Mainly, They Just Waited (LA Times). This is a chilling article describing what is known (publicly) about the hijackers.

Questions for Martin E. Marty, a Scholar of Religion (New York Times Magazine) The average person doesn't understand that Catholicism and most of Protestantism and Judaism are developing faiths -- development is built into the first generation. Islam has a loyalty to every word of the Koran, but its history has unfolded in different ways in different social climates. The fundamentalist, however, says there was a moment in history when a particular book, leader and original social community was perfect, which in my opinion never existed. In the period of the early Christians, Paul and Peter are fighting like mad in Acts already. But fundamentalists teach that there was that perfect moment, and in their selective retrieval they go back to that perfect moment. They say, ''We don't change at all,'' and people say, ''Yeah, while all the other people are compromising with modernity, these people really reach deep.'' But the hymnity, the songs, the scriptural base -- it's all a very particular interpretation, and the fundamentalist convinces us that it's always been there. --Martin E. Marty

13pt | 13 Days: The World Trade Center This is one of the best photo essays I've seen.

The top ten ugliest couches *shudder*

Crypto doesn't kill--people do An excellent primer on why back-door access to encryption is a stupid idea.

Boycott- Wal-Mart We have chosen Walmart as the target of our primary call for a boycott because of the company?s unfair labor practices around the world. Not only does this chain mistreat many employees that work for them, it also sells goods made by suppliers that grossly violate the rights of their workers around the world. Despite protests and a law suit they have refused to correct these problems. I am linking to the site above in answer, in part, to the link below from the Economist. I do not necessarily agree with the editorial I cite below. They argue that no one is going to force people to buy Nike or eat at McDonald's. But I think Walmart is a perfect example. In addition to the items cited above and at the linked site, and many more (see this old, but still relevant article by Jon Katz) it is clear that this is a company that has some serious issues and is quite worthy of being boycott. Neither Ann nor I ever go to Wal-Mart and are happy to pay more rather than give any money to them. But look at how popular they are. No one is forcing anyone to shop there but most people do. Why? Because they are not aware of the issues or they do not care. And ignorance and apathy are a constant in the Universe. And it is one reason why many people see globalization as a threat rather than a benefit. I'm actually on the fence leaning towards liking the idea of globalization. And my wife is keen to point out that people's ignorance and apathy is their own problem and their own fault but I'm still not sure. Any thoughts? Drop me an email.

Is Globalisation Doomed? (The Economist) John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics and a much-quoted thinker on these matters, spoke for many last week when he declared that the era of globalisation is over. "The entire view of the world that supported the markets' faith in globalisation has melted down...Led by the United States, the world's richest states have acted on the assumption that people everywhere want to live as they do. As a result, they failed to recognise the deadly mixture of emotions - cultural resentment, the sense of injustice and a genuine rejection of western modernity - that lies behind the attacks on New York and Washington...The ideal of a universal civilisation is a recipe for unending conflict, and it is time it was given up."

Journalism 3.0 Online, I saw another kind of reporting during those awful hours and days. Via e-mails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal Web journals and non-standard news sources, I received valuable context that the major American media couldn't, or wouldn't, provide. --Dan Gillmor

Are You Smarter Than Miss America? "Sure, I'm smart," you ask yourself on a daily, even hourly basis. "But am I as smart as a beauty pageant contestant?" Well, it's time to start showing some appreciation around here, because at long last you have the chance to pit your wits against five of the most poised and shaven women in America. I feel special. I got all 8 right. Though I guessed on one of them...

Dreamsmith's Forge - Terrorism and Religion ... Interesting...

The Onion managed to do a tasteful, yet hysterical, send-up of the past two weeks.

Make it green Let students take a corner of the field and plant a crop there. Perhaps corn, our native grain. Let the harvest be shared all over the world, with friends and enemies, because that is the teaching of our religions, and we must show that we practice them. Let the harvest show that life prevails over death, and let the gifts show that we love our neighbors. --Roger Ebert

SourceForge.net Compile Farm Features Latest Version Of Apple's Mac OS X Woo hoo!

LEGO Studios Screening Room. This is truly marvelous!

Boycott Microsoft! More info about this and a call to action. As a Mac user, I am boycotting the Microsoft Windows business unit but I am a customer of their Macintosh Business unit. While it's still the same company, it's two distinct groups within it. So, am I doing the right thing by still buying Office 10? I think so because I am supporting the part that doesn't do this practice and I am one more body not buying Windows products from them and thus hurting that bottom line.

What's Wrong With Product Activation This is very scary stuff. I very much hope the Mac version of Office 10 due out in early November doesn't do this.

Census Links

Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack

Only connect The day the twin towers disappeared, ex-spouses, former crushes and old lovers reappeared in many lives. As if a voice from on high granted an across-the-board reprieve, people began dialing telephones with scarcely a thought for the consequences. (Salon.com)

Suds in Space Bubbly, frothing and ticklish -- soft drinks and beer promise a welcome taste of home to faraway space travelers.

Weblog Access A small discussion has started on Schoolblogs.com as a result of the article I wrote on Weblog Accessibility. I'm glad people are talking about these ideas. Adam Curry has an interesting idea (see discussion).

The New York Review of Books: Saving Us from Darwin

Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities: one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague...? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve.

Random observations from today

• When your team is just playing out the schedule and is losing to a team even worse than yours by an embarassing score and star players have left the game and only rookies doing early spring training are in, rather than "PEANUTS!" and "CRACKERJACKS!" being shouted by the vendors you want to hear "PROZAC!" and "ZOLOFT!"
• In front of the store Selletto on Newbury Street in Boston are these animals. They are made from that same stuff that is used in place of soil at plant stores and have leaves growing out of them. Are they chia? Are they topiary? Ann says they are faux-topiary, or fauxpiary.
• I bought a book all about Gelato. God help me.
• Once while walking down Newbury street with Mike we saw a lone woman standing on a corner shouting up to some unknown window above "Fernanda!" over and over. Mike and I observed that there's a little Fernanda in all of us.
• At an outdoor cafe, gorgeous women walk by and one of the wait staff drops some plates onto the cement with a giant clatter as motorcycles rumble by and a duck tour boat ("Quack! Quack!") follows. The fauxpiary animals do not react. They do not care.
• Even People magazine is doing a collectable issue about the tragedy. I'm just glad the cover story wasn't "Best and Worst Dressed of the World Trade Center Disaster" or "How the stars are styling their hair as war looms."
• Ann is convinced Joan Rivers and her daughter will soon have a tv special about this.

A Summer Project Completed. We finally manage to collect all six Red Sox pins celebrating the 100th birthday of the Sox.

Today is Sunday and we're going to a baseball game. We'll drop Jack off at a friend's house and then go and enjoy the simple pleasure of baseball. It is our last game of the season and the final commemorative pin of the six pins we've been collecting all season long. Today will also be our last hot dogs and cheap beer and, since we're moving away from here in a month, our last walk down Newbury Street and our last Emack & Bolio's ice cream. It will be a happy day even with all of the finality.

The Quiet Consolation of the Material World Sometime around the weekend after the tragedy we just stopped surfing, stopped watching TV, turned off the radio, and just tried to return to life. We drove out past the Arena Farmstand to their ice cream shop and got some fresh ice cream (the lines were incredibly long so we weren't the only ones thinking this!) and then we drove around the countryside for awhile.

The Sunday Times (London): Why Do They Hate America?

The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed

The Search for Intelligent Life on the Internet

Still, the incessant blending of fact and fantasy on the Web looks a lot like a venerable response to tragedy in a slightly new form, according to people who have studied the origin of rumors and urban legends. The need to arrive at a common understanding of a disaster and to forge a united front to deal with it often leads to an outpouring of theories that may or may not be true.

snowdeal.org

Scientific American: A Precursor of RNA?

Scientists generally assume that life started in an "RNA world." But because four-carbon sugars like threose can be made from two identical two-carbon units, TNA or related polymers maybe developed more easily. Thus, TNA and its relatives could have been the precursors of RNA on primitive Earth.

ResearchBuzz

( blogdex )

blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses. at current, blogdex is focused on the referential information provided by personal content, namely using the timeliness of weblogs to find important and interesting content on the web.

Apple's Silent Contribution

"Out thoughts are with those who were affected by the recent tragic events" says Apple's home page along with a link to the American Red Cross. Any statement like this from a company is usually either a show that there are really humans working there, or just a crass attempt at commercialism in disguise. In this case, there's more to the story.

David Letterman, September 17, 2001:

And it's very simple... there is only one requirement for any of us, and that is to be courageous, because courage, as you might know, defines all other human behavior. And I believe, because I've done a little of this myself, pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing.

Moo! Last night Jack picked up a stuffed cow, walked over to Ann and announced "Moo!" to her. It was quite a scene! Now his words are "Abba" (his version of "Robin," our cat, which he uses for all animals), "meow" which is exactly what you think it is, and "addah" which he says whenever he drops something. We think it might be his attempt at "All done" but we're not sure.

James (jamesonline.co.uk) is probably my favorite band (my tastes in music is so eclectic that it is often hard to pin down, but more often than not, I return to James again and again). I first discovered them after they'd been around about 10 years with their CD Laid which I first listened to on my wife's birthday in 1995 when we were first dating. I just got the import of their new CD "Pleased to Meet You" and am 4 tracks in and love it so far despite what this review says. :)

Jon Stewart's opening monologue on the return of the Daily Show yesterday

The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center and now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that.

