The Influentials

This book is very interesting. Compelling arguements that roughly one in ten determine the course of most societies, businesses, and personal decisions. They are educated, socially active, and have an opinion that is listened to. They are on the leading edge for new technology updates and social trends. They demand autonomy and control over their own life. They demand positive experiences over convienience. They are, for want of a better word, the Influentials.
Heres how you utilize them:
1. Be where the information is
2. When the critics come knocking, invite them in
3. Get out into the community
4. Make it easier -- then make it easier still
5. Know the "exceptions" -- and keep up with them
6. Be a brand, tell the world.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743227298/qid=1072986155//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i0_xgl14/103-7195468-2096645?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Blur: Think Tank

This cd blew me away. Freakin amazing and a total departure from the party-anthem/brit-pop sounds that I sensed Blur to be. Complex, moody, but not without its uplifting tunes. Check this one out for sure.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000931OG/qid=1072841050/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-7195468-2096645

Radiohead: Hail to the Thief

An introspective, sullen cd. Not quite as suicide inspiring as Amnesiac, but full of post-modern angst. You can feel 9-11 in this cd. Absolutely brilliant in a Cure - Disintigration kind of way. But doesnt cohere or inspire like OK Computer or Kid A. Still not bad.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000092ZYX/qid=1072840918/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-7195468-2096645

Sting: Sacred Love

I love this CD. Introspective, great lyrics, many suprises. Not just for Sting fans. Very good.
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?N=36&R=1754347&act=A03&Item=60249860800&Section=music&Catalog=Music&Lang=en&mscssid=PTAHKLKXCFPR8JF1EPJND9FJS4HQ0FE6&WSID=1712177F407AAEE142AF8FEAA9B96D19659C4526

Groove Armada: Lovebox

Just got this. Very cool, slinky beats. Some tracks are like Massive Attack meets Jimi Hendrix. Others are like Portishead, Tricky, sometimes even Dee-lite. Must hear, especially Purple Haze and Groove is on.
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?N=36&R=1746103&act=A03&Item=1241418302&Section=music&Catalog=Music&Lang=en&mscssid=PTAHKLKXCFPR8JF1EPJND9FJS4HQ0FE6&WSID=1712177F407AAEE142AF8FEAA9B96D19659C4526

The Art of Innovation

Very, very, cool. From the guys that brought us Contextual Design. All about keeping teams creative, innovative, and keeping work fun. Deconstructs many of the myths of innovation... and some good design tips too. Best quotes:

"Make simple things simple, complex things possible."

"Fail often to succeed sooner."

"The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas."

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/item.asp?N=35&R=808660&act=A03&Item=978038549984&Section=books&Catalog=Books&Lang=en&mscssid=PTAHKLKXCFPR8JF1EPJND9FJS4HQ0FE6&WSID=1712885C6F6EF799408BB40DDB8F60C17E743426

Top 25 Songs On My iPod

The Scientist / Coldplay / A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Cactus / David Bowie / Heathen
Groove Is On / Groove Armada / Lovebox
My Favorite Game (GT2 Mix) / The Cardigans / Gran Turismo 2
Clocks / Coldplay / A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Love street / The Doors / Waiting for the Sun
Bring Me To Life / Evanescence / Daredevil Soundtrack
As Heaven Is Wide / Garbage / Garbage
99 Red Balloons / Goldfinger /
Purple Haze / Groove Armada / Lovebox
Inertia Creeps / Massive Attack / Mezzanine
Its My Life / No Doubt / The Singles 1992-2003
Achin To Be / The Replacements / Dont Tell A Soul
I Ran / A Flock Of Seagulls / A Flock Of Seagulls
Smooth Criminal / Alien Ant Farm /
Little Things Of Venom / Arid / Little Things Of Venom
Silent Sigh / Badly Drawn Boy / About a Boy
With A Little Help From My Friends / The Beatles / Blue Album 1967-1970 (Disc 1)
Dont You (Forget About Me) / Billy Idol / Greatest Hits
God Put A Smile Upon Your Face / Coldplay / A Rush of Blood to the Head
Yellow / Coldplay / Parachutes
In Between Days / The Cure / Staring At The Sea - The Singles
Doing The Unstuck / The Cure / Wish
Forgotten Sanity / Curve / Come Clean
Doppelganger / Curve / Doppelganger

http://www.apple.com/ipod

Current Read: How to Be a Star At Work

Absolutely great book with a terribly trite name. I found it to be very accurate -- both as a supervisor and a subordinate. There is a very good section on the misconceptions of workers and how people measure them.
https://catalogue.calgarypubliclibrary.com/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1071LD96768Q8.43573&profile=dial&uri=full=1100001@!797668@!1&ri=30&menu=search&source=203.139.1.145@!dial&ipp=20#focus

Current Read: Leadership Aikido

Not bad book -- an attempt to merge the philosophies and ethics of Aikido with business. Sometimes works, sometimes not, but the 6 practices are good. For an Aikidoka, these map roughly to O-Senseis 6 pillars. They are: Self-knowledge, Planning, Habits of Language, Values, Resiliency (dealing with failure), and Control (or lack thereof).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0517705753/qid=1072478580//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-7195468-2096645?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Current Listen: Love Is The Killer App

Bitchin audio book. Importance of networks, social contacts, ethics, and individuals. Everything that was devalued and rubbed me the wrong way at my last job. Everybody should read this... just get past the "feel the love" message and dig into the meat. A must read.
https://catalogue.calgarypubliclibrary.com/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1071LD96768Q8.43573&profile=dial&uri=full=1100001@!986462@!4&ri=26&menu=search&source=203.139.1.145@!dial&ipp=20#focus

Current Read: Simplify Your Work Life

Very simple book, a few good ideas however: use voice mail to your advantage, same for email. Schedule time out to focus and recharge. Keep your work life uncluttered.
https://catalogue.calgarypubliclibrary.com/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1071LD96768Q8.43573&profile=dial&uri=full=1100001@!939040@!2&ri=24&menu=search&source=203.139.1.145@!dial&ipp=20#focus

Current Scotch: Glendronach 15 yr

This is a simple, clean, if understated scotch. Elegant with more than a hint of sherry. Got it on a good deal from Willow Park Liquor Store on recommendation from the owner.
http://swwwl.homepage.dk/malts/glendronach.htm

Nother Supposedly Hack Proof DRM Unveiled

Philips Electronics said on Tuesday it was six months away from launching a system against illegal copying that will allow consumers to play digital video and music on any digital media player. Philips hopes the so-called digital rights management (DRM) system being developed by Intertrust, which it jointly owns with Sony, will replace a confusing array of proprietary systems. Digital music stores which have opened on the Internet this year use different DRM methods to protect songs against unlimited copying. But consumers can then only play the music on computers, CD and MP3 players which support the same DRM system. "Consumers want an open system, and the electronics industry wants it too," Ruud Peters, chief executive of Philipss intellectual property and standards unit, told Reuters.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61625,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail91.html

Lookin for Life in Jovian System

Scientists envision sending a huge, 300-foot-long, nuclear-powered craft -- called JIMO, for Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter -- on a voyage to the Jovian neighborhood to spend up to five years circling the ice-encrusted moon called Europa, plus two others, Callisto and Ganymede, which also are covered with ice but are less likely to have inhabitable oceans. Even though landing the spacecraft on Europas surface would be extraordinarily difficult, mission scientists have not ruled it out. Europa is JIMOs principal target. Images from the Galileo mission nearly seven years ago revealed its surface as studded with icebergs, frozen ridges and dark streaks that seemed to indicate organic molecules rising through gigantic cracks from a deep ocean beneath.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/12/09/MNGON3J5RN1.DTL

Goin Back to the Moon?

