chattr +a -V

Last Tuesday (Mar 29), I was at the Triangle Bloggers Regional Meetup, graciously hosted by Anton Zuiker, and Jane Peppler commented how there's an amnesia today (unlike times past?) about history, among younger people. I've run into the same thing in different contexts: sports, the Catholic Church, politics, so I doubt whether this is something peculiar to the late 20th, early 21st century.

Another blogger at the meetup, David Warlick and I chatted briefly after the formal meeting broke up, and it turns out he was a sysop way back when, as I was (I ran a Wildcat! bulletin board, mostly for echomail on FidoNet; some archives here).

A few years later, I abandoned the BBS, but an even older one, the WELL marks its twentieth anniversay with parties and reminiscences beginning tomorrow. You are invited: Celebrate with us online and off as The WELL turns Twenty in April 2005!.

The WELL = Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, and Stewart Brand (link is to an interview), who founded the Whole Earth Catalog waaaay back in 1968, started this electronic meeting and discussion place. There's an August, 1985, interview with Brand at The WELL: Interview with Stewart Brand (8/85), (hat tip to Quartopiano's Radio Weblog (you have to scroll down a bit)), at the Netweaver Blog, a site I hadn't been aware of until poking around the 'nte for this post.

This space will contain the archives of the old Netweaver Newsletter as well as current comments. ...

Netweaver was the electronic newsletter of the Electronic Networking Association (ENA). ENA was formed in April, 1985 by a group of folks who were interested in the social and human aspects of the new medium of electronic networking. At the time, other organizations were focused on the engineering issues and/or the challenges of large scale users (for example, The Electronic Mail Association).

ENA's mission was:

To promote electronic networking in ways that:
- enrich individuals
- enhance organizations
- and build global communities

In 1991, ENA "sunsetted" itself in light of the many new organizations and SIGs springing up to take on various aspects of the mission. By then, there were other organizations looking at computer supported cooperative work, computers for social responsibility, telecommunications law, distance education and more. But, before it was done, ENA held 4 face-to-face conferences in DC, Allentown PA, Philadelphia, and San Francisco that drew participants from across the country and around the world. ENA also contributed to international conferences, including the first conference on electronic networking in Japan. Many members of the ENA network are still the ones working in other organizations and initiatives to promote the human and social side of the web. ...

One of the amazing things about looking at some of these old articles is that so many of the same issues, themes, and hopes are still alive in discussions in newsgroups, on listservs, in online communities, in blogs and at conferences of people interested in the social and human side of networking. We'll be making connections from here to some of the current conversation.

I don't have any magic ideas on how to reduce the amnesia Jane Peppler mentioned or I've noticed, especially since there doesn't seem much interest in reducing it by those who suffer from it. At times, I get a 'pearls before swine' ('neque mittatis margaritas vestras ante porcos' in the Vulgate, did you know 'pearls' here is 'margaritas'?, not bacatus -a -um) attitude, but we do what we can.

It's be a shame to put MS-Windows on these.

Army chooses Alienware for new computers states that '[t]he Army's Aviation Mission Planning System [AMPS] Project Team is to use Alienware [Area-51m 7700 notebook] mobile systems and supporting peripherals for mission planning sessions.'

Default specs on the Alienware Area-51m 7700.

From the Aviation Mission Planning System page at globalsecurity.org, the Army will use the Alienware machines in its plan to push tactical Command and Control (C2), planning, management and rehearsal of rotary wing missions down to the company and aircrew levels, tasks which had been performed at aviation brigade and battalion levels. AMPS also supplies data to brigade and above levels to create the Common Tactical Picture, allowing the data to be displayed and manipulated, creating operational plans, and communicating battle plans, orders, and enemy and friendly sitreps.

Four integrated speakers, subwoofer, 17-inch screen

Pass the popcorn.

Archive.org has Republic Films' 1952 serial Radar Men From the Moon for download. Chapter One: Moon Rocket.



All twelve episodes listed here.

The possibilities for jokes are legion: three economists 'investigated' the possibility (after walking into a bar?) that 'by exploit[ing] the competitive edge gained from specialization and free trade ... humans increased their activities in culture and technology, while simultaneously out-competing Neanderthals on their joint hunting grounds', causing the extinction of Neanderthals: Did Use of Free Trade Cause Neanderthal Extinction?.

