ZDNet: News: Government asks hackers for Y2K break,

I got this link from Mike's Weblog. Mike says it so right, "Brought to you by the Committee for Surrealism in Everyday Life: according to ZDNet, the chairman of the President's Council on Y2K has asked all the hackers everywhere to not break into anything during the January 1 confusion, but to wait a week till everything is all better. I assume that in the same vein the FBI will be asking bank robbers to please not rob any banks between January 1st and 7th, and that the CIA will be quietly contacting terrorist leaders around the world and suggesting they not set off any bombs while we're busy with the date rollover. Is it just me, or is this sort of thing actually an ENCOURAGEMENT to do all your hacking January 1?"

This is one I intend to look deeper into. Mercator helps you create "mind maps". Mind maps are based on visual learning and are meant help you organize your ideas, tasks and activities. Mercator is free alpha software but there are also several links to mind mapping software for sale.

I've always been interesetd in cryptography and here´s a new book on the history of cryptography that is getting very good reviews. It has warfare, politics, and royal intrigue. And at the back of the book is the Cipher Challenge -- $15,000 goes to the first person to crack the code.

Here´s an another one from Mike´s Weblog. A comprehensive index of 6000 artists represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources. The Artcyclopedia. You can search by artist, movement, medium, subject and nationality. They also have a monthly Top 30 list.

Here´s an awsome one from Mike´s Weblog. A java applet that demonstrates various juggling techniques. You can really waste a lot of time studying or just admiring the the many juggling tricks the applet can simulate and animate.

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I'm reading a really, really good book right now called Cryptonomicon. Here's what the author, Neal Stephenson, has to say about it:

"Cryptonomicon" is a book about many things -- World War II, the Philippines, venture capital and the high-tech economy, to pick just a few -- but the axis around which everything revolves is precisely that issue of how important science and technology have been -- as viewed from "the end of a century like this one." The novel's journey back in time follows directly, Stephenson says, from his ruminations about the future.

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Hey Noah! I'll probably pass on this one. Cool cover art though.

Killer tornadoes. Violent tropical storms. Devastating temperatures.Are these just the prelude to an unprecedented environmental disaster in our near future? It will begin with a massive, unprecedented storm that will devastate the Northern Hemisphere. This will be followed by floods unlike anything ever seen before -- or perhaps a new Ice Age.

Scientists have made a pair of tweezers capable of picking up objects just 500 nanometers (billionths of a meter) across. The achievement is being hailed as another milestone in the fast-developing field of nanotechnology in which researchers manipulate matter at the scale of individual atoms and molecules. The nanotweezers could become an important part of the toolkit that one day allows us to create a host of molecular-scale devices with extremely miniaturised electronic circuitry.

Now from Muppetlabs we have an interesting essay on Albert Einstein´s Theory of Relativity. Don´t run off screaming, "I can´t understand that weird stuff". You see, this is the Theory of Relativity explained using words of four letters or less.

TechnoSphere is a 3D model world inhabited by artificial lifeforms created by WWW users. There are thousands of creatures in the world all competing to survive. They eat, fight, mate and create offspring which evolve and adapt to their environment. When you make a creature it will email you to let you know what it has been getting up to in its world. Using the creature tools you can find out how your creature is surviving, what it is doing at any time, and where it is in the terrain.

Use the creature tools to make your own artificial lifeform for free and take part in this unique simulation.

According to Space Views, "If it launches this month, STS-103 will become only the third NASA mission to be in space on Christmas Day."

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Here´s a cool one from the stuffed dog: "I happened across a great site describing the appearance and history of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which includes lots of links to related information as well as a bit of history about where the list came from and a list of forgotten and modern wonders from the Mayan temples at Tikal and the Great Wall of China to the Panama Canal and the Petronas Towers."

Have you ever thought about going on a "Hunt For Red October"? Well, this isn't it, but then again... Dive! Dive!

Or maybe I should say ïîãðóæàòü! ïîãðóæàòü!

From the "Rose by any other name..." department comes this scary little item. What's your name? Is it yours? Think again if you said yes.

Laura Walker has gotten some strange phone calls, including one from a gaming industry trade group and another from WebVan, the online grocery-delivery firm. Both wanted to know how they could benefit from XML, the Extensible Markup Language standard for data interchange that's seemingly taking the world by storm.

Here's a good one from Mike's Weblog .

"The LEWIS CARROLL Home Page You know…the guy who wrote ALICE IN WONDERLAND and all that? This page links to a vast variety of online resources, including online reprints of much of Carroll's work, bibliographies, translations of "Jabberwocky" (even into Klingon!), and a lovely centenary exhibition. I could spend a lot of cheerful hours rereading some of this. In fact, I think I'll go have a look at HUNTING OF THE SNARK right now. IN LEWIS CARROLL'S "Through the Looking Glass", Alice innocently wonders at one point whether looking-glass milk is good to drink. In fact, there is an answer to that question: looking-glass milk is best avoided. The reason is that it would contain proteins that are mirror-images of the ones normally found in the body. And although molecules and their mirror-images are chemically identical, our bodies are not used to mirror-image proteins -- making them quite indigestible."

Also from Mike, a site with all sorts of antique labels for sale. The "Alice In Wonderland" bookplate (above) and the food label at the left are miniature examples of only two of the many labels for sale. They have crate labels, cigar box labels, seed packets and more. I love maple sugar and found their maple syrup labels very interesting.