So go ahead. At your church or on your street or driveway build a 4 feet by 8 feet by 8 inch high plywood box and set it out. Or build a slightly sloped wedge-shaped ramp about six foot long and a foot high at one end. Set it out on or near the sidewalk or parking lot in view of the street or where you have seen a skater traverse the church property. Have some full octane Coke or Gatorade ready… maybe candy or chips. I tell you, if you build it, they will come.

Next-Wave: If you build they will come, part 2 by Tom Chapman

Soundmosaic constructs an approximation of one sound out of small pieces of other sounds.

The soundmosaic algorithm is: Split the target file up into equal-sized segments, or "tiles". For each tile in the target file, find the closest match in the source files, and replace the target tile with the tile from the source files.

soundmosaic

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money -- with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 -- and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.

Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier

economics are not, after all, suspended in cyberspace like the laws of gravity in outer space. Content needs to be paid for on the Web just as in any other medium. And it probably has to be paid for the same way most other things are paid for: by the people who use it. We tried charging the customers at Slate. It didn't work. Future experiments may be more successful, and we at Slate encourage others to jump in. We'll watch. But meanwhile, let's look again at this notion that in every medium except the Internet people pay for the content they consume. It's not really true.

It's Not Just the Internet - Almost no one pays for content in any medium. By Michael Kinsley

Your computer is full of evidence. You need help now.

Years of Internet data could be used by the police.

Time of latest investigation: Today 7:28:18 P.M. ON 29 NOVEMBER 2002

Click Here Now For Urgent Help To Stop This Investigation

Are you guilty? What's that on your desktop? What are all those PICTURES?

YOU HAVE A BIG PROBLEM

Welcome to the home of the Word Spy. This Web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways.

Each weekday, the Word Spy presents a new word, its definition, and a citation (usually from a major newspaper or magazine) that shows how people are using the word. You also get extra goodies such as background on the word's formation, a list of related words from the Word Spy database, quotations on words and language, and more.

The Word Spy

January 31, 2000 | P icture this: A photo of a boy and girl -- unmistakably naked, posed and giggling -- holding two very large sausages (Italian?). The boy is maybe 8, the girl maybe 6. They are not touching each another, nor does the camera seem especially interested in their genitals. What catches the eye are those sausages, but not that they are involved in anything you or I would call, right off, sexual: They are not being licked, stroked or inserted. They are more atmospheric, I guess you could say.

Is this child pornography? Well, if you are a photo lab manager in Burbank, Calif., you follow the in-store policy and ask the store manager. The store manager, noticing the nudity and the meat, follows what he takes to be the law and calls the Burbank police. The police send two undercover cops out with instructions to nab the photographer. The cops then order the photo lab manager to phone the customer, tell him his prints are ready and instruct him to come pick them up right away.

salon :: :: mwt :: feature :: Is this child pornography?, By James R. Kincaid :: Page 1

Man opens strip club in 'sovereign nation' south of Twin Cities

Associated Press

Published Nov. 18, 2002
STRI19

ELKO, Minn. -- An Ojibwe man has declared a piece of land in this tiny town a sovereign nation, opened a strip club and pledged to fight anyone who tries to mess with either.

``There ain't no way on God's Earth that they're going to stop me,'' said Al LaFontaine, 82, of St. Paul.

It's not the first time LaFontaine has said that.

In 1959, he offered to sell a third of North Dakota to the Soviet Union and he's put forth a variety of schemes to build casinos on land that he's bought and declared sovereign.

Man opens strip club in 'sovereign nation' south of Twin Cities

Mitchie Brusco seems like your average 5-year-old boy.

He loves Power Rangers and his favorite movie is ``Spider-Man.'' He spends hours on swing sets, and he still thinks school will be fun once he attends.

But when Mitchie hops onto a skateboard, he is anything but average.

He is becoming one of biggest -- and smallest -- sensations in Northwest skateboarding.

Mitchie, who lives in Kirkland, is a skateboarding prodigy -- already sponsored by six different companies.

He has won his past three competitions, including the first-place trophy at the 8-and- under Northwest League Competition held in Portland in June.

The win earned Mitchie an all-expenses-paid trip to the Gravity Games in Cleveland, one of the biggest skateboarding events in North America.

``Everybody has a talent,'' said his mother, Jennifer Brusco. ``I think he just found his sooner than most.''

southcountyjournal.com - Skating prodigy, 5, turning heads

To experience the mental state of flow is to create ecstasy over actions, said Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of Claremont Graduate University who spoke to an audience of 100 in Herter Hall yesterday afternoon

Csikszentmihalyi said he and his students conducted interviews of musicians, composers, writers, poets, and figure skaters to determine aspects of flow. Csikszentmihalyi described the seven aspects to how it feels to be in flow:

Being completely involved in what you are doing - focused, concentrated; a sense of ecstasy-of being outside everyday reality; great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing; knowing that the activity is doable - that our skills are adequate to the task; a sense of serenity - no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego; timelessness - thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes; intrinsic motivation - whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

"The goal has to come from the inside, and nobody can tell you whether it was the right goal," Csikszentmihalyi said.

The Massachusetts Daily Collegian - Visiting psychology professor speaks on attaining the mental state of flow