Random Neat Stuff Archive

This is an archival list of the neat and/or thought provoking stories that don't fit easily in other sections and which have overflowed from the general links section.

• 2010/07/29: Eureka: Groundbreaking research [50Gbps Silicon Photonics Link] from Intel Corp. demonstrated at IPR
• 2010/07/23: StageLeft: Police Officer Gets Conditional Discharge For Beating Handcuffed Man
• 2010/07/22: CBC: Woman shoved by police says, 'He has no right'
• 2010/07/22: CBC: Police shoving woman on video raises questions
• 2010/07/20: TGBeaver: Why do people laugh at creationists? Part 1 & 2
• 2010/07/20: CBC: Crime decreased again last year
• 2010/07/20: StatsCan: Police-reported crime statistics
  Police-reported crime in Canada continues to decline. Both the volume and severity of police-reported crime fell in 2009, continuing the downward trend seen over the past decade. Nearly 2.2 million crimes were reported to police in 2009, about 43,000 fewer than in 2008. Overall, three property crimes accounted for the majority of this drop: 17,000 fewer motor vehicle thefts, 10,000 fewer mischief offences and 5,000 fewer break-ins. The crime rate, a measure of the volume of crime reported to police, fell 3% in 2009 and was 17% lower than a decade ago. The Crime Severity Index (CSI), a measure of the seriousness of police-reported crime, declined 4% in 2009 and stood 22% lower than in 1999.
• 2010/07/18: uComics: (cartoon - Auth) Women Priests
• 2010/07/17: AlterNet: Exploring the Crazy Conspiracy Theories Bubbling Up Around the BP Disaster
• 2010/07/17: G&M: Iroquois lacrosse team bowing out of UK tournament
  After a week of appeals to British officials to be let into the country on Iroquois passports, the answer is still "no."
• The Oracle of Bacon
• 2010/07/15: Guardian(UK): Native Americans should not have to earn sovereignty
  US and British governments treat indigenous peoples' right to travel, even their right to existence, with high-handed contempt
• 2010/07/15: Guardian(UK): Catholics angry as church puts female ordination on par with sex abuse
• The Fugs
• 2010/07/12: LotL: Counterculture RIPs
• 2010/07/13: CBC: U.S. do-not-call list puts Canada's to shame -- Collected $22M in fines so far versus $250 in Canada
  While Canada's do-not-call list has proven to be expensive and ineffective when it comes to collecting fines, a similar system in the U.S. has collected over $22 million from telemarketers and shut down several fraudulent operations.
• 2010/07/13: DM:SRK: Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission?
• 2010/07/12: CBC: Electronic anklet trial a 'disaster'
  A federal pilot project to outfit parolees with electronic anklets in hopes of keeping track of them and deterring further crimes has been a costly failure, according to a corrections expert. "The whole fact is that the program was an unmitigated disaster," said Paul Gendreau, a professor emeritus at the University of New Brunswick who is known internationally for his research in corrections and electronic monitoring. Nearly two years ago, then public safety minister Stockwell Day announced the pilot project with great fanfare as part of the Conservative government's tough-on-crime stance. But an internal review of the program, obtained by CBC News, found that it was plagued by technical malfunctions with the anklet's global positioning system and showed little proof as to the effectiveness of the device.
• 2010/07/10: BRitholtz: Periodic Table of Swearing
• 2010/07/08: EUO: Europe has lost 80% of its silent films
  Some 80 percent of European silent films are estimated to have been lost, and, due to legal challenges, even modern digital technology may not be sufficient to prevent something similar happening to other other types of film, the European Commission has warned in a new report. Only Latvia and Denmark have so far developed film digitisation strategies covering the whole national heritage. Hungary has decided to digitise only a hundred of its movies. Less then a third of member states currently collect digital material in the way they do analogue material, the report shows. "The loss of 80 percent is an estimate based on the holdings archives we have of the silent period. Notwithstanding the small chance of some films surfacing over time in other countries and hidden caches, we believe it to be correct," Martin Koerber, curator at Deutsche Kinemathek Museum of Film and Television in Berlin, told EUobserver.
• 2010/07/08: PhysOrg: Breakthrough in plant-fungi relationship
  Massey biologists have uncovered for the first time the complete set of gene messages that define the symbiotic interaction between a fungal endophyte and its grass host.
• 2010/07/08: DM:DB: A Fully Armed and Operational Lightsaber Earns George Lucas’s Wrath
• 2010/07/07: CBC: Court rejects Manitoba Métis land claim -- Métis federation alleges Crown didn't transfer land it promised in 1870 deal
  The Manitoba Métis Federation has lost another court battle in a massive land claim dispute that includes all of present-day Winnipeg. The Manitoba Court of Appeal upheld a lower court ruling Wednesday that found the federal government did not violate its duty to the Métis when it distributed land more than a century ago after Manitoba joined Confederation in 1870. The federation quickly vowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.
• 2010/07/07: CBC: Wrongly convicted man sues police, lawyer
  An Ontario man who says he pleaded guilty on the advice of his lawyer to a 1987 crime that Paul Bernardo later confessed to is suing Toronto police, the Ontario Attorney General and his former lawyer. Anthony Hanemaayer, now a 42-year-old resident of Harriston, Ont,, seeks $1.1 million in damages.
• 2010/07/07: CBC: Do-not-call list 'useless,' critics say -- $250 in fines collected after 300,000 telemarketing complaints
• 2010/07/06: SciDaily: Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar
• 2010/07/05: AlterNet: Hedges: A Needed Antidote to the Worst of Commodity Culture
• 2007/08/18: AF: Why Intelligent People Fail [20 reasons listed]
• 2010/07/05: CSM: Kooky? Ahead of his time? The man who would be stateless
• 2010/07/05: NakedCapitalism: Big Pharma Research Cost Defense of High Drug Prices Debunked in Study
• 2010/07/04: BCLSB: Keep the Canadian Census Long Form Petition
• 2010/07/02: Tyee: She's Baaaack! 'Metropolis' Revived -- New extended restoration of iconic 1927 film is fresh as a whiff of G20 tear gas.
• 2010/07/01: PhysOrg: First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb
• 2010/06/26: CBC: Vatican's anger at Belgian abuse raids escalates
• 2010/06/26: Skeptico: The Vatican - Still Doesn't Get It
  [...]
  Finally, the prosecution body of one country at least has decided that professing belief in a magic invisible sky fairy doesn’t mean that you can rape children without the possibility of being prosecuted. Better late than never. Let’s hope that other countries now follow suit.
• 2010/06/25: BBC: Sex domain gets official approval
  Official approval has been given for the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography. The board of net overseer ICANN gave initial approval for the creation of the .xxx domain at its conference in Brussels.
• 2010/06/24: CBC: Rat lung regenerated, say scientists
• 2010/06/21: SlashDot: Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter
  [...] "I don't really care what you had for breakfast."
• 2010/06/21: TreeHugger: New York City To Remove "Eyesore" Ghost Bikes
• 2010/06/19: BRitholtz: Their Finest Hour (70th anniverary) -- House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill -- June 18, 1940
• 2010/06/18: SF Gate: 19 reasons why God torched Jesus
• 2009/08/13: ChangingChina: Love the Motherland, Love Statistics
• 2009/11/05: BBC: Feeling grumpy 'is good for you'
  In a bad mood? Don't worry - according to research, it's good for you.
• 2010/06/16: DM:DB: iCop: Police to Use Facial Recognition App to Nab Criminals
• 2010/06/16: TreeHugger: 21 Year Old "Cathedral of Junk" Dismantled After Neighbours Complain
• 2010/02/25: CBC: Canada's prison farm system being phased out
• 2010/04/05: CBC: Prison farm closings are firm: minister
• 2010/06/15: CBC: Prison farm protesters threaten blockade
• 2010/06/10: OTI: Yottabytes
• The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster
  Journal of Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith and Servant to His Supreme Excellency the Emperor Palpatine.
• 2010/06/07: LFB: Gizmodo: Are Cameras the New Guns?
• 2010/06/08: BBC: Poland castration law takes effect
  A Polish law that can force some rapists and paedophiles to undergo chemical castration has come into effect.
• 2010/06/08: TreeHugger: The Greenest Brick: City Votes to Demolish Entire Street of 41 Historic Buildings
• 2010/06/08: NBF: Exaflop Supercomputer Could be As Early as 2015 and Non-CMOS Zettaflop Supercomputer
• Wiki: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
• 2010/06/07: Guardian(UK): Lost John Ford movie unearthed in New Zealand
• 2010/06/07: CBC: Fire damages Barber House, Winnipeg's oldest house
• 2010/06/07: G&M: Hanging up on the phone book -- Yellow Pages will no longer deliver residential directories in Canada’s seven largest cities unless asked to
• SnarXiv -- High Energy Physics - Theory - Generator
• PoMo: The Postmodernism Generator -- Communications From Elsewhere
• 2010/06/03: DM:DB: Sign of the Apocalypse? "Drunk" Parrots Fall From the Trees in Australia
• 2010/05/31: PhysOrg: Scientists breed goats that produce spider silk
  Researchers from the University of Wyoming have developed a way to incorporate spiders' silk-spinning genes into goats, allowing the researchers to harvest the silk protein from the goats’ milk for a variety of applications. For instance, due to its strength and elasticity, spider silk fiber could have several medical uses, such as for making artificial ligaments and tendons, for eye sutures, and for jaw repair. The silk could also have applications in bulletproof vests and improved car airbags.
• 2010/05/31: Guardian(UK): New Zealand PM John Key cuts press conference short with frank admission
  John Key was responding to questions about funding changes to early childhood education centres when he was asked whether he would send his children to one with fewer qualified teachers on its staff. "I think if I sent my 15-year-old or 17-year-old to early childhood at the moment, they would have a meltdown," he quipped. What if his wife, Bronagh, had another child, a reporter asked. "I'd be extremely worried," he replied, "because I've had a vasectomy." The acknowledgment caused reporters who were present to fall silent, and Key admitted that it was "probably too much information" for a press conference.
• 2010/05/31: CNN: Guillermo del Toro drops out of directing 'The Hobbit'
• 2010/05/29: Guardian(UK): Dennis Hopper, American film actor and icon, dies at 74
  The Hollywood star, best known for his roles in Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet, has died from cancer
• 2010/05/27: Time: The 50 Worst Inventions
• 2010/05/29: VoxEU: Pop internationalism: Has half a century of world music trade displaced local culture? by Joel Waldfogel
  Is pop music leading to cultural globalisation with the US at the helm? This column examines data from over a million chart entries in 22 countries covering 98% of the world music market. It finds no evidence that the rise of music trade has eroded interest in local music production or consumption. In fact some smaller countries actually benefit disproportionately.
• 2010/05/28: SlashDot: The Hobbit On Hold
• 2010/05/28: NewScientist:CL: [Book Plug] _30-Second Theories: The 50 most thought-provoking theories in science, each explained in half a minute_ by Paul Parsons
• 2010/05/28: AlterNet: Would You Hire Your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should be Teaching Them
• 2010/05/27: CBC: Cyclist's video showcases dangerous drivers
• 2010/05/27: CNN: Harry Potter Stars Emotional as They Set to Wrap Final Film
• 2010/05/24: AlterNet: Why the Internet Is Ground Zero in the Global Consciousness War
• 2010/05/26: DVoice: Destroying Public Education in America: Part II
• 2010/05/25: CSM: Seven online scams and how to avoid them
• 2010/05/24: SoS: Scene from an Airport
• 2010/05/24: AlterNet: Catholic Leader Says Woman Should Die With Her Fetus -- When Did Woman-Hating Go Mainstream?
• 2010/05/21: AlterNet: Barbara Ehrenreich: Why Forced Positive Thinking Is a Total Crock
• 2010/05/20: Telegraph(UK): Pink Hitler posters provoke fury
  Giant posters of Hitler dressed in bright pink, with a love heart in place of a swastika, have provoked a furious debate in Italy
• 2010/05/20: Ph&Ph: Street Corner Science: Ask A Nobel Laureate
• 2010/05/12: BoingBoing: Confident dumb people
• 2010/05/19: SlashDot: [Book Review] _The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist_ by Frederic P. Brooks, Jr.
• 2010/05/18: UOH: You go, girl
• 2010/05/12: H+Mag: GestureTek Turns You into the Controller
• 2010/05/13: GizMag: Video: Is Steve Durnin's D-Drive the holy grail of infinitely variable transmissions?
• 2010/05/13: Onion: Report: 23% Of Population Just Sort Of Like That
• Best of History Web Sites
• Wiki: Malamanteau
• 2010/05/12: XKCD: Malamanteau
• 2010/05/13: SlashDot: Wikipedia Is Not Amused By Entry For xkcd-Coined Word
• 2010/05/10: H+Mag: "Like Neurons in the Brain": A Molecular Computer That Evolves
• Wiki: W. E. B. Du Bois
• 2010/05/06: NYT: The Last Days of the Dragon Lady
  Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union announced that it had shot down an American U-2 spy plane and that its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was alive. It seems like a long-ago event from the cold war. That may be why, in this era of satellites and drones, most people are surprised to learn that the U-2 is not only still in use, but that it is as much a part of our national security structure as it was a half-century ago.
  [...]
  The U-2 is nicknamed the Dragon Lady for good reason. You never knew what to expect when you took it into the air, no matter how seasoned a pilot you were. This was an unfortunate consequence of its design. The trade-off of a plane built light enough to fly above 70,000 feet is that it is almost impossible to control. And 13 miles above the ground, the atmosphere is so thin that the “envelope” between stalling and “overspeed” — going so fast you lose control of the plane, resulting in an unrecoverable nose dive — is razor-thin, making minor disruptions, even turbulence, as deadly as a missile. The challenge is even greater near the ground, since to save weight, the plane doesn’t have normal landing gear.
• 2010/05/10: PhysOrg: Next generation hard drives may store 10 terabits per sq inch: research
• 2010/04/29: AlterNet: Cum Has 2,000 Calories!?: Sex According to Right-Wing Moralist Crusaders
• 2010/05/07: 1Div0: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• 2010/05/06: Skeptico: Vatican Excuse Bingo
• 2010/05/06: CBC: Police unite to defend long-gun registry
  Three national police associations came together for the first time on Parliament Hill Thursday to defend the long-gun registry. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the Canadian Police Association and the Canadian Association of Police Boards are in Ottawa to present a united front against the Conservative government's bill to scrap the registry. "This should not be about us versus them. Or rural versus urban, or even police versus politicians," said Charles Momy, who is the president of the Canadian Police Association, which represents rank-and-file officers. "The firearms registry represents a valuable tool in assisting police in doing their job. It is a valuable tool, which has significant preventative and investigative value in keeping our communities safe." The groups say perceptions about the registry are dated and full of misconceptions. They say while it got off to a bad start years ago, it now costs taxpayers just $4 million a year.
• 2010/05/06: CanWest: What have reserves got to hide?
  It is high time some light were shed upon the pay and perks of the elected officials on First Nations reserves. Currently, many band chiefs and elected council members are refusing to disclose how much they earn. Instead, they set their own pay in secret and often hide the information from their own people. How can the citizens of Canada's aboriginal communities judge whether they get value for money from their leadership if the leaders are hiding how much they pay themselves? It is time this changed.
• 2010/05/04: Crikey:Cinetology: Release dates announced for del Toro’s take on The Hobbit [December 2012 & December 2013]
• 2010/05/03: HP+Mag: Graphene is Next -- The Substance Found in Pencils will Speed Up our Computers One Thousand Fold
• 2010/05/03: NBF: Exaflop Supercomputer Race
• 2010/05/01: CBC: Outrage over publication ban in [Victoria (Tori) Stafford] child slaying
• 2010/05/02: TStar: Media ban cheats Canadians
• 2010/05/01: PhysOrg: China's online population passes 400 million: state media
• 2010/04/30: SoS: Homeopathic Bomb
• 2010/04/30: CanWest: Mountie Faked Memo -- Drug Case Tossed
  A stunning admission by a senior RCMP officer that he drafted a bogus memo to cover up concerns about police wiretap methods has led to the collapse of a major drug prosecution in northern Ontario and raised questions about wiretapping in at least 30 investigations. Federal prosecutors in Sault Ste. Marie stayed trafficking charges this week in Project Omax, a long-running investigation that allegedly uncovered a "multi-kilo" cocaine ring linked to the Hells Angels in Quebec. The decision to stay the charges comes after testimony revealed a fabricated memo about wiretapping concerns by RCMP Sergeant John Roskam, a long-time member of the force who was head of the wiretap unit in Ontario. Sgt. Roskam, who insisted he acted on his own, revealed under cross-examination last November that there was both a fake memo and a real memo in responding to lawyers' concerns about wiretaps and whether the force was not complying with court orders.
