The "Yet Another 'How To Create Your Own Home Page' Home Page" offers illustrated step-by-step instructions for basic and advanced WWW HTML and CGI programming. . [Vince Kerchner , c.i.www.announce, 7/15/95.]

Wired editor Kevin Kelly says that language is flourishing on the net. "Most of the richness in language can now be found in this new space, not in novels. ... You can't download it. That's the whole point. You want to read it like a book, but that's precisely what it *can't* be. You want it to be data, but it's experience -- and experience that you have to have *there*." [Harper's, 8/95, p. 35. EDUPAGE.] (Or, the speech acts of online prose are woven into an interactive, social context. Remove them from the real-time stream and their intent to influence is lost. Their life drains out as soon as the opportunity to respond and participate is lost. That's why I try to present the Communique as an interactive news service.)

IPL Moo is an interactive virtual environment for librarians and information professionals -- part of the Internet Public Library at the UMichigan School of Information and Library Studies. Current topics include distance education, collaborative learning, and remote reference services. Telnet to ipl.sils.umich.edu and log in as iplmoo, then "connect guest" and "@tutorial intro". Or see , or write to . [Schelle Christine Simcox , IRLIST Digest, 7/17/95.]

ToolVox from Voxware (Skillman, NJ) disassembles a voice recording into phonetic "components" -- such as vowel harmonics -- then reassembles them for altered speech. You can change your sex, improve your singing, or speed up your intelligible speech by as much as 30-fold. [Otis Port, BW, 7/24/94, p. 83.] (Compression could save transmission costs, but surely sending just the parameters would be even faster. A new age of digital telephony? Just inserting the higher frequencies in women's voices would be a big win. And soon multimedia sound tracks could be entirely synthesized, giving the director or developer full control over pacing and vocal emotion.)

MeshMart archivist Richard Tilmann suggests that "the market for 3D mesh objects is about to explode" as people upgrade from simple web pages to 3D virtual-reality "home spaces." Of course, building a 3D "space" with VRML is far more difficult than creating home pages with HTML -- which creates opportunities for designers and artists. MeshMart is helping homespace builders with a new VRML-VR page for virtual-reality tools, in addition to pages for 3D mesh objects. . [, comp.cad.autocad, 7/14/95.]

Virtual reality is bringing out a new medical condition: cybersickness "flashbacks." Apparently the brain reacts to inconsistent motion cues by opening new neural pathways, sometimes causing flashbacks hours or days after a simulation session. "There could be some big lawsuits looming." [BW, 7/10/95, p. 110. EDUPAGE.]

"I love the National Gallery and the British Museum, indeed, as noble reserves of pleasure on which I can draw at need. They make London almost worth living in, whereas without them it would be a wilderness. ... Museums and art galleries exist for potential visitors as well as actual visitors. They are a part of the rich surroundings of our lives. ... If they were closed I should feel an infinitely poorer man, as though my income of possible pleasures had been cut down. I can bear not visiting them, but I could not bear so easily not having them to visit. ... I like to feel that somewhere or other in the neighbourhood troops of people are shuffling round in high rooms, peering at pictures and staring at statues and paying a puzzled reference to antiquity. They are our representatives in the public appreciation of the arts just as the people who attend political meetings are our representatives in keeping alive the flame of democratic government." -- Robert Lend, "On Never Going to the British Museum," The Portable Irish Reader, Viking, 1946. [Michelle Baudais , QOTD, 5/18/95.]