The latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, includes an article by Stephen Budiansky on something most Americans have had all too much experience with — traffic gridlock. I was particularly struck by what Budiansky has to say about what might best be called psychological gridlock, The eeriest thing that came out of these equations, however, was…
December, 2000
-
-
The BBC reports that remarkably well preserved fossils of tiny winged dinosaurs may be the missing link to resolve the debate over the origin of birds. But the real question is: will anybody believe the fossils are genuine? As recently as 1999 gullible paleontologists put up $80,000 for an alleged winged dinosaur fossil from China…
-
For the most part, I find the BBC’s news web site far superior to American fare such as CNN or any of the American news networks, especially for coverage of international news. Unfortunately with its coverage of the horrific shooting of 7 people in Massachussetts, the BBC seems more than willing to emulate the shoddy…
-
I’ve received a number of e-mails and seen several web sites carrying the following text, which is obviously supposed to refer to George W. Bush (this is from Adam Curry’s web site, The quote below is one of Nostradamus’ quatrains. In 1555, Nostradamus wrote: “Come the millennium, month 12, In the home of greatest power,…
-
Cleaning out my e-mail inbox today, I noticed an online acquaintance who is what I like to call an atheist fundamentalist sent me a link to this anti-religious page. The page puts forth several claims that religion is, in fact, a negative influence, but simply demonstrate’s the author’s complete lack of understanding basic principles of…
-
RPGSheets has nothing but character sheets — 700 of them to be exact — for more than 200 different role playing game systems.
-
A lot of libertarians used Microsoft’s antitrust trial to highlight the numerous problems with antitrust law. Personally, I’d like to see all antitrust legislation repealed (or found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). But some libertarians went further and almost created a cult of Bill Gates in which the billionaire was some sort of hero, even…
-
The morons at Interplay did this with Starfleet Command and they’ve decided to do it again with Starfleet Command II — the game ships with a bonus disk, but the only way to get the bonus disk is to pre-order through the Interplay site. What, the money I spent at Best Buy just isn’t good…
-
The Register has been reporting on Warner Brothers going after people who registered domain names with the words “Harry Potter” in them — for example, their lawyers intimidated some poor chap in the UK in to handing over www.harrypotterisawizard.co.uk. I happen to think this is nonsense. In the real world there are a number of…
-
A couple years ago graphic chip maker 3dfx was so far ahead of its competitors that people often used 3dfx and 3d accelerator cards as synonymous. Its competitors tended to put out propriety chips that didn’t work well (if they worked at all) and had numerous problems. 3dfx was on top of the world and…