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Daily Traversal started out as a personal blog, but became something else, something... more. We post whatever kind of links grab our fancy, which tends to be entertaining web things, time wasters, bits of technology, and obligatory culture. We also don't moderate our content, pleasing only our selves, so DT should be considered NSFW if you work in that kind of place. If you'd like to send us a link or drop us a line, you can do so via our email address: DailyTraversal@gmail.com. Cheers!
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Thursday, October 28, 2004
Afro-Ninja Identified!
Afro-Ninja, the moniker given to a man doing some sort of audition in the worst way possible, has been an enigma on the internet for some time now. Andrew Baio, Herr Kapitan of waxy.org put out a $50 reward on Google Answers that went unclaimed for several weeks. Finally, someone got back to him, informing him that the man in question was none other than Mark Aleen Hicks, a stuntman with an impressive career, auditioning for a Nike commercial.
Baio would enjoy interviewing Hicks if he could find out where to contact him. Email log at waxy dot org if you have any info on how to contact Mark Allen Hicks.
Link [via bb]
New Eyes
Here we go: MicroVision, a Redmond, WA, company, has developed a wifi device that paints an image directly onto your retina with a laser. They promise all sorts of high-falutin' applications for it ("Kill the enemy better!" or "Make your technicians more productive!") but seem to be missing the obvious market: 24/7 chatrooms and video games. Hell, why do you think I want one, to more accurately assemble circuit boards for my robotic overlords? Cyber me all the way through the Chicago Loop, bay-bee...
Link [via bb]
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
100 Cum Swallowing Tips
Is that really what this article is about? I'm afraid so, so, obviously, don't read this at work, or in the home, or on your cell phone, or wireless PDA, or anywhere...unless, that is, you want to read some rather, er, insightful anecdotes about what it means to "love" someone instead of just "like" them.
Link
"Canada's Burning!" by Theodore Marmor & Kip Sullivan
This is an article in the Washington Monthly about the misconceptions and distortions of facts that the American media places on the socialized health care of Canada. The bottom line: Canada insures 100% of its people, spends 50% less as a government than our governments spends (to insure only 84% of the populace, mind you), and has exactly the same troubles and issues that American hospitals have. If you've ever wondered how it fares with our neighbors to the north, this will answer many questions for you.
Link [via mofi]
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Denis Dutton on authenticity in art
I was researching the concept of "authenticity" in art--a very elusive and difficult to define term--when I ran across this article. It's the "Authenticity" article for the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics by prominent cultural writer Denis Dutton.
Link
Religion for the Hell of It
Robert Anton Wilson, that mad sage and prophet (not to mention bullshit artist extraordinaire) wrote this essay in 1986, and I stumbled across it tonight while looking for the Discordian Free Mantra (below). It's a great article talking about some of the counter-culture or underground religions out there that dare to feel however they dare to feel. Worth a great read, especially if you've ever wanted to become a pope.
From the article:
Discordianism shuns dogma but has one catma, the Syadastan Affirmation, which reads, "All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." DIscordians call this the Free Mantra -- unlike the Transcendental movement, they charge no fees -- and insist that if you repeat it 666 times you will achieve Spiritual Enlightenment, in some sense.
Link
Monday, October 25, 2004
A 50,000 word steeplechase
So, I'm thinking of writing a 50,000 word steeplechase for NaNoWriMo. Wow, that's a lot of form shifting, especially if I follow Hemenway's rule: three pages per form, max, even if it's working for you.
I might have to make a few exceptions to that.
Click Inside for deciphering; apocraphyl pronouncements
Dob Bob
An excellent parody of Carlos Casteneda using the cast of sub-dimensional con men who run the Church of the Subgenius, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs & co.
Link
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Evil Clown Generator
Yes, they are evil. Yes, they are clowns. Yes, they are Evil Clowns, and you can make them with this handy flash video. Make them, and make them Eeeevvilllll.
Link [via lifi]
The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft
Full text of the classic story of death and insanity... I mean "love."
Link [via lifi]
Flash Puppy
Another very nerdy submission: Linux distro, Puppy Linux, is a micro distro all ready to go on a USB Thumb drive. I would install it right now, but it seems that it would destroy all the data on my drive, so fug that. I'll buy another one for linux.
Link [via lifi]
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Neal Stephenson on /.
Stephenson is one of my favorite and most respected authors (although he lost me with the self-indulgent "The Confusion" series.) He participated in a Slashdot interview, and the results are in. Give a read. He's definitely one of the most intellegent authors out there.
