february 2002
:: More food weblogs:
VanEats
The Making of Restaurant
Food Words
Rogov's Ramblings--sort of a self-weblog. (Thanks, Mike!)

And not a food weblog, but two food diaries from breakfast choices and midnight snacks. (thanks, steve!)
[ 02/01/02 ]

:: Ooh, and look at this: QuiltIndex: a guide to all the Quilting Stores on the Web.
[ 02/01/02 ]

:: Update on the addresses.com situation. They have now added the ability to delete your addresses from their database; they continue to block your IP if you attempt to delete your address and then search for your name again (a reasonable thing to expect people to do, by the way), but it would appear that you can delete your infomation at least from public view.

The question of whether or not they are spam harvesters remains; I'm reluctant to suggest that you delete your information, since this will confirm that the addresses you delete are real ones. What is clear it that they obtained these addresses by spidering the Web.

I quote:

...we never sell access to our data to marketers, credit collectors, or others that would send you email we believe you would not want to receive. All data provided to us by users is treated with great care. It is never sold or distributed or provided to any commercial enterprise without your specific permission.

Note that they promise not to sell the information that you provide to them; and that they promise not to sell the information they collect to those they judge would send you email you might not want to receive. Those are weasel words. They mean that addresses.com retains the right to sell your information to anyone they please.

The bottom line is that if I want someone to have my address, I will give it to them. Addresses.com is collecting email addresses unethically, without permission, and they are seeking to make a profit from it.

This brings up a good point: since your email address can be listed on the Web in so many places, it makes good sense to use a throw-away address (like a yahoo or hotmail account) when you participate in any(like a yahoo or hotmail account) any mailing list or discussion group that may be archived on the Web.

Websites that list members' email addresses generally do so as a convenience to other members; for anyone to build a business from collecting those addresses without permission is an abuse.
[ 02/01/02 ]

:: Sky! Toilet! Retractions! (thanks, Anil!)
[ 02/04/02 ]

:: More food weblogs:
f*** corporate groceries
Gohan Taberu. (thanks, James!)
[ 02/04/02 ]

:: From the second, I found the delightful men's cooking class, a recounting of Ken'ichi Nagano's adventures in the kitchen.

Last year-end, my husband Ken surprised me saying, 'I have just applied "Cooking class for men" today.' I was confused but at the same time delighted a little. I soon made an apron as a present....

It's just one part of Mieko Nagano's wonderful home page. Here is an account of cake making research and her charming Keeping an account

I keep 35 account books on my shelf. It is a surprise and at the same time impressive to see them and realize we have been married already more than 35 years.

When I was a girl, I used to help my mother in preparing for a new year and summing up a household account book for the past one year. It was very natural for me to believe that when I got married, I had to keep an account book. When I got married, my mother prepared me a new account book - the same stylebook she was using - without fail.

In a train on our way back from the honeymoon, my husband opened his purse and handed the contents, saying 'Well, my honey, I ask you to manage our family budget from now on.' I still remember clearly that I realized my responsibility to create our new home.

[ 02/04/02 ]

:: As computers become ubiquitous in schools, the librarian's role has grown, so much so that they are now known as media specialists.

Now that computers and the Internet are ubiquitous in schools, librarians spend more time online. Several librarians said they are less search engines than gatekeepers, filtering out irrelevant, useless or even dangerous information. [...]

'Now the biggest problem kids face is too much information and how to sort through it and evaluate it,' says Peggy Hallisey, the media specialist at the high school in Burlington, Massachusetts. She and others say they're often helping students look critically at Web sites to learn if the information presented is accurate and unbiased.

'In the old days, you could trust a book, more or less,' she says. 'You could look at the publisher. Now they have to figure this out for themselves.'

[ 02/04/02 ]

:: What kind of a crazy, mixed-up world is it when Democrats cry out that government needs to live within its means?
[ 02/04/02 ]

:: Just one extraordinary story today. Marion Pritchard spent WWII rescuing children from the Holocaust. The story--and the woman--is inspiring and beautiful. And very, very moving. Please read The Power of One: A Hidden and Solitary Soldier

People want to know where this 81-year-old woman gets her grit. She eludes the question the way she once eluded her pursuers. 'There's nothing you can tell somebody that's going to make them less fearful,' she says in her faint Dutch accent. 'I was scared stiff all the time during the war.'