Weblog Accessibility. This is a primer on making weblogs accessible. As I wrote yesterday, this is very important, especially since the idea behind weblogs is the sharing of information. Why would you want to restrict access to those ideas? I welcome any comments on the article so that I may improve it.

Well, that's embarassing... The most recent website that I've designed is now live. It's DisabilityDirect.gov and is the central website in the Federal Government for disability-related information. Right now, the amount of information there is somewhat limited but in the coming weeks and months it will grow to become an incredible resource. It will let people put in their zip codes and find out what resources are availble in their communities and a great deal more. In designing the site, I had to become an overnight expert on Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, spefically §1194.22 which covers the accessibility of websites. And I learned an enormous amount. I read through (in painstaking detail) the Web Access Initiative's (WAI) guidelines (the WCAG) and ran the site through every checker I could. And it checks out (though I am going to be calling one person who had trouble with the site using a JAWS browser for the visually impaired to see what he ran into and what I can fix.) So, what's so embarassing? This site. I just checked it in lynx for grins and giggles and found that none of my images use ALT tags. I do not provide a way to skip the repetetive navigation on the left (it's fine visually but imagine if you were trying t read this page in an audio reader, you'd have to sit through those links every time you reloaded your page), and the little symbols after each blog entry which indicate a way to permenantly link back to an entry are nonsense in readers. You get the idea. My site is poor in the area of accessibility and I promise to fix that as soon as I can. I also want to put out a call to other webloggers to do the same. The whole idea behind weblogging is to share ideas and start discussion (and shameless self promotion sometimes too :) and it is flat out wrong to make it so that disabled users have a hard time getting to those ideas and discussions. Now that I think of it, I'll put together a quick set of guidelines for webloggers to make their sites accessible... watch this space for more...

The Vermont Teddy Bear Company¨

...[S]end your personal message to the families of the firefighters, rescue workers and police officers who gave their lives to save others in the tragic events of September 11th.

This is one of the most wonderful things I have seen in a long time.

The Infinite Matrix.

The Infinite Matrix | Bruce Sterling | Schism Matrix Intro. Author Bruce Sterling has a weblog now. Cool!

Letterman Leads Talk Show Hosts Back on the Air

I'm working outside on the patio today because it is gorgeous outside and these birds keep swooping by. It seems like hundreds but it's probably more like 20-30. When they go by it's an amazing sound -- very powerful. Is anyone else a bit freaked when they hear a plane going overhead? I'm not scared, I'm just so not used to the sound at all! Very weird.

Designing a Networked Learning Environment - A working paper. Huh. I had no idea that I was credited with this. I was a research assistant on the project. I guess I can now add a "Published Papers" section to my resume! (I just emailed them to change my name to Affleck in the listing to match with my current alias :)

A quiet day. Oh, there's lots interesting on the net today and you will find much of it in the links down the left of this page. I'm just not feeling inspired to read much of it or to comment on it. I think I got overloaded and need to take it easy. That and today was quite a busy day which has also added to my feeling a bit burned out. So, I may start blogging tons tomorrow or I may be silent for a few days. Call it a break from last week. I know I'm not the only one who needs it.

Internet Surpasses Its Original Goal

I'm taking the rest of the day off from the News, from the Internet, from blogging, etc. It's beautiful out, we're going to brunch at Dave and Damon's house (and their dog Diva who is Jack's best friend in the world :) and then maybe we'll swing out by Walden Pond to just enjoy the day. Tonight we'll put Jack to bed and watch Band of Brothers (which is, so far, amazing). This week it will feel strange to watch it given the events but life is starting to return to normal and I'm glad for that. Anyway, it's gorgeous outside and I just need to be away from it all for a time. See you tomorrow!

The Search for Intelligent Life Online (washingtonpost.com)

Scobleizer:Don't mess with these 45 words

What is America all about, anyway? I note that our most-cherished freedoms are freedom of speech and freedom to practice whatever religion you want (or no religion at all). That's right at the top of the American Bill of Rights. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Parse those words. They are the most powerful words ever written.

Amateur Newsies Top the Pros

Brother, if you don’t mind...

As the world continues to reel from this tragedy, people in the streets are lashing out. Not far from my home, a Pakistani woman was run over on purpose as she was crossing the parking lot to put groceries in her car. Her only fault? That she had her head covered and was wearing the traditional clothing of my homeland. I am afraid for my family?s well being within our community. My older sister is too scared to take the subway into work now. My 8-year-old sister?s school is under lockdown and armed watch by police. --Usman Farman

My friend Ed Robinson wrote the following (reprinted here with permission) and it sums up so much.

