my passport photo |
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by Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May
3, 2002 • Last
week's weblog
Friday afternoon,
and I'm about out of words for the week. Time to go sit under the lilacs
with a cold one. Some loose links before it's a wrap:
•
Too big to hide: U.K. artist David
Mach's latest creation -- a 50-ton sculpture made from four abandoned
cars and 150,000 copies of The (Glasgow, Scotland) Herald newspaper --
is something any ink-stained wretch would want to see. But I can't find
it. I
can read about it, I can see many
other Mach works (such as a full-size train made of red brick, sculptures
made of match heads, others made from coathangers). But I can't find a
photo of Bangers and Mash, the newsprint behemoth. If you can,
please email me.
• Botanical
Eve: World's
'oldest flower' found in China: It's the 125-million-year-old ancestor
of a water lily.
•
Listen: Leo
Kottke audio samples and video
clips at guitarmusic.org,
no longer updated but still floating in webspace.
• Weekends,
we cook: Index to the cooperatively created Mastercook
archive of recipes. Fast way to browse through food categories --
the recipes are text if you don't have the Mastercook program, importable
if you do.
• Temporary
pass: SpamhOle.com:
"Two hour email addresses. No logins required. Spam dies here."
• Improv:
Part of (ex-Recording Academy President/CEO) Michael Greene's address
at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards set
to music
May
2, 2002
My space
mistake: For Earth Day, April 22, I wanted to publish a photo of Earth
right now.
NASA
photo
When I was small, no photos like this existed; humans had never gotten
far enough off the earth to photograph the whole planet. The Apollo
17 crew shot this photo on December 7, 1972.
Larger image |
Not the first
television image of earth from space shot
by Tiros I on April 1, 1960; not the Christmas, 1968 "Earthrise"
photo by Apollo
8 astronaut Bill Anders that graced The
Whole Earth Catalog and
"saved" 1968, nor the famous 1972 version by the Apollo
XVII crew. It wasn't easy, but I thought I'd found one on NASA's Astronomy
Picture of the Day site when I saw the date Jan.
31, 1999 leading the page, and hastily linked to it. This date turned
out to be the date NASA made this the image of the day, and several readers
wrote to tell me that this was indeed the Apollo XVII crew's shot of Dec.
7, 1972. (at right)
I kept looking
for a current one, and found that it doesn't exist. It was supposed to
exist, but it doesn't. And why it doesn't exist involves Al Gore, layoffs
at Kennedy Space Center and the 2000 election.
The next
generation of whole-earth photos were to have come from Triana,
a satellite that would photograph a full-color, continuous view of the
entire sunlit face of the rotating Earth every 15 minutes for display
on the Web, but it's sitting in
storage in an aluminum box in the corner of Building 7 at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Here's a
simulation
of what the camera is to send back to the Internet from a million miles
away, a distance called
L1 orbit. "A spacecraft at the Earth-Sun L1 point, like Triana,
will experience a gravitational attraction from the sun that is the same
strength as that felt at Earth. Since the strength of the attraction determines
the orbital period, Triana will orbit the sun at the same rate as the
Earth, one year."
In March,
1998, then vice-president Al
Gore proposed "that NASA scientists and engineers design, build
and operate a satellite that will make available a live image of earth
24 hours a day on the Internet." The
Washington Post reported on March 13 of that year that "Gore
almost literally dreamed up the idea in his sleep about a month ago, waking
at 3 a.m. one night, according to a White House official." According
to the Post, Gore had the Apollo XVII shot at right on the wall of his
White House office.
Triana was
named after Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta who first sighted
land on Columbus's first voyage in 1492, but it was quickly dubbed Goresat
or Gore-cam by wags.
The idea
(and the cost) grew as scientific
projects were added to Triana's mission, among them a study
of global warming by the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San
Diego.
With some
Republicans dismissing Triana as a $75 million screensaver, the House
Science Committee killed the project on May 13, 1999, with a 21-18 party
line vote on an amendment proposed by Rep. Dave Weldon, (R-Fla.) in retaliation
for job cuts at Kennedy Space Center in his congressional district. (N.Y.
Times: Politics
Keep an Earth-Viewing Satellite Earthbound; Orlando Sentinel: Politics
puts $100 million satellite on ice)
House Majority
Leader Dick
Armey said, "This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once
dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn't call up the Fish and Wildlife
service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened."
The
bill directed NASA to suspend all development work on Triana until
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) completed a thorough evaluation
of Triana's true scientific merit and value. If Triana received an unfavorable
review from NAS the program would be terminated.