Archaeological evidence exists to suggest traveling bands of early humans interacted with each other and that inter-group trading emerged, says Shogren. Early humans, the Aurignations and the Gravettians, imported many raw materials over long ranges and their innovations were widely dispersed. Such exchanges of goods and ideas helped early humans to develop \u201csupergroup social mechanisms.\u201d The long-range interchange among different groups kept both cultures going and generated new cultural explosions, [University of Wyoming economist Jason] Shogren says.

Anthropologists have noted how judicious redistribution of excess resources provides a distinct advantage to "efficient hunters" as measured by factors such as increased survivorship, social prestige, or reproductive opportunities, the researchers say.

"One of the striking features of the archaeological record is that Neanderthal technology was nearly stationary for many thousands of years whereas technology of early humans experienced many innovations," Shogren says.

He says the evidence does not support the concept of division of labor and trade among Neanderthals. While Neanderthals probably cooperated with one another to some extent, the evidence does not support the view that specialization arose from any formal division of labor or that inter- or intra-group trade existed, he says. These practices seem to require all the things that Neanderthals lacked: a more complicated social organization, a degree of innovative behavior, forward planning and the exchange of information, ideas and raw materials.

"Basic economic forces of scarcity and relative costs and benefits have played integral roles in shaping societies throughout recorded human history," Shogren says. "No reason exists today to discount either the presence or potential impact of economics in the pre-historic dawning of humanity."

This post's title is a play on the title of chapter five of Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, reviewed in numerous places, including the February 2003 issue of the Foundation for Economic Education's The Freeman (link is to a pdf).

The article's title is Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children, but that's the message. Never actually defining 'vibrant', though it seems to mean young, wealthy, adults who choose where to live based on availability of 'dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary', the Times mentions Portland, Ore., San Francisco, and Seattle:

San Francisco, where the median house price is now about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more dogs than children, was a close second. Boston, Honolulu, Portland, Miami, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin and Atlanta, all considered, healthy, vibrant urban areas, were not far behind.

The article misleadingly cites national birth statistics ('The problem is not just that American women are having fewer children, reflected in the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the country. ... Nationally, the birthrate has been dropping while the overall population is aging as life expectancy increases.') without looking at birth rates in the very cities it focusses on, and without comparing those cities with other places in the country. While 'the number of [Portland's] school-age children grew by only three between the census counts in 1990 and 2000', Wake County, North Carolina, where I live, 'picked up 5,098 new students this [school] year and could gain 4,000 to 5,000 more this fall. ...' (Wake growth bears $107 million tag in the March 16, 2005, News & Observer).

What's so 'vibrant' about places where folks measure their satisfaction with buying stuff, eating out in fancy places and generally being so self-absorbed that they don't see how barren life is without kids, theirs and other families'? Sounds like these people never grew out of adolescence, when new things, belonging to cliques and short term entertainment were values: examples of immaturity. And the folks taking up space in Portland, Seattle and the other cities in the Times' story aren't forward looking in a social sense, only in money terms.

In Report says North Korean reforms spread, Seoul's JoongAng Ilbo daily looks at a paper from the South's Unification Ministry and the Korea Institute of National Unification, a government think tank: following and because of economic liberalization begun in July, 2002, prices and wages in the DPRK have risen sharply, grain is the only item still rationed, and the currency has been devalued.

This intriguing sentence appears, without further detail:

According to the report, students at Kim Il Sung University are studying with textbooks that cover market principles, starting with the laws of supply and demand.

Which textbooks would those be? Austrian economic texts (here is an historical summary, the previous link concentrates on the distinctive theoretical tenets of the Austrian School) sparked eastern Europe's liberation from Soviet Communism. The name Friedrich von Hayek was frequently heard, especially The Road to Serfdom.

Wholesale stores and 24-hour convenience shops have opened in the country's larger cities, catering to wealthier individuals, the report said. Although it is still forbidden for individuals to own and operate shops, some individuals are running illicit beer bars, karaoke clubs and computer cafes, the report said.

The country's economy grew 1.8 percent in 2003, but wholesale and retail businesses have seen 9.8-percent growth, the report said.

With the shipping restrictions Japan imposed on the North (requiring insurance certificates), China forcing the DPRK's casino money machine to close, and the Japanese halting imports of North Korean chickens because of the avian flu outbreak ( Japan stops poultry imports from North Korea), the North is racing to avoid economic crackup, and the same forces which impelled eastern and central Europe (which includes Russia) towards economic liberalization, are influencing the DPRK.

