MetaFilter posts by jhiggy.
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The Guardian asked readers to send weblog recommendations, and they did, and the Guardian post a whole big bunch of them. Look at the page soon; sometimes these Guardian links change addresses...
posted on Jul-5-02 at 8:43 AM
The We-Did-It-Our-Way Tax Relief Anti-Massacre Page one guy describes how he spent the tax rebate check, and invites you to tell him how you did. (the title's a bit of a nod to Alice's Restaurant, fyi)
posted on Jul-25-01 at 7:01 AM
Forbes.com suggests you IT people use shareware or freeware office packages instead of that expensive Microsoft stuff.
posted on May-2-01 at 8:14 AM
Text messaging is inspiring artists to new areas of creativity from theatre to sculpture, says the Guardian.
posted on Apr-20-01 at 8:46 AM
Bill Gates' dad in NY Times Mag Q&A on bequests, estates, philanthropy and work ethic. (He's involved in administering his son's charity activities.) NY Times link, so free registration or your own personal backdoor required.
posted on Mar-21-01 at 1:20 PM
Sex Diseases Increasing in People 50+ The incidence of AIDS in people 50 and older is growing at a rate twice as fast as for people younger than 50, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But that's largely been ignored by the health-care profession, say longtime health educators.
posted on Mar-16-01 at 3:22 PM
Guardian weblog has assembled a special page with foot-and-mouth disease links, mostly (tho not completely) Eurocentric. The links include one to an elaborate backgrounder (with a few graphic photos) from thepigsite.com.
posted on Mar-15-01 at 2:29 PM
Scientists test hallucinogens for use in treating mental illness: Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and peyote — derided as toys of the hippie generation — are increasingly drawing the interest of neurologists and psychiatrists who want to test the idea that they may be valuable tools in treating a range of mental disorders. The researchers involved in the new work are not suggesting that people start medicating themselves with hallucinogens. Still, Dr. David E. Nichols, a professor of pharmacology and medicinal chemistry at Purdue, believes the drugs' potential should be investigated. Nichols, an expert on hallucinogenic drugs, said there were reports that symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, like washing one's hands dozens of times a day, subside under the influence of psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms. (Note: it's a New York Times link, free registration required.)
posted on Mar-14-01 at 6:37 AM
Dig the Wig: In the face of the mainstream media's campaign to keep us distracted with the fake news of presidential pardons and the eyewash of budget debates, only independently published mavericks have the courage to cover the story of Samuel Jackson's hair.
posted on Mar-13-01 at 3:29 PM
This nonsense has to stop: " One of the most heavily guarded secrets in the computer business and the closely related consumer electronics industry is how many products are returned by customers because they are defective or the customer cannot figure out how to use them."
posted on Mar-12-01 at 3:06 AM
500 albums essential to a happy life, says Elvis Costello. And he oughta know. (For extra credit, compare and contrast this with the RIAA top songs of the century list announced earlier this week.)
posted on Mar-9-01 at 11:34 AM
The Ornery American proclaims to publish "the voices of those Ornery Americans -- the common folk who don't pretend to be intellectuals or elite in any other way, but who are just stubborn enough to think that we ordinary folk are the ones to whom this nation was entrusted from the start." It's godfather is sci-fi writer and social critic Orson Scott Card.
posted on Mar-9-01 at 11:19 AM
The NEA and the RIAA (demon spawn) collaborate on a list of the top songs of 20th century, topped by Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The list was picked by hundreds of "music lovers across the country" from "all walks of life," including the "music industry," according to the press release. The voters picked from 1,100 songs provided by the RIAA and the NEA, though write-in spaces were available on the ballots. The announcement of the list is part of a wider effort to bring the songs to school-age children and adolescents, in a project that involves Scholastic publishing and AOL (the Great Satan). Step right up and take a few whacks at them...
