Invisible Web: JSTOR McLovin

In transit, but had to note this:

How to get free access to JSTOR!

Well, it's not quite so exclamation-deserving as all that, but what the helot, happy gnu ear.

Holyddle

Mike and Goo

"Here are some tools."

"Here is our vicarious rendering of the experience we feel we are justly entitled to expect you to have with our awesomest wonderful software. So confident are we of the exactitude of our anticipation of your entire mind, soul, body and imaginative desire that we feel you are obligated to have this precise experience or your account will be terminated.. . .Have a nice day."

Non rhyming pairs

1. Tickle yr arse with a feather?
2. Typically nasty weather.

1. Nauseous holiday muzak on NPR?
2. Ideology.

Dream of a more semantically efficient Google

In a bleary moment, I was looking at Google search results for a movie -- in fact, it was Our Hitler, which I learned has recently been released, after many a year. I found myself wishing Google had simply grouped all the individual search results into folders - surely it has an algorithm to put similar search results in little bundles, at least in cases of specific things like Our Hitler. That way, just as you do a right click "open all in tabs" in Mozilla, so you'd right click each Google folder result, and a bunch of search results would open all at once.

Save all that damn clicking and clacking.

[Later] Maybe Google could let you tell it how many results to cluster in each bundle.

Santa's little workshop

If you ask nicely, wishes might be granted that Grinch

is unlikely to heed.

Make that seggregation

Pervasive changes (SOP) manual for Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba)

Language control

• "hunger strike(s)" changed to "Voluntary Total Fasting" or "VTF"
• "suicide" changed to "self-harm" (even though "self-harm" is elsewhere defined in the 2004 SOP as excluding potentially fatal behavior).

Chaplain

• Substantial reduction in the Chaplain's role and powers.

Textual changes

• "MP" (military police) becomes "guards".
• "golf carts" changed to "Gators".
• "Annex E Air Bridge Operations" becomes "Annex E/SIPR Detainee Movement Operations (DMO)".
• "recreation" changed to "exercise".
• "MSU", "Maximum Security Unit" changed to "SHU", "Special Housing Unit" or "seggregation"

At Wikileaks via Gifthub

Also on Gifthub: After Beliefnet, RuMurd looks to buy Wealth Bondage. Next up: Exquisite Safaris?

Guess he'd never buy something like StrictlyNoPhotography.com - even though it's more journalistic than most newspaper sites.

The Happy Paranoiac's Corner: Gaze Adjustment for Larger Micro-Surveillance

They're getting larger

Inch for inch, the price of flat screens is coming down. But instead of pocketing the savings, many consumers are upgrading to ever-larger sets. 2008 will be the tipping point where the majority of sets will be more than 36 inches. (More like 70 inches.)

To see us better

Under a new deal, TiVo will provide NBC with second-by-second information about its subscribers' viewing habits, which the TV network can then share with advertisers.

Habitat helps Homeless and Itself with Food Drive

A clever idea I'd not seen before:

A local Habitat for Humanity Resale store has linked its furniture sales for the holidays with a food drive benefiting a local Homeless Coalition's food bank.

Quite simply, customers of the store are asked to bring in canned goods -- the more goods, the bigger their discount on home furnishings at the Habitat Resale Store.

At the end of the 20-day sale event, Habitat gives the collected food items to the Homeless Coalition.

The idea was the store manager's. I'd not seen anything quite like it -- perhaps others have. But it seems like an exploit that might easily be replicated.

Here's a Craigslist posting about it.

Update: I'm pleased to find that the store manager's idea struck a few other people as worth noting, including Sheila Lennon (Subterranean Homepage News) whom nothing worthy of note escapes, and Phil Cubeta (Gifthub), whose network of philanthropic endeavors is richer in scope, if not in actual dollahs, than any I know of.

Phil: "When you net all this out, though, it looks like the poor helping the poor." Indeed, although not everyone who shops at a Habitat Resale Store is poor. But why shouldn't working people take time out from their mindnumbing tasks to help one another productively?

If anyone has a problem with that, say, the plantation owners, or certain moths who flit about the endless array of philanthropic spectacles, they might wish to fathom why.

Footnote (pantagoogoolian)

To the interesting colloquy of a few days ago with Jon Husband, Mike Golby and others -

List of Google Products.

Is Microsoft the new AOL?

Later: Google's mission: to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”