UPDATE: Tom Palmer at North Korean Karaoke? emailed the reporter at the JoonAng Daily, for more information, and perhaps to find out which textbooks the Kim Il Sung University students use. He's with the new kid on the block, the Cato Institute and also with oldtimers the Foundation for Economic Education and back before the collapse of Soviet Communism, he 'worked to get Paul Heyne's wonderful book The Economic Way of Thinking translated and published in Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and Albanian.'

The Japanese built four I class subs during WWII. I class subs still at sea surrendered to American forces after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this one sunk.

Members of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory located I-401 off Oahu during test dives. WWII-era Japanese sub found near Hawaii (hat tip to Boots and Sabers' Japanese Sub Found off Hawaii).

These were the largest submarines before the nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines of the 1960s.

The H.I.J.M.S. I-400 Submarine-Aircraft Carrier says that they had a cruising range of 37,500 miles, one and one-half times around the globe.

More notably, each member of the I-400 class was allotted three Aichi M6A1Seiran torpedo bombers--one-off floatplanes with an 1,800 pound payload prepped for a quick lift from the boat's bulging hanger to its short flight deck where an 85-foot pneumatic catapult readied them for lift-off A folding deck crane was provided for retrieval in case anyone came back home in one piece. I-400 was unusually stable for a submarine of her era thanks to a split hull design that reduced surface roll.

New Scientist reports that Spirit, one of the two rovers on the Martian surface, captured two images of dust devils, miniature tornadoes possibly caused by surface heating or eddies and columns caused by turbulent wind over craters. Martian dust devils finally caught on camera. NASA has the images at Spirit Captures Two Dust Devils On the Move, Spirit Captures Two Dust Devils On the Move (Unlabeled), Dust Devils Seen by Spirit, and Dust Devils Seen by Spirit (Unlabeled).

Electric power limits both rover's effective lives, and the solar panels have a year of accumulated dust. But on March 9, Spirit's electric output abruptly increased to 93% of its initial level, raising the tantalizing possibility that wind might have cleaned off its solar panels.

'The team is still figuring out exactly when the power boost occurred, and whether it was a single event or not. Science team member Geoffrey Landis told New Scientist that the cleaning of the solar panels may have taken place at night. But dust devils occur only in the midday sunlight, he notes, so it may have simply been a strong breeze that cleaned the rover.'

On a late night drive back from Florida, I first heard on this story in the interview of Dr David Grinspoon on John Batchelor's radio show.

On March 17, 1905, Albert Einstein submitted his paper, Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt (Concerning an Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light (pdf)). This is the paper for which he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", not for Brownian motion, not for special relativity, not for general relativity, not for the famous equation E = mc².

Max Planck had hypothesized that energy came in discrete packets, which he called quanta.

[T]he problems of radiation processes engaged his attention and he showed that these were to be considered as electromagnetic in nature. From these studies he was led to the problem of the distribution of energy in the spectrum of full radiation. Experimental observations on the wavelength distribution of the energy emitted by a black body as a function of temperature were at variance with the predictions of classical physics. Planck was able to deduce the relationship between the energy and the frequency of radiation. In a paper published in 1900, he announced his derivation of the relationship .... The energy for a resonator of frequency v is hv where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant.

Max Planck -- Biography. Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery: "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta".

Maxwell's equations and classical thermodynamics assumed that the range of possible energies was continuous, consistent with the view that electromagnetic energy propagated through space as waves.

Physicists knew that when ultraviolet light shined upon certain metals, electrons were ejected from the material. But the number of electrons ejected depended on the intensity of the light, and the energy of the electrons depended on the frequency, not the intensity, of the light, facts difficult to explain under classical physical theory, but not difficult if the ultraviolet light and the electrons were quanta, and that only certain energy states were permitted: the intensity of the light is the flux (concentration, or number passing through an area) of the quanta, and the energy is Planck's equation.

Sources:

• Albert Einstein, from A Dictionary of Scientists
• The 1905 Papers
• Einstein, A.; Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt / On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light (in the .su tld!).

.

The next few days, I'll be away from the keyboard more than usual because of a family-related trip. I'm grabbing some podcasts from Podcast Alley for the long drives: their one Unix podcast, ApocXPs Blog OStuff, baseball from Baseball Musings and Sports Bloggers Live, LinuxQuestions.org, Linux Log and some stuff from Catholic Podsquad.