• 2010/04/28: JCMorton: Repealing long-gun registry could get officers killed: Chief
  Here's the real issue -- what works? What protects police without unduly limiting the liberty of the subject?
• 2010/04/27: BBC: Nokia launches open source phone
  The first handset to use the Symbian operating system since it became open source has been announced by Nokia
• 2010/04/26: DM:BA: Tremble before Boobquake!
• 2010/04/26: Eureka: How shape-memory materials remember
• 2010/04/26: BBC: Sony signals end for floppy disks
  Sony has signalled what could be the final end of the venerable floppy disk. The electronics giant has said it will stop selling the 30-year-old storage media in Japan from March 2011. Earlier this year Sony stopped selling the disks in most international markets due to dwindling demand and competition from other storage formats.
• 2010/04/19: Onion: Report: China To Overtake U.S. As World's Biggest Asshole By 2020
• 2010/04/23: CBC: Nimoy beams up to Vulcan in Alberta -- 'Live long and prosper'
• 2010/04/23: Yahoo:CP: Engage! Spock beams into Alta. town of Vulcan
• 2010/04/23: BuckDog: Mr Spock Travels To Vulcan (Alberta) Today
• iFixit
• 2010/04/20: SeattlePI: Leonard Nimoy Announces Retirement From Acting
• 2010/04/21: BCLSB: Robberies Since The Advent Of The Long Gun Registry
• 2010/04/20: WiredSci: Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists
• 2010/04/20: BBC: Quakes blamed on 'immodest women' -- Promiscuous women are responsible for earthquakes, a senior Iranian cleric has said
• 2010/04/16: UN: Ten million detainees held in dire conditions worldwide - UN expert
• 2010/04/16: NBF: Memristors for Faster Computers, Extending Moore's Law and Brain Emulation
• 2010/04/15: CBC: Fatal jump from plane ruled a suicide
  A coroner's inquest in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, has concluded that the death of Julian Tologanak, 20, who jumped from an airplane in mid-flight one year ago Thursday, was a suicide. The inquest panel also issued five recommendations on how to prevent similar deaths in the future -- aimed mostly at government and health-care officials. The panel released its report late Thursday afternoon, hours after hearing final statements from lawyers and presiding coroner Garth Eggenberger.
• 2010/04/16: CanWest: Australian rescued by Canadian Forces after Arctic accident
  An Australian adventurer on a solo-mission to the North Pole was rescued by a Canadian military search team on Thursday night after he fell through the ice about 300 kilometres short of his goal. Tom Smitheringale, attempting to become the first Australian to trek unassisted to the North Pole, activated his emergency beacon just after noon Thursday, which transmitted a distress signal and gave his exact position, said Jim Pizzey, a member of Smitheringale's support staff in Perth, Australia.
• 2010/04/14: BBC: Cash is being 'replaced by cards' [in UK]
  Cash payments will account for less than half of all transactions in five years' time, according to research.
• 2010/04/13: CBC: Nunavut plane jump inquest hears from MD
  A Nunavut coroner's inquest into the death of Julian Tologanak, the Cambridge Bay man who jumped out of a plane in mid-flight, heard Tuesday from an emergency room doctor who examined him hours before the fatal trip. The inquest panel in Cambridge Bay is hearing testimony this week into the death of Tologanak, 20, who was aboard an Adlair Aviation charter flight from Yellowknife to Cambridge Bay on April 15, 2009, when he forced open the twin-engine plane's door and jumped out from an altitude of about 7,000 metres. Tologanak jumped somewhere near Umingmaktok, about 180 kilometres away from the Cambridge Bay airport. Despite a lengthy search, his body was never found.
• 2010/04/13: WaPo: Jobless dropouts head back to school for basic skills
  The push to return unemployed workers to the nation's payrolls is hamstrung by a decades-old legacy of poor schooling that has left tens of millions of Americans without the basic reading or math skills necessary for today's jobs.
• 2010/04/12: CBC: B.C. asks court to toss Taser lawsuit
  The company that manufactures Tasers has no more right to dictate regulations for their use than cigarette makers do over second-hand smoke regulations, says the B.C. government. Craig Jones, a lawyer for the province, told a B.C. Supreme Court justice Monday that if the company is successful with its application to quash the findings of a public inquiry, it would be akin to giving Taser International that power. The province is asking the court to toss Taser's court action against a report prompted by the death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver's airport.
• 2010/04/12: CBC: Nunavut inquest into fatal plane jump begins
• 2010/04/08: DM:TheLoom: In Memory of the Great Bear of Locktown [John Schoenherr]
• 2010/04/08: NatureTGB: Memristance is not futile
• 2010/03/18: Pew: The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household
• 2010/04/07: NYT: H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip [memristor]
• 2010//: NPS: Channel Islands Live Bald Eagle Webcam
• 2010/04/06: Guardian(UK): The limits of liberation
  When I worked as a stripper at university, my job came under fire not from religious misogynists, but from the campus feminists
  Here's the assumption: to prevent women being victimised or exploited there must be prohibitions on female sexuality, and things certain women do made illegal for their own good
• 2010/04/05: CBS: Newspaper's UFO Prank Causes Mayhem in Jordan -- April Fool's Article Documents Arrival of 10-Foot-Tall Aliens; Duped Mayor Dispatches Security Forces
• 2010/04/05: Guardian(UK): The man who predicted an earthquake
  On 6 April 2009 an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila. A year on, it's reported that toads predicted the disaster. But there was a more vocal warning from a scientific technician -- whose forecast was, fatefully, ignored
• 2010/04/03: Telegraph(UK): Prostitutes sign confuses motorists
  A road sign warning of prostitutes is confusing motorists in an Italian town.
• 2010/04/02: Gawker: Stuff Catholics Have So Far Blamed for the Church's Pedophilia Scandal
• 2010/04/02: CBC: Internet link case to go before Supreme Court
  Can posting a link to someone else's website constitute defamation?
• 2010/03/29: Guardian(UK): Globish: the worldwide dialect of the third millennium
  More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of 'decaffeinated English', according to the man who coined the term 'Globish', makes it the world's most widely spoken language.
• 2010/04/02: AlterNet: Ruling OK's Tasering Pregnant Woman Three Times
• 2010/04/02: TStar: RCMP gives cash settlement to Taser victim’s mother
  The mother of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski says her battle with authorities is over after she received a financial settlement and an apology from the RCMP for its role in the death of her son. "I have to close this chapter," said Zofia Cisowski. "I think I will sleep better for today." Dziekanski died after he was Tasered during an encounter with four RCMP officers at the Vancouver International Airport in October 2007. Cisowski sued the police force a year later. At that time, Cisowski’s lawyer said punitive damages would be in the millions. But the financial settlement from the RCMP for Cisowski announced Thursday is confidential.
• BritishMuseum: Ashurbanipal Library Phase 1
• Wiki: Great libraries of the ancient world
• Wiki: Enûma Eli
• Wiki: Adapa
• Wiki: Epic of Gilgamesh
• Wiki: Paul-Émile Botta
• Wiki: Library of Ashurbanipal
• Wiki: Austen Henry Layard
• 2010/04/01: CBC: RCMP apologizes to Dziekanski's mother
  The RCMP has formally apologized and offered a financial settlement to compensate the mother of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who died at the Vancouver airport after RCMP officers used a Taser to subdue him. The RCMP deputy commissioner for the Pacific region, Gary Bass, gave the apology at a news conference Thursday morning attended by Zofia Cisowski, Dziekanski's mother. Details of the financial settlement are being kept confidential.
• 2010/03/27: DerSpiegel: Sex in the Service of Aphrodite -- Did Prostitution Really Exist in the Temples of Antiquity?
  "Holy harlots" in Jerusalem, temple sex in the service of Aphrodite? Many ancient authors describe sacred prostitution in drastic terms. Are the accounts nothing but legends? Historians are searching for the kernel of truth behind the reports.
• 2010/03/26: CBC: Nunavut's 1st traffic light comes to Cambridge Bay
• 2010/03/26: PhysOrg: World's first electronic underpants created Down Under
  An Australian company on Friday announced the rollout of what it said were the world's first electronic underpants, saying its product was able to send text messages if the wearer became incontinent.
• 2010/03/25: AlterNet: Are You Afraid to Plan for Your Own Death?
• 2010/03/25: EarthTimes: Miracle baby elephant [Mr Shuffles] gets Miracle for a name
• 2010/03/23: Gadgetopolis: The Death Watch for Hard Disk Drive Technology Begins Now (Finally!)
• 2010/03/23: Eureka: How did gambling become legitimate?
• 2010/03/22: NewInt:TEB: Hate has no place in the house of God
• 2010/03/22: ScienceInsider: New Report Explains 'Why So Few' Women in Science
• 2010/03/20: TomsHW: 5 Reasons Tablets Suck And You Won't Buy One
• 2010/03/20: BBC: Herman Van Rompuy and the love of haiku
• 2010/03/19: G&M: Senior Mountie backs federal long-gun registry, rebuffing political boss
  Program makes Canadians safer, Bill Sweeney tells Commons; Vic Toews calls it a waste
• 2010/03/15: SMH: Mr Shuffles takes the world in his stride
• 2010/03/18: BBC: Row over 'torture' on French TV
  A disturbing French TV documentary has tried to demonstrate how well-meaning people can be manipulated into becoming torturers or even executioners. The hugely controversial Game of Death was broadcast in prime-time on a major terrestrial channel, France 2, on Wednesday.
• 2010/03/17: CBC: Reality TV lures players into sadistic game
  A French TV documentary to be aired Wednesday records people involved in what they thought was a game show in which they are asked to administer electric shocks to rival contestants. The fake game show, called Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death), features a glamorous hostess and a studio audience who eggs contestants on with cries of "punishment." The documentary showed that 82 per cent of participants were willing to pull the levers that inflicted a shock on their opponents. The experiment was modelled on a famous study conducted at Yale University in the 1960s which used similar methods to examine how obedient citizens could be driven to take part in mass murder. In that study by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, 62 per cent of participants agreed to administer a shock when instructed by a person in position of authority. Makers of the program that will air on France 2 TV on Wednesday evening say they wanted to show how reality television can push people to ever more outrageous limits.
• 2010/03/18: BBC: Hobbit filming to begin in July
  Shooting of the long-awaited film version of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit is set to begin in New Zealand in July. Actor Sir Ian McKellen, who reprises his Lord of the Rings role as Gandalf the Grey, revealed casting is taking place in LA, London and New York. Mexican-born film-maker Guillermo del Toro will direct the film and its proposed sequel. The films will be prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Oscar winner Peter Jackson. Jackson - together with his wife Fran Walsh - will produce the films, to be made back-to-back in New Zealand.
• 2010/03/17: Eureka: Spider silk reveals a paradox of super-strength -- Research finds weakest chemical bonds produce materials stronger than steel
• 2010/03/15: NewScientist: [Electronics 'missing link'] Memristor brings neural computing closer
• 2010/03/15: CanWest: Privacy rules hinder investigation of rogue scientists -- Government wants stiffer rules for publically funded researchers
  The federal government has been pushing Canada's largest research council to release the names of scientists who fudge research results, plagiarize reports or misspend grant money, according to federal documents obtained by Canwest News Service. But the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council has yet to change its rules, despite pointed recommendations from its political masters. The council, which distributes $1 billion in federal funding every year to thousands of researchers across the country, says federal privacy laws prevent it from identifying scientists involved in misconduct, or their universities.
• 2010/03/13: AlterNet: Chatroulette: Naked Chicks, Boys Seeking Boobs and Connections Across the Globe
• 2010/03/12: NewScientist: Pi day: Five tasty facts about the famous ratio
• 2010/03/11: Guardian(UK): Scientologists try to block 'intolerant' German feature film
  Television network denies claims that Until Nothing Remains depicts group as totalitarian and unethical
• 2010/03/10: PhysOrg: Could Porn Be Good For Society?
  The arguments against pornography are many, ranging from insistence that porn degrades women and is morally reprehensible to the assertion that pornography viewing is the cause of sex crimes. However, over the years, there have been numerous studies done on this subject. And, reports The Scientist, it appears that there are links between sex crimes and pornography. Just not the sort of links many of us might have expected. Instead of causing sex crimes, porn might actually contribute to reducing their incidence.
• 2010/03/10: EarthTimes: Jumbo error: Sydney's baby elephant not dead after all
• 2009/11/09: PhilosophyPress: My philosophy: Alan Sokal -- Julian Baggini meets the man who dropped a bomb on postmodernism
• 2010/01/31: QBNets: Why String Theorists Should Switch Fields to Quantum Computing
• 2010/03/09: Eureka: Divine intervention? New research looks at beliefs about God's influence in everyday life
• 2010/03/06: AlterNet: Too Much Sex? No Such Thing -- Why Sex Addiction Is Total B.S.
• 2010/03/05: PhysOrg: Ancient Texts Present Mayans As Literary Geniuses
  Literary critics, cultural scholars and aficionados of the Mayans, the only fully literate people of the pre-Columbian Americas, have lined up to call the first fully illustrated survey of two millennia of Mayan texts assembled by award-winning scholar Dennis Tedlock, "stunning," "astounding," "groundbreaking" and "literally breathtaking." The book is "2000 Years of Mayan Literature," published in January by the University of California Press. Its author, a SUNY Distinguished Professor, James McNulty Chair in English and Research Professor in Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, has long been recognized as one of the world's principle experts in Mayan culture and literature.
• 2010/03/03: SciDaily: Artificial Bee Silk a Big Step Closer to Reality
  CSIRO scientist Dr Tara Sutherland and her team have achieved another important milestone in the international quest to artificially produce insect silk. They have hand-drawn fine threads of honeybee silk from a 'soup' of silk proteins that they had produced transgenically.
• 2010/02/26: UCSD: Blue Ribbon Task Force Report: Preserving Our Digital Knowledge Base Must be a Public Priority
• 2010/03/02: NewScientist: Finding the facts that online news leaves out
• 2010/03/01: IaState: ISU study proves conclusively that violent video game play makes more aggressive kids
• 2010/02/28: Guardian(UK): Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don't use a computer at all"
• 2010/02/26: CBC: Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes
• 2010/02/25: RawStory: 'Zombies' have free speech rights too, US court rules
• 2010/02/24: RawStory: Police escort student out of class after refusal to recite Pledge of Allegiance
• 2010/02/24: CBC: Italian court convicts Google execs over video
  An Italian court has convicted three current and former Google executives of violating privacy laws in a case the company calls a serious threat to freedom on the web. The case involves a video posted to Google Video in 2006 showing teenage bullies in Turin abusing a disabled boy. The judge said the three executives violated privacy laws because Google did not remove the video quickly enough. Judge Oscar Magi on Wednesday absolved the three of defamation but gave them a suspended six-month sentence for violating the youth's privacy. He acquitted a fourth defendant altogether. Google said it would "vigorously" appeal the decision.
• 2009/12/03: CanWest: Swifter, higher, stronger -- safer? 100,000 free condoms for Vancouver Olympic athletes, officials
• Wiki: Theory of multiple intelligences
• 2010/02/18: DerSpiegel: Punished for Love -- Man Indicted for Breaking Into Prison
• 2010/02/19: BBC: Final Canadian WWI veteran [John Babcock] dies
  The last Canadian veteran of World War I has died at the age of 109.
