From the currently-causing-a-storm-on-ox.talk dept.: The story of a page yanked from the ox.ac.uk network hits slashdot and gets mentioned in NTK. I'm following with interest; we're currently having similar problems with editorial bleed in another of my lives.
A weblog by Matt Webb, CEO of BERG.
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I just downloaded and compiled LambdaMOO. On connecting as wizard for the first time there was one room with nothing there. I had this urge to type '@let there be light'. 'I don't understand that' said the MOO.
Al Green's cover of Light My Fire on Groove Armada's album Back To Mine has got to be the funkiest damn thing I ever did hear.
One hundred thousand galaxies are in the newest and largest three-dimensional map of the universe, complete with fly-though movie.
http://glassdog.com/lancelog2000/ - [insert pithy comment here]
Followup to yesterday's post about MUDs. David Rubin let me know and has posted links about PUB and POO, both MUD servers in Python. The former is static, the latter modelled after LambdaMOO. I don't know Python but I hear it's pretty easy to pick up.
Bill Stilwell urged me not to give up on LambdaMOO; it wouldn't be too hard to grab an RSS off the web and parse it. Now that's power. Given the maturity of LambdaMOO I'm going to give it a good hard look. I've got some ideas that sound like they might really be possible. But after Finals. Yes, after Finals.
Argh! It's the spider goats, come to kill us all. [via Metafilter]
Every since I read My Tiny Life I've been interested in MUDs. There doesn't seem to be any analogue to them in the year 2000, which is a shame. If you think of the way http/WWW has improved on gopher, ICQ/AIM/etc on telnet/talkd, it seems odd we still haven't found any way of improving on the basic MUD client. Mind you, the only single-player adventure game I've seen that's improved on the text-adventure games of the 1980s has been Riven but that's only one game. Six years of development and photo-realistic graphics to feel as good as shitty text-descriptions? The power of words.
So, back to the point: A virtual world for weblogs would be muchos kewl. Imagine the way all the guys at pyra.com would have their rooms close together, and then the way other people would have their weblogs close by to pick up traffic. Now think about using syndicated content from WWW weblogs to feed into the MUD so you can see where people are reading and chat to them about articles. Given the way people love designing their weblogs, giving them an entire world to design around -- the possibilities are intriguing.
I investigated. LambdaMOO seems pretty popular, so I had a look at that. It turns out to be a whole lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I can't imagine how hard it would be to pull RSS off the web and parse it. Hm.
Hm indeed. What I really need is a Perl MUD server because then I can customise it. Hopefully. Or perhaps I should look around for other MUD servers that do what I want. Hm. Hm again. This could be interesting.
The XML Cover Pages are a reference guide to XML & SGML. They've got a good page of links to RSS resources.
You know, I think this kind of crib-notes page is really important on the web. What is it called - metacontent? But not the metacontent in meta tags. Hm. A human edited summary page is so much more useful than DMOZ or searching at Google. I need to know how good card indexes work; I have a feeling that would be useful. Thinking, thinking.
Not terribly detailed, but interesting because it's so easy to jump to topics I'd never usually look at: HowStuffWorks.com is like an online version of those 1001 Questions & Answers books.
Once upon a time all CDs were new and we lived in a world of shiny tech. Now the boxes are scuffed and broken and some of my CDs are scratched; a couple of the sleeves are stuck together and rippled after being soaked in water. CD players always used to work because they were less than two years old. Now there are four lasers just in my room and I've got a broken stereo tucked away. Old tech is so cool. Years ago, I used to hang around in an abandoned carpark with bushes pushed through shattered concrete and trees where the cars used to drive.
Lance Arthur's latest seems to have struck a chord with the world (at least, with the sites I read). If you haven't read it yet, go now to Awarding. Message: We can still make a difference. I guess we were all in need of a pep-talk.
Is your child or loved one being subliminally influenced by backwards-masked messages embedded in pop-songs? Be prepared by listening to these samples. Don't forget to reverse them to hear the dastardly messages they conceal.
Things that annoy me: Creationism.