When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there. If he does, it will mean that he has decided the United States should once again become a space-faring nation. For more than 30 years Americas manned space program has limited itself to low Earth orbit; indeed, everyone under the age of 31 ? more than 125 million Americans ? was born since an American last set foot on the moon. The speech will come at a time when events are converging to force some important decisions about the future of American efforts in space. China has put a man in orbit, plans a launch of three Sinonauts together, and has announced its own lunar program. The space shuttle is grounded, and its smaller sibling, the "orbital space plane," may not be built. The International Space Station, behind schedule, over budget, and of limited utility, has been scaled back post-Columbia.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/powell200312030858.asp

Sexy Cylons?

 

 

"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday nights Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by -- well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom. One of the newly humanized enemy androids, Number Six, is played by former Victorias Secret model Tricia Helfer (so thats Victorias big secret! -- we always knew there was a sinister purpose behind those ubiquitous catalogs). While in the throes of sex, her spine glows a luminescent, otherworldly, X-ray crimson.

http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,61436,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Jaron Lanier: Something Wrong In Computer Science

Ive had a suspicion for a while that despite the astonishing success of the first generation of computer scientists like Shannon, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, somehow they didnt get a few important starting points quite right, and some things in the foundations of computer science are fundamentally askew. In a way I have no right to say this and it would be more appropriate to say it once Ive actually got something to take its place, so let me just emphasize that this is speculative. But where might things have gone wrong?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier03/lanier_index.html

Canadian News Stories The US Doesnt Want You To See

They tell us more about what is was like when the bombing started over Bahgdad, what is was really like to live in a fox hole with the American troops and what happened when the Palestine Hotel - where the media was based - was bombed.
http://www.cbc.ca/deadlineiraq/stories.html

Sun Sheds Its Magnetic Skin

The fact that the Suns outer layers are bubbling, and that the Sun rotates faster at the equator than the poles, and faster on the inside than on the surface, results in a solar dynamo that, over 11 years, becomes increasingly wound up. So at some stage during the magnetic cycle the Sun has to somehow shed its old, contorted magnetic skin, and allow a newer, less troubled one, to emerge.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3226844.stm

iPod Jack Swapping

During his regular evening walk, software executive Steve Crandall often nods a polite greeting to other iPod users he passes: He easily spots the distinctive white earbuds threaded from pocket to ears. But while quietly enjoying some chamber music one evening in August, Crandalls polite nodding protocol was rudely shattered. Crandall was boldly approached by another iPod user, a 30ish woman bopping enthusiastically to some high-energy tune. "She walked right up to me and got within my comfort field," Crandall stammered. "I was taken aback. She pulled out the earbuds on her iPod and indicated the jack with her eyes." Warily unplugging his own earbuds, Crandall gingerly plugged them into the womans iPod, and was greeted by a rush of techno. "We listened for about 30 seconds," Crandall said. "No words were exchanged. We nodded and walked off."
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61242,00.html

Mystery Meson

X(3872) was found among the decay products of so-called beauty mesons - sub-atomic particles that are produced in large numbers at the Tsukuba "meson factory". It weighs about the same as a single atom of helium and exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second before it decays into other longer-lived, more familiar particles. Although this is extremely short-lived by human standards, scientists say that a billionth of a trillionth of a second is nearly an eternity for a sub-atomic particle this heavy. Particles smaller than the atom are grouped into families depending upon their mass, spin and electric charge. But X(3872) is peculiar in that it does not fit easily into any known particle scheme and, as a result, has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the worlds physics community.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3277579.stm

Hilarious Slashdot Thread

"...Athletes is about supply and demand. There are very few people who can supply an acurate, repeatable 50 yeard pass(or whatever) while 3 or 4 300 pound guys moving as fast as an elk bear down on them.

>As fast as an elk? Is that some kind of Canadian measure
>of velocity? Can you get a speeding ticket for going 2
>elks in a school zone? What is the speed of light in elks?

>>Its a canadian unit of velocity AND mass. (So now that I
>>think about it its a unit of momentum). Its defined as
>>the momentum of your average elk running at the average
>>maximum elk speed. A football player with all his gear
>>does about 0.2 elk.

>>Im upset that us yanks are still using Imperial Elk instead of Metric.

>>What is the speed of light in elks?
>>What do you mean? An African or European elk?

>>Are Canadian engines measured in elk-power? By the way:
>>elks can run at about 35 MPH [discovermyvillage.com],
>>and the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second,
>>so I guess the speed of light is 19,160,434 elks.

>>What is the speed of light in elks?
>>Zero. Elks are opaque."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/10/1751238&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=98&tid=99

Hitchikers Guide Coming Back To BBC

Production is under way on the Tertiary Phase of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, with episodes due to begin airing on Radio 4 in spring 2004. As we reported in September, independent company Above the Title have the rights to adapt Douglas Adams novels for radio. Its now become clear that three of the Hitchhikers novels are indeed getting their first radio adaptation. A six-part adaptation of Life, the Universe and Everything will be up first in the spring. This will be followed towards the end of 2004 by an eight-week serialisation combining So Long and Thanks for All the Fish with Mostly Harmless.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/cult/2003/11/04/7768.shtml

Biggest Flare Ever Recorded

Today word came from the SEC that their best estimate was X28. We have a new number 1 X-ray flare for the record books.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence Trailer

Man, this looks sweet...
http://www.innocence-movie.jp/information/trailer/tokuho1/480.mov

Current Scotch: Glenfiddich Solera Reserve 15 yr

Very good basic scotch. Hints of vanilla, heather, and citrus.
http://world.glenfiddich.com/enjoy/range/whisky_range/solera_res.html

Cosmic Reality Check

The probes findings have provided a few salient new notions about the nature of cosmic reality. For starters, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Unlike previous figures, this is not a rough estimate; the margin of error is about 1 percent. In addition, the universe is flat. Forget all that mind-boggling space-time-is-curved stuff. Euclid was right all along. And the space-time pancake will expand infinitely. Theres no such thing as an end to this particular universe.Now heres the really wacky part: Everything were made of or can measure - from atoms to energy - is only 4 percent of the whole shebang. The rest is dark matter (about 23 percent) and, best of all, dark energy (73 percent).Although it has been overlooked amid the recent military ruckus, the Wilkinson probe has given the 21st century a brand-new cosmology. Such intellectual upgrades nearly always begin by debunking humans in some obscure but potent way. The Copernican revolution revealed that Earth was not the center of the cosmos. Newtonian physics proved that the planets move according to lifeless clockwork rules instead of majestic divine will. Einsteinian relativity showed us that the cosmos lacks absolute values; it all depends on how things are measured, by whom, and under what circumstances.The new cosmology is very much of that order. Everything we can see or touch, everything material and physical, is mere fat in the cosmic milk. Everything we thought was important is a tiny fraction of whats really going on.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_4

New StrongBad Halloween Cartoon

http://www.homestarrunner.com/ween03.html

Enterprise Survives Mach 5

For StarTrek fans we tested the USS Enterprise in our super-orbital expansion tube - X2. A scale model was placed in the test section and the facility used to generate a high speed gas flow of around 6.6 km/s. This was passed over the Enterprise for a duration of approximately 100 microseconds. We perform similar tests on other models investigating dissociation and ionisation processes which occur during atmospheric re-entry.
http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/lp/lasdiag/enterp.shtml

The Problem With Abundance

What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.The automobile made it possible for individuals to travel 100 kilometres in an hour. The result is that roads and parking must potentially accommodate everyone driving downtown from an area approximately 200 Km in diameter. The speed of travel reduces the constraints of distance. When we unthinkingly increase the speed at which we can travel, we increase the distance we travel without thinking.The human body was designed to survive on scarcity, and it has served us well over the past 50,000-plus years. On those rare occasions when food was abundant it was stored as fat in advance of future scarcity. Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy ? it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031007.gtdejageroct7/BNStory/Technology/