• 2010/02/18: BBC: A website called PleaseRobMe claims to reveal the location of empty homes based on what people post online
• 2010/02/18: AlterNet: Shocking Report Reveals Epidemic of Sexual Abuse in Juvenile Prisons
• 2010/02/17: DigiJo: Pregnant woman jailed for having thought about abortion
• 2010/02/16: Onion: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion
• 2010/02/15: BBC: A study of schoolchildren has found that most of those questioned thought violence towards women was acceptable if there was a reason behind it
• 2010/02/13: DerSpiegel: Back to the Future in Berlin -- Restored 'Metropolis' Comes Home
  After 83 years, Fritz Lang's Sci-Fi classic "Metropolis" has returned to Berlin in its full glory. On Friday night 2,000 fans braved the snowy weather to watch the restored classic at the Brandenburg Gate. It took restorers a year to repair the damage to the newly discovered scenes. They say the original film was much more complex and interesting than just a sci-fi cult classic.
• 2010/02/11: MTV: Roland Emmerich Plans [Isaac Asimov's] 'Foundation' [trilogy] As 3-D Motion-Capture Epic
• 2010/02/11: SciDaily: Millimeter-Scale, Energy-Harvesting Sensor System Can Operate Nearly Perpetually
• 2010/02/10: SciDaily: Battery-Less Radios Developed
  At the International Solid State Circuit Conference, imec and Holst Centre report a 2.4GHz/915MHz wake-up receiver which consumes only 51µW power. This record low power achievement opens the door to battery-less or energy-harvesting based radios for a wide range of applications including long-range RFID and wireless sensor nodes for logistics, smart buildings, healthcare etc.
• 2010/02/10: DerSpiegel: The Failed War on Drugs in Latin America -- Could Decriminalization Be the Answer?
  The massacre in Ciudad Juarez at the end of January made it clear that Mexico is losing the war on drugs. Narcotics-related violence is on the rise in other Latin American cities as well. An increasing number of voices are demanding that drugs be decriminalized.
• 2010/02/10: BBC: Hacktivists turn to web attacks -- Political activists are increasingly using net attacks as a means of protest, reveals a [Prolexic] report
• 2010/02/08: Blevkog: I Swear, Sometimes These Things Just Write Themselves.
• 2010/02/04: NBF: IBM Makes Graphene at 30 GHz and Potential of 100 Ghz to 1 Terahertz Graphene
• 2010/02/05: PhysOrg: Sun sets on Silicon Valley's Sun Microsystems
• 2010/02/04: BBC: Ancient Indian language dies out
  The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC. Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end. She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage. Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old. The islands are often called an "anthropologist's dream" and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.
• 2010/02/04: CBC: Skype on iPhone may signal end of voice plans
  Analysts believe it's only a matter of time before cellphone companies start offering data-only options for smartphones such as the iPhone.Analysts believe it's only a matter of time before cellphone companies start offering data-only options for smartphones such as the iPhone. The death of cellphone voice plans may be on the horizon as internet calling service Skype will soon be available over iPhone cellular connections. David Ponsford, head of Skype's iPhone team, said in a video released on Wednesday that the company was working on a calling service that will deliver "CD-quality sound" on the iPhone. Users will be able to make free Skype-to-Skype calls or use the paid SkypeOut service that lets them phone landlines and mobiles at significantly cheaper rates. SkypeOut offers unlimited calling within North America, for example, for about $40 a year. Skype also offers phone numbers in 25 countries, not including Canada, which allows users to accept incoming calls. For about $60 a year, the user can sign up for an internet-based phone number that then forwards incoming calls to them via Skype. Skype will release the app globally "real soon," Ponsford said, once it perfects a call quality indicator that will tell the user what sort of connection they can expect to get over their 3G connection.
• 2010/02/03: TreeHugger: Potentially Amazing Technology: Is Spray-On Liquid Glass About to Make Everything Greener?
• 2010/02/02: RawStory: Obama grows the drug war, with enforcement a clear priority
• 2010/02/02: AlterNet: North Carolina Politicians Seek to Unseat Councilman Because He's an Atheist
• 2010/01/29: LaughingSquid: San Francisco’s Answer to Westboro Baptist Church
• 2010/01/29: Asahi: Warlord robot has all the right moves
• 2010/01/29: CBC: Winnipeg police caught on video beating man -- Cody Bousquet gets 11 months for dangerous driving, assaulting officer
• 2010/01/29: CBC: New morning-after pill works for up to 5 days
• 2010/01/29: AlterNet: People's Historian and Progressive Hero Howard Zinn Dies
• 2010/01/26: Onion: Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further
  Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had. "Look, we've tried, we really have, but it's simply not possible to set the bar any lower," said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he "could not in good conscience" make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile.
• Wiki: B2FH
• 2010/01/27: CBC: Privacy commission probing Facebook again
• 2010/01/27: FSF: iPad is iBad for freedom
  With new tablet device, Apple's Steve Jobs pushes unprecedented extension of DRM to a new class of general purpose computers
• 2010/01/26: PhysOrg: Engineered metamaterials enable remarkably small antennas
• 2010/01/27: PhysOrg: Canada privacy office launches new Facebook probe
  Canada's privacy commissioner is once again probing Facebook over the online social network's privacy policies.
• 2010/01/26: BBC: EU to monitor anti-piracy trial
  A human rights watchdog has asked the European Commission to assess the legality of software being used to analyse file-sharing in the UK. The software in question is called CView and will be used by ISP Virgin Media to identify legal versus illegal traffic on its network. The EC has said it will monitor the use of the software, following a complaint from Privacy International. Virgin Media countered that the software posed no risk to privacy. Privacy International has concerns about the software, designed by monitoring firm Detica. It utilises so-called deep packet inspection, which means that it can identify actual file-names, making it possible to accurately find out what content is legal and what is not. According to Alexander Hanff, head of ethical networks at Privacy International, use of such software is in breach of current UK law.
• 2010/01/27: CBC: Drivers feel new police siren before they see it
• EFF: Panopticlick
• EFF: Self-Defense
• 2010/01/27: EFF: A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy
• 2010/01/27: EFF: Help EFF Research Web Browser Tracking
• 2010/01/26: PhysOrg: Going For Exawatts: Building the most powerful laser in the world
• 2010/01/26: NYObserver: After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site
  In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect? So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com? The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.
• 2010/01/21: NBF: High Energy Microwave Cannon for Disabling Cars and Improvised Explosive Devices Has been Field Tested
• Wiki: Corporate personhood debate
• 2010/01/23: Reuters:FS: More NYT paywall math
• Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator
• 2010/01/22: CBC: Police report traces violent trajectory of Winnipeg gang
  African Mafia has splintered, is moving into Alta., says document submitted in court
• 2010/01/21: Guardian(UK): Government data from around the world. Welcome to our single gateway
• data.gov.uk
• 2010/01/21: BBC: Web founder Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his latest venture [[website, data.gov.uk] for the UK government, which offers the public better access to official data
• 2010/01/19: PhysOrg: Explained: The [Claude] Shannon limit
• 2010/01/11: CaliforniaWatch: The rising cost of education: A history of UC fees
• 2010/01/14: PhysOrg: Study: 1 in 4 female teens involved in violence
  About one in four female teens is involved in some sort of violent behavior at school or at work, according to a government report. A survey of more than 33,000 girls and women aged 12 to 17 found that 26.7 percent had been involved in a serious fight at school or work, a group-against-group fight or had attacked someone with the intent to harm the person in the previous year, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported Thursday.
• 2010/01/12: ProPublica: In Mass., Recording an Arrest May Get You Arrested
• 2010/01/13: NewScientist: Five emotions you never knew you had
  Can you name the six basic emotions? Take a straw poll of your friends and we guarantee that you will find no consensus. Yet psychologists are unequivocal: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. These are the Big Six, quite literally, the in-your-face emotions - the ones that everyone the world over exhibits with the same dramatic and characteristic facial expressions. They have been the subjects of intense research for over half a century, not least because of the role they have played in our survival as a species.
• 2010/01/12: AlterNet: 4-Year-Old Boy Suspended From School for Months Because His Hair Is 'Too Long'
• 2010/01/09: NBF: Memristor, Memcapacitor and Meminductor Research Update
• 2010/01/09: BRitholtz: Flight 1549 3D Reconstruction, Hudson River Ditching Jan 15, 2009
• 2010/01/05: TreeHugger: Super Smooth: Magnetic Bearings Glide Closer to the Mainstream
• 2010/01/05: Rabble:CN: UBC student leaders file complaint with UN against Canadian government; impeachment threats follow
• 2010/01/04: CBC: Social workers bound for High Arctic communities
• 2010/01/04: BBC: Bono net policing idea draws fire
  Bono, frontman of rock band U2, has warned the film industry not to make the same mistakes with file-sharing that have dogged the music industry. Writing for the New York Times, Bono claimed internet service providers were "reverse Robin Hoods" benefiting from the music industry's lost profits. He hinted that China's efforts prove that tracking net content is possible. The editorial drew sharp criticism, both on its economic merits and for the suggestion of net content policing.
• 2010/01/03: CBC: Boy calls dog who fought off cougar his 'guardian'
  A boy from Boston Bar, B.C., whose golden retriever saved him from a charging cougar, says he wouldn't be alive if his dog hadn't stepped in. Austin Forman, 11, was gathering firewood in his backyard at about 5 p.m. Saturday when his dog, Angel, started acting strangely. Angel started following him to and from the woodshed, Austin said, almost as though she was checking to make sure he was OK. Suddenly, Angel ran toward Austin and jumped over a lawn mower -- right into the path of a charging cougar.
• 2009/12/31: PhysOrg: AT&T wants out of landline business
  AT&T said the high costs of maintaining the legacy phone network were "diverting valuable resources" US telecom giant AT&T has asked US regulatory authorities to waive a requirement that it and other carriers maintain costly landline networks.
• 2009/12/31: CBC: Apple wins ruling on alleged iPod hearing loss
• 2009/12/31: SlashDot: AT&T Readying For the End of Analog Landlines
• 2009/12/29: LA Times: California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design
• 2009/12/28: TreeHugger: Solar Powered Eyes - Powering Electronic Contact Lenses and Retina with Sunlight
• 2009/12/22: CBC: New libel defence allowed: Supreme Court -- 2 publications fighting $1.5M, $100K libel awards
  The Supreme Court of Canada has opened the door for journalists to use the defence of "responsible communication" against libel suits. Canada's highest court ruled Tuesday in two decisions that publishers can escape liability if they can show that they tried to verify the facts and the published material is a matter of public interest.
• 2009/12/21: AlterNet: 10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who've Been Screwing You
• 2009/12/18: PhysOrg: Swiss and Google reach privacy accord pending verdict
• 2009/12/17: BuckDog: Canadian Judge Speaks Bluntly About 'Insanity' Of Canada's Pot Laws
  "Nobody has been deterred. People have been going to jail for drug offences for - for a couple of generations now and the drug - the drug plague is worse than it ever was.... If something doesn't work, do I try doing it again and again to see if it does work? Isn't that the definition of insanity?" -Justice Elliot Allen (Ontario Judge)
• 2009/12/16: BBC: Cheques to be phased out in 2018
  Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the body that oversees payments strategy has said. The board of the UK Payments Council has set the date in a bid to encourage the advance of other forms of payment. The first cheque was written 350 years ago and the decision will be greeted with disappointment by some small businesses and consumers. The Council said there should be "no scenario" for using cheques by 2018. The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in "terminal decline". However, there will be annual checks on the progress of other payments systems and a final review of the decision will be held in 2016.
• 2009/12/16: AlterNet: Former Police Chief Norm Stamper: 'Let's Not Stop at Marijuana Legalization'
• 2009/12/15: BBC: Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to websites containing criminal content
• 2009/12/15: AlterNet: Huge Signature Gathering Success Sends Pot Legalization to Ballot
• 2009/12/12: CBC: Sci-fi writer arrested at U.S. border
• 2009/12/13: TStar: War of words ends in author's arrrest at border
• 2009/12/10: EFF: Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy
• 2009/12/09: SoS: My Reaction to Eric Schmidt
• 2009/12/11: CBC: Open-access internet rules take hits
  The federal government has taken a pair of shots at rules that give smaller internet service providers regulated access to the networks of big phone companies such as Bell and Telus. In the first of two internet-related decisions quietly released on Friday, the government rejected an earlier order by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that would have given smaller ISPs the right to sell the same speeds as Bell and Telus. The CRTC's "matching speeds" decision, made in December last year, would have required the large companies to offer the same speed services they themselves sell to smaller regional ISPs, such as Teksavvy or Execulink, at reasonable rates. These smaller ISPs rent portions of the big companies' networks to provide their own services. They are currently limited to selling internet speeds up to around five megabits per second, while Bell and Telus offer up to 15 or 16 megabits.
• Wiki: Constellation program
• Tom Lehrer
• 2009/12/11: CBC: RCMP had no grounds to use Taser on N.W.T. girl: report -- Police force also accused of protecting officer
  An RCMP officer in Inuvik, N.W.T., was not justified in jolting a teenage girl with a Taser in 2007, a federal police watchdog agency has concluded. Furthermore, the Inuvik RCMP detachment appears to have tried to cover up what happened, according to a final report released Friday by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.
• 2009/12/11: AlterNet: Zinn's 'People's History' Masterwork Hits the History Channel
• 2009/12/09: G&M: Left in the dark
  By giving out false information on the fatal tasering of the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, and refusing to correct the errors for more than a year, the RCMP persisted in the destruction of the public's trust in their national police force. Two years earlier, a Mountie spokesman said, "The public doesn't have a right know anything," after a British Columbia officer shot and killed a 22-year-old man in unusual circumstances. The RCMP shows by its actions it still seems to believe the public is best left in the dark.
• 2009/12/09: Guardian(UK): Laid bare: the sex life of the ancient Greeks in all its physical glory
• 2009/12/09: Guardian(UK): The 100 essential websites
• 2009/12/07: BoingBoing: Major record labels rip off 300,000 songs for compilation CDs, may owe $60 billion in damages
• 2009/12/08: CBC: Public Complaints Commission Report slams RCMP in [Dziekanski] airport Taser death
  RCMP officers at Vancouver airport discharged a Taser five times while restraining Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski on Oct. 14, 2007. RCMP officers at Vancouver airport discharged a Taser five times while restraining Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski on Oct. 14, 2007. (Paul Pritchard)A damning report on the conduct of RCMP involved in the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport was released on Tuesday by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. In the strongly worded report, Paul Kennedy, chair of the commission, made 23 findings and 16 recommendations that were highly critical of both the actions of the four officers and the followup investigation by the RCMP. Dziekanski died at Vancouver's airport in October 2007 minutes after he was stunned repeatedly with a Taser by the RCMP, who were responding to a disturbance call in the airport arrivals lounge.
• 2009/12/06: CBC: Ceremony marks Great Halifax Explosion
• 2009/12/08: AlterNet: Why Fake Optimism Is the Worst Way to Deal with Life's Problems
• 2009/12/03: KEI: Ambassador Kirk: People would be "walking away from the table" if the ACTA text is made public
• 2009/12/07: SlashDot: Ambassador [Ron Kirk] Claims ACTA Secrecy Necessary
• 2009/12/04: AlterNet: Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence?
• 2009/12/03: BBC: Intel unveils 48-core cloud chip
• 2009/12/02: CBC: Google to limit free access to some news content
• 2009/12/01: BBC: Potter actors look to the future -- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out on DVD on 7 December
• 2009/12/01: BCLocalNews: Newly unionized Sunridge staff fired
  Uncertainty is swirling around the future of Cowichan’s largest private care facility amidst reports most of its staff has been fired. Employees at Duncan’s Sunridge seniors complex were told this afternoon about 200 will be let go as of March 31, a Health Employees Union official told the News Leader Pictorial. "It’s a mass firing," Margi Blamey said. Her report comes on the heels of Saturday’s HEU certification vote when some 70 per cent of the facility’s employees voted to join the union.
• 2009/12/01: Eureka: Are the effects of pornography negligible? Universite de Montreal professor refutes demonization of pornography
• Wiki: Methanogen
• Wiki: Hans Moravec
• 2009/11/23: ORTS: Top 50 Free Open Courseware Classes for Aspiring Scientists
• 2009/11/27: SeattlePI: (cartoon - Horsey) Man and religion, a synopsis
• 2009/11/27: NewScientist: Networked surveillance minicopters can't be kept down
• 2009/11/26: PhysOrg: Internet activists push for greater democracy
• 2009/11/25: AlterNet: Black Teacher May Get 15 Years in Prison for Cutting in Line at Wal-Mart
• 2009/11/26: Guardian(UK): How science is shackled by intellectual property
  Ownership rights pose a real danger to scientific progress for the public good
• 2009/11/24: CBC: Regina man survives 3-day ordeal on B.C. island
  A Regina man considers himself lucky to be alive after being alone for three days on a small B.C. island with his bones broken and nothing to eat or drink.
  [...]
  At one point, he couldn't feel his hands anymore, he said. But he kept going.
  "You know, the second you give in and let yourself panic or whatever, you're as good as done. You're useless to yourself. So you keep pulling and fall where you may... Hopefully you get yourself a few feet closer."
• 2009/11/23: SciNews: First programmable quantum computer created -- Ultracold beryllium ions tackle 160 randomly chosen programs
• 2009/11/23: AlterNet: The War on Weed: Marijuana Is Basically Harmless -- The Monumentally Stupid Drug War Is Not
• 2009/11/22: CrTimber: A vaguely passive-aggressive post on commenters
• Wiki: Lichen
• 2009/11/20: NBF: Intel Predicts Brain waves will replace keyboard and mouse, dial phones and change TV channels by 2020
• 2009/11/20: CBC: Billy Bragg, NDP push for new law on music downloads
• 2009/11/20: AlterNet: What if People Actually Treated Religion as Just a Metaphor (Like Trekkies and Secular Jews)?
• 2009/03/03: ThoughtExperiments: Pundits Are Wrong About Everything
• 2009/11/16: CCurrents: ACTA: Death Of Internet As We Know It
• 2009/11/18: BBC: Tiny chip could diagnose disease
  Researchers have demonstrated a tiny chip based on silicon that could be used to diagnose dozens of diseases. A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light.
• 2009/11/18: CBC: Spain makes broadband a universal right
• 2009/11/18: ABC(Au): Scientology a 'criminal organisation'
  The Church of Scientology says allegations made in Federal Parliament by Independent Senator Nick Xenophon are an abuse of parliamentary privilege. Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment and forced abortion. He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status.
• 2009/11/16: CWorld: Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018 -- The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems
• 2009/11/17: NBF: 100 Million Core Exaflop Supercomputers Coming by 2018
• 2009/11/16: NYT: About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds
• Wikileaks:Call to Arms
• 2009/11/13: PhysOrg: Thoughtful words help couples stay fighting fit
  Couples who bring thoughtful words to a fight release lower amounts of stress-related proteins, suggesting that rational communication between partners can ease the impact of marital conflict on the immune system.
• 2009/11/10: Tyee: Canada's Most Secret Treaty [ACTA] Why don't they want us to know about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?
• 2009/11/10: Tyee: If Long Gun Registry Is So Dumb, Why Do Police Like It?
• 2009/11/11: FuturePundit: Telomere Genes Linked To Longer Life
• 2009/11/14: AlterNet: Single Payer Now! by Sen. Bernie Sanders
• 2009/11/14: TStar: Watchdog: Jail system fails native prisoners -- Ottawa urged to appoint new corrections official
  Canada's prison watchdog is sounding the alarm over the plight of aboriginal prisoners, warning that without urgent action the situation will become a crisis. Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, released a progress report Friday on aboriginal people in the federal corrections system. It states bluntly the federal government has failed to live up to many of its commitments on improving the system.
• 2009/11/13: NewScientist: Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics
• 2009/11/13: CBC: Swiss privacy watchdog to sue Google Street View
• 2009/11/13: AlterNet: The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful
  [...]
  I'm realizing that everything I've ever written about religion's harm boils down to one thing.
  It's this: Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.
  It therefore has no reality check.
  And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality ... and extreme, grotesque immorality.
• 2009/11/12: SlashDot: MPAA Shuts Down Town's Municipal WiFi Over 1 Download
• 2009/11/12: SlashDot: MPAA Asks Again For Control Of TV Analog Ports
• 2009/11/12: SciDaily: New Evidence That Dark Chocolate Helps Ease Emotional Stress
  The "chocolate cure" for emotional stress is getting new support from a clinical trial published online in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. It found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in the bodies of people feeling highly stressed. Everyone's favorite treat also partially corrected other stress-related biochemical imbalances.
• 2009/11/10: Guardian(UK): For whom the net tolls
  Rupert Murdoch wants to remake the web as a toll both, with him in the collector's seat, but the net won't shift to his will
• 2009/11/11: NatureTGB: [3] More science advisors quit over Nutt-gate
• 2009/11/11: G&M: Ottawa moves to remodel Canada's image
  Immigration Minister will unveil a new citizenship guide that puts greater emphasis on military history this week The Conservative government will redefine what it means to be Canadian this week by introducing a new guide to citizenship, a rare and significant attempt to reshape the national image. The new document, which will be the citizenship study guide for the 250,000 immigrants who arrive in Canada each year, instantly becomes one of the country's most widely read and potentially influential pieces of writing. It will replace a document created by the Liberals in 1997 that the Conservatives criticized for its anemic presentation of Canadian history and identity. No longer will new Canadians be told that Canada is strictly a nation of peacekeepers, for example. The new guide places a much greater emphasis on Canada's military history, from the Great War to the present day. It also tackles other issues of historical significance, from Confederation to Quebec's separatist movement, that were barely mentioned by its predecessor.
• 2009/11/09: NewScientist: Stop selling out science to commerce
• 2009/11/09: NakedCapitalism: Drug Marketing Continues to be Criminal
• 2009/11/07: EconoSpeak: Antidepressants and Violence
• 2009/11/06: NatureTGB: Home Secretary under fire over ‘Nutt-gate’
• 2009/11/05: ScienceInsider: U.K. Science Advisers Want R-E-S-P-E-C-T [Nutt-gate]
• 2009/11/06: PhysOrg: Google's desire to scan old books has critics casting it as Goliath
  Google's ambitious plan to scan millions of old, out-of-print books, many of them forgotten in musty university libraries, has turned into one of the biggest controversies in the young company's history.
• 2009/11/03: EFF: Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA
• 2009/11/06: MGeist: [link to 107k pdf] The Leaked ACTA Document
• 2009/11/06: BBC: Minister 'appalled' by Nutt exit
  A minister has said the removal of the government's chief drugs adviser in a row over cannabis was a "big mistake". In a leaked e-mail published by The Sun, science minister Lord Drayson said he had been "pretty appalled" by the decision to sack Professor David Nutt. Home Secretary Alan Johnson said Prof Nutt "crossed the line" in his role by campaigning against government policy. And Gordon Brown defended his removal, saying the government could not afford to send "mixed messages" on drug use. Prof Nutt was controversially axed from his unpaid role as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after using a lecture to say that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. He also said it had been upgraded from class C to class B - against the council's advice - for political reasons.
• 2009/11/06: CBC: Saskatchewan prosecutor wins Supreme Court appeal
  A Saskatchewan Crown prosecutor did not maliciously prosecute people who were accused of sexually assaulting children two decades ago, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled. Overturning a ruling by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal on Friday, the Supreme Court said the lower court erred when it found senior Crown prosecutor Matt Miazga acted out of malice. "It is my view that there is no evidence to support a finding of malice or improper purpose," Justice Louise Charron wrote in the 27-page decision. Six other Supreme Court judges concurred in the unanimous decision. Miazga is a senior Crown prosecutor in Saskatchewan's Ministry of Justice who prosecuted sexual assault charges against several adults more than a decade ago. The original criminal case was a media sensation in Saskatchewan as allegations emerged about satanic rituals and dead babies in secret rural locations. In 1991, police and prosecutors decided to arrest 16 people and press more than 70 charges of sexual assault. Among those charged were biological parents, foster parents and extended family. As the criminal cases worked through the court system, many charges were stayed or dismissed after a preliminary hearing. Ultimately, only a few convictions were secured. The three children later recanted their stories.
• 2009/11/06: CanWest: New copyright law [ACTA] could cut families off Net for year
  Canadian officials in secret talks; Internet service providers would police illegal downloading of copy-protected material Canadian officials are taking part in negotiations for a top-secret copyright treaty that could see families barred from the Internet for a year if someone in the household is suspected of illegal downloads. Under the worldwide rules of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Internet service providers such as Bell and Rogers in Canada would be required to become copyright police and filter out pirated material from their networks, hand over the identities of customers believed to be infringing copyrights and restrict the use of identity-blocking software. ACTA would employ a three-strikes policy. People believed to be regularly downloading copyright-protected material, such as movie and music files, could have their Internet connection severed for up to 12 months and forced to pay a fine.
• 2009/11/06: CanWest: An appalling betrayal
  What a bitter spectacle: MPs from all parties, except the Bloc Québécois, caving to a decades-long campaign by disgruntled gun owners, to U.S.-inspired attack advertising in targeted ridings and to self-interest to issue a death warrant to the long-gun registry. The symbolism could hardly be more poignant -- well, yes, it could be. Our parliamentarians missed the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre, which inspired the creation of the registry, by a month.
• 2009/11/05: BBC: Smart spectacles aid translation -- Spectacles that can provide subtitles have been created by hi-tech firm NEC.
• 2009/11/05: CBC: Internet users not isolated, survey suggests
• 2009/11/05: CBC: RCMP defend Taser use on girl, 16 -- Force used was 'justified, and necessary' to subdue teenager
  A Selkirk, Man., RCMP officer denies any wrongdoing in the case of a teenage girl who says she was injured with a Taser while in police custody two years ago. The incident, and a resulting lawsuit by the girl against the RCMP, the City of Selkirk, the province and the federal justice minister, have raised concerns about the use of Tasers by police on minors. In a statement of defence obtained by CBC News on Wednesday, Const. Roger Gavel asks Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench to throw out the lawsuit, saying the use of the stun gun on the girl was legitimate. "The actions of the RCMP members -- were justified, and necessary, in the circumstances," the documents said. Gavel's defence -- written by a lawyer from the federal Department of Justice -- was filed on Oct. 14. The girl, who was 16 when taken to the Selkirk RCMP detachment on Nov. 3, 2007, is seeking an unspecified amount of financial damages for physical and emotional trauma.
• 2009/11/04: NatureTGB: Nutt-gate rolls on
• 2009/11/04: NewScientist: David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs
• 2009/11/04: SlashDot: Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart
• 2009/11/03: BBC: Science chief backs cannabis view
  The UK government's chief science adviser has told BBC News that he supports the former chief drugs adviser's scientific view on cannabis. Professor John Beddington, the UK's chief scientist, would not be drawn on whether the Home Secretary was wrong to sack Professor David Nutt. David Nutt was chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He was fired after using a lecture to say cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. Asked whether he agreed with Professor Nutt's view that cannabis was less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol, Professor Beddington replied: "I think the scientific evidence is absolutely clear cut. I would agree with it."
• 2009/10/30: NatureTGB: Government sacks independent drugs advisor
• 2009/10/30: BBC: Cannabis row drugs adviser sacked
  The UK's chief drugs adviser has been sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after criticising government policies. Professor David Nutt, head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, criticised the decision to reclassify cannabis to Class B from C. He accused ministers of devaluing and distorting evidence and said drugs classification was being politicised. The home secretary said he had "lost confidence" in his advice and asked him to step down. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is the UK's official drugs advisory body. Following his sacking, Prof Nutt told the BBC he stood by his claim that cannabis should not be a Class B drug, based on its effects. He described his sacking as a "serious challenge to the value of science in relation to the government".
• 2009/10/29: CBC: CRTC denies internet throttling appeal
  Bell Canada says it needs to throttle peer-to-peer applications because of congestion on its network.Bell Canada says it needs to throttle peer-to-peer applications because of congestion on its network. The CRTC has denied an appeal from a group of internet providers to force Bell Canada to stop its internet traffic management, otherwise known as throttling. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Thursday threw out a "review and vary" request from the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, a group of smaller companies that rents portions of Bell's network, on a decision the regulator made last year. In its previous decision, the CRTC found that Bell was within its right to extend the throttling -- which it applies to customers using peer-to-peer software -- to its wholesale companies. Bell said it needed to throttle because peer-to-peer traffic was causing congestion on its network. The smaller ISPs appealed to the CRTC and said Bell had not proven that congestion. The CRTC's decision on Thursday reaffirmed its earlier order.
• 2009/10/29: NatureTGB: UK government vs its own drugs advisor, Part II
  The head of the UK government’s independent drug advice group looks set for another row with politicians who continue to ignore researchers’ advice over illegal substances. Earlier this year the UK’s Home Secretary launched an attack on David Nutt, chairman of the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and a respected academic. Nutt’s crime, in the eyes of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and other politicians, was to write an article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. His article called for a wider debate on the risks of drugs and, in passing, compared the risks of MDMA (‘ecstasy’) to horse riding. (See: Ecstasy advice is a bitter pill.) Credit to the man though, he has stuck to his guns and come back with another reasoned critique, delivered as a lecture at King’s College London. In it he reiterates his call for improving public understanding of the actual risks of drugs and again recommends a more logical classification of these. He also says the divide between illegal drugs and alcohol and tobacco is foolish.
• 2009/10/29: BBC: Celebrating 40 years of the net
• 2009/10/29: AlterNet: Pot Is More Mainstream Than Ever, So Why Is Legalization Still Taboo?
• 2009/10/28: BBC: Cannabis evidence 'was distorted'
  The row over the reclassification of cannabis has been reignited after the government's chief drug adviser accused ministers of "distorting" the evidence. Professor David Nutt, who heads the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, says it does not cause major health problems. He accused ex-home secretary Jacqui Smith, who reclassified the drug, of "devaluing" scientific research. The Home Office said these opinions "do not reflect the views of government". A spokesman said: "Prof Nutt's views are his own." He added: "The government is clear: we are determined to crack down on all illegal substances and minimise their harm to health and society as a whole." It comes after Prof Nutt used a lecture at King's College in London and briefing paper to attack what he called the "artificial" separation of alcohol and tobacco from other, illegal, drugs.
• 2009/10/28: PhysOrg: Answering that age-old lament: Where does all this dust come from?
• 2009/10/28: AlterNet: The Case for Marijuana Legalization and Regulation
• LoC: Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
• 2009/10/27: BBC: A French court has convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud, but stopped short of banning the group from operating in France
• 2009/10/26: CBC: Internet set to allow non-English addresses
  The internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names -- or addresses -- that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN -- the non-profit group that oversees domain names -- is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, email address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.
• 2009/10/25: BBC: Exposing the colour of prejudice
• Royal Dutch Shell plc .com -- News and information on Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
• 2009/10/26: Guardian(UK): 92-year-old's website leaves oil giant Shell-shocked -- How online protesters are using 'gripe site' as the focus for their complaints about big business
• 2009/10/21: TerraDaily: General Electric unveils pocket-sized ultrasound tool
  General Electric (GE) on Tuesday unveiled an ultrasound device about the size of an iPhone, saying the gadget could become "the stethoscope of the 21st century."
• Wiki: On Bullshit
• 1986: WebArchive: On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
• 2009/10/21: RawStory: Don’t fire Tasers at the chest, manufacturer warns
• 2009/10/21: BBC: An ambitious new website [data.gov.uk] that will open up government data to the public will launch in beta, or pilot, form in December
• 2009/10/21: AlterNet: Rethinking Marriage. The World Has Changed. It's Time!
• 2009/10/20: NYT:Economix: The Skyrocketing Costs of Attending College
• 2009/10/20: AlterNet: Major Blow to 'War on Drugs': Obama Tells Fed Prosecutors, Don't Waste Your Time with Medical Marijuana Arrests
• Vook
• 2009/09/: CACM: The Status of the P Versus NP Problem
• 2009/10/15: CBC: Canadian broadband blasted by Harvard study
  Canada has some of the poorest high-speed internet service in the developed world and is an example of what not to do from a policy perspective, according to a study by Harvard University. The 232-page study, commissioned by American regulators and released Wednesday evening, found that Canada rates poorly compared to peer countries when measures such as national broadband adoption, network capacity and prices are taken into account. Canada was 22nd overall out of 30 countries surveyed by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Canada ranked 16th on broadband adoption, 20th on speed and capacity, and 25th on price. Japan, Sweden and South Korea headed up Harvard's rankings, while the United States placed above Canada at 13th overall.
