Good Articles, 2001 and before

• Letter from an Afghan-American by Tanim Ansary.
• Terrorism: Theirs and Ours by Eqbal Ahmad. Reagan once hailed the Taliban as "The Moral Equivalent of Our Founding Fathers. But yesterday's heroes are today's terrorists. Reagan also applied that label to the Nicaraguan Contras.
• The Massacre at Deir Yassin - why did the Palestinian Arabs flee in 1948? The village of Deir Yassin (about 400 people) was the site of a legendary massacre. Like the massacres in Bosnia, this proved to be an effective tool of "ethnic cleansing".
  • Deir Yassin Remembered - this is the standard version of the story as enshrined in the collective memory of the palestinian people.
  • The Zionist Version of Deir Yassin - according to this version, the village was a stronghold of Syrian forces, rather than an innocent village of civilians, and only about 120 died in a bloody battle. The story of the massacre was encourgaed by a jewish commander in order to incite panic, and it worked.
• Palestinian Cultural Identity
• Digital Millenium Copyright Act section 104 report - a 232-page report on the DMCA. It really is a bad law ;-)
• Succumbing to the Dark Side of the Force: The Internet As Seen from an Adult Website - Dan Klein, Cybertainment, Inc. gave this talk at the LISA 98 workshop. "Yes, my mother knows what I do for a living".
• The Writings of Leslie Lamport - LL masy be best known to the computing community as the author of the LaTeX document macros for scientific typesetting, but he has written a ton of very diverse papers.
• Jakob(?) Rindsig, Cand Merc, Copenhagen
  • Shadow of the Sun about the Japanese market superiority in the 1980s and early '90s.
  • Comparative analysis of Sony and B&O
• TCP/IP Lecture notes - really, this is a compendium in English based on Douglas Comer's wonderful IP protocol textbook. About 27 PDF files also available as a 24 MB zip file.
• My Second Computer was a Univac-1 by George Sadowsky, prof. emeritus of NYU.
  I wish I could say that George Sadowsky is an old friend of mine, because I admire him a lot, but I have at least met him a couple of times.
• The influence of the Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories on the development of supercomputing. - Donald MacKenzie.
• Genghis John - Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, July 1997.
  A tribute to an amazing military man. This biography has just been published. It is getting great reviews. The core of Boyd's final work was A Discourse on Winning and Losing, the charts of which are at this link.

  Here is another Tribute To John R. Boyd from the company magazine of Lockheed-Martin.

