Cranezilla --Mark Crane's collection of rarely annotated links

Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/30/2002 | Jonathan Storm | A side of the Amish rarely seen

"There will be bootlegs that they'll watch on somebody's TV running off a car battery in the closet," Walker said. "For a community that isn't supposed to watch movies, boy, has everyone seen Witness."

Richard A. Bartle: Players Who Suit MUDs

Corrective Eye Surgery

10 x 10 MAKE A TABLE

What follows is a step-by-step guide to building a modest-sized but very sturdy sidetable. It'll hold your TENbyTENs snugly and has a couple bonus hiding places, too. I wanted to create something that could be made during the course of a Saturday afternoon by readers who may not have tools, a workshop, or much experience in object-making. For affordable and flexible material, I turned to cardboard, that great under-utilized, inexpensive stuff. Good design does not have to be expensive--this is said all the time but never taken too seriously. With this table, you may be able to do it yourself for free! It's a straightforward solution for small spaces and even smaller budgets.

The Chronicle: Career Network: Overseas Instructors (5/17/2002)

Overseas Instructors and Deans: Indianapolis College of Business and Computer Science (ICBCS) currently is accepting resumes for teaching and administrative dean positions for 12 month (June 15 2002-June 15, 2003) contracts in Lahore, Pakistan. ICBCS is a progressive, innovative institution affiliated with the University of Indianapolis offering US business and computer science programs in Asia. MBA and baccalaureate programs will be offered at ICBCS' campus in Lahore. Minimum requirements include a Master's degree in related area and a sense of adventure.

Salon.com Technology | Totally awesome software?

In an era of cheap, portable computers and universal connectivity, the image of two people working over the same keyboard seems about as quaint as an RCA vacuum tube. For a growing number of programmers, however, it's the latest thing: "pair programming," a cornerstone tactic in an emerging grass-roots software development methodology sweeping the industry

Guardian Unlimited | Netnews | Geeks go hack to the future

"I thought this was a nice exotic thing that would never work, but would let me present things in nice conferences in Hawaii, but... it worked!" said Bonabeau, as he presented the ideas to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara last week.
It certainly does work. By studying the way individually stupid creatures - social insects like ants and bees - can collectively solve massively complex problems, Bonabeau and others are building techniques that are proving to be massively useful in the human-sized world. When a swarm of bugs following simple rules act together, a form of intelligence emerges.

SpamAssassin: Welcome to SpamAssassin SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures. This makes it harder for spammers to identify one aspect which they can craft their messages to work around.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 05/20/2002

No one told me that fertility begins to decline at age 27. I'm not sure what I'd have done with that information had I known it then -- but I wish I had. And if you're a woman in academe who wants children, Ms. Hewlett has done you a great service by destroying any illusions you might still harbor about the chances of pregnancy much past 35.

The Chronicle: Career Network: 05/24/2002

Not all reporters come at you with an ideological agenda. In some cases the agenda is more personal. This is certainly true of those higher-education beat reporters who either washed out of graduate school, or got the Ph.D. but never got a job, or got a job but it didn't work out. Like Milton, who always felt that he had been "church-outed by the Prelates," these would-be or failed academics spend much of their lives trying to prove that they were too good for the institution that could not find a place for them. They love to write stories showing the foolishness that has taken over the academy since they were excluded from it. They love to paint a picture of education having gone astray, of overpriced professors worshiping false foreign (usually French) gods, of students betrayed when their teachers forsake the "basics" in favor of texts that are studied only because they were written by someone who has been oppressed. And they love to write that story again and again, living out a compulsion for repetition that has its source in a trauma they cannot leave behind.

We received a notice from our apartment manager about increased security due to a general terrorist warning. So now they're locking the laundry room and only giving keys to tenants. Take that, Bin Laden!

Economist.com | Neuroscience

IN AN attempt to treat depression, neuroscientists once carried out a simple experiment. Using electrodes, they stimulated the brains of women in ways that caused pleasurable feelings. The subjects came to no harm—indeed their symptoms appeared to evaporate, at least temporarily—but they quickly fell in love with their experimenters.

Harry Blackwood column: PA think we're idiots (2000). Regional UK Journalism. HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk

Mail reporter Cora Purnell's probe into goods that attract shoplifters explains why I can never pick my favourite Mach 3 razor blades from the shelf.