Memo to Mr. Bin Laden or whoever did this: If you thought that you were going to break the spirit of my hometown, guess again. I saw something very wonderful this Friday night in New York City. I saw a Friday night in New York City. People are starting to come back out onto the streets of Manhattan again. They were gathering in bars. Going to restaurants. Not looking as zombified. Yes, the trade center is gone and the southern horizon of Manhattan still disappears in a smokey cloud around Chambers Street but I think we've begun to notice that we're still here. And we're quite a bit stronger now, Mr. Bin Laden. Today the New York Post decided to focus on human interest stories on this national day. That old bit about there being eight million stories in the naked city has never been more true. Any where you look, from a woman pushing a child wearing a dust mask in a stroller to the people on West Street waving signs that say "Thank you" as relief workers drive by, the largest city in America is wearing it's humanity on its sleeve. Aren't we all supposed to be rude? And where's the crime? Doesn't everybody realize the police department and the rest of the city government is completely overextended? My assignment was to cover the largest of the impromptu candlelight vigils that were set to begin at 7 p.m. as called for on the Internet. It was at Union Square Park in Greenwich Village. The park has become something of a gathering place since the crisis. By 7 p. m it was entirely filled with thousands of people covering the park in a sea of light. The incense and aromas were quite a contrast from the dust I experienced 24 hours earlier at the trade center. A small group began singing "America the Beautiful" then "God Bless America" then some street performers began leading us into several renditions of "The Star Spangled Banner" All types of songs. "Amazing Grace," "Lean on Me," We Shall Overcome," Even "Somewhere over the Rainbow." We cried. We hugged. We held onto each other. A young actor who was posting a picture of a missing friend at one of the many makeshift shrines that sprung up, told me through tears, "You can tell your problems to anyone here even though they're strangers." People wrote messages on the ground with chalk. They prayed they held hands. Then a strange thing happened. As the night wore on, people seemed happier. The singing became less solemn. People who brought musical instuments began to jam. A bagpiper who had been playing "Amazing Grace" began to make his bagpipe sound jazzy. I was kind of impressed. People danced. In short, a party was beginning to break out. People told me they needed to emote they needed to celebrate life. A few told me they were angry saying the music was inappropriate. It may be paradoxical but I felt all opinions were valid. People need to deal with grief in their own way. The point is we are dealing with it. We've all been changed individually and collectively by what happened on Tuesday. We learned what it is to be human. You might want to try it some time Mr. Bin Laden.

What it is like to be out of the country when major events happen from my friend Chris who is in Kiev until he is able to get a flight back home.

Mr. Rogers on helping children cope

Too much God?

If I believed in a God of vengeance (I don't), I'd pray for him or her to smite Coulter, Robertson and Falwell, smite them with mercy but smite them nonetheless: hemorrhoids, maybe, for the portly Christian gentlemen; a year of bad hair days for the nasty blond Coulter. (A friend asks, "Does she talk to Jesus with that mouth?") But in the end they'll punish themselves. Falwell and Robertson have to live with their own idiocy: By their twisted logic, the terrorists were agents of God, and thus we should welcome their vengeance. Coulter has to live with her own meanness. --Joan Walsh

Now more than ever (Salon.com)

My mother had a very different explanation for her daughter today. "To me, this rain is proof that there is no God," she said on the phone from Boston. "People say that God can't help terrorism, that he gives people freedom to act as they choose. Fine. But a God who would hinder the rescue workers with rain? If God can't control nature, then what's the point? How can anyone believe today?" -- Lauren Sandler

Trade Center's Past in a Sad Paper Trail. This just about made me cry. I used to work for a painting crew in Manhattan in the summers during high school. Once we worked on renovating a brownstone somewhere on the upper east side. In addition to taking out a wall with a very big hammer (named Thor) I also had to clean out a room of all the garbage. Well, that garbage were leftover papers and notes from the people who lived there. I became fascinated with the papers. I just sat there reading them trying to understand who they were and why they had left the stuff behind. My favorite books in antique shops are the ones people have written in. I love these little hints of people and who they are or were. They touch me inside and I feel a connection for a brief moment. These papers from the World Trade Center do the same thing but on a much deeper, more painful level.

People, relax. The Nostradamus prediction was a fake.

A wonderful poem by Pablo Neruda via The Doc Searls Weblog.

Stocking up... Dan Gillmor has a great idea: on Monday, everyone buy a few stocks. If we all do it, the market will do well and we can hopefully avoid some of the doom and gloom predictions going around...

TOS Cast Remember Late DeForest Kelley (The Trekker Newsletter). So, I'm being a sci fi geek tonight. Sue me.

JMS Update (Sci-Fi Storm). Some Babylon 5 and other news. Ragers to debut on SciFi on Jan, 2nd.

Handling the Loads (Slashdot). How Slashdot stayed up on Tuesday with the increased net traffic.