A National
Academies of Science Task Group on the Review of Scientific Aspects led
by James
Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor, agreed to evaluate the mission's objectives and to review Triana's
contributions to the nation's science priorities for climate and environmental
studies. The
report, issued in March, 2000, concluded that Triana could make contributions
to Earth and solar science at a relatively reasonable cost. (N.Y.
Times: Science
Panel Supports Gore Satellite Plan)
 The
animation at right is the Triana
project site's substitute for the live images expected someday from
the Scripps Earth Polychromatic
Imaging Camera.
In November,
2001, Congress earmarked $1 million of the $14.8 billion for NASA in Bush's
2002 budget for Triana's science team. Triana
is ready to fly.
A
NASA page on the Triana project now projects a launch in 2004. In
February of this year, Space
News (subscription required) reported that NASA
was considering foreign options for launching the satellite: "One
proposal would launch Triana as a secondary payload on an Ariane 5; such
a launch would be paid by a European national space agency in exchange
in a scientific role on the mission. A second possibility is to launch
it on a Ukrainian Tsiklon launch vehicle, arranged by an unnamed company
trying to market the Tsiklon commercially."
So for Earth
Day 2004 (2005? 2006?), we all might be able to see on the Web a live
photo of Earth right now.
Link to this item
May 1,
2002
Browsers
revisited: personal recollections: Robert
Maxwell Case writes,
"Enjoyed
your 'browser history' ... you're mostly 'on the money.' The only fine
tuning I might offer is this:
"I was a Mosaic user prior to Netscape's debut in November 1994.
Marc Andreesen had 'shopped' his next-generation Mosaic during the prior
18 months to all the big PC players including Apple & Microsoft, but
nobody would bite save Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics) who responded
to an email.
"By Netscape's debut, Mosaic had become a runaway success and Bill
Gates belatedly wanted in. The programmers left behind by Andreesen also
kept working and NCSA licensed the technology to a Chicago company called
Spyglass. Microsoft sublicensed the technology from Spyglass and hired
a number of the programmers left from the inital development team.
"But Netscape had the jump with a superior product. They charged
$39 for 'stable' versions but allowed 'betas' to be downloaded free. I
never paid for a version of Netscape, but I could see a clear business
model and fully expected to pay eventually.
"Then, one day in late 1997 Microsoft announced that their version
of Mosaic, Internet Explorer, would henceforth be free and, in fact, be
bundled with Windows 98. I was angry because this move neglected the reimbursement
of the sizeable development costs Microsoft had incurred and completely
demolished Netscape's business model. Netscape had no choice but to offer
their clearly superior product for free, too.
"The subsequent sale of Netscape to AOL has really yet to play out
... Mozilla is really a return to the 'open source' model that NCSA's
Mosaic was a part of. While IE now may be the superior product, Mozilla/Netscape
is close enough so that AOL's forecasted dropping of IE could change the
internet landscape."
Here's my
own recollection of that time, originally sent as an email to Mr. Case:
I pretty
much had the same experience you had -- I remember downloading everything
that came along back in those days. I was using the net on a local Free-Net,
via Lynx, running a computer bulletin board as a Fidonet
sysop, and freely distributing the Fidonet mail and file feed off a
dish on my roof to any other BBS that would also agree to pass it along
for free.
Every new
browser came on the filebone, and I tried them all. I also never paid
for Netscape -- it was a joke that the browser was free but the box
was $39. Because everybody was using slow modems, software was a lot
smaller, then, too!
Day of
Silence: "Hundreds of Internet radio stations and channels across
America are shutting off their music streams today, in a "Day of Silence"
to highlight their concern over the upcoming U.S. Copyright Office ruling
on royalty rates that may shut down or bankrupt the vast majority of the
nascent Internet radio industry. Details here."
They aren't going truly silent, though. Like a "teach-in" of
old, participating stations will carry a 24-hour talk show/live interview
program. Here are some links to the stream (these open Windows Media Player
on my system):
MayDay 20k
•
MayDay
124k
More Links: SaveInternetRadio.org
(includes form to contact Congress with your views), RAIN
(Radio and Internet Newsletter).
The upside
of all this is that many who haven't yet discovered Net radio may now
find this audio equivalent of weblogs.
Klez worm:
Cultural chaos in Outlook inboxes. "Klez:
Don't Believe 'From' Line" at Wired: 'The (Klez) virus e-mails
itself from infected machines using a bogus "From" address randomly plucked
from all e-mail addresses stored on an infected computer's hard drive
or network. ...Klez e-mails' subject lines are randomly chosen from a
pre-programmed list of about 120 possibilities, including "Let's be friends,"
"Japanese lass' sexy pictures," "Meeting Notice," "Hi Honey" and "SOS."
