Blast off
The Nobel Prize is 100 years old this year, and although the awards will not be announced until December, celebrations are already under way (see www.nobel.se/nobel/events/schedule ). A centennial exhibition opened this month in Stockholm, and, in the US, the Smithsonian Institution is holding a Nobel Week of exhibitions and lectures starting on April 21. The SI's Lemelson Centre has also opened a populist website, Innovative Lives ( www.si.edu/lemelson/centerpieces/ilives ) to tell the stories behind a number of inventions from Kevlar to windsurfing.
Bitstreams
Another great museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, has produced Bitstreams, an exhibition of digital art (see www.whitney.org/bitstreams). It does require non-trivial resources including Macromedia Flash 4, RealPlayer G2 and the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) plug in. However, some of the works are worth the effort, though the site runs with glacial slowness even on a broadband DSL line.
New views
The desktop is dead, according to David Gelernter, Yale academic, Unabomber victim, and author of the influential Mirror Worlds. The book spawned a company, also called Mirror Worlds, which has developed Scopewear: software that lets you organise your information by time (see www.scopeware.com/products/products_whatis.htm ). Although it offers many different views, the basic idea is of an expandable sequence of index cards. The good news is that a single-user personal version of the software is expected this summer. However, if you want to try a new way to find your data now, try Enfish.
Red hot
Over the past year, since the department of justice won its anti-trust case against Microsoft, the Nasdaq exchange has become best known as the home of plunging tech stocks. What better time to offer a real-time pictorial representation of the board, with green showing price rises and red showing falls? The idea is to help you spot trends. The "heatmap" of the top 100 stocks is at http://screening.nasdaq.com/ heatmaps/heatmap_100.asp.
Web stacks
The British Library's curators and bibliographers have been developing pages of resources covering the humanities, sound and music, rare books, and science and technology. The resources include a virtual reference library or index of external links. It isn't Yahoo, but it provides a good way in to the BL and related topics.
Unloaded
Ammo City has been launched with a range of promotions designed to attract 18 to 24-year-old members of "youth culture". They include painting graffiti at secret locations, club nights with notable DJs, Ammo City road signs, and hitchhikers (actually, drama students and actors from the Wide Theatre Group) with Ammo City scribbled on bits of card. Parental discretion is advised: the latest efforts at www. ammocity.com include an emailable clip from "Add N to X's latest experimental/ pornographic music video". The site's awful design is all part of manufacturing a "lifestyle brand".
Pop game
Robbie Williams has launched a platform game to help promote his latest single, Let Love Be Your Energy. You can either download it or play it online. The aim is to pick up as many girls as possible. This exercise in animated ecstasy can be found at www.robbiewilliams.com.
Ice time
The Stanley Cup play-offs are one of the sporting highlights of the year, as North America's professional ice hockey teams fight their way through best-of-seven series to the ultimate team prize. Although the play-offs are now covered in depth on Channel 5, you can also follow events on the web. And this year, the NHL and Virage are publishing highlights and a searchable video database at NHL.com.
Chain cutter
The tens of millions of newbies coming on to the internet each year are sometimes deceived by the hundreds of chain letters circulated by email. Many contain truthful information but most are junk. The Breaking the Chain is a good place to check their contents, and provides a useful companion to Snopes, the Urban Legends Reference Pages. Remember, all chain letters are bad for the net, even if they claim to be in a good cause.
New & noted
• Two net crazes in a single site: www.amiallyourbaseornot.
• Two crazes in a spoof video: www.parkwars.com.
• If you missed Underground, Suelette Dreyfus's book on hacking and computer crime, you can download it from www.underground-book.com.
• AskTog on Replay TV: www.asktog.com/limit.html .
• AltaVista's Babel Fish translation system now supports Asian language characters and translates Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to and from English.
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