Here are some interesting items recently available on the Internet Archive:

• Chapter 1 of the 1937 Dick Tracy Movie Serial.
• Four Episodes Of The 3 Stooges
• Betty Boop's Big Boss
• Betty Boop: Parade of the Wooden Soldiers
• Betty Boop: Chess Nuts (several other Betty Boop cartoons are available on the archive.org site)
• Film Chest Vintage Cartoons
• Popeye: Fright To The Finish
• Popeye: I Don't Scare
• Popeye: Patriotic Popeye (several other Popeye cartoons are available on the archive.org site)
• Mighty Mouse: Wolf! Wolf!, and
• Merrie Melodies: Falling Hare.

There may be clandestine video footage of North Korea's public executions of human traffickers and cellphone users. Seoul's Chosun Ilbo reports in Crackdowns, Public Executions on Sino-Korean Border, that according to a North Korean administrative official who defected, 'there were three rounds of arrests aimed at "anti-socialist groups" in the Hoeryeong [a town on the border between the DPRK and China] area between January and February this year by squads made up of agents of the State Safety and Security Agency, the Ministry of Public Security and police.'

Three individuals were executed for human trafficking and trying to sell U.S. military dog tags on Feb. 28 and March 1.

The defector said a judge on Feb. 28 read the sentence aloud. "In times made difficult by the vile anti-DPRK schemes of the U.S. and their South Korean puppets, anti-party counterrevolutionaries who damaged the authority of the party and Fatherland will be executed," he quoted the judge as saying. Nine women implicated in human trafficking were given prison sentences.

Other defectors said 63 households -- about 300 people -- were sent into forced exile in remote mountainous regions in South Hamgyeong Province such as Jangjin and Bujeon counties. One said that secretly filmed footage of the Feb. 28 executions was smuggled abroad.

The size of a London double decker bus, Inmarsat 4-F1 is now in a supersynchronous orbit. (Apogee altitude (km) achieved 90,553 (predicted 90,497); Perigee altitude (km) achieved 441 km (predicted 440); Inclination (deg) achieved 20.83 (predicted 20.83).) Click here to watch a replay of the launch. Once in its final position over the Indian Ocean at 64 degrees East, the satellite's footprint will cover Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, most of Asia Pacific, and Western Australia.

As its name indicates, it's the first of three fourth generation satellites Inmarsat will launch to provide Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) service: IP and circuit-switched voice telephony and high-bandwidth services, including internet access, videoconferencing, LAN and other services, at speeds of up to 432kbit/s while on the move on the ground or in the air, using a laptop antenna or special cellphone.

An Atlas V vehicle, with 4-meter-diameter fairing, three solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and a single-engine Centaur upper stage, placed Inmarsat 4-F1 in orbit. Lockheed-Martin builds the Atlas V. International Launch Services, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center of Moscow, carried out launch services from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It's the largest privately owned satellite launched from the Cape. ILS also uses the Russian Proton vehicle.

Later this year, a second I-4 satellite should go up, and once it's operational over the Atlantic, 85% of the world's land mass will have access to BGAN.

Sources:

• Atlas V Rocket Launches From Cape
• Successful Launch for Inmarsat-4 Satellite
• ILS Atlas V Vehicle Lifts Massive Satellite for Inmarsat

  

  

Not surprising, of course, but a reminder how totalitarian regimes insinuate themselves into every corner of society, and turn subjects into traitors against their friends, communities and morals: Newly-discovered documents reveal a jealous cleric's attempts to sell out the pope.

[S]ecret police were helped in their efforts by one of Wojtyla's fellow clerics, Wladyslaw Kulczycki -- an informer who, until his death in 1968, sent in regular reports on the rising star of the Polish church.

An adviser to Cracow's top church officials, Kulczycki was incensed that the younger Wojtyla was elevated to the rank of bishop and then archbishop while he was passed over. His reports denounced Wojtyla as a lightweight and dismissed his growing popularity.

The article doesn't say when Kulczycki's reports began, though Pope Pius XII made Wojtyla a bishop in 1958 (he was one of the last bishops Pius XII made), so maybe Kulczycki reported for ten years.

The article also doesn't say whether these documents were among those released earlier this year.

