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Monday, November 5, 2007
Fourmilab Navigation Pages Revised, New Site Map
I have just completed an overhaul of the Fourmilab site's navigation pages, which are generated automatically by a home-brew content management system cobbled together from a Perl program and make. The revision applies the uniform Fourmilab site-wide style to topic pages and displays them with margins which keep the text from running into the edges of the frame. The most substantial change is the replacement of the 1994-style global site map (which, although sporadically updated, was missing many items added in the last several years and, in any case, was of unwieldy length and difficult to navigate) with a modern-style site map organised as a set of nested bulleted lists. This map is generated automatically from the topic descriptions used in the hierarchical navigation pages, so there's no need to maintain two parallel navigation mechanisms. The new site map can be accessed, as was the original, from the left navigation pane of the home page, a link in the main welcome page, or from the text displayed by browsers which do not support frames when viewing the home page.Posted at
22:18
Reading List: Tales of the Bizarro World
- Siegel, Jerry and John Forte. Tales of the Bizarro World. New York: DC Comics, [1961, 1962] 2000. ISBN 1-56389-624-9.
- In 1961, the almost Euclidean logic of the Superman comics went around a weird bend in reality, foretelling other events to transpire in that decade. Superman fans found their familar axioms of super powers and kryptonite dissolving into pulsating phosphorescent Jello on the Bizarro World, populated by imperfect and uniformly stupid replicas of Superman, Lois Lane, and other denizens of Metropolis created by a defective duplicator ray. Everything is backwards, or upside-down, or inside-out on the Bizarro World, which itself is cubical, not spherical. These stories ran in Adventure Comics in 1961 and 1962 and then disappeared into legend, remaining out of print for more than 35 years until this compilation was published. Not only are all of the Bizarro stories here, there are profiles of the people who created Bizarro, and even an interview with Bizarro himself. I fondly remember the Bizarro stories from the odd comic books I came across in my youth, and looked forward to revisiting them, but I have to say that what seemed exquisitely clever in small doses to a twelve year old may seem a bit strained and tedious in a 190 page collection read by somebody, er…a tad more mature. Still, ya gotta chuckle at Bizarro starting a campfire (p. 170) by rubbing two boy scouts together—imagine the innuendos which would be read into that today!
Posted at
02:28