posted on Mar-7-01 at 3:07 PM
Beyond the bar code: Tags on retail products will send radio signals to their manufacturers, collecting information about consumer habits -- and raising privacy concerns. Radio tag technology is already here, used in fields such in livestock, freight-train cargo and highway tolls. The only barrier to widespread use is consumer products is price. When they can be made for a penny, expect to see them everywhere. From the March issue of MIT Technology Review.
posted on Feb-20-01 at 7:51 AM
In time for Valentine's Day, the fabulous Guardian weblog has a special collection of links to articles about love, sex, cybersex and permutations of those three, from Australia, US, Canada, maybe a few virtual realms, too.
posted on Feb-13-01 at 11:57 AM
Couples who click online, notably Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke. Photo as well.
posted on Feb-11-01 at 12:04 PM
'Chinese' New Year news fest The generally wonderful Guardian Weblog has a special page of hard-hitting Chinese news links in honor of Lunar New Year beginning Jan. 24. (Commonly called Chinese New Year, but the Vietnamese celebrate it, too.) These include a link to a Foreign Affairs discussion of the Tiananmen Papers, believed to be internal Chinese documents about the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. (Earlier MeFi linkage of a Tiananmen Papers article can be found here.
posted on Jan-23-01 at 11:48 AM
It's uncertain how important online privacy is to President-elect George W. Bush. He indicated a general support for online privacy laws during the presidential campaign without indicating whether he leaned more toward industry self-regulation, technological solutions, legislative solutions, or some combination. A working document drafted by the Bush transition team on "technology proposals" echoes the same undefined support for online privacy. One analyst thinks his transition-appointments indicate a reference for industry self-regulation.
posted on Jan-19-01 at 10:27 AM
The stilt palm. Easter lilies. Pilobolus. Plants that move, and the people who study them.
posted on Jan-17-01 at 10:31 AM
Singer Steve Earle, who knows something about jail himself, became friends with a death-row inmate in Texas and walked the last mile with him. Earle wrote this piece for Tikkun; the link is to Utne Reader Online reprint of it.
posted on Jan-10-01 at 7:57 PM
Not just another Weblog link: This, apparently, is the front door (or at least today's front door) to the ChristianityToday.com Weblog. It comments, it provides links, it archives.
posted on Jan-8-01 at 8:44 PM
A Minor Threat to business as usual: A fine Q&A with Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) about the ethical, fan-friendly approach to music business at Dischord Records. Obligatory MeFi disclaimer: It's a Salon link.
posted on Jan-8-01 at 10:39 AM
In a long essay-review of the report of the official inquiry into mad cow disease, the London Review of Books also points (but without helpful html coding) to the government site where the full text of the BSE Inquiry and the supporting evidence can be found. You can download it as a PDF file if you like, for light reading with your next carrot juice and stir-fried tofu.
posted on Dec-21-00 at 6:31 PM
"Ferociously proud and somewhat vain, you like to be impressive and seen as Somebody Special." It's George W. Bush's natal horoscope, interpreted by some anonymous folks at Astrozine/iVillage. The many screenfuls include this statement: "An innate clairvoyant tendency could also be developed quite easily by you." Via the frequently wonderful Guardian Weblog.
posted on Dec-14-00 at 12:43 AM
E! Online presents the top devils (take that literally) in the movies. It's from November, but I spotted it just now via the Guardian Weblog
posted on Dec-8-00 at 2:51 PM
The 13th Story fiction site is running "an interactive experiment in collaborative fiction" and looking for the "best online fiction" of 2000.