• The end of Computing Science by Edgar Dijkstra. Disjkstra published an amazing number of very influential articles over a 40-year teaching career. Many of them are archived here.
• Overcharged in Katmai - Chapter X of Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun. Some great pictures of wild bears, and the story of how such pictures are made. It is not all as you may think. (I found this article from a link here while searching for the above Dijkstra article.)
• USS Liberty - during the six-day war in 1967, Israel attacked a US Navy ship, killing 34 US servicemen and wounding 171 more. Both countries tried to hide the incident for 30 years.
• Security Flaws in Alcatel ADSL modems - Things to think about when designing a router that allows firmware upgrades across the network.
• Pulling a System Up by its Bootstraps - a walk-through of IBM S/390 Initial Program Load.
• Advances and Remaining Obstacles to Adoption of Public Key Encryption Infrastructure Technology - from the U.S. General Accounting Office. I have not read this yet, but I know I will have to. Soon.
• QEF Technical Papers - a set of articles about various software engineering topics, mostly written by David Tilbrook. One of my favorites is about 7 different ways he found the "rename(2)" system call to be broken in various commercial unix releases. Most of these articles are stored as PostScript files, and you will need to install the "GhostScript" program to read them on Windows.
• Kennedy-Krushchev Exchanges - Correspondence between Kennedy and Krushchev from the first congratulation on Kennedy's election, through Jackie's thank-you nopte after Jack's funeral. In between, discussions and justifications for disputes such as the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.
• Technology Review - a magazine published by MIT. Great articles such as Flying Made Easy.
• Origins and Development of TOPS-20 by Dan Murphy. The history of TENEX, written by a system programmer at BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman of Cambridge, Massacchussetts). Reader will also want to explore http://www.36bit.org which includes among other things a repository of PDF files containing scanned-in DEC hardware manuals.
• Broadband Network Legislation in the 106th Congress - Things that ISPs should worry about.
• A panoramic view of the world from the new space station - You can scroll East-West and North-South. Canada's population is almost exclusively along the U.S. border. Moving east to Europe, there is a high population concentration along the coast of the Mediterranean. Check out the development of Israel compared to the rest of the Arab countries. Note the Nile River, The Outback of Australia and the TransSiberian Rail Route. Moving east, most striking is the difference between North and South Korea (remember, prior to 1950 N Korea was the industrial heart of the nation, S Korea was agricultural). Truly unique! It is an absolutely awesome picture of the Earth. (Astronomy Picture of the Day is a great ongoing series with links to all sorts of information on other NASA web sites).
• NTSB Accident Report of John Denver's crash. It wasn't suide, nor was it alcohol related. A user interface design problem, really. Computer guys know this kind of problem. This version of the report is more offical but less readable.
• USEnet FAQs - These collections of "Frequently Asked Questions (with answers)" are goldmines of information on everything from how to borrow a 12 minute video on how Lego bricks are made to how to inspect the electrical wiring in a house for safety hazards.
• Back in the USSR - in Inc. Magazine, a British museum director tells about buying an obsolete Soviet supercomputer. More about the BESM-6 (60 bit) computer at this link.
• Vintage and Classic VW - lots of history about the VW bugs and buses.
• Mathematical Background by John F. Sowa - from his book Conceptuial Structures. A quick overview of calculus in 36 pages.
• After Running Through the Thistles the Hard Part Begins by the Rev. Dr. Mark D. Morrison-Reed.
  - An essay about the relationship between the minister and the church. Our minister will retire in a couple of years, and I am hoping she - and her husband - will stick around. Rev. Reed says she must leave.
• Governor Huckabee of Arkansas - We westerners often look down on southerners, and there are many jokes about people from Arkansas, but I came across this speech by their governor, and I must say I took a liking to him.
• The New Old Economy by Jonathan Rauch - How computers have transformed the oil business and other mineral exploration operations.
• Hack Furby! is about how to transform the over-cute stuffed Furby toys (which speak Furbish) to something less cute and more fun. A conversion kit is now available.
• Gerald Weinberg published a book in 1971 called "The Psychology of Computer Programming". I read it 10 years later, delighted that an outsider had such great insights in how our business works. This book has now been in print continously for 30 years!
• Look Who's Talking ... by Howard Rheingold in Wired. - Are the Amish allowed to use cellphones? How do they decide?
• Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine - 100 years before the ENIAC, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer. While it was never completed, it had many of the atttributes of the computers of our times.
• An evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer - I was shocked to learn recently that Tom Lehrer is practically forgotten. Here is a fan page with several good songs.
• That's the way the Money Goes - Why do rich people have all the money? Applying thermodynamics to the economy.
• What do you do with a scrapped old computer? You've seen MacIntosh fish tansks, but have you seen The VAXbar ?
• 5 Steps to Building Communities in Youth Groups - works for all sorts of other groups, too.
• Junkyard Wars - Can you build a flying machine in one day out of materials from the junkyard? In this British TV series (now airing on The Learning Channel on Wednesday evenings) two teams are competing on such challenges.
• The AN-94 Abakan Assault Rifle - Legends and Reality - the story of the successor to the AK-47.
• Not Negotiable - what happens if you deposit a $95,000 advertizing junk check to your checking account?
• Joe Frank was born in France of Polish parents, and now lives in Santa Monica, California where he produces (on an erratic schedule) these one-hour montages which are a mix of Joe reading musings on the nature of the world and edited interviews with people he found on the road. You are never quite sure how much of this is reportage and how much is literature.
• The Digital Silk Road - a communication protocol for micro-payments. Agorics is an interesting research group. The "Technical Library" has good articles as well as links to other sites about financial systems.
• Why Copyright Will be Hard to Enforce in the Future
• Bush Spells Trouble for Economy, Tech Policy - Dan Gillmor, San Jose Merc, 2000-12-15 ... and a sampling of readers' responses (mostly those who disagree)
• Who Pays Taxes in the USA? - an analysis of some numbers from the Congressional Budget Office.
• Saint Chad, bishop of Lichfield - in 669 AD, this bishop resigned from his office in order to protect the unity of the Church of England.
• News, Information and Value - the challenges to newspapers in the Internet age
• What I learned from being in a campaign - spinning a story is still lying.
• Tribute to the IBM 360/67 by Tom van Vleck (of Multics fame). Contains links to several other good articles, including Melinda Varian's memoirs about VM/CMS.
• The History of the US Penny Coin from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.
• Election Privacy and Security by Professor Douglas Jones, Iowa State University (Nov-2000).
  Now includes Prof. Jones' testimony before the US Civil Rights Commission.
• The Dead Media Project - a fascinating look at obsolete technology.
• Marketing High Tech Products: Lessons in Customer Focus from the Marketplace, Deborah Rosen, June 1998. - Includes case stories about CD-I, Apple Newton and BetaMax.
• (In Danish) En Medarbejder om Universitetsledelse - Peter Naur (1995)
• The History of Software Engineering - In 1968-1970, two famous conferences sponsored by NATO called for the establishment of a proper discipline of Software Engineering. In 1996, a seminar brought together many of the original paticipants to review how they had fared.
• The Best Congress Money Can Buy - while the data is a bit old, it is quite instructive.
• The Candidate Match-o-Matic - did you vote for the person you agreed with?
• The Turn - Aerodynamics by William Langeweische, Atlantic Monthly, Dec 1993.
• The Lessons of ValuJet 592 - a reconstruction of the famous crash by William Langewiesche, Atlantic Monthly, Mar 1998.
• Marijuana and the Drug War - a history of Cannabis and some policy options for change.
• Creating the Interstate System - the Federal Highway Act of 1956 (by Richard Weingroff, 1996). How Albert Gore senior "took the initiative in creating the Interstate highways".
• Edge of Space Sciences - high altitude balloons and amateur radio.
• Urban Legends Reference Pages from the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society.
• Violence as Policy in the Occupations of Palestine, Kashmir and Northern Ireland, by Michael Kolodner, April 1996.