of building elevantions along a 30 mile continuous route through San Francisco. By editing these images to join up seamlessly he is producing one single continuous image. Like many innovative art projects, this takes advantage of techniques that were previously unavailable. This is a project that would be almost impossible without digital cameras and imaging software. seamless city – San Francisco – m.koller
The Epicentric/Vignette deal is interesting. Portals are about aggregation and CMS is about publishing. It links the portal and content management space and demonstrates that webservices will be a part of content management – no big surprise. More interesting, however, is that this is the model that was innovated on a grass-roots level with hybrid RSS news aggregation and weblog publishing systems like Dave Winer’s Radio Userland. Weblog publishing via standard XML based RPC API’s coupled with RSS aggregation are perhaps the template for all future enterprise content management systems. On a secondary note, it is bad news for Plumtree, with Epicentric, their nearest rival, selling for $32M it proves that they will have to go way beyond the current portal space into EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) to validate their $70M market cap (already way below their peak of nearly $300M). To do this quickly will involve developing adapters into…
I am an atheist – not an agnostic but a rabid, dogmatic, anti-believer. It is for this very reason that one of the newspapers that I regularly read, online, is the Christian Science Monitor. In a country where money is tantamount to a religion, where corporations vote twice to fund both the GOP and the Democrats to ensure their interests are ‘marketed’ to the voters, the CSMonitor often provides a secular balance to the belief in free markets as the saviour of all. The CSMonitor was founded by a Mary Baker Eddy in 1908 – before women had the vote. After being hounded by Joseph Pulitzer’s (who later endowed the Pulitzer prize) New York World as being unfit to manage her own affairs at 86, she decided to form a newspaper that would injur no ‘man’ and be a truly independent voice not controlled by “commercial and political monopolists.” The…
A couple of years ago I found myself in a large room in the National Gallery in London. The room was unusually empty except for a tall middle-aged man who was standing next to me, looking at the same painting. I was suddenly overcome with the smell of putrefying flesh and Sulphur as he broke the golden rule of farting (don’t break wind when there are less than three people in the room). I glanced round and it was none other than Charlton Heston, the star of ‘A Touch of Evil’, he blushed and promptly made a swift exit. ‘From my warm moist…’ So I finally went to see ‘Bowling for Columbine this weekend, and sure enough Heston himself appeared on the silver screen holding a rifle and bellowing ‘from my cold dead hands…’ – and a curious thing happened, I could have sworn I smelled putrefying flesh and Sulphur….
So I couldn’t get a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times yesterday – which nearly ruined my weekend. [Justine: “You failed to mention that your way of getting the paper yesterday morning was to stay in bed and hope that your girlfriend was going to find one in her non-white-yuppie neighborhood.”] Scanning through the San Francisco Chronicle, the article about the peace march in San Francisco listed a turnout of 40,000 – fairly big. But then the article lists the turnout in other cities round the world – 8000 in Berlin and 300 in Tokyo. Now these numbers would technically constitute a disaster for protest organizers – two countries, the only ones listed being coincidentally ones that the US has been to war against, could only muster a handful of protesters. So why mention these two cities? There were other marches this weekend – three times…
Christopher Hitchens lauds the American people’s patriotism and restraint after 9/11: “He [Hitchens] was, however, slightly disturbed by Gornick’s suggestion that the increase in patriotic displays over the last 18 months was nothing more than collective insecurity masquerading as civic engagement. “In my day, Vivian,” he said, “we called it ‘solidarity.’” Hitchens added–rather calmly, for a change–that none of the looting, pillaging, and persecution predicted after 9/11 occurred because people were acutely aware of the danger of turning into something completely antipodean to American values.” Coming from the UK where the Victorian’s famously created the idea that children should be ‘seen and not heard’, an American value that I particularly admire is the celebration of childhood. A large portion of American culture celebrates childhood. As such, the Washington snipers’ threat last week that no children were safe, produced an instinctive reaction of revulsion. So two people have been arrested over…
“The day before the first bombing run on Bhagdad during the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi TV showed a mass of Iraqi soldiers marching beneath the huge crossed swords of the Victory Arch, to the theme music from ‘Star Wars’.”” Samir Al-Khalil’s book, The Monument, deals with the subject of monuments built by Saddam in modern day Baghdad. Some of the details of these monuments are a perfect study in monstrosity. Take, for example, the above mentioned celebratory arch constructed in honour of the victory in the war with Iran. “The triumphal arch is shaped as two pairs of crossed swords, made from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers that were melted and recast as the 24-ton blades of the swords. Captured Iranian helmets are in a net held between the swords. And surrounding the base of the arms are another 5,000 Iranian helmets taken from the battle field. The fists…
Up till now, US census data has only appeared on subscription sites such as Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com CNN.com – Mormons put census from 1880s online – Oct. 24, 2002
When the body of Czar Nicholas II was discovered, a blood sample was taken from the Queen’s husband, Prince Phillip, (being one of the closest living relatives) to authenticate the find. Maculate concept: It is possible that the recently discovered Ossuary once contained Jesus’ brother’s bones. Imagine that DNA from James’ remains could be retrieved from the box. Imagine also that this DNA could be used to authenticate one or more of the morbid collection of religious relics claiming to be Jesus’ toe-nail clippings or whatever. In fact a positive result would somewhat authenticate both the Ossuary and the relic(s), since it would be somewhat co-incidental that two fakes would contain remains of relatives. Imagine further that an intact cell from an authenticated relic could be used to create a clone. Then a lot of people like these would be dissappointed because, according to recent research, Jesus was short and…
Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby post their validator, which is optimized for 2.0 by default, but validates against: RSS 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0 RSS Validator
This is a classic – extract from a real court case in the UK, a man accused of stealing 40,000 coat hangars runs rings around the lawyer. … Counsel: Yes, m’lud. Now, Mr Chrysler, perhaps you will describe what reason you had to steal 40,000 coat hangers? Defendant: Is that a question? Counsel: Yes. Defendant: It doesn’t sound like one. It sounds like a proposition which doesn’t believe in itself. You know – “Perhaps I will describe the reason I had to steal 40,000 coat hangers… Perhaps I won’t… Perhaps I’ll sing a little song instead…” Judge: In fairness to Mr Lovelace, Mr Chrysler, I should remind you that barristers have an innate reluctance to frame a question as a question. Where you and I would say, “Where were you on Tuesday?”, they are more likely to say, “Perhaps you could now inform the court of your precise whereabouts on…