Ian Fleming’s evil globe-fish – also known as puffer, blowfish, swellfish, or in Japanese, fugu – is one of the most mysterious creatures of the sea. It is perhaps the world’s most deadly fish, yet in Japan the honorable fugu is the epitome of gourmet dining.

About 100 species of puffers in several closely related families can be found throughout the world. Their most obvious characteristic is their ability to balloon out from a reasonable fish shape into a sphere two or three times large. When frightened, excited, or annoyed, they gulp water, or even air, into a sac on the belly. It swells inside their tough, elastic skin, like an inner tube inside a tire, so as to discourage predators or intimidate rivals. When the fish feels safe, it squirts out the water or releases the air, deflating to its normal shape.

In Japan, eating fugu has been the gastronomic version of Russian roulette for centuries. Sometimes a diner stills losses the gamble. His chopsticks clatter to the table from nerveless fingers; he pales; his breathing labours. It is often the subject of traditional senryu verse. Last night he and I ate fugu;
Today, I help carry his coffin
“It’s a terrible death,” a Japanese restaurant owner told me. “Even though you can think very clearly, your arms and legs become numb. It becomes impossible to sit up. You can think but cannot speak, cannot move, and soon cannot breathe.”

Why the Japanese, who venerate hygiene, should make a ritual of eating deadly poisonous fish, is difficult for foreigners to comprehend. fugu ovaries, intestine, and liver can be so deadly that if even a tiny touch of them is left in the flesh, the gourmet dies, often within minutes. About 60 percent of puffer poisonings prove fatal.

When eating fugu, the diner puts his life in the hands of the chef. Before practicing their risky art, all fugu cooks must be licensed and must take intensive courses, extensive apprenticeship, and written exams.

To eat fugu liver is the height of exotica. It is one of the most poisonous parts of the fish, and techniques for detoxifying it are not dependable. Chefs are prohibited from serving fugu liver, but they sometimes relent under the impassioned pleas of gourmets. Mitsugoro Bando had four servings and paid the ultimate price.

Despite the danger, demand for puffers is increasing so fast that the Japanese fishing grounds are being depleted. Today the Japanese are successfully culturing the fish.

Every year from October through March, millions of diners bet their lives on not getting fatally poisoned. Thanks to strict regulation of restaurants and wholesalers, the number that loses decreases each year. But this droll and perposterous fish with the goggling eyes, swollen belly, and floppy fins remains the world’s most deadly feast. The enigma of the fugu is summed up in the traditional verse:
Those who eat fugu soap are stupid But who’s who don’t eat fugu soup are also stupid.

EVEN BEFORE THE ADVENT OF TV telecasts, a tour of England by an Indian cricket team always had enormous appeal for the fans back home. The BBC radio commentary enabled the Indian fan to follow the post-lunch play after returning from work. The feel of the English summer game being played against the backdrop of everyday life was vividly conveyed by commentators like Brian Johnstone: “And as Kapil Dev runs into bowl, another train pulls out of Warwick Station.” Apart from hearing the cricket, you could read it in the morning newspaper. There were the likes of The Times of India cricket correspondent K N Prabhu who was never shy of reminding the Indian fan that the summer game in England was played at venues steeped in history.

And then there was the swashbuckling Aussie all-rounder turned correspondent Keith Miller whose introduction to his report on India creating history by winning its first series in England in the summer of 1971 at the Oval is still fresh in the memories of hard-boiled cricket fans: “India, you finally did it! But, phew, what a nerve-tingling, nail-biting affair!” .Miller went on to mix metaphors while writing about leg-spinner chandrashekar’s deliveries “snaking off the pitch like greased lightning” as he won the Oval Test for India. The low point would have to punch magazine’s cartoon on India’s score of 42 all out in the Lord’s Test in the 1974 tour where a female spectator tells her hubby.”You should have gone to the loo before we left home. The entire Indian second innings is over!” Once the India-England Test series starts in July, we will be treated to the telecast on ESPN and the commentary by legends like Botham, Gower, Holding and Gavaskar, backed by Hussain and Shastri. Each time fast bowler Harmison’s deliveries go so far down the legside that they cannot be collected by diving wicket-keeper Prior, Gower is liable to quip that “The good old Harmy radar is not quite working today!” There could be a few humorous asides on the BCCI’s inability to find a coach for the Indian team. However, even the call-a-spade-a shovel Botham could refrain from pointing out the only reason why the BCCI chose the 72-year-old Chandu Borde at the last minute as the manager for the Indian tour was because c K Nayudu(born on October31, 1895) and DB Deodhar (January 14, 1892) were not around!