HT to Patrick Sweeney at extreme catholic: The Vatican: Peeking Into the Past.

Borders can be a touchy point for Communist regimes. East Germany, of the Berlin Wall and the most heavily armed border in the world back in the 1980s, began to totter when in 1989 the Hungarians started allowing refugees asylum and transit to the West. (Oddly, the Hungarian Prime Minister is currently visiting Seoul and is talking about boosting economic ties.)

Now, the North Korean-Chinese border is causing problems for Pyongyang: N. Korea launches harsh crackdown:

[T]wo North Koreans were shot to death in public [on February 28] on charge of smuggling North Korean women into China, according to a Seoul-based online radio service run by defectors from the communist nation. ...

According to North Korean defectors and intelligence sources in Seoul, human trafficking is rampant in North Korea for sex trade and labor. ...

So far this year, North Korea has executed more than 60 citizens to warn its people against committing any "anti-republic" behaviors, such as illegal border crossing and information leakage, according to [the Seoul-based Headquarters for Protection of North Korean Defectors].

The article points out that 'North Korea amended its criminal code last year increasing penalties for expressing criticism of the government and other "anti-state" crimes. The revision, the fifth since 1950, also calls for tougher regulation on new crimes caused by infiltration of outside information.' And now the regime is restricting cellphone use:

Many North Koreans, including border peddlers and border guards, have Chinese cell phones, and they easily contact South Koreans with them in the border areas. ...

Chinese communication firms, which have rapidly expanded their cell phone services, recently installed relay stations along the border with North Korea, which has kindled a cell phone boom in North Korea.

The Chinese devices are charged using pre-paid phone cards, and cost some 400 Chinese yuan (less than $50) for three month's use.

About the statement that the DPRK is banning and confiscating cellphones, there isn't any elaboration.

US SecState Rice will visit the South on Saturday March 19 and Sunday March 20, Xinhuanet reports the ROK's Foreign Ministry as saying.

Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata is reading some alternate history, specifically What If? a little while ago, and now More What If?. More What If?.

He says that his 'favourite what-ifs are the ones that start with someone very obscure doing something very obscure slightly differently, which causes X, which causes Y -- Y being a happening of universally agreed importance -- not to happen. The human version of the Butterfly Effect, in other words.'

James Burke's Connections book, Scientific American columns, and television series of the same name, were great entertainment and stimulation, though they instead of changing one of the connections, they follow the web of knowledge and events along paths less imaginative or less poetic folks wouldn't see. 'What do the Hubble Space Telescope, Buffalo Bill, and the Spanish Inquisition have in common? How do margarine's strange origins tie it to plankton shells, receding stars, hot chocolate, and the first solo Atlantic flight?' James Burke, and how is Robert Owen's 19th-century socialist commune in New Harmony, Indiana, connected to the transistor? Connect This!. Read the book and watch the shows.

In Wartime plan to use Princess to woo Welsh, the Daily Telegraph reports that Edward Iwi, a lawyer and constitutional expert, suggested making the then Princess Elizabeth (now HRH Queen Elizabeth), 'Duke of Cymru' 'to stop the Welsh nationalist movement from becoming a danger in a future war with Nazi Germany' and 'to create a focus of loyalty for the people of north Wales, whose adherence to the British cause was considered suspect.'

Iwi warned of a flourishing nationalist movement in north Wales that threatened to become a copy of the Irish republican movement and a danger to the unity of Great Britain.

The more extreme members were already calling for dominion status like that granted to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The lawyer gave as an example an arson attack on a RAF depot in Caernarvonshire in 1936 carried out by three Welsh nationalists.

('Cymru' is Welsh, for Wales, and is pronounced Kum'-ree.)

moneypans.net reports:

Sources in Beijing told Yonhap News Agency ... that North Korea issued a directive to close its trade office in Beijing "soon" and another in Dandong within six months. The offices, operated by the North's Korean National Economic Cooperation Federation, help South Korean companies do business with the North. ...

Over 100 South Korean companies engaged in ventures in North Korea are reliant on the trade and investment offices in Beijing and Dandong.

Andong Hemp Textile Co., which was last year the first South Korean company to incorporate a firm in the North, said the report was particularly embarrassing because all of its products from Pyongyang require certification from the North Korean office in Beijing.

"If those products don't have a certificate of origin issued by the Beijing office, they cannot pass customs here," said company official Kim Hyuck in Seoul.

