The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell is a collection of images of strange dark entrances (usually boarded up.) There is now a Flickr group too. Remember the safety rules:
Rule 1: It may be an obvious thing to say but NEVER try to go inside an entrance to Hell.
Rule 2: Always approach an entrance on your stomach.
Rule 3: Don’t shout at the devil (not even with good news).
Rule 4: Wear rubber gloves for 3 or 4 days after your visit.
This site came up when I googled “go to hell”.
The DigiBarn Computer Museum has a collection of amusing Screenshots Funstuff including this shot of Word with so many toolbars turned on that they frame the content. Toolbars gone wild.
Read the press release, XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 Become Standards: Tools to Query, Transform, and Access XML and Relational Data. The W3C has released a series of new standards for web data. Thanks to the TEI-L list for this.
This weekend I attended parts of a conference called Deus in Machina | Exploring Religion and Technology in Comparative Perspective that was organized by Jeremy Stolow. The conference started with a great paper by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, “Social Sofware and Contemporary Jewish Life” that dealt ways in which new social networking tools are being used to reach out to youth. She talked about the The Open Source Judaism Project and other projects that are supported by ?û?¶?™ ¬ª MATZAT.
The Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL) is a centre attached to the Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Fran?ßaise (ATILF / CNRS) lab at Nancy Universit?©. They have a portal for lexical, morphological and etymological work in French. It takes a French word and will give you synonyms, dictionary entry, etymology and so on. Neat. I wonder if it can be mashed into a TAPoR tool?
This is thanks to Jean-Guy.
Mike Elgan has an article on iPhone: 20 things we don’t know (Jan. 12, 2007) in Digit a magazine about “the future of digital design”. In particular I agree with his questions about the touch screen interface and virtual keyboard – will it be responsive enough for Blackberry users who do push e-mail?
One way of asking about the iPhone is to think about the Newton PDA which was also supposed to be a magical reinvention of personal computing. Like the iPhone, and unlike the iPod, it tried to do lots of things and as a result didn’t do anything well. The Palm Pilot got the PDA market right by doing fewer things very well and in a small enough package to fit in your pocket. As pretty and desirable as the iPhone is, I worry that it will be a delicate and fat phone; a slow and poor Internet device; and an expensive iPod with little memory.
That said, it will shakeup the cell phone business. If it doesn’t take off, someone else will get the need for new designs and digital integration right.
Update: Shawn pointed me to an article Apple Ushers in Era of the Fluid UI by Om Malik. Malik correctly, I think, identifies the fluid interface as the important innovation.
According to Reporter’s Notebook: Highlights from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association a lifetime member of the AHA was knocked down and arrested for jaywalking in Atlanta. Others were stopped and warned.
No one seems to be suggesting this was a move to intimidate historians. This AP story suggests the policeman was not on duty but was hired by the Hilton Hotel to “direct pedestrians to use crosswalks”. Is it normal for hotels hosting conferences to hire off-duty police to discourage jaywalking?
Stephen Ramsay, who I first met at the University of Virginia, has now started a blog which should be worth following as Steve is doing great work in text analysis and data mining.
This Semester in Game Academia: Edition 1 – GameCareerGuide.com is an up-to-date look at the rapidly changing world of university game programs by Beth Dillon. They have a section on Featured Schools that is extensive and lists McMaster’s Software Engineering and Game Design program.
So I got a Facebook account. (See Geoffrey Rockwell.) I’m not sure how to use it as a professor – do students really want their profs in their space?
For a good biography of Facebook see the profile by Sid Yadav from Augst 25, 2006 on Mashable.com:
Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user base. Since their launch in February 2004, they’ve been able to obtain over 8 million users in the U.S. alone and expand worldwide to 7 other English-speaking countries, with more to follow.