Tight, good-looking use of strong blue color. The frame around the lead-in graphic looks very good too. Note the use of an initial gradient on the article text to give it more texture. Header, navigation, content and sidebar are clearly-defined areas with their own colors. (TheManInBlue Home Page)

Nice use of dark military colors; the first page (seen to the right) also makes good use of a familiar “shopping flier feel” for sales information. At the bottom is a list of credit cards supported, which offers information and an nice visual touch. (Steam Home and Steam News)

A single-product web site with two columns and modest use of color for attracting attention. Note the “What’s new” and “Download” buttons featured prominently and that the product description, upgrade and documentation information all fits into the first scroll pane. (IntelliJIdea Home Page)

Nice use of watermark graphics in text boxes (see logo at bottom right). Site is a bit slow; have patience. (Enlightenment Home Page)

This is a gaming site and looks it, but the menu design on the left is quite tight and looks “solid”. The “bubbles” in the middle serve to nicely accent the important parts of the site. Compare and contrast with the highly metallic style of GameSpot. They have a very similar layout, but more boxy (though the headers for the boxes are nice). (Inside Mac Games Home Page)

This BeOS-variant maintainer is simple, but quite nice. I find the banner graphic fits with the logo quite well. Both the actual logo and the site icon (3 leaves in a circle) are elegant and nice. (Haiku Home Page)

Mike Lischke’s Soft Gems site is a good example of this cool control in use. It uses accelerating/decelerating animation and opacity progression to show/hide menus. Very slick … and it’s cross-browser. (Dynarch Navbar Home Page)

Nice, clean, professional single-product web site. Icons are simple, consistent and single color; uses one other color for the word “Free”. (UserPlane Home Page)

This site is quite nice, using the four colored boxes motif to make their sidebars and articles distinct. Especially nice is the gradient shading at the bottom-left hand corner to separate the text blocks from each other and to draw attention to the details for each block.

I kind of like the little stipple-pattern used as a separator too. (Pie Home Page)

“You can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic.”

“[The attitude towards Haiti] is a depressing illustration of how a highly disciplined intellectual class can reframe even the most depraved actions as yet another opportunity for self-adulation.”

The people of New Orleans should put their heads together and come up with something in their patois.

“President Bush once spoke to a major gathering of the American Indian Nation in Arizona. He went on for almost an hour about plans to increase every Native American’s standard of living. He referred to his career as Governor of Texas, where he had signed “YES” 1,237 times — once for every Indian issue that came across his desk.

“Although vague on the details, he seemed most enthusiastic to... [More]”

“The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

“A comedian has to be one of the most serious of people, for he must be able to understand implicitly and to mimic his fellow man, and still be able not to hate him.”

“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”

Impeachment is a word that’s going to turn up almost no hits on a Lexis Nexis search. The word gets kicked around whenever a president does stuff he shouldn’t. The last time it was used was with Clinton, who actually was impeached, but was not forced to leave office. As with everything else in American politics, impeachment is too complicated for a mortal mind to grasp. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, Clinton was impeached not for adultery (though there are many in the Puritanical... [More]

It is generous to say that the U.S. education system doesn’t place much of an emphasis on learning history. Knowing history breeds learning about current policy (before it becomes history), discussing it (politics for the layman? absurd) and, worst of all, questioning it. The typical American history education during the 70s and 80s included years of repetition of the same 75 years during the founding of the U.S., coverage of the Civil War, some stuff about the Arch Duke Ferdinand and WWI,... [More]

The End of Poverty by Onnesha Roychoudhuri (AlterNet) is an interview with Jeffrey Sachs, head of a panel of “over 250 development experts to lay out practical strategies for promoting rapid development”. The biggest hurdle, as far as he’s concerned is the “lack of appropriate effort” on the part of “rich countries”. The main problems faced by poor countries today are malnutrition and diseases like AIDS and malaria; these could be “controlled quite dramatically and easily if we just put in the effort”. Opponents have criticized his... [More]

