marginalia.org

Coffee plant's caffeine gene isolated. Now this should be an interesting GM battle - the cost savings, both for makers of decaff and consumers (presumably, anyway) would be immense. ©

Nothing is secure. Something to think about next time you're sending your cc# over the net. ©

I've updated the simple view of marginalia.org so that you can set the number of days you want to see; just add ?days=# where # is some digit. You can even see all blurbs available with simple?days=all. @whee. ©

Some of my favorite videos are by Tool. I didn't know until today that they're all available for download from Tool's website. You can read more about the guy that made several of the videos here. ©

Ah ha! I found a clip of the Spike Jonze Visits the Gores documentary. Not something you see every day. ©

Very articulate rant about the success of Gulf War propaganda. ©

Lovely story about how criminals try to mess with DNA evidence:

Turner, determined to cast doubt on the science upon which his conviction was based, had smuggled a sample of his own semen out of jail, concealed in what had been a ketchup packet. Family members then paid a woman $50 to use the sperm to stage a phony rape. Turner was wound up being sentenced to 120 years in prison.

©

The National Post goes to town on what it considers the Globe and Mail's declining standards. Which are all due to their fear of the National Post, of course. ©

Library System Terrorizes Publishing Industry. ©

Alphanumerica releases Theme Builder, a theme builder for mozilla built with mozilla. Neat, but when are they going to build a mozilla tool builder with mozilla tools, huh? THEN I'll be impressed. ©

Everyone's been talking about 405, a short film with extensive CGI work produced entirely on a couple of home computers, but I just got around to watching it today. Wow. You can also view it at ifilm. ©

A working lego desk. Note that this was built because it was stipulated in someone's employee contract. (Comment: "!")(From powazek.) ©

Y'all know you can ICQ me at 8634383, right? ©

Finally - multilingual domain names. Of course, what they're really talking about is allowing non-ascii (I'm going to assume unicode) domain names. I'm really looking forward to the day when I have to remember if it's résume.com or resumé.com or résumé.com. ©

The interesting bit of this article:

I have to report that the "realest" moment of the whole blatherfest for me was something I saw on screen. In a stroke of surprising originality (perhaps born of desperation) the Gore campaign invited film director Spike Jonze to make a short documentary film. Gore had evidently liked Jonze's delightfully bizarre "Being John Malkovich," and chose to offer him an opportunity to film the Gore family at their vacation home in North Carolina and various other places earlier this summer.

Now there's a bit of political theatre I'd like to see. ©

This article about the non-reality of Big Brother is interesting, I suppose, although I can't help but wonder if anyone really cares. I certainly can't imagine watching the live feeds of the show (heck, I don't even watch the show). ©

woah - a new $5,000 hard disk recording system, built around BeOS. This is great news for Be and is a major endorsement of BeOS' capability. Plus, it's built by a local company. ©

Genius: some guy hooks up AOL Messenger to the eliza program. (From q.) ©

SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON! Teletoon is showing The Tick five nights a week! ©

Are you in pi? I am. ©

Nautilus is slow and a serious memory hog at the moment, but damn it's so purty. ©

Only Canadians will get this: It's Mark Kingwell week at good magazine. Read more in this National Post story. I especially loved Dreams of Markennium:

"King me!" Douglas Coupland said gleefully as he jumped three of Mark Kingwell's men and landed in the back row of the checkerboard.

Mark Kingwell glared irritably at Douglas Coupland before reluctantly placing a previously captured piece on top of the foreign invader sitting in his back row. This was an important game. It was more than a game. As agreed upon beforehand by both competitors, the victor would assume his rightful place as the pre-eminent Canadian pop-culture icon and media darling. One man would emerge as the ubiquitous talking head on television programs broadcast from coast-to-coast. One man would take his place on myriad editorial boards and as author of a thousand guest articles in a thousand periodicals distributed ad mari usque ad mare.

