July 2004
National Security Archive
The National Security Archive (George Washington University) was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who had obtained documentation from the U.S. government under the Freedom of Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over the past decade, the Archive has become the world's largest non governmental library of declassified documents. Located on the seventh floor of the George Washington University's Gelman Library in Washington, D.C., the Archive is designed to apply the latest in computerized indexing technology to the massive amount of material already released by the U.S. government on international affairs, make them accessible to researchers and the public, and go beyond that base to build comprehensive collections of documents on specific topics of greatest interest to scholars and the public. Below is from the Cuban Missle Crisis.
On Saturday evening, after a day of tense discussions within the "ExComm" or Executive Committee of senior advisers, President Kennedy decided on a dual strategy - a formal letter to Khrushchev accepting the implicit terms of his October 26 letter (a U.S. non-invasion pledge in exchange for the verifiable departure of Soviet nuclear missiles). coupled with private assurances to Khrushchev that the United States would speedily take out its missiles from Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding, not as an open agreement that would appear to the public, and to NATO allies, as a concession to blackmail. The U.S. president elected to transmit this sensitive message through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who met in his office at the Justice Department with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.
Happiness
Virtual Religion Index (Rutgers University) is designed to advance research in matters of religion. As a global forum that may be accessed instantaneously anywhere, the internet promises to surpass the impact of the printing press on the study of religion. It analyzes & highlights important content of religion-related websites to speed research. Hyperlinks are provided not only to homepages but to major directories & documents within. Their purpose is not to circumvent tours of worthy sites, but to cut down the time spent on surfing & sorting of gopher searches. After all if you know what source has information you can use, chances are you will visit it more often. I clicked myths in the Comparative Study of Religions and read thru the description of sites. Think Deeply interested me and from there, clicked the link to Where is Happiness?
But why is happiness so difficult to find? Is it just a natural fact that the life is hard and full of suffering, so that there's nothing we can do about it? Is it simply that, in the worlds of Dr. Johnson, 'man is not born for happiness'?
I don't believe this is true. In fact I believe the opposite: that happiness (or contentment) is human beings' most natural state. The problem simplistic though it may sound is that wešve lost our bearings, and have largely forgotten where true happiness is. It only seems so difficult to find because we're looking for it in the wrong place.
Bayer & Heroin
The German drug manufacturer Bayer sold "Heroin", a semi-synthetic morphine derivative, to dozens of countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bayer claimed the drug was an effective treatment for a variety of respiratory ailments, including bronchitis, tuberculosis, and asthma. Heroin was marketed by Bayer as "the sedative for coughs". The medical profession, far from being bothered by the drug, embraced it and even prescribed it to babies to treat colic. Bayer registered heroin (meaning 'heroic treatment' from the German word heroisch) as a trademark. Bayer halted production of heroin in 1913, after doctors finally realized the drug was highly addictive. Quite ironic, the pharmacist Heinrich Dreser, died an addict. Another page to view would be: A Brief History of Psychopharmacology.
Like aspirin, the drug that Bayer launched under the trademark Heroin in 1898 was not an original discovery. Diacetylmorphine, a white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder deriving from morphine, had been invented in 1874 by an English chemist, C R Wright.
But Dreser was the first to see its commercial potential. Scientists had been looking for some time for a non-addictive substitute for morphine, then widely used as a painkiller and in the treatment of respiratory diseases. If diacetylmorphine could be shown to be such a product, Bayer - and Dreser - would hit the jackpot.
Diacetylmorphine was first synthesised in the Bayer laboratory in 1897 - by Hoffmann, two weeks after he first synthesised ASA. The work seems to have been initiated by Dreser, who was by then aware of Wright's discovery, even though he subsequently implied that heroin was an original Bayer invention.
Origin of Bandnames
Ever wonder how a band picked their name, or reason behind the name. Listed alphabetically, some origins may be rumor or folklore.
GRATEFUL DEAD - Refers to a series of Old English folk tales with the same basic theme. A traveler enters a village and finds the villagers desecrating, or refusing to bury the body of a dead man because he died owing creditors money. The traveler pays the dead man's debts and sees to a decent burial. Later in his travels the man is saved by a mysterious event, which is credited to the dead man's grateful spirit. Hence, The Grateful Dead. The band was originally the Warlocks, and picked Grateful Dead out of a dictionary after realizing there was another band called the Warlocks.
Nature
Backyardnature.net is an impressive site in helping us find out about nature in our back yard. There are sections on Ecology, Plants, Geology, Animals, Tools, Fungi and Naming and Classifying Living Things. Not to be outdone by other outdoor sites, there is a list of 101 Nature-Oriented Things to Do this Summer. Below is from the Energy Flow in Nature page, found in the Ecology section.
