He's also so very, very right.

...here's the bad news: We have three more ungodly and humiliating and colon-curdling years of BushCo. We have three more years of some of the most miserable foreign and environmental and human-rights policy you will see in your lifetime.

We have three more years of brutal unforgivable war and misprision and of the religious right trying to cram its splintered stick of wicked self-righteousness straight up the country's yamdinger, and if I'm here to tell you anything at all I am here to tell you this: Your energy is needed. Right now.

Energy of transformation. Energy of possibility. Energy of intellect and clarity and progress and joy and sex and kiss, of change and growth and defiance. Oh I know, it sounds all swoony and big-brushed and impossibly affected. It might sound all froufrou and New Agey and San Francisco. You know what? Who cares.

(And I'd already decided what to call my resolutions post, so there.)

When I named this site, I intended to write a lot more pieces like this, or at least as close to it as I could get.

Brava!

Yahoo's gone and bought del.icio.us, just as I'd really got the hang of using tags. I hate Yahoo, first because they pollute everything with advertising, and second, because they are soulless corporate worldfuckers who would shank their grandmothers if there was a dime in it:

The text of the verdict in the case of journalist Shi Tao - sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for “divulging state secrets abroad” - shows that Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided China’s state security authorities with details that helped to identify and convict him, Reporters Without Borders said today.

“We already knew that Yahoo collaborates enthusiastically with the Chinese regime in questions of censorship, and now we know it is a Chinese police informant as well,” the press freedom organisation said.

“Yahoo obviously complied with requests from the Chinese authorities to furnish information regarding an IP address that linked Shi Tao to materials posted online, and the company will yet again simply state that they just conform to the laws of the countries in which they operate,” the organisation said. “But does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations? How far will it go to please Beijing?”

Better technical background with less drama can be found here. So yeah, bastards. And now they own my favourite bookmark organizer, so I've deleted my account and gone looking for a replacement. Right now I'm using furl (my links are here), which is clunkier but has pretty much the same functionality. Off the top of my head:

• the google ads piss me off but they only show up on the public view spoke too soon, they're all over my view as well. That's a dealbreaker as soon as I find an ad-free alternative.
  
• calling tags "topics" is stupid
  
• not allowing me to edit the default tags would be a dealbreaker if there were anywhere else to go
  
• searching by multiple tags doesn't seem to be available, which is just nuts, so maybe I'm missing it -- if I'm supposed to use the search syntax, bite me
  
• tagging posts from a drop-down list is another reason to keep looking
  
• the privacy policy is crap and there's a lousy feedback form instead of a development forum/blog
  
• there are import and export functions but I haven't checked to see whether they work with, say, spurl, which I've been using as a backup for del.icio.us (autoloading of furl links, as spurl does for del.icio.us, would be nice)
  
• There should be a way to hack the one-click button to post to whichever tag/s I want, but I can't figure it out (if html is a dialect of Martian, then fucking javascript is an obscure dialect of Ancient Martian)

I came up with about twenty different sites/applications while I was looking; for future reference and in case they're of use to readers, here they are:

http://protopage.com/v2
https://www.foldershare.com/
http://www.farfetch.com/
http://www.netvouz.com/
http://www.blinklist.com/
http://www.backpackit.com/
http://base.google.com/base/default
http://www.bitfolge.de/snif-en.html
http://www.linkroll.com/index.php
http://unalog.com/about/
http://toolbar.a9.com/
http://www.hyperlinkomatic.com/index.html
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/booksync
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Bookmarks&numpg=10&id=14
http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/Link_Management/
http://www.sync2it.com/
http://de.lirio.us/rubric
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.mybookmarks.com/
http://www.myhq.com/

That's weird. My comment on this Inhabitat post was deleted. From memory, what I said was

Love the site too, but ads in feeds are a dealbreaker. If the ad-free excerpt feeds go I'll just stop reading.

Am I missing something here? Why would you delete that? It occurs to me that there was no mention of culling the ad-free excerpt feeds, so I over-reached a bit there, but still. As it happens I have unsubscribed, because the "excerpts" turn out to be title-only and the titles aren't all that informative. I read rss feeds for the convenience, because I don't want to have to click through on every post. If the ads are all-important, if you're running the blog as some kind of business, then this rant's for you.

Schade, I really liked their stuff.

