November, 2001

  1. Required Reading: USS Clueless

    This is how good Steven Den Beste’s USS Clueless weblog is — every morning I turn on CNN to find out the latest news in the war against Afghanistan. Then I bring up Den Beste’s site to find out everything CNN left out or got wrong. If there is a more comprehensive, insightful look at…

  2. Sometimes, Metafilter Really Frightens Me

    No, it’s not as scary as Slashdot, but sometimes Metafilter posters come close. For example, check out this recent thread started by someone who had apparently never heard the saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” before hearing it on a “Babylon 5″ episode — and was subsequently astonished to hear a recent speech…

  3. Car Wars, 2001

    Okay, I spent way too much time as a teenager playing Steve Jackson Games’ excellent Car Wars — a board game in which the goal is to outfit cars with all sorts of weapons and then blow away your friends (and it is a travesty that there has never been a computer car fighting game…

  4. Difficult Getting Back in the Groove

    Over the past few years I’ve become an extreme creature of habit — my wife says that every year I’m becoming more and more like Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man.” So I spent much of last week in the hospital where my daughter was having surgery and then taking care of her after her…

  5. Why Did the WTC Towers Collapse So Quickly?

    Via Poliglut come two separate theories about why the WTC Towers collapsed so quickly. In this corner we have chemistry professor Art Robinson. Robinson told World Net Daily that he believes the towers came down quickly because of New York’s 1971 ban on asbestos. When the towers were originally designed, the columns were to be…

  6. Explanation from Google

    The support folks at Google sent me a very nice message today answering my questions about why my web site seemed to periodically disappear from their index. We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our index we find new sites, lose some sites and sites shift in their ranking. If you…

  7. The Religious Right, the Nutty Left and Everybody In Between

    After I posted about that horrific child murder in Chicago, Seth Dillingham noticed that the news story seemed awfully slanted against religion. Seth writes, So many people crow about the unfair, imbalanced influence that the “religious right” has on the U.S. political system. The “religious right” political bodies bug me too, much of the time,…

  8. Catch as Cam Can

    Cam catches Dave Winer engaging in a bit of hypocritical image appropriation. But what inquiring minds really want to know is why does Manila produce links like this: http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/11/15#l29087f2fd63ed79a2f44bdcf49529eba That almost makes The Guardian’s deep links intelligible.