Link [bb]
Na-No-Blog-Mo
Blogspot has a blog for people blogging their process during NaNoWriMo. Go visit it and observe how writers (including myself) deal with their writing process under the gruelling NaNoWriMo deadline.
Link
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Killing [Palestinian] children is no longer a big deal | Metafilter
Palestinians use their women and children to charge Israeli positions. Israelis use their women and children in the armed forces and for settlement defense. It's terrible to use women and children in armed conflict, but they have a vested interest in the outcome of this as well. Everybody acts like the Palestinian are practically kidnapping their people and forcing them into harm's way, but try to be an Israeli woman and turn down compulsive military service; or a fourteen-year-old boy in a settlement in the gaza strip. Everybody has an interest, so everybody fights. Women in WWII America were used to manufacture arms. That's why they call it war. The total annihiation of the enemy. Well, guess what? The enemy is a race or ideal, which extends just beyond all of the men between the ages of fifteen and forty. Everyone dies. Because one side accuses the other side of being kidnapped as a population by various people. Unfortunately, those people have names like "Jesus" and "Mohammed [MHNBP.]" But they make it sound more like "Adolf Hitler" and "Saddam Hussein." Dammit, we'll kill the [diety] out of you until you figure it out. Yay.
Fuck it
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Support for New Writers
Author-me.com is a site by a colleague of mine at Columbia college, Bruce Cook, that works as a community support group for young and new writers. From the "about" page:
When we invented this website in February, 1999, we wanted to serve writers who felt frustrated because their writing career fell short of their expectations. For example, we recognized the plight of many potential authors who...achieved success in a fiction writing class in college or high school, but never continued their initial work. (Does this differ much from brilliant musical performers who, after high school band and a few successful gigs, simply put their trumpet or French horn into the case--forever?)
Author-me.com is a friendly, homey kind of site; one where you would expect to meet aunts and uncles that also were writers. I say this because there is a great deal of Christian content on the site, and my family is quite religious. (For my religious views, see the Gematriculator post below.)
Link [thanks Bruce!]
THE HUMILITY MACHINE
A contest, of sorts, between people and their accomplishments. Kind of like "amihotornot" but in duels between accomplishments. You can register and put your own accomplishments on there, as well as vote on others. Big fun Saturday.
Link
Pirates & Emperors
An incredible animation detailing some examples of how the US funded terrorists in the name of "Freedom Fighters", e.g. Contras. But the great thing about this animation is that it's set to a catchy tune and animated ala "Schoolhouse Rock."
Link [via everywhere]
Blog Explosion
So, after reading about it in TCL's blog, I signed up for Blog Explosion. Many claims about increased traffic, etc, but we'll see. If you come over from there, give a shout out.
Bowling Green Kentucky: Execute Juveniles
The Bowling Green Kentucky Daily News is calling for the Supreme Court to rule that it is acceptable to execute 16 and 17-year-olds.
Quote:
What kind of message does it send juveniles who commit murders if they know they would not face the death penalty?
How about: What kind of message does it send the families of poor and impoverished Americans--the majority of which are drawn to desperate crimes such as murder--when you say that the lives of their kids aren't worth as much as the lives of rich kids that can afford attourneys and escape the death penalty? Hi, let's make the problem worse by aggravating it instead of trying to fix it.
Link
Jon Stewart unleashes both barrels on "Crossfire"
Political pundits Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, hosts of CNN's popular "Crossfire," got it in the cornhole yesterday by comedian Jon Stewart. Stewart, who has been ever critical of the show for engaging less in debate and more in partisan squabbling, let the moderators know in no uncertain terms that he did not approve of their methodology.
"I felt that wasn't fair, and I should come here and tell you that it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America," Stewart told Carlson and Begala. "So I wanted to come here today and say . . . stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America."
Carlson tried to fire back at Stewart, accusing him of being guilty of hypocracy, having the nerve to critisize "Crossfire" when Stewart's own show had John Kerry on it.
"If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to," Stewart sneered.
And that's really the point, isn't it? Jon Stewart has made no attempt to hide the fact that "The Daily Show" is a comedy show, ont a news network, something the partisan pundits--O'Reilly, Carlson, et al.--just don't get. By engaging in comedy and parody, Stewart successfully exonerates himself from the responsibility of reporting actual news. And goddamn it's funny.