Update: I wrote the admin, and Jill F wrote back to say that my comment was collateral damage when she deleted a couple of obnoxious ones. I'm glad not to have given offense. Jill also points out that the site is free so it's a bit rich for me to complain about ads. I confess to a deep hatred of advertising, but I didn't mean to complain so much as add a data point to the thread. I can stand ads on the site, hell, I'll even click through occasionally; it's just ads in rss feeds that cross my personal line. I've left a new comment that I hope is clearer. (And -- now that I look at that first comment again -- less pushy.)

You may never have heard of Jimmy Massey; I hadn't, until today. He's an Iraq War vet with severe PTSD who's been telling anyone who'll listen that civilians are being killed nineteen-to-the-dozen over there. He's published a book you can't buy in the US because, apparently, all of our publishers are chickenshit; it's called Kill Kill Kill and -- that popping sound is wingut heads exploding -- it was published in France. (You can, however, buy a couple of DVDs of Jimmy talking about his experiences and the military here.)

How did I come to hear of Jimmy Massey? A few days ago, the St Louis Post-Dispatch published a hit piece by Ron Harris claiming that Jimmy was lying; Charles points out that you'll be hearing "Jimmy Lied!" a lot in certain circles over the next little while, as though it invalidated the entire case against the war, and Nathan talks sense about why it doesn't.

As it turns out, Jimmy isn't lying: Ron Harris is a sleazy hack who never lets the facts get in the way of sensational copy. In the linked article, Stan Goff makes a detailed case that Harris has propagated a smear, false in all particulars, probably because Massey caught him out in a lie last September.

So consider this post a gift from me to that special rightwing nutjob in your life. When they start crowing about Jimmy's lies, send 'em here (or rather, to Stan).

This is fun: Frappr lets you stick a virtual pin in an online map to show where in the world you are. You can even attach a photo and a comment if you want to.

If no one signs my map, I'm gonna be all hurt. (Those of you with anonymity to protect, pick a location you'd like to be in.) I'll update the screencap if y'all show up.

Update: whee! I like the way that, if two or more virtual pins are stuck too close together to show up separately, the shadow darkens to indicate more than one entry.

Jay Manifold has left the blogroll. He thinks it was excusable for US troops to position two dead Taliban facing Mecca and burn their bodies, then taunt onlookers:

Desecration

Jay Manifold

TIME dutifully reports that:

... as one Kabul cleric Mohammed Omar told newsmen, "The burning of these bodies is an offense against Muslims everywhere. Bodies are burned only in Hell."
I know just what he has in mind. <----------- (WARNING: Twin Towers 9/11 image!)

October 22, 2005 11:31 AM

(Warning added by me.) I don't remember, and can't be bothered looking up, whether Manifold had anything to say when the bodies of US contractors were desecrated in Falluja. If he did, I bet it wasn't self-righteous and approving.

Update: Jeanne has links to a transcript of the original broadcast and an interview with the photographer.

I think your mind is probably twisting in the wind, too, dear reader, and there's cool piss dripping from your boots, too, and that rope is creaking above you too in the coming dark.

Stavros is writing again. Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy! Or, you know, go read.

Do you read WorldChanging? If you don't, you should. Seriously -- check 'em out. They're a great resource for all things green, sustainable and environmentally responsible.

If you do read WC, please head over to their reader survey. It will take you less than ten minutes to complete unless you have lots of suggestions for them.

It's quick and easy, and he asked nicely. No, get your mind out of the gutter. If you have a blog, please take ten minutes to help Cameron out.

In a feeble attempt to hinder independent local journalism, a certain scumbag has glommed the obvious domain names for the Seldovia Herald, the newspaper run by my friend Savannah. The Seldovia Herald is not some rinkydink mimeographed collection of hick minutiae (not that there's anything wrong with that!). It's a charming and professional local publication with community clout and political savvy. S has been using a tilde account but is tired of having to explain a long, awkward web address to her somewhat non-geeky readership, so she's registered sovnews.com. I've added it to googlebombs for good and urge anyone with a web page (and the minimally developed nervous system required to understand the value of independent journalism) to give the Seldovia Herald some Google juice. (tip o' the titfer: Brad)

Sphincterine. I'm not kidding. There's even a mascot: Pucker the chocolate starfish.

Truly these are the End Times.

(Blame Defective Yeti for this.)

Oh my. Ask MetaFilter goes where few others would dare.