• 2009/10/01: FlowingData: 30 Resources to Find the Data You Need
• Wiki: Frederick Douglass
• 2009/10/14: BBC: Youth 'cannot live' without web
  A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they "couldn't live" without the internet. The report, published by online charity YouthNet, also found that four out of five young people used the web to look for advice. About one third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online.
• 2009/10/14: AlterNet: Ridiculous Study Blames Feminism for Non-Existent 'Happiness Gap' Between Men and Women
• 2009/10/13: MWatch: Drug wars: Big Pharma, Afghan, Mexican cartels -- Decriminalizing drugs can boost corporate profits and state tax revenues
• 2009/10/13: ArsTechnica: 100 years of Big Content fearing technology -- in its own words
• 2009/10/13: BRitholtz: Every Space Mission Ever Flown On One Map
• 2009/10/09: NatureTGB: Small World: Big pictures
• 2009/10/08: PhysOrg: Kraken becomes first academic machine to achieve petaflop
• 2009/10/08: BRitholtz: Microsoft’s grinning robots vs the Brotherhood of the Mac
• 2009/10/07: CBC: Google Street View goes live in Canadian cities
• 2009/10/06: PhysOrg: Islands of Life Across Space and Time
• 2009/10/04: Dominion: Arctic Fox
• 2009/10/06: CBC: Violent crime in 15-year decline: report
• 2009/10/05: CBC: Ottawa giving up millions in gun registry fees
  The Conservative government is relinquishing millions of dollars in gun registry and licensing fees at a time when the government is running record budget deficits. Documents obtained by the CBC under access to information show the federal government's decision to waive fees for people licensing their firearms will cost more than $15 million this year alone. Should the fee waiver be extended for another three years, internal forecasts predict an additional $60 million in "projected lost revenue." The Conservatives started granting amnesty to gun owners in 2006 -- neither forcing new owners to register rifles and other long guns, nor collecting fees from those who already had. It also waived fees for licence renewals. The amnesty has been extended twice more since then.
• 2009/10/05: DawgsBlawg: Fernando Manuel Alves rape case: closed courts, secret justice
• 2009/10/05: EconView: "Kuhn's Paradigm Shift" -- Daniel Little discusses Thomas Kuhn's contributions to the philosophy of science
• 2009/10/02: PhysOrg: Anthropologist Wins 'Ig Nobel' Prize for Study Of Why Pregnant Women Don't Tip Over
• 2009/10/02: APA: Where’s the Science? The Sorry State of Psychotherapy
• 2009/10/02: CBC: Cisco takes aim at the videoconferencing market -- To pay $3B US for Tandberg
• 2009/10/02: AlterNet: What Is an Orgasm, Anyway?
• 2009/10/01: CBC: Top court won't hear woman's appeal of Indian status
• 2009/10/01: AlterNet: Marijuana in America: More Mainstream Than Ever, More Arrests Than Ever
• 2009/09/30: BBC: US relaxes grip on [ICANN] the internet
  The US government has relaxed its control over how the internet is run. It has signed a four-page "affirmation of commitments" with the net regulator ICANN, giving the body autonomy for the first time. Previous agreements gave the US close oversight of ICANN - drawing criticism from other countries and groups. The new agreement comes into effect on 1 October, exactly 40 years since the first two computers were connected on the prototype of the net. "It's a beautifully historic day," Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's head, told BBC News.
• 2009/09/29: SlashDot: 100-Petabit Internet Backbone Coming Into View
• Balloon Juice Lexicon
• 2009/09/25: PhysOrg: Code breakthrough delivers safer computing
  Computer researchers at UNSW and NICTA have achieved a breakthrough in software which will deliver significant increases in security and reliability and has the potential to be a major commercialisation success. [...] Professor Gernot Heiser, the John Lions Chair in Computer Science in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and a senior principal researcher with NICTA, said for the first time a team had been able to prove with mathematical rigour that an operating-system kernel - the code at the heart of any computer or microprocessor - was 100 per cent bug-free and therefore immune to crashes and failures. [...] Verifying the kernel - known as the seL4 microkernel - involved mathematically proving the correctness of about 7,500 lines of computer code in an project taking an average of six people more than five years.
• 2009/09/23: AlterNet: Is Darwin Film "Creation" Too Controversial for American Audiences?
• 2009/09/23: AlterNet: 5 Things the Corporate Media Don't Want You to Know About Cannabis
• 2009/09/04: Telegraph(UK): 50 things that are being killed by the internet
• 2009/09/17: CSM: A haiku
• 2009/09/15: AlterNet: The Insurance Industry's Heartless Logic: Getting Beaten by Your Husband Is an Excuse to Deny Coverage
• 2009/09/14: HuffPo: When Getting Beaten By Your Husband Is A Pre-Existing Condition
• 2009/09/15: CDreams:G&M: An Inconvenient Truth for the GOP: Canada's System is Better
• Wiki: Kyriarchy
• 2009/09/16: Guardian(UK): Dirty Dancing, feminist masterpiece
  Patrick Swayze's film delivered a subversive counter-narrative to the things I was taught as a teenager about women and sex
• 2009/09/16: AlterNet: A Recipe for Disaster: School Cops Are Being Armed with 50,000-Volt Tasers
• 2009/09/14: AlterNet: The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder
• 2009/09/13: Guardian(UK): The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable
  The extreme profits to be made from narcotics -- a direct result of prohibition -- fuel war and terrorism. Legalisation is urgent
• 2009/09/11: Telegraph(UK): Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America'
  A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
• 2009/09/12: BBC: PM apology after Turing petition
  Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay.
• 2009/09/11: CBC: Tech giants share thoughts on charging for online news
  Some of the world's most prominent technology companies are offering suggestions to publishers on how they can charge readers for online news. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Google -- a company some newspapers blame for helping dig their financial hole -- responded to a request by the Newspaper Association of America for proposals on ways to easily charge for news on the web. But building the infrastructure for charging readers is only one part of the equation. The other part looks more challenging: getting publishers to make the leap and stop giving news out for free online.
• 2009/09/10: AlterNet: Over 100 Million Americans Have Smoked Marijuana -- And It's Still Illegal?
• 2009/09/12: SlashDot: Russia's New Official Holiday -- Programmer's Day
• 2009/09/10: No.10: Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" - PM [text of apology]
• 2009/09/10: SlashDot: Alan Turing Gets an Apology From Prime Minister Brown
• 2009/09/09: CBC: Fredericton gallery wins appeal over Beaverbrook collection
• 2009/09/08: BBC: Legal path clear for Hobbit movie
  A film version of JRR Tolkien's novel The Hobbit is to go ahead after its producers settled a legal row with the author's heirs.
• 2009/09/08: EarthTimes: Dying swan and faithful mate cause Dutch traffic havoc
• 2009/09/07: AlterNet: Girls Gone Wild vs. Virgins Till Marriage: Why Is Sexual Life in America So Schizoid?
• 2009/09/05: PhysOrg: Fla. boaters urged to look out for missing robot
• 2009/09/05: SciDaily: New Graphene-based, Nano-material Has Magnetic Properties
• 2009/09/05: BBC: Maths 'no better than in 1970s'
  Pupils are no better at maths now than they were 30 years ago - despite a rise in exam grades, a study suggests. Researchers asked 3,000 11 to 14-year- olds in England to sit maths exams taken by pupils in 1976, and compared their scores with the earlier results. Analysis suggested there was little difference between the two generations. But among pupils from the previous generation taking O-level maths, less than a quarter gained a C or above, compared to 55% in GCSEs last year.
• 2009/09/04: CBC: Paramedics needed in delirium cases: [NS Taser] report
  Paramedics should be summoned immediately when police are called to deal with overly agitated and aggressive people, says a Nova Scotia committee created following the death of Howard Hyde. The recommendation is contained in a report by a panel of medical and mental-health experts. The provincial Justice Department released the document on Friday. The committee says it should be up to responding officers to decide the best way to subdue someone who is extremely combative, paranoid or incoherent, but they should use the least restrictive way and call for medical help. If "overwhelming force" is used, the committee adds, the subject should be immediately taken to hospital for observation or treatment. The committee says it can't make any recommendations about the use of Tasers because there isn't enough research available.
• 2009/09/05: SlashDot: All-You-Can-Eat College For $99-a-Month
• Bad Science
• 2009/09/03: Guardian(UK): The war on drugs is immoral idiocy. We need the courage of Argentina
• 2009/09/02: FTimes: Sony plans to put 3D televisions in homes by the end of next year
• 2009/09/03: NatureN: India says no to HIV drug patents -- Patent office rejects applications from two US drug companies.
• 2009/09/03: PhysOrg: First-ever calculation performed on optical quantum computer chip
• NASA: Lunar Engineering Handbook
• 2009/09/02: PhysOrg: Two More Earth's Chandler Wobble Jumps Revealed, Last in 2005
  The Chandler Wobble is a small variation in the rotation of the Earth on its axis. It has been known for some time that the phase of the Chandler Wobble jumped by 180 degrees in the 1920s, but a new study by scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the same thing also happened in 1850 and 2005. But no one knows why.
• 2009/07/24: NewScientist: [VASIMIR] Ion engine could one day power 39-day trips to Mars
• 2009/09/02: CantonRep: Canton judge orders silence in the court -- with duct tape
• 2009/09/02: BBC: Online politics reserved for rich
  US civic engagement remains in the hands of the middle-class despite hopes that the internet would democratise political involvement. Those are the findings of a report from the Pew Internet Project. Online political engagement such as contacting officials, signing petitions and making donations is skewed towards richer and better educated Americans. The report found signs that social networks could be encouraging younger people to get involved in politics. According to the report 35% of US adults on incomes of at least $100,000 (£62,000) participate in two or more online political activities compared to just 8% of adults on incomes of less than $20,000 (£12,000).
• 2009/09/02: BBC: Jail threat for donkey bloggers
  Two bloggers from Azerbaijan are facing up to five years in jail after posting a video of a donkey giving a news conference on YouTube. Shortly after the video was released, Andnan Hajizade and Emin Milli were held on hooliganism charges following a scuffle in a restaurant.
• 2009/09/02: Spectrum: Singular Simplicity -- The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple--and wrong
• 2009/09/01: CNN: Petition seeks apology for Enigma code-breaker Turing
• 2009/09/01: NewScientist: Why AI is a dangerous dream
• 2009/09/01: PhysOrg: Carbon nanoballs as data storage units
• 2009/09/04: BBC: Two Bangladeshi newspapers have apologised after publishing an article taken from a satirical US website which claimed the Moon landings were faked
• 2009/08/31: TheOnion: Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked
• 2009/08/31: BBC: Watching the start of World War II
  There are only a handful of people left who can say they saw World War II start. A German battleship, the Schleswig-Holstein, bombards the Polish coast at Westerplatte, at the start of World War II Few survive to tell the tale of the German cruiser, Schleswig-Holstein, unleashing a barrage of 280mm and 170mm shells at a Polish fort and shattering the dawn breaking over the Westerplatte peninsula in the free city of Danzig on 1 September 1939. "I took the telescope and looked out at the channel, first right, then left and then at the cruiser which was moored in the bay," Ignacy Skowron remembered. "At that moment I saw a flash of red and the first shell hit the gate," The attack began at 0445. Simultaneously, the German Wehrmacht poured across the frontier of Poland from the west, north and south. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. The then 24-year-old Cpl Skowron was one of just 182 Polish soldiers defending the military transit depot on the Westerplatte peninsula.
• 2009/08/31: Guardian(UK): Latin America starts revolt against US 'war on drugs'
  Mexico and Argentina move towards decriminalising drugs -- In a backlash against the US 'war on drugs', Latin America turns to a more liberal policy
• 2009/07/22: DSPDesignLine: Processor architectures: Where will we be in 2020?
• 2009/08/28: EETimes: From 2009 to 2020: A history of developments in programmability
• 2009/08/31: BBC: Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing
• 2009/08/31: BRitholtz: Who Said Creative Accounting Is Dead?
• 2009/08/29: BBC: Growing marginalisation of Hungary's Roma
• Buffy Sainte-Marie
• 2009/08/27: CBC: Bill Cosby struck by N.L. rescue story
• MIT: Personas
• 2009/08/26: PhysOrg: From Terabytes to Petabytes: Computer Scientists Develop New Hybrid Database System [HadoopDB]
• 2009/08/25: BBC: The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption
• Wiki: Antikythera Mechanism
• 2009/08/25: PhysOrg: Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs
• 2009/08/24: XKCD: Tech Support Cheat Sheet
• 2009/08/23: BBC: Tens of thousands of people in Mali's capital, Bamako, have been protesting against a new law which gives women equal rights in marriage
• 2009/08/22: NewScientist: Failure to launch: abandoned NASA projects
• 2009/08/21: BBC: Handsets enhance the real world
• 2009/08/19: CM: The 50 Funniest Internet Infographics
• 2009/08/21: BBC: Video appears in paper magazines
• 2009/08/20: CBC: Video ads to make magazine debut
  Entertainment Weekly, the popular show-business publication, is blurring the line between print and television with new video ads that will appear in the magazine next month. The video-in-print ads will appear in the Sept. 18 editions of the magazine distributed in Los Angeles and New York. The ads are super-thin, about 2.7 millimetres thick, and about the size of a cellphone display. The small players will be embedded into a normal full-page ad. The chips inside the slim-line screens are powered by a battery, similar to those found in greeting cards, and can hold up to 40 minutes of video. The battery will last for up to 70 minutes and can be recharged through a mini-USB connection in the back of the player.
• 2009/08/17: Reuters: Reader's Digest plans prearranged bankruptcy
  Reader's Digest Association Inc, whose namesake magazine has been a staple of dentists' offices for generations, said on Monday it planned to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for its U.S. businesses as part of a prearranged plan with lenders to cut debt by 75 percent.
• 2009/08/17: PhysOrg: 40 percent of Twitter messages 'pointless babble': study
• Wiki: Anorthosite
• Wiki: Moon
• Wiki: Moon Rock
• 2009/08/14: AlterNet: An Evolutionary Biologist Visits the "Creationism Museum"
• 2009/08/13: CBC: Bell to charge small ISPs by usage
• 2009/08/12: CBC: Fake wedding tricks family into reunion
• 2009/08/12: NatureTGB: Victoria Crater still looking lovely
• 2009/08/12: SoS: Lockpicking and the Intenet
• 2009/08/11: G&M: Can a busy female politician give reliable evidence? A judge says no
• EyeWitness to History
• 2009/08/10: CanWest: The Tories on pot: Cheech and Chong were never this silly
  The media have had very little to say about Bill C-15, a federal Conservative bill currently working its way through Parliament. This legislation will require that everyone convicted of growing a single marijuana plant or more must spend a minimum of six months in jail. The last decade of cannabis cultivation convictions in our province clearly shows that if this mandatory minimum is implemented, there will be close to a 50-per-cent increase in the provincial jail population, just to house those who cultivate cannabis
• 2009/08/09: GreatFallsTrib: 100-year-old woman recalls state's homesteading days
• 2009/08/08: AlterNet: The Shocking Benefits of Legalizing Pot
• 2009/08/06: NYRB: The News About the Internet
• 2009/08/07: NewScientist: Could recession end cannabis ban?
• 2009/08/07: NewScientist: Expert panel urges NASA to revive futuristic think tank
• 2009/08/06: PhysOrg: Mitsubishi, Hitachi eye disc for cloud computing era
  Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. and some other organizations plan to jointly develop a next-generation optical disc that can store 25 times more data than a Blu-ray Disc, with the aim of putting the technology into practical use in 2012, industry sources said this week. The next-generation one terabyte disc will be designed to complement cloud computing, which allows for the storage of data and information offline on interconnected databases. It also would increase the efficiency of personal computers. According to the sources, the next-generation disc will employ hologram technology, in which a laser is used to write 3-D images to record and reproduce data. The greatly increased data-storage capacity of the new disc is achieved by storing data not only on its surface but also within the disc.