Of course, animals don't keep their taken-in energy forever. Animals pass on their energy in four main ways:
- they may get eaten, as when squirrels are preyed upon by hawks, the Monarch Butterfly gets eaten by the Ash-throated Flycatcher, or when humans eat cows (perhaps in the form of hamburgers)
- they may lose some energy to parasites such as fleas or intestinal worms
- they may defecate, in so doing passing on some energy to a wide variety of organisms such as decay microorganisms and fly maggots
- they may die and decay, thus passing their bodies' stored energy to decomposition microbes, who then may either pass on the energy to nature as heat or simple compounds to be broken down further, or else they may take the energy into their own bodies
Gender Identity
A short humor page of the gender identity of ten common everyday items. Oh, wait a second - you said pickup lines.
1) Ziploc Bags -- Male, because they hold everything in but you can see right through them.
2) Copier -- Female, because once turned off, it takes a while to warm up. It's an effective reproductive device if the right buttons are pushed, but can wreak havoc if the wrong buttons are pushed.
World Languages
Ethnologue.com is a place where you can conveniently find many resources to help you with your research of the world's languages. It contains a large database of languages of the world. Here is the index of language families. Creole, for instance, is a language based in a mixture of two or more languages, it is spoken in 81 countries. 417 of the languages listed in the Ethnologue are classified as nearly extinct. They are classified in this way when "only a few elderly speakers are still living".
Visual Search Engines
Hoppa.com is one of the strangest visual search engines I have ever seen. Another is a visual music search engine; musicplasma. The music search engine IMHO is a rip off, gives no information on the artist: just links to Amazon, where you can purchase the album. I bet they are an Amazon affiliate.
Phreaking
A freak is slang for any kind of obsessive person, such as a "health-freak" or "control-frea". Phishing is the act of fraudulently obtaining, or seeking to obtain, personal information, such as electronic passwords and bank-account numbers, by using fake e-mails and/or websites (spoofing). The word is formed by substituting a "ph" for the initial letter in the verb "to fish" (fishing expedition), an imitation of the illegal pastime of the 1970s, "phreaking". This involved manipulating the electronic switchboards of phone companies (by introducing tones and clicks on the line) in order to obtain free long-distance calls. Good page on the history of phreaking.
Where It All Began
He discovered that he could dial recorded messages, and listen to all kinds of fascinating things. Often, he would happily whistle to himself as he listened to the recordings, and one day, the recording stopped abruptly as he was whistling. Ever curious, he experimented. Because he was blessed with perfect pitch, he discovered that whistling the E above middle C (a frequency of 2600 Hz) would stop the recording every time.
What the eight-year-old Engressia didn't realize was that the 2600 Hz frequency was an internal telephone company signal to take control of a trunk line, which opened up almost limitless possibilities for routing calls with no long-distance charges. Since he didn't know what was going on, Engressia actually called the phone company and asked why the recordings stopped. That was just the beginning of his love of exploring the telephone systems.
Dog Days
Ever wonder where the term "dog days of summer" came from? The phrase dates back to ancient Roman astonomers.
The brightest of the stars in Canis Major (the big dog) is Sirius, which also happens to be the brightest star in the night sky. In fact, it is so bright that the ancient Romans thought that the earth received heat from it. Look for it in the southern sky (viewed from northern latitudes) during January.
In the summer, however, Sirius, the 'dog star', rises and sets with the sun. During late July Sirius is in conjunction with the sun, and the ancients believed that its heat added to the heat of the sun, creating a stretch
of hot and sultry weather. They named this period of time, from 20 days before the conjunction to 20 days after, "dog days" after the dog star.
Cable News
Cablenewser is a good blog about whats happening in the cable news industry, a behind the seen look at the battlefield. The author is an 18 year old college student. He mainly covers Fox, CNN and MSNBC. In late July his blog became part of Mediabistro.
Dictionary Search Engine
One Look dictionary search has an interesting diversion from the norm. Every hour a computer program selects five words that get an unusually large number of searches on their site. These words tend to reflect topics that have appeared in the world news or in discussion groups across the Web. Each morning the top word is featured as the Word of the Day.
Think of this web site as a search engine for words and phrases: If you have a word for which you'd like a definition or translation, we'll quickly shuttle you to the web-based dictionaries that define or translate that word. If you don't know how to spell the word, we'll help you do that too. No word is too obscure: More than 5 million words in more than 900 online dictionaries are indexed by the OneLook® search engine.
Another cool site is Words Referenced Elsewhere. Remember the microsoft 9.0 browser add on television. When the butterfly explains the meaning of Cassandra to the expectant couple.
Cassandra
In colloquial use, a "Cassandra" is anyone who forecasts doom, but the Greek legend is more rich: Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam of Troy, who was taught the gift of prophecy by Apollo. However, when she refused his amorous advances, he cursed her by commanding that though her divinations should always be true, they would never be believed. She correctly warned her father and the Trojans about the wooden horse and the coming downfall of Troy, in vain. A true Cassandra, therefore, implies the tragic element of impotent wisdom.
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