Sometimes, you just gotta do the experiment, even if it means a swimming pool full of snot.

This site has GM MIDI files of algorithmic music determined by mathematics and the musical preferences of a human. Insert obligatory Philip Glass joke. (via BoingBoing, which probably should carry a NSFW label these days)

Growth industry: New Zealand scientist Christopher Anderson is sowing corn and canola and reaping gold, mercury and other toxic contaminants from small-scale mines. Metals recovered from the plants are used to pay for cleanup and local programs to combat poverty. (via jwz)

Of, like, pertaining to, resulting from, resembling. Be sure to check out the rest of the Phrontistery as well. (via kindall)

What with all the Patriot Act insanity going around, amateur photographers might want to carry the Photographer's Bust Card with them. Especially if they're, you know, brown.

For the nerd who has everything: cufflinks with embedded instrumentation. (also via BoingBoing)

Graham's right, this animated gif is hypnotic.

Rivka has a wonderful post up about abortion, disability and prenatal diagnosis. Do yourself a favour and go read it.

The spousal unit's side project, Get In My Belly, a food blog, is featured in today's Willy Week (on page 3 of that article). Apparently the authors like the term "spousal unit" too.

A while back, Max ran a contest to identify the most vicious comment made on a blog by a member of the Instapundit blogroll. Being a fair and balanced couple of bloggers, dsquared and Max decided (scroll down a bit) to run the reverse contest at the same time, that is, for the most vicious post or comment by a member of Max's own blogroll.

To my delight, Max links to me, and to my continued delight one of my posts has been nominated.

The disingenuously named American Family Association is at it again, this time frothing at the mouth over the "homosexual agenda" (about which, see this). If you have a spare moment, go mess up their survey (that is, unless you're a raving bigot, answer the dishonest leading questions as accurately as they can be answered). (via Atrios)

I note with schadenfreudenous glee that they tell you how many people have taken this survey after you submit your answers -- I was the 95894th -- but not what the results are. Presumably they learned something from this little incident.

Oh, and you have to give them a name and email address. I gave them real info, as I'm happy to keep casual tabs on what these malignant morons are up to, but you can always just make stuff up. Vote early, vote often.

I wish I had time to collect my thoughts and words to write them down with, but I don't right now so I'll just point you to Stavros:

It becomes easier when everyone else is Them. We didn't saw off poor Nick's head, it was those scum, those vermin, the evil-doers, those others. We didn't stick blunt objects up prisoners' asses, either, or rape them or set dogs on them, we didn't rip those kids apart with our amusingly-named ordinance. That was other people, a few bad apples, and they're not us! We're consumers of the images, don't you see? We didn't make this world! We didn't maim that boy! It was them. Them! We didn't slit Daniel Pearl's throat, we didn't knock over the gravestones, we didn't fly airplanes into the World Trade Centre! We didn't sell arms to Saddam, we didn't sell arms to Iran, we didn't ask for the double-anal pissporn, we didn't do any of that shit. We are watchers. Watching makes it real, and watching keeps it separate from us. Watching is a noble act, at least until it gives you a hardon.

The basic truth gets obscured. What's the difference between Osama bin Laden and George Bush? There isn't one. What's the difference between that fucker Amrozi who set the bomb that killed my friend Rick and me? There isn't one. What's the difference between the animals that sawed off Nick Berg's head and the animals that beat prisoners to death at Abu Ghraib? There isn't one. Between the Pope and Saddam? Between that old lady in front of the TV in a trailer in Alabama and that old lady digging up roots in a field in Kazakhstan?

We are one. We are all meat and electricity. And if there is more than that, we are all equally a part of that divine More. Or none of us are.

I'm too busy doing it to write about science and too sick over it to write about politics, so just go read dong resin already.

I love how these republicans are all so law and order/ responsibility-for-one's-actions until they get caught out. Then suddenly there's a whole lot of "complexity."
Their problems are complex, not simple, not like homelessness, which is what just happens when you're lazy, or drug addiction, which is what just happens when you're lazy and weak, or AIDS which is what happens when you're Freddy Mercury. My God, he had that shit coming to him, didn't he. I saw him fuck a panda once, he was insatiable. No, they get what they deserve, and how about a little self control/personal responsibility next time, you sad losers.
Oh, but ineptitude on a global level? No, that shit is nuanced.