posted on Dec-8-00 at 11:15 AM
Inside the world of Alcoholics Anonymous: John Sutherland has a long piece in the London Review of Books on how AA operates and why it works well for some. The article purports to be a review of a biography of Bill W., one of AA's co-founders, but there is very little review in it; it's mainly a discussion of what AA is all about for a British readership. I am not an AA member, but have attended open AA meetings, have AA friends and belong to a different 12-step group so I can say it's a fairly accurate piece, though colored with some quirky opinions and a few opinions I think are wrong. An occasional line is humorous: "If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this country are problem drinkers then you will conclude that the LRB readership will contain some 10,000 of them. And that 1.5 contributors per issue might have to be so classified." Yes. I'd be willing to wager a few quid that 1.5 contributors to almost any periodical have an alcohol problem! Sutherland correctly observes that the anonymous nature of AA means no one will ever be able to track how many people the program has truly "reformed" (an old-school AAer would say no one is ever reformed, they're only recovering a day at a time). The main beef I have with his piece is his statement about other organizations: Weight Watchers is NOT based on AA, though Overeaters Anonymous is; also, I don't think it is fair to say Al-Anon, OA and Narcotics Anonymous are weak imitations of AA.
posted on Dec-5-00 at 6:08 PM
Four out of 10 people mistakenly believe it is possible to get HIV by sharing a drinking glass or being coughed or sneezed on by an infected person. The survey, released Thursday, was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's scary that so many people are still so ignorant of what causes HIV-AIDS," said Marty Algaze, a spokesman for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. "Almost 20 years into this epidemic, it's disturbing that people think you could still get it from casual contact."
posted on Dec-1-00 at 3:15 AM
Everyday life for a teenager with AIDS: Stephanie Lee Ray, a 12-year-old with AIDS, is proving the doctors wrong. She was not supposed to live past age 5, so she lives for every moment. She wants to play and grow and go to school. She has felt the effects of people's ignorance about the disease. She has suffered disapproving stares and comments.Rather than feel sorry for herself, she prefers to educate people to make wise choices. She knows that her life really counts. (The story is almost 2 years old, and the wonderful pix aren't archived with it, but it's worth reading anyway, especially for the feel of a life when any cold or simple fever can become a life-threatening crisis.)
posted on Dec-1-00 at 1:56 AM
MARSBUGS, The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter. Founded in 1994, e-mail subscriptions are free on request. The scholars (Dr. David J. Thomas, Math and Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR, and Dr. Julian A. Hiscox, School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom) who edit this journal have kindly archived all issues online. Budding exobiologists, fire up your browsers.
posted on Nov-10-00 at 8:58 AM
The Mideast's forgotten people, Bedouins cling to ancient tradition - and Israel's bottom rung. With strong historical ties to the land that go back 2,500 years, they feel left out of the who-gets-what debate in the Holy Land.
posted on Oct-24-00 at 1:10 PM
Surrogate clone mother Bessie, an Iowa farm cow, is pregnant. But she's not having a cow. Inside her uterus is an endangered species called an Asian gaur, a heavily muscled, humpbacked, ox-like animal native to the bamboo jungles of India and Burma. The embryonic gaur, Noah, due to be born next month, was cloned from a single skin cell taken from a dead gaur, researchers report in a paper in the latest issue of the journal Cloning, to be released this week. It is the first endangered species ever to be cloned, and the first cloned animal to gestate in the womb of another species. Is this a new era in wildlife conservation? (Already, the Massachusetts scientists who created Noah are laying plans to clone endangered giant pandas.) Or are we bringing on Jurassic Park?
posted on Oct-9-00 at 7:17 AM
Animals thought extinct found in remote Cambodian jungle: British scientists have found a wilderness in the Cardamom region of Cambodia where exotic species, some though to be extinct, have been found. These include the Siamese crocodile, the wolf snake (a new species so named because of its dog-like fangs), large populations of tigers and Asian elephants, and the gower, a forest cow. Ironically, the habitat was protected from significant human intrusion because it was a longtime Khmer Rouge stronghold and also because routes lead to and from it are landmined.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 6:06 PM
"Babylon" brothers and sisters, a fan has collected, archived and portaled a large collection of postings (Usenet and other forms) on writing, SF and TV work by J. Michael Straczynski, the "Babylon 5" creator-executive producer, also a longtime SF writer and, if you are as old as I am, you may remember him as the Scripts columnist for Writer's Digest. They're not ordered chronologically or topically, so they read more like random postcards from the volcano. But there's plenty of writing advice here and some nuggets of TV gossip dropped along the road.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 11:42 AM
posted on Jul-5-02 at 8:43 AM
The We-Did-It-Our-Way Tax Relief Anti-Massacre Page one guy describes how he spent the tax rebate check, and invites you to tell him how you did. (the title's a bit of a nod to Alice's Restaurant, fyi)
posted on Jul-25-01 at 7:01 AM
Forbes.com suggests you IT people use shareware or freeware office packages instead of that expensive Microsoft stuff.