You could even call the commentary the icing on the cake in terms of the appeal the game has for millions, especially in the country which Nirad G Chaudhuri once termed as “the Continent of Circe”. Once the England-India Test series starts, walk down any Indian road - high street or low - and you will find quite a few people rooted on the pavement and looking intently through the shop window of an electronic store which has rows of TVs stacked one on top of the other, all tuned in to the live cricketing action. It is the kind of vision which could have inspired Simon & Garfunkel to sing. “And in the naked light I saw Ten thousand people, even more People talking without speaking, /People listening without hearing,/People writing songs that voices never share. And no one dare/Disturb the sound of silence.”

THE truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is a fine aspiration. But, as Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “What is truth?” For decades, researchers have grappled with the problem of creating a machine that can tell, definitively, whether a person is lying. Until recently, their efforts have been unsatisfactory.

The current generation of lie-detection technologies has been put under scientific scrutiny and found wanting. But science, ever resourceful, is coming up with new ideas. Soon, at least in some cases, that old courtroom platitude may itself come to resemble the truth more closely.

Mention the term “lie detector” to most people and they will probably think of the polygraph. This was invented in 1921. It looks at changes in a range of physiological phenomena—such as a person's breathing rate, pulse, blood pressure and perspiration—that take place while a suspect is being
questioned. These are supposed to indicate if the answer given is untrue.

Polygraph evidence is accepted in many jurisdictions, notably in America. Although American military courts will not allow it, the only civilian courts there that have deemed it completely inadmissible are those of the District of Columbia and the Fourth Circuit (the group of states immediately south of the Mason-Dixon line). In other states its use is at the judge's discretion. Unfortunately for people in areas where they are still used, polygraphs do not work—or, more charitably, are easily duped. That was the conclusion of a report released in 2002 by America's National Academy of Sciences.

Another apparently promising candidate, voice analysis, does not seem to work either. There are repeated claims that tremors in a person's voice can reveal when he is lying. But a study by Mitchell Sommers of the University of Washington in St Louis, showed that—at least in the case of a system
called Vericator—it is not as reliable as had been thought. Voice analysis can, Dr Sommers concluded, indicate an individual's level of stress. But that does not correlate with dishonesty.

The problem with both polygraphy and voice analysis is that they rely on second-hand signs of lying which a good actor can suppress. Furthermore, someone who is telling the truth might exhibit just these signals, because the very act of being questioned by the authorities is stressful. Instead, current research
is looking directly at the source of lies, the brain itself.

Daniel Langleben, of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, uses a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging to probe his subjects' honesty. The lie which those subjects are asked to tell is a small one: they have to persuade Dr Langleben, or one of his assistants, that they
are holding a particular playing card when often they are actually holding a different one. Each successful deception earns a subject $20. The researchers have not had to hand out much cash, though. The brains of lying subjects light up in particular places—notably the anterior cingulate gyrus and left prefrontal
cortex—in ways that they do not in the honest.

A second technique for probing the brain directly during questioning is the “cognosensor” developed by Britton Chance, who also works at the University of Pennsylvania. His subjects wear a headband that beams infra-red light through their skulls and into their brains. Part of this light is reflected back, and the pattern of reflection indicates activity in the tissue it has been reflected from—in particular, changes  in the flow of blood to that tissue.

According to Dr Chance, different emotional disturbances have characteristic reflection patterns. And when a person lies, more of the light is reflected, and the reflections come from a wider area, than when he is telling the truth.

