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By Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
June 24, 2003 5:18 p.m. -- (Last
week's weblog)
Vacation starts tomorrow: Short blog as Subterranean Homepage
News takes a vacation. The next edition will be July 7. Any blogging
in the meantime will happen at my
personal site.
Will the real Joe Bevilacqua please stand up?
On NPR Weekend
Edition Saturday this Saturday morning, Joe Bevilacqua, a 44-year-old
New York-based radio producer, searches the United States for other Joe
Bevilacquas. From his emailed press release:
“Over the years, I’ve been confused for a lot of Joe Bevilacquas...
And never the same one twice. There was the time, for example, my auto
insurance was cancelled when I was confused with ANOTHER Joseph Bevilacqua
in the same state who "hit a pedestrian" on the same day I
was hit as a pedestrian! Just this year my dentist almost pulled the
wrong tooth because of he has another Joe Bevilacqua as a patient!”
That last incident was enough to send Bevilacqua to the web where he
found forty-two Joe Bevilacquas listed at infospace.com’s white
pages. They were spread out over eleven states from Rhode Island to
California. Radio listeners follow him through the odd-ball phones calls,
new coincidences "as they happen" and finally get to meet
several of his “doppelgangers,” including two Joe Bevilacquas
from Providence, Rhode Island, in the midst of their own confusion involving
their dry cleaning. And along the way, the veteran public radio producer
also gets to meet his commercial radio name-alike, Providence program
director Joe Bevilacqua of WHJY.
You can hear the 8-minute piece on your local NPR station at 9:50 a.m.
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Scooterman:
Great idea from London. Go out on the town without a designated driver
and, when you're ready to come home, Scooterman will meet you, put his
folding scooter in your trunk, and drive you home safely.
Guaranteed to be cheaper than a taxi and your car ends up in your own
driveway.
I can see downtown bar owners hosting a fleet of these.
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prairie
point, Bill Hopkins' blog about gardening in north Texas, had
been added to Garden Blogs.
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June 23, 2003 5:55 p.m.
Librarian blogs reaction to high court's OK
of net censorship: Jennie
Levine, The Shifted Librarian gathers
links, adds that "Some librarians are reporting calls from companies
selling filtering software already," and notes,
Look twice at that Yahoo News headline (Court
OKs Anti-Porn Filters in Libraries) -- it refers to the Court approving
"anti-porn" filters in libraries. What they fail to mention
is that there's a heck of a lot more content than just porn that is also
being blocked.
Levine quotes Andrew
Mutch, of the Waterford, Mich. library, who notes,
"I think where the Court did the most harm is with its endorsement
of the viewpoint that our patrons are simply sheep who will be fed the
information that we decide they need. The introduction of the Internet
had changed the information flow for the public in our libraries by
allowing patrons, not the librarians, to decide what information they
wanted to access. In my mind, the Court is trying to push libraries
back to a day when the librarian was viewed as a censor and a scold.
While the filtering advocates will applaud this decision for both political
and pocketbook reasons, it will be the libraries and librarians who
will suffer in the long run from the reaction of patrons who come to
view us as the new thought police."
Then Levine adds,
Unfortunately, the (court's) decision will put up a major roadblock
to information at the one place you're supposed to be able to get it.
The one and only place where a large number of people can get access
to the internet. Those of us with computers at work, computers at home,
and broadband access at home tend to forget this.
Levine's all over this issue. If you care about it, she's got her fingers
on what will change and what it means.
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"The
Baghdad Bulletin is Iraq's only English-language newsmagazine
and one of the country's only independent publications."
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The
Paint Game: The poets laureate of the paint can are at it again.
Given a choice of five colors, can you guess which is "Russian Velvet"
or "Ice Storm"?
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Trying
to Stay Put in Florida Mobile Homes: (NYT,
reg.req.) For anyone's who has looked at that 401k lately and thought
a trailer might be a fine retirement home after all:
To live in a trailer park like Gulfstream, one of more than
2,600 in Florida, is to occupy a precarious niche in the housing system.
Residents at Gulfstream own their homes, which cost $10,000 to $40,000,
but rent the land. Most homes are mobile in name only, too old or anchored
to survive a move. As the value of real estate skyrocketed through the
1990's, park owners found they could make more redeveloping the land for
houses or condominiums or selling to redevelopers.
"I can sympathize with the park owners," said Robert Cintron,
a lawyer representing the tenants of Gulfstream. "They're getting
below-market rent."
At the same time, said Joshua Mothner, a commercial loan officer in
Marathon, without trailer parks the Keys' essential work force —
the teachers and police officers, hotel workers and bank tellers —
could not afford to live there. The price of houses in the area begins
at around $300,000, apartment rentals at about $1,000 a month.
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Amino
acid art: Lovely colors under a microscope. That's arginine above.
Burgers 'n Fries through a microscope aren't bad either -- especially
the cheese.
The Molecular
Expressions Gallery at Florida State University is extensive and cool.
For instance,
Silicon
Zoo: ...a collection of photomicrographs (photographs taken through
a microscope) featuring many of the interesting silicon creatures and
other doodling scribbled onto integrated circuits by engineers when
they were designing computer chip masks. The tiny creatures are far
too small to be seen with the naked eye, so we have provided high-magnification
photomicrographs to share these mysterious wonders with our visitors.
 ...This
unique version of Mickey Mouse (at right) with his hands pointing
to 12 and 7 (creating a miniature silicon clock fixed in time) was found
on the Mostek 5017 alarm clock integrated circuit. We were alerted to
this creature by Eric Putnam of Kirkland, Washington who also loaned
us a copy of the integrated circuit for photomicrography. David DiGiacomo
of Adobe has informed us that the Mostek 5017 chip has the capability
of displaying the time with an alarm output feature as well. These chips
were useful in table clocks, clock radios, and other appliances that
featured clocks in the early 1970s.
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You don't know me: At a page called Google
Weblog: "Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to
your page? Just enter its URL:
So I did. The
results: poliglut.org
and three conservative sites. Oops.
But maybe it was an anomaly. So I put in J.D.
Lasica's site. (He's a senior editor of Online Journalism Review.)
His top hit is Sharpton for President. Oops again.
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Savant
for a Day in the N.Y. Times Magazine is getting lots of links.
The premise is "that people undergoing undergoing transcranial magnetic
stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those
isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in
autistic people."
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal
lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What
would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing
cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have
no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and
how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some
sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a
creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of
mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the
raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the
unconscious mind of all of us.''
 Two
minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again.
After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course
a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed.
I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing.
But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic
stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their
faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear
clever expressions.
Um... has anybody noticed that his cat is a dog?
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com |
