This could be
interesting: Fatbrain says they'll let anyone at all
publish
electronically through their Web site--and they offer a 50 percent
royalty. They assure would-be publishers that the buyer won't be
able to read the files on a new computer without paying for another
copy, but if I can't print them, I won't want anything long, and
if I can print, I can print ten copies as easily as one.
This looks like a fine way to distribute technical material, poetry, and such, but it's not likely to replace standard distribution for mass-market paperbacks, and I suspect few people will want to pay the minimum $2.00 price for a short story or single poem. On the other hand, if you can't find a publisher for that anthology, this might be the way to go. Like many another site, they say they're all in favor of free speech, but add that they won't accept "pornographic" material; it will be interesting to see what that turns out to mean. (On the other hand, since porn is one of the few things people will already pay for online, those vendors may not feel a need to go to Fatbrain.)
Play is
important for children's development: they learn more than it looks
like, including crucial social skills.
A too-early focus on academics
and organized sports, promoted by well-meaning parents and
schools, may actually harm them in the long run.
Bruce
Pfaffenberger on the threat of
dubious
software patents.
An account of
a
correspondence
with the Unabomber. This five-part article reveals as much about
its author as about Kaczynski, intentionally so: one theme is
the author's dealings with the publishing world.
He also combines a look at someone who
a lot of people were fascinated by a few years ago with some
thoughts on the appeal of historical artifacts, however trivial.
[updated 2 September 1999]
Upgrade
your sense of humor courtesy of Stephen Poole's
Y2K page.
A nice
article on the possibility that several planets in our solar
system, especially Neptune and Pluto,
formed
in very different orbits than they're in now. The distribution
of Kuiper Belt objects, in particular, points to changes in Neptune's
orbit, in which Neptune and these minor planets affected each other's
orbits.
A BBC
documentary claims that
the
first Americans were Australian. Specifically, that
descendants of Australian aborigines were living in Brazil
50,000 years ago, possibly after a boat went astray, and that their
only surviving descendants are in Tierra del Fuego. The evidence
includes cave paintings and fossil skulls.
A newly discovered
slow, faint
pulsar is a challenge to current theories of how pulsars work.
Molly Ivins
points out that the real question about George W. Bush and
cocaine is
what
did Bush learn from his youthful "mistakes"?
It looks like
alien hardware floating near a gas giant planet; it's actually a
tetanus
toxin protein from Paul Emsley's
protein crystal
slideshow.
An
explanation of
swan upping,
including history, ceremony, and swan conservation, is part of
the official Web site of the British monarchy.
Oddly,
survivors of plane crashes are mentally healthier than
frequent fliers who have not been in crashes.
Interactive public art:
Cow
pies on parade is a playful supplement to Chicago's
Cows on Parade.
The
Antarctic
circumpolar wave may be as major an influence on Southern
Hemisphere climate as El Niño. The size of Australia and
600 meters deep, the wave
circles Antarctica endlessly, taking about nine years for one
rotation, and its temperature changes affect
the amount of rain over a very large area. [I had linked this to a
Reuters story on Yahoo!, which as vanished; I hope this CSIRO page is
more durable. --VR, 8/25/99]
A BBC site on
how
to beat the clock explains why "Whoever said time
is money didn't understand either."
Most of the research on how estrogen-mimic chemicals in the
environment affect animals may be
flawed:
the mice most commonly used in the research turn out to be far less
sensitive to the chemicals than most other mice, and probably than
humans and most wild animals.
Alien Abductions,
Inc., won't actually carry you off in a UFO--but they offer
to implant appropriate memories, for those of you who are tired
of waiting for that spaceship. They also sell t-shirts.
Some really nice
pictures of
last week's total solar eclipse. The accompanying text is in
Polish, but I think includes some discussion of the film used.
Do click on the thumbnails for the full effect.
A White House
proposal to
revive
the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico by restoring wetlands and
reducing fertilizer use on Midwestern farms is drawing predictable
opposition from the American Farm Bureau, which claims that the
precise relation between nitrogen runoff and the dead zone is
unclear.
Dan is right:
myCNN
sucks. It's a shame: they took a perfectly decent
Web site, and jazzed it up into annoying uselessness.
A digital
sky survey has found a
mystery
object with an unusual and so-far-unexplained spectrum.
It's not a star or a galaxy, and we have no idea how far away
it is. If it's a quasar, it's an odd one.
Infants may
not consciously remember pain, but they do suffer, and it does
affect them later. In particular,
pain
experienced by newborns affects their reaction to vaccinations
months later, and to other pain at the age of 18 months.
The Ontario
government has
created
the world's first sky preserve. The Torrance Barrens
Conservation Reserve is 2000 hectares of flat bedrock with few
plants, providing good sightlines almost to the horizon, in
a relatively undeveloped--that is, dark--area of southern Ontario.
Astronomers who worry about light pollution are pleased.
[This isn't a great link, since it will probably expire in a
couple of weeks, but the only other story I could find on the
subject has already expired. If anyone has a better pointer,
please let me know.]
Healthy tadpoles
avoid
sick tadpoles when kept in the same container.
This is contrary to standard epidemiology, which
has assumed that animals interact equally with infected and
uninfected members of their own species.
If other species behave similarly, most
of our theories about how diseases spread are over-simplified.
How to
irrigate
with sea water, without paying for an expensive desalination
plant: run cold seawater through pipes, and
enough fresh water condenses on the outside to support crops.
A similar trick can be used for air conditioning.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.