Welcome to the Vancouver Courier - On Line - News

As an example of the hopeless situation police face, Fisher points to a bust last December at the flea market alongside the city's train terminal. In a six-hour sting, police seized $300,000 worth of stolen property from vendors-there's a thriving market for stolen goods at Thornton Park outside the terminal-but they've been unable to charge anyone for lack of proof.

Welcome to the Vancouver Courier - On Line - News

The hawking is most obvious at the Savoy Hotel at 258 East Hastings St. A decrepit-looking younger man arrives with a school-bag full of stolen Mach III shavers with three extra cartridges-price: $2-and squats in front of the bar, offering a staff member first dibs on an electric razor for $10.

Canadian Retailer: Bug Out Gary Smith, a Shoppers Drug Mart associate in Saint John, New Brunswick, underscored the frustration many retailers feel when he discovered razor blades for sale at flea markets for less than he pays for the same product at legitimate retail outlets.
"On Saturday someone stole 24 packs of Mach III blades out of my store. That's not for personal consumption. I don't know where they went, but on Sunday there was a flea market where there were lots of blades for sale."

U.S. Olympic Chief Quits Over Lies on College Degrees

According to Mrs. Baldwin's U.S.O.C. biography, she graduated from the University of Colorado in 1962 and received a doctorate in American literature from Arizona State in 1967. On Thursday, she acknowledged that she left Colorado in 1959 after three years at the university, and received a bachelor's degree from Arizona State in 1962. She said she completed doctoral studies at Arizona State, but did not have time to do the dissertation because she had to care for her two children and run the family farm after her parents died. Mrs. Baldwin subsequently taught English at Arizona State for 11 years before starting a real-estate firm in the early 1980's.

Silicon Valley Grows Up The same broken dialogue is now repeating itself between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Hollywood went to Congress to block any sale of DVD's without legislatively mandated copy protection. It sued to block the sale of MP3 players and digital VCR's because these devices make it easy to make fast, durable, portable copies of music or movies.

O'Reilly Network: Essential Blogging Public Review [May 23, 2002]

Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that's not really useful? Our goal isn't to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Time to blog on

"I think we've moved profoundly from the older period in which news was a lecture," he says. "Now the job is that we tell you what we have learned, you tell us if you think we are correct, then we all discuss it." Whether the thousands of people blogging their own personal subjects can be called journalists, or whether they can make a living at it, or whether the wide availability of the free blogging tools makes for a hard time filtering the signal from the noise, are all debates starting now; but for the people consuming blogs as their premier news service, the arguments are somewhat irrelevant.

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.
One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

From slashdot:



peer-review is overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
by EccentricAnomaly on Tuesday May 21, @01:46PM (#3559706)
(User #451326 Info | http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday December 16, @05:28PM)
I've gone through peer-review several times and it's mostly an exercise of massaging the egos of people in the field who are 'respected' just for being in the field for so long and who haven't really produced anything new in their lauded carreers. You go through a ton of busywork making sure you have the right damn font and you have all of the right people referenced (whehter or not you actually used their papers) and you get paid nothing, the journal takes your copyright and charges you $10 to make fair use copies of your own damn paper.

In academia, if you have a good idea someone will steal it, if you have a great idea they will dismiss you without listening to it. If you don't believe me, look into whether or not Watson and Crick _really_ discovered the structure of DNA or if it was a grad student who's ideas they orginally dismissed.

In academia there's this absurd notion that if someone understands your explanation of a new idea that they somehow helped you come up with it.

So Bravo to Wolfram for thumbing his nose at academia! I just hope he can back it up.

(5/20/02, 4 p.m. ET) -- Ted Nugent was the target of the Osbourne family's rage after hearing Nugent's comments about The Osbournes show. Nugent told the New York Post, "I think it's an indictment to the soullessness of modern man that we get a kick out of witnessing a magnificent creature reduced to a blithering hopeless idiot." Nugent says the paper didn't print his complete statement.
"My first comment was that, isn't it fantastic and thank God. I think it saved Ozzy's life that he met and eventually married Sharon--I hope he finally realizes he is married to Sharon--because she really has managed what is left of Ozzy into a wonderful, wonderful, increased quality of life," he explains. "I'm confident that they're sharing it with the best of their ability with their children."
Nugent adds, "However, what is displayed on the Osbournes TV show is what I said it was. Its success could be an indictment to the soullessness of my fellow Americans who don't just watch it because it's funny, because it's not funny when you see people that have a scattered shambles of a life like that. And they can criticize me and make fun of me for killing Bambi and all that other vacuous transparencies. But I wish nothing but the best for the Osbournes."
Nugent wants to get on the phone with Osbourne to clear the air and to try to get Osbourne and family pointed in the right direction. "I would like to speak to Ozzy personally about it because...