A third brain-probing lie-detection technique, based on electroencephalography (EEG), has actually made it out of the laboratory and into the courtroom. Lawrence Farwell, the founder of Brain Fingerprinting
Labs in Seattle, Washington, calls it MERMER (memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic response). It is, he claims, 99.9% accurate at determining the veracity of certain sorts of statement.

MERMER works by hooking someone up to a standard EEG machine and asking him about specific details of, for example, a crime scene. Lack of a brainwave called P300 denotes lack of familiarity with the details in question, suggesting any denial should be taken at face value.

The technique has already stood up to legal scrutiny twice—once when it supported a conviction, and once when it freed an innocent suspect. It will soon be used again, in the appeal by Jimmy Ray Slaughter, from Oklahoma, against his conviction for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Melody Wuertz, and their 11-month-old daughter, Jessica, in 1991. MERMER suggests that Mr Slaughter had no recollection of important facts about the murder, such as which rooms the victims' bodies were located in.

Although not yet foolproof, these three methods do offer possible alternatives to the antiquated techniques of the polygraph. The truth is out there. It is just a question of finding it.

Painstaking observations of a kind of subatomic dance suggest that the universe may contain a shadowy form of matter that has never been seen directly and is unexplained by standard physics theories, a team of scientists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island announced yesterday. The studies appear to confirm similar findings the scientists reported last year. The research involves muons, rare subatomic particles similar to electrons but 207 times as heavy.
The work has been controversial, though for reasons that have little to do with the experiment itself. Theorists who are not involved in the research, but whose computational results must be used to interpret it, have recently uncovered errors and uncertainties in their own work. For that reason, the Brookhaven experimenters say they are not ready to claim they have proved a new form of matter exists.

In a weird reflection of the boundless complexity of modern physics, top theorists from around the world were still sending conflicting calculations to the Brookhaven team in the hours before the new findings were disclosed yesterday afternoon at the laboratory. Frustration with the theorists boiled over at the lab, where scientists have been hoping that more than a year of new work would determine whether they had stumbled upon what would be a history-making discovery. The frustration stems from the seeming inability of the theorists to reach a solid conclusion. ''We're telling them, 'Look, you guys, get the damn answer on the table,' '' said Dr. Thomas B. Kirk, Brookhaven's associate director for high energy and nuclear physics.

The researchers found that muons wobbled like microscopic tops, or perhaps frenetic dancers, about 229,074 times a second, when they were placed in a powerful magnetic field in a vacuum chamber. Physicists have long known that such vacuums are not really empty, but are filled with a sea of ''virtual'' particles that flit briefly into existence and back into nothingness again. Like dance partners, the virtual particles change the rate at which the muons wobble. Theoretical physicists have long labored to calculate how much the rate of wobble, or precession, changes as a result of all the known particles in the virtual sea. Using those calculations, the Brookhaven researchers found last year -- and confirmed with the newer studies, involving observations of four billion muons -- that the actual wobble is about 0.6 times a second faster than predicted. The difference, called an anomaly by physicists, means the universe must contain previously undiscovered particles.

''If that sea contains some particles we didn't know about before, that will modify the anomaly,'' said Dr. James Miller, a professor of physics at Boston University -- one of 11 institutions in the United States, Russia, Japan and Germany involved in the experiment -- who presented the results yesterday. ''And the rate of precession is just directly proportional to that anomaly.'' Such a finding would delight many physicists who have been suggesting for years that the accepted theory, called the Standard Model, contains deep conceptual faults that can only be remedied with a more abstruse theory called supersymmetry. That theory predicts that every known particle has a difficult-to-detect partner that has yet to be discovered -- perhaps the extra particles in the virtual sea that the Brookhaven experiment may be detecting.

The initial Brookhaven finding was announced in February 2001. But a group of theorists in Marseille, France, announced in October that they had found a computational error in work led by another highly respected theorist, Dr. Toichiro Kinoshita of Cornell University, which was used to produce the Standard Model's prediction for the wobble. Dr. Kinoshita, who was traveling in Japan and unavailable for comment yesterday, acknowledged that a bug in his computer software had produced the error, said Dr. Sally Dawson, leader of the high-energy theory group at Brookhaven. A revised calculation found that the difference from the Standard Model's prediction, and therefore the evidence that new physics had been discovered, was ''much smaller than before,'' Dr. Dawson said.

