randomWalks

Sudama is an acronym? No, it’s not. It’s a name which appears in ancient Hindu literature.

“Cameras have been attached to the sides of rockets before but the images from the rocketcam on the side of the first launch of the Atlas 3 booster must be the most dramatic. They take the viewer on a 1 minute 50 second ride from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida to the edges of space with the curved horizon of the Earth clearly visible.” thanks, davenetics.

Freshly-Ripped: the beat don’t stop until the buffer runs out.

If you decide to stay in your body form - Click Here.
If you decide to be transformed into an energy shape - Click Here.

I'm afraid I can't see much difference between Spielberg's serious movie and his boy's book movies. Schindler's List depends on Spielberg's inflatable, one-size-fits-all myth about how a clever, resourceful character can outsmart a system. Is that what the meaning of the Holocaust boils down to--Indiana Schindler versus the Gestapo of Doom? ... How about a movie that deeply, compassionately entered into the German point of view in order to reveal how regular people with wives and children could be drawn into committing such horrors? How about a movie that showed that, at least potentially, we are them? A film that didn't locate the bad guys in an emotional galaxy far away?

When Brent Kennedy started questioning his origins, an aunt doused old family documents and photographs with gasoline and set them ablaze. "I hope you burn in hell," another relative told him.

Even worse than the Q-Tip test: the candiru fish.

Barnes & Noble.com is offering a slew of free eBooks for download in conjunction with Microsoft. It’s a promotion for the new PocketPC, but Palm users can take advantage of the deal by downloading the free eBook reader software from PeanutPress. thanks, PalmLounge.

A shared sense of mortality has been the basis for feeling a commonality with other human beings -- a sense of going through the same life cycle, a sense of the preciousness of time and life, of its fragility. The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents potentially dramatic changes in our psychology.

NBC will likely broadcast the five unaired episodes of Freaks and Geeks in a three-hour marathon this summer. If you appreciate the kind of good TV that comes around a few times a decade, you should check this out.

This movie of a cat getting scared will make you laugh out loud. Poor cat!

When an underwater volcano erupts near the surface, it sometimes forms an island. A team of scientists were lucky enough to happen upon such an eruption recently.

Cabeem is bubblet for the Web. Very dangerous.

LARS ULRICH: I think that most of what you're saying deals with the record company being these money hungry, greedy, blah blah blah. Remember one thing: I can guarantee you that there's nobody at Napster who is doing as a charitable event for all of mankind. There are investors behind Napster, and there are people sitting and counting the days until Napster puts out an initial public offering, and they'll make millions of dollars in return for their worth.
CHUCK D: It's always been about the shadow of technology hanging over the entertainment industry anyway. And it's definitely been about two different worlds--
LARS ULRICH: Right. And there's millions of dollars involved in Napster in the same way that there are millions of dollars in your evil music business. I think it's like, if the record company bosses don't take the money, then the Internet people are going to take it. Somebody's going to profit off it, and if it's not the artist, then you're profiting illegally. It's bulletproof--who can argue with that?

Ars Technica weighs in on Mac OS X DP 4 – a must-read for UNIX/Linux users and technically inclined Mac heads.

Scott McCloud’s top ten Web comics are bound to be worth investigating. thanks, bird on a wire.

Gnute.com is a Web based interface to the gnutella file-sharing network.

Go read the new Lynda Barry cartoon at Salon, you turtle-headed sucker-leg.

For each of the past two winters it has snowed at least 36 feet. Feet, not inches. The building is called Begich Towers, a 14-story monolith and a model of drab Army efficiency, rising like an urban transplant amid the town's rail-yard waterfront. City Hall, the Country Store, the U.S. Post Office and Cabin Fever Cures, a combination video store and tanning salon, all sit on the first floor. The tunnel has long been Whittier's lifeline to the rest of the world. In winter, when the ferry service isn't running, a train ride through the two-mile tunnel under a mountain is the sole avenue of access. It runs four days a week, with a single passenger car and a series of flat cars; folks sit in their cars and trucks for the slow ride through the tunnel, then about 10 more slow miles out to the Seward Highway.Foul weather, a fortress of a building and a tunnel. That's this town.

I’ve jazzed up the ‘links open windows’ tool a bit: see the linked text next to the checkbox? This is now a bookmarklet, a tool that can live in your toolbar or favorites list for you to use wherever you like. Just drag the link up to your toolbar (a la deepleap) and click it whenever you want links to open windows – on any Web page, not just randomWalks. Enjoy! (Note: these are not the improvements I mentioned earlier. This bookmarkletization I did myself.)

I think I’d rather read a hiking site for amnesia victims than this old blog any day. No, not that one, this one.

Believe it or not, I did come up with that ‘links open windows’ toggle all by myself. Once again, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Someone emailed me recently about some improvements they made to the code, which I’ll share (or at least link to) soon.

Some roots and seeds that were churned up in the landslides came to rest near the surface and soon sprouted. Insects buzzed in, and pollen rode the mountain winds. Tiny pocket gophers, whose burrows had served as bomb shelters, emerged to dig new holes, churn up fresh soil. One forested valley that was transformed into a flat expanse of rubble is today a patchwork of wetlands and plains, home to bright green Pacific chorus frogs, red-winged blackbirds, elk and coyotes. The air is heavy with alder pollen, and noble firs and Douglas firs sprout everywhere. As more plants like the purple lupine flower or the orange fireweed sprout, rebirth gathers momentum. The area should be fully renewed within 100 years, an eyeblink in geological time.

Stealing artists' music without paying for it fairly is absolutely piracy, and I'm talking about major-label recording contracts, not Napster. If these major labels aren't going to do for me what I can do for myself with my nineteen-year-old Web mistress Brooke [Barnett], which is drive millions and millions of people in less than a month by just doing that Web site, and providing real content for that Web site, than they can go to hell.

How good was that Simpsons last night, and how bad was that X-Files? I’m so sure Scully is excited about her pregnancy.