Serious CME Today

The Sun today unleashed what appears to be the third most powerful flare in recorded history, a storm of charged particles that could hit Earth mid-day Wednesday with more effect than any since 1989, when an entire Canadian province had its power knocked out.Depending on the storms magnetic orientation, it could set off a dramatic display of colorful northern lights well into mid-latitudes of the United States and Europe.Meanwhile, satellite operators and power grid managers are preparing to endure a potentially damaging event. And astronauts aboard the International Space Station have taken cover from heavier radiation sent out by the flare. They are not expected to be in any serious danger.Kicked up at 6 a.m. EST (1100 UT) today, the major solar outburst comes on the heels of four other flares late last week and over the weekend. All were considered fairly severe, but the latest eruption makes the others seem like solar sneezes.Todays blast is classified as an X17, where X denotes a major flare and larger numbers are stronger. That compares to two flare-ups over the weekend that were rated less than X2."The flare today may be the third strongest X-flare on record," said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the SOHO spacecraft, which first spotted the event.A slightly stronger flare on April 2, 2001 was not pointed at Earth. Todays storm is headed directly at us and could generate fantastic colorful lights in the atmosphere, known as aurora. The storm associated with the flare is called a coronal mass ejection, an expanding bubble of charged particles that race outward.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/28/1854214&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160

Oldest Artwork Found

The human images were found in 2001 by Pietro Gaietto on an expedition through the Borzonasca district of Italy. He claims the rock has been sculpted into faces that look in opposite directions; one is bearded with what Gaietto calls an "expressive face". If this is genuine, the artist would have been an extinct human species that died out about 150,000 years ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3197402.stm

Ultimate MAME Box

A few years ago I had this sudden desire to start collecting the arcade games I remember from my childhood in the 80s. Im not completely certain why this notion suddenly took hold of me seemingly out of the blue. Maybe it was the nearly mint Pac-Man machine I kept walking by at the Bistro at Sweet Briar College where I work. It wasnt getting a lot of play there in the late nineties where it had lived a fairly sheltered existance for nearly 20 years.To some extent Im certain I had the sudden realization that it might be possible to actually own an arcade game now. I was older and had an income higher than I did when I was ten years old and had to think twice about spending a whole quarter in such a fleeting manner. As a child in the 80s the thought of owning an actual arcade game was somewhat akin to the likelihood that I could take a ride on the space shuttle just by asking nicely. This was a time when the height of excitement was a gradeschool friend having a birthday party that included a set number of FREE tokens for the gameroom at the local Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. The choices and spending power in that couple of hours was overwhelming.Maybe it was the fact that I grew up immersed in computers and did play a lot games on the Atari 2600, my Commodore 64 or a friends ColecoVision. This was the era when finding a console version that came close to the real game was a challenge that made the genuine arcades a luxury for their graphical prowess if not the big screen and the neat lighted marquees. There was a certain ambience to an 80s gameroom filled with noisy arcades that added a lot to the experience.
http://sparhawk.sbc.edu/mame/

RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edisons Mistakes

After watching the RIAAs public Dance of Death closely for only about a year, everything they do is so predictable that Im beginning to wonder if they even have any control over their own destiny. For some inexplicable reason, they seem compelled to follow through until the final scene, perhaps unaware that theres been a rewrite in the ending over the last 90 years.While suggested reading is the series I did earlier on Thomas Edison, here is a synopsis of how Edisons approach to running an entertainment industry so closely parallels what the RIAA is trying to do. After all, the goal is the same -- to maintain a monopoly.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2003/mistakes.html

Why We Sleep

In a finding that backs up motherly advice to get a good nights sleep, scientists have found that peaceful slumber apparently restores memories that were lost during a hectic day.Its not just a matter of physical recharge. Researchers say sleep can rescue memories in a biological process of storing and consolidating them deep in the brains complex circuitry.The finding is one of several conclusions made in a pair of studies that appear in Thursdays issue of the journal Nature that look at how sleep affects the memory-recording processes, and perhaps safeguards them.
http://www.rednova.com/news/stories/2/2003/10/08/story006.html

How Does My iPod Wheel Work?

Contrary to what you may have read they do not work by pressure. They work by using a principle called coupling capacitance. The touchwheel and buttons contain two layers of electrodes. The top layer is composed of vertical electrode strips, and the bottom has horizontal strips. These two layers form the coupling. An integrated circuit underneath them measures the capacitance from each of the horizontal electrodes to each of the vertical ones.
http://www.ipodlounge.com/faqs_more.php?id=1410_0_10_0_C

Ever Want To Know What The Useless Keys Are For?

In some cases oddball keys were put on the PC keyboard (or to be more precise, included in the ASCII character set, most of which found its way onto the PC keyboard) because the developers figured theyd come in handy for something, and on the whole they have--programmers and developers have been able find a use for nearly every key on the keyboard, even if that use isnt obvious to the general computing public. Witness the tilde <~>, which, whatever use it may have as a diacritical mark in some languages, now can mean "home directory" or "text omitted," among other things.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mscrolllock.html

Being Smart Isnt Always Smart

Being smart isnt always successful in the evolutionary race. Swiss researchers wondered why, if intelligence is such an asset, we havent evolved to the point where everyone is super smart. Since this hasnt happened, there must be some good reasons to be dumb. Scottish researchers have discovered that it pays to be smart if youre poor, but if youre rich, it doesnt make any difference.
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=3186

Finally .... New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail86.html

Bigfoot Proof?

The creatures are real enough to those who say they have spotted them - but most scientists remain sceptical about their existence. Investigator Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department in Texas, who specialises in finger and footprints, has said he believes he is certain around six footprints found - claimed to have been made by Bigfoot - are genuine. He added that one 42 cm (18-inch) print found in Washington in 1987 has convinced him. "The unique thing about this cast is that it has dermal ridges - and the flow and texture matches the ridge flow texture of one from California," Mr Chilcutt told BBC World Services Discovery programme. "The ridges are about twice as thick as in a human being."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3152468.stm

Negroponte: Tough Times? Go Crazy

The MIT labs are facing funding problems. But their backers don?t want another set of traditional research labs, Negroponte insists. "They don?t need us to do those things," he said. "They need us to be on the lunatic fringe -- a very interesting place to be, but you can go over the edge very quickly. It?s a very delicate line." He described Media Lab as a corporate "demilitarized zone" where companies that often compete in the real world can instead collaborate on ideas and intuitions. But the effervescent research labs, known for producing wearable computers, whole menageries of robots, digitized shoes and funky computerized musical instruments -- including a hypercello specially built for musician Yo-Yo Ma -- definitely are facing tough times, he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60643,00.html

MIT Open Courseware

a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MITs mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MITs values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm

Doctor Who Comin Back

After aeons drifting hopelessly lost in the space/time continuum, Doctor Who is finally coming back to Earth.In a move that heralds the most eagerly anticipated comeback in television history, BBC1 said yesterday that it is developing a new series of the sci-fi classic.The BBC hopes that Doctor Who, which ran from 1963 to 1989, with a brief reappearance by an eighth incarnation of the Time Lord in a film in 1996, will once more become a fixture of Saturday early evening viewing.
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/26/nwho26.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/09/26/ixhome.html

The Future Was Cancelled

Modern art often treats space exploration in a mocking and playful manner, which is emblematic of our diminished aspirations to conquer the stars. 1972 was the last time that humans actually travelled to and walked upon the Moon. In 1999, by contrast, artist Aleksandra Mir staged her happening First Woman on the Moon - in which, as Topham explains, a beach at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, was transformed by mechanical diggers into a crater-filled landscape, and participants enacted their own lunar landing while children played among the giant sandcastles. Genuine space exploration seems to have become subordinate to cultural kitsch. In the absence of substantial state funding, even pioneers of real-life space exploration missions have to turn their work into a cultural gimmick in order to win investment and publicity. Topham describes how the Beagle 2 probe currently travelling to Mars was dressed up as a piece of Cool Brittania: Blur composed a track based on a mathematical sequence to act as a call sign once the Beagle has landed. A spot painting by Damien Hirst will be used as an instrument calibration chart to check everything is in order after touchdown.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DF1E.htm