Via DaveNet, Mir Tamim Ansary on Afghanistan "

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. -- Mir Tamim Ansary

Anyone who thinks we should up and attack Afghanistan should read this piece.

DaveNet : Palestinians. Dave Winer writes a wonderful essay about peace and understanding.

WTC wreckage guards buried treasure of COMEX gold

"It's probably safer than it's ever been. It's probably buried under 107 stories of rubble,'' said Jonathan Potts, president at FideliTrade Inc, the Wilmington Del.-based parent of the Delaware Depository Service Co., an official COMEX warehouse for silver.

God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says (washingtonpost.com)

Television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two of the most prominent voices of the religious right, said liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals and abortion rights supporters bear partial responsibility for Tuesday's terrorist attacks because their actions have turned God's anger against America.

This is disgusting. This is offensive. I can't even begin to describe how mad this makes me feel. These men are no better than the terrorists to carried out this act. Why is it that such terrible tragedy brings out such ugliness in people? What we need is come together as a community, as a society, as a nation and heal inwardly while we take decisive and just action outwardly. I don't know what else to say except that this makes me so angry and so sad because far too many people think like they do. And I may not be the most religious person in the world but I certainly do know that the God portrayed in the New Testament would not take retribution out on the innocent. Where does Jesus say or do anything that leads them to think this? It's awful, just awful.

It Was Business as Usual, Then 'Boom' (DefenseLINK News)

My High School Director When I was in high school, I was in Oklahoma (Jud), Carousel (Mr. Snow), The Fantasticks (The Boy), and other plays. But the three I singled out are interesting and not just because I danced with a very young Jennifer Lopez in Oklahoma (really!) but because of the director. Kathy is a phenomenal director. She brought such skill and artistry to the work and our plays were damn good because of her. I have the most wonderfully fond memories of these plays. I last saw Kathy two years ago at a Christmas party and I hope to see her again soon. I'm thinking of her today because her brother, a New York City Fireman, has been missing since Tuesday.

Demands of Leadership

George W. Bush is facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leadership. The nation, reeling from this week's terrorist attacks, needs to see its president in control, ready to make tough decisions for the right reasons. Expressing determination to punish the people who organized the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is important, but not nearly enough. --The New York Times

kottke.org has an excellent collection of pictures/media about Tuesday's events.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, September 13, 2001. I read his entry "Other Voices" and I was moved by it. I'm new to Doc's weblog but I see why he's so popular. And I also agree with him. I haven't been listening to NPR lately. My commute isn't in a car anymore. It's upstairs to my office at home (until we actually move to the DC area) so I rarely have the radio on. I'll change that today.

Donate to the Red Cross from Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, the Red Cross website or call 1-800-HELP-NOW.

100 Questions and Answers about Arab Americans: Let's combat ignorance with information. People who are calling for the expulsion of Arab Americans from the United States are wrong and need to see this. They need to understand what the United States is and why it was founded. anil dash speaks about this on her weblog far better than I can here.

Ok, I redid the navbar on the left. Mangia!

My friend Andrew Pulrang has a wonderful weblog: apulrang.diary. I should have linked to this a long time ago. Come to think of it, I should add my favorite weblogs to the left column on the main page. I think I will. Watch that space...

Salon.com News | Arab-Americans fear backlash

Anti-Attack Feds Push Carnivore "Federal police are reportedly increasing Internet surveillance after Tuesday's deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Email groups warn of terrorism-related scams online "Email protection and consumer advocacy groups warned today of online attempts to fraudulently profit from yesterday's attacks on the USA. These attempts are taking the form of unsolicited e-mail ("spam") and postings in community forums, soliciting "donations" in the name of victims of the attacks." Yet another example of why you should just never trust unsolicited email no matter how good the cause may seem.

This picture says it all.

Investigators Identify Team of 50 Terrorists

One idea for rebuilding the WTC...

News from the WTC & Pentagon terrorist attacks. Comprehensive site.

My friend Ed, who lives in New York City and works for the Post, sent out this email late last night:

I went to a prayer service at St. John the Divne, a press briefing at the port authority bus terminal (in the past the port Authority usually holds press briefing at WTC) and they sent me to a medical triage center near the Chelsea piers a giant sports complex on the Hudson River that is up the road from WTC. I watched as hundreds of police cars and ambulances went down the road. You've never seen so many. The thing is they were all diferent colors because they didn't come from NYC some of them came from towns upstate and on Long Island. Some nearly 75 miles away As massive as the NYPD is they needed tha much help. They just kept coming. Like some sort of parade. Some came back but they were mostly carrying injured emergency workers and the like nothing major. We were told that the serious cases wouldn't come untill daylight. There was also a horrible rumor going around. It was being said that the Chelsea Pier was chosen because it has a giant Hockey rink which could serve as a morgue. I have a feeling I'm going to hate tomorrow.