• Wiki: List of cognitive biases
• 2009/08/05: CSM: Noodle-hanging idioms and other inscrutables
  The buzz around a new book has the Monitor's language columnist noodling on some intriguing turns of phrase in use around the world.
• 2009/08/05: SlashDot: Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009
• 2009/08/04: Ph&Ph: The Falling Raindrop, Revisited [the Sokal Hoax]
• 2009/08/04: NG: Science vs. Faith
• 2009/08/01: Cracked: Conspiracy Theories
• 2009/08/03: BBC: Fire risk 'super' ants discovered
  Ants believed to have a "kamikaze attraction" to electricity have been discovered in one of England's finest National Trust gardens. Colonies of Lasius neglectus, the so-called Asian super ant, have being found at Hidcote Manor, near Chipping Campden, in Gloucestershire. [...] Their compulsion to follow electricity is stronger than their need for food or drink. Swarms of ants around electrical cables can cause blackouts. [...] Simon Ford, nature conservation advisor for the National Trust in Wessex, said: "The ants themselves pose little direct threat to us as they don't bite people or pets. "Their habit of creating super-colonies means they pose a threat to native species by out-competing them for food and space, and their attraction to electrical circuitry means they could pose a fire risk.
• 2009/08/02: BostonGlobe: The truth about grit -- Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success
• 2009/08/01: AlterNet: Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings
• Wiki: Heliosphere
• Wiki: Solar wind
• Wiki: Coronal mass ejection
• Wiki: Photosphere
• 2009/07/27: PhysOrg: Transparent aluminium is 'new state of matter'
• 2009/07/25: NYT: No Doubts: Women Are Better Managers
• 2009/07/24: BBC: Wireless power system shown off
• 2009/07/24: AlterNet: Obama's $100 Billion Investment in Our Schools Begins: What It'll Take to Have a World-Class System
• 2009/07/22: BBC: Artificial brain '10 years away' [says Henry Markram]
  A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain. He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," he said.
• 2009/07/22: NewScientist: [VASIMR] Ion engine could one day power 39-day trips to Mars
• 2009/07/21: CBC: Controversial Winnipeg water utility up for vote
• 2009/07/17: WiredSci: 5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole
  1) Holy grail, 2) Silver bullet, 3) Shedding light, 4) Missing link, 5) Paradigm shift
• 2009/07/21: StatsCan: Police-reported crime statistics
  Police-reported crime in Canada continued to decline in 2008. Both the traditional crime rate and the new Crime Severity Index fell 5%, meaning that both the volume of police-reported crime and its severity decreased. Violent crime also dropped, but to a lesser extent. This was the fifth consecutive annual decline in police-reported crime. There were about 77,000 fewer reported crimes in 2008, including 28,000 fewer thefts of $5,000 and under, 22,000 fewer break-ins and 20,000 fewer motor vehicle thefts.
• 2009/07/21: ChronicleHerald: Conspiracy theorists will never believe this
• Wiki: John Robert Lewis (American politician)
• Wiki: Heptarchy
• Wiki: Plutarch
• 2009/07/18: PhysOrg: Amazon sends Orwell to 'memory hole'
• 2009/07/17: TVP: Kindling Some Anger
• 2009/07/16: DM:DB: NASA Geologist Is Sent Thousands of Rocks from Around the World
• 2009/07/17: SciDaily: Human-computer Interaction: Beyond -- Way Beyond -- WIMP Interfaces
• 2009/07/16: CBC: Teen sailor breaks record as youngest to travel world
• 2009/07/13: Time: The State of Homelessness in the U.S.
  The 2009 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress -- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Community Planning and Development [168 pages] The Gist: There are few economic indicators as grim as homelessness, as the Department of Department of Housing and Urban Development demonstrates in its 4th annual report on the topic, which found that some 1.6 million Americans stayed at homeless shelters from October 2007 to September 2008. The Department also noticed some troubling trends: more families seeking shelter — particularly in rural and suburban areas — and more people going to shelters from stable living arrangements (instead of jails, institutional settings or the military).
• 2009/07/15: AlterNet: One a Day is Good for You -- Apples and Orgasms!
• 2009/07/14: BBC: Australia seeks new army robots
  Australia has launched a multi-million dollar competition to build a new generation of military robots.
• 2009/07/13: CBC: B.C. boy clings to toy after being swept down river
• 2009/07/13: CBC: Man dead, 4 arrested after Winnipeg rampage -- Fatal stabbing followed crime spree in North End
• 2009/07/08: NewScientist: Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence
• 2009/07/09: PlanetArk: Drunk Badger Disrupts Traffic In Germany
• 2009/07/09: BBC: Award-winning film-maker Michael Moore has announced [_Capitalism: A Love Story_] the title of his forthcoming documentary, which looks at the global economic meltdown
• 2009/07/07: FTimes: Copyright laws threaten our online freedom
  If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not "ours" at all. On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down. This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.
• 2009/07/07: FireLarrySummersNow: Why Economists Should Study Anthropology...
  OK, so one big gripe I have with the way that economics is taught is that emphasis has always been on just doing a bunch of math, writing proofs, etc., with no realization that most economists' views on any economic issue are in fact decided, not by any model, but by said economists political views, sex, race, and social position. Economists merely use models to argue for their preconceived political views, often which were developed in high school or before. Hence, when evaluating someone's argument (or one's own), it is always appropriate to evaluate their (your) biases.
• Wiki: DTN - Delay-tolerant networking
• 2009/07/06: NewScientist: Interplanetary internet gets permanent home in space [DTN - delay-tolerant networking]
• Wiki: Lagrange Point -- Lagrangian point
• Wiki: Joseph Louis Lagrange [1736 - 1813]
• 2009/07/03: Tyee: What's in an Acronym? Undefined EAJs send journalist OTE.
• 1909//: UMich: The Futurist Manifesto
• 2009/07/01: NewScientist: Treat killing like a disease to slash shootings
• 2009/06/30: BBC: The most complete terrain map of the Earth's surface has been published
• 2009/06/29: NewScientist: Building a crash-proof internet
• 2009/06/29: BBC: Pirate Bay starts video streaming
  The world's most high-profile file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), has lifted the lid on its new video sharing website, The Video Bay. Billed as a rival to YouTube, the service will offer unrestricted video content, in violation of copyright law.
• 2009/06/25: CSM: Two haikus
• 2009/06/26: BBC: Horror of Kenya's 'witch' lynchings
• 2009/06/25: Eureka: Online ethics and the bloggers' code revealed
• 2009/06/25: BBC: 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'
  Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.
• 2009/06/23: NewScientist: NASA criticised for sticking to imperial units
• 2009/06/23: DM:Disco: Doctors Stumped by 16-Year-Old With Toddler’s Body, Brain
• 2009/06/23: CBC: Man saves tumbling toddler after 3-storey fall
• 2009/06/22: SciDaily: Radio Frequency Identification: The Internet Of Things
  A tiny radio chip is arousing fear -- but also great enthusiasm. Is it a threat to everything that we know as personal data protection, or the optimal way of keeping track in a chaos of products? Imagine a world in which everything that you own is numbered and catalogued. All your shoes; every piece of clothing. A world in which nothing can be regarded as private, but where everything can be traced back to you. Take a step further in your thinking and you have a universe in which every movement is also registered. How many times did you visit the off-licence last month, and how many litres of milk did you buy last Saturday? This situation is not far off, if we can believe Kathrine Albrecht, one of the USA’s leading experts on personal data protection. She is among those who regard with suspicion the potential applications of identifying individuals with the aid of the new technology known as RFID - Radio Frequency IDentification
• 2009/06/22: BBC: Calling Marshal McLuhan! Tools are 'temporary body parts' -- The brain represents tools as extensions to the body...
• 2009/06/22: CBC: U.S. plans to monitor blogs for biased claims, payments
• 2009/06/20: BRitholtz: Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey
• 2009/06/21: Guardian(UK): After 40 years' reflection, laser moon mirror project is axed
• 2009/06/18: BBC: Lisbon's light-touch drugs policy -- Has decriminalising all drugs worked in Portugal?
• 2009/06/19: AlterNet: Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages -- Will Universities Adapt or Die Off in Our Digital World?
• Time Tree -- The Timescale of Life
• 2009/06/17: DM:CV: 20 Insults from P. G. Wodehouse
• 2009/06/17: Eureka: Study supports validity of test that indicates widespread unconscious bias
  In the decade since the Implicit Association Test was introduced, its most surprising and controversial finding is its indication that about 70 percent of those who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious, or implicit, preference for white people compared to blacks. This contrasts with figures generally under 20 percent for self report, or survey, measures of race bias. A new study published this week validates those findings, showing that the Implicit Association Test, a psychological tool, has validity in predicting behavior and, in particular, that it has significantly greater validity than self-reports in the socially sensitive topics of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is an overview and analysis of 122 published and unpublished reports of 184 different research studies. In this analysis, 85 percent of the studies also included self-reporting measures of the type generally used in surveys. This allowed the researchers, headed by University of Washington psychology Professor Anthony Greenwald, to compare the test's success in predicting social behavior and judgment with the success of self-reports.
• 2009/06/16: AlterNet: Wolfram/Alpha: Nerd-Powered Web Gadget of the Future?
• 2009/06/17: CanWest: Text-message markup 4,900%: expert -- Canadian scientist testifies before U.S. lawmakers
  The consumer markup on some text messages is an estimated 4,900 per cent, according to a leading Canadian computer scientist who testified before U.S. senators on Tuesday.
  Srinivasan Keshav, Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing at the University of Waterloo, told lawmakers probing text messaging rates and the state of competition in the wireless telecommunications industry that the maximum cost of a single text message "very unlikely" exceeds 0.3 cents.
  In Canada, the large cellphone companies charge pay-per-use texters 15 cents to send a text message and, beginning next month, Rogers will join Bell and Telus with an additional charge of 15 cents to receive a text message.
  In the United States, carriers recently increased their per-message rate to 20 cents for those without a text plan.
  "I'm not here to judge whether the market is competitive or fair, I'm just telling you this is the price and this is the cost. Let people who are experiencing these plans decide whether it's correct or not," Keshav said in an interview before testifying.
• 2009/06/16: PhysOrg: Brain Regions Responsible for Empathy Mapped by Researchers
• 2009/06/15: FourSW: Tiller Assassination and The Media: When does freedom of speech cross over to crimes against humanity?
• 2009/06/15: PhysOrg: New exotic material [bismuth telluride] could revolutionize electronics
• Wiki: Intellipedia
• 2009/06/14: CBC: 1 dead, 3 injured in 4 shootings in Winnipeg's North End
• 2009/06/13: PhysOrg: 700,000 callers phone digital TV hot line
• 2008/08/26: MGS: Discussion vs. Debate -- How do you have a discussion when you disagree?
• 2009/06/13: Guardian(UK): Cocaine study that got up the nose of the US
• 2009/06/11: SiliconValley: Phallus drewesii: New mushroom species with risque name stands out
• 2009/06/12: TStar: Ottawa embarking on its own war on drugs
  The ending was anticlimactic. On Monday evening, just as Canadians were sitting down to dinner, Parliament quietly enacted one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's most controversial pieces of legislation. The Liberals joined forces with the Conservatives to pass Canada's first mandatory minimum jail sentences for individuals convicted of drug dealing.
• 2009/06/11: CBC: Vancouver's hollow tree gets stabilization, not axe
• 2009/06/09: CNN: The day I held a sobbing WWII medic in my arms
• 2009/06/10: NewScientist: Betelgeuse: The incredible shrinking star?
• 2009/06/09: UCB: Red giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking
• 2009/06/10: NatureTGB: Betelgeuse about to blow?
• 2009/06/09: CBC: How is Whois? Internet registry seeks your feedback on privacy
• 2009/06/09: SlashDot: California To Move To Online Textbooks
• 2009/05/28: Onion: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
• 2009/06/05: DM:DiscoB: Toil and Trouble: Scientists Analyze 17th Century "Anti-Witches Brew"
• 2009/06/06: CalcRisk: Unemployment Rate and Level of Education
• 2009/06/03: uComics: (cartoon - Auth) The Uses of Rhetoric
• 2009/06/02: ARC: Four of the Free Dominion "John Does" Have Been Identified
• 2009/06/01: AlterNet: Students Aren't Customers; Education Is Not a Commodity
• 2009/06/02: CBC: Alberta passes law allowing parents to pull kids out of class
  Written notice required when sex, sexual orientation, religion are covered
• 2009/06/01: Guardian(UK): Terror in the name of Jesus
• 2009/05/31: PhysOrg: French physicists claim breakthrough in ultra-fast data access
  French physicists said on Sunday they had used ultra-fast lasers that could accelerate storage and retrieval of data on hard discs by up to 100,000 times, pointing the way to a new generation of IT wizardry.
• 2009/06/01: DM:CV: Silence is the Enemy
• 2009/06/01: DM:SRK: Silence Is The Enemy
• 2009/06/01: DM:BadAstronomy: Silence is the Enemy
• 2009/05/31: SciDaily: Waves In Earth's Radiation Belt Get Mapped
• 2009/05/28: NBF: New Projectors Will Enable Large Displays and More Usefulness from Small Computers and Smartphones
• 2009/05/29: DawgsBlawg: Camera-shy cops target photographers
• 2009/05/29: BPerens: Stupid Burglar Nabbed by Backup Program
• 2009/05/28: NewScientist: Six things science has revealed about the female orgasm
• 2009/05/27: InfoProc: Fermi problems
• 2009/05/28: EconView: "Fermi Problems"
• 2009/05/27: CrazyBitchesRUs: How to be a Traditional man
• 2009/05/27: QP: Strip Malicious Mischief
• 2009/05/27: CBC: Taser inquiry into Dziekanski's death hears last witness -- Closing arguments begin June 19
• 2009/05/26: TreeHugger: Engineering Is Hip Again
• 2009/05/21: LNB: What 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel looks like
• 2009/05/26: BBC: Dr Paul Twomey, president of the internet admin body Icann, talks about the net's potential for change
• Wiki: Overton window
• 2009/05/25: CBC: Parents accused of racist teachings begin court battle for children
• 2009/05/22: CCurrents: Internet Threatened By Censorship, Secret Surveillance, And Cybersecurity Laws
• 2009/05/21: PhysOrg: New memory material may hold [1 terabyte per square inch] data for one billion years
• 2009/05/18: DerSpiegel: Opera-Singing Bird Disappears -- Theft of Abusive German Parrot Saddens Munich
  A parrot who sings opera songs and once famously called the mayor of Munich an asshole has been stolen. The disappearance of Koko has upset the entire neighborhood which had grown fond of the hot-tempered feathered diva.
• 2009/05/19: CNN: Restoring the Earth helps veterans heal
  "Green" jobs program helps military veterans learn marketable skills - Program not only helps the environment, veterans say -- it aids them, too - Veterans almost immediately form "new platoon" to support one another - Program's success does not make it immune to budget cuts
• 2009/05/19: UN: UN announces launch of world’s first tuition-free, online university
• 2009/05/19: SciDaily: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
• 2009/05/18: SciNews: It’s not their dirty mouths -- Komodo dragons kill prey with venom, not oral bacteria, study suggests
• 2009/05/18: NewScientist: Venom is key to Komodo dragon's killing power
• 2009/05/18: PhysOrg: Komodo even more deadly than thought: Research
• 2009/05/18: EconView: "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness"
• 2009/05/15: NewScientist: Sex selection brings Vietnamese boy boom
• 2009/05/15: PhysOrg: Fujitsu develops world's fastest processor [128 GHz]
• 2009/05/15: AlterNet: Obama's Drug Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs'
• 2009/05/13: CBC: Crown drops charges against student in alleged racial taunting incident
  Crown prosecutors in Newmarket, Ont., have dropped assault charges against a 15-year-old accused of punching a classmate after the classmate allegedly taunted him with a racial slur. Last week local police recommended dropping the charges against the teen, who is of Korean descent. Prosecutor Amit Ghosh told the court on Wednesday that there is "no reasonable prospect of conviction and it would not be in the public interest to continue the prosecution" of the teen.