The assorted scientific 'creation myths' aren't the same as the other myths through history. They're a level higher in truth. They fit into a larger whole. They're just truer, dammit! Okay, think about it this way: In the past there have been loads of explanations for what the Earth is 'really' like: It's flat; it sits on turtles; it's a bubble inside solid rock. But then comes along this idea that they Earth is roughly a sphere and it orbits the Sun, &c. This isn't just another story - we can go up in space, look down and see that the Earth really is a sphere. Just because loads of people throughout history and prehistory have believed something else it doesn't make them right. Ditto evolution and creationism.
Evolution isn't just evolution, it's part of a whole package of science which stretches from cause and effect to, well, how hairless apes came from fish. This one aspect of science: It's complete. Is it just another belief system like religion? No it isn't. There's trust involved in this facet of science; I trust other scientists to ensure the whole hangs together. But this isn't faith. The only reason I couldn't personally verify the whole of science is because I won't live for a million years. Could I verify the existence of God or the resurection of Christ if I lived for a million or a billion years? No, and that's the difference between faith and trust.
Science is more than equations and explaining what happens. It's about predicting. It's about saying what won't happen, or what might not happen. It's about how systems work. And it's about how to judge itself; how to compare explanations, how to prove, how to disprove. From looking at the systems at work around us today it simply wouldn't make sense if evolution hadn't happened. And from the same argument creationism isn't scientific. Where are the predictions it can make? If creationism was part of science we couldn't even predict the path of a ball through the air because there are no limits on supernatural interference. Creationship explains everything, and nothing. There is nothing that could possibly be that could shake creationism, and that means it's not a theory, it's not science; it's faith.
In the end science gives you a world view. Could there be a God? I guess so. Could the universe have been created 10000 years ago? I guess so. But isn't the fact that I don't believe in a God a kind of faith in itself? No. It's for the same reasons I believe that pigs don't fly. I see the world through scientific eyes; it makes sense. Systems are systems wherever they are and ultimately the universe is a collection of systems and nothing more. There can't be exceptions and there's no room for faith in my life.
Luckily, Gödel's theorem hasn't intruded on my mathematically consistant universe yet. Ask me again then.
The left side of my face, the bottom of my nose (does that bit of my face have a name?), my right cheekbone; my knees, my shins, my left foot: They're all that ominous prickly warm that means (1) it was hot today, and (2) whoops I was supposed to be revising.
Today was also the first day of the barbecue season, at least for me. I went with a few friends and we sat by the river and enjoyed the evening. The rain even held off until we were inside. While we were eating some kids came up and started playing round us. For a while they looked as though they were going to drown themselves in the river, and then they started sitting really close to us and singing Kum Baya. We were on an ignore strategy but kids just push it and push it so when they came over and started chatting we had to chat back. Give in gracefully, you know?
Right, so there were four of them, two boys and two girls: One of the boys was the ringleader. He was quite cocky and a bit taller than the others. The other boy seemed a bit apart from the others, and was climbing trees and standing in the canoe they'd found with his shoes off most of the time. "Don't worry, he's not dangerous," the others said. We weren't worried. I mean, maybe that he'd fall in the river or put something in the barbecue that'd explode in his face, but he seemed fairly safe apart from that. One girl laughed like she had TB and the other one didn't.
They were all pretty funny if incredibly mouthy. The ringleader had an obsession with women being 'lezzers' (which was apparently a bad thing). Kids have this ability to bounce back from everything - being told off, being caught out, falling face first on concrete, that kind of thing. Kirsty knew the name of the mouthy boy and that he danced and he was rattled for a bit then went back to mucking around.
Anyway. These kids are all over the place trying to get food, and we're like No, and they say they're hungry and we say Why? and the boy says Because I live in a caravan, and then he says: Yeah, why don't you come back later? (saying this to Jamie, and then pointing to his friends:) She wants it. And she wants it. And you can bring the girls too, if you know what I mean.