' I've seen all of these in my Netscape inbox, but that same Netscape
protects me from the chaos: As usual, "The virus can launch automatically
when users click to preview or read e-mails bearing Klez on systems that
have not been patched for a year-old vulnerability in Internet Explorer,
Outlook and Outlook Express. Klez only affects PCs running Microsoft's
Windows operating system."
Online
books sorted as they would be in library stacks: From Robot
Wisdom (probably the first weblog I bookmarked), a link to the Online
Books Page. "This page lets you look up online books by their
Library of Congress call number category. It can serve as a crude listing
by subject." Robot Wisdom's caretaker, Jorn Barger (1999
interview), has proposed the Open
Web Content License as a way to quote and link without running afoul
of copyright.
April
30, 2002
The day
the music died (that's tomorrow): Proposed royalty payments to record
labels -- represented by (you guessed it!) those same lovable folks at
RIAA who sued Napster -- would shut
down most Net radio, and many stations on the Web will go silent tomorrow
to protest: "Net
radio will pull plug this week to protest fees." Ironically,
writes Jefferson Graham of USA TODAY, "Traditional radio stations
pay no performance royalties because of radio's proven role in promoting
new music; in the proposed copyright fee structure, they would pay half
of the Net-only broadcast fee when simulcasting on the Internet."
Worthwhile sidebar ("All
that jazz, and everything else, on Net radio") has links to stations
and directories of stations. (Mike
Goldfein reports via streaming video.)
Now that
Linda
Lovelace is dead... : John
Dean plans to unmask Deep Throat: "I think that thirty years of hiding
is enough. So I'm going to surface him for the 30th anniversary of Watergate
on June 17, 2002. " (avi
movie clip of Dean testifying about telling Richard Nixon there was
a "cancer on the presidency" 30 years ago at the Watergate hearings).
Speculation: Who Was Deep
Throat?
Heroine
of the rumpled: Last week, the Lemelson-MIT
program presented its lifetime
achievement award to Ruth Rogan Benerito, inventor of the processed
that made wrinkle-free cotton, leading to "wash
and wear" clothing.
Decades before
"extreme
ironing" became a macho
competitive sport, I'd come home from elementary school and head to
the kitchen, where mom was always ironing. Sheets, handkerchiefs, blouses,
skirts, shirts that weren't sent out to be starched -- there was an endless
stream of wrinkled cotton to be dampened with a giant salt shaker full
of water.
I hated ironing.
I was always burning myself, struggling with the temperature of the iron,
making new wrinkles on the left as I smoothed out those on the right,
and I promised myself that when I grew up I would never iron again. (Fortunately,
there's a long tradition of rumpled journalists). And I have Ruth Rogan
Benerito to thank for helping me fulfill that promise. You went, girl!
Penalty
phase:
Dave Winer (Scripting
News) clicked on the Publish
your own item link above, and wrote: "There was another error
in the lead paragraph of that Time article (The
Browser That Roared). 'When Microsoft won the browser wars, by hook
or by crook (the jury is still out on that), life got simple again.' Actually
the jury is not out. Microsoft was convicted."
Coverage
of Gates' testimony has emphasized his improved persona (BBC:
"Bill Gates appears to have upgraded his legal abilities. Maybe it's
a new project at Microsoft -- Witness XP with a cooler, more soothing
interface. On Monday, Mr Gates avoided many of the missteps he made in
videotaped testimony four years ago.") as though this were his second
chance. Microsoft has been convicted; it's too late to promise they won't
do it again (that horse is already out of the barn).
What's at
stake, from an advance story last month by the L.A. Times: (Microsoft
Case Enters Crucial Penalty Phase) "In this punishment phase
of the case, they (the nine states that refused to go along with the [Bush]
Justice Department's surprise decision in November to settle its dispute
with Microsoft) are seeking to prevent Microsoft from quashing its competitors
not only in the old world of personal computers but also in the emerging
markets of advanced cell phones, hand-held computers, television set-top
boxes and countless devices yet to be invented."
Here's a
day-by-day trial archive
from PC Magazine.
Later,
dudes: I promised an item on my own recent error today, but it's grown
into a miniseries involving space, Al Gore, and more. I'll have to write
it while you're sleeping.