Link
State Television
In the posted article ("Iran refuses to stop uranium enrichment", Xinhuanet News), it uses the following quote as its leader:
TEHRAN, Oct. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran on Saturday said it would reject any European proposal to drop its uranium enrichment, the state television reported.
Notice the last bit, "...the state television reported." I read that and flags went off in my head. For instance, does Xinhua (or anyone else) refer to the British news agency as "state television?" They should--the BBC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the government and subject to strict regulation and censorship. But of course they don't. This is an article about "extremism," and the British obviously[fnord] don't engage in extremism when Iranians obviously[fnord] do.
Link
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Micrograms
"Micrograms" is the title of the monthly DEA bulletin. In it you will find all kinds of interesting information, inluding many cases of ingenious transport for controlled substances, overview essays on things like GHB and Yaba, as well as job postings.
Link [via bb]
Monday, October 11, 2004
Open Source Flash Fun
Levitated.net is an open-source repository of all those cool physics things you can do with flash. They have a sample of each piece, and you can DL the source. Hot tamale!
Link
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Saturday, October 09, 2004
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
My Annoying MSWord Problem
At work I installed MSWord 2003. Big mistake. In addition to total and complete bloat ("Task pane" anyone? wtf...), it also had one very annoying "feature": whenever I would change the formatting for a word or sentence (e.g. bold, italics, nothing fancy), it would change the formatting for the entire friggin page. I would make a word bold, but MSWord would make the entire document bold. Only by then hitting CTL-Z could I undo the bold for the rest of the document, but often that would make the things that I already had bolded all messed up.
After a little searching around, I found a solution. Turns out that MSWord 2003 has the feature "Automatically update [style]" enabled by default. That means whenever you make a formatting change that could possibly be applied to a style (you know, line spacing, indentation, font, anything), it would go ahead and change it for the style, thus the entire document. Well, this was a huge pain in the ass, and searching for it wasn't easy, so here is the fix for any other people searching for the answer.
[Solution Inside]
Link
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Nerd Star's ebook archive
Nerd Star has a lovely archive of computer-related ebooks.
Link [via toddy]
Neocon Agenda Video
A two minute animation piece outlining the Neoconservative agenda as outline in the "Project for a New American Centrury." YOU MUST WATCH THIS.
Link [via mefi]
Pres Bush's Resume
The "I'm an Evil Man" version, with many hyperlinks to supporting documents.
Link [via mefi]
Campaign Report Card
CBS Chief Political Writer David Paul Kuhn asked some top political insiders to offer updated grades on how the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaigns are doing. These are updated grades, so you can get a sense of where they were a few weeks ago, prior to the debates, and where they stand now. The overall prognosis is a slight slip for Bush and a slight gain for Kerry, with Bush still in the lead, but not by much.
Where's my October Surprise?
Link
Their Majesties the King and Queen of Cambodia
NORODOM SIHANOUK OF CAMBODIA is the name and title of the Cambodian King. At least, yesterday was the king. Today he has announced his abdication. This isn't the first time he's done this. Usually it was for some petty political squabble where he pouted if he didn't get his way, but apparantly this time it's for real.
Link
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
The Psychedelic Jew's Harp Home
I've been listening to this all day, and,what can I say--applications of the Jew's Harp such as these were never imagined in my mind. Best of all: You can dl the entire album for free and listen to what happens when you mix a Jew's Harp, an LFO, and some hippy with a bunch of new-agey meta-philosophies.
Link [via boingboing]
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Channel 4's Gay-O-Meter
How gay are you? Looks like I'm 53% gay. Is that 3% too much, or 47% too little?
Link [via mofi]
School has begun
Traffic has slowed, and can expect to stay slowed, since my very busy life has actually begun, and the holding patter of summer has turned into a blitzkrieg of scholarly attack. I've got about six very active projects and many classes to attend & teach, so I'm going to call it an official semi-hiatus on the pleasure blogging.
However, NaNoWriMo is coming up, and if I don't get too depressed at my progress (or depressed trying to think about my progress beforehand), then I will blog my process in the event as I go. According to the mathematical statistics, I should be able to actually do it this year (year 1: 8000 words; year 2: 22,000 words; year 3: 60,500???)
NaNoWriMo
Saturday, October 02, 2004
MeaningofLife.tv
No, it's not a tribute site to "Monty Python," rather a video archive of today's leading scientists and philosophers on that biggest of all questions, "What is the meaning of life?" Covers such topics as "Being Good without God," and "Direction in Evolution."
Link [via mefi]
