Week 53

11.04.02

"The Dicshunary aims to provide a home for all the small, endangered 'werds' that might only exist in the language of one neighbourhood, one family or even one person."

http://dicshunary.com/faq.php

Like these off-the-wall British insults and compliments, for instance.

http://dicshunary.com/view_dict.php?< BR>issue_id=11&issue_name=Insults

http://dicshunary.com/view_dict.php?< BR>issue_id=12&issue_name=Compliments

11.05.02

One of these days, instead of referring to the technical "specs," these guys who make head-mounted displays will just refer to their products as "spex."

http://www.microoptical.net/products.html

These gizmos give your doctor the friendly bedside manner of a covert surveillance SWAT team.

http://www.microoptical.net/applications.html

11.06.02

Aw man, now even Autonomedia has built a slashdot site. This is like a geek food-fight for anarcho-syndicalists. Instead of news of Pentium overclocking, you get stuff like the "International Women's Conference Against Imperialist War and Plunder."

http://www.autonomedia.org

11.07.02

These guys are into shopping malls that have collapsed, gone broke, and been shuttered-up.

http://www.Deadmalls.com/

Dead and dying malls are sometimes known as "greyfields." There are lots of them.

http://www.rich.frb.org/cao/reports/
greyfields.html

Here's a similar take on dead grocery chains.

http://www.groceteria.net/about/
deadchains.html

These urban design types are having a contest to try to figure out what to do with derelict shopping malls.

http://www.laforum.org/deadmalls/

This isn't exactly nostalgic, Ray Bradbury, Norman Rockwell territory. On the other hand, for the 21st century, maybe it is.

11.08.02

Hey, nifty animated map of the Salem Witchcraft hysteria.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/%
7Ebcr/salem/salem.html

Man, that's a lot of witches and wizards. A hundred and sixty of them. A wonder there was anyone left.

http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/
texts/salemaccused.html

Nice selection of pics here. Kind of explains a lot when you realize that Puritan judges got to take a teenager's clothes off.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salem/
generic.html

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salem/
images/mattwitch1.jpg

Nice use of hotlinks here. You get to follow the melancholy biographies of the accusers, the afflicted, the fit-stricken, the slaves, and so forth.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salem/
people.html

And you can search the hallucinatory trial evidence, which seems to have been hastily scribbled by court clerks scared to death:

(H) how did you go
(T) we ride upon stickes and are there presently
(H) doe you goe through the trees or over them
(T) we see no thing but are there presently
(H) why did you not tell your master
(T) I was a fraid they said they would cut off my head if I told

Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.