I tried to think of something to say about this, but I decided it's the kind of thing you need to see for yourself.

It was 65 years ago today that radio listeners heard War of the Worlds. It's funny to listen to this recording in the context of today's information age. Would it be possible this kind of show to succeed today, or in the future? On one hand, I think it wouldn't work because we have so many media sources that it would be extremely difficult to pull off without a huge coordinated effort. But who knows? It might be fun to re-record a modern version of War of the Worlds in normal speaking voices, and try to broadcast it across the country or even just within a large metropolitan area. Now that I think about it, I could see somebody taking over a local radio station and broadcasting some crazy story. You're bound to trick at least part of the audience.

This site has various recorded versions of the original broadcast of the show, including this link to a RealAudio stream. Check it out, it's an hour long. The academic description of the "heat ray" is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

What would be your last wish if you were to die tomorrow? I don't know what mine would be, but I guess this lady had already given it some thought when her time was up. The following is taken from this notice:

Word has been received that Gertrude M. Jones, 81, passed away on August 25, 2003, under the loving care of the nursing aides of Heritage Manor of Mandeville, Louisiana. She was a native of Lebanon, KY. She was a retired Vice President of Georgia International Life Insurance Company of Atlanta, GA. Her husband, Warren K. Jones predeceased her. Two daughters survive her: Dawn Hunt and her live-in boyfriend, Roland, of Mandeville, LA; and Melba Kovalak and her husband, Drew Kovalak, of Woodbury, MN. Three sisters, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren, also survive her. Funeral services were held in Louisville, KY. Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office.

Click for a larger picture

After test driving an Elise 111s this morning, I can easily understand why most people go from test-drive to placing an order immediately afterward. Even though I only took it for a quick spin, its nimble and quick behavior was immediately apparent. The Elise felt like it wanted to go fast, and both the engine and steering were amazingly responsive. At $40,000, I could see myself owning one (in yellow, thank you very much), but the wait lists are growing longer every day and the U.S. version isn't even available yet (it's on target for May '04 release).

Andrew and Neil at Autostrada told me they're slated to get 50 Elises during the first year (May '04 to May '05), and 37 of those are already spoken for. It probably won't be more than a matter of weeks before would-be owners here in Austin put downpayments on the last of those 50. Previous versions of the Elise have won just about every award possible, and the upcoming U.S. version is expected to be even better (and it will have a bigger engine, too).

Check out Lotus for more info on the Elise.

Even though they're not the first to do it, a group of 13 students from Middlebury College in Vermont took to the road in May 2003 driving a school bus that was powered by used vegetable oil. Their trip? Drive across the country, from Vermont to Washington state. Gas stations? Try stopping at cafeterias and fast-food joints to collect their discarded cooking oil. Smell? One of the students said, "it smells a little bit like whatever it was used to fry -- sometimes you get onion rings, french fries, chicken patties".

In the late 1990s, activist Joshua Tickell drove all around the country racking up 25,000 miles on his Veggie Van USA tours. Joshua Tickell wrote a book "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as Alternative Fuel", and it helps illustrate the inner-workings of a biodiesel engine.

Future impact? In 2001, the John Deere Company approved the user of biodiesel in all of its diesel-powered equipment. With the threat of petroleum sources running dry in the near future, perhaps other vehicles might crop up. Used vegetable oil isn't anything other than waste, so finding a way to re-use it seems like a great idea (especially in fast-food crazy America).

Related links:

• Project Bio Bus website
  
• a brief write-up at Middlebury's website
  
• CNN article
  

One of the largest known solar flares erupted from the sun on Tuesday, producing a storm of superheated gas that's predicted to hit Earth by mid-day Wednesday.

Solar flares are categorized on in three categories, with X being the strongest. Within each category, there's a number (from 1 to 20) that describes the intensity.

If I understand this correctly, the numeric portion is measured like the Richter scale that measures earthquake activity. For earthquakes, a magnitude 4.0 is 10 times more powerful than a magnitude 3.0 quake. And a 5.0 is 10 times more powerful than a 4.0. With a solar flare, the X17 that just occurred is way up there on the top of the scale, especially given that X20 is as high as we measure and the only outbursts that were more powerful than the X17 (in recorded history) were two X20's. Additionally, the recent solar burst happened to be directed straight at Earth, which is something that has not happened in the past.