Web Offers Both News and Comfort [New York Times] "For many Internet users, the medium simply provided an immediate way to share their own personal experience of a national tragedy in postings to chat rooms, Internet discussion forums and personal Web sites."

Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Swift says election should continue. Our Acting Governor is, frankly, an idiot. This has nothing to do with bending to terror. It has to do with giving people the chance to spend time with their families and loved ones. It has to do with the fact that people on those planes were from Boston. It has to do with respect for the injured and the dead.

In the early '80s my sister Ann worked in the World Trade Center around the 100th floor. I was still pretty little then and when she took me to work for a day, it was the most fun I ever had to that point in my life and for some time after. I spent all day wandering around, looking out the windows, and taking tons of pictures. I have to go and look them up now in whatever box they got consigned to. To see these wonderful twin buildings on the ground in ruins makes me so sad. I can't even begin to comprehend the loss of life and the overall human tragedy. Those of you who know me know that I embrace my disdain for organized religion fully but shaving aside the cynicism my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved. Tonight we feel for the families and friends of the innocent victims of this horrible crime. Hug your loved ones, kiss your children, make peace with people you've had a falling out with. It's just not worth it. Put everything in perspective and embrace the good in your lives. On a related note, I hear that after previous terrorist attacks, including the home-grown Oklahoma City bombing, many Muslim-Americans suffered at the hands of outraged people. Don't give in to hate. Wait for the true perpetrators of this crime to be found and let justice be served. Vigilante justice is no justice at all. Don't give in to hate. That's just playing into the hands of the people who did this. That's what they would love to see: us collapsing from within. We cannot do that. Stand together, embrace your neighbor, remember what makes America great.

This picture (right) shows all that remains of the base of one of the towers. I remember taking pictures of this as I was fascinated with the architecture and how the lines went all the way up the building.

World Trade Center - Minoru Yamasaki - Great Buildings Online

You're watching TV Barn. This weblog is providing good coverage too. It's also criticizing the network news coverage which is both inappropriate but also oddly interesting.

Also connecting to chat.cnn.com via irc and joining channel #CNN_Newsfeed gives you live close captions from CNN's live broadcast.

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog is doing an excellent job of covering the news based on reports on many weblogs around the Internet. In many cases, this is the best channel of news given the fact that the major news sites are hard to reach. Many people are reporting what they are hearing on TV, the radio, and from their own sources.

Good source of news from a news site that's actually loading today: The New York Times: APNews

X-Ray Orbiter Becomes a Particle Physics Experiment

Physicists Strive to Build a Black Hole '"Future colliders could become black hole factories," said Dr. Steven B. Giddings, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. If some recent theories turn out to be right, the effect would be far from subtle, with one tiny black hole popping into existence every second and harmlessly disappearing with an unmistakable burst of energy.' Well, that's reassuring. Assuming there isn't something about higher dimension physics that they don't know yet which will bite them in the ass. I'm reminded of James P. Hogan's sci fi novel Thrice Upon a Time which is an old favorite of mine (I love Hogan's books even though he is hardly the world's best writers -- then again, I haven't read anything he's written in the last 10-15 years, he may have improved) in which a super-collider is brought online and millions of tiny black holes are created by accident. These black holes immediately fall (they're very heavy, of course) and start passing back and forth through the Earth. When they surface, they can cause havoc. In one case, one passes through someone's leg and damages everything on its way through. Eventually, they would settle down in the center of the planet and eat it away from the inside. OK, it's hokey but I read this when I was, what, 12? It stuck with me. I can't help but think of that when I read this article. So, I just hope they are right :)

Salon.com Politics | Book says Justice Souter was close to swaying Kennedy in election case

Forbes.com: U.S. business forecasters expect recovery by end 2001 "U.S. business economists lowered their forecasts for U.S. growth for 2001 and 2002 but most say the U.S. economy will not slide into recession and should start recovering by year end, a survey showed Monday." I hope they are right. Last week's plunging Dow came after the higher-than-expected unemployment numbers (among other things). I'm very surprised that the current jump in unemployment shocks people. I know a lot of people (including myself) who were laid off back in the early spring but were given generous severance packages. None of these people would show up on the jobless listings until they were able to file for unemployment when their severances ran out. Are we the only ones who knew this? I was out of work from April through the end of August and I didn't file until mid-August so I wasn't counted until then. This worries me. Was there another round of such layoffs in June or so which won't show up until much later on?

