On a serious note…

Craig has some links and facts about the death penalty today. It’s also being discussed in this MetaFilter thread.

Even more Blog You

They have now reviewed The Curmudgeon (John), dangerous meta (Garret), Blivet (Hal), Duncan’s Jotter (Duncan) and I really must insist you leave (PattiAnn) as well. (And none of the anchor links seem to work… sigh!)

Heh, they didn’t even realize that Duncan uses Conversant to maintain his blog. To them, anything that looks similar to some Manila blogs, is a Manila blog.

All in all, it seems to me that Tom puts much more work into his reviews than Ed. He can spell better than Ed, seems to be able to click his way around one site more easily, and tends to give a higher rating.

For additional comments, check out the discussion group (for today and tomorrow).

Wie die Zeit vergeht…

Fühlen Sie sich alt? Da kann ich nur sagen: Ja! Ich kenne noch Raider und Treets, und Eis gab’s früher für 50 Pf die Kugel. Allerdings muß ich zugeben, daß ich mich kaum an die Zeit vor Kanzler Kohl und Papst Johannes Paul II erinnern kann… also ist’s vielleicht doch nicht sooo schlimm.

Link via Bastian.

Academy Awards Nominations

Besides Tiger & Dragon, I’ve seen three of the films that have been nominated: Julia Roberts, nominated as best leading actress in ‘Erin Brockovich’, which has also been nominated for directing, best picture and writing (original); ‘Oh Brother, where Art Thou’, nominated for cinematograpy and writing (adapted); and ‘Space Cowboys’, nominated for sound editing.

Kino

André and I went to the cinema tonight and watched Wo hu zang long, better known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or just Tiger & Dragon in German(y).

We really enjoyed the film. The story is excellent, the fighting scenes are breathtaking, and the old Chinese clothes and buildings are interesting. We just kept wondering whether large parts of the landscape shootings were done in Death Valley…

I especially liked the scenes in which the main characters seem to run up walls, fly over roofs and through forests, or walk on water. Those reminded me of dreams I had in which I could fly or walk on water. The feeling was just right!

And by the way, Tiger & Dragon has been nominated for the Oscar in ten categories: art direction, cinematography, costume design, directing, film editing, foreign language film, music (score), music (song), best picture, and writing (adapted).

Across Antarctica

Have you been following the Bancroft Arnesen Expedition? Well, the two women made it across the whole continent. They are now on the Ross ice shelf and have only some 800 km left, I think. Read their latest updates here or look at a map of Antarctica to see where they are.

Community News

Hey, Garret started an image gallery!

It seems everyone is going ego-surfing for his/her first name: Duncan, John, aka The Curmudgeon, Al… Anyone else?

Flatrate?

Heise Newsticker: Flatrate von T-Online möglicherweise vor dem Aus. Was? Möglicherweise wird die Flatrate für ISDN eingstellt, die für DSL aber nicht.

Klasse. Wenn’s nach André und mir ginge, hätten wir längst DSL statt der ISDN-Flatrate, aber die Telekomiker kommen mit der Technik nicht nach. Das wird ja immer schöner, wenn der Benutzer jetzt teuer bezahlen soll, daß die Telekom mit DSL-Anschlüssen nicht nachkommen!

Link via Bastian.

Blog you

This morning I received an email from Edward Champion, informing me that my weblog has been reviewed at Blog you. You can find it at http://www.edrants.com/_blogyou/a.html#andrea, but the anchor doesn’t seem to work, so you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page. And they got the name wrong and write about “Andrea’s World”.

Update: They corrected the name. Thanks!

The best part? Tom writes: “Andrea is bilingual […] I’m barely lingual.”

Other than that, there’s not much to say about the review, we have talked about this a couple of days ago.

However, I have a few things to say about their design. They criticize the “drastic limitations of Manila”, but don’t really seem to know a thing about Manila. I don’t know whether they use any software to build their pages, but something seems to keep their anchor links from working, for example on the index page of Blog You. And on that page, the whole text is a link to the page itself. Does that make sense?

And have you noted that many headlines appear at the end of the last line of the previous paragraph, for example here?

Human genome

Sheila has three links to interesting human genome articles today. Recommended!

Science helps to retreive classic literature

Independent: Digital device reads wealthy Roman’s library of ‘lost’ classics.

“Hundreds of long-lost works of ancient Greek and Latin philosophy, science and literature – possibly including works by Aristotle, Archimedes and Seneca – are about to be rediscovered in what promises to be the most important re-emergence of classical literature and thought since the Renaissance.

American scientists have succeeded in developing a remarkable new high-tech system for reading previously illegible manuscripts. Using digital technology, academics from Brigham Young University near Salt Lake City, Utah, will ‘remaster’ the lost wisdom of the ancients. Classical scholars believe the technology will open up the world’s greatest surviving ancient works which have been illegible because of their poor state of preservation.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Google searches

I’m famous. Duncan says so.

Well, Duncan did a Google search for Andrea, and my site is the #2 hit. But when you search for Frick, I’m not even in the first 100 hits. Well, at least I’m the number one Andrea Frick. Okay, enough ego-surfing for today…

Astronomy

Heavens above is a site that provides info for observing satelites, Mir, the ISS, the Space Shuttle, and “a wealth of other spaceflight and astronomical information”. You can even get maps according to your location and local time!