April
29, 2002
Errors
in Time: Browser history
Last week, I pointed to a Time
story by Lev Grossman headlined The
Browser That Roared, about the nearly-released Mozilla
browser. It troubled me that the lead sentences contained errors,
but I needed time to gather links for an accurate chronology. (I'm not
Grossman's editor, so I'm a little uncomfortable about correcting his
work, but I can't let this hang out there. I was there, and it didn't
go down that way. Tomorrow, I'll correct an error of my own in as much
detail.)
Here's the
problem: Grossman wrote, "In the beginning there was one Web browser.
It was called Mosaic, and if you didn't like it you could go back to watching
Murphy Brown, or whatever it was we did before we had the Web. Then Microsoft
started giving away Internet Explorer, Mosaic turned into Netscape, and
suddenly life was complicated."
This wasn't
the way it happened at all. Here's
some early history:
- From
A
Short History of Web Browsers
by Selena
Sol at Web Developer's
Virtual Library: "In
terms of the use of a web browser by the mass public, the history of
web browsers begins with LYNX. LYNX is a simple text-based web browser
primarily accessed via UNIX shell accounts (i.e. Lynx resides on
the server) that displays formatted HTML text (but not images)...
LYNX's text-based interface is actually quite clumsy (unless you are
a blind user, in which case LYNX rocks for its speed and text-based
simplicity where other browsers tend to be useless). In fact, soon after
the development of LYNX, as the concept of web browsing took off, web
browsers would quickly evolve into the graphical web browser species
beginning with Mosaic, Mozilla, and finally browsers such as Navigator
and Explorer..."
- A
short history of web browsers, dated May 8, 1995, part
of a project at the University of California, San Diego: "While
the WWW was useful with simple browsers which simply loaded and displayed
documents, the great explosion in the use of the WWW was a result of
the development of attractive graphical interface browsers such as Mosaic,
the browser developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Mosaic was developed to run on
Unix X11 workstations, Macintoshes and Microsoft Windows personal computers.
Web pages had essentially the same appearance on all computers, and
the browser operated in very much the same way on all computers. This
meant that WWW applications became independent of the computing platform
used. Another thing which contributed to the popularity of Mosaic was
that anyone could download it from the NCSA server at no cost.
The programmers who created Mosaic were undergraduates at the University
of Illinois. They graduated and formed their own companies where browser
development continued. Meanwhile, new undergraduates continued to develop
the NCSA free version of Mosaic. This has kept competition fierce and
prices low. The most successful of the commercial ventures was Netscape;
they are particularly popular in the education market because they do
not charge for their browser if you do not require support."
- From
Index
DOT Html: In mid-1994, Silicon Graphics founder Jim
Clark collaborated with Marc
Andreessen to found Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape
Communications.) Andreessen had just graduated from the University of
Illinois, where he had been the leader of a certain software project
known as "Mosaic". ...With the launch of Windows 95 and a web browser
of its own (Internet Explorer) in August 1995, Microsoft began an effort
to challenge Netscape. ..In January 1998, Netscape made an announcement
that their browser would thereafter be free, and also that the development
of the browser would move to an open-source process. (That's Mozilla)
- From
LivingInternet.com
(About:
"The mission of this web site is to make comprehensive, in-depth
information about the Internet available around the world."), comes
"Browser
History: A chronological listing of early web browsers ... each
of which influenced subsequent browsers and advanced the state of the
art."
- Also:
Hobbes'
Internet Timeline v5.6 by Robert
H'obbes' Zakon, Internet Evangelist
- Newest
Browser: Mozilla
at a glance. Mozilla.org speaks for itself.
Access
to tools: An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet
connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Read
all about it.
Happy
sites: Webby
Award nominees were announced today. NPR's All
Songs Considered tops the music site nominees. Awards are June 18,
and you can
still vote for the "People's Voice" awards.
Heroes
in their own right: Reporters
watched history unfold by Bill Cotterell, "Capital Curmudgeon"
of the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper: "I went to Montgomery (Ala.)
last weekend for a reunion of United Press International reporters, photographers
and editors who covered the civil rights movement."
Lemons:
What's
the Worst Car of the Millennium? A top-10 list from the Car Talk guys.
Grows
on you: Kitten
jazz band The music (a latino mix of John B's We like the music)
is great. The cats are silly.
Doing
life backwards? Bill
Clinton to replace Bryant Gumbel on CBS's The Early Show?
It worked for Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, who used his four-year stint
as a WHJJ radio talk-show host as a platform for his political comeback
in 1989. (A 1984 assault conviction after he attacked his former wife's
lover had forced him from office.)
Back
issues: Week one
Back
issues: Week two
Back
issues: Week three
Back
issues: Weeks four and five
Back
issues: Week six
Subterranean Homepage
News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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