That set off a worldwide scramble to refine the calculations further. So as the announcement approached yesterday, Dr. Lee Roberts, a physics professor at Boston University who is a spokesman for the Brookhaven experiment, was still sorting e-mail messages about new, conflicting calculations by theorists from Japan, Russia, Switzerland, England and France. ''Obviously, this is all work in progress,'' Dr. Roberts said. But all the new calculations showed at least some deviation from the Standard Model, he said. A few even suggested huge deviations, he added with a nervous chuckle. Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year.

In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones-the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs-unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.


"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."


A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.
"While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes," said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. "The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this company."


"If this patent holds up in federal court, Apple will have no choice but to convert to analog," said Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs, "and I have serious doubts whether this company would be able to remain competitive selling pedal-operated computers running software off vinyl LPs."
As a result of the Microsoft patent, many other companies have begun radically revising their product lines: Database manufacturer Oracle has embarked on a crash program to develop "an abacus for the next millennium." Novell, whose communications and networking systems are also subject to Microsoft licensing fees, is working with top animal trainers on a chimpanzee-based message-transmission system. Hewlett-Packard is developing a revolutionary new steam-powered printer.


Despite the swarm of protest, Gates is standing his ground, maintaining that ones and zeroes are the undisputed property of Microsoft.
"We will vigorously enforce our patents of these numbers, as they are legally ours," Gates said. "Among Microsoft's vast historical archives are Sanskrit cuneiform tablets from 1800 B.C. clearly showing ones and a symbol known as 'sunya,' or nothing. We also own: papyrus scrolls written by Pythagoras himself in which he explains the idea of singular notation, or 'one'; early tracts by Mohammed ibn Musa al Kwarizimi explaining the concept of al-sifr, or 'the cipher'; original mathematical manuscripts by Heisenberg, Einstein and Planck; and a signed first-edition copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness. Should the need arise, Microsoft will have no difficulty proving to the Justice Department or anyone else that we own the rights to these numbers."
Added Gates: "My salary also has lots of zeroes. I'm the richest man in the world."


According to experts, the full ramifications of Microsoft's patenting of one and zero have yet to be realized.
"Because all integers and natural numbers derive from one and zero, Microsoft may, by extension, lay claim to ownership of all mathematics and logic systems, including Euclidean geometry, pulleys and levers, gravity, and the basic Newtonian principles of motion, as well as the concepts of existence and nonexistence," Yale University theoretical mathematics professor J. Edmund Lattimore said. "In other words, pretty much everything."
Lattimore said that the only mathematical constructs of which Microsoft may not be able to claim ownership are infinity and transcendental numbers like pi. Microsoft lawyers are expected to file liens on infinity and pi this week.


Microsoft has not yet announced whether it will charge a user fee to individuals who wish to engage in such mathematically rooted motions as walking, stretching and smiling.
In an address beamed live to billions of people around the globe Monday, Gates expressed confidence that his company's latest move will, ultimately, benefit all humankind.


"Think of this as a partnership," Gates said. "Like the ones and zeroes of the binary code itself, we must all work together to make the promise of the computer revolution a reality. As the world's richest, most powerful software company, Microsoft is number one. And you, the millions of consumers who use our products, are the zeroes."

One statistic is missing from the slew of data published about the state of the U.S. economy. It is the length of the commute between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Since last fall, when the layoffs began in the valley, this journey, which I have been making twice a day for the past 15 years, has started to shorten.

There are plenty of signs of the shockingly sudden economic slowdown during my commute. The radio isn't filled with the hopeful jingles of Internet retailers, and I can almost always get a cell-phone circuit. Some of the signs are just that--vacancy signs dangling from buildings whose landlords until recently were demanding shares in the companies started by their tenants. And the blank billboards along Highway 101--the valley's main thoroughfare--mutely advertise the downturn. There are few tire kickers in the lots of the luxury-automobile dealers. Near my office, the people who sometimes paraded along the sidewalk bearing placards that said WILL WORK FOR EQUITY have mercifully disappeared.