Buy his book, too, or God will kill a kitten.

Jee-sus H Christ. If you haven't been following Baghdad Burning, start now with this.

She shook her head and waved away my words of sympathy, "It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they did was beat me."

I don't go in for much of the rah-rah-new-media-paradigm hype about weblogs, but something like this reminds me that at least a little of it is justified. Who else would have told you that story?

Update: because it seems to fit here, and because it should be the point of all the war talk: here is something else about Iraq that you won't see on CNfuckingN. Warning: contains graphic images of Omar Abdul Kader's arm after two AK-47 rounds got done with it. Beware. Spousal unit, this means you.

Update the second: if these two items have whet your appetite for insight into what's actually happening in Iraq, Doc points to a roundup of good sources.

Porpidia flavocaerulescens, orange boulder lichen, photographed in Alaska by Steve and Sylvia Sharnoff, whose beautiful lichen sampler and gallery are taken from their book, Lichens of North America. (thanks to Anne Galloway for the link)

I never thought too much about the old adage that you can't fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times; I tried with a couple of different pieces of paper, couldn't do it, and stopped there, except for a vague idea that I could do better with a much bigger piece of paper. Not Britney Gallivan, whose elbows you see there on a piece of paper folded 11 times (she's since managed 12). She derived expressions to describe the folding limits for one direction (L = (π.t/6)(2ⁿ + 4)(2ⁿ - 1), where L = length and t = thickness of the material and n is the number of folds) and alternating directions (roughly W = π.t.2^3(n-1)/2), then demonstrated the validity of her equations with gold foil and then with paper. Another approach is described here on Math Forum, or you can buy Ms Gallivan's booklet. I wish I'd had her chutzpah, not to mention her smarts, when I was in high school.

I sure like Alton Brown. I don't watch his cooking show Good Eats as often as I might, because the wacky/zany stuff feels forced to me, and gets in the way of the information (which is excellent), but Mr Brown seems like someone whose company I would really enjoy. His website is entertaining, informative and well designed, and gives me the sense of a complex and curious mind. He even has a blog:

Georgia state school Superintendent Kathy Cox has decided that the word “evolution” is “…a buzzword that causes a lot of negative reaction” and should be replaced in all Georgia school curriculum with the phrase “biological changes over time”.

I agree. I hate buzzwords, don’t you? That’s why I think we should go one further and replace the phrase “slack-jawed backwater ignoramus” with the phrase “Kathy Cox”.

He also has lots of fans, and it's my guess that they skew cerebral as a demographic; you can even build your own Good Eats Geek Code. (Picture by Pelosi&Chambers stolen from Channel Guide Magazine.)

8< "Open Reading Frame" would have been another good name for this blog. I didn't think of it until after the spousal unit built me a site and a logo that I like too much to change, so mol biol geeks feel free to steal that idea.

8< (via Jared) A big ol' collection of record labels on the web.

8< Like photoblogs? Photoblogs.org is your one-stop shop (3,273 photoblogs in 54 countries and 25 languages as I write this). If that's too much, just try Eliot Shepard's slower.net, which is consistently wonderful.

8< (via BoingBoing) It had to happen sometime, I guess: geek names son version 2.0.

8< Super Size Me wins Documentary Directing Award at Sundance. I want to see this film, in which madman Morgan Spurlock documents the terrible things that a month-long diet of nothing but McFood does to his body.

Blake at American Footprint reminds everyone about Tibet, the forgotten cause. He links to a story in the Times of Tibet and asks why we aren't seeing articles like that in the New York Times.

Cory Doctorow links to a story on homelessness in Columbus, OH:

When Tom Bingham describes his new apartment, a slow smile creeps across his face.

The place is small - 402 square feet - squeaky clean, and bare. A metal-frame twin bed sits in one corner, a large, worn purple chair in another. But it has one thing that Mr. Bingham, an older man, has never known: privacy.

"It's the first time I've been by myself," he says, relishing the words. "You come from a family of 10 kids, like I did, and you're never by yourself. In the shelter I was with 120 other guys.... Now, I'm getting used to peace and quiet."

The program is based on providing permanent supportive housing for the long-term homeless, and after a five-year trial signs are good that it has been a success, not only for the direct participants but also for shorter-term users of homeless resources.