Warning: I wept from about halfway through to the end. (thanks, jessamyn!)
[ 02/07/02 ]

:: Critical IP sucks. Pass it on.
[ 02/09/02 ]

:: This is important. Comcast, the nation's third-largest cable company, admits it has been tracking the Web activities of its subscribers without notifying them. Do you use Comcast? For heavens sake don't buy anything over the Web.

The company that sold Comcast the technology acknowledged the cable company is collecting too much information.

'It's not needed," said Steve Russell, a vice president for Inktomi Corp. Russell said Inktomi's software also records other information from Comcast subscribers, such as passwords for Web sites and credit-card numbers under limited circumstances.

Russell discounted privacy concerns, saying engineers are using the information to improve Comcast performance.

[ 02/12/02 ]

:: Grant Barrett, formerly of the excellent World New York, has a new joint: ABC Electric Journal.
[ 02/12/02 ]

:: When a Grand Hotel sits abandoned, slated for demolition, what do you do? Restore it as low income housing. (Thanks, jjg!)
[ 02/12/02 ]

:: Interview with novelist Nega Mezlekia (via the Guardian weblog)

Storytelling is not a bedtime confection only, but it's something that was used, and is still used, as a vehicle for communicating wisdom and history. So it's a part of our culture....

Not just in Ethiopia, but also in Africa in general. I remember someone saying, "When an old man dies in Africa, a whole library is burned down." People carry their history and their fables with them. They move around, passing them on to the next generation in installments.

[ 02/12/02 ]

:: Creating artificial intelligence by means of 'evolution' is remarkably intelligent, but does this sound like slightly the wrong approach? Predatory Robots.
[ 02/12/02 ]

:: Are you sick of the Lord of the Rings parodies yet? I love this one: Lord of the Black Adder.
[ 02/12/02 ]

:: I think you know SpinSanity, the weblog that 'exposes and analyzes the increasingly pervasive use of manipulative and subrational rhetoric in American politics'. (I hope you're reading it every day.) SpinSanity is one of the few weblogs that really exploits the potential of the genre, in my opinion.

They've just been hired by Salon. I'm just thrilled. They're doing very good work, and they deserve wider exposure.

I'll also note that this is the first example of a weblog being picked up by major media. Sure, there are journalists doing weblogs, but, to my knowledge, this is the first time professional journalism has opened their ranks to bring in someone from the outside based solely on their weblog. (via rc3.org, which you should be reading every day, too.)
[ 02/13/02 ]

:: The Art Institue of Chicago has just opened a new exhibit that features the new aesthetic of train stations: glass and light.

The Art Institute also features the work of surrealist Mary Reynolds. Here are her bookbindings and other works.
[ 02/13/02 ]

:: Oooh! A law weblog, and one for the Consulate of Sri Lanka!
[ 02/13/02 ]

:: Believe it or not, the FTC is finally taking on spam

The FTC is taking action against deceptive spammers in part because of a consumer backlash: the FTC receives approximately 10,000 individual pieces of spam every day from irate consumers who forward the unbidden missives to the agency, Beales said.

Related links: About the proposed FTC do not call list and how, as consumers, to respond to the proposed changes.

consumerprivacy.org and opt-out
[ 02/13/02 ]

:: They have a word for it. Words for which there is no direct equivalent in English. (via marginalia)
[ 02/15/02 ]

:: 'US aircraft over southern Afghanistan have scattered $100 bills tucked into envelopes bearing a picture of President George W. Bush, witnesses said on Thursday.'

Isn't that weird? And didn't the pacifists suggest something along these lines instead of a military action? Just what, exactly, is this supposed to accomplish? To buy the loyalty of people we feel might not be too impressed with us at the moment?