The problem with all of this fake spam from Nigeria is that it's not allowing the REAL Nigerian royalty with misplaced wealth to get their message out.

I would think that using a tool like blog buddy would encourage more narrative posting and less linking to abstracts of other documents. Which could be a good thing.

Blogbuddy seems to be working, and it's a good deal quicker than the web interface.

testing Blog Buddy.

12 things about weblogs

"While the throngs of marketing professionals have not yet embraced the phenomenon clusters of influence are forming. That sort of infrastructure (the social network that creates technical momentum) has a longer half-life than the technical innovation itself."

1stperson.org Want to record something and you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive way to do it without sacrificing quality? The answer is Minidisc! The medium is a cross between a CD and a floppy disc, small ( almost 3" by 3" square ), and uses magnetic as well as optical methods of recording digital audio. They are re-recordable, and very easy to use.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms.

welcome to peterme.com

Yesterday's keynote was given by Steven Johnson, talking about a "City of Blogs", where he takes the urban studies notions he discussed in Emergence and applies them to the groundswell of interesting in personal publishing that weblogs have inspired. You can read much of his thesis in his essay for Salon, "Use The Blog, Luke". (Which wasn't his choice of a title...) The basic idea is that weblogs are a great knowledge management medium, but need tools to extract the value of the information therein. To turn it from a writer's medium to a reader's medium (or somewhere in between). I've noodled on this in the past, largely because of my work at Epinions. Epinions 1.0 was a writer's site--it was pretty much designed to support authors to write reviews, filling the site with content. The charter of Epinions 2.0, which is essentially what you still see (though it's probably more a 2.3 or 2.4), is to extract the value of all the content and present it in a way that is truly valuable for readers.

A Very American Movie "Star Wars" is like science fiction, but freed of the future. And yet it is America, all over: flaming, tumbling aircraft; huge enterprises collapsing before they're built; earnest, rich young princesses pretending to be democrats; a corrupt and inept Senate. As entertainment, it's full-speed sideways into a fun-house mirror, as Mr. Lucas's youthful aspiration is methodically replaced by an endless, brilliant, consumerized torrent of guns, gowns, clones and plastic figurines.

The Predator was small and quiet. It flew at 135 kilometers per hour for a range of 640 kilometers, with a ceiling of 7,600 meters and a loiter time of up to 40 hours, and it carried two Hellfire-C missiles under its wings.
On February 8, it was following something very interesting. Several sport utility vehicles, not the sort of auto that even well-to-do Afghans could afford, were driving in the remote Zawar Khili region, near caves where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The convoy stopped, and (according to news accounts) three men dressed in robes got out of the most heavily guarded vehicle. One was considerably taller than the others. Osama bin Laden? They stopped (to relieve themselves, presumably). The Predator pilot maneuvered to within eight kilometers, aimed a guide laser, and fired along its beam a missile powerful enough to blow up a tank.
The missile obliterated the men and the tree under which they stood. Bad weather hampered a U.S. effort to get to the site and collect DNA samples, and the eventual results, if any, have not been disclosed. But anticipation was high. Had Osama bin Laden been destroyed?

Earthweb IT Management: Security: Social Engineering: The Human Side Of Hacking

People have been conditioned to expect certain things," says Robertson. "If you dress in brown and stack a whole bunch of boxes in a cart, people will hold the door open for you because they think you're the delivery guy...Sometimes you grab a pack of cigarettes and stand in the smoking area listening to their conversations. Then you just follow them right into the building."

Early this morning I saw the body of a friend's mother being carried away in a green minivan while her daughter sobbed in the kitchen.

About two hours ago I received a job offer.

It has been a long and strange day. Life feels very deterministic right now.

The Labs: Stylistic 1000

I think I'll take a year off of the web, so I can come back and have a year's worth of cool stuff to look at. I think it's killing my concentration, what little I have.