This kid can't have been more than 11 years old! Well. We're on our way back when James falls on his arse into the river trying to put out the disposable barbecues and gets covered in mud. Fortunately we'd left the kids by then.
yahoo.co.uk have a sponsored 404 page. Surely not. Surely yes.
Apparently the internet isn't as interconnected as we've been told. It's interesting having real numbers on what seems intuitive; that not all pages will be highly connected but there will be a bell curve distribution. The fact that many people point to the same page is simply confirmation of what happens in any statistically large system: If one of a set has only a small advantage then after many choices that single one will be very highly selected. And that there are 'islands' in the internet I think are different hubs each obeying their own bell curves. I've a feeling that a lot of what this study has found are artefacts of the assumption that there is a single centre to the net. What I don't like about this study is that it's going to be misinterpreted for people with vested interests to mean that the users aren't interested in independent publication, and that makes me nervous. What is ought to do is inspire the MSNs of this world to link more to individual sites (which in fact the BBC News site does quite well). Something else that makes me nervous:
"If you know who's linked to you, then perhaps you know your content is valuable. (You might say) 'Hey, let's throw up a royalty, a fee for pointing to me'"
Now that's just fucking stupid, but people are really thinking like this! How can people be saying this when everyone else is working on XML and free syndication? Let's put aside the fact that a royalty would never work, but what sort of internet does this person want? You'd end up with a collection of online cdrom presentations, endless duplicated content, nothing building on anything; metacontent sites would all have editiorial biases. Okay it'll never be as bad as that, but this is an attitude that indy content providers are going to have to contend with in the future. The answer? Make it easy to jump in and jump out of your site - no frames and give context on every single page. Make it easier to link so that people really feel confined when they go onto a 'sticky' site.
Keywords: US. Nuclear bomb. Moon. Kind of like Space 1999, but, erm, the other way round.
Bad MIDIs can be great fun. We've been dancing round the flat to the terrible music on this Brigadoon page, 'Almost like being in love'.
Hey, I got anonymously flamed! I presume it was about the Page of Hate. Kewl.
If you didn't watch the Eurovision Song Content last night you really missed out. For some reason, all contestants simultaneously decided that irony is dead (and it is, you know) and fielded sensible songs, even Germany who took the piss but took the piss in a pretty dedicated way, and Sweden who entered a subversive number. Some of the entries were actually quality music. The major embarrassment was the UK entry which was yet another Abba ripoff.
The Swedish went all out on the show. It was superbly designed in every detail, and if their media companies don't get a lot of work coming their way now I'll be very surprised. You can still see the webcast, but if you can't be arsed with that and didn't watch it last night then worry not because we kept notes.
btw, Denmark won which was good because they were pretty good and better still they stopped Russia from winning who were shit but somehow came second mainly because the singer was 16 years old and practically falling out of her top, and Latvia only came third but should have come first because they were shit hot and the lead singer wore white bell bottoms and looked manic, absolutely manic.
Myst III: Exiles has been announced, to be released Spring 2001. Excited is just not the word. I lived in Riven for weeks. Without doubt the best game, the most beautiful, I have ever played. The puzzles weren't puzzles if you spent time just wandering around, learning the history, trying to understand the culture of the world, and then everything would become intuitive just like you were a native. I never wanted to finish it so I could spend more time looking around, immersed in Riven. That's why I really hope they don't fuck up Exiles. Cyan and the Miller brothers don't appear to be involved, and looking at the Gallery... it just doesn't look as deep as Riven. I'll find out, I guess, in time. There's a monthly series following the development of Exiles on Presto's site.
A pearl, hidden in the press release: Cyan are working on Myst: Dimensions, with a new 3d engine so that the entire world is rendered realtime. Night/day transitions, ambient wildlife; release date Q4 2000. This article has a link to a demo movie. I just don't know what to say. I can't wait.
The 8 latest posts are named
FuelBand for alpha waves, Science questions, Belief and desire, After I die, Decision fatigue, Instagram as an island economy, A slow savings account, and Peak Attention and the DuPont Equation.
Read them.
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Interconnected is copyright 2000—2011 Matt Webb.
