Web Monitor
17:42 UK time, Tuesday, 21 July 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
The most interesting items from cyberspace, prepared with a pinch of weird, a slice of wonderful and served on a wholesome dish known as Web Monitor. Send us your own favourite links via the comments box.
•Everyone likes a solar eclipse, but would you ever say the experience makes the Earth move for you? This Wednesday, , a team of geophysicists will be stationed at six sites across China to see whether a solar eclipse really does lead to fluctuations in gravity. In 1954, a French economist and physicist Maurice Allais noticed erratic behaviour in a swinging pendulum when an eclipse passed over Paris.
Pendulums typically swing back and forth as a result of gravity and the rotation of the Earth. At the start of the eclipse, however, the pendulum's swing direction shifted violently, suggesting a sudden change in gravitational pull.
•The joy of technical infrastructure may not appeal to all and it's a subject that would probably find few takers outside the blogosphere, but by Britta Gustafson appealed to Web Monitor, who used to spend many a long car journey dreaming of electric pylons running round the fields, inspired by .
•What is it about confessionals in blogs? First there was the seminal blog , showing a secret in visual form on a postcard, usually involving crayons in some way. Then a raft of others followed, from sending in regretted texts from last night, to holding up signs about what someone may have once told you. And now there is the opportunity to reveal .
•As a former painkiller addict, actress Jamie Lee Curtis ponders on speculation surrounding Michael Jackson's death, with :
"Listen, I can relate. I too found painkillers after a routine cosmetic surgical procedure and I too became addicted, the morphine becomes the warm bath from which to escape painful reality. I was a lucky one. I was able to see that the pain had started long ago and far away and that the finding the narcotic was merely a matter of time. The pain needed numbing. My recovery from drug addiction is the single greatest accomplishment of my life... but it takes work - hard, painful work - but the help is there, in every town and career, drug/drink freed members of society, from every single walk and talk of life to help and guide... Mr. Jackson was an addict... Donations should be donated to drug treatment and prevention, not to his children."
•And in another thought-provoking piece, Katharine Mieszkowski in looks at how the historical stereotype of a babysitter reflects adults' fear of changing girlhood:
"She's the source of fear, frustration and sexual fantasy... The bad babysitter's a teenage girl, often dressed inappropriately, who is an unreliable scatterbrain, more interested in doing her nails or texting than the kids. When she's not glued to the TV, she's gabbing on the phone all night while eating Mom and Dad out of house and home. Or maybe she's sneaking her boyfriend in after the kids are asleep, or batting her eyelashes suggestively at Dad on the drive home. The bad babysitter can be a threat not only to the children left in her care, but also to the very marriage of the parents she's working for."
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