New StrongBad Email

http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail85.html

Plasma Life

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.Most biologists think living cells arose out of a complex and lengthy evolution of chemicals that took millions of years, beginning with simple molecules through amino acids, primitive proteins and finally forming an organised structure. But if Mircea Sanduloviciu and his colleagues at Cuza University in Romania are right, the theory may have to be completely revised. They say cell-like self-organisation can occur in a few microseconds.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994174

US Senator Challenges RIAA

Brownback said the DMCA subpoena process raises serious privacy and due-process concerns. "There are no checks, no balances, and the alleged pirate has no opportunity to defend themselves," Brownback said when introducing the bill. "My colleagues, this issue is about privacy, not piracy. "This will provide immediate privacy protections to Internet subscribers by forcing their accusers to appear publicly in a court of law, where those with illicit intentions will not tread, and provides the accused with due process required to properly defend themselves."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60461,00.html

Are you worse off than Mom and Dad?

According to Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthors of "The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke," the average two-income middle class family today earns 75 percent more than the typical single-income family did 30 years ago. But todays family, they say, ends up with less money for everyday living expenses and savings. Why? The costs of housing and a good education are killing them.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/11/commentary/everyday/sahadi/index.htm

StrongBad: Teen Girl Squad #4

http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs4.html

Plane Didnt Hit The Pentagon On 9/11

Pretty convincing page -- I cant see how the pentagon was hit by a 757. Why the cover up?
http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm

Opus the Penguin Back In the Funny Business

After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called "Opus," starring his beloved penguin of the same name. The Washington Post Writers Group, which will syndicate the strip, is expected to officially announce Breatheds return this Sunday. The reclusive Breathed, who rarely gives interviews, could not be reached yesterday for comment. The new strip will appear on Sundays in The Washington Post starting Nov. 23.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45450-2003Sep8.html

RIAA Sues 12 Year Old Girl

Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail84.html

Plants Have a Way With Metals

If farmers could plant crops designed to exploit these genes, they could theoretically produce food with more nutrients while using less fertilizer by making plants pull minerals from soil more efficiently, Salt said. They also could use plants to mop up toxins. For markets in richer nations, Salt is partnering with a company called NuCycle Therapy to develop selenium-rich plants, because that compound has been found to fight cancer. Likewise, many people in developing nations suffer from "hidden hunger," Salt said. They lack important vitamins in their diet even though they get enough calories. He hopes his technology will address that need.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60302,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail83.html

Good Industrial & Electronica Stream

Digital Gunfire is an industrial, ebm, synthpop (and all the other genres, subgenres and wannabe genres) Internet radio station. Its run at 128k quality (which requires approximately 16KBps download speed) through a Shoutcast server.
http://www.digitalgunfire.com

Biosoldiers

The researchers also try to hide behind grandiose-sounding claims of working to the greater good as a way to fool the public, and possibly themselves, into believing that these projects really do have some benign reasons for being, if only to promote the cause of science. That is why nearly every program in the conference guide comes with a suggested benign use (my own flippant phrase). After all, whines Rudolph, todays soldiers brain chip may be tomorrows brain damage therapy. We should be impressed? After all, the same argument was used by Hitlers researchers to justify their heartless medical experiments on Jews, gypsies, retarded children, enemy soldiers, prisoners, et al.). What is truly chilling is that these technologies, in essence, are seeking to turn our soldiers into human fighting machines, sacrificing their autonomy and, very likely, long-term quality of life for short term military savings -savings that will go right into the pockets of the governments beloved defense contractors. There is no way these technologies can be benign -the whole concept is totally against what America stands for and against any other reasonable code of ethics, for that matter. In addition, with the way they are being rushed through the research gamut, there is no way they can be proven safe, especially long-term. I can just imagine the residual tissue damage, cancers, post-traumatic stress disorders, etc, that DARPA-style human enhancement will inflict on our guys and gals in uniform. Remember Agent Orange? Remember aboveground nuke testing? Remember submarine sailors being gassed as a DARPA experiment, or those soldiers, most of them black or Hispanic, fed LSD? As it is, more than half of all Gulf War vets have now filed for disability because of the devastating effects of Gulf War Syndrome.
http://www.newsinsider.org/seal/frankensteins_in_the_pentagon.html

Current Game: Silent Hill 3

... kicks ass. Im about 2 hrs into the game and it rocks.Its not about the puzzles, playability, anything like that.The ambience of the game is nothing like Ive ever seen.Graphics are amazing. Not in a startlingly clear, well-rendered way, but in a gritty, messy way. Everything casts dynamic shadows (the game is very dark and you have a very small flashlight).But what gets you is the sound. I can only play the game for about an hour -- the game gets you after a while. Not in an annoying way, you become very anxious and jumpy. Its freaky. You have to play it on a big screen with surround sound in the dark to understand it.You know that feeling when you first watched blair witch? At the end?The whole game so far is like that.
http://www.konami.com/silenthill3/

Wired AI Article

A new type of thinking machine that could completely change how people interact with computers is being developed at the Department of Energys Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years, a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been working on creating intelligent machines: computers that can accurately infer intent, remember prior experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze problems and make decisions. Forsythes team was originally trying to create a "synthetic human" -- software capable of thinking like a person -- for use in national defense.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60153,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail82.html

Interview With Neal Stephenson

The heroes in your books are often hackers. Did you see the roots of that mentality in Newton and his contemporaries in the Royal Society?
Yeah. Something happened where a bunch of these people found each other, and they just seemed to do everything within 20 or 30 years. They did it all. It must have been a remarkable time to be alive. If you have a scientific or hackerish personality, I cant imagine anything better than being there for one of those Royal Society meetings.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/history.html

Growing Fiber Optics

Scientists say they have identified an ocean sponge living in the darkness of the deep sea that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication.The natural glass fibers also are much more flexible than manufactured fiber optic cable that can crack if bent too far.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030820_1203.html

Copying Music Legal In Canada

The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003. While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.
http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-081803C

Meta-Hacking

Is that too big? No. We cannot think in those terms anymore. Like it or not, hacking has changed. We have to think big. Hacking is not just about seeing the limits of a computer system, or even the limits of the political world that has risen up around the modern-day hacker. Hacking is about understanding the system, the complete system. You must hack yourself. Not the digital self, because there is truly no division anymore. We are plugged in, and there aint no going back. We *have* to hack ourselves. Not just the surface tension that is wrapped in a nym, but the core of your hacker self. Explore mental ring zero. Live to hack, and hack to live.This is the future of meta-hacking, not just controlling the operating system, but controlling and influencing what the operators of that system do -- whether those operators do what they do for good or ill, and whether that system is a computer, a political set of ideals, or your own thought processes.This is why we are pursued through cyberspace by USA Patriot and the other horses of the digital apocalypse. It is our potential. If we turned our hacking skills from the systems we have root on to the data stored on those systems *and what that data represents*, we could possibly discover where that 10% is really at.
http://www.nmrc.org/pub/report/sn-dc-2003.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail81.html

Current Read: The Salmon of Doubt

This is of course, not a stand-alone work of fiction. It is instead a collection of works, from the unfinished Dirk Gently novel "Salmon of Doubt" to Douglass many columns and letters. You get a much better perspective on who he is, how he thinks and what he finds important than you could get from his fiction. I laughed my way through this book but from time to time I stopped, stricken by great sadness that Douglas is dead now. It sounds excessive but I really do see him as one of the Great Minds of history. I respect him, his viewpoints and his work.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400045088/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-7741374-0914311?v=glance&s=books&vi=customer-reviews