©

Chretien hit with pie - complete with video. (By the way, how lame is real player - if you put a space at the beginning of a URL in its open location dialog, it won't work. buh.) ©

Only 485 days to LOTR. That's right, Salon's top story is a 4-pager on a movie that won't be released for 16 months. God bless them. ©

Michael Cowpland, CEO of Corel, resigns. Let the Corel deathwatch begin. (Continue?) ©

For as long as I've ridden SkyTrain (over 10 years now), there's been a house between New Westminster and 22nd Street Stations that has had "Read Qu'uran Proven Scipture" on its roof in big white block letters. Today, I noticed it was gone. I wonder if someone just bought the house and immediately removed it or if the homeowner had gone for years without knowing their roof advertised Islam to the world. ©

"Keeping shit real" - David Eggers on selling out. Make sure you read the addendum, which is the really interesting bit. (From those sellouts at signal vs. noise - do you know how many hits they get?) ©

Lincoln Clarkes' "Heroines" photo exhibition. More here and here. Beautiful and fascinating stuff. ©

Sad article about Macaulay Culkin. ©

Fishermen pelt fisheries officers with fish guts

Mr. Lanteigne said the bait was probably from "a bucket of mackerel" and that the department was considering laying charges.

The horror, horror.

©

The Globe & Mail has lots of fun with the Reform rucus:

Yesterday, the party ruptured into two separate and competing leadership conventions. The branch of the party led by right-wing firebrand Pat Buchanan banished the party's other major faction, led by Transcendental Meditation enthusiast John Hagelin, whose supporters marched to another convention hall singing We Shall Overcome while Mr. Buchanan's supporters jeered at them.

In what looked like a comic-opera production of Robert's Rules of Order, the two sides spent the day arguing about just who had the right to speak and vote at each of the conventions. Each side referred to itself as the "real Reform Party."

Note that Buchanan picked an African American woman, Ezola Foster, as his vice-president running mate. (Not that it matters.) ©

The biggest ant colony in the world.

The ants in this so-called supercolony are so similar to each other genetically that different colonies do not fight with one another the way they do in their homeland. As a result, they are using a united family front to win territory from native ants.

In Argentina, where they are known as sugar ants, different nests of the fiercely territorial ants fight with one another, competing for food and space. An ant that wanders into the territory of another colony just 50 yards away will quickly be torn apart by workers who recognize the peculiar odor of a rival. But in California, scientists found that they could take a worker from San Diego and put it in a colony from San Francisco and it would be welcomed like a kissing cousin.

©

Cheap shot: Compassionate conservatism in action.

Cruz, whose IQ has been tested as low as 63, is scheduled to die one hour after Brian Keith Roberson's execution.

©

Ode to robertson screws - I didn't realize roberston was pretty much a canadian-only screw. ©

Pokemon dethroned by Napster! That's right - after 30 weeks as the top search on lycos, pokemon drops to #4. Napster wasn't top dog for long though - it dropped to #2 behind (sigh) Britney Spears. ©

Netscape's response to complaints about the half-baked, buggy-as-hell preview release 1 of Netscape 6: quarter-baked, buggier-than-buggy-as-hell preview release 2 of Netscape 6. What is the PDT team smoking? If you want a good impression of what will become Netscape 6, try the M17 release of mozilla. ©

mook culture - excellent article about the convergence of metal, rap, wrestling and porn into an angry unholy union. Only nitpick: rap metal fusion isn't new, dammit! It's been around since the 80s - does nobody remember Epic, by Faith No More? I'm turning into such an old fogey. (via dack.)

Addendum:Anthony points out another great rap/metal combo - anthrax and public enemy's version of bring the noise, which is from the early 90s. ©

Good article about Roger Ebert's business empire, although it does contain one glaring inaccuracy: Ebert wrote three Russ Meyer films, not just one. Hey, would I(mdb) lie to you? (Thumbs up to lake effect.) ©

How much do you want to bet someone will use this as evidence of mozilla's bloated state? Personally, I think it's cool. (Chomped at camworld.) ©

Great article on Motley Fool on handling credit cards. My favorite recommendation:

I had a friend who used to freeze his card in a bowl of water. If he still wanted the item when his card thawed out, he would buy it. Remember, no cheating. The microwave will hose up the magnetic strip.