In 6th grade, John Hubner jumped on top of a gym mat that had fallen on me and broke my left (from my perspective) front upper incisor (tooth #9). For the next 21 years or so I wore a crown which, I found out last December, should only have been in for, at most, 4 years. Last Christmas, the root underneath finally got infected and I had to have the crown removed, get root canal, and a new, temporary crown. It was time to finally get GOOD front teeth. Well, then came the long unemployment streak and I backburnered my dental plans. But they're done now and they look incredible (I say they because we decided to put crowns on both front teeth so they'd look more natural). And tomorrow, after they are fully set, I can eat an apple for the first time in over 10 months. What's more, there's no longer a gap between my front teeth! On the downside, I now talk with a pronounced lisp. Call me to hear it. I'm rapidly improving. The dentist reports that it shouldn't take me more than two weeks to re-learn how to speak with the new architecture in my mouth.

For some insane reason, I am now also running a Webcam. I doubt this experiment will last too long, but I've been wrong before.

UK Children Cause Earthquake in Giant Jump. I've always wanted to conduct an experiment like this. I also wanted to do one where everyone in the US shines a flashlight straight up to see if it shows up on a satellite picture...

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The art of war. A review of "Band of Brothers" which starts tonight on HBO.

Apple - Hot News - Neighborhood Nerve Center. We need one of these here. Better still, in Arlington, VA...

Lots of X Windows software for Mac OS X...

My friend Chris has some thoughts on his current trip to Kiev. It's all my fault. I went on and on about weblogs and he finally tried one to shut me up ;)

Well, I'm home again... but now we're getting the upstairs office all set up so I can work full time from up here. I also dragged out one of my old PowerMac 7100/80's (I've got two if anyone wants to buy the other) so I can set it up as a linux box... This is how I celebrate football season.

Boston Globe Online / Sports / It's high time for Harrington to own up to it. Damn straight. Damn right on.

It's the end of a long week, my first in the new job. Tomorrow morning I board a plane and head back to my family. I miss Jack and Ann a great deal, I hate being away from them for even this long. I know this winter, when we expect to do this regularly, is going to be very tough. But for the next two months I'll be working out of home mostly and will get to see them much more.

Savage Plays Oswald The Octopus. We love this cartoon. We love everything on Nick Jr. for that matter. Yeah, we're parents...

ReplayTV. Oh wow... I must own one of these. I must.

Happy 1e9 Day!

Viking Data Still Cause Stir About Mars Life

Meteor Was Really Space Junk, Magazine Says. Dang it! I was up at that hour and in Washington DC... I missed the show.

New Evidence of Early Humans Unearthed in Russia's North

Evidence Found of Black Hole at Center of the Milky Way

Indisciplinary Education: A Pedagogy of Nudges. This looks at the use of the web in education. Specifically, this weblogger.

Scobleizer : A Tale of Two Classrooms. I've been trying to blog this all day but the site wasn't reachable for a good chunk of the afternoon. Odd. Anyway, still more for me to read tonight... Update: (8:15PM) -- Read his piece. I agree with a great deal of what he says. Saymour Papert talks about the same things in his books. Especially The Children's Machine in which he says that computers have largely failed education because we have not gone anywhere near far enough. Computers must be allowed to completely revolutionize schools to the point where every concept of how schools work and operate are changed. We should not be forcing computers into the current model of schools.

Dear Web Diary, SO Much to Tell! (washingtonpost.com)

The Map That Named America May Now Call It Home "The only known surviving copy of the first map to bear the name of America, often called "the baptismal certificate of the New World," has found its way to America from Germany as an acquisition of the Library of Congress."

It's not very often I have days where I blog so much. It seems like today just has a lot of activity in the technology in education field where I work too. But it occurs to me that a major drawback to this blogging software is that all of what I am blogging is lumped together: Tech in Ed stuff, personal anecdotes, Mac news, Red Sox rants, etc. What I need is a way to group things. I could create multiple blogs and have a Tech in Ed page, a Mac page, a personal page, etc. But that really reduces the friendliness of this site. I'd love to have each day have sections, individual boxes of content and I can assign a given entry to one of those boxes. Anyone know how this can be done?

More from Chris Ashley who wrote the article immediately below this item.

Weblogging: Another Kind of Website. I'm going to have a lot of reading tonight. I'm just skimming these and blogging them if they're interesting. Tonight when I get home from work I'll go in-depth and write up my thoughts.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 Specification: Today this was submitted as a recommendation by the W3C.

Fool.com: [Dueling Fools] Apple Core of Ailing PC Sector

Distance Learning Yet to Hit Home

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Delhi children make play of the net "In the slums of Delhi, an experiment has shown how illiterate street children can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computers and the internet." Update: (8:30PM) -- This reminds me (and this may be stretching things a bit) of something I read in Matt Ridley's excellent book Genome. He describes how research has shown that children learn new languages much quicker than adults can. This has been known for a long time. What's interesting is that where groups of people of different backgrounds come together and pidgin languages form, there's little grammatical structure and it is hard to express difficult concepts. But within a generation this changes: children learning the pidgin growing up actually create grammar and build rules. There is something in children which lets them learn these new paradigms easily and quickly -- and to improve upon them too! So, extrapolate this out to the article above and I think it's this is a shade of the same thing: children learn new communications easily and quickly, including web surfing. Can you imagine if they had some way to change the way the web or the browser worked? Now THAT would have been incredible!

