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News and Sports Updates While in Chile (1Jun95) (from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) We often get asked by visitors for latest news items or sports scores while on the mountain. The following are my own opinions and comments on the "how to stay in touch with that football/basketball/baseball score/game/standings" that you just can't live without. My organization probably wishes to remind us that the network exists for scientific purposes---but then they're not Bulls or Cubs fans. Padres or Yankee fans need read no further. 1) If you understand or read Spanish, El Mercurio is a decent newspaper, with fair international news coverage. It's better than most US papers, although perhaps not the NY Times or the Washington Post. It is delivered daily to the mountain (except not always on Sundays). Also the Chilean TV news (currently at 9 pm on two channels) has 10-15 minutes of international coverage, also quite acceptable in my opinion. We may eventually feed the local cable channels up the mountain or find some other way to get things like CNN and ESPN and HBO on the mountain. There are mixed opinions on the value or appropriateness of these measures. If anyone thinks a daily newspaper in English is necessary, he or she could consider a donation of an International Herald Tribune subscription. It is available here 3 or 4 days delayed, and is expensive (about $2.50/day, 6 days a week). It is a high quality paper, and also features Calvin and Hobbs, and Doonesbury. 2) You may chose to get personal pay-for-service e-mail or other network news/information services. For example, USA Today has an inexpensive e-mail (five days a week) headline service for sports, news, economy, etc, sections. Also Compuserve is reachable via the Internet and has AP news as part of their regular services. Ask me if you want details of either of these two commercial services. 3) The freebies on the net. There are a lot of them, and here is a list of some that I have found or used over the past year. No guarantees at this point, some of them may be out-of-date, etc. Also I will just give the Mosaic/url address, there are a variety of ways to reach these services. http://www.mit.edu:8001/services/sis/NBA/NBA.html Professional Basketball Server gopher://cns.cscns.com/11/News%20and%20 InformationCommunity News Service http://rs560.cl.msu.edu/~cookm/tigers/tigers.html Detroit Tigers' Info gopher://info.umd.edu:925/11/Todays_News Today's News (midnight to midnight) http://cyber.sfgate.com:80/sports/ San Francisco Chronicle Cybersports http://tns-www.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/sports World Wide Web of Sports http://www.clark.net/pub/watc/watc.html Welcome to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered! http://debra.dgbt.doc.ca/cbc/news.html CBC News Experiment http://www.nando.net/baseball/bbserv.html The Nando X Baseball Server http://www.ccnet.com/SF_Free_Press/sports/ The Sporting Gray Note that Mosaic and other Web browsers are very easy to use if you have little experience, but surfing the Web may not be consistent with maximum productivity at the telescope. I will happily take comments, suggestions and additions, and make a "hotlist-news/sports" file available for visitors. Bob Schommer (rschommer@noao.edu)
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