November 2004
Saturday, 27 November 2004
Great composers scored on language: “Dr Patel, who was speaking at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Diego yesterday, now hopes to investigate whether pianists from different countries impose elements of their language on pieces they play - the equivalent of playing the piano with an accent.”
Friday, 26 November 2004
In Studies, Umbilical Cord Blood Shows Promise for Adults: “Cord blood offers an important advantage over marrow that makes it particularly valuable for use in transplants: its stem cells are less likely to attack the recipient’s body. That allows a wider margin of error in matching up donors and recipients.”
Thursday, 25 November 2004
In My Next Life: “I want to take time on this Thanksgiving to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own.”
Wednesday, 24 November 2004
The dollar’s demise: “But Buttonwood suspects that the deeper significance of Mr Greenspan’s admission is that the game that has been played since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s is drawing to a close. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency—its preferred store of value, if you will—is gradually coming to an end.”
Friday, 19 November 2004
USC findings rewrite history of man: “‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary standards of evidence,’ Anderson said in a statement to reporters. ‘A human presence upwards of 40,000 years old in the New World has been proposed by many previous investigators, but none of these early sites have survived careful professional examination.’”
Tuesday, 16 November 2004
Music Is Not a Loaf of Bread: “Something interesting happened. We were contacted by fans who were excited about the fact that they found it on P2P networks, but wanted to give something back in good faith. They wanted to send money to express solidarity with the fact that we’d embraced the downloading community. We couldn’t take the money ourselves, so they asked if we could pick a charity instead – we pointed them to Doctors Without Borders, and they ended up receiving about $15,000.”
Senate May Ram Copyright Bill: “The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content – like a gory or sexually explicit scene – in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited.”
Monday, 15 November 2004
Atlantis found off Cyprus coast
Friday, 12 November 2004
Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp: It’s worth noting that Frankel is in many ways the person directly responsible for the popularity of digital music for which Fanning and Jobs get the credit.
Video games: “For this week’s launch of `Halo 2’, a shoot-‘em-up that runs on Microsoft’s Xbox console, over 6,000 shops across America opened their doors at midnight to sell the game to queues of fans. Add over 1.5m pre-orders and the game brought in over $100m in its first day on sale. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, called it ‘an opening day that’s greater than any motion picture has ever had in history.’ For example, ‘The Incredibles’, the latest blockbuster film from Pixar, took a mere $70.5m in its opening weekend, while the record for an opening day’s ticket sales, at $40.4m, is held by ‘Spider-Man 2’.”
Thursday, 11 November 2004
Jonathan Edelstein has some thoughts on life after Arafat.
Archived Memepool Post: Nov 11, 2004
The Top 10 reasons why sex at the speed of light is not an advisable form of procreation does not remind Catholics to confess before reaching infinite mass. (Posted to Sex)
Wednesday, 10 November 2004
Wanted: to borrow your goat: “If you have a goat, I would like to borrow it, and graze it on their lawn. When they complain, I will explain to them what ‘Commons’ means.”
The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines: “And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It’s not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.”
Archived Memepool Post: Nov 10, 2004
She may be a flight risk, but he’s a werewolf. (Posted to Media)
Tuesday, 9 November 2004
Exploded Star Possibly Affected Human Evolution: “The supernova lit up somewhere between 30 light-years and 300 light-years from Earth, the study concludes. The rough estimate is due to the fact that the star’s exact mass isn’t known, and the extent of iron-60 is also not fully known. There is one pretty solid clue that helps provide a minimum distance: Our ancestors survived and even thrived.”
Monday, 1 November 2004
Important addition to resume: nonsmoker: “The ACLU has already raised the topic, citing demographic data that shows that blacks and young women smoke in disproportionately high numbersand thus could be unfairlytargeted by anti-smoking policies.”
I’ve been fairly critical of the Bush administration of late, so in the interest of balance I suggest you check out my friend Alex’s weblog for an alternative take. I disagree with his reasons for supporting Bush, but he does have reasons.