Consequences? Probably nothing devastating, but communications systems might go down for a while and various electronic systems might freak out. Obviously those kinds of things could indirectly cause devastating results (for instance, if hospital equipment were to malfunction), but those kinds of cases will likely be isolated and certainly nothing really crazy like people melting if they look at the sun during the solar storm.

I found this cool story about the solar storm of 1859, apparently the oldest solar storm we have on record.

General info from this article, and more specifics from spaceweather.com's main site or their page about solar radiation storms.

Southern California is burning to the ground. So far, news sites are reporting 13 people dead, 700 homes destroyed, and more than 300,000 acres burnt to a crisp. There are more than 8,000 firefighters working to contain "the worst fires we've faced in California in 10 years", according to Gov. Gray Davis. Hopefully things will calm down soon and people's lives can return to normalcy again.

While this blog has been pretty much ignored by any spambots, the latest craze in junk propagation is the auto-spamming of comments in public blogs. This article, seven quick tips for a spam-free blog, describes some interesting tactics for minimizing unwanted spambot blog posts. The tips are Movable Type-centric, and you can safely ignore tip #7 unless you work for Six Apart (the company that produces Movable Type).

Here's my summary:

1. Rename your comment script from "mt-comments.cgi" to something else
   
2. Don't link to the comments script from your front page
   
3. Include multiple decoy html forms and make them hidden so they won't distract web users but might confuse a spambot
   
4. Require a hidden variable for the comment script
   
5. Require the user to "Preview" each comment before posting, that way a spambot will be less likely to succeed
   
6. Include a "Delete this link" in your notification email, so that you can quickly eradicate any slime that slips past your defenses
   

My own solution? Disable comments altogether. Let's see you spamming bastards get past that one!

I have heard that The Italian Job was a good movie that shouldn't be missed, but it's taken us several months to finally get around to watching it. You never really know how a movie endorsement is going to turn out (don't even get me started on what a bad movie The Crying Game was, made all the more shocking by the number of people who said it was a good movie...).

Back to the present. The Italian Job is a fun, fast-paced action/crime movie that's pretty darn entertaining to watch. So entertaining that we ended up watching it several times before returning it to the video store.

The original version from 1969 is supposedly a decent film, though one reviewer said it wasn't as good as the 2003 remake. Could be fun to watch Michael Caine and Benny Hill as younger guys.

Dateline has this interview with the mother of the alleged D.C. sniper, Lee Malvo. Her English isn't great (she's from Jamaica), but she offers some info about her son and how things turned out the way they did. Includes a few excerpts from letters written to her by her son while in prison. An interesting read if you followed the D.C. sniper events last year.

The future of energy, the end of the Oil Age

Just saw this movie tonight, and overall I think it's great. Summary: good, clean fun for the whole family. Kids have been positive on the movie, adults have been positive about it, and most importantly folks who weren't previously fans of Jack Black's genius have come away happy. School of Rock appears to have become one of those oddball Hollywood films that's left most critics satisfied. Joan Cusack puts in a great performance, too.

If you've got nothing better to do, go check out a series of totally odd shorts at Pleix films. This type of thing highlights the weirdness of what's available on the internet.

The University of Quebec study found that off-the-shelf video games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament created a suitable simulation for various phobia scenarios (arachnophobia, acrophobia), while maintaining a safe environment that produced the mid-range levels of anxiety that are most useful in therapy.

Regular, off-the-shelf computer video games are an effective method of treating people's fears, using a style of therapy that exposes people to what scares them in a controlled setting, according to a new study released on Friday. -- full article

Today's news of the weird: a 10-year-old boy finds a two-headed snake and names it Mary-Kate and Ashley

applematters has this interview with Herbie Hancock.

A few highlights from the inteview...

He calls himself "a techno geek", says, "I can't go anyplace without my computer". He also says, "I always take my PowerBook so everything is there... and I can do more things than just listen to music. I have everything on there."

Another neat detail - during the Future to Future tour, they had two PowerBooks on stage that ran the iTunes visualizations during the show. He says, "We were using the [iTunes visualization] graphics because it seems to respond to the music and it's fascinating to play, and you have this graphic thing automatically, and you don't have to do anything. It's in sync with what is happening with the music, and it looks beautiful." Pretty cool.

They've been around for several years, but they are no more. Groovetech didn't make any announcement or attempt to communicate what was about to happen, they just pulled the plug on everything - no more website, no answering the phone, no orders shipped for customers (or refunds). From various posts I've read it seems they went out of business sometime in the month of September. And I only found that out after Google told me what happened to groovetech. I guess the streams of Jesse Rose, Mark Shade, and Colin Dale that I ripped are keepers now.