All this is good news for those of us whose business is to help start and organize young companies. Today Silicon Valley is akin to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after spring break. The tourists have abandoned us. Most of the people who came here in search of a quick buck during the past few years have gone. The foreign billionaires have scuttled back to Europe and Asia, the corporate parvenus have retreated, and Hollywood celebrities no longer swish through our office seeking a smattering of pixie dust.
Suddenly, starting a company is no longer a fashion statement. Now only the genuine believers want to leave large companies to create or join a new business. Everyone has become far more prudent about spending money. Unbridled optimism has been splattered with a large coating of reality. Today the climate for investments in tiny, unknown valley fledglings is the best it has been for more than 10 years.

I don't mean to belittle the human consequences of the recent convulsions. If it's any consolation, plenty of companies with which I've been involved have encountered their share of bad news and hard times. But this is the inevitable result of the excitement and chaos that surround any new industry. Think of all the dreams that were shattered, careers that were ruined and money that was lost as a result of the birth of the huge industries that developed around oil, telephones, movies, automobiles, airplanes, semiconductors and personal computers. Working with young companies can be dangerous for anyone. It doesn't matter whether that was in Akron, Ohio, in the 1870s, Detroit in the 1920s or Santa Clara, Calif., in the 1990s.

In Silicon Valley the cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment has been compressed as the years have gone by and the pace of innovation has increased. The 1960s spawned the rise of the semiconductor business. The 1970s brought personal computers. The 1980s gave us computer-networking companies and biotech firms. And the 1990s produced a rush of Internet companies. Each of these waves was followed by disappointments as hundreds of weak companies collapsed or were gobbled up by their larger competitors. But all these periods gave rise to the formation of a handful of venture capital-backed firms that have come to occupy major roles in the U.S. and the global economy, such as Intel, Compaq, Amgen, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Dell, AOL, Oracle and Cisco Systems.

If the savagery of a young industry leads to casualties, so does the chaos surrounding rapid corporate growth. There is barely an important technology company that has not had a close encounter of the worst kind. Over the past 20 years, business writers have penned plenty of premature obituaries for all the companies I just mentioned. These companies seem to go through similar phases: a period of obscure labor followed--in rapid order--by glowing notoriety, loosely controlled growth, chest-pounding arrogance, a rude comeuppance and public humiliation. The fortunate recover and become stronger. The weak surrender to economic necessities.

Although stock-market indexes are dropping to ankle level, there is still little reason for gloom about the long-term prospects for U.S. technology companies. Progress will not stop. Invention will not cease. Ambition will not evaporate. Many years ago, during a similar period of bleakness, we encountered a little company with a dozen employees attacking a market that few people understood. Eight weeks after the crash of 1987, when the only sound in the air was of checkbooks slamming shut, Sequoia Capital became the first investor in this unknown company. Its name was Cisco Systems.

For many of us, George Orwell's "1984" was required reading at some point during our formative years. The picture it painted of a world where privacy was virtually nonexistent and the consequences faced by an individual who dared to oppose the system provoked in many of us an almost instinctive reaction against such a totalitarian exercise of raw authority.

In the 23 years since the actual year 1984 came and went -- happily with few of the horrors envisioned by Mr. Orwell when he finished the novel back in 1948 coming to pass -- we have allowed our privacy to seep away. Instead of ceding control of our private information to a single all-powerful regime, however, we dole it out in bits and pieces to a diffuse network of eager information-gatherers, many if not most of them in the private sector.

Sometimes we trade it willingly for the sake of convenience, as when we disclose a credit card number to a voice over the phone or a Web site over the Internet. Sometimes we reveal ourselves without knowing it, as when the Web sites we visit are tracked and recorded by small programs surreptitiously loaded onto our computers, which report our meanderings to some private master, usually an advertising company. Sometimes we may not think about it very much, as when we hand our drivers' license to a guard in the lobby of an office building who asks for our identification and then scans the license into the building's computers.

