Google Zeitgeist. A peek into search trends on Google. Not a real-time voyeur page, like Excite, Ask Jeeves, or MetaCrawler, but it has other stats to make up for it, like a breakdown of operating systems. Oh, and the #1 query last week? Jolene Blalock. A new kind of fame.

The Matwix [via MyNakada] Requires Flash. And it seems to be finicky about what browser you’re using. Opera users, set your Connection preferences to identify as MSIE 5.0.

Kottke: Now the spin and the analysis phase has set in. … I feel like I’m the last person in a giant game of telephone in which most of the participants are deliberately modifying the message so that when I actually do receive it, there’s little of the original message left. And I don’t feel like playing anymore.

OpenOffice XML FAQ. OpenOffice (of which StarOffice is a branded distribution) uses an open, fully documented, patent-free XML-based format as its native document format. An OpenOffice “document” is really a .zip file of several XML files and directories of images and other binary objects associated with the document. They even document why they chose to do it this way. My faith in technology is restored. Eventually, open standards always win. I hope this one wins too.

Text of Evidence Against bin Laden [via Scripting News] Basically, this boils down to four points:

  1. “Osama bin Laden has urged and incited his followers to kill American citizens, in the most unequivocal terms.” They hate us, so it must be them.
  2. “The attacks of 11 September 2001 are entirely consistent with the scale and sophistication of the planning which went into the attacks on the East African Embassies and the USS Cole. No warnings were given for these three attacks, just as there was none on 11 September.” they’ve attacked us before without warning, and this attack was without warning, so it must be them.
  3. “No other organization has both the motivation and the capability to carry out attacks like those of the 11 September.” We can’t think of anybody else who could have done it, so it must be them.
  4. “There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to the guilt of bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release.” We have more details that we can’t tell you.

Bottom line: the Taliban promised they would release bin Laden if we provided proof of his guilt. This was widely regarded as an empty promise, and this “evidence” is an attempt to call their bluff. They will never, of course, voluntarily turn over bin Laden, but this “evidence” will give us justification to go into Afghanistan and make the rubble bounce. I’m disappointed. If you have evidence, let’s hear it. Don’t tease us.

Salon: Poison on the mind [via BoingBoing] Historically, health officials have assumed that an [smallpox] infected person will infect roughly 15 others per day, until he or she has been isolated. If just two terrorists gave themselves smallpox and spent a day in, say, LaGuardia airport, 450 travelers could have smallpox by dinner time. Five days later, by this formula, almost 350 million could have it. And it would still be another week before anyone knew.

Go rent Outbreak if you haven’t already seen it. In the movie, an entire town gets infected with a deadly virus for which there is no known cure. The U.S. military comes in, locks down the town, locks out the media, and shoots strays on sight. When the virus mutates and goes airborne, the U.S. government decides to bomb the town into oblivion for the good of the rest of the country. The scariest part of the movie was when I realized that I wasn’t suspending disbelief: I really do believe that our government could and would do this. Of course, in the movie, Dustin Hoffman comes in at the last minute with a cure and saves the day. I don’t think we’ll be so lucky in real life.

The Onion: American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie. The collective sense of outrage, helplessness, and desperation felt by Americans is beyond comprehension. And it will be years before the full ramifications of the events of Sept. 11 become clear. But one thing is clear: No Austrian bodybuilder, gripping Uzis and striding shirtless through the debris, will save us and make it all better. Shocked and speechless, we are all still waiting for the end credits to roll. They aren’t going to.

Stephen Falken, in “War Games”: Now, children, come on over here. I’m going to tell you a bedtime story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, and they fought and they flew, until suddenly, quite recently, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren’t even apes then. We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks. And when we go, nature will start over. With the bees, probably. Nature knows when to give up, David. (Found on SciFlicks)

WebWord: Why do so many geeks juggle? Frankly, I learned to juggle in high school to meet chicks. It didn’t really work until college. Actually, it didn’t work until I moved to my second college, Earlham. And it didn’t work at all after college. Though at my last job, I kept three juggling beanbags on my desk all the time. It gave people something to do while they were standing around waiting for me to acknowledge them because I was buried in some programming problem on-screen. At that job, I did meet the woman whom I am now living with, but I don’t think it was my juggling ability that impressed her.

On the Weblogger’s User Group mailing list, we’re having a discussion about blogging etiquette.

Here’s the template I generally follow:

<article-title-as-link>. [via <source-as-link>] My-description-or-brief-quote.

If I have more extended comments, I put them in a separate paragraph (or, if I have *really* extended comments, a separate page). If the source is a weblog, I usually just link to the front page. (I realize this is laziness, but Manila encourages this, since I probably have the front page set up as a shortcut and can just do “source-name” in quotes to make it a link.) If the source site has their own [via] link, I do *not* use that instead. In other words, I never cut out the middleman. This is an important point: every part of the link+description+via template is important.

War and commentary. [I]t’s not fair or reasonable for those of us in favor of the war to shut up the opposition to it by saying they’re undermining national unity. If you’re against the war, undermining national unity is exactly what you should be doing. At another time in history — Vietnam or the Mexican-American War — some of us who are hawks now might have felt precisely the same obligation.

This reminds me of last night’s episode of “The West Wing”. If you missed it, it’s your loss. They took a break from their regular storyline (and delayed their season premiere) to have a single episode set in the present — what their fictional White House would be like if the 9-11 attacks had happened in their storyline. Complete with “crashes” (lockdowns where no one is allowed in or out of the White House — they’d been having one every few days), and the interrogation of an Arab-American White House employee who happened to have the same name as one of the aliases of a terrorist that made it onto the FBI’s radar.

The main plot device of the episode was that a group of high school students from the Presidential Classroom group (question: is this a real organization? I suppose I could ask Google, but I’m lazy) visit the White House and get stuck there during a “crash”. This gives the high school students the chance to ask the questions that everyone is asking (”Why does everyone hate us?” “Where did terrorism come from?” “What do we do now?”), and it gives the regular cast a chance to speak their mind on the many sides of these issues. One character made the analogy that the Islamic fundamentalists who were responsible for the 9-11 attack are to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity. Another made the analogy (which I’d heard before) comparing the Taliban to Hitler, and the people of Afghanistan to the people of occupied Poland.

The other salient point, which I find particularly disturbing, was during the discussion of the causes of terrorism. Certainly there are root causes, but a character noted that you don’t need to look any further than our own inner cities to find the more mundane causes. People need to belong to something, and terrorist groups give them a sense of belonging, much like (on a smaller scale) city gangs give kids who otherwise have nothing to hold onto a sense of belonging. This is particularly disturbing because it is about people, not ideology. Certainly there is some radical ideology involved (otherwise these groups of people would just go around harassing locals and killing each other, like city gangs do), but if you dig deep enough, you always find individuals. Individuals who are so lost that they need to believe in something, and latch on to a terrorist group as a way to fit in. How do you counter an individual’s choice like that? The only thing I can think of is to give them more options. I don’t see us doing that any time soon.

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