Amp reports on a modern medical horror story. Amber Marlowe checked out against medical advice from Wilkes-Barre General Hospital because they insisted she have a C-section, which she did not want. About the same time she was giving birth (vaginally, without incident) at Moses Taylor Hospital, attorneys representing WBGH sought and obtained a court order forbidding her to refuse the surgery. If you'd asked me beforehand, I'd have said I didn't think it possible in this day and age.

Prometheus6 gives a nod to Steve Kerr, who referred to Yao Ming by an ethnic slur but then made a sincere apology without making excuses; you can read his letter to Ming here. I'm linking this because Kerr did wrong, but it took cojones to face the facts the way he did, and I think that sort of response should be encouraged.

Also from Prometheus6, the last Tuskegee airman died about a month ago. A quick google finds stories in all the usual places, but it wasn't exactly splashed across their front pages. The University of Virginia has a good background here if you're not familiar with the story.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.    -- Vincent to Theo, 1878

The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is the site for van Gogh online. It's endorsed by the van Gogh Museum (<brag> I've been there! </brag>) and features, well, everything: 2200 images and 874 letters, every surviving thing that Vincent ever painted, sketched or wrote. Chronological and subject matter indices, a canonical works gallery, commentary and analysis, biography, an online forum and more, available in thirteen languages on a clean, well designed site. Bravo, Mr Brooks.

The Art*o*mat is just plain cool. In 1997, Clark Whittington converted a recently-banned cigarette vending machine to sell his black&white photos for $1 each. Today, his company Artists in Cellophane operates 60 art vending machines in 18 states, featuring the work of over 300 artists from 10 different countries. I note that there are no artomats in Oregon yet; I wonder what it costs to sponsor one?

Way cool update: the artist whose pendant is shown here, Sandra Marchewa, showed up in comments. You can see more of her art here. While I'm updating, it appears there's now an Art*o*mat in Oregon, at Lane Community College -- but still none in Portland...

I have pretty much given up on keeping my bookmarks organised on a day-to-day basis; I keep a few handy reference links that I use regularly (like Merriam-Webster online) and just use Google to find anything else I want from time to time (say, a currency or temperature scale converter). Other than that, I keep a toolbar folder into which I dump all the interesting links that come my way, and every now and then I sort those links into an organised set of folders. It's cleanup time again, so here are a couple of web goodies:

Winning greater influence for science. Daniel Yankelovich argues that there is an unspoken agreement between science and society which provides science with a "separation from involvement with goals, values, and institutions other than its own", and that

This "social contract" has allowed science to pursue long-term fundamental questions and to build slowly on the basis of its new knowledge. Science has been able to do this even in the context of a society such as ours, which in most domains is impatient, excessively pragmatic, and thinks only in the short term. But this same social contract is responsible for the widening disparity between the sophistication of our science and the relatively primitive state of our social and political relationships.

Most scientists of my acquaintance (and I am guilty of this too) treat the gulf between the public and our "ivory towers" the same way as everyone treats the weather: we complain, but we do nothing. Yankelovich at least suggests a model for dealing with the problem.

On a related note, Eugene Goodheart's essay Imperial Science takes on the "two cultures" view of CP Snow and his inheritors EO Wilson, Jared Diamond and Richard Dawkins. I'm probably a little more sympathetic to Wilson's side of things than Goodheart is, but the essay is a welcome thorn in the side of "sociobiology", that misbegotten offshoot of evolutionary biology which attempts to reduce human lives to formulae and ape-behaviours.

Happy second birthday (for yesterday) to creatures in my head.

Eliot Gelwan is right on the money again, this time about the anti-SSRI backlash. If you have reason to know what SSRI stands for (and even if you don't), you should be reading Eliot regularly.

Mark Liberman plays interesting sociolinguistic search engine games (see also this earlier post) at Language Log. Personally, I dislike the use of "refute" to mean "deny", and I strongly dislike the ""refute/refutes/refuted that" construct, but (as Mark points out) those are side issues. (Don't take me for one of those barbaric descriptivists though!) What's really interesting is the kind of analyses that a huge body of searchable text makes possible.