• 2009/05/13: CBC: Cause of death 'undeterminable' for Red Deer man jolted by Taser: inquest
  An inquiry into the death of an Alberta man shocked three times by an RCMP stun gun couldn't come to a conclusion about what ultimately killed him. In a report released Wednesday morning, provincial court Judge Monica Blast said the most likely cause of Jason Doan's cardiac arrest was "excited delirium," but because no underlying medical diagnosis could be identified as the trigger that put him into that state, the cause of death remains "undeterminable." Without a cause of death, the judge said she had no recommendations.
• 2009/05/14: CanWest: 101,000 in abuse shelters, Statscan says
  About 101,000 Canadian women and children stayed in shelters last year, a new Statistics Canada report reveals, and most of them fled there to escape abuse. In a snapshot count on a single day, the agency found 4,273 women living in shelters across Canada, along with 3,361 children. Nearly 80% were fleeing abusive situations, the agency found, and just one-quarter of abused women said they had reported their most recent incident to police. Of the women in shelters claiming abuse, 65% reported psychological abuse, 55% physical abuse, while one-quarter of the women said they went to a shelter to protect their children from witnessing the abuse. The bad economy appears to be increasing the calls for help.
• 2009/05/13: NewScientist: Will designer brains divide humanity?
  We are on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic "plug-ins" or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity?
• 2009/05/13: PhysOrg: Political blogs more accurate than newspapers, say those who read both
• 2009/05/11: NYT: Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets
• 2009/05/09: NewScientist: 'Cone of silence' keeps conversations secret
• 2009/05/08: PhysOrg: New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers
  Prime numbers have intrigued curious thinkers for centuries. On one hand, prime numbers seem to be randomly distributed among the natural numbers with no other law than that of chance. But on the other hand, the global distribution of primes reveals a remarkably smooth regularity. This combination of randomness and regularity has motivated researchers to search for patterns in the distribution of primes that may eventually shed light on their ultimate nature. In a recent study, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have discovered a new pattern in primes that has surprisingly gone unnoticed until now. They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. In addition, this same pattern also appears in another number sequence, that of the leading digits of nontrivial Riemann zeta zeros, which is known to be related to the distribution of primes.
• 2009/05/08: SciDaily: Scientists Surprised By Unexpected Emergence Of Periodical Cicadas -- Four Years Early
• Wiki: The Tale of Genji
• 2009/05/06: SlashDot: Reliable Male Contraceptive In the Works
• 2009/05/05: ArsTechnica: Google book settlement has librarians worried
  The American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries have filed comments on the proposed settlement between Google and book publishers, voicing concerns over pricing, access, and privacy, and suggesting that the deal may require long-term monitoring.
• 2009/05/05: G&M: Racist Bullying -- Bullied teen returns to class after school's reversal
  A 15-year-old black belt who was suspended for breaking the nose of a classmate who racially abused him will return to school today after a sudden change of heart at the York Region board. The reversal represents a dramatic victory for the Asian student, who was suspended a maximum 20 days last week. He had received a letter from the school board - later retracted - that said his principal recommended he be expelled from all schools in the region. The 15-year-old will return to Keswick High School this morning with the suspension removed from his academic record and his upcoming expulsion hearing cancelled, the boy's father said yesterday. The turnabout began yesterday when the 15-year-old and his parents were invited to a hastily convened reconciliation session with his antagonist and that boy's parents. At that meeting, the white student apologized for directing a racial slur at the 15-year-old and for punching him in the mouth. The 15-year-old apologized for breaking his classmate's nose.
• 2009/05/03: TGBeaver: "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender"
• 2009/05/02: Guardian(UK): Happy birthday Pete Seeger
  As the iconic folk singer turns 90, we can say that America is a far better country for his having shared his music with us
• 2009/05/02: TSun: Student who belted bully voted 'World's Best Person' on MSNBC
• 2009/05/01: BBC: Lithium in water 'curbs suicide' -- Drinking water which contains the element lithium may reduce the risk of suicide, a Japanese study suggests
• 2009/05/01: AlterNet: What's Behind the Epidemic of Family-Killings? Could it Be Anti-Depressants?
• 2009/04/30: NewScientist: Huge gene study shines new light on African history
• Digital Karnak
• 2009/04/27: Guardian(UK): Bertrand Russell's mathematical quest adds up to unlikely graphic novel hit
  Logicomix is already a bestseller in Greece and has been eagerly picked up by publishers around the world
• 2009/04/29: DM:CV: Logicomix
• 2009/04/29: SciDaily: Native Americans Descended From A Single Ancestral Group, DNA Study Confirms
• 2009/04/28: CSM: A haiku
• 2009/04/27: BBC: Optical disc offers 500GB storage
  A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric. The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry. But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.
• 2005/02/11: CDreams: Fasten Your Seatbelts -- The Rapture Index
• 2006/06/18: DamnInteresting: Guidestones into the Age of Reason
• Wiki: Georgia Guidestones
• 2009/04/26: PeakEnergy: American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse
• 2009/04/24: PlanetArk: Scientists Make Super-Strong Metallic Spider Silk
• 2009/04/23: USAToday: 1 in 4 drops out of high school, but some [US] cities improve
• 2009/04/23: CBC: Revenue Canada refuses to pay for million-dollar mistake
• 2009/04/23: PhysOrg: Internet has only just begun, say founders [Tim Berners-Lee et al.]
• Wiki: Human papillomavirus
• 2009/04/21: SymmetryMag: World's first hard X-ray laser switches on
• WDL: World Digital Library
• 2009/04/21: AlterNet: Why Susan Boyle Has Captured Hearts Around the World
• 2009/04/20: SlashDot: Oracle Buys Sun
• 2009/04/18: SciDaily: Important Breakthrough Towards Silicon-based All-optical Integrated Circuits
  Nature Photonics has published the first experimental proof of all-optical ultra-fast communication signal processing with silicon-based devices for transmission speeds above 100Gbit/s.
• 2009/04/18: PeakEnergy: Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass
• 2009/04/18: BBC: How Susan Boyle won over the world
• 2009/04/15: EPI: It’s not academic: Why charter schools close
• 2009/04/16: BBC: Force is strong for Jedi police
• 2009/04/15: BBC: Sewing machine hoax hits Saudi Arabia
  Saudi police say they are investigating a hoax that has seen people rushing to buy old-fashioned sewing machines for up to $50,000 (£33,500). The Singer sewing machines are said to contain traces of red mercury, a substance that may not exist. But it is widely thought that it can be used to find treasure, ward off evil spirits or even make nuclear bombs. It is believed that tiny amounts can sell for millions of dollars...
• 2009/04/13: Yahoo: 18-month sentence sought for South Korean blogger
  Seoul, South Korea - Prosecutors demanded an 18-month sentence Monday for a popular South Korean blogger who is accused of spreading false financial information in a case that has ignited a debate about freedom of speech in cyberspace. The 30-year-old blogger, a fierce critic of government economic policy, was arrested and indicted in January after he wrote that the government had banned major financial institutions and trade businesses from buying U.S. dollars. Prosecutors have said the posting was not only inaccurate, but it had affected the foreign exchange market and undermined the nation's credibility. But opposition parties and critics have claimed the arrest is aimed at silencing criticism of the government and restricts online freedom of speech.
• 2009/04/13: FTimes:CB: A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US
• 2009/04/11: SciDaily: Was A 'Mistress Of The Lionesses' A King In Ancient Canaan?
• 2009/04/08: BBC: Spock gives fans Star Trek treat
• 2009/04/09: DerSpiegel: 'The Producers' Debuts in Germany -- It's Springtime for Hitler in Berlin
  Berlin's Admiralspalast theater will break new ground in May by staging the first production in Germany of the Mel Brooks musical "The Producers." Some, though, say Germany isn't ready for tap-dancing stormtroopers and a camp Hitler singing "Heil Myself."
• 2009/04/09: Guardian(UK): New digital library to display world on a website
  Multimillion-dollar [World Digital Library (WDL)] project will carry thousands of cultural treasures
• 2009/04/07: DM:AF: Explanatory Gaps and Scientific Theories of Consciousness
• 2009/04/01: PhysOrg: LIFE.com goes live -- LIFE, the defunct US magazine, came back to life online on Tuesday as a website featuring photographs from its legendary and prize-winning collection
• 2009/04/01: WpgFP: Canadian police want to keep gun registry going
  The Conservatives, the party of law and order, appear on a collision course with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Saskatchewan MP Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton-Melville), a fervent opponent of the gun registry, has introduced a private member's bill that launches the most sweeping attack on Canadian gun control since its inception. Bill C-301 not only has the full backing of the Conservative caucus, but also from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. If just 11 opposition MPs support it, it will become the law of the land. The police chiefs are dead set against it, as are a clear majority of Canadians. A 2001 Gallup poll found that 61 per cent want stricter laws governing the sale of firearms and 63 per cent believe gun ownership should be made illegal for ordinary citizens. "I urge you and other members of your party not to support (Bill C-301)," CACP president Steven Chabot wrote in a March 9 letter to the prime minister. The police chiefs have been at the forefront calling for gun control since 1973, he noted.
• 2009/03/31: CBC: Cellphone jamming principal forced to retreat at B.C. high school -- Device illegal in Canada, students point out
• Wiki: Metamaterial
• 2009/03/28: OilDrum: Crisis Blogging: Opiate of the Masses or Catalyst for Change?
• 2009/03/27: PhysOrg: Pope 'publicly distorted' science in condom row: Lancet
  One of the world's top medical journals accused Pope Benedict XVI on Friday of having distorted scientific evidence in his remarks on condom use and demanded he make a retraction. "By saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on this issue," The Lancet said in an editorial. "Whether the Pope's error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. "But the comment still stands, and the Vatican's attempts to tweak the Pope's words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward." The London-based journal added: "When any influential person, be it a religious or political figure, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. "Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide." The pope made the controversial remarks last week when he travelled to Africa, the worst-hit continent for AIDS.
• 2009/03/27: NTI: "Smart Dew" to safeguard homes against intruders
• 2009/03/26: BBC: Therapists offer gay 'treatment'
  Therapists are still offering treatments for homosexuality despite there being no evidence that such methods work, research suggests. A significant minority of mental health professionals had agreed to help at least one patient "reduce" their gay or lesbian feelings when asked to do so. The survey, published in the journal BMC Psychiatry and conducted by London researchers, involved 1,400 therapists.
• 2009/03/25: AlterNet: Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party
• 2009/03/24: CBC: Komodo dragons kill man in Indonesia
• 2009/03/23: SameFacts: What do the editors of JAMA have in common with the Pope?
• 2009/03/21: CBC: Paramount settles Alberta town's Star Trek aspirations with preview
• Wiki: Geosynchronous orbit
• Wiki: Carrying capacity
• 2009/03/17: PhysOrg: Memristor chip could lead to faster, cheaper computers
  The memristor is a computer component that offers both memory and logic functions in one simple package. It has the potential to transform the semiconductor industry, enabling smaller, faster, cheaper chips and computers
• Wiki: Liebig's Law of the Minimum
• Wiki: Justus von Liebig
• 2009/03/16: Guardian(UK): Obama drops 'war on drugs' rhetoric for needle exchanges
• Wiki: Dead Sea scrolls
• 2009/03/13: Denialism: Jon Stewart should win the Pullitzer
• SSRI Stories -- Antidepressant Nightmares
• 2009/03/11: CBC: Born to surrogate, child has no legal mother, Quebec judge rules -- Couple broke provincial law banning the practice
  A Quebec woman has no legal right to the child she paid a surrogate to carry for her, a judge has ruled, leaving the child without a legal mother. The case is stirring up debate in Quebec legal circles over the province's ban on surrogacy and the impact the law has on children caught in the middle.
• 2009/03/06: AlterNet: Out of Respect for Human Decency, Obama Should End the Drug War
• 2009/03/07: Twine: Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google
  In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
  It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example.
  Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"
  Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.
• 2009/03/08: ZDNet: Wolfram Alpha: 'A new paradigm for using computers and the web'
• 2009/03/04: DerSpiegel: History in Ruins -- Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians
  The collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne on Tuesday buried more than a millenium's worth of documents under tons of rubble. Archivists and historians hope something can be salvaged, but the future of the city's past is grim.
• 2009/03/06: BBC: Italy revives Sicily bridge plan -- Italy's government has revived plans to build a controversial bridge linking the island of Sicily to the mainland
• 2009/03/04: NYT: Backed by Green Party, Comic Pastor Runs for Mayor
  Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping is -- to say the least -- not your typical candidate for mayor. With his blond pompadour, cobalt blue suit, black shirt and white collar, he made his announcement in Union Square on Sunday accompanied by a choir in green robes. But he has the nomination of an actual political party and might have a spot on the ballot in November, something Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has yet to secure.
• 2009/03/04: NYT: Senator Asks Pfizer About Harvard Payments
• Language development
• 2009/02/24: BBerg: Delphi Allowed to Cancel Benefits for 15,000 Workers
  Delphi Corp., the bankrupt auto- parts maker, won permission to cancel health-care benefits for 15,000 current and former salaried workers, saving $1.1 billion as it tries to emerge from court protection amid falling vehicle sales. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in New York issued the ruling today after witnesses for Troy, Michigan-based Delphi testified the cuts were vital to its survival because its lenders demanded them. About 1,600 objections were filed by workers.
• 2009/03/01: NewsWeek: Why Doctors Hate Science -- Scaremongers warn that 'effectiveness research' threatens the lives of Americans.
• 2009/03/01: SciDaily: New Method Of Self-assembling Nanoscale Elements Could Transform Data Storage Industry
• 2009/02/28: NewScientist: How to spot a hidden religious agenda
• 2009/02/27: TFreak: Pirate Bay Witness’ Wife Overwhelmed With Flowers
• 2009/02/27: CBC: Universities need higher fees to get through recession: report
  The recession will hit post-secondary institutions hard in the next few years, and governments should allow dramatic fee increases to help deal with a shortfall in revenues, a new report says. The report on Canadian university funding by the U.S.-based Educational Policy Institute (EPI) says that the increases -- coupled with an appropriate bump in financial aid -- are needed to maintain the quality of education at post-secondary institutions.
• 2009/02/25: CV: ETs -- I went and watched Jill Tarter’s acceptance speech...
• 2009/02/25: SH: Designer Babies - Like It Or Not, Here They Come
• 2009/02/22: Denialism: For-Profit Fundraising Fleeces the Charitable
• 2009/02/19: PhysOrg: 250 DVDs on a quarter: New method of self-assembling nanoscale elements could transform data storage industry
• 2009/02/19: CBC: Pint-size heroes 'almost like Superman,' rescued girl says
• 2009/02/18: Google:AFP: New service unmasks blocked telephone calls
• 2009/02/18: PhysOrg: The liberating effects of losing control
  Self-control is one of our most cherished values. We applaud those with the discipline to regulate their appetites and actions, and we try hard to instill this virtue in our children. We celebrate the power of the mind to make hard choices and keep us on course. But is it possible that willpower can sometimes be an obstacle rather than a means to happiness and harmony?