I think I’ll go ISS and satellite watching tonight…

Geography and more

“In February 2000, the SRTM radar system flew onboard Space Shuttle Endeavour and gathered topographic data over approximately 80% of the land surfaces of the Earth, creating the first-ever near-global data set of land elevations.” Read about it at the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission‘s site (mission). The SRTM measured the elevation every 30 metres and to an accuarcy of about 6 metres. Pretty impressive.

More info can be obtained at the SRTM Update of the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) (Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum).

Links via c’t.

In der aktuellen Ausgabe der c’t (4/2001) gibt es dazu einen ganzen Artikel (Report: Erdvermessung – 3D global; Seite 102 ff), der wirklich sehr lesenswert ist. Leider ist er nicht online verfügbar.

Art? Cool!

“An alternative browsing experience”: See Andrea’s Weblog shreddered. – Go and shredder your own site at Potatoland’s Shredder. Or read about the Shredder here.

Link via Familie Berg.

Community News

“Good stuff coming” at Oliver’s site! A new design and maybe a move to his own server… Maybe he’ll be able to “find a more positive spin on things”, too? Would be nice. Oliver, I’m looking forward to the Far side of my mind‘s rebirth!

More reading

Read the first chapter of The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan.

Link via WannaWrite?.

Reading

Helena describes how she reads books:

“I usually have at least two books on the go, where one of them is the slow read, and the other one is the one that I read straight through. That way I finish about three books before I finish the slow reading book. Oh well, I guess that’s my style.”

That’s exactly what I do. At the moment, I’m reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. That’s the slow one, I started it a few months ago, I think. In the meantime, I’ve read Harry Potter parts three and four, a few other books and now Die glücklichen Inseln Ozeaniens by Paul Theroux, which I will be finishing soon. I wonder how long The Design of Everyday Things is going to last…

Mathematik

Da hat der Schockwellenreiter mal wieder eine schöne Site für mich aufgetan: Polyhedra. Eine mathematische Unterweisung in die fünf platonischen Körper, pardon, in die “fünf regulirten Cörper”, aus dem Jahre Anno, M. D. LXVIII.

Sowas kommt mir doch für meine Examensarbeit gerade recht! Schöne alte Kupferstiche…

Typographie

Nach dem Motto: Gut, daß wir veglichen haben… Hier ist ein Artikel, der die Schriftgrößen bei Internet Explorer und Netscape sowie unter Windows und MacOS vergleicht: Schriftvergleich Mac/PC

Fazit: Die Schriftgrößen stimmen am besten überein, wenn man sie in px angibt.

Gleich nebenan gibt’s noch ein paar Infos zu Cascading Style Sheets.

Link zu upuauet.com via BookLog.

Physics

Physics today online: Feature – Wolfgang Pauli. “Max Born thought that Pauli was, perhaps, an even greater scientist than Einstein. ‘But he was a completely different type of man,’ wrote Born, ‘who, in my eyes, did not attain Einstein’s greatness.'”

Link via MetaFilter.

The Internet Age

Cool comic over at Bluepixel yesterday: “No, you weren’t downloaded…”

Family of five

Oh happy day! The day before yesterday, Elijah Hunt Donellan was born! Congratulations, Wendy and Mike – and Syndi and Harry, too!

English – German

Yesterday’s Birthday Boy Scott had two links to English-German dictionaries on the web: Leo – Link everything onine and the German-English dictionary of the TU Chemnitz. Useful.

Weblog rating

Update to yesterday’s entry: Duncan, another fan of View From The Heart, chimes in:

“Al, don’t take the criticism to heart. […] The world’s a better place because of you. I don’t think I could say the same thing about these so-called critics.”

Weblogs

Blog You wrote about Al’s weblog. Like the Curmudgeon, I say he deserves a much better rating! Wise words from John:

“It makes you wonder whether traditional criticism makes sense for weblogs. They shouldn’t be judged in isolation, as one would judge a magazine or TV show. It’s important how they add to the total fabric of the web, especially the local community of weblogs they’re part of.”

Al, you don’t get any ‘Donalds’ from me, you get these:

– That’s five out of five.

Garret has some thoughts about criticising weblogs as well, and he sums it up like this:

“so ignore the critics, and blog away my friend. your particular audience is listening.”

I think it doesn’t make sense for weblogs to be rated or criticised by people who don’t read the weblog regularly. You can’t base your judgement on briefly reading the current homepage, as Blog You obviously do. The only opinions I would consider to be significant are the ones of the faithful readers. And if you have many of them, and they’re all nice people, that says a lot more about the quality of your blog than anything else.

Big brother is watching you

Especially on the internet. Today I found How to surf anonymously.

Link via Netdyslexia.

LaTeX

Note to self: Here is a page with instructions on how to make PDF files with OzTeX:

PdfTeX for OzTeX 4.0.

Birthday!

Today, Scott turns 39 years old. Happy Birthday, Scott! Have a great day!

Oh, and I hope your other birthday presents are better than the one you got yesterday!