posted on May-2-01 at 8:14 AM
Text messaging is inspiring artists to new areas of creativity from theatre to sculpture, says the Guardian.
posted on Apr-20-01 at 8:46 AM
Bill Gates' dad in NY Times Mag Q&A on bequests, estates, philanthropy and work ethic. (He's involved in administering his son's charity activities.) NY Times link, so free registration or your own personal backdoor required.
posted on Mar-21-01 at 1:20 PM
Sex Diseases Increasing in People 50+ The incidence of AIDS in people 50 and older is growing at a rate twice as fast as for people younger than 50, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But that's largely been ignored by the health-care profession, say longtime health educators.
posted on Mar-16-01 at 3:22 PM
Guardian weblog has assembled a special page with foot-and-mouth disease links, mostly (tho not completely) Eurocentric. The links include one to an elaborate backgrounder (with a few graphic photos) from thepigsite.com.
posted on Mar-15-01 at 2:29 PM
Scientists test hallucinogens for use in treating mental illness: Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and peyote — derided as toys of the hippie generation — are increasingly drawing the interest of neurologists and psychiatrists who want to test the idea that they may be valuable tools in treating a range of mental disorders. The researchers involved in the new work are not suggesting that people start medicating themselves with hallucinogens. Still, Dr. David E. Nichols, a professor of pharmacology and medicinal chemistry at Purdue, believes the drugs' potential should be investigated. Nichols, an expert on hallucinogenic drugs, said there were reports that symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, like washing one's hands dozens of times a day, subside under the influence of psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms. (Note: it's a New York Times link, free registration required.)
posted on Mar-14-01 at 6:37 AM
Dig the Wig: In the face of the mainstream media's campaign to keep us distracted with the fake news of presidential pardons and the eyewash of budget debates, only independently published mavericks have the courage to cover the story of Samuel Jackson's hair.
posted on Mar-13-01 at 3:29 PM
This nonsense has to stop: " One of the most heavily guarded secrets in the computer business and the closely related consumer electronics industry is how many products are returned by customers because they are defective or the customer cannot figure out how to use them."
posted on Mar-12-01 at 3:06 AM
500 albums essential to a happy life, says Elvis Costello. And he oughta know. (For extra credit, compare and contrast this with the RIAA top songs of the century list announced earlier this week.)
posted on Mar-9-01 at 11:34 AM
The Ornery American proclaims to publish "the voices of those Ornery Americans -- the common folk who don't pretend to be intellectuals or elite in any other way, but who are just stubborn enough to think that we ordinary folk are the ones to whom this nation was entrusted from the start." It's godfather is sci-fi writer and social critic Orson Scott Card.
posted on Mar-9-01 at 11:19 AM
The NEA and the RIAA (demon spawn) collaborate on a list of the top songs of 20th century, topped by Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The list was picked by hundreds of "music lovers across the country" from "all walks of life," including the "music industry," according to the press release. The voters picked from 1,100 songs provided by the RIAA and the NEA, though write-in spaces were available on the ballots. The announcement of the list is part of a wider effort to bring the songs to school-age children and adolescents, in a project that involves Scholastic publishing and AOL (the Great Satan). Step right up and take a few whacks at them...
posted on Mar-7-01 at 3:07 PM
Beyond the bar code: Tags on retail products will send radio signals to their manufacturers, collecting information about consumer habits -- and raising privacy concerns. Radio tag technology is already here, used in fields such in livestock, freight-train cargo and highway tolls. The only barrier to widespread use is consumer products is price. When they can be made for a penny, expect to see them everywhere. From the March issue of MIT Technology Review.
