Entries from July 2002 ↓

After September 11, many experts have claimed that we may be at the end of the age of skyscrapers. I don’t think that the illustrators at SkyscraperPage.com would agree.

They have a terrific community of artists creating lovingly detailed and accurate drawings of the world’s skyscrapers. You can search for them by location, architect, year. They’ve even got categories for buildings that have been proposed but not yet built.

Their very active forum contains discussions about how the drawings are created, glimpses of drawings in progress as well as much discussion about urban issues. There are also a huge number of pro and amateur photos of skscrapers.

One of the coolest features is the forum members’ access to architect’s renderings of proposed buildings. I love the style of these drawings and the cleanliness of the cities they depict.

Just in case the 4440 illustrated structures isn’t enough skyscrapers for you, check out Skyscrapers.com. It’s a news and database site for skyscrapers and real estate worldwide. The database is very deep and requires many clicks to get just about anywhere, but once you get to a building page, the info is very complete.

In the 20 years Jenn & I have been living together, we’ve shared our home with six cats (four still living), one dog (still annoying), one lizard (in hiding), five mice (gone to the great exercise wheel in the sky), and forty or so fish (each buried at sea in a solemn ceremony, except for Gil, who is happily swimming upside down in Jenn’s office.)

The large mammals — dog and cats — have all been spayed or neutered after being rescued or adopted. The four male cats and the dog never seemed to notice that anything was missing. They never paid much attention to their furry little empty scrota. They never looked at me accusingly for having their balls removed without consulting them. They never developed complexes or syndromes as a result of their manhoods being removed.

So, I just don’t understand Neuticles — testicle replacement implants for dogs, cats and horses. While too many animals remain unspayed or neutered, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unwanted cats and dogs being euthanized each year, I really wonder if it is the actual removal of the testicles which causes “Many caring pet owners [to] hesitate or even to refuse to neuter their pets…”

Are the pet owners really worried about how their ball-less dog will look? Or is it more likely that they haven’t the time or the money or concern to take their pet to the vet for the operation? Or is it that they are interested in breeding the pet? Or is it religious objections, if the cat is Catholic, for example?

Of course, since only 50,000 pets had the Neuticles implanted between 1995 and 10/2000, I don’t think it’s a mass phenomenon. I just wonder about the owners of those 50,000 pets…

Tolerance.org, the Southern Poverty Law Center project, has a self-quiz that’s a lot more meaningful than the usual IQ tests, color tests, spending tests, etc.

Created by psychologists at Yale University and the University of Washington, this collection of Implicit Association Tests (IAT) measures unconscious bias.

The results may be disturbing, strange, or enlightening. They may confirm prejudices you know about, or they may bring to light biases you may not have known you held. The site is full of disclaimers, but the exactness of the test is not the point: causing us to think about the automatic associations we all make is the goal of this site.

Don’t miss the rest of the site — great articles and references and news sources.

According to the SF Chronicle,

A belt buckle that raised suspicion with security workers at Los Angeles International Airport caused the temporary evacuation of part of a terminal area Sunday, authorities said.

The belt buckle had an image of an explosive device on it, said airport spokeswoman Gaby Pacheco.

What did the examiners think? That the belt buckle would explode because it had a picture of an explosion on it? Are they going to ban listening to “The 1812 Overture” next?

Wired and The Register are both reporting on a patent claim made by Forgent Networks, a video-conferencing company which acquired US Patent No 4,698,672 in its purchase of Compression Labs. The patent, filed in 1986, but never before enforced, covers “methods and apparatus for processing signals to remove redundant information thereby making the signals more suitable for transfer through a limited-bandwidth medium.” This seems to apply to JPEG compression (maybe MPEG, too?). In fact, Sony has already entered into a licensing agreement with Forgent for US$15 million.

Beyond the question of whether a patent-holder should be allowed to spring something like this on people and companies who have been using this technology for the past 15 years, comes the question of how this is going to affect end-users.

Is PNG support strong enough in the major browsers that a wholesale switch is possible? Is it the impetus that’s been needed to encourage everyone to switch to this format, which has been a W3C recommendation since October 1996? Or is this going to be a repeat of the Unisys/GIF issue which raised a lot of dust and resentment, but ultimately had only minor impact on GIF usage and probably netted Unisys a lot of money?

Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives.com posted his weekly column, “The Disappearing Author Syndrome,” on July 15, discussing the reason so many authors are missing from the shelves of various Barnes & Noble bookstores in Manhattan. (The article link to Moby may not work past this week, since Moby archives the weekly columns with individual, rather than date-based names. Try the Archives if it’s not on the front page.)

The missing books were by authors such as “Michael Baisden, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Nick Hornby, E. Lynn Harris, Shannon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, Salmon Rusdie, Omar Tyree, Sister Souljah, Iceberg Slim, Teri Woods and Zane”, as well as J. D. Salinger, Martin Amis and Paul Auster.

Speaking to booksellers and store managers, Johnson came away with several reasons why those books are often kept behind the front register. The reasons ranged from theft to customer convenience to bookseller convenience — much easier to get a book from behind the info desk than it is to run up 4 flights of stairs.

A couple of days later, the Times runs a story called “The Best Stealer List” by Martin Arnold, discusses the most popularly stolen books downtown, which include Jack Kerouac. “… Bukowski, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Hunke. Kafka and Abbie Hoffman are also hot steals, and Tom Wolfe’s ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ is tucked away, available only on demand.” Uptown, it’s the big, expensive art and photography books.

Having worked in many bookstores over the years, including Barnes & Noble, I’d be willing to bet that the reason is more complicated than just plain theft, and more in keeping with the many reasons Johnson came up with. At B&N, we kept the “Anarchist Cookbook” behind the counter because we’d had too many irate parents returning the book while their red-faced, black-clad teenaged sons stood miserably by. We kept Jock Sturges’ “Radiant Identities” and “Last Day of Summer” behind the counter because radical Christians kept ripping out the pages of glorious black-and-white photos of naked parents and children after the FBI accused Sturges of creating and distributing child pornography. (The case was later dropped and all his materials returned to him.) We kept Howard Stern’s “Miss America” behind the counter because all the yahoos who’d never been in a bookstore or read a book before kept telling us they couldn’t find it on the incomprehensible-to-them alphabetized shelves. To be honest, our twice-a-year inventories didn’t really give us enough information to be sure that a particular title or particular author was being stolen; to me, theft is the least likely reason.

Although both articles cover the missing book problem from different angles, it’s interesting that they should both appear so close in time to one another. Does Arnold, the author of the Times’ “Making Books” column (and the subject of a nasty profile in Salon two years ago) read Moby? It would be a big surprise if he doesn’t, and a great recommendation if he does.

Nelson Mandela is 84 today. Complex and ambiguous, he is one of the great heroes of our age.

Visit his official site (but be forewarned — it seems like it’s connected by a 28.8 modem), or check out this site from a PBS “Frontline” documentary.

“… things we were never meant to comprehend. The Ark of the Covenant. The Crystal Skull. Alien spacecraft . . . and aliens. Documentation of conspiracies and cover-ups. And more.” All in the Warehouse 23 Basement. (via Metafilter)

I packed my lunch this morning: a lovely vegetarian turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread with soy cheese and Nayonnaise, a bag of baby carrots, some fresh green grapes, some cherries, a nectarine, a banana and a Clif bar. I poured a cup of coffee and went down to the first floor to check my email, getting a couple of minutes’ relaxation before I started my day. I heard Jenn come down to the second floor from blow-drying her hair.

She fussed in the kitchen for a second, then I heard her say, “Oh, no! You better come here…” “Me?” I yelled, unsure whether she was talking to one of the animals. “Yes, you,” she said, and I came bounding up the stairs to see her holding a half-eaten nectarine and a partially-chewed bag of grapes. The dog was sitting at her feet, ears down, tail wagging furiously, head swiveling nervously from Jenn to me and back again. “Bad dog!” I said, and he laid down on the floor and rolled over on his back, all four feet up in the air. Jenn was trying hard to keep from smiling or laughing. I looked in my bookbag, and everything else was still there — except the sandwich.

“Did you find the sandwich?” I asked Jenn. “No,” she said, and I could tell she was struggling not to burst into hysterical laughter. I walked into the living room, looking for some bread remnants or something, but all I found was an empty plastic bag with a little smear of Nayonaise. When I walked back to Jenn, holding up the bag, the dog slunk behind her, trying not to look at me.

I’d say that this is proof that even a dog can’t tell the difference between good vegetarian food and the real thing, but this dog has no taste — he thinks cat shit tastes good, too.

Pete Bevin brings the magnitude of the stock market woes to the local pub:

If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.
If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for a nickel deposit, you would have $79.