Bookmark dump

I have built up quite a few links that I'd like to pass along.

• I've been searching with no luck for very detailed maps of Iraq, but leave it to Mike Gunderloy, master Web-explorer to come through, finding these Iraq maps at the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas. Lots of links to follow there, including lots of other sources.
• Boilerplate: History of a Victorian era robot. "Even in an age that gave birth to the automobile and aeroplane, a functioning mechanical man should have been accorded more significance."
• We hate the PATRIOT Act's LiveJournal
• Textpattern is available for download
• wood-tang a good Chicago blog I hadn't seen before.
• lispman another worthwhile Chicago blog. This town is just chuck full of damn good blogs.
• Galen Rowell's final National Geographic assignment

3_29_03 #

Weblogging

The Chicago Bloggers are moving up in the world. You can tell by the bar tabs.
And for once I'll be the first to do the attendee list from our gathering at the Drake last night, but I'm going to use the much less personal weblog titles: absenter, audiblefrequency, golublog, anchulis, angst-indent prone, bells and whistles, did you know?, fuckcorporategroceries, me3dia, picturepicture, pickhits, planetshwoop, sourbob, smellen, thurifer

3_28_03 #

Iraq Links

Learn more about Iraq

• Understanding Iraq Three key points put Iraq's history into context.

  "When you think of Iraq in the context of post-World War I colonialism, internecine conflict with Iran, and the global economy for oil, the current conflict can begin to seem painfully predictable -- even inevitable."

  This article contains some excellent links to the History of Iraq, and its place in the world economy, including the following two links.
• The Lesson of Iraq

  " Political repression in Iraq had been relatively severe. Severe enough, that is, effectively to close to the opposition all peaceful means of change and to deprive the younger generation of any overt means of giving vent to its dissatisfactions. It was the emerging middle class which was grievously conscious of this oppression; these were the people who had been most exposed to Western life and thought and upon whose technical abilities, acquired during that exposure, the old regime depended. Thus, while the government depended upon the newly educated generation for all of its schemes of economic and social betterment and indeed for all of its technical functions, from the operation of the telephone company to the weaving of cloth, yet the government was immune to the political ideas of this new generation."

  That's from The Atlantic, 1958.
• Tumultuous rule of Saddam

  "Before there was oil, there was water.
  The Fertile Crescent defined by the Tigris and Euphrates saw some of the first great advances in human civilization, from the practice of settled agriculture to the rise of the first identifiable city-states.
  Standing at the crossroads of three continents and boasting a rich lowland area, the central plains of modern Iraq have tempted countless invaders from outside over the centuries. The mountainous north and east have provided a natural safe haven for the Kurds, the largest of Iraq's many ethnic minorities, while the desert south has traditionally been dominated by seminomadic and settled tribal groups who have maintained an uneasy relationship with the central, urbanized authority."

• First Gulf War Iran vs. Iraq: 1980-1988. From the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century

  "When two of the world's leading suppliers of oil go to war, the world has to take sides, but when the war pits a corrupt dictatorship against a fanatic theocracy, it's hard to know which side to take. As a purely practical matter, however, it's best to line up with corrupt dictatorships because they're usually more willing to work a deal. During the Iran-Iraq War, the world as a whole tossed in with Iraq."

War Links

Poynter has many more links relating to covering the War Including Crittenden's Embedded Journal

The Pentagon's tactical Internet - a war too early? From the Register.

" Note that between the first Gulf war and Kosova the requirement grew from 256Kbps to 1.5Mbps, and that the target for 2010 and beyond is 25Gbps in order to achieve "network centric warfare", quite possibly with no soldiers at all needed on the ground."

Some tech info on the M1A2 Abrams, found via the previously listed Register link.

3_23_03 #

War Links

Some links relating to technology, and the war

• Satellite videophones go to war An older story, but it has a link to a video of Ashleigh Banfield demonstrating how the phone is used.
• NBC News Develops Exclusive New Technology

  "Using state of the art compression and multiplexing technology exclusive to NBC News, our correspondents throughout the Gulf region can now transmit high quality pictures to our viewers, far exceeding the performance of a typical videophone."