Synthetic Diamonds

Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by years end. This sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the publics perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based semiconductors.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Quantum Logic Gates

Although qubits have been made with trapped photons, atoms and ions, it is generally thought that it should be easier to build working devices with solid-state systems. Several teams have made significant progress with the superconducting approach to solid-state quantum computing. Now Steel and co-workers at Michigan, Michigan State, the Naval Research Laboratory and the University of California at San Diego have demonstrated the first all-optical quantum gate in a semiconductor quantum dot. Steel and co-workers grew a thin gallium arsenide layer 4.2 nm thick between two 25 nm aluminium gallium arsenide barriers to make a quantum dot. Electrons are trapped in the dot because the gallium arsenide layer has a smaller energy band-gap than the surrounding material. When excited by light, electrons from the valence band in the dot move to higher energy levels. The excited electron and the hole it leaves behind combine to form an exciton. The system has four states: a ground state containing two unexcited electrons; two states containing one exciton; and a state containing two excitons (see figure). The two single-exciton states can be distinguished from each other because the excitons have different polarizations.
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/8/5

Turn Off The Lights

A century and a quarter later, electric light turns night into day around the globe. In the first world atlas of artificial night-sky brightness, released in 2001 by the Italian astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano and based on high-resolution satellite data, the heavily developed urban corridors of Japan, Western Europe, and the United States blaze like amusement parks. We flood the heavens with so much artificial light that nearly two-thirds of the worlds people can no longer see the Milky Way. On a clear, dark night far from light-polluted skies, roughly 2,500 celestial points of light can be discerned by the naked eye. For people living in the suburbs of New York, that number dwindles to 250; residents of Manhattan are lucky to see 15. Moreover, as the stars fade from view, a growing body of research suggests that excessive exposure to artificial night light can alter basic biological rhythms in animals, change predator-prey relationships, and even trigger deadly hormonal imbalances in humans.
http://www.discover.com/July_03/featlights.html

Understanding Time

According to both ancient and present day physics, objects in motion have determined relative positions. Indeed, the physics of motion from Zeno to Newton and through to today take this assumption as given. Lynds says that the paradoxes arose because people assumed wrongly that objects in motion had determined positions at any instant in time, thus freezing the bodies motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived. "Theres no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. Its something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, its the outcome of brain function and consciousness."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/icc-gwi072703.php

Dumb Intelligence, Dumber Strategy

The main problem with the doctrine is that it demands absolutes. Bush is notorious for reflecting a simple black-and-white worldview in his speeches and public pronouncements. The world contains good guys and bad guys, us and them. The bad guys might be states or they might be non-state actors, but they all have one thing in common: they threaten our interests and mean us harm. They must therefore be dealt with mercilessly before they have the chance to strike. Yet if there is one thing we have learned from the Iraq conflict, it is that intelligence is rarely black and white. Instead it expresses shades of grey, percentages and probability over which careful judgements must be made. Very often, intelligence will prove nothing, and smoking guns are a rather rare phenomena. But to convince a sceptical media and voters that a pre-emptive strike is justified, the case must be proved - and it must be done in advance, before any evidence can actually be gathered.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006DEAB.htm

New Battlestar Series Sucks

The original 1970s series debuted on the heels of Star Wars, but lasted only one season. Despite adding up to only 24 hours of show time and a disastrous 80s remake, its fan base exploded when the original went into international syndication. Decades of reruns spawned fans diverse in age, geography and demographics -- but largely united in reaction to the forthcoming miniseries.
They hate it.
"Its a travesty," said Shawn ODonnell, co-host of the Battlestar Galactica Fan Club. The 30-something California resident became a fan in 1979, then contacted original series star Richard Hatch (Capt. Apollo) two decades later to ask for the actors virtual blessing on the clubs newly created website.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59906,00.html

Dracucell

A device that produces electricity from blood could be used to turn people into "human batteries". Researchers in Japan are developing a method of drawing power from blood glucose, mimicking the way the body generates energy from food. Theoretically, it could allow a person to pump out 100 watts - enough to illuminate a light bulb. But that would entail converting all the food eaten by the individual into electricity. In practice, less power would be generated since food is needed by the body.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849278131.html

Canada To Join 2007 Mars Mission

NASA announced today that the Scout Mission"Phoenix," that includes a sophisticated instrumentation package developed bya team of Canadian scientists and engineers, has been selected to go to Marsin 2007. The focus of the Canadian team will be on studies of the Martianatmosphere using laser radar (lidar) technology. Researchers from YorkUniversity, headed by Dr. Allan Carswell, Professor Emeritus at York andChairman of Optech Incorporated, will lead the Canadian scientificinvestigations in collaboration with scientists from several other Canadianuniversities.
http://www.newswire.ca/releases/August2003/04/c7798.html

Good Anti-Right Wing Rant

"Cheap-labor conservative" is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because its exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America ? whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper youll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite ? or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads ? your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/

AI Depends On Your Point Of View

Even the dumbest people can look at a situation from several different angles. But thats still a problem for even the smartest computer systems. The Real-World Reasoning project, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, is designed to get computers to start examining situations in more than one way. Its part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the Agencys Information Processing Technology Office, or IPTO, to move toward machines that can think for themselves. Software has gotten a lot smarter in recent years -- computers are now much better at recommending books, guessing your chances for getting appendicitis, and even piloting a spaceship. But each of these efforts requires a different type of reasoning. And programs still stink at switching from one mode to another.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59799,00.html

Robot Rover Covers 1km Of Rough Terrain Autonomously

Experiments completed. We came to the Atacama this field season to gain information and experience. We will now begin research and development of a comprehensive robotic system that will seek life in desert environments. To enable that process we needed understand the requirements and make basic measurements for system design. We have been working from an experimental plan in which we intended to test components and subsystems and to collect data in the relevant environment.
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/atacama/

Gravity Density Survey Of The Earth

The sweep of colours shows minute variations in the Earths gravitational field. If you were to fly over the red areas, you would be tugged ever so slightly downwards; the blues mark regions where the planets attraction is much weaker. These gravity anomalies, as they are known, are imperceptible to the human senses, and so the scientists have wrapped the data on to a sphere and exaggerated the highs and lows.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3093927.stm

Zen In The Workplace

Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Dont just do something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. Theyre being won over, in part, by findings at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_30/b3843076.htm

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail80.html

Play NES Classics In Your Browser

http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/ONE_Play.html

Canada, The New Home Of The Free

For all they share economically and culturally, Canada and the United States are increasingly at odds on basic social policies - to the point that at least a few discontented Americans are planning to move north and try their neighbors way of life.A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforksherald/6343068.htm

Peppers Say No To iTunes

This is the one of the first main stream mp3 articles that got it right...
Of all the iTunes holdouts, the Chili Peppers, with their longstanding popularity and reputation for artistry, are perhaps the most respected. Others include bands spanning hip-hop to metal rock, from Linkin Park to Metallica. All of them fret that they would lose creative control if they let Apple sell their songs individually on iTunes. "Our artists would rather not contribute to the demise of the album format," Mark Reiter of Q Prime Management Co., which manages the Chili Peppers, Metallica, and several other artists, told Reuters recently.
TOO MUCH FILLER. Its a bogus argument that makes these bands sound like shills for the music-industrys suits. After all, most individual artists and groups lost that kind of control when they signed up with a big label. For listeners, the album format has all too often been a tool of oppression.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2003/tc20030715_6812_tc056.htm

Tron: Reloaded

A young hacker. An evil mainframe. A mind-bending motorcycle chase. Sound familiar? Long before The Matrix uploaded us into a computer world, Tron provided a glimpse of what life would be like with a master program in control. Two decades of f/x innovation later, Tron fans will soon be back in the middle of the films futuristic bike race, this time on the computer screen. Tron 2.0, due in August in the form of a PC game, upgrades the bright colors and sharp angles that made Tron a cult favorite - and finally puts you inside the system. Game developer Monolith stayed true to the 1982 motion pictures minimalist aesthetic but upped the visual ante. Syd Mead, one of the films production designers and a contributor to the game, was impressed with how well the developer understood and respected Trons vision. "Monolith perfectly exploited the movies look," says Mead, "but made it much more layered and colorized." He had a blast updating his designs for Trons signature race sequence. "For the movie, the light cycles had to be geometrically simplistic to suit the severe limitations of the early computers. The game has the classic cycles, but I designed a new supercycle that incorporates some of my initial ideas, like making the rider visible."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/tron.html

Lava Lamps, Chaos, and Encryption

Now Noll is working with Cooper on an improved RNG called LavaRnd (which debuted in May at www.lavarnd.org). The new process replaces the lava lamps with a more Zen-like source of entropy: a webcam with its lens cap on. The chaotic thermal "noise" emitted by the webcam is digitized and put through a hash algorithm that churns the number set, stripping unwanted sections of predictability. The result is a cryptographically strong sequence of numbers, ready for use in the real world. And because the new service is open source, patent-free, and license-free, anyone will be able to cheaply build and operate a LavaRnd server and receive the precious commodity free of charge - a random act of kindness.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/random.html

Posthumus Interview With Philip K. Dick

After spending the bulk of his life cranking out pulp paperbacks for peanuts, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is now finally recognized as one of the most visionary authors the genre has ever produced. While masterminds like Arthur C. Clarke anticipated technological breakthroughs, Dick, whose speed-ravaged heart called it quits in 1982 when the man was only 53, foresaw the psychological turmoil of our posthuman lives, as we enter a world where machines talk back, virtual reality rules, and God is a product in the check-out line.
Dicks fractured and darkly funny novels have left their mark on video games and rock bands, avant-garde theater and electronic opera. But his influence has been particularly profound in Hollywood. Ridley Scott turned Dicks novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner, one of the most powerful SF films of all time. A 1966 short story formed the basis of the Schwarzenegger hit Total Recall, and Steven Spielberg turned Dicks tale "Minority Report" into his darkest flick yet. The reality slips and cartoon metaphysics of The Matrix are thoroughly indebted to Dick, and his spirit hangs heavy over Richard Linkletters astounding Waking Life.
http://frontwheeldrive.com/philip_k_dick.html

Celebrating 20 Years Of The NES

On July 15, 2003 a very special milestone will occur: That day will mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Nintendos Family Computer (aka Famicom) in Japan. You may know the system better by its Western name, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). But whatever you call it, theres absolutely no denying the impact that Nintendos 8-bit console had on the video game industry. The Famicom virtually took over the game market in many parts of the world, and it single-handedly revived the flagging interesting in video gaming in North America. Not bad at all for a gaudily-colored lump of plastic built from 1970s technology.
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/july03/famicom/index.shtml

Curve Puts Old Videos Online

http://www.curve.co.uk/missinglinkmovie.html

Oldest Known Planet Found

In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe itself.The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and so may be more abundant.Astronomers reported yesterday that the planet is more than twice as massive as Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of burned-out stars. It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/national/11PLAN.html?ei=5062&en=376db8d91712a12f&ex=1058500800&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

Antigravity For The Masses

Conspiracy theorists have always insisted that antigravity was being developed "in the black" by covert government commissions and military units. Its the secret engine in the B-2 bombers, man! Theyre testing them at Area 51! What makes lifters different is that theyre no secret at all. Fans post home videos of themselves grinning as their devices hover above their kitchen tables. Last spring, three Detroit high school students won the citys science fair by floating a giant lifter, and the teachers sent out an exuberant press release ("BEAM ME UP SCOTTY," they gushed). With stuff like this, who needs black ops? This is antigravity for the masses.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/pwr_antigravity.html

Only Dopes Get Duped

On both sides of the Atlantic, opposition politicians, commentators, anti-war activists and even military men claim to have been conned, misled or downright duped by Bush and Blairs pre-war claims. There is something distinctly disingenuous in all this dupe-talk. Weapons and intelligence experts were picking holes in Britain and Americas evidence long before the war kicked off. In the USA, there were newspaper headlines like Evidence on Iraq challenged and Doubts over administrations case as far back as September 2002 (2). Britains main dossier of evidence was ridiculed six weeks before the war started, for having been plagiarised from a students 12-year-old PhD thesis (3). Who could possibly be duped by such dopey claims?
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DE39.htm

RAFs Secret Hunt For Aliens

The secret papers obtained from the US military give an insight into an astonishing chain of events sparked by UFO sightings over East Anglia in 1956.
After receiving numerous calls reporting bright lights darting across the sky, fighters from RAF Lakenheath spent more than seven hours trying to shoot down the objects, which were picked up on army radar screens.
The classified documents were secured under the US Freedom of Information Act by Dave Clarke, an author researching the subject.
One US Air Force intelligence report described how 12 to 15 objects were picked up on radar screens on 13 August 1956. They were tracked for more than 50 miles. One object was logged travelling at 4,000mph. Operators making these radar sightings are of the opinion that malfunctions of equipment did not cause these radar sightings, the document said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,992218,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail79.html

Top 10 Lies About Gulf War II

On the terrible day of the 9/11 attacks, five hours after a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, retired Gen. Wesley Clark received a strange call from someone (he didnt name names) representing the White House position: "I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein," Clark told Meet the Press anchor Tim Russert. "I said, But ? Im willing to say it, but whats your evidence? And I never got any evidence."
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16274

Andreessen: Browser Innovation Dead

Andreessen says that "that there hasnt been any innovation on the browser in the last five years" and doesnt see any in the next five years. "Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons - we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser," he told an industry audience in London yesterday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31525.html

Stephenson Short Story

Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, Im not a paranoid schizophrenic - this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the infomercial window. "Hey!" it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, "Im Raster! Just speak my name - thats Raster - if you need any help."
I dont like Rasters looks. Its likely he was wandering the streets of Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the screen, leaving a trail of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste.
"Give me the damn encyclopedia!" I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews erupt from the rug and flee.
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Outlaws/SimoleonCaper.html

Cool: The Integral Fast Reactor

1) is cheaper to build and cheaper to operate than water reactors.
2) is passively safe. It uses a metallic fuel that expands when it overheats, causing the volume to increase which decreases the neutron density to the point where the reaction is shut down by the laws of nature without operator intervention! Loss of coolant poses no threat because the thermal currents of the liquid sodium are sufficient to stabilize the reactor.
3) can be operated in a mode where it uses as its fuel the spent fuel of the water reactors. By far the most lethal nuclear waste on the planet is the spent fuel which is produced in the United States at the rate of 6 tons a day. Currently our government policy is to store this waste for 30,000 years (Yucca Mountain). Electric rate payers are assessed one mill per kilowatt hour of power produced by nuclear reactors to deal with nothing but these spent fuel rods --- to the tune of more than $800 million per year!
http://www.dcia.com/ifr.html

More Ice On Mars

The Martian north pole is honeycombed with frozen water, exceeding the ice deposits detected on Mars southern end and raising hopes of finding traces of past microscopic life, astronomers reported on Thursday. The northern ice lies just below the Red Planets surface, according to Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, part of a team of U.S. and Russian scientists who made the discovery.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20030626/sc_nm/space_mars_dc&e=2&ncid=753

Cool Pic Of Phobos

http://www.rednova.com/news/images/1/2003/06/25/phobos_6big_mgs.jpg

Interview With Designer Tim Brown

The way I think of it, technology travels curves. You can think of the steep part of the curve as the technology push stage, when new technology is changing very fast. And what accelerates that curve are issues of usability and accessibility?that is, having to get people to understand what the technology can do and figure out a way to fit it into their lives. Later on, as the technology change curve starts to flatten out, then users need a different way of differentiating the technologies. A good example is the personal computer: technology does not differentiate PCs these days. The only place you get any differentiation is when somebody recognizes a new need that a PC can address. Thats the role of what we call human factors?the fit of technology to individuals and groups of people.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_brown062503.asp?p=0