Our MetroCards can track the subway stations we use; E-ZPass records the tolls we pay; our cell phone records detail the calls, text messages, and pictures we send and receive. Google or Hotmail or Yahoo hold our e-mails for us and, increasingly, our personal documents, images, spreadsheets, financial records and even (in a recent venture) personal medical records. Surveillance cameras have blossomed in such numbers that, at any moment when out in a public or semi-public space, it is not unreasonable to assume that our grainy image is being recorded by someone.

It should thus come, as no surprise that communications made during work hours may likewise be less than private, even if they relate to purely personal matters. On reflection, this is not unreasonable; communications systems are to today's offices what the assembly line was to Henry Ford: They are the instruments by which the employer makes money. It is far from unreasonable for employers to place restrictions on how those systems can be used by employees. And because so much of what happens in business is recorded by those systems, it is just as reasonable to expect employers to be able to monitor the information exchanged over those systems by company employees.

These cases do not address the situation where an employer institutes a policy that permits some personal use of firm communications systems, but still retains the right to access all systems and to review all communications. They also do not discuss the implications of the waivers that were found to have occurred. Presumably the employees in these cases had some communications with their attorneys away from the office. Should the waiver of the privilege caused by the employees' use of company computer systems result in a waiver of the privilege as to all other communications with counsel on the same topic as well?

They also do not address the situation of voice mail or phone communications. In many companies, telephone systems are now integrated with company computer systems; indeed, many phone conversations are carried over the Internet via so-called "VoIP" systems and no longer use traditional phone lines, at least within the confines of the employer. In those cases, does the broad language of the company's communications policy allow the company to eavesdrop on the employee's conversations or capture and record them on a company server?

The clearest advice for employees wishing to confer with their personal attorneys during business hours would be to make sure that all remote communications take place over communications devices that are controlled by the employee -- a personal cell phone, home computer and home phone lines.

Employers, on the other hand, may want to weigh the relative merits and problems associated with creating a "limited personal privacy exemption" for employees using company communications systems. While such an exemption may come to be considered a valuable benefit, it would have to be carefully crafted to limit liability to the employer.
Perhaps one way might be to provide a "personal Internet use" link on the company system, or "personal use" phone booths and lines, and making it clear to employees how to go about taking advantage of those benefits. The dangers of accommodating such personal privacy, however, may outweigh the benefits.

Although ''Vespertine,'' the long-awaited album by the pop singer Bjork, will finally be released next week, fans with Internet access are already listening to its tunes. As part of an online marketing campaign for the album, remixed versions of three songs are available at Bjork.com as free downloads, including a country-and-Middle Eastern treatment of the first single, ''Hidden Place.''

That was the official edition. Now, here is a ''digital populist'' remix of that paragraph, putting a different spin on the basic information that you can hear Bjork's new songs online. Keith Kenniff spent Thursday remixing ''Hidden Place.'' To enliven the moody number he added an introduction, modified the chorus and dropped in some tricky beats. But Mr. Kenniff is not part of the ''Vespertine'' production team. He is a 19-year-old drummer in State College, Pa., with a fondness for Bjork's songs and the computer skills to tinker with them.
''I like taking someone else's ideas, bringing them into your own head and trying to make sense of them through your own interpretation,'' Mr. Kenniff said. Judging from Bjork Remix Web, a remarkable site at www.arktikos.com, he has plenty of company. Mr. Kenniff's remake of ''Hidden Place'' is one of 10 ''Vespertine'' tracks on the site. Overall it contains nearly 800 remixes, submitted by about 160 different Internet contributors, of songs taken from Bjork's five solo albums. If transferred to compact disc, the fan-made music would fill about 50 albums.

The Web site was started in 1997 by Hisakazu Tanaka, a software programmer in Japan who is, needless to say, a serious Bjork devotee. Mr. Tanaka said he expected the release of ''Vespertine'' to spur a new round of submissions, bringing the year-end total to 900 remixes. The site's growth demonstrates how digital technology, abetted by the Internet, is turning fans from passive acolytes to active participants in the artistic process. In postmodern culture, in which existing elements are routinely cut, pasted and blended into new works, computers are providing handy tools for these transformations, and the Internet is supplying an eager audience for the results.