  Pictured is NBC's typical mobile sat truck.
• Satellite Photos of Iraq for Sale Two private satellite offer images with resolutions below a meter - sharp enough to see cars. However they're not much good if our enemy wanted to buy them - they take a week or two to deliver. Military satellites can see objects around 20 inches or smaller, but the precise resolution is classified. This is interesting:

  "The only off-limits spot on the planet isn't even inside the United States. In 1997, Congress blocked U.S. companies from photographing Israel at a resolution higher than 2 meters. "

• Digital Globe has a few Iraqi images available for download. These things are very detailed. Note that their scrolling layer script doesn't work in some browsers.
• NIMA (NAtional Imagery and Mapping Agency) has some Special Reference Maps of Baghdad and Iraq
• And of course CNN is offering some lower res images of Baghdad, Oil Fields and Presidential Palaces. (click on the Iraq tab for those images).
• CNN reporter Kevin Sites' Warblog has been suspended "First-person account of a solo journalist's life on the front lines of war." This would have been interesting, but I'm sure it would have conflicted with his job, in terms of time, resources and contractual obligations. Hopefully he'll get his journal, and his photos up at some point.

3_22_03 #

Movable Type

Last night the Chicago Bloggers came out to see Ben and Mena Trott of Movable Type fame. They had some neat ideas for applying Movable Type to non-weblog sites. We could really use trackback and an RSS aggregator, like they talked about, to aggregate everybody's comment and photos of the events. It sounds like their talk has inspired some projects around here. I'll just aggregate the old fashioned way - AKMA live blogged the event, as did Eric and Mike, Andrew has an annotated group photo, Cinnamon made Mena an MT purse. Afterwards we gathered at Nevins pub, and in lieu of my Movable Type donation, I gave them a ride back downtown to their hotel.

Here's a list of Chicago weblogger attendees Naz - AKMA - Alicia - Cinnamon - Chris - Eric - Anne - fuckcorporategroceries - Heather - alex golub - lay-c - Jim McGee - Mike - Phineas - Shylo - Eric Snowdeal - Brian Sobolak - sourbob - Stephen Riley - graham walker

(this post cross-posted on my weblogs weblog, for redundancy and to allow for comments)

3_14_03 #

3_14_03 #

Links

Some links:

• New York Songlines Detailed walking tour maps of NYC. "The Aboriginal Australians were able to navigate across their harsh and unforgiving land by memorizing and following the Songlines--an intricate series of song cycles that identified the landmarks that one needed to pass to get where one needed to go... An oral cultures uses songs as the most efficient way to remember and transmit large amounts of information; the Web is our technological society's closest equivalent." An amazing amount of knowledge is packed into this site, as well as an enormous amount of work. The sources are listed but I don't see why you'd go anywhere else.
• Propaganda Techniques "Knowledge of propaganda techniques is necessary to improve one's own propaganda and to uncover enemy PSYOP stratagems."
• The Bigha blog excellent example of how to use a blog for marketing. Some links, some light propaganda, some friendly correspondence, and a genuine love of their product and the lifestyle it's meant for. And before you say that I'm selling out by giving a plug for a reciprocal link, check out the bike they make. Lots of thought and engineering went into to this thing, and while it might be difficult to get over the eccentric factor, you got to admit that this thing has all the stuff you want on a bike - from a comfortable seat and pivoting handlebars, to electronics that control lights and signals. It even has an altimeter and a built in alarm system. It better have an alarm, since it costs more than the blue book value on my jeep.
• In other blog-marketing news the Raging Cow blogs written by fictional farm animals that are promoting a brand of 'extreme' chocolate milk are recieving some backlash. There's the usual boycotts, satires, and discussions but only AKMA could find the relation between this weakly-thought-out marketing campaign and Christian martydom.

3_11_03 #