• Erowid -- psychoactive plants, chemicals and related issues
• 2009/02/16: SwissInfo: Atheists launch non-prophet bus campaign -- Coming to a tram near you: an atheist advertising campaign like this one in Britain
• 2009/02/15: Guardian(UK): Why we said pants to India's bigots
• Wiki: Prometheus
• Bible Verse Finder
• DavidUlansey: Mithraism -- The Cosmic Mysteries of Mithras
• 2009/02/11: NewScientist: Ecstasy's legacy: So far, so good
• 2009/02/10: WWMT: Zoorotica program at Binder Park Zoo
• 2009/02/08: Telegraph(UK): British teenagers have lower IQs than their counterparts did 30 years ago
  Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert
• 2009/02/03: Tyee: Canada's Do-Not-Call Disaster -- How a good idea to protect your privacy was bungled
• 2009/02/02: PhysOrg: Scientists Develop First Chip-Scale Thermoelectric Cooler
• WikiQuote
• 2009/02/02: CBC: UBC engineering students arrested in botched bridge prank
• 2009/02/02: TStar: Tough action can reverse do-not-call disaster
• 2009/01/30: Ph&Ph: Learning and Scientific Reasoning
• 2009/01/30: PhysOrg: Samsung Develops World's Highest Density DRAM Chip (Low-power 4Gb DDR3)
• 2009/01/30: Eureka: Queen's chemist sheds light on health benefits of garlic -- Researchers trace benefits to acid produced in decomposing organic compound
• 2009/01/30: BBC: Naked ramblers face Swiss fines -- A local Swiss government plans to take action against a sudden and apparently unwelcome phenomenon - naked hikers.
• 2009/01/29: OSU: Study: learning science facts doesn’t boost science reasoning
• 2008/11/26: OvercomingBias: Abstract/Distant Future Bias
• 2009/01/16: OvercomingBias: A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
• Sign Spotting
• 2009/01/27: Wonkette: Why Can’t You See This Vegetable Pornography Commercial During the Super Bowl?
• 2009/01/27: PhysOrg: Ashes of "Star Trek" creator and wife rocketing to deep space
• 2009/01/27: PhysOrg: New study may revolutionize language learning
• 2009/01/27: CBC: Okalik criticizes Aariak for removing justice minister over email
  Minister was trying to start debate, Okalik says; premier calls remarks 'offensive'
• Recipe Goldmine
• 2009/01/23: G&M: Fraudsters abusing do-not-call list
  Phone numbers on registry are being sold online in a possible violation of privacy laws, consumer advocacy group says
• 2009/01/23: CBC: Registered with the do-not-call list? Expect more calls, says consumer watchdog
• 2009/01/22: CBC: Police discover cache of faked Salvador Dali works
• 2009/01/18: Wired: Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge -- Agnotology
• 2009/01/21: TreeHugger: Scrabble Keyboard Is Possibly The Coolest Nerdy Project Ever
• Datamancer: The Scrabble Keyboard
• 2009/01/19: TWM: Irony Is Dead
  Yesterday, various bloggers, including Steve, posted a wonderful YouTube video of Pete Seeger singing 'This Land Is Your Land'. I hope you watched it then, since it's no longer available: HBO has taken it down (h/t). If you click the video, you get the following message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Home Box Office, Inc."
• 2009/01/20: Guardian(UK): In praise of ... Pete Seeger
• 2009/01/19: Guardian(UK): Smugglers of truth by Naomi Wolf
• 2009/01/11: RefreshingNews: 14 Percent of U.S. Adults Can't Read
• 2009/01/08: NAAL: [US] State and County Literacy Estimates
• Marxists: Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive
• Wiki: Rosa Luxemburg
• AMC: The Prisoner 1960s
• 2009/01/14: ClimateP: The top 25 Bushisms of all time
• 2009/01/14: BBC: Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan dies at 80
• 2009/01/11: InfoProc: Confirmation bias and the Einstein myth
• 2009/01/08: CBC: Manitoba Métis win hunting rights case
• 2009/01/08: SlashDot: Panasonic Working On 2-Terabyte SD Cards
• 2009/01/08: G&M: Polygamy charges in Bountiful
• 2009/01/07: Eureka: New tool enables powerful data analysis
• 2009/01/07: NewScientist: Ten extinct beasts that could walk the Earth again
• 2009/01/05: NewScientist: Invention: Exoskeleton power steering
• EuroSpaceward: The European Spaceward Association preserving & improving life on Earth by going into space
• 1986/03/07: UVirginia: "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming
• 2008/12/29: Eureka: Facial expressions of emotion are innate, not learned, says new study
• Wiki: Logarithmic Scale
• Wiki: Zero Mostel
• 2008/12/18: UnderstandingSociety: The sociology of class
• 2008/12/17: PhysOrg: Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from [8] Sony Playstation 3
• 2008/12/17: SciDaily: Persistent Imminent Orgasms In Women Are Associated With Restless Legs
• 2008/12/15: Aegisub: If programming languages were religions...
• 2008/12/15: NYDN: Top ten quotes of 2008
• 2008/12/16: CBC: Prince Albert honours girl, 7, who helped save family
  A little girl from Saskatchewan who kicked her way out of a crashed truck and helped save her family has been honoured in Prince Albert. On Monday night, accolades flowed around Micah Brown, 7, as she was given Prince Albert's Award of Merit at city hall. Micah said she was happy to receive the award, although she admits to feeling a little overwhelmed. "I feel like everybody was trying to pull me around and everybody wants to take me," she said. The plucky little girl heard the story told once again of the day in October when her family hit a bad patch of grid road and rolled their vehicle north of the city. Everyone was trapped in the flipped-over truck except Micah, who managed to get loose from her seatbelt and kick out the vehicle's back window. Alone and shoeless in sub-zero weather, she ran for more than a kilometre to find help. She found a farmhouse and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. She ran to the next house and this time someone was home. That person immediately called 911. Soon, an ambulance was on its way to rescue her family. Paramedics said someone might have died if they hadn't been called when they did. Weeks later, the story of Micah's bravery made headlines and was broadcast across the country.
• 2008/12/09: WFM: "Holiday" Music That Doesn't Suck
• 2008/12/10: SciDaily: Higher Rates Of Mental Illness Among The Homeless In Western Countries
• 2008/12/07: FTimes: The hottest recessionary activity in town
• 2008/12/07: Spectrum: How We Found the Missing Memristor
• 2008/12/05: GulfTimes: Search for quality on the Web
• Wiki: Forrest J Ackerman
• 2008/12/05: Telegraph(UK): Otto the octopus wreaks havoc
• 2008/12/05: SciDaily: Opening Up The [Terahertz] Last Part Of Electromagnetic Spectrum
• 2008/12/05: OLJ: Woody Guthrie: A little recession music, please
• 2008/12/03: PhysOrg: [Calling Marshall McLuhan!] Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains?
• 2008/12/02: CBC: Nearly 1 in 5 young adults in U.S. has personality disorder: study
• 2008/12/01: CBC: Could consumers own their internet connections?
• 2008/11/26: EconView: Why Did Forecasters Missed the Crisis?
• 2008/11/25: CanWest: Sweeping changes proposed for B.C.'s trail system
• Element Four - The Element Four WaterMill provides fresh, potable water from an unlimited source: the air.
• 2008/11/23: SlashDot: NVIDIA's $10K Tesla GPU-Based Personal Supercomputer
• 2008/11/20: Yahoo: US officials flunk test of Amerian history, economics, civics
• 2008/11/21: Rice: Molecular memory a game-changer -- James Tour’s graphene device may make massive storage practical
• 2008/11/21: CSM: Sci-fi fans go into warp drive over an independent Star Trek film
• 2008/11/21: BBC: IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains
• 2008/11/21: Guardian(UK): History's missing pages: Iranian academic sliced out sections of priceless collection
  British Library to sue after 150 books are vandalised - Wealthy scholar pleads guilty and may face prison Farhad Hakimzadeh removed a map by Hans Holbein the Younger from Simon Grynaeus?s 16th century work Novus Orbis To the untrained eye the damage is barely visible. Yet within the handbound pages of books charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards, the damage caused by one Iranian academic to a priceless British Library collection is irreversible. Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation's collection for centuries. The monetary damage he caused over seven years is in the region of £400,000 but Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British and early printed collections at the library, said no price could be placed upon the books and maps that he had defaced and stolen.
• 2008/11/19: Telegraph(UK): The 30 greatest conspiracy theories - part 2 [#s 16 - 30]
• 2008/11/19: Telegraph(UK): The 30 greatest conspiracy theories - part 1 [#s 1 - 15]
• 2008/11/19: PhysOrg: Massive EU online library looks to compete with Google
• 2008/11/17: PhysOrg: Toward a new generation of paper-thin loudspeakers
• LaetusInPraesens: Why Systems Fail and Problems Sprout Anew [Book Review] _Systemantics; how systems work... and especially how they fail_ by John Gall
• Intel 4004
• Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before
• 2008/11/15: DailyIndia: Brit airman who sank 'The Bismarck' dies at 93
• 2008/11/13: NatureN: Illegal drug shows promise in treating trauma symptoms -- MDMA may boost the benefits of psychotherapy, trial suggests.
• 2008/11/06: CNN: Armed guards keep watch over church services
  Churches nationwide turning to parishioners to join volunteer security teams - Many volunteers are retired and off-duty officers who carry concealed weapons - Congregants say the armed security presence provides peace of mind - Consultants encourage using armed guards who are trained in weapons handling
• 2008/11/04: CJR: Studs And Me -- Studs Terkel interviewed me, and I didn’t even know it
• 2008/11/07: BBC: Blind pilot guided to land by RAF
• 2008/11/05: NYT: Text of Nelson Mandela’s Letter to Senator Obama
• 2008/11/04: WorldChanging: Chop Wood, Carry Water
• 2008/11/03: CBC: Frozen mice cloned; wooly mammoths on horizon
• Fabbaloo
• 2008/10/25: NYT: Multitasking Can Make You Lose ... Um ... Focus
• 2008/11/01: StageLeft: My Only Ghost Story
• 2008/10/31: CNN: Acclaimed author Studs Terkel dies at 96
  Terkel won Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for book about World War II, "The Good War" - Son: "My dad led a long, full, eventful -- sometimes tempestuous -- satisfying life" - Terkel once said death "makes the value of life all the more precious" - Author believed elderly, those "who've borne witness" to life are best storytellers
• 2008/10/29: BBC: David Tennant quits as Doctor Who
  David Tennant is to stand down as Doctor Who, after becoming one of the most popular Time Lords in the history of the BBC science fiction show. Tennant stepped into the Tardis in 2005, and will leave the role after four special episodes are broadcast next year. He made the announcement after winning the outstanding drama performance prize at the National Television Awards. "When Doctor Who returns in 2010 it won't be with me," he said.
• 2008/10/29: SciDaily: Flexible, Affordable Light Source Can Printed
  Researchers working in the European ROLLED project have developed a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) element that can be mass produced using roll-to-roll printing technology. The OLED elements can be used to add value to product packages. The new method is considerably cheaper than the traditional manufacturing method.
• 2008/10/28: PhysOrg: Satellites approach the Shannon limit
  Satellites are achieving unparalleled efficiency with a new protocol, DVB-S2. The performance of DVB-S2 satellite systems is very close to the theoretical maximum, defined by the Shannon Limit. That efficiency could be pushed even further by network optimisation tools and equipment recently developed by European researchers.
• Eliza Gilkyson
• 2008/10/27: UIllinois: 'Digital Dark Age' may doom some data
• 2008/10/24: SlashDot: Packs of Robots Will Hunt Down Uncooperative Humans
• 2008/10/23: DVice: Oracle watch mixes telling time, I Ching philosophy for confusing results
• 2008/10/23: CBC: Manitoba, Winnipeg the country's murder capitals
• 2008/10/21: CanWest: Lack of funding imperils historic sites -- 70% of 689 not federally managed are in fair or poor shape: survey
• 2008/10/20: XKCD: (cartoon - Munroe) Twitter
• 2008/10/17: PhysOrg: Future planes, cars may be made of 'buckypaper'
  It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made. Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.
• 2008/10/16: PhysOrg: All-in-one PC is TV, media center and touchable
• 2008/10/15: BBC: The revolution of paperless paper
  [...] a new kind of newspaper. What's new about it? Well, for a start there's no paper - it's electronic. The device looks just like a table mat, it's as light as a magazine. But onto it you can download hundreds of newspapers and - at the touch of a button - browse through them quite safely, without elbowing anyone ever again.
• 2008/10/14: CBC: Web searches boost aging brain beyond books: study
• SFU: Twin Myths from around the world
• Wiki: Multiple Births
• Wiki: Twins
• 2008/10/08: ArxivBlog: How religions spread like viruses
• 2008/10/11: SciDaily: Tobacco Smuggling Is Killing More People Than Illegal Drugs, Experts Claim
• 2008/09/08: MRMag: Interview with Linda Niemann, Author of Boomer, Railroad Memoirs
• 2008/10/01: CBC: Inquiry blasts pathologist Smith and his overseers -- Ontario told to overhaul system of investigating child deaths
• 2008/09/30: PhysOrg: Super Talent Introduces a 128Gb SSD for Under $300
• 2008/09/30: CBC: Website, phone lines for do-not-call list overwhelmed
• 2008/09/28: SlashDot: On Fourth Launch Attempt, SpaceX Falcon 1 Reaches Orbit
• 2008/09/28: CNet: The 50 most significant moments of Internet history
• 2008/09/26: FPB: Fusion Man for president
• 2008/09/24: ArsTechnica: Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does
• Wiki: Unsolved problems in economics
• 2008/09/16: NotSneaky: What should the Top Unsolved Problems in Economics Be?
• 2008/09/15: NBF: 3-d Processor designed to run in 3-D first not just a stack of 2D chips -- The 'Rochester Cube' points way to more powerful chip designs.
• 2008/09/20: Guardian(UK): Yankees say goodbye to stadium that Ruth built (24 pictures)
• 2008/09/18: DailyIndia: Fidel Castro 'bedded 35,000 women'!
• Wiki: Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia [aka the Constitutional Convention, the Federal Convention or the Grand Convention at Philadelphia]
• Wiki: First Continental Congress
• Wiki: Second Continental Congress
• 2008/09/15: LNB: Peter Diamandis, "Long-term X Prizes"
• 2008/09/11: CCurrents: Twenty Questions: Social Justice Quiz 2008
• 2008/09/13: SlashDot: [Carleton] University Brings Charges Against White Hat Hacker
• 2008/09/05: DailyIndia: Meet the two men who live together as 'transexual lesbians'!
• 2008/09/01: TheBigPicture: Banned OSHA Films
• UCI: The Silk Road
• Wiki: Iron Law of Oligarchy
• 2008/08/20: LNB: Be sure to read the fine print!
• 2008/08/22: BBC: Argentine dog saves abandoned baby
• 2008/08/17: PeakEnergy: Medieval European peasants had more holiday time than modern American office workers
• 2008/08/12: SlashDot: Digitizing Rare Vinyl
• 2008/08/12: News(Au): Giant inflatable dog poo wreaks havoc
• 2008/08/11: PeakEnergy: The Rise Of The Machines
• 2008/08/06: EUO: Talking cars to save lives on EU roads
• 2008/08/04: SlashDot: Scotty's Final Mission
• 2008/08/01: PhysOrg: A Brief History of Solar Sails
• 2008/07/31: SlashDot: R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
• 2008/07/31: FPB: Russian judge: Sexual harassment a patriotic duty
• 2008/07/30: Tudelft: 'Hidden' Van Gogh painting revealed - a portrait of a woman behind Patch of Grass
• 2008/07/28: NewScientist: Wild orangutans treat pain with natural anti-inflammatory
• 2008/07/26: SlashDot: Google URL Index Hits 1 Trillion
• Knol
• Easterlin Paradox
• 2008/07/17: DailyIndia: Man ordered to apologize for penis costume
• 2008/07/17: Guardian(UK): War really has now become a videogame - Raytheon has announced plans to use videogame technology in its UAVs
• Geology: World's Biggest Tsunami [July 9, 1958]
• 2008/07/15: PhysOrg: Study: Americans Expect Business Leaders to Be White
  Despite decades of progress for minorities in corporate settings, Americans still expect business leaders to be white, and they judge white leaders as more effective than their minority counterparts. This is according to research published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology by professors from Duke University, the University of Toronto and Northwestern University.
• 2008/07/15: SlashDot: MSM Noticing That Patent Gridlock Stunts Innovation
• 2008/07/15: PhysOrg: Goodbye to faulty software?
• 2008/07/12: SciDaily: Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral
• 2008/07/11: FTimes: A thoroughly modern emperor [Hadrian]
• Wiki: Miracle fruit
• 2008/07/05: TreeHugger: Another One Bites the Dust: University Closes Observatory, Evicts Famous Astronomer
• 2008/07/01: PhysