There’s not much to say here, except that sometime many colors can look nice. The menus on the right are in several shades of soft pastel and are quite harmonious. Keep it in mind as a choice for themes. Nice that it matches the big background graphic. (Obvious Diversion Home Page)

And then there’s Apple. They have an enviable style to their pages. The large black block draws in the eye to the product. The product description uses a nice open line-spacing and magazine-style picture layout to make a pleasing picture. “Buy now” is nice and obvious against the white background (and doesn’t even introduce an extra color, matching instead the banner). The store page highlights the two colors available (matching the selection buttons to the products) and using small pictures... [More]

Similar to the blue man web site, but less 3d, it makes good use for color for the different areas. The search at the top is “Live” and results update as you type above the Sidenotes. The green new icon also draws the eye. Click an article and scroll down to see the comments view, which is also a nice touch. (Bartleme Home Page)

This is another pretty clean-looking design. In particular, the page navigation is nicely organized and presented. The breadcrumbs are integrated under the section tabs and the “Quote Size” buttons on the right are like a toolbar (with result count shown in the same area). All information is gathered at the top. The company web site and philosophy are also interesting (Zaadz Home Page)

Another relatively clean look; the thing of note is that the tab folders here are nicely done, collecting the date and topic without being too disturbing. (Steel Gryphon Home Page)

A very corporate web site, but light-colored as well. Good use of line spacing (1.30em), light menu headers on top (tightly against one another and turning light gold when hovered). Uses green for the “read more” links to draw the eye and differentiate from menu links. The bottom of the page has an elegant copyright and site info section, with nicely grayed images. (WebSideStory Home Page)

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: