This is not the Ted Nelson Newsletter, nor the book by Terry Pratchett.

Interesting Times
(an annotated hotlist)

Serendipity  History  Current Events  People  Business  Reference  Food  Homepage  Organizations  Culture  Worst  Antireligious Tendencies  Searching Feedback

s e r e n d i p i t y
Jet City Orange, webzine with unusually high hit rate for me.

modern humorist. Wish they had a print magazine.
Finally snapped out of their April fool's joke.

Everything
Communal encyclopedia. Very pleasant to edit. Go there, sign up, waste some time.

South Park
May God have mercy on us.

Fact sheet on the Guevara Lock of Beethoven's Hair

"Dr. Guevara, a urologist, and Mr. Brilliant, a Beethoven collector and specialist, have assembled a nationwide team of scientists to perform tests on a small sample of the portion of the hair in Dr. Guevara's possession."

Star Wars IV
The first 30 minutes or so, in ASCIImation. Abridged script of part I.

ConScript Unicode Registry.
Unicode has code space for private use. The CSUR is trying to manage the assignment of invented and reconstructed languages to this code space. The result is a fascinating list of current and historical invented alphabets, often beautifully lettered. (Maybe having one's own glyph will one day become a geek fashion statement like having one's own domain name.)

The Laundry Product Showcase.
New! Wow! The EarthSmart, Unbelievable, Natural, Ionic, O.K., Turbo Plus, Stereo, Dynamic, EcoSave, Tri-Clean Laundry Ball, Disk, Washball, Stone, 2000.

Turing test for Barry.

Industrial Immolation from Eric Paulos.

``Brass Lips On The Finer Statues Of Europe'' is exactly what it says it is.
Our Wonderful Cerebellum,'' a short paper (with a few huge images)
by MIT grad student Matthew J. Marjanovic.)

h i s t o r y

Napoleon's Wallpaper

An Abridged History of the United States. Very much so; covering WWII to 1996 in 13 short articles.

The History of Computing, with lots of photographs;
the ``Association for History and Computing'' and their links to history servers.

The VW Type III Owner's Manual: the ``grown-up'' Beetle, from around 1963.

The Dead Media Project.

1925: The Year in Review
1933 (Horrid layout.)
Raoul Wallenberg's rescue operation of Hungarian Jews in World War II.

The steadily growing MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
contains biographies of more than thousand mathematicians, about half of them with images.  Johnathan Bowen's A Brief History of Algebra and Computing refers to it a lot. Johnathan also maintains the Virtual Museum of Computing, the Virtual Library's home page for computing history.

PLATO: The Emergence of On-Line Community
Describes how the Notes system, predecessor of USENET and just about everything else, evolved in the early seventies.

A Brief Stop at Mount Carmel
Two years after the Waco disaster, libertarian Daniel Tobias visited what remained of the Branch Davidians.

c u r r e n t   e v e n t s

Vocabulary: www.ntk.net; www.suck.com; slashdot.org; www.tbtf.com.
The Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool
Where the web jet-set bet on the dates of the dead. (Dot com version.)
Speaking of dates of death: here's the very tasteful Death Clock. A non-virtual version would give the Y2K countdown clock producers something to do on Jan 1 0000.
Berserkistan, a.k.a. Bosnia.

Envisioning the Information Age sounds like a paper, but is mostly news.

Local (German) News from today.
For medium- and long-range analysis of international developments in German: the Deutsche Welle service.
The current DFN trouble tickets.

p e o p l e
Don, Clive, mfx, Cosma (news/notes). Mark Thomas, Gareth Rees, John Lawler.
Clebor trebor.

Momus.

mjd's Universe of Discourse is rebuilding; Ranjit's playground has moved.
Pope Anon.

Verbal Carnage from Scott Christensen.

Houdini!

Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing Home Page.
The author of ``Alan Turing: Enigma'' has created an engaging site; not just for the generous quotes from his book, but also for countless little scanned pictures and scraps.

Don E. Knuth.

Ken Thompson gets to fly his first MIG, while Ken Jenks takes a ride (fall?) in the KC-135 zero gravity trainer.