That last entry was made by Deseret.

67gbubhy hybhv

Powdered Oxygen Bleach Products: Oxiclean, Oxygen8, Oxyboost, Stain Solver, Oxygen Bleach Plus, White Wave, etc. An Overview

Frequently Asked Questions: Oxygen Bleach Oxy-Boost versus Oxicl__n and Oxygen8

PalmHeads - Palm -> Linux Tools

From the net:

When Peter Parker first discovers he can climb up walls (while in citizen clothing), he tests it out by climbing up a building in an alley. During this scene, you can clearly see his clothes hanging out forwards, indicating that the scene was filmed with him crawling along a floor horizontally.

In the scene where Mary Jane is being mugged by four men, Spider-Man throws two of the men into two windows behind Mary Jane. Then the camera goes back to Spider-Man beating up the other two guys. When the camera goes back to Mary Jane the two windows are intact.

In the scene where Goblin blasts into Aunt May's bedroom to scare her, she is praying with her back to the wall/window that is blasted out. Yet her only injury is three small cuts on the right cheek of her face (which was away from the blast). Later in the hospital, the three small cuts have changed position.

When Peter is beating up the robber that killed his uncle, he smashes his head into both windows of double doors. When he smashes the glass, the same shot is used twice to show his head smashing the glass.

When Harry introduces Peter to his father, Norman, and they're talking on the steps, there's a redhead in a purple sweater that walks behind Norman probably 3 or 4 times.

As the balcony at the youth festival falls apart, Harry Osborne is whacked on the left side of his head by falling debris. However, during the scene following this, Harry has a bandage on the RIGHT side of his head.

In the school cafeteria after Peter saves MJ, he notices the fork that is stuck to his hand. If you look at the back of his hand, the spider bite is gone. In the next scene, it is back again.

When Peter is taking out the trash, and begins talking to MJ, as MJ walks toward him you can see her underwear sticking out above her pants. As the shots change, this underwear seems to appear and dissappear.

In the scene where Peter Parker is taking M.J.'s picture for the school paper, the spiders dissapear.

In every other version of Spiderman - comics, cartoons, films, games, etc., Spiderman gets his web from web cartridges, not his wrists. Also, if he could shoot web from his wrists, how is it that he can shoot through clothing without making a hole? [This is probably the only comic/film discrepancy I'm going to include, just to stop people sending it to me. No other differences though, please...]

After Spidey saves MJ for the first time, there's a stain on Harry's shirt while he's talking on his cell. Then it cuts to Peter, then back to Harry. When it comes back to Harry, there's no stain on Harry's shirt.

In the balcony scene, Peter is in the crowd taking pictures and at one point spots Harry and Mary Jane (MJ) together. MJ is holding a martini glass in her hand as she talks to Harry. In the rest of the scene she is holding a champagne glass.

When Peter is drawing up ideas for his costume the hand is that of comic artist Phil Jimenez, current artist of Wonder. Phil Jimenez is right handed and Tobey is left handed. In one of the cuts the pen is in Tobey's left hand but it shows him drawing with his right.

When Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) is preparing for the super soldier experiment, he is seen wearing a watch on his left hand. After he removes his shirt, the watch isn't there.

When Peter and MJ are talking outside the diner, MJ's trechcoat collar is first lying flat, then is tucked in, then is flat, happens several times when the shot goes back and forth from Peter to MJ.

In the scene when the Osborne is testing the performance enhancers on himself, his heart stops. His assistant comes in and begins to apply pressure to his heart and doesn't remove the arm restraints. The next shot is shown from further away and the arm restraints are removed.

When Peter and Osborne are talking, their distance from the balloons changes.

Peter is supposed to help his uncle paint the kitchen - when Peter leaves the house the kitchen is green, when he comes back his uncle has painted it blue. The following scene the kitchen is green again.

Throughout the movie references to how long Spiderman has known Kirsten Dunst are made. It seems to change anywhere from six years old to sixth grade.

After Spider-Man saves MJ after the World Unity Festival and is swinging quickly away, he is carrying her so that she is facing backwards. When we see a shot of MJ smiling, however, her hair is blowing very lightly in the direction they're heading.

In the final battle scene, Goblin's costume alternates between clean (green) and dirty (white/dusty) throughout the scene.