Music is just one realm where this is happening. There are hundreds of ''fan fiction'' sites, where amateur authors have taken popular characters from television shows like ''Star Trek'' and ''The West Wing'' and written new, sometimes smutty stories about them. In film, a shorter version of the ''Star Wars'' movie ''The Phantom Menace,'' digitally edited by a supposedly impatient fan, is rumored to be circulating in cyberspace. Bjork was among the first pop stars to take the plunge into remix culture. Over the course of her solo career, this Icelandic singer has invited dozens of professional remixers to reimagine her songs, including the tunes previewed on her Web site.

Next to these efforts, the Bjork Remix Web entries range from the revelatory to the mangled. But Mr. Kenniff, who has submitted 52 remixes, is a skilled craftsman. His ''Glow'' mix of the song ''Headphones,'' taken from Bjork's 1995 album ''Post,'' benefits from a gorgeous keyboard countermelody and a strengthened rhythmic pulse. It is arguably as good as any of Bjork's commissions. Yet there are few places for Mr. Kenniff to ply this aspect of his trade. As the Napster controversy has shown, the music industry is not wild about an Internet where music files are shared freely. Nor is it easy to name musicians who would be thrilled to have fans fiddle with their precious tunes. This might explain why, except for the occasional label-sponsored contest, sites similar to Bjork Remix Web remain scarce.

Even Bjork Remix Web has never been fully authorized by the singer's camp. Mr. Tanaka thinks two enthusiastic messages from Bjork in the site's guest book are fake. In an e-mail message Bjork's manager, Scott Rodger, said she was aware of the site but not actively involved in it. He declined to answer additional questions or to arrange an interview with Bjork on the subject. What appears to be a policy of benign neglect has probably kept the site online, and Mr. Tanaka said he was not worried about legal challenges over copyright violations. Still, he would not give his age or identify where in Japan he lived, other than to say west of Tokyo.

Mr. Tanaka runs the well-designed site from his bedroom studio, where he also has prepared 42 remixes of his own. ''Remixing is a way that I, who live in a country far from Iceland, can approach her mind,'' he said. Feeling closer to an idolized performer or favorite character may motivate fans to engage in online remixing. But when the starting point is someone else's creative output, can the results be viewed as being wholly original?

Marta Asensio, a video editor in Madrid, acknowledged that remixing a ''Vespertine'' song for Mr. Tanaka's site seemed ''a little vampirical.'' An aspiring composer, she made her version of ''An Echo a Stain'' only as a way to help find her own sound. But Matthew Herbert hears things differently. A rising star in the remixers' universe, this London musician programmed percussion parts for the album version of ''Hidden Place'' and has more than 100 remixed songs to his credit.

Digitally remixing music ''is a new genre, and no one seems to have quite realized it yet,'' Mr. Herbert said. ''It's like a recipe. You take the ingredients that they've already got and construct a different dish from it.''  Classically trained as a child, Mr. Herbert, 29, likened remixed songs to the theme-and-variations compositions of Brahms. In some instances the source material is treated with respect; in others a work is ''hijacked,'' he said, so the remixer can impose his own will.
For ''Pagan Poetry,'' another song from ''Vespertine,'' Mr. Herbert is producing a trio of remixes: a version with a mysterious fairground sound, an acoustic treatment and an aggressive rendering that, he said, ''will be quite full on, like blood pumping through veins.''

Mr. Herbert listened to an excerpt from the ''Pagan Poetry'' remix on Mr. Tanaka's site. In the album version, near the song's end, Bjork chants the phrase ''I love him'' with raw intimacy. Here the passage has been moved to the song's start, and the naked vocal line has been expanded with a harmonizing program. Mr. Herbert said he preferred to respect such a pure expression of emotion.  For Mr. Kenniff these decisions are at the heart of the creative process and make Bjork Remix Web much more than an exercise in knob twiddling. Compared with original songwriting, ''where you have to create something out of nothing, here you are creating something out of something,'' he said. ''Most of the time it proves to be a very hard thing to do.''