Kathy Acker got kicked off AOL for talking dirty.
More about that, and about the new book (``Pussy, King of the Pirates'') in an interview with Rosie X in an old issue of geekgirl.
RU Sirius interviews Acker for i/o magazine. The interview is dumb, but there are links to Acker's original writing on the bottom.
The short story ``The Language Of The Body'' was recently reprinted by CTHEORY.

Spyke, aka Brian W. Bramlett, has been voted `Mr. Leather, Portland.'

Stuart Moulthrop

A few of Dave Sim's essays on how to become a cartooning self-publisher are being marked up.

Kate Sherwood, the World-Wide Webfoot.

Pop
Elvis, Andy Warhol.

Mark Weiser died of a sudden illness; he'll be sorely missed.
Against my expectations, Jaron Lanier's site is growing into something real and interesting.
The Noam Chomsky archive has moved under the wings of ZNet.

Sandman, Feynman.
More physicists at CalTech's PhotoNet.
Penn & Teller at Sin City. The transcript of a talk that Penn & Teller's good friend Randi (hypermail archive of the James Randi Hotline) gave in 1992 at Caltech was reprinted in Jim Lippard's Skeptic magazine.

b u s i n e s s
Velcro

Index
Internet Providers.
E-mail addresses of German companies

Fake
Wired: underwired.
Slate: Stale.
Bonk.

Most Fucked-Up Person Alive Tells All, and their What Sn00z? Page (nothing behind it, but the descriptions are well­aimed.)
Silicon Folley's TeraMemory.
First Issue Reserved Edition: stamps.
Fake teeth, genuine shop: Dr. Bukk's.
Demotivational: www.despair.com, the Franklin Mint for the rest of us.

Vendors
AT&T (especially the Computing Science Research Center); Xerox, Silicon Graphics (europe), Novell (text only), Digital service / research; Microsoft service / research, Apple Motorola.
Malls
Marketplace.com, Branch.com, The Internet StoreFront, EUnet, Internet Shopping Network (use the text-based version), Digital.

r e f e r e n c e
Archives
of comp.risks; of comp.infosystems.www.announce;
of a few sweet technical and social Internet mailinglists;
of IETF RFCs (quickref) and current Internet Drafts (via ftp)
of TV evening news abstracts from 1969-1995

Joe Smith's PDP 10 Page
frees (among other things) Henry Baker's hypertext PDP 10 manuals from their netcom vault.

Multics, including live coverage from the last minutes of the Multics host at MIT;
HTML Multics Glossary.

Yow! HAKMEM items 145..180 from Gerad K. Newman;
and more HAKMEM (items 1 .. 191) from Henry Baker, mirrored.

Vintage Hypertext Documentation
mfx on HTML, SGML, etc., HTML Developer Resources at U Washington.

Programming in C (local)

Standards
Computers and Telecommunications standards (Mirror: Stuttgart)
POSIX 1003.2 draft, Shell and Utilities, WAIS-searchable index.
Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 series reference.

Lists/References
Brigitte Jellinek's ungeek (expands geek code v2.1, it doesn't really get you a life).
Searchable Computer Science Bibliographies mirrored in Germany Portugal UK Czech Republic Arizona
CPUs; Illustrated Data Powers of Ten.
The On-line Dictionary of Computing;
Jennifer Myers' Unix reference desk.

Inter­Network Mail Guide; X.500 directory service.
Well-known and Registered (TCP/UDP) port numbers, ISO 3166 country codes.

Public Companies by ticker or name.
Weights and Measures from the CIA factbook (95).
Animals in the Animal Diversity Web.
MEDLINE medical journal search.
Exchange Rates; Koblas Currency Converter; Time Zones
Search the first 1254541 digits of PI; more on the Value of Pi; large Primes.
US Postal Service Address Quality & ZIP Code Lookup
Search US phone books; find US people/businesses given name, state.

Viewpoint
Sells 3D models and related data. You can look at, and walk through, the models before you buy the data. I like one of their slogans: ``Save Time. Save Money. Save Sanity.''

Chemistry & Physics
Practical Holography, by Christopher Outwater and Van Hamersveld.
DIY Glycolysis; Molecules-R-Us; periodic tables at U Sheffield / UCB / UNSW, Australia / TU Wien;

The HCI Launching Pad
collects pointers to all available HCI­related resources and to other launching pads, such as Hans de Graaf's HCI index, or Mikael Ericsson's list of HCI Resources.