Filtering is a life-raft on the sea of information, and taste tribes are emerging as one of the best filtering mechanisms available (link-fu props to Jerry Kindall). I'm a bit surprised that Joshua Ellis didn't mention tribe.net by name (and that he did mention the dismal Blogshares) but it's a good essay. As I've mentioned before, I think that trackback and syndication and metablogging tools are turning blogs into a conversational medium of sorts, out of which it is easy to build your own taste tribes. I note that Ellis' sense of the term seems to be more interactive than mine -- superspecialrock versus Bloglines -- so maybe I need a different term for solitary geeks assembling a virtual panel of cultural taste-testers. Whichever way you look at it, I think it's safe to ignore Xeni's so-hip-it-hurts whining about "that post-Friendster/Tribe/LinkedIn/SixDegrees oh-god-not-again feeling" on the otherwise excellent Boing Boing. Taste tribes, and applications that pander to them, are here to stay.

Skippy at The American Street points out that CBS, which wouldn't take MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 seconds" ad because they don't run "issue-oriented" ads, is planning to run anti-Mary Jane ads during the Superbowl. He has some addresses if you want to let the rat bastards know that their hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed.

Speaking of rat bastard hypocrites, I am all tingly with Schadenfreude as I note that the American Family Association has had to abandon its "gay marriage" poll because the position they liked lost out by nearly two-to-one. Hat tip to Atrios, whose "go torture X" memelet probably helped. "Pro-family" my arse.

(via Doc Searls) First the Great Old Ones, now pathogenic microorganisms. When they made a plush Cthulhu, I did not speak up because I was not an Elder God of unspeakable evil...

Via Body and Soul, Obsidian Wings has truly outstanding coverage of the Maher Arar travesty. Arar is a Canadian citizen whom the US gummint deported to Syria so that they could have him tortured. I kid you not. Go read about it; this shit could happen to you next.

If you're part of the choir and you like being preached to (I am and I do), go read this from Rep. Bernie Sanders (I, VT) (via Dave):

The middle class is collapsing, and we need a fundamental alternative to trickle down economics and unfettered free trade.
We've got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
We've got to renegotiate our disastrous trade policies that have cost us millions of decent paying jobs.
We've got to change labor law so that workers can join unions when they want to.
We've got to protect the overtime pay that workers have earned.
We've got to put people to work building affordable housing, schools, mass transportation, and a sustainable energy system.
Our health care system is disintegrating... we can guarantee health care to all Americans through a single-payer national health care system. [...]
Our national priorities are backwards. Instead of giving huge tax breaks to the rich and large corporations, we should provide for the middle class and working families of this country. [...]
Environmental degradation is threatening the wellbeing of our planet. We must move to sustainable and nonpolluting forms of energy as well as energy conservation. [...]
We must work for world peace, and not U.S. imperial power. [...]

This, via Boing Boing and Atrios, is no surprise to me, but I hope it gets tremendous coverage:

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media...

It's not clear that the thieving bastards in question can be prosecuted, but then the law is an ass.

"You just wrong, and I be tryin' to right you." Via pretty much everyone, Margaret Cho is a class act, yo.

Metafilter's signal:noise ratio renders the comment threads a waste of time, but with the magic of RSS I can scan the front page for old school posts like these:

From magullo, a link to this polished amateur continuation of the Library of Congress' exhibit and project on the pre-WWI work of Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Prokudin-Gorskii took three black and white exposures of each scene he shot, using a different filter for each; then, by projecting the plates back through the same filters he could create a single colour image on a wall. The LoC, and now Addison Godel and friends, have used modern image manipulation to reproduce some of these extraordinary images. [pic ; I made the grayscale one in Photoshop.]

       

Godel has it exactly right:

...I'd always felt that the past was somehow obscured by being viewed solely through a greyscale window. To see places, buildings, and especially people in color was to understand, on a very deep level, that they had at one time really, truly existed - that the "Typical Russian Peasant of Figure 32" was not merely some gaunt presence in the side of a textbook, but a genuine person who, if not for temporal chance, could have been my neighbor or my friend.

Shibori is a labour intensive Japanese textile dyeing method, and this is a labour intensive post from user lobakgo. Techniques similar to tie-dyeing are used to create patterns like those on the left,from which extraordinarily detailed images like the one on the right are built with months of painstaking effort. [pic 1, pic2]

      

This also ended up on MeFi, but I got it from jwz: the industrial photography of Edward Burtynsky.