In the graduation day scene as Norman Osbourne is talking with Peter Parker, Norman's right hand is on Parker's left shoulder then off. This happens a few times as the camera angle switches.

In the last scene where Spider Man beats up the Green Goblin, Spider Man is right next to him smashing him in the face. When Norman Osborn reveals himself as the Green Goblin, however, the camera is shot at a different angle and Spider Man is instantly a yard or so away from him.

After Peter picks up his 'winnings' from the wrestling promoter, we see the sillouette of the robber using his right hand (holding the gun) to hit the promoter on the left side of the head. After the robber escapes and the promoter askes Peter why he didn't stop him, the promoter is injured on the right side of the head.

In the wrestling scene the cage is lowered around the ring for the match. The announcer instructs the assistants to lock the 'doors' of the cage. In fact there are no doors. We see the assistants chaining and locking the 'corners' of the cage. Then at the end of the match when 'Spiderman' has won, the cage is immediately lifted away from the ring and there are no locked chains on the corners.

In the lunch scene, everyone notices Peter dragging the lunch tray. This seems like something noticeable to a point that they would say something when the Daily Bugle is asking who Spiderman is. Something that's not easily forgotten.

This is not a mistake, only a cameo appearance. Jameson (the boss at the newspaper) has the male assisstant who is dressed completely in black and has the glasses. This is in fact the director's brother, Ted Raimi.

In the scene where Peter is following M.J. to the bus stop (the morning after he was bitten), while Peter is talking to her we see the bus start to pull up behind him. Moments later one of M.J.'s friends pulls up in a green Mustang. The scene cuts back to Peter, and we see the bus pass by him again. Don't you think the bus would've passed the Mustang?

How did the referee get back into the cage during the match so quickly when the cage was still just rising?

In the appartment fire scene, Spiderman enters the building twice. In between time the fire backdrafts (explodes) out the building several times from different windows before and after Spiderman enters. Backdrafts only happen once, then the fire escalates rapidly never returning to a more passive state without intervention.

In the bridge scene, the orientation of the elements of the scene gets very confusing. There are so many camera angles that understanding where everything is becomes difficult. Nevertheless, it is very apparent that when Spiderman runs to dive off the bridge (to save MJ and the cable car), he jumps off the wrong side of the bridge.

When Spiderman returns to Peter and Harry's appartment (for Thanksgiving dinner after the firey appartment fight with Goblin), the slashing injury to his arm changes positions (from the apartment to the ceiling of his room to the dinner table).

At the bridge scene, MJ begins to climb down the steel cable, then the Green Goblin swoops in, attacks Spider-man and causes her to fall a considerable distance, yet she manages to catch on to the rail on the cable car. Now unless MJ has super powers of her own, cathing on to a rail after falling from that distance would be nearly impossible. Her arms would be yanked right out of the socket.

More at http://www.movie-mistakes.com/film.php?filmid=2225

Boston Globe Online / Magazine

A week of college costs roughly $1,100 at a $35,000-a-year school, factoring in 32 weeks of education, a half-dozen holidays, and 19 weeks of summer, winter, and spring break. Rob Bellinger's room is about $20 per day, and includes a thin lumpy mattress and wood frame; a desk, bureau, high-speed Internet connection, and 3-by-4-foot closet; and a daily scrubbing of the hall's bathroom.

simple ice cream

ice cream recipes

The Looping Technique It is within the first stage – Creating – that the experienced, disciplined writer is able to rise above those annoying distractions and obstacles brought on by writer’s block which so often will stymie the young, inexperienced student writer. This is because the disciplined writer is aware of and has mastered the repertoire of various creating techniques available. Those techniques are found under three distinct categories dependent upon the nature of the writing task: (1) the Simple techniques that include, among others, free writing, brainstorming, clustering, mapping, listing, chaining and the Reporter’s Formula; (2) the Expanded techniques which include looping, cubing, track-switching and Classical Invention; and (3) the Enhanced techniques of Reading and Research (i.e., R&R) and Noticing Inside Purpose. For a more in-depth discussion of these techniques, consult Elizabeth Cowan-Neeld’s excellent Writing (Scott, Foresman and Company). For many, knowledge of these techniques ended in that Senior Composition course during high school where the instructors covered one or more of the simple creating techniques. Those in AP courses may have been given the majority of the simple techniques. In either instance, none of the expanded or enhanced techniques were presented to the student.