(From signal vs. noise.) ©

Yow, this site is amazing - view all of JS Bach's handwritten scores. This page is a good starting point. (From research buzz.) ©

Hmm, it's completely unsubstantiated and unverified, but what the heck: William Gibson's screenplay for Neuromancer. (found behind some deep ice at the null device.) ©

More problems with copyright online - writers are finding their work showing up via content aggregators in violation of their contracts with publishers. ©

Reefer madness for raves. Funny and sad at the same time. Among the things ravers might be subject to: "Drunken feeling from Special K" & "Possible out-of-body experiences from Special K" (Found in eastvan, where you might just be subject to drunken feelings.) ©

Ok, just for linking to this I've renounced bastard-hood and linked to monkey-mind. Are you happy now, monkey boy? ©

What with being Canadian and all, I likely won't have much to say about the US Election. However, I like this column about the Cheney's two-facedness on the subject of their lesbian daughter a lot. ©

No, really, it's called the Palm Vx Claudia Schiffer Edition. ©

Long interview with the principle architects of C#. (Who also wrote some obscure language called Turbo Pascal (which I once learned in an introductory computing science course (along with Modula) before SFU wised up and started teaching C)). Some very pointed jabs at java, of course:

I might point out that we're taking a true open standards approach with ECMA. When and if ECMA actually arrives at a standard for C# and a common language infrastructure, the result will be available under ECMA's copyright and licensing policies, which are truly open. Any customer, and any person, will be able to license the ECMA C# standard, subset it, superset it, and they won't have to pay royalties. They'll be able take it and go implement it on any platform or any device. We fully expect people to do that. That is something fundamentally different from our competitors who wandered around the standards bodies, looking for someone to rubber-stamp their proprietary languages.

If Microsoft does go ahead with this, Sun should (but probably won't) be deeply shamed, considering its own "yes we want a standards process but we still want complete control" approach to java. ©

ironchef.com is back! Good thing, it was hard not having what was cooked during, say, the fatty tuna battle at my fingertips. ©

Can (should) the swastika be redeemed?

Pretty soon swastikas were everywhere, rotating both clockwise and counterclockwise. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, included the swastika in the seal of the society. "Rudyard Kipling combined a swastika with his signature in a circle as a personal logo," Mr. Heller reports. And the swastika was part of the logo of the Bauhaus, under Paul Klee.

The swastika spread to the United States, too. Coca-Cola issued a swastika pendant. Carlsberg beer etched swastikas onto its bottles. During World War I, the American 45th Infantry division wore an orange swastika as a shoulder patch. At least one train line had swastikas on its cars.

It's a shame in some ways, but I think the swastika should probably remain dead, or at least reviled. ©

The only thing I regret about my recent camping sojourn: missing illuminares yet again. At least I can check out sylloge's pictures. Public Dreams Society is a very cool organization. ©

Ooooh, ftrain has relaunched. Thing like ftrain and miromi make me want to do so much more with this site. Perhaps a public promise of imminent original content will kick my ass: Coming Soon, The Umbrella Chronicles! ©

"They're housewives and they're hackers," Hedgepath said. "I don't care if they have kids. I don't care that they are grandmothers. They're bootlegging us out of business."

The latest crazed recording industry executive on Napster? A movie mogul fuming over DVD piracy?

Nope. A needlepoint pattern publisher exec on doily-swapping grannies. While the dollar figures are much smaller, the similarities to the napster issue are quite striking, as alluded to in the article. (Stitched together at obscure store.) ©

Dude, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms like totally rocks, man. ©

First Microsoft, now Corbis is getting some government love:

What had been a dowdy business has become a battleground between Corbis and Getty, companies controlled by two of the richest families on earth. Over the past several years, the two firms have been gobbling up smaller stock companies and now control at least 135 million images. The attraction is simple: With the digitization of images and the elimination of costly storage and shipping costs, photo supplying has become a much more inviting business. And given the Web's bottomless appetite for content -- as well as continuing revenues from old media -- a nice collection of photos can reap a nice heap of money.

...

Ridgely Evers, CEO of Exactly Vertical, which offers photographers business management software, is not alone in foreseeing a future where buyers will become habituated to using just one or two photographic superstores. And many photographers allege that because Getty and Corbis effectively control both the fees paid to photographers and the prices for images -- in addition to many of the most valuable images around -- they are scaling themselves into an oligopoly.

©