Fake Minds
The Autonomous Agents Group at the MIT Media Lab.
The Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham.
Karl Sim's Virtual creatures at think.com.
Peedy at Microsoft, and their list of related works.

The Sociable Web  (Paper, 4 illustrations, lots of links.).
f o o d
Turing Test
``Before the test, the Twinkie was relatively quiet, and the Lovett sophomore was confused by the whole thing.''

Spork!
1970 Official Gaz. (U.S. Patent Office) 11 Aug. tm 65 Van Brode Milling Co., Inc., Clinton, Mass... Spork for Combination Plastic Spoon, Fork and Knife.

Cooking with Cronin: Mango Sorbet
You can tell if your sorbet is ready to eat by pressing a small amount into your hand. If it melts under the pressure, then it is ready to serve. If your hand feels cold and then shatters when you bang it against a hard object, leave the sorbet to thaw for a few more hours.

Mrs. Morrison's Mace Cake
``... Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and 1 tablespoon mace.''

Insect Recipes from Iowa State University
Bug Blox, Banana Worm Bread, Rootworm Beetle Dip, and Chocolate Chirpie Chip Cookies.

The Hacker's Diet, or How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition.
A self-help hypertext book by John Walker, a hacker who lost more then 70 pounds in less than six months and managed not to regain them - he hacked dieting.  (He's kidding about the hair, though.)

Sex In A Pan from Carrie Gates, CS dep., Dalhousie University.
Almonds or nuts, cream cheese, vanilla pudding, chocolate pudding, cool whip, and optional shaved chocolate.

Patrick R. Michaud's Strawberry Pop­Tart Blow­Torches.

Pizza Hut and the UnPizza UnHut, the Internet Pizza Server.
Along similar lines, The Internet Lunch Counter.

Mark Hutchenreuther explains how to Roll Your Own Sushi.

o r g a n i s a t i o n
Good guys:  CPSR, EFF, LPF, ACLU, Greenpeace.

Standards
The IETF's gopher service and Web page.
ISO Online, ANSI Online, ASC X3.
The IEEE Computer Society.

Societies, etc.
USENIX, UniForum, OSF, Lysator.

FBI, NSA, NRO, the CIA (yes, that CIA) with their World Factbook;

Crime
The National Fraud Information Center.
Don't click there: digicrime.
c u l t u r e
Writers, Publishers, Movies, Literature
(A separate page with all those bookish/media links. The best catalog is amazon.com's, the best movie reference the Internet Movie Database [uk, au us de jp kr])

Skripts:
William Gibson's Alien III Script, Pulp Fiction, Dune

Fonts
Esperfonto at Will-Harris House; Cakefonts from Charles Anderson. David Siegel's typography (critique of Siegel from the wayward web), and the Silicon Graphics Typeface Collection at Paul Haeberli's Graphica Obscura. Internet Font Archives
Letraset evaluation typesetting. Pixelsight custom buttons.

Jim Pallas: The Senate Piece.
``Generally, ONE OF THE BOYS only inflates during quorum calls, the dollar may fall at any time, and the action of the wheels of justice is erratic.''

domespace, the ``house of the future''.

Stage designs by jean sebastian bouju.

English Grammar FAQ, articles posted to alt.usage.english
by John Lawler, the hippest Linguistics professor I've ever had the pleasure to meet over coffee. Who else can you talk Chomsky, Penn & Teller, and FORTRAN with?
Peter Ladkin occasionally veers into the linguistic as well.

Dreamtime - The Didjeridu W3 Server
Moooohbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrchakachakachakabrbrbrbr.
Putrid Afterthought, by Antonio Mendoza: Escher on acid.
Outrageous Lies.
Communities:
Voxers at Large
The Well's gopher and WWW server (home pages, Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World)
biancaTroll(tm) (quickref real­time collaborative licentiousness).

Language:  (Human) languages in general.
Neologisms in Journalistic Texts, Apr-Jun 1994: oulipian, churchlift.
CobuildDirect Corpus Sampler, grep 40 lines from a huge database of spoken (transcribed) and written American and British sources.