An Interview with Sherri Jilek How do you keep a balance between family, work, and your writing?
It is all-consuming to maintain balance. How does one clean house; cook; keep half an acre of flower garden; and another acre and a half outside the fenced flower area; care for two dogs; RV; read from a 1,000 book private library; spend time with children and grandchildren; ad infinitum? The answer for me is to give writing 1st place. I don't give it ALL of my life, but I keep it at the front of my life. First the writing work; then everything else. Discipline has a lot to do with it. I'm a disciplined writer.

Nonsense Verse How to make it stick? Like anything requiring discipline, I imagine one of the most effective techniques is forcing yourself to work it into your routine. When I used to go to the gym regularly, I did it X days a week, usually first thing in the morning (when I wasn't awake enough to talk myself out of it), got it out of the way, and felt better for it. When I used to be a ballet dancer, I did special stretching and strengthening exercises religiously--first thing in the morning, and first thing after dinner--because I had to, because I knew it was good for me. It was part of my routine, and I diverged from it only when deathly ill (and I mean deathly--I'm someone who once performed while stricken with bronchitis, that's how determined I was).

Nonsense Verse Discipline is forcing yourself to do something--usually something with a certain amount of regularity--even if at the time you know you should be doing it, it's one of the last things you want to be doing. Working out. Calling your parents. Doing your homework. Finishing your taxes. Brushing up on your French. Cooking rather than dining out. WRITING.

Sociology 101 Book List
Wow, some great stuff on this list.

Blocking Ads with a Hosts File

stating the obvious

The current World Wide Web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of pages in varying ratios, with results that range from unsatisfying to disastrous. But the next stage of the web is going to come from the native form that evolves from, and incorporates elements of, these two existing structures. Even after this form emerges, however, the web will still be populated with plenty of stories and tools, of course, just as television retained the idiom of an anchor at a desk authoritatively reading us the news, even after the invention of the situation comedy and the game show.
If you take a look at the pages we have today, one thing becomes clear: Stories on the web just plain work. The obvious, and so far ultimate, display of this is The Fray, which sets out in its very mission to tell stories. It's the definitive example. But less obvious examples are abundant and instructive. Every news item proffered on whatever portal or provider you prefer is presenting a story. The content presented in web interfaces to Usenet and even Wikis are largely story-oriented. In a medium originally designed to present structured documents, the natural divisions and regular formatting of stories was destined to be a good fit, even if they technically fell outside the precise realm envisioned by the web’s creator.

Salon.com Technology | Swimming with the online card sharks

The economist Earl Grinols calculated that 52 percent of casino revenues come from problem gamblers. Of course, you never have a problem as long as you're winning.

Neat not always organize TRN 121201

Pilers may also discard things they find irrelevant in the process of hunting for their information, while filers may tend to value tidiness more than efficiency by prematurely filing papers they could have discarded, Whittaker said. “Often filers will file information that later turns out to be irrelevant.” When the filers finally cast off paper, 23 percent of the material is thrown away unread, the study found.

Pilers and Filers. I'm a Piler.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

Continually invent words
that name your intuitions, and use those words consistently when writing
in your notebook. Work back and forth between the private language of
your notebook and the public language that you use with others.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

* Graduate students often write badly at first because they are trying to
imitate the prose they encounter in seminars. After all, don't academic
writers use a lot of big words? Yes and no. Many academics are posers
or show-offs, of course, and others just can't write. But good academic
writing is really no different from regular writing. Start with the
English language and work up to the big words from there. The big
words do have a purpose. Some serve as flags that a community can use
to identify its distinctive approach to research. Others are closely
identified with particular authors and their ideas. Sometimes a community
chooses a word in order to contrast their position with some other
position. Collect these words one at a time. As you gradually become a
member of a community you will learn the significance that its words hold.

Red Rock Eater News Service: [RRE]learning how to write

Let's ignore the ideologies and just teach people how to write. In
this article I have gathered the best ideas on the subject that I have
encountered in my years as a writer and teacher.

Zap2it.com MOVIES | MOVIE NEWS | STORY

"You always expect a torturous development process, but Brandt and Haas turned in a bang-up first draft that provides a great intro for Paul," said Snider. "They wrote modular stories, one that could have gone with Dominic Toretto and one without him."