posted on Feb-20-01 at 7:51 AM
In time for Valentine's Day, the fabulous Guardian weblog has a special collection of links to articles about love, sex, cybersex and permutations of those three, from Australia, US, Canada, maybe a few virtual realms, too.
posted on Feb-13-01 at 11:57 AM
Couples who click online, notably Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke. Photo as well.
posted on Feb-11-01 at 12:04 PM
'Chinese' New Year news fest The generally wonderful Guardian Weblog has a special page of hard-hitting Chinese news links in honor of Lunar New Year beginning Jan. 24. (Commonly called Chinese New Year, but the Vietnamese celebrate it, too.) These include a link to a Foreign Affairs discussion of the Tiananmen Papers, believed to be internal Chinese documents about the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. (Earlier MeFi linkage of a Tiananmen Papers article can be found here.
posted on Jan-23-01 at 11:48 AM
It's uncertain how important online privacy is to President-elect George W. Bush. He indicated a general support for online privacy laws during the presidential campaign without indicating whether he leaned more toward industry self-regulation, technological solutions, legislative solutions, or some combination. A working document drafted by the Bush transition team on "technology proposals" echoes the same undefined support for online privacy. One analyst thinks his transition-appointments indicate a reference for industry self-regulation.
posted on Jan-19-01 at 10:27 AM
The stilt palm. Easter lilies. Pilobolus. Plants that move, and the people who study them.
posted on Jan-17-01 at 10:31 AM
Singer Steve Earle, who knows something about jail himself, became friends with a death-row inmate in Texas and walked the last mile with him. Earle wrote this piece for Tikkun; the link is to Utne Reader Online reprint of it.
posted on Jan-10-01 at 7:57 PM
Not just another Weblog link: This, apparently, is the front door (or at least today's front door) to the ChristianityToday.com Weblog. It comments, it provides links, it archives.
posted on Jan-8-01 at 8:44 PM
A Minor Threat to business as usual: A fine Q&A with Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) about the ethical, fan-friendly approach to music business at Dischord Records. Obligatory MeFi disclaimer: It's a Salon link.
posted on Jan-8-01 at 10:39 AM
In a long essay-review of the report of the official inquiry into mad cow disease, the London Review of Books also points (but without helpful html coding) to the government site where the full text of the BSE Inquiry and the supporting evidence can be found. You can download it as a PDF file if you like, for light reading with your next carrot juice and stir-fried tofu.
posted on Dec-21-00 at 6:31 PM
"Ferociously proud and somewhat vain, you like to be impressive and seen as Somebody Special." It's George W. Bush's natal horoscope, interpreted by some anonymous folks at Astrozine/iVillage. The many screenfuls include this statement: "An innate clairvoyant tendency could also be developed quite easily by you." Via the frequently wonderful Guardian Weblog.
posted on Dec-14-00 at 12:43 AM
E! Online presents the top devils (take that literally) in the movies. It's from November, but I spotted it just now via the Guardian Weblog
posted on Dec-8-00 at 2:51 PM
The 13th Story fiction site is running "an interactive experiment in collaborative fiction" and looking for the "best online fiction" of 2000.
posted on Dec-8-00 at 11:15 AM
Inside the world of Alcoholics Anonymous: John Sutherland has a long piece in the London Review of Books on how AA operates and why it works well for some. The article purports to be a review of a biography of Bill W., one of AA's co-founders, but there is very little review in it; it's mainly a discussion of what AA is all about for a British readership. I am not an AA member, but have attended open AA meetings, have AA friends and belong to a different 12-step group so I can say it's a fairly accurate piece, though colored with some quirky opinions and a few opinions I think are wrong. An occasional line is humorous: "If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this country are problem drinkers then you will conclude that the LRB readership will contain some 10,000 of them. And that 1.5 contributors per issue might have to be so classified." Yes. I'd be willing to wager a few quid that 1.5 contributors to almost any periodical have an alcohol problem! Sutherland correctly observes that the anonymous nature of AA means no one will ever be able to track how many people the program has truly "reformed" (an old-school AAer would say no one is ever reformed, they're only recovering a day at a time). The main beef I have with his piece is his statement about other organizations: Weight Watchers is NOT based on AA, though Overeaters Anonymous is; also, I don't think it is fair to say Al-Anon, OA and Narcotics Anonymous are weak imitations of AA.