Museums: The San Francisco Exploratorium and the Smithsonian Institution.

w o r s t
Annotated pointers
Useless WWW Pages from paulp@primus.com.
Mirksy's Worst of the Web has ceased publication and will close down entirely in February.

Destructive criticism
Why AOL Sucks

Deliberately bad design
B1FF#S K3WL H0M3 PAG3!!! , recent winner of the Bill Cheswick Award.

Netiquette
The Blacklist of Internet Advertisers from Axel Boldt.

a n t i r e l i g i o u s   t e n d e n c i e s

Creative
PINEAL WEB, Browser for the Illuminated Generation! Fnord!
God's Total Quality Management Questionnaire
A.R.S: The Clearing playing cards
Decapitate an Angel. Kill, slay, maim.
Wallet reading, by Daniel Will-Harris
McWorship at McChurch!
Your personalized Torot reading and the Sacred Chao.
How To Talk New Age, by Mick Winter; with illustrations by Bob Johnson.
The Joy of Sects, by Robert S. Wieder (converted from TeXinfo)
Andrew Plotkin's ``Old Time Religion'' search engine.
The Universal Life Church, and of course the Church of the Subgenius.

Tales
A conspiracy­rich excerpt from Mike Davis' City of Quartz describes how Hubbard picked up the basics of occult dramaturgy in a Crowley­influenced L.A. black magic loge around 1945.
Tilman Hausherr has put a few photographs from a Berlin anti-$cientology demonstration online.
Jack Chick: Someone Goofed;

Factual
Christian hypocrisy: The Charlatan Observer
General scepticism, with a focus on health issues: Brian Wall's Sceptics' Sanctuary.
Ron Newman: The Church of Scientology vs. the Net.
Scientology Critics' Info Page; interesting texts from alt.religion.scientology.
Martin Hunt's alt.religion.scientology Acronym and Terminology FAQ and David Dennis' extensive archive of Clam hunting material.
Celebrity Atheists. Do your gods have gods?
Bob Bigham: Skeptical Scientology Stuff, aka Sloth's Suppressive Person's Page, now: organized.
The Talk.Origins Archive at uci.edu.
The hypertext Alt.Atheism FAQ.
Not directly atheist, but may come in handy: Fallacy reference from Diana Mertz Brickell.

Indices and Organizations
The CSICOP sponsors the First World Skeptics Congress in Amherst, NY.
The Left Hemisphere: Skepticism, Religion, and Secularism on the WWW.
The Secular Web (part of the WWW Virtual Library).
High Weirdness by WWW

The (UK) Skeptic magazine; Jim Lippard's Skeptics Society Web; BC Skeptics; Robert T. Carroll's excellent The Skeptic's Dictionary.
More focused, the UK newspaper the observer presents the A - Z of Cults.
[German] `Religio', Winfried Müller about cults in Germany.
s e a r c h i n g
News
The Green Eggs Report (URLs posted on USENET, sorted by subject.)
Searchable News (technical only) at deja news (& | &! ^ (near), default &)
Automatic News HREFs, linked USENET article excerpts.

Hierarchy
Yahoo at Stanford (Search/ What's New?)
Parody: Yecch!
What's New Too! (All of today)
The central www.w3.org registry's list of all WWW servers (What's new)
The Planet Earth Home Page. (Backup, Text version.)
Global Network Academy Meta­Library (Search)
Special Internet Connections, by Scott Yanoff.
The Whole Internet Catalog (at GNN)

Crawlers
Lycos query (large / small).
Inktomi (+must -maynot), Altavista, Opentext, Infoseek ("two words", two-words in any order, [two words] within 100 words of each other, +must, -maynot)
The World Wide Web Worm
WebCrawler (ex U-Washington, now America Online)

Meta
CUSI meta-index at Nexor, U Twente, Quarterdeck, CWI, Telecom Australia, U Saskatchewan
Savvy Search (parallel).
All-in-one Search Page
The Internet Sleuth, searchable databases by subject or alphabetically.
CUI WWW Catalog
NCSA Experimental Meta­Index


Last update: June 5th, 1998, jutta@pobox.com.