      

Rebecca keeps a useful list of antidotes to the special-interest spin in which everything seems to be drenched these days:

Snopes is an old favourite, hunters of urban legends (now in 41 flavours) since 1995. They include "common fallacies, misinformation, old wives' tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items" in their expansive definition of "urban legend". The site is maintained as a hobby by Barbara and David Mikkelson; they take some advertising (they say they have no direct contact with the advertisers, and appear to take ads only through Burst!Media) and accept donations. Of particular interest in these days of Democratic Primaries and Looming Federal Elections is their politics page.

Spinsanity is the creation of Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, all of whom disclose activity and affiliations with "Democratic and progressive politics". It's not clear where (other than their own pockets) they get the money for the site; the site is an Amazon affiliate and they accept donations.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and accepts no funding from "business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals". Their mission is to "monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases."

The Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk offers political reality checks by medium, angle (Fact Check, Hidden Angle, Local Story, Echo Chamber, Money Trail, Spin Reducer, Distortion, Tip of the Hat and Cheap Shot), issue or candidate. Their stated goal is "to straighten and deepen campaign coverage almost as it is being written and produced" and they focus "not on what politicians say and do, but on how the press is presenting (or not presenting) the political story". No mention of funding sources.

I suspect that I might not hate advertising, at least not with a passion so far beyond reason, if more advertising execs were like David Ogilvy, whom Doc Searls says "was to advertising what Shakespeare was to theatre". There are online bios here and here. There are Ogilvy quotes all over the place, and they paint a picture of that rara -- indeed I'd have said extinct -- avis, an honest advertiser:

The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.

I always use my clients' products. This is not toady-ism, but elementary good manners.

If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out - either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time.

Of course, some of them suggest that he came from a time when television was not so dominant a cultural force:

Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

If this piqued your interest, Ogilvy wrote three books, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), and Blood, Brains and Beer (1978, reissued 1997 as An Autobiography). The first two are apparently classics in the field.

Two from jwz:

Soviet exploration of Venus:

The Soviet exploration of Venus, from 1961 to 1984, is the largest effort ever undertaken to study another planet. The fundamentals of interplanetary spacecraft design and remote sensing were first realized in these attempts. Successful missions included 3 atmospheric probes, 10 landings, 4 orbiters, 11 flybys or impacts, and 2 balloon probes of the clouds.

And the best part? Pictures of the planet's surface!

[Update: it occurred to me that "Venus is pretty hot, isn't it?", so I looked it up. Yes, Venus is very hot: almost 500 °C. Not only that, but the surface pressure is 90 atmospheres, and the perpetual clouds are mostly sulphuric acid. The probe Venera-13 survived 127 minutes on the surface in 1982.]

PERV (porcine endogenous retrovirus) can be transmitted to human cells from the pig/human chimeric cells that form in pigs grown from embryos into which human stem cells have been injected. One of the aims of the research is (was) to create tissues that could be used in xenotransplantation. Some researchers would disagree with me:

...the question is how widespread and how many of these hybrid cells were found? If they are very rare - and we haven't found any in our experiments - then I don't think it is that important.

but I think this is the end of porcine xenotransplants.

Typing "poetry" into a search engine will get you nowhere; or rather, it will get you everywhere, which is no use at all. Every angsty teenager should write poetry, of course, but only in a vanishingly small number of cases should anyone else ever read it. Herewith a short list of readable poetry on the web.

Dead white men; or, "classical" poetry:

Steve Spanoudis' Poet's Corner offers 7600 poems by 780 poets indexed by author, title and subject. Biographies of about 30 and photographs of about 120 poets (many of them somewhat obscure) are also available. They accept submissions, if you have a favourite poet you'd like to see included (but beware copyright restrictions!). The daily poetry break features a poem a day from the Poet's Corner collection, with commentary by Bob Blair. I frequently disagree with Bob's opinions, but he's interesting.

Representative Poetry Online includes about 2,900 English poems by over 400 poets. It's based on a 1912 textbook but includes hundreds of additional poems and poets as well as biographical data, commentaries and other features.

The estimable Project Bartleby offers a wonderful selection of verse anthologies and volumes. Special mention here to the best anthology of English poetry ever made, the 1919 Oxford Book of English Verse. Quoth Q:

My wish is that the reader should in his own pleasure quite forget the editor’s labour, which too has been pleasant: that, standing aside, I may believe this book has made the Muses’ access easier when, in the right hour, they come to him to uplift or to console.

The venerable Project Gutenberg currently includes 209 volumes of poetry, from Aristotle's Poetics to the selected poems of Oscar Wilde.

