Many thanks to David Walker, rapidly assuming the role of an unofficial auxiliary FmH editor for the number of blinks he sends me, for the following list, reprinted in its entirety, of what captivated during my week away:
- followup on the MIT blackjack team profiled in Wired
kottke.com
- recruiting the leading minds of computer science into “the industrial revolution of biology” Wired
- Born Digital
: a special report on the ‘children of the digital revolution’. Wired - report about Robert Blake’s celebrity status in the LA jail where he is being held after charged with his wife’s murder. E! Online
- Calvin Trillin wonders if wine connoisseurs can really tell ’em apart
The New Yorker
- boing boing‘s
blink to writer John M. Ford’s 110 one-line “stories” about being in NYC on 9-11
- “America may want to rethink a system that creates so many hardened criminals” The Economist
- Ambushed on “Donahue”! Salon. “A defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here’s what he really wanted to say.”
- “How NPR’s online executive producer turned the nation’s top public network into an Internet player.” Business 2.0
- Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka, interesting blog found via Robot Wisdom with which I hadn’t been familiar
- null device‘s take on the ‘Florida faith-based spanking’ travesty I wrote about below
null device‘s take on Turkmenistan’s madman leader Niyazov, whose effort to rename a month of th year in his own honor I wrote about last week
- Jamie Lee Curtis turns traitor, as noted on Supermodels are Lonelier Than You Think (SALTYT)
- Russian authorities enjoin a St. Petersburg hospital from psychosurgery as addiction treatment Plastic
- Rafe Colburn links to a 8/16 article from Army Times “that includes a lot more detail about the rigged Millenium Challenge 02 wargame”; he’d been skeptical when he’d only read about it in The Guardian. [I love to blink to The Guardian, as I suppose readers have gleaned… — FmH] rc3
- kottke’s comments on hearing James Gleick discuss what the Internet has done to journalism. Gleick doesn’t much like weblogs, kottke observes, and he offers this Steven Levy observation in a Newsweek piece about “Living in the Blog-osphere” in counterpoint:
“Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what’s happening on Planet Blog don’t go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”
As one of the 490,000, I agree…
- Not clear what David is pointing to in the null device
‘s 08/23 archives
, but if I had to guess I’d cast my vote for the pointer to this fascinating Ohio.com story
about a European skeptic’s investigation of “the story of a man who appeared suddenly on the streets of New York City in 1950, bearing the property and identity of a man who had vanished in 1876”
I recall my panic when I took a vacation after the first few months of FmH’s existence about whether there would be any readers left when I returned two weeks later. I approached each of several friends from the blogiverse about having them keep up the blog as a guest editor during my absence. Ultimately, I rejected the idea — I’m too much of a control freak about FmH, I guess — and it certainly seems that it remains interesting enough for many of you to remember to come back after a week or two when it hasn’t been refreshed, and for others of you to think of me, by collecting pertinent blinks, while I’m away. Again, I’m indebted, David. Keep sending me those pointers!