posted on Dec-5-00 at 6:08 PM
Four out of 10 people mistakenly believe it is possible to get HIV by sharing a drinking glass or being coughed or sneezed on by an infected person. The survey, released Thursday, was conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's scary that so many people are still so ignorant of what causes HIV-AIDS," said Marty Algaze, a spokesman for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. "Almost 20 years into this epidemic, it's disturbing that people think you could still get it from casual contact."
posted on Dec-1-00 at 3:15 AM
Everyday life for a teenager with AIDS: Stephanie Lee Ray, a 12-year-old with AIDS, is proving the doctors wrong. She was not supposed to live past age 5, so she lives for every moment. She wants to play and grow and go to school. She has felt the effects of people's ignorance about the disease. She has suffered disapproving stares and comments.Rather than feel sorry for herself, she prefers to educate people to make wise choices. She knows that her life really counts. (The story is almost 2 years old, and the wonderful pix aren't archived with it, but it's worth reading anyway, especially for the feel of a life when any cold or simple fever can become a life-threatening crisis.)
posted on Dec-1-00 at 1:56 AM
MARSBUGS, The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter. Founded in 1994, e-mail subscriptions are free on request. The scholars (Dr. David J. Thomas, Math and Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR, and Dr. Julian A. Hiscox, School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom) who edit this journal have kindly archived all issues online. Budding exobiologists, fire up your browsers.
posted on Nov-10-00 at 8:58 AM
The Mideast's forgotten people, Bedouins cling to ancient tradition - and Israel's bottom rung. With strong historical ties to the land that go back 2,500 years, they feel left out of the who-gets-what debate in the Holy Land.
posted on Oct-24-00 at 1:10 PM
Surrogate clone mother Bessie, an Iowa farm cow, is pregnant. But she's not having a cow. Inside her uterus is an endangered species called an Asian gaur, a heavily muscled, humpbacked, ox-like animal native to the bamboo jungles of India and Burma. The embryonic gaur, Noah, due to be born next month, was cloned from a single skin cell taken from a dead gaur, researchers report in a paper in the latest issue of the journal Cloning, to be released this week. It is the first endangered species ever to be cloned, and the first cloned animal to gestate in the womb of another species. Is this a new era in wildlife conservation? (Already, the Massachusetts scientists who created Noah are laying plans to clone endangered giant pandas.) Or are we bringing on Jurassic Park?
posted on Oct-9-00 at 7:17 AM
Animals thought extinct found in remote Cambodian jungle: British scientists have found a wilderness in the Cardamom region of Cambodia where exotic species, some though to be extinct, have been found. These include the Siamese crocodile, the wolf snake (a new species so named because of its dog-like fangs), large populations of tigers and Asian elephants, and the gower, a forest cow. Ironically, the habitat was protected from significant human intrusion because it was a longtime Khmer Rouge stronghold and also because routes lead to and from it are landmined.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 6:06 PM
"Babylon" brothers and sisters, a fan has collected, archived and portaled a large collection of postings (Usenet and other forms) on writing, SF and TV work by J. Michael Straczynski, the "Babylon 5" creator-executive producer, also a longtime SF writer and, if you are as old as I am, you may remember him as the Scripts columnist for Writer's Digest. They're not ordered chronologically or topically, so they read more like random postcards from the volcano. But there's plenty of writing advice here and some nuggets of TV gossip dropped along the road.
posted on Oct-5-00 at 11:42 AM