I guess it's the analogue to our 'tax cut' last year. You have to ask yourself who is running these things. It's obviously cheaper than bombing them some more, but doesn't it seem like better PR to go in and, for example, head up a serious effort to remove the land mines from the country? We could start with the unexploded cluster bombs we dropped and work from there.....

It really is as if we all woke up the day after the presidential election, suddenly inhabiting Bizarro-World. Nothing has made a shred of sense since then, and it just keeps on getting more weird and more wrong.

(thanks, Anil!)[ 02/15/02 ]

:: 'As the clock ticks over from 8:01 PM on Wednesday, February 20th, 2002, time will (for sixty seconds only) read in perfect symmetry. To be more precise: 20:02, 20/02, 2002. It is an event which has only ever happened once before, and is something which will never be repeated....'
[ 02/15/02 ]

:: Penis News! A bill has been introduced by the Ohio Senate that would make it a felony to throw or spray semen on another person. (via ideas, etc)
[ 02/15/02 ]

:: Who knew? the FBI has a weblog. (via killyourtv.com)
[ 02/15/02 ]

:: This is important: Lawrence Lessig is almost ready to unveil what he calls the Creative Commons--and it's going to be a boon to artists and intellectuals everywhere.

...Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.

[ 02/19/02 ]

:: Get yourself organized: Software for Research (using Windows)
(Getting organized, managing information, finding information, analyzing information, presenting research, buying software--a terrific collection.)
[ 02/19/02 ]

:: David Gallagher wants to be #1 on google. I like the guy. I want David Gallagher to be #1, too.
[ 02/20/02 ]

:: The New Science of Marketing: Penetrating the Mind by Metaphor [NY Times: rebeccas_pocket, password: pocket]

Citing prominent scholars of the human brain — like Steven Pinker and Antonio Damasio — Mr. Zaltman argues that consumers can't tell you what they think because they just don't know. Their deepest thoughts, the ones that account for their behavior in the marketplace, are unconscious. Not only that, he insists, those thoughts are primarily visual as well.

'Because we represent the outcome of thoughts verbally, it's easy to think that thought occurs in the form of words,' he said. 'That's just not the case.'

[ 02/25/02 ]

:: Encyclopedia Mythica
[ 02/25/02 ]

:: CBS News reports that the Pentagon has lost $8,000 of your taxes for a total of $2.3 Trillion--25% of their funds.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

(via david grenier dot com)
[ 02/25/02 ]

:: True Urban Legends

But many urban legends are true — or at least "based on a true story," as they say in Hollywood. Here's a bone chilling story that's undeniably true: On the day that American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in New York, both of New Jersey's winning Pick 3 lottery combinations included the numbers 5, 8, and 7. The morning drawing was 5-7-8. The later drawing was 5-8-7.

[ 02/25/02 ]

:: Try it! You can see the world through the eyes of a honeybee (via que? technoir)
[ 02/25/02 ]

:: What is real? 415 564 1347
[ 02/26/02 ]

:: In the age of Tivo, television advertisers take a different tack: product placement, and orienting whole shows around their advertising campaigns.

'Our phone has almost become a character on Alias, and that has worked out very well for us,' says Nokia spokesman Keith Nowak. 'So any opportunities that present themselves like that we will always be interested in. As for sponsoring an entire show, it's one of those things we would probably have to see before we did something like that.'

[ 02/26/02 ]

:: Alpha, Beta Gamma: the world of high-school female politics and power. FWIW, I wasn't any of these girls. (via oliver willis)
[ 02/26/02 ]

:: Just a note on using antibacterial products at home and an introduction to The Precautionary Principle [NY Times: rebeccas_pocket, password: pocket].

In Europe, a different approach [from risk analysis] has taken hold. When Germany, for example, discovered in the 70’s that its beloved forests were suddenly dying, there was not yet scientific proof that acid rain was the culprit. But the government acted to slash power-plant emissions anyway, citing the principle of Vorsorge, or 'forecaring.'

Soon, Vorsorgeprinzip – the forecaring, or precautionary, principle – became an axiom in German environmental law. Even in the face of scientific uncertainty, the principle states, actions should be taken to prevent harms to the environment and public health.

[ 02/26/02 ]