January 2003
Thursday, 30 January 2003
Dave Kopel & Glenn Reynolds on RAVE Act on National Review Online - “empire-building federal bureaucrats have been whipping up culture-war hysteria against musicians ever since Henry Alsinger blamed ‘swing’ music (and its practitioners, such as Glenn Miller) for marijuana use”
Tuesday, 28 January 2003
Ants, Mushroom and Mold: An Evolutionary Arms Race - “They developed two remarkable inventions – agriculture and antibiotics – some 50 million years before people did.”
LEGO Island Xtreme - “If you want to be a part of the LEGO Island Xtreme Stunts fun”… then you don’t deserve the simplicity of the LEGO brick. Sheesh.
Satellites Uncover Ancient Mideast Road Networks: Mr. Ur?
U.S. Department of State: General Advice For Americans Resident Overseas - Public Announcement - “We do not want American citizens to become unduly alarmed. These are precautionary measures only.”
Monday, 27 January 2003
Trendspotter offers likely developments for 2003 - [We’re doomed.]
Japan call interest rate under zero for first
The Customizer Is Always Right - “Ordering online versus going to the mall is no longer much of a choice. The fact that after an hour at the store I emerge with something that’s an inch too long has made me even less enthusiastic about the mall. And so Lands’ End cleans up, charging me extra for the quality of the fit.”
Who’s Minding the Store? - “‘Retailers who delegate category management to suppliers will never give customers a reason to shop their stores,’ Harris says. ‘This was supposed to be a tool for retailers,’ not an excuse to abdicate. And yet, category captains are proliferating. Category management is finding its first foothold in books and music for the same reasons it took root at Schnucks: new competition […], a bad economy, and a CEO who knows Harris.”
Sunday, 26 January 2003
Thousands Enslaved by Ireland’s Catholic Church - “the last Magdalene laundry to shut down was in 1996”
Saturday, 25 January 2003
Giovanni Agnelli, Patriarch of Fiat Auto Company, Dies at 81
Friday, 24 January 2003
AICN: The Screenwriter Of THE CORE Responds!! - “No problem with warp drive, alien species who can’t open a kitchen door, or a living liquid planet-god. But an improbable equation for semi-solid fluid dynamics, you’re the logic cops.” - contains wounded professional ego, geeks being slapped with an encyclopedia, light vulgarity, and Jessica Alba references
Tech firms fight copy-protection laws - “‘The MPAA is trying to reach a mutually agreeable conclusion whose aim it is to stop the thievery of films so that a legitimate digital marketplace can thrive,’ Valenti said. ‘We are not the enemy. We are not at war with the IT community.’” - No, we just want the computer and electronics industries to agree to completely cripple their products while raising cost to all consumers and businesses across the country because we like protectionism. Go protectionism!
The Guilt-Free Soldier - “Are we ready for the infamous Nuremberg plea - I was just following orders’ - to be made easier with pharmaceuticals?”
Thursday, 23 January 2003
SourceForge.net: spamassassin-talk - possibly the most ironic mailing list post in the history of the universe
Wednesday, 22 January 2003
News and Views: On Antiwar Protests: “By its nature protest is insular, which feeds the sectarian language and the sense of speaking to the converted.”
Monday, 20 January 2003
Fans Howl in Protest as Judge Decides X-Men Aren’t Human
Saturday, 18 January 2003
Ends, means and barbarity - “American officials are moving towards a policy of using torture on a systematic basis”
What I just entered into the customer service comment form on Netflix:
Can’t you get your marketing partners to quit spamming me about your service? You know I have an account, there’s no reason to send me the average of FIVE MESSAGES PER DAY which ask me to sign up. Even if I weren’t a member, I’d NEVER sign up for this service through unsolicited mail, and if I’d gotten this level of mail from them (read: you) before I was a member I never would have signed up (“wow, they must be jerks”). If it gets much worse I’ll probably discontinue the service so I can safely filter and delete any mail containing the word ‘netflix’.
Pressing “send” resulted in an error, twice in a row, so who knows whether it got through.
Monday, 13 January 2003
A friend of mine had trouble burning CDs from her Mac, and asked me to help. It looks like the problem is actually in the CD player she was testing on, as the CDs burned play on everything else we can find. She gave me a copy of the CD she was trying to burn, a collection of Christmas tunes, in order to test it in my car’s CD player. I’ve been driving around listening to it.
I now have what appears to be Doris Day singing “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas” mixing against the Meow Mix song in my head.
Much like the night I had “Blister in the Sun” v. “The Girl from Ipanema” being mixed in my head, this is sick, wrong, oddly melodic, and driving me bonkers.
Did the Chinese discover America?
Sunday, 12 January 2003
Where the Girls Aren’t - “If this is a field we would prefer to dominate as a nation, we should be developing more women in the field.”
Saturday, 11 January 2003
Excalibur, the rock that may mark a new dawn for man - “Dr Petraglia said the find was ‘potentially exciting’ but doubted that it was sufficient to reach such scientifically explosive conclusions about the development of the human mind. ‘We often have great difficulty in assessing if something is intentional,’ he said. ‘Often we require more evidence than one tool.’”
Intel’s Grove warns of the end of Moore’s Law - “the interdependence becomes more one-sided, with an adverse impact on our educational system because so much of the university funding comes from industry. There is a spiral there in the wrong direction.”
Friday, 10 January 2003
Blame Game / Gamers say social problems, not video games cause violence - “Japanese pundits rarely assert that media violence causes real-life violence.”
Transdermal Nutrient Delivery System (TDNDS): like the nicotine patch but for those who need to quit eating
Thursday, 9 January 2003
Market law found? - “This is in striking contrast to the usual assumption made in economic theory that traders make their decisions in a strictly rational manner, calculated to maximize gains.”
Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail - “the principal threat to the telephone companies’ ability to shrink costs but not revenues is their customers’ common sense”
Wednesday, 8 January 2003
Einstein proved right on gravity - “knowing the speed of gravity is important in the study of branches of cosmology where the Universe has more spatial dimensions”
The eyes have it - “Scans have shown a normalisation of brain wave-patterns after three sessions, with dormant left-hemisphere functions beginning to become active again and the right hemisphere dulling down.”
Charges expected in drug-bust scam - “any experienced narcotics officer should have been able to take one look at the substance and know it was not cocaine”
Tuesday, 7 January 2003
Puzzling Ring of Stars Discovered Circling the Milky Way
Saturday, 4 January 2003
Pot possession not illegal, judge rules - in parts of Canada, at least for now
Friday, 3 January 2003
European Copyrights Expiring on Recordings From 1950’s - “Callas recordings, most of them made between 1953 and 1960, account for about 5 percent of sales for EMI’s classical division in a typical year,”
Chain-reaction bankruptcy filings continue to soar - “This spring, the court plans to implement a system that allows people to file for bankruptcy electronically.”
Thursday, 2 January 2003
Huge, Ancient Ocean Predator Found - “Fossils of Liopleurodon have been found in England, France, Germany, eastern Europe, and Australia, where some years ago researchers dug out the remains of a young individual about 13 meters long.”
Wednesday, 1 January 2003
E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative - “For now, any clue would be welcome.”