Black Holes And Stellar Births

They are the most efficient engines of destruction known to humanity. Their intense gravity is a one-way ticket to oblivion for anything that strays too close; inside them is undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. We see them only because the victims do not go quietly to their doom. Material spiraling into a black hole can heat up to millions of degrees and glow brightly. Some of its kinetic energy and momentum may be transferred to a jet of particles flowing outward at close to the speed of light. Black holes of varying sizes take the rap for fusillades of radiation and plasma that astronomers observe all over the cosmos.
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004567B-11FB-1EDD-8E1C809EC588EF21

Wired Interviews StrongBad Creators

Every Monday morning, a bare-chested Flash cartoon creature with an indeterminate accent, a potbelly and a Mexican wrestling mask entertains almost 300,000 people with antics like composing an impromptu techno song. Not everyone gets it, but enough people flock to Mike and Matt Chapmans HomestarRunner website that its stars, Strong Bad, Homestar, Marzipan and The Cheat are gaining cult status with pre-teens, the Gen-X crowd and everyone in between. To boot, the Atlanta-based brothers have made a tidy business selling T-shirts featuring their creations. Wired News interviewed the twenty-something Chapman brothers, with contributor Melissa Palmer, who is the voice of Marzipan. Here is an excerpt from the interview.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59261,00.html

The Genome Changes Everything

For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because were going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. Thats not to denigrate whats gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into whats going on, and just from the first few genes were looking at.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p2.html

The Aesthetic Imperative

Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that few manufacturers can survive on performance and price alone. To produce value, they must give customers something to please their sensory side. Aesthetics is the killer app.
Public policy professor Richard Florida recalls serving on a Pennsylvania economic development advisory panel. "At one of our meetings," he notes in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, "the states Secretary of Labor and Industry, a big burly man, banged his fist on the table in frustration. Our workforce is out of balance, he steamed. Were turning out too many hairdressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory workers like welders and machine-tool operators."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view.html?pg=1

Wormholes A Bit Easier

They key to exotic matter lies in quantum fluctuations, which give empty space a kind of fizziness. Quantum theory says that subatomic particles and their corresponding antiparticles are continually popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of empty space. Exotic matter might arise by suppressing this fizz, or as a physicist would say, by violating the averaged null energy condition (ANEC).
If this were to happen, quantum effects could give rise to tiny amounts of exotic matter. But how much is needed to sustain a wormhole?
That is what Visser and colleagues have now calculated. They find that, if the wormhole is designed carefully, "the total quantity of ANEC-violating matter can be made infinitesimally small". This makes a wormhole considerably easier to create.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030527/030527-12.html

How To Build A Time Machine

...Thorne and his colleagues realized that if a stable wormhole could be created, then it could readily be turned into a time machine. An astronaut who passed through one might come out not only somewhere else in the universe but somewhen else, too--in either the future or the past.
To adapt the wormhole for time travel, one of its mouths could be towed to a neutron star and placed close to its surface. The gravity of the star would slow time near that wormhole mouth, so that a time difference between the ends of the wormhole would gradually accumulate. If both mouths were then parked at a convenient place in space, this time difference would remain frozen in.
Suppose the difference were 10 years. An astronaut passing through the wormhole in one direction would jump 10 years into the future, whereas an astronaut passing in the other direction would jump 10 years into the past. By returning to his starting point at high speed across ordinary space, the second astronaut might get back home before he left. In other words, a closed loop in space could become a loop in time as well. The one restriction is that the astronaut could not return to a time before the wormhole was first built.
A formidable problem that stands in the way of making a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in the first place. Possibly space is threaded with such structures naturally--relics of the big bang. If so, a supercivilization might commandeer one. Alternatively, wormholes might naturally come into existence on tiny scales, the so-called Planck length, about 20 factors of 10 as small as an atomic nucleus. In principle, such a minute wormhole could be stabilized by a pulse of energy and then somehow inflated to usable dimensions.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0004226A-F77D-1D4A-90FB809EC5880000

No WMD Spells Big Problems in Britain

Saddams elusive weapons of mass destruction seem to be causing more destruction in Britains corridors of power than in Iraq. The failure to find WMD in postwar Iraq has led to a shouting match among the British elite, with leaks, claims and counter-claims about the reliability of the pre-war evidence.
John Reid, leader of the House of Commons, says rogue elements in the intelligence services are questioning the evidence in order to undermine the government. Cabinet ministers accuse shadowy spies of skulduggery. Over 50 New Labour MPs signed a Commons motion demanding an inquiry into British intelligence, causing one loyal Blair official to say, They must really hate us....
Now, both the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee have launched investigations into the pre-war evidence.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DDE3.htm

Margret Atwood -- George Orwells Possible Outlook On 911

The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwells Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won - from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we would have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.
But with 9/11, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once - open markets, closed minds - because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturers dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina - all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it - their ways of silencing troublesome dissent.
Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things - openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the west are tacitly legitimising the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us towards the improved world - the utopia were promised - dystopia must first hold sway.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,978474,00.html

Good Matrix Parody

http://www.detonate.net/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=4

The MP3 Economy

The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apples (AAPL) iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales havent changed much since the vinyl era -- despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though its clearly a better deal than they get from piracy.
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,49472,00.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail76.html

/. Thread On Quitting Your Job

Some good points in here, dont agree with the most extreme of them, but having been in bad situations it can be enlightening.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/05/0641208&mode=thread&tid=187

Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness

I dont think that Poindexters nutty scheme has much real-world traction. I think the questions badly formulated, really. I dont think theres much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere. A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend. I noticed that people are doing a lot of "googling" before a first date nowadays--this represents the real trend. Poindexters doing this and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) allowed him to do it for the propaganda that someones serious about cyberwar someplace. Googling is international. Its not just restricted to cranky Republicans who couldnt erase e-mail in their PROFS (Professional Office System). Thats going to have more of an effect. Its difficult to escape a tragedy in your life thats not your own fault. Years ago, if your husband died in a house fire, you could get a covered wagon and go to Oregon. Now, as soon as you arrive in Oregon, someone could google you. "Oh, well, widow Simpson. Really sorry to hear about the house fire." You dont get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. Youre always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.
http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1105_2-1013033.html?tag=printthis

A Working Force Field?

A plasma valve, a device that uses electrically charged particles to act as a barrier between air and vacuum, has been invented by a Brookhaven-Argonne collaboration. These two DOE labs joined forces to provide a needed component for Argonnes Advanced Photon Source and similar facilities worldwide. Inside the walls of accelerators, synchrotrons and storage rings, a good vacuum--empty space mostly devoid of matter--enables particle beams to travel unimpeded for hours. However, if a leak causes air to rush into the vacuum, the particle beam spreads out and deposits its energy onto surrounding walls, disrupting the beam and damaging valuable equipment. The faster the leak can be closed, the less damage will be done to the walls. The plasma valve, which has no moving parts, can activate in a nanosecond, a million times faster than mechanical valves. To keep air from rushing in, the Brookhaven-Argonne team create a dense, high-temperature plasma (collection of charged particles) held together by electric and magnetic fields. Housed inside a hollow copper cylinder, the plasma reaches a temperature of 15,000 degrees Kelvin (about 50 times greater than room temperature)--making the plasma particles bounce around so vigorously that they collide with air molecules and prevent them from passing into the vacuum. Moreover, the valves confining electromagnetic fields prevent the plasma itself from rushing into the vacuum.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2003/split/640-2.html

