David Matchett: News File

Old news--category test

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 17:20:39 GMT

Keiko buried in secret ceremony Monday, December 15, 2003 Posted: 9:53 AM EST (1453 GMT) OSLO, Norway (AP) -- Keiko, the killer whale star of the "Free Willy" movies, was buried Monday in a snow-bound pasture during the deep darkness of Nordic winter in a ceremony kept secret from the public. "We wanted to let him be at peace," said Dane Richards, one of his caretakers. "He's free now and in the wild." The roughly six-ton whale died Friday in a Norwegian bay where his team was trying to reintroduce him to the wild. His trainers said the likely cause of death was pneumonia. Richards said the burial in a pasture just yards from where Keiko, about 26, died was done in secret to avoid a media circus. Despite the whale's size, the burial went smoothly, Richards said. Machines dug a hole near the waterline, under cover of darkness, and then slid Keiko slowly a few yards across the snow into his grave, he said. "It was beautiful. He went to the grave quietly, quickly and peacefully, just like he died," said Richards. Only seven people -- including his team and the machine operator -- were present. Keiko, which mean's "Lucky One" in Japanese, became a darling of children through his stardom in "Free Willy," a film in which a young boy befriends a captive killer whale and coaxes him to jump over a sea park wall to freedom. The fame prompted a $20 million program to free Keiko from a Mexico city aquarium where he was languishing. He was brought to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in 1996, then to Iceland, near where he was born in 1977 or 1978, for preparation for his return to the wild. When he was released in 2002, he swam 870 miles to the waterss near the village of Halsa, on Norway's west coast. He became an instant hit, with so many people swimming with him and even crawling on his back, that animal protection authorities imposed a ban on approaching him. His team coaxed him to the more remote Taknes bay, still in Halsa, where they tried to coax him into a life completely in the wild. He was free to leave the bay, and sometimes did, but appeared to prefer human company. The grave site, a lush and grassy field during the summer, was covered with snow and barely visible by daylight Monday. Normally, Norwegian fisheries authorities would order the remains of a large sea mammal towed to sea and sunk in deep water. However, they acted quickly during the weekend to give Keiko's backers, which included the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation and the Human Society of the United States, permission to bury the celebrity on land.

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 07:17:59 GMT

Another test picture.

Chris Ware is a comic strip artist who also does oil paintings.

[How to Save the World]

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 16:39:48 GMT

New "everyday neuroscience" book from author of Emergence. Steven Johnson, the guy who wrote the brilliant Emergence (a book whose lyrical description of emergent phenomena in ant-colonies inspired both my forthcoming novella Human Readable and the ants that crawl over Appeals Court, the sequel Charlie Stross and I wrote to Jury Service, which will be published as a fix-up novel by Argosy in just a couple weeks), has a new book out: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which he describes as:

...an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 07:19:28 GMT

Rolling Stone interviews Steve Jobs. [Scripting News]

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 07:57:42 GMT

On the IMAP Operating Table. You (well, some of you who bothered to comment) advised me to get off POP and switch to IMAP for receiving my mail. Ever your faithful servant, I have attempted to do so. Here is my report. I started out switching from POP to IMAP in Eudora, and creating a... [Mitch Kapor's Weblog]

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 07:51:20 GMT

Font Woes. On my 15" G4 Powerbook, editing a Word document in Times 12 requires zooming to 150% to make it legible to my demi-century plus eyes (with my cheaters âo[base "] without them nothing less than 30 point is any good). Times is a nice font for printing and 12 points is... [Mitch Kapor's Weblog]