randomWalks

Note the megatextual references to Heaven, Superior Being-as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. [via riley dog]

“Here’s how the whole tabbed browsing thing happened…"

TrackBack is a system for connecting weblog posts across sites. If you've been reading weblogs for a while, you've probably seen how conversations can happen across several weblogs. TrackBack simply makes the connections more visible.

TrackBack was developed by Movable Type, and integrated into their weblog tool. It's rapidly becoming an open standard for connecting posts.

• TrackBack at MetaFilter
• homebrew trackback tutorial
• TrackBack development weblog
• TrackForward?

The question of the day at BlogRoots: is there sexism in blogging? For further reading see is MetaFilter a boyzone? and is randomWalks a fraternity?

Syracuse New Times: Dirty Thoughts: A germ-laden childhood might be a good thing for a person’s immune system.

The United States, like most other industrialized nations, has seen a rise in allergic reactions such as asthma, hay fever and eczema. Two British scientists believe this rise in allergic disorders may be the result of obsessive cleanliness, as well as the uses of antibiotics and vaccinations. They maintain that all of these elements deprive the immune system from learning to distinguish between harmful and non-harmful agents.

Among their findings are the discoveries that you are less likely to be allergic if you were not given antibiotics as a child; had older siblings, especially brothers; rarely washed your hands or face as a child; lived in a home with bacteria-laden dust; were brought up on a farm with animals; had a dog; had a childhood infection that was transmitted by fecal-to-oral contamination; and grew up in Communist, rather than Western, Europe.

Imagine libraries of TIFFs of phono-records available through the Internet Archive, available for downloading and processing into Ogg or MP3 files. Keep the TIFFs handy and you can re-rip them into new formats as they emerge. Imagine bulk-feeding phono-scanners that automatically feed stacks of wax through and turn them into digital music, rescuing and restoring entire libraries of music... Gosh, this is cool stuff.

It’s time once again for the Project Censored list of the top underreported, underplayed, and underanalyzed stories of 2001. Topping the list this year are radio and water, two things that have been increasingly on my mind. See also http://www.projectcensored.org/.

You wanted to hear Aloha? You’re in luck: http://www.insomniaville.com/aloha/sounds/.

Before I steal a half-dozen links from one buddha, allow me to politely point you in his direction. Get your third eye open!

Mass graves discovered in May near the northern city of Shebergan could contain as many as 1,000 bodies of Taliban prisoners who suffocated in sealed trucks last November. The deaths allegedly occurred during the transport of prisoners by a militia under the command of Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum. The Newsweek report described Dostum's militiamen cramming Taliban fighters who had surrendered into sealed trucks for the trip to Shebergan. The report said many prisoners suffocated slowly in the intense heat and that drivers were beaten by Dostum's troops for trying to allow the captives to breathe.

Women in the U.S. armed services are increasingly at danger -- not from foreign terrorists, but from men in the U.S. armed services.

9 percent of women in the Marines, 8 percent of women in the Army, 6 percent of women in the Navy and 4 percent of women in the Air Force and Coast Guard were victims of rape or attempted rape in one year alone.

Early this morning, as the restaurants and clubs were shutting down in the Adams Morgan neighborhood here, a young waiter named Rick Roman joined a crowd gawking at the new attraction on the sidewalk: an 18-foot-wide vending machine.

Mr. Roman looked through the glass at the dozens of products - bottles of olive oil and milk, cartons of eggs, chicken sandwiches, paper towels, detergent, diapers, pantyhose, toothpaste, condoms, DVD's - and realized what he absolutely had to take home at 12:15 a.m. After he inserted a $10 bill and punched numbers on a screen, the crowd watched a metal bin rise to collect a package of razor blades from one shelf and a can of shaving cream from another.

It's a masterpiece of convenience in the drive-through age. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, then, to learn that the Tik Tok Easy Shop is actually a division of the people who spawned fast food and helped put a happy face on the exporting of American culture: McDonald's.

You cannot go back and become a person who doesn't know how to write FedEx, but if you will actually decide to write it over your paintings, FedEx may sue you, because it hold a "copyright" it owns the part of your brain where the FedEx logo is located.

I can’t remember the last time it really rained. Our farmer says:

We did get a small fraction of an inch of rain this week, but it was hardly enough to even wet the dust. We are now going on over 2 months without more than a sprinkle. 4 months of really very little rain. The ground, out here, is cracking. Deep cracks several inches wide. I can’t plow without first watering the ground, the plow just bounces on top of the concrete like soil. This last week a number of trees started dying. We are sure fortunate to have a good water source for our vegetables. Our spring, as of now, shows no signs of slowing. There are other springs around here, springs that didn’t even dry up in the 30’s that are now completely dry. There are people around here who are having to sell their cattle because they don’t have enough water for their animals.

I understand over 50% of the rest of the country is also in a major drought. That is almost to the level of the 1934 dustbowl days.

I wonder, if we weren’t such a large and powerful country, how long it would take before droughts like this started causing food shortages.

I think maybe if we can't grow (or pay to have grown) our own food nearby, maybe we shouldn't be living here. What do you think? I mean, if we can't directly experience the impact we have on the world, how can we possibly judge whether what we're doing is something we ought to be doing?

We went to the pond today, and I wouldn't have been able to take this picture (from May). I can't remember the last time it really rained.

The government is preparing a national crackdown on file traders that would crush the rogue swapping networks in the same manner hackers were pushed underground 12 years ago.

Remember last year's summer of the shark? Welcome to the summer of the abduction.

The public didn't need to watch little Samantha's funeral "live ... in its entirety" on CNN. The public didn't need to listen to Larry King bloviate about this topic night after night, not just with Runnion's grief-stricken mother, but also with a panel of people involved in the case, and, most pathetically, with celebrity hack Dominick Dunne. It's fine to alert the public when a child is missing or there's a serial killer on the loose in the neighborhood, but that's largely a job for local news. What Larry King, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest are doing is something else entirely: It's sensationalizing other people's tragedy.

The world is a scary enough place without kids being made to feel that at any moment a masked man could sneak into their bedroom and spirit them away. It could happen--and does on extraordinarily rare occasions. But our children are in no greater danger this summer than any other.

What will comics look like in 5 years? I don’t know either, but Patrick Farley makes web comics look like a mature art form. While you can’t go wrong with anything at electric sheep, particular favorites include “Overheard at the Rave”, “The Guy I Almost Was”, and “The Spiders”. I’m mentioning e-sheep again because Farley has just launched the weekly strip “Barracuda: The Scotty Zaccharine Story, a look back on the rise and fall of Dot Com San Francisco.”

Cooking with monkey! Oh, my.

“Not directly experiencing racism is, in fact, directly experiencing racism.” Aaron, uppity-negro.com

This week, the government refused to comply with a federal judge who ordered that he be given the underlying evidence justifying Hamdi's treatment. The Justice Department has insisted that the judge must simply accept its declaration and cannot interfere with the president's absolute authority in "a time of war."

Is that one of those guitars that’s, like, a heart-shaped triple guitar?

My inner child lives in an Earthship.

I'm black and I'm going to do anything I want to do. Then it'll be black because I did it.

Get Your War On 13

What kind of title is “San Francisco’s ‘Sleeping Giant’ Awakens” for an NPR segment? How often do we see white people described with racialized, monolithic, and anthropomorphizing imagery?