Sunday, September 22, 2002

I have just discovered that the Atomz search engine is not configured to automatically index this website. It should now index once a week automatically and I will attempt to force an index more frequently. 7:31:59 PM     And the winner is .... Forbes recently supplied a list of the richest fictional characters of all times. Jot down an ordered list of your top five or ten candidates before visiting their link. http://www.forbes.com/2002/09/13/400fictional.html The Forbes crew overlooked existing documentation of one of the fortunes. http://home.swipnet.se/~w-47991/CarlBarks/$crooge.htm I have always considered Steve Forbes fictional and would like to see him added to the list. 11:47:14 AM     Book review alert. It turns out that a group of five very interesting residents of Birmingham England got together once a month on the Monday nearest the full moon for interesting talk. The chat was sufficiently interesting, and the roads were dark as the 19th century had not yet arrived, that the full moon allowed them to find their paths home in the early hours of the morning and this calendaring gave rise to the name of their group - "The Lunar Society." The members of this club happen to be seriously interesting - Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin (he had a grandson named Charles). They managed to have a jolly good time and created a "democracy of knowledge." Among other things they came up with the name hydrogen to apply to something Priestly was working on, created bizarre inventions and schemes. If you have the slightest interest in the history of technology find a copy of "The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World" by Jenny Uglow. The book is a bit slow at times, but the great period detail makes the read enjoyable. 12:06:22 AM     Urban helicopters - the stuff of Scifi dystopias. Perhaps the fact that it is being developed in Israel is a clue. http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Articles%5El198&enZone=technology&enVersion=0 If they can get it working, it will be very cool - that is if it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. My guess is that this will fall by the wayside though, as many people have given this a try with less than excellent results. The power to weight ratios and lift to power are awful. 12:06:03 AM     Also in the "this has been done before, but new technology may exist" category is a compressed air vehicle. It isn't clear what the efficiency is, but they seem to have done a nice piece of work if the range and performance figures hold up in a production version. It does suffer a long recharging time. That, coupled with a short range, caused people to turn from electrics to hybrids in North America (of the population that would consider either). http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_harney091902.asp?p=1 12:05:43 AM     It would seem that a certain music industry group hires people of equivalent caliber at all levels of their organization. From The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27230.html amazing if they were this stupid ... 12:05:15 AM     capsizing noun. Downsizing a workforce to the point where the company goes under. There are more than a few great new words and phrases that are on the border of popular usage. Paul MacFedries has a great tourguide http://www.wordspy.com/ Tradigital is something I've heard several times in the past week. Carcooning, barkitecture and war chalking are among the novel terms I've seen in recent emails and trips about the web. Do you have any candidates? Technical jargon is mostly absent here. For a fix of that there is always the Jargon File http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/ It has been around for years and is still worth consulting. 12:04:45 AM

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