"At first glance, this new girl on the block doesn't give Barbie much of a run for her money. After all, Barbie is everything Razanne is not -- curvaceous, flashy and loaded with sex appeal.

But that's exactly why many Muslim Americans prefer Razanne, with her long-sleeved dresses, head scarf and, by her creator Ammar Saadeh's own admission, a not-so-buxom bustline." full article

How long until we see dolls for all other social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds? On one hand, this seems like a good idea as it appeals to young Muslim girls living in the United States. But on the other hand, it contributes to further separation and division between social groups, and discourages social blending. For the case of Muslim dolls, it's really not too big of a deal one way or the other. But I hope this doesn't set a precedent that every culture represented within this country needs or deserves equal representation (beyond toys), because that could really get out of hand in a silly way.

Please don't be upset, baby. Although I don't know what made you mad, rest assured that I didn't mean it. Smoove would never hurt you. Was it my words? My words should only be used to describe your beauty and to express the deep feelings that I have for you. If some of my words somehow went astray and hurt you, please accept my apologies. Was it one of my actions? Was it when I lit a fire in the fireplace after you said you were chilly? Maybe instead, you wanted Smoove to wrap you in a blanket and hold you close. Perhaps you were upset by the sliced fruit that I brought to you. I brought you those slices of fruit because I thought that you might be hungry. If those fruit slices were not fresh enough, I will go to the 24-hour supermarket all the way on the other side of town and hand-select the store's ripest kiwi, in hopes that you will find it acceptable. If you don't like kiwi, I will seek out a farmers market and purchase fresh fruits of the finest local varieties. full article

It's too bad that teachers in the United States can't rough up the students like they can in other countries. Sure, it would stink to be thrown out of a window, but you can be damn sure that none of the other kids are gonna misbehave!

RABAT, Morocco -- Two Moroccan schoolboys were injured Monday when their teacher threw them out of a first floor classroom window for being too noisy, an Education Ministry official said. full article

A Tenacious D DVD is on the way, for which Black notes, "I'm [also] proud of the menus. ... Nowadays, if your menus don't kick [butt], then you are lame." full interview with Jack Black

Not only is School of Rock in theaters, but there's a Tenacious D movie in the works, and apparently a separate D dvd on the way.

This is both a good and bad reflection on American life. On one hand, the reality is that the majority of people in this country are either overweight or obese (the other way to look at it is that you're in the minority if you're skinny). Does anybody really care? Apparently less than 1/3 of us think it's really a problem. So this article is interesting, because it's the first thing I've seen that actually embraces and accepts this country's trend in gaining weight. The entire article appears below, and is copied directly from a Reuters article.

Catering to Obese Becoming Big Business

Fast-food chains may be introducing more healthful menu items such as salads and major food manufacturers may be trimming portion sizes, but not everyone has joined the fight against obesity.

An increasing number of entrepreneurs have discovered there's big money to be made out of catering to Americans' bulging waistlines -- without seeking to trim them down.

It's big business.

Continue reading "Catering to Obese"

Caption from the article titled "Man sentenced for selling body parts":

"A crematorium owner who removed heads, knees, spines and other parts from dozens of bodies and sold them to medical researchers was sentenced to 20 years in prison." full article

I think the title pretty much sums this one up. Yuck.

I'm about as much of an Adam Sandler fan as one could be, and a movie featuring Sandler alongside Jack Nicholson, John Turturro, and Woody Harrelson can't be bad, right? Wrong. Anger Management should have been named This Movie Is Idiotic.

I found this article from July 2003 announcing free wireless access throughout downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The whole goal is to lure more folks to hang out downtown.

The city of St. Louis is setting up what could be the nation's largest, free, wireless Internet network in hopes of drawing techno-savvy businesses, tourists and residents to the downtown business district. The city has teamed up with a local company, O2Connect, to offer the service in a 42-square-block area. full article

There's a similar effort in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tourists and residents with laptop computers and hand-held digital organizers will be able to receive free wireless Internet access in a limited area along the [Baltimore Harbor] waterfront as part of a new service provided by the city. full article

I'm curious to see how well this will do, because my guess is that usage will spike in the beginning and then drop off sharply soon after. I think it's one of those things that sounds ultra-neato until you actually try it a few times and realize that it's more hassle than it's worth.