South Korean customs have since last year required all North Korean products imported here to be certified by the North Korean federation. The policy was introduced to prevent Chinese-made goods wearing a North Korean labels being sold in South for higher price. ...

"If they do close, companies may have to go back to the old ways and do business through a third party," said Lee Jong-geun, research fellow at the Korea International Trade Association.

Back on Dec 01, 2004, I posted about the Groningen Protocol, 'guidelines' for Dutch doctors in deciding whether and under what circumstances to kill children under 12, including newborns.

Now, 'to prod the government of the Netherlands', 'a group of senior Dutch doctors has reported itself to prosecutors for having "killed" 20 newborns.' (The quotes around 'killed' are in the original.) In Netherlands, debate begins on euthanizing critically ill children.

The current Dutch law permits doctor-assisted suicide, but only for people over 12, and only by persons who request it. At least 22 babies have been put to death since 1987, according to last month's Dutch Journal of Medicine.

While the University Medical Center Groningen page describing the Protocol states

• the suffering must be so severe that the newborn has no prospects of a future;
• 'there is no possibility of a cure or alleviation with medication or surgery;'
• 'the parents must always give their consent;'
• 'a second opinion must be provided by an independent doctor who has not been involved with the child's treatment; and'
• 'the deliberate ending of life must be meticulously carried out with the emphasis on aftercare.'

doctors have been taking the babies' lives against the law for 17 years. If they have been ignoring the law until now, why should parents expect them to obey the law if it changes?

HT to Colleen Hammond: Debate begins on euthanizing critically ill children at Dressing with Dignity blog.

2005 Text Mode Browser Roundup gave me a reason to try out the text mode browsers lynx, links, w3m and elinks (a links fork). All the following was done on a Debian 3.1 (testing, or 'sarge') desktop, xfree86 at 4.3.0.dfsg.1-1, and inside multi-gnome-terminal 1.6.2-10, which has tabbed terms, split windows, scrollback buffer search, echoing stdout to other terms and other useful features.

Hyperlinks supplied since oddly, the Linux Journal article doesn't.

links is a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/links, and /etc/alternatives/links is a symlink to /usr/bin/elinks on this Debian desktop, so I'm not testing links as such. lynx didn't handle the css in my home site, as the table below indicates, but the other three had no difficulty with the crummy code in the pages. (My home site started off with all the css in each page, not in one .css file, and I've never taken the time to simplify things. The chattr and inillotempore.com blogs do have one .css file each, and one page makes editing and changes much simpler.)

elinks, w3m and lynx didn't like the css in this blog: the sidebar gets shoved way down to the bottom of the page.

My Logitech scrolling mouse scrolls pages in elinks-links and w3m, but not in lynx. Tapping the ESC key in elinks-links brings up a horizontal, drop-down menu across the top of the screen. The page doesn't resize, so the uppermost line in the displayed page is obscured by the menu. Lastly, the images in Can you name [Kate Pierson's Catskills motel] can be displayed with display (/usr/bin/display), which will pop up a separate window.

I fired up XEmacs (21.4.17-1 here), and `M-x w3-fetch RET http://devmike.com/blog` pleasingly displayed images inline, though the sidebar again is shoved to the bottom. shows hideously oversized header fonts. Emacs/W3 seems to be installed by default on this Debian box. I don't remember playing with the init.el or site-start.el to install w3, and the only init.el under /home/mike/ is in Documents/ and is the leftover from when the machine was running Mandrake, so I doubt it gets loaded and if it did get loaded, it'd probably get horribly confused. The bottom line is if I ever felt the urge to run xemacs, I could use it as a browser.

Text Mode Browser Feature Comparison [swiped from linuxjournal.com article]

	Lynx	Emacs/W3	w3m	Links	ELinks
Tables	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Frames	N	N	Y	Y	Y
SSL/TLS	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
CSS	N	CSS1	N	N	Y
Javascript	N	N	N	N	Y
UTF-8	Y	Y	Y	N	N

No pink air and the tree's aren't red, but the B-52s' Kate Pierson has a motel in New York State's Catskill Mountains: Kate's Lazy Meadow Motel, a 'dream getaway'. Here's a kitchen and living room, showing the 'dazzing color pallette':

  

HT to Debbie Daughtry at Kate's Lazy Meadow on WFMU's Beware of the Blog.