Opting for ‘Opt-In’ by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor (AlterNet) shows how schools are dealing with increasingly predatory military recruiters in their schools. As the military misses more and more recruiting deadlines, they demand more and more access to the records for younger potential recruits: kids in high school. The military has access to a student’s personal records by default, unless the school district or the parents deny it.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

Swiss wrap a glacierThe Real Junk Science by George Monbiot (AlterNet) covers a recent letter by a pillar of the scientific community (no, really, he apparently is … or was) in which he claims that most glaciers in Europe are, in fact, growing. Global warming naysayers have naturally taken this as “proof” that global warming is a sham dreamt up by fruity eco-socialists who want to ruin it for everybody.

Monbiot’s look into the validity of the claim takes him on a twisty path a myriad of citations, each building on the last without adding... [More]

What follows are some tales from recent U.S. domestic and foreign policy — tales of a government increasingly concerned neither with the will of its people nor the welfare of humans in general. A government that prefers to shortsightedly amass power unto itself, ignoring long-term realities that make such power fleeting at best.

Taking action in Darfur

Ring Them Bells by Chris Floyd (CounterPunch) sounds the alarm that the sweet-faced young up-and-comer, the United States, is poised to pop its self-interest cherry by... [More]

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Amazon) is a work of fiction about a baptist family from the American South who embark on a mission to the Congo in 1959. It tells the tale from the viewpoint of the minister’s four daughters with intermezzos told by the mother. The clash of cultures on social, political and military levels is exquisitely woven from these individual strands of experience. The political context is remarkably similar to that in which an amnesiac America has placed itself today, lending ever more... [More]

Mapping Google is an in-depth examination of Google Maps, a new web application that searches the US graphically. There are follow-up articles in Making the Back Button dance and Still more Fun with Maps. The series of articles covers the techniques Google used to bring a full-fledged, usable application to a web browser.

What’s so special about it? It feels like a desktop application:

Apple LCD (not reviewed)Budget LCD Roundup April 2005 (Firing Squad) is a perfect guide for people looking to buy an LCD. Let me rephrase that to anyone looking for a computer, because CRTs barely even exist anymore. In fact,

*That’s me. I’ve got two vintage 19" Viewsonics, both 5 years old.

Pixel Speed

So, LCD it is, then.... [More]

A little while ago, the United States Senate invited British Parliamentarian George Galloway over the pond for a bit of a chat. They wanted to hear what he had to say about the accusations they’d made that he profited from the Oil for Food program in Iraq during sanctions. The U.S. media had naturally already weighed in and found him guilty supported by marginal circumstantial evidence. (He knew a guy who knew a guy … what more do you need?) Galloway is by no means an angel, but after... [More]

“You don’t run an empire; it runs you.”

Two bills signed into law this year will have major effects on the average American citizen’s life in the coming years. First, the Congress and the President gleefully passed the written-by-credit-card-companies bankruptcy bill. Soon after, RealID slipped through on the coattails of the appropriations bill for the next whack of change for Iraq.

Bankruptcy is Obsolete

Debt Slavery by David Swanson (Common Dreams) provides some background on the recently passed bankruptcy bill.

The bankruptcy bill was sold to us by our media... [More]

Having Fun With Intelligent Design by David Morris (AlterNet) offers some good advice to teachers charged with spending time on alternative theories to evolution. The crux of the matter is that in two states so far, Pennsylvania and Kansas (big surprise there), teachers must address a theory of the world known as intelligent design. This is not religion; it is a pseudo-scientific justification for a God-like being.

As Winston Smith noted long ago, keeping history up to date is a full-time job. It’s good that we in America are blessed with a vigilant media that takes care of the job. When W. Mark Felt recently came forward to name himself as the erstwhile informant in the Watergate scandal, the right-wing loonies seized the opportunity to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War in today’s context.

Deep Throat and Genocide by Ben Stein provides a truly stunning summary of Nixon and the Vietnam War, claiming that Nixon... [More]