randomWalks

With apologies to Shel Silverstein, check out Where the Internet Ends. Ok, not really. Much more fun awaits at the 404 Research Lab.

Iconfactory has announced the winners of Pixelpalooza, its annual icon design contest. The Iconfactory icons are very well done (and some are truly beautiful), but none of them can touch the Mozco !Garash! icons—far and away the best I’ve ever seen.

Monkey Fist (which rocks) notes that there are a slew of “white pride” clubs on Yahoo which violate the Yahoo Terms of Service (section 6a, specifically). You can encourage Yahoo to enforce these terms with an email.

MacAddict is running a comparison of Mac Napster clients, “currently the best way to get MP3s.” thanks, macsurfer.

But can Tama climb a tree when AIBO chases her? thanks, slashdot.

It had to happen: m³tacubed. “What was missing, it occurred to me, was a place that listed some of the better lists of weblogs, so that people could identify the best places to identify the best places to identify the best places to go for actual content.” My brain hurts. thanks, running tally.

Minute Books presents Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Valentine Michael Smith: You people would cure all society’s ills if you’d just “grow closer” to your friends. People: You sick dog. (stone him) Valentine Michael Smith: I don’t get it. Truly, I am a STRANGER in a STRANGE LAND. (dies) thanks, metafilter.

Marlys Magazine carries Lynda Barry’s “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” on the web, updated weekly for your enjoyment. thanks, robotwisdom.

“I really got up this morning and fried an egg for my daughter and myself. There is another world where my daughter and I had cereal. The cereal world is in the wave function of the universe, but it’s not real in the sense that any information I’m going to get will falsify the hypothesis. All the information says we had eggs. Look at my cholesterol level!” Dr. Seth Lloyd tells the New York Times why Schrodinger’s cat is either dead or alive, but not both. A recent experiment has shed light upon how an atom in a quantum state (existing in all possible states simultaneously) decoheres into one particular position. It seems to me that mystical traditions and this branch of physics have a lot to learn from each other; many of the supernatural powers attributed to yogis, buddhas, and christs would seem almost unremarkable in light of this new understanding of the universe. It also seems to me that ‘the wave function of the universe’ is just one of the nine billion names of God.

Do you visit Slashdot at least once a day? …twice a day? …once an hour? Do you have a user account at Slashdot? Do you configure your Slashboxes? Have you ever read Slashdot via ultramode.txt? Do you take it personally when you are moderated down? In the grand tradition of the Purity Test comes the Unofficial Slashdot Purity Test.

Space weather. Space weather? thanks, macintouch.

Grim Reaper’s Age Guesser—which guessed I was 27 (not too far off)—is one of Dan Zen’s fascinating games. This is really fun unique stuff that’s worth a visit; be sure to look around at the other games before you leave. thanks, lake effect.

“frontwheeldrive humbly attempts to bring intelligent reporting to emerging sciences such as Artificial Intelligence, Memetics, Complexity, Chaos Theory and the like with a nod toward design and an open eye on new media. Forever forward in the pursuit of positive stimuli. Information in formation.” It does a good job, and draws some big names. thanks, peterme.

What’s an egg cream? Where does the steam rising from manholes come from? Is Jamaica, Queens named for the island? Does milk spoil more quickly in the city? Carolyn Hahn spent two years researching all sorts of obscure questions about New York City so you wouldn’t have to. Go on, Ask, Already!

A British woman has taken it upon herself to cure her chronic fatigue by drilling a hole into her head, a procedure known as trepanation which is purported to increase brain blood volume and have all sorts of other beneficial results. At the risk of freaking the hell out of my family and friends, I have to admit that I’ve always been quite fascinated by the reports of incredible peace, clarity, and even bliss told by those who have taken the plunge, so to speak. If anyone who knows me doesn’t think it’s a really bad idea (the gift, not the hole in the head,) I’d love to get this documentary for my birthday. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has an informative entry under trepanation, including a few more interesting links. They don’t have a link to the Trepanation Trust, a site which I should probably stay away from lest temptation get the best of me. thanks, davenetics.

I want this t-shirt.

Someone’s selling homemade duct tape wallets for $5. If they were halfway cool, they’d post instructions on how to make your own… it does look pretty complicated though. thanks, baylink.

This weekend we developed 10 rolls of pictures we took on our honeymoon. We ended up choosing 1 hour developing at Rite-Aid, because it was only a couple of dollars more than dropping it off at the supermarket for 3 day developing. It ended up being a bad choice, not because the photos weren’t developed well but because the people running the developing machine obviously looked through all of our pictures and ended up rearranging them (I hate that) so badly that in one envelope we found photos of Buffalo from Yellowstone, a picture of our friends' house in Winston-Salem NC, and a picture of a deer we saw when we were camping outside of Austin, TX. What’s up with that? Anyway this photo is of the Pacific coast taken during our drive from Santa Cruz down to Big Sur, and it’s one of the ones I’m pretty proud of.

evhead found browserware.org, a site about free software that works through your browser. They don’t have a link to workspot, which looks pretty amazing (I haven’t tried it yet) – a Linux workstation you can use through a browser via either an HTML interface, or a Java-based Timbuktu/pcAnywhere-type deal. Thanks to metafilter for that one.

“The Web may provide us with a way to transcend our current and limited spheres of knowledge to grasp a further and deeper understanding of what it means to be human and to be alive.” Derek Powazek’s contribution to the growing literature about weblogs pointed me to Julie Ann Petersen’s thoughts on some of the ways in which this will happen. This is some of what I’m reaching for when I bore my friends with babble about how incredible, unprecedented, revolutionary, paradigm-changing, blah blah blah the Internet is. I mean, people used to huddle under rocks when they weren’t killing things for food and picking bugs out of each other’s hair. I don’t know what that means.

Butternut squash is my new favorite food. A ripe one will have a sort of dull skin (rather than shiny) and feel heavy for its size. I just slice them in half symmetrically, scoop out the seeds, place them face up on a plate and wrap it with plastic wrap, and microwave the whole thing for 20 minutes. Then scoop it out of the shell and maybe add a little salt. Delicious!

Redesigning your site bit by bit is a little like thinking out loud. I felt that using headlines for each post like pitas does was restricting me somewhat, but now I think my page is harder to read. I guess I’ll keep playing with it. Please let me know what you think at any time.

People tell me I look a lot like this guy.

Props to pitas for creating a tool so simple it got me and my friends logging the Web in no time, but I’ve decided to switch to blogger because it is more powerful and flexible.

Please feel free to use my javascript ‘links open windows’ code in your own pages – and whatever else you find on randomWalks, for that matter. Take it, it’s yours. That’s why I publish on the Web. As I said to Tom, anyone who says people shouldn’t steal code is a hypocrite and a fool.