Ancient Writing Links China and MesoamericaMany symbols from Mesoamerica's Olmec culture resemble Shang dynasty characters. This may be evidence of an encounter between the two peoples.

The Chinese may have arrived in the New World more than 3,000 years ago, argues Professor Mike Xu, who has spent the past five years studying similarities between Chinese characters and symbols from an ancient Mesoamerican culture known as the Olmec. The symbols for Temple; Building, Mound; Grave; Hillock, and Container are among those that are uncannily similar between the two cultures.

The 1999 Darwin Awards

In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards celebrate evolution in action by commemorating the remains of individuals who most contributed to the improvement of our gene pool. Winners minimized their own genetic contribution by suffering idiotic and fatal misadventures, thereby dousing our gene pool with chlorine.

Microworlds - Exploring the Structure of Materials MicroWorlds is an interactive tour of current research in the materials sciences at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. It's intended for science education in grades 9-12. Read about the Advanced Light Source, an X-ray machine the size of a soccer field!

Virtual Friends from Haptek are really interesting - the next step beyond animated web greeting cards. They feature three D talking heads. A small download for your browser is all that's required.

kdem is a program for displaying United States Geological Survey (USGS) Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) in the KDE.

From TBTF

What comes after 99? In New Zealand, the Aukland International Airport's Web site posted a news flash after local midnight to assure everyone that the airport was open and operating normally. It is timestamped 02:58 1 Jan 100. (In case they fix it soon and you miss it, see this mirror TBTF captured.)

Hubat: The Automatic Directory Builder is now in beta test. It's organised much like Yahoo and other human intensive directories but is created and maintained automatically by software. Check it out.

DaveNet: As time goes by

Simple. A most excellent New Year wish from Dave Winer.

Recipe Finder -- Looking for that "just right" recipe for your millennium celebration. You just might find it here.

A List of Internet Accessible Machines maintained by Bennet Yee at University of Calif. San Diego. Some of the links seem to be dead and some are very slow but there's still some interesting stuff here. It's mostly webcams but there are links to robots, coke machines, model railroads and many other internet accessible devices.

ADS launches receiver small enough for human implant. "The integration of humans and computers has moved on with Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) transceiver that is small enough to be implanted into the human body." Maybe I shouldn't have watched "Enemy of The State" but I don't think this "tracker" is such a good idea. They call it a "digital angel". I can think of other less complimentary things to call it. Here are some more contrarian views on this technology.

Fezbox is a site that allows you to make custom install disks for Redhat 6.0 so all you have to do is just pop the boot disk in, kick back and it will install everything for you. I haven't tried this yet, but I expect to soon.

Science News of the Year, Science News Online. There are some interesting picks here. The main drawback is that not all of the articles are available online. Oh well, there's always the brick-and-mortar library &;^)

Trying to E-Right a Wrong Many book editors have become agents, but Richard Curtis will become the first agent who not only represents authors, but also publishes their out-of-print titles online. E-Rights.com will revive out-of-print books in electronic form. Its sister site, E-Reads.com, will be a consumer destination for these titles.

The Advertising Graveyard: Real Ads That Almost Ran There's some interesting stuff here. Some of these ads look pretty good. Then again, some of them... look for yourself.