Gene Wolfe wrote an essay on his love of Lord of the Rings for this book, and his essay was rejected.

If Wolfe, one of SF and fantasy's greatest living writers, didn't make the cut, it kind of makes me want to get that book and find out what did....

Here's one of those ultra-cool "VR" tours, of an Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb. Ultra-cool, even at 56K. (Yeah, I'm still on dial-up. And I'm quite happy with it, because I do very little downloading of big video files and I don't do filetrading of any sort. So there.)

My own theory is that some people prefer the dessert to the main.

Instead of confronting pressing national problems, our president lands airplanes while Rome burns.

Senator Jim Jeffords (Ind., Vermont) recently gave a speech that neatly summarizes why so many of us are, shall we say, less than satisfied with President Bush. And he's not even a Democrat.

(link via Ruminate This.)

I have a recurrent feeling these days, that I'm living in the wrong trouser-leg of time.

And, going even farther, SF author Charles Stross commented the other day on why he's less than satisfied with the 21st century.

(crossposted on Byzantium's Shores.)

Suppose, when he went to Gettysburg to dedicate the cemetery there, Abraham Lincoln had been able to employ the wonderful abilities of....


....(wait for it)....



PowerPoint.

No, but if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.

Literally.

A scientist studies what may be the mummy of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.

(Note to self: Check previous posts before posting....oh well, at least I got a picture!)

What if Superman were a Red?

What if he had landed in the Ukraine instead of Kansas? An interesting take and very creative endeavor. (Review: may contain spoilers).

A consequence of the computer age: cursive is apparently dying.

Every so often I'll attempt to scrawl a bit in cursive, and it always takes me several minutes just to recall how to make every letter. I believe I was in my early college years the last time I actually used cursive for anything longer than my signature. Even though I do a lot of longhand writing, none of it is cursive. (I print in italics.)

Should we still teach cursive, or has it become irrelevant?

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture (via plep on MeFi). Of course, ol' languagehat has already been there.

Your assignment: pick a favorite site? (and we aint talkin web here, baby.)

What is the Matrix?

This aint near penance enough for my utter lack of posting over here, but why not break the trend now?

Clinton says term limits should be for consecutive terms, not a lifetime.

Now that's an interesting idea (relative to him). I think he's right that it won't happen for him, but would you vote for him?

So you want to have an outdoor wedding. But you still want the trappings of a church, and your addiction to connectivity means that you'll still want to be able to check your e-mail and see if your favorite blogs have updated during the reception.

But how can you have your day to remember, and still have all this too? It's easy!!

First, you pick the field for the ceremony and reception.

Second, you rent one of these:





Third, you solve your connectivity-at-the-reception problem by just stocking the reception area with these:





Fourth: if you seriously consider doing any of the above, smack yourself with one of these:

MemeWatch: Andrew Carlssin

The Collaboratory needs more hits, I think, so I thought I'd add it to the growing list of echoes of the current meme. This is a story about a story.

I first heard of Andrew Carlssin back in March this year in a story posted in Yahoo News:

'TIME-TRAVELER' BUSTED FOR INSIDER TRADING
Wednesday March 19, 2003

By CHAD KULTGEN

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28.

"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider.

"But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.

"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."

The past year of nose-diving stock prices has left most investors crying in their beer. So when Carlssin made a flurry of 126 high-risk trades and came out the winner every time, it raised the eyebrows of Wall Street watchdogs.

"If a company's stock rose due to a merger or technological breakthrough that was supposed to be secret, Mr. Carlssin somehow knew about it in advance," says the SEC source close to the hush-hush, ongoing investigation.

When investigators hauled Carlssin in for questioning, they got more than they bargained for: A mind-boggling four-hour confession.

Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune.

"It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment."

In a bid for leniency, Carlssin has reportedly offered to divulge "historical facts" such as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and a cure for AIDS.

All he wants is to be allowed to return to the future in his "time craft."

However, he refuses to reveal the location of the machine or discuss how it works, supposedly out of fear the technology could "fall into the wrong hands."

Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."

Weekly World News will continue to follow this story as it unfolds. Keep watching for further developments.

but it was only after I happened upon this page that I suddenly realised what kind of Internet super-celebrity he has become since then.

The fact that the story was posted in the Entertainment section or that the story was syndicated from Weekly World News should have been enough of a warning for most people you'd think but, no on the contrary, the story of Andrew Carlssin has been running hot continues to be copied verbatum from newspaper to newspaper.

Here's a rundown on the story's progress so far and, of course, as you might expect Carlssin now has his own webpage.

SDB is annoyed that the University of Massachusetts is considering changing its mascot from a Minuteman to a gray wolf. Of course, he seizes on the single sentence in the article he cites that mentions "gender, firearms and ethnicity issues" to complain about political correctness, and completely ignores the article's larger point -- that the Minuteman-bearing merchandise just isn't selling these days.

Is this PC-run-amok, or is this just the free market at work?

Gee, if Frodo had only checked this site, he wouldn't have had to mess around with that smelly ol' Strider guy after all.

Shuttle's Worms Found Thriving in Debris

As NASA begins closing down its primary shuttle debris collection sites, a surprising and symbolic find has heartened the team tasked with the grim and challenging chore of piece together the wreckage: worms, packed aboard the shuttle as an experiment, not only survived Columbia's breakup and free-fall, but thrived.

"It's really wonderful," said Terri Lomax, director of NASA's fundamental space biology program at the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters. "We never expected this."

Lomax's research team at Ames Research Center in California received the first samples on Wednesday — pencil-tip sized nematodes that had flown in Petri dishes to test a new synthetic nutrient solution designed to extend the critters' lives.

Evidently it works. The worms, known by their scientific nomenclature as C. elegans, were in their fourth or fifth regeneration since being packed aboard the shuttle for launch on Jan. 16.

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Automated Denial-of-Service Attack Using the U.S. Post Office

In December 2002, the notorious "spam king" Alan Ralsky gave an interview. Aside from his usual comments that antagonized spam-hating e-mail users, he mentioned his new home in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The interview was posted on Slashdot, and some enterprising reader found his address in some database. Egging each other on, the Slashdot readership subscribed him to thousands of catalogs, mailing lists, information requests, etc. The results were devastating: within weeks he was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.

Ironic, definitely. But more interesting is the related paper by security researchers Simon Byers, Avi Rubin and Dave Kormann, who have demonstrated how to automate this attack.

If you type the following search string into Google -- "request catalog name address city state zip" -- you'll get links to over 250,000 (the exact number varies) Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalog in the mail. Or, if you follow where this is going, you can type in the information of anyone you want. If you're a little bit clever with Perl (or any other scripting language), you can write a script that will automatically harvest the pages and fill in someone's information on all 250,000 forms. You'll have to do some parsing of the forms, but it's not too difficult. (There are actually a few more problems to solve. For example, the search engines normally don't return more than 1,000 actual hits per query.) When you're done, voila! It's Slashdot's attack, fully automated and dutifully executed by the U.S. Postal Service.

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History textbooks in the United States have long been sanitized to promote the "correct" view of America. Now, apparently they're doing the same thing in Europe.