Build Date: Mon Sep 9 16:00:11 2024 UTC
I spent about three hours tonight reading the journals of the Donner Party for no real good reason, except to think, "Hey, wouldn't it suck to be in the Donner Party?"
-- Tjames Madison
New Twist on Searching for New Twist
2003-06-02 23:50:00
When was the last time some company produced a new Search Engine and you actually gave a shit?
Once I found Google, I'd pretty much given up on even LOOKING at other search engines. Why bother? When I needed to find something, Google gave me the links I was looking for right at the top of the page, no muss, no fuss.
While Google uses the links between sites to find the site most relevant to your search, KARTOO shows what those relationships ARE. It maps the "strong" links between sites and pulls them all together into an interactive Flash map. I put in friend's web site names, and lo and behold, found who their friends are, and their friends' friends. It gives you the vicarious thrill of instantly visualizing 7 degrees of web separation... I know Bob and his web site is linked to by Janet's and hers is intertwined with Frank who is highly thought of by the NRA... You can imagine the FBI using a tool like this to unpeel the relationships of a high tech mob family, or to make lists of the usual suspects for a 21st century COINTELPRO operation.
It's cool AND nefarious AND it finds stuff. It needs to be fed more data and map more links, but KARTOO kicks serious butt.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Liquidation of Hobo Junction
Albany, CA's homeless hooverville by the Bay, "Hobo Junction," is going to be torn down by The Man. Entrances are already being blocked off, and it's now difficult and dangerous to get there. Worse, these obstacles are making it hard to get to the nearby HORSE TRACK on foot. Local historian, Pao Tzu, has an overview of situation. (More...)
The Peppermill Is Not Good For You
Paradise lounge on the strip. Expense it, bad boy! (More...)
It’s election night. My wife and I are holed-up in this hotel that my political party has rented out for the evening. Outside, people are being violently beaten for whom they voted for. Is this South Africa? Perhaps we’re in Haiti or some Southern state during the 60’s. Of all the places where this sort of thing happens, it’s mind-boggling that we are in Portland, Maine. (More...)
The IBM Selectric Typewriter Changed My Life
I ran my hands lovingly across her frame, lightly brushing her metallic nipples with my fingers, admiring the shapes and the ways of her curves, the empathetic hum she produced as I had my way with her, the way she made it all seem so effortless and right... she didn't even seem to mind the way I roughly manipulated her knobs and tweaked her casing. She was extremely tolerant, for a typewriter. (More...)
Negative Nancy, touring the gin joints of the world, sent us her latest Spocktail creation, The Inattentive Beachcomber, which she concocted and field tested somewhere in South East Asia. (More...)
High Availability Guinness Stress Test
All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists. (More...)