Apple II Is 26 Years Old Today

This was the first PC I ever wrote code on. I was in grade seven, and I wrote a basic program that showed a Saturn V rocket launching in wonderful low-rez 4 color graphics.
It rocked.
http://apple2history.org/history/ah03.html

Mars Express Launches Today

The missions main objective is to search for sub-surface water from orbit and drop a lander on the Martian surface. Seven scientific instruments onboard the orbiting spacecraft will perform a series of remote sensing experiments designed to shed new light on the Martian atmosphere, the planets structure and geology. The lander, called Beagle 2 after the ship in which Charles Darwin set sail to explore uncharted areas of the Earth in 1831, is an exciting opportunity for Europe to contribute to the search for life on Mars. After coming to rest on the surface, Beagle 2 will perform exobiology and geochemistry research. As well as its science objectives, Mars Express will also provide relay communication services between the Earth and landers deployed on the surface by other nations, thus forming a centre piece of the international effort in Mars exploration.
http://sci.esa.int/marsexpress/

Cool Aikido Pictures

http://www.aikiweb.com/gallery/showgallery.php?stype=2&si=tcg3j&cat=500&sort=1&ppuser=2450

PS2 Supercomputer Beowolf Cluster

The resulting system, with components purchased at retail prices, cost a little more than $50,000. Researchers at the supercomputing center believe the system may be capable of a half trillion operations a second, well within the definition of supercomputer, although it may not rank among the worlds 500 fastest supercomputers.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The centers scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.
"It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the plastic packaging," said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project.
The scientists are taking advantage of a standard component of the PS2 that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. That chip is not the PlayStation 2s MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom-designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.
http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1010037.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail74.html

Scoping Mars

All telescopes are tuned to Mars as it draws nearer Earth than at any time in recorded history. The record-setting date is Aug. 27.At the same time, an earthly invasion of the red planet nears completion, as rovers of all shapes and sizes are launched toward our next-door neighbor in space.If everything goes as planned, by January 2004 there will be a total of seven spacecraft sniffing around Mars. Four will survey the situation in orbit, while three others will scratch around the rocky red surface.
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/5945451.htm

Dark Matter Definately Out There

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the motion of the satellite galaxies indicated the presence of a much larger, invisible mass. In other words, the larger galaxies are located at the center of giant concentrations of dark matter.
"This is a very important test of our understanding of how the universe works," said one of the researchers, Anatoly Klypin of New Mexico State University. "This is one of the most direct probes of the distribution of dark matter and the properties of dark matter."
The study further found that the gravitational pull of dark matter weakened at its periphery, a unique property not exhibited by bodies composed of ordinary matter.
"We detected a specific law -- the decline in dark-matter density toward the periphery," said Klypin. "The goal of our research is now to measure that law."
Dennis Zaritsky, an astronomer at University of Arizona at Tucson, first postulated dark matter in 1994. Zaritsky saw the excessive motion of satellite galaxies, indicating the presence of an invisible mass, but made no attempt to measure it.
"He was the first to see there was something wrong with motion," said Klypin. "Now (that) weve measured the law, we can reject other theories like MOND."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,58966,00.html

No Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Iraq: Whoops!

Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. Weve been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and dont understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team.
But wait, is liberation of a brutalized and tormented people now the reason? The justification for our thuggery? That is so cool! So that means were going to blow the living crap out of Sri Lanka and Sudan and Tibet and North Korea and about 47 others, right? Right? Maybe Saudi Arabia, too, second only to the Talilban itself in its abuse of women? Cool! As if.
Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, right? Lets ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCos own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops whove been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically.
Surely theyve found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah!
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/05/14/notes051403.DTL&nl=fix

/. Thread On The Matrix

Theres also a fair amount of Buddhism mixed in the Matrix ... more specifically the idea that the world is not real, and that anybody can find enlightenment through belief. But I guess since we dont have a "Buddhist Science Monitor" in this country we get a lot more observations on Christian "Wester Religion" themes. Theres a good essay about Buddhism, Gnosticism and Christianity on the Matrix website...
Thats Gnu/sticism, darn it!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/13/1634257&mode=thread&tid=188&tid=200&tid=97

Polar Bear Attacks US Sub

During the ICEX 2003 naval exercises near the North Pole, the American submarine Connecticut (SSN 22) poked its sail and rudder through the ice. When an officer looked around outside via the periscope, he noted that his sub was being stalked by a hostile polar bear. The periscope cam was turned on, and these photos of a polar bear chewing on the subs rear rudder resulted. The damage was said to be minor. The SSN 22 is a Seawolf class boat, one of the navys newest submarines. It wasnt designed as a polar bear snack, but thats how life is sometimes.
http://www.strategypage.com/gallery/default.asp?target=bear_sub1.htm

Smart Heuristics

What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gigerenzer03/gigerenzer_p2.html

One Canadians Big Questions About 911

Why did the United States Air Force fail to scramble interceptor jets ? in defiance of all long-standing rules and well-established practice ? for almost two hours after it was known that an unprecedented four planes had been hijacked?
How could the worlds most powerful military fail to react throughout a prolonged, horrifying attack on the financial and political capitals of the nation?
How did the FBI know the exact identities of the hijackers within 24 hours of the attacks? If their files were so readily to hand, why hadnt they been apprehended earlier? After all, several conscientious FBI agents had raised the alarm about a number of known Al Qaeda sympathizers at U.S. flight schools, and had been ignored.
Why did Donald Rumsfeld call for a war on Iraq (not Afghanistan) the morning after the Saudi hijackers had accomplished their attack?
Why did the two squadrons of fighter jets at Andrews Air Force base, 19 kilometres from Washington, not zoom into action to defend the White House, one of their primary tasks?
Why did George Bush sit for half an hour in a Florida classroom, listening to a girl talk about her pet goat, after his chief of staff told him about the second plane? For that matter, why did he pretend that he first learned of the attacks in that classroom, when he had actually been briefed as he left his hotel that morning?
Why has there been no public investigation into the billions of dollars "earned" by insider trading of United and American Airlines stock before 9/11?
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1052251546550&call_page=TS_Columnists&call_pageid=970599109774&call_pagepath=Columnists

Teen Girl Squad #3 (StrongBad Style)

http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs3.html

EU To Look For Life On Mars

If all goes according to plan, a Soyuz-Fregat booster rocket will lift off from Baikonur cosmodrome next month carrying an extremely compact and sophisticated life detection probe that might finally settle one of the most intriguing questions in science: did Mars once harbor microbial life?and is it still there?
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/may03/mars.html

Hackers And Painters

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people Ive known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

New StrongBad Email

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail72.html

US: Canada Cares Too Much About Liberties

The State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesnt spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties.It says "some U.S. law enforcement officers have expressed concern" about Canadian privacy laws.The U.S. officers feel those laws, as well as funding levels for law enforcement, "inhibit a fuller and more timely exchange of information and response to requests for assistance," the report says."Also, Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from government intrusion sometimes limit the depth of investigations."
http://canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=78a2260b-4770-4682-be60-e6fe1d3b8144

Hilarious Tale

This one makes me actually want to contribute content to my weblog!
http://www.teemings.com/extras/truelife/scylla6.html

Gibson on Blogging

Is there an art to blogging? I think there is and I dont think Ive necessarily mastered it yet! I have got that feeling of when youre working in a new form and you start to feel the edges of it and its really intuitive. However, if Im ever going to write another book, Im going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.
What constitutes a good blog? I havent really had that much experience of them as a reader. I wasnt looking at them much prior to starting my own blog. I saw a few more after that and then, I think during the first week of the war in Iraq, I feel as if I saw blogging go mainstream. On a Monday, Id mentioned to a friend in Vancouver that there was a guy in Baghdad who was blogging and my friend asked me "what the fuck is blogging?" By the Friday, blogging was being discussed on the evening news.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,946503,00.html