“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?em&ex=1163998800&en=f02de71136ca5dd5&ei=5087%0A

Star Trek Inspirational Posters

My fave: "Captian Kirk -- I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."

Also, more here. 

http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/star_trek_insp.html

Gosling on Open Sourcing Java

"The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process. In addition, there are massive test suites, and we will do an immense amount of testing. We expect that people who care about reliability and compatibility with the spec will use our version.

The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves -- those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that, and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

So it shouldn't give anybody any concerns as far as fragmentation. We're not just going to let random people check random code in. Just like every other open-source project, we will end up with a set of rules for who's allowed to check in a lot. Everything will get checked and rechecked and debugged."
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/gosling_os1_qa.html

Managing IT

Executives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0611/article/R0611J.jhtml;jsessionid=ZI5G4OQONIVHKAKRGWCB5VQBKE0YOISW?type=F

Communication

It isn't often you get something from your boss that makes you think. I got this tidbit in my MOR meeting a couple of weeks ago and it's been drifting through my mind.
He asked me how many times do you have to communicate something before people get it. Take a guess.
I bet you're wrong. 13 times. Thirteen freakin' times.
Think about that the next time you're rolling out a new app or process. Sheesh.

A Sound Of Thunder

OK.
This wasn't a good movie. But it wasn't a terrible one either.
For those that don't know, it's a very loose adaptation of a Robert Heinlien movie where a bunch of guys go back in time on a hunting expedition where one accidentally steps on a butterfly and alters the timeline.
The effects, acting, writing, or direction weren't good. But the story still was. At least if you read it as a child like me and were enamored with it.
Look, it's science fiction. When it tries to be interesting it's at least worth overlooking the fact that it's not, isn't it?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/

Canada, Germany Lead World In Privacy and Human Rights Protections

Bottom of the list? China, Malaysia, Sweden, the UK and the US.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/phr2005/phrtable.pdf