Its not so lonely at the bottom: US has joined the ranks of human rights abusers, like Malaysia

US' illegal witholding of information on terror suspects is condemned by courts for the first time since Sept. 11th.

"`You understand Google, person? I index many things and if I am very good I get to go to Bot Park and have more processors. And an oiljob! Thank you Google! Must come inside apartment and index. Must!'' His video eye winked up at me." --Robot Exclusion Protocol

Myoclonic jerks, sleep paralysis, and nightmares... its all in the Dream FAQ

An update on how the censorship of the war is coming along.

Vague and unsubstantiated references to 'links' or 'ties' to infamous names and organizations should not be a substitute for credible evidence.

A face only his mother could love. **WARNING - EXTREMELY GRAPHIC**

Government report on the Israeli spy scandal leaked to www.antiwar.com.

President Nixon puts his foot in his mouth again.

More on Anna Kavan

Hearing colors? Seeing sounds? That's synesthesia.

The Commissar Vanishes: Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia

Corpse exhibit

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: 29 volumes and over 44 million words now online

Kowloon: Walled City

I am your clock

More on the Israli spy scandal

Collection of extraordinary astronomical images

spamradio: listen to speech-synthesized junk mail with soothing music in the background....
mmmm... spam! spam! spam! spam!

"For too long the file system has been semantically impoverished in comparison with database and keyword systems. It is time to change!"
--The Naming System Venture by Hans Reiser (of ReiserFS fame)

Quantum crypto used in sattelite communications.

HashCash: a weapon against spammers, protection against anonymous remailer abuse, and access control for other unmetered resources

Vim 6: A Great Linux Outliner
(vim is also a great editor, but that's another story)

Philosophy as a way of life.

An honest critique of a recent Holocaust exhibit.

Capturing information from monitor images reflected in a user's face.

outliners.com

The "Great Masters" of art may have cheated

Experimental subjects chose to be spiteful even at a cost to themselves.

The home-schooling adventures of an MIT prodigy.

Gorgeous truecolor map of the world

Oh! You make me sooo stupid!!!

Slaughterhouse webcams

Anti-police brutality protesters arrested in droves

ModifyMe

Every 45 minutes a mysterious x-ray source blinks near Jupiter's north magnetic pole.

More evidence of a police state solidifying in the US.

CIA may have been involved in anthrax attacks.

Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice kills 15 schoolgirls in an attempt to prevent them from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress

100 Dumbest Moments in e- Business History

Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity:

"Epochal events such as two world wars, the Cold War, and numerous economic, cultural, and social upheavals have failed to provide the slightest dent in the pace of the fundamental trends. As I discuss below, recessions, including the Great Depression, register as only slight deviations from the far more profound effect of the underlying exponential growth of the economy, fueled by the exponential growth of information-based technologies... Occasional ethical and legal impediments to fairly narrow developments are rather like stones in the river of advancement; progress just flows around them... Already, at least two dozen of the several hundred regions in the brain have been satisfactorily reverse-engineered and implemented in synthetic substrates. I believe that it is a conservative scenario to expect that the human brain will be fully reverse-engineered in a sufficiently detailed way to recreate its mental powers by 2029."

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities

a 10,000-year marking system to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

(More and an earlier, related project.)

"eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will"

US govt secretly sending prisoners to be tortured in countries where torture is legal.

Lego death

"It cost me less than $300 to discover the geographic distribution my patrilineal kin in Europe. I obtained all this personal genetic archaeological information by swabbing the inside of my mouth for a sample of my DNA, sending it to Oxford with a check, waiting for 3 months for my Y chromosome "haplotype" results, and then submitting a query form on a haplogroup database web page after filling in 5 blanks with the test results."

CodeCon: wish I was there...
Some coverage... and some more

Hey! Leggo my Mojo! -- The future of micropayment/crypto-based distributed resource sharing.
Well, maybe not, as they seem to be a victim of the dot-crash... mnet is the heir apparent.

A great parody of ad-based revenue business models.

AlteredPage

Tub Cat
Fat Mouse

Domain name ownership street map of San Francisco.

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Correspondence between Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound

'President Bush has not been forthcoming about progress in the war on terrorism or about a "secret government" operating since Sept. 11, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Sunday.'

Noam Chomsky on Private Tyrannies -- Corporations

The name of this blog was inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
I originally read the story as a teen (as part of an amazing high-school English class), and have just re-read it for the first time tonight. It is every bit as good and magical as the first time I read it.

Doomsday Clock Creeps Forward

"...the United States cannot support a court that lacks the essential safeguards to avoid a politicization of justice." --Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in a comment made in opposition to the proposed international court in The Hague, completely ignoring the lack of, or lack of effectiveness, of the same safeguards in American courts.

HOWTO: Use gzip to do computational linguistics