The American Verse Project from the U of Michigan contains entire books of poems from about a hundred authors, mostly 19th century.

The Poetry Archive has about 5000 poems by about 150 poets. Lots of advertising though.

Contemporary:

Poetry Daily will email you a contemporary poem every day, or you can read it online. There's an archive but, sadly, poems are only retained for one year.

Web del Sol is "a collaboration on the part of scores of dedicated, volunteer editors, writers, poets, artists, and staff whose job it is to acquire and frame the finest contemporary literary art and culture available in America and abroad, and to array it in such a manner that it speaks for itself."

Various and Sundry:

Verse Libre offers more than 13000 poems by almost 500 authors, both classical and contemporary, searchable/browsable by author and title. The random poem feature is fun (aaaahhhh! I got one by the horrible McGonagall when I went to fetch that link!), and I was suprised by the top 20 list (I expected it to be pure schmaltz, if not worse; I'm a snob and an asshole). Like Poet's Corner, they accept submissions (but not from angsty teens; published work only).

The Atlantic magazine online has a poetry archive which includes numerous essays and, best of all, audio files of poets reading their own and others' work. Unfortunately, they use the malignant and execrable RealAudio format, but as the spousal unit recently noted, there is at least one alternative way to access those streams.

The Academy of American Poets has photographs, biographies and selected works from over 450 poets. Some are living, some not; not all of them are American. Their listening booth has a nice selection of audio (more RealAudio I'm afraid).

If you like poetry audio, Laurable has more than 2500 links to audio covering nearly 500 poets.

"...if you're going to insist on meaning in life, you're going to have to choose between intellectual dishonesty and unhappiness."

Anapestic is the nom de web of a madman with a golden tongue. He has quite a way with words, too. Think of a waspish (not WASP-ish) American P G Wodehouse, and you're halfway there.

For me, the best thing about Wampum's 2003 Koufax Awards is the number of excellent blogs to which the nominations (which start here) have introduced me. True to form, though, I haven't been paying attention as I added new blogs into my favourite new toy, so no list of new notables from me. Instead, I've gone through the nominations for Best Post, and here present (in no particular order within each group) my own selections from that list, with reasons why you should go vote for them as well.

Best of breed:

Lady Sisyphus' post, actually written by a friend of hers, called so great a cloud of witnesses. I defy anyone to read this and maintain opposition to gay marriage without engaging in serious cognitive dissonance.

Billmon is nominated for a number of posts, but the one that really resonated with me was Dream Time. I also grew up in a racist milieu, bear its lasting marks, and am determined to rid myself of every last trace of it.

The rest of the best:

Prometheus 6 looks at American slavery from a viewpoint you should not miss. Whites, as well as blacks, had to be conditioned to accept an economy built on injustice.

David Niewert at Orcinus is nominated for a widely (and deservedly) praised post on the impact of the political on the personal.

Amp at Alas, A Blog takes a swipe at one of the last socially acceptable prejudices. What I want to know is, what's so terrible about being fat anyway?

Amp has also been nominated for his succinct explanation of how Republicans could get a late-term abortion ban if they really wanted one, and why they don't.

Very Very Happy on why you should at least get your facts straight before you decide to hate the French. Read this before you ever make the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" joke again, 'k?

Honourable Mentions:

Allen Brill at The Right Christians provides annotations for MLK Jr's "I have a dream" speech. If you can stomach my writing and opinions, you don't need me to explain why that speech is important, and Allen has done a nice job of tracking down the sources of its powerful imagery.

The Left Hook is nominated for a post about Jose Padilla. I was embarassed to realise that I did not know what was happening in that critical case, so the post makes my list for administering a much-needed jolt (even if it was written back when I was still paying attention). If, like me, you need to catch up, Google is your friend. (Bottom line: no progress.)

Greg at The Talent Show also makes the list for telling me something I should have known. He starts out teeing off on Transcendental Meditation, then goes on to deliver the coup de grâce to the Hundredth Monkey bullshit (that the latter was so readily debunkable is what I didn't know, but should have).

Nathan Newman gets points for defending the (almost) indefensible Al Sharpton, and doing a good job of it.

Tresy is nominated for an enjoyable and accurate anti-Shrub rant on corrente, The Chickenhawks Come Home to Roost.

I admit it, Atrios' Secret Media Memo made me laugh.