February 2003
Friday, 28 February 2003
Bureaucrats get EBay fever - State sells penknives confiscated at airports at online auction: “I don’t want to use the word ‘theft,’ but it starts smelling like it.”
Wednesday, 26 February 2003
Pioneer 10 falls silent after nearly 31 years: “The spacecraft continues to coast toward the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. It will take 2 million years to reach it.”
AOL Starts a Service For Copying of Music - “MusicNet on AOL marks the first major premium offering from America Online, which is struggling with sluggish subscriber growth and wants to increase the amount of money spent monthly by existing subscribers.”
Umberto Eco: Love America and march for peace
Monday, 24 February 2003
The mystery of Stalin’s death - “it was a provocation. He wanted an answer from America”
Thursday, 20 February 2003
Public nuisance - “If you don’t meet that threshold–in mid-January, less than one-quarter of the 1,226 publicly traded IT companies actually did–your stock doesn’t trade in high enough volume to make it truly liquid. And as for public stature, the lengthy list of federal investigations, class action lawsuits, and executives warming prison bunks is an indication of what that’s worth in 2003.”
Job losses in state twice as bad as thought: “‘We’ve been trying to figure out why personal income tax receipts have been falling so rapidly,’ said Brad Williams, senior economist in the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. ‘You don’t get there from the official (data) series.’”
Wednesday, 19 February 2003
‘Genetic changes’ triggered Man’s artistic abilities - “An explosion of art, culture and individual expression that took place in Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago may have been triggered by biological changes in the human brain” - there’s a Rothko joke in here somewhere
AltaVista flogged to Overture: “AltaVista has repositioned itself as an internet search company. There was a period when AltaVista was in the position Google is now. Then there was a drift in the company, a lack of focus - the portal strategy.”
Thursday, 13 February 2003
Virus May Block HIV’s Destructive Power - “Research suggests that the virus has been around as long as people have.”
I just received spam from a company called spamarrest offering to filter out all my spam.
When i say “received”, I mean that I found it in my junk folder while looking for any false positives.
SpamAssassin continues to work.
‘Hi-tech’ shuttle pic really low-tech - “There was no official project or tasking to do this. The people who work here are geeks. This was an opportunity to look at a rapidly moving object and try to take a picture of it. That’s really all it was.”
Wednesday, 12 February 2003
t.A.T.u.’s “All The Things She Said”, in the original Russian, is much better than the English translation, in that the two seem to be able to actually sing in Russian rather than just screeching out words.
Tuesday, 11 February 2003
New York cabs will eliminate celebrity voices offering seatbelt reminders: “Twelve per cent of respondents said they deliberately refused to buckle their seat belts because they were so annoyed by the announcements.”
Living up to the Hype: Superconductors - “6 to 7% of the electricity generated in the United States gets lost along the way to consumers, partly due to the resistance of transmission lines”
New insights into how the nerve connection machinery remodels itself - “PSD significantly alters its shape in response to the kind of neural activity that takes place during learning”
Researchers develop ‘natural bandages’ that mimic body’s healing process - “He’d probably whip out a gauze, slap it on and hold pressure on it. When you get to the hospital, they’re going to rip that gauze off and start the bleeding all over again.”
Monday, 10 February 2003
Yesterday I was in the Haight helping shoot a friend’s short film. I stopped in to F8 and picked up a bunch of stuff. The new Morphem CD is what my friends from New Hampshire would refer to as “Wicked Bad”. Retro also looks promising.
Thursday, 6 February 2003
Stockpiling Popularity With Food - “The ration program is regarded by the United Nations as the largest and most efficient food-distribution system of its kind in the world.”
Counterspin Central on Neolibetarianism: “the very fact that we are going down this path again, even though, as a society, we have long aknowledged that what we did to Japanese Americans during WWII was unconscionable, contradicts that assertion”
Scientists develop darkest substance on earth
Wednesday, 5 February 2003
Nothing But The Truth - “The fear is that if juries know this sort of thing, they’ll ‘abuse’ their power to acquit. Such unsupervised discretion is antithetical to the rule of law, w’e told. But that’s not true – or, if it is, the rule of law is already in trouble, because juries are the only players in the criminal justice system who don’t have this power.”
Tuesday, 4 February 2003
Carriers Face ‘Britney’ Dilemma - yet one more reason everyone will eventually go flat rate or die trying
Monday, 3 February 2003
Saddam’s bodyguard warns of secret arsenal
Saturday, 1 February 2003
A War Crime or an Act of War? - “Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades - not solely by controlling Iraq’s oil, but by controlling its water.” - also read the rebuttal