Schoolblogs.com. I just found this and wanted to blog it and, later, read through and grok what's going on here. If this is what I think this is and they are doing what I think they are doing, this is VERY exciting for education... I'll write more later. Update: (8:22PM) -- It is exactly what I think it is! Using weblogs as a tool for education is a fantastic idea. Earlier today I had a long conversation with a colleague at work (on day 2!) about this. I believe that weblogs can be revolutionizing if used correctly. Right now my thoughts are still too diffuse but I'll think about this more and write more at a later date. I'm actually consider using weblogs as part of a larger project I'm being asked to spec out at work.

Yahoo! Sports: MLB - Red Sox dispute Pedro claim of minor tear in rotator cuff. Dan Duquette is an idiot and he is ruining the Red Sox. He must be fired and he must never be hired to work in baseball again. Period. Dammit.

`The Fantasticks' to Shut for Good. I was in this play in High School and it is my favorite of all the musicals. I've only seen it at the Sullivan St Playhouse twice and should try to go once more before the end. I'm very sad about this.

Embryonic Stem Cells Turned Into Blood Cells (washingtonpost.com) "Researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison guided stem cells into blood cells by surrounding them with chemical cues and nutrients that signaled the immature cells to morph into every type of regular blood cell -- red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets."

Apple Expands as PCs Cut Back "Brand in the PC industry ain't worth much," said Roger Kay, a senior analyst with market research firm IDC. "They want Apple when it's Apple, but they don't care about Dell, Compaq, Gateway, or IBM."

On Monday, the 3rd, we flew from Providence to Baltimore (thank Gods for Southwest Airlines!) and our friend Chris picked us up and took us down to to his new northern Virginia home which was quite nice. We grilled, we hung out, and picked up Liz and Eric who were flying into National and had good Mexican for dinner at Guapo's. And on the 4th I started the new job. I was nowhere near as nervous as I would normally have been. I guess the fact that I'd been to the office before, had been working for them remotely for months now, and did the same work I've been doing all along anyway helped. And that's that. Tomorrow (it's midnight as I write this) is day two.

They should have used a different font...

We're in Cranston, RI now. Tomorrow morning we fly to DC. Ann will start looking for a place for us to move and I will start my first day of work on Tuesday. So, updates will be a bit sparse until I get settled. Here's hoping that the folks I'm staying with have a wireless network at home (I believe they do...)

Maybe I jinxed us. Maybe we're cursed. Maybe it was just bad timing. But just a day after I put up a whole page about our garden we had the Great Aphid Indicent of 2001. Here's how it went: Ann went out to pull out the mystery gourd plant now that we know what it is and have decided that it's nice to have gourds but the plant is ugly and is taking over the Universe. That's when she found that it was covered with aphids. When she began clipping it, they began to swarm. Tiny little bugs all flying around. Tiny little bugs flying to and landing on our other plants. Uh oh. We got nasty with them. I went online and checked with my friend google on remedies for aphids and found that a solution of 1 part Murphy's Oil Soap, 1 part rubbing alcohol, and 9 parts water in a spray bottle will do the trick. And it did! But, all the same, Ann went crazy and tore up half the garden removing the things that were past their prime or looked just nasty. It's a bit sparse now but we'll go shopping for some mums and other nice autumnal plants and fill things in.

A Meteor's Remnants Draw a Posse. Well, it's not here... :)

Gore Gets a Tepid Nod From Donors

As Cable Applies Pressure, Network TV Spouts Expletives. Huh. On the one hand, it is true that shows for adults (in adult timeslots) should be more adult in nature (that is, be able to be more adult if that makes sense) but on the other hand, broadcast reaches everyone regardless whereas you have to actually pay for and bring cable into your house (then again, you have to actually pay for and bring a tv into your house so maybe there is little difference...)

Boston Globe Online / Sports / Here's a pitch to have the ace shut it down. I agree completely. With a miracle, the Sox could make the postseason but the smart move would be stop trying now and start working on next year now. Let the injured get healthy and start really working the rookies to get them ready. We need strong new players next year and the time to start training them is now.

Our Garden, 2001. A huge page (I put all the pictures on a single page -- sorry about that) which will take a modem viewer quite some time to download (about 3-5 minutes) but which has lots of great pictures and the story of our garden this year. Of course, you have to be into flowers and gardens to care...

Some pictures from today's grand opening of the new Apple Store at the Northshore Mall.

Boston Globe Online / Sports / Kerrigan managed to make matters worse. This is a dead on critique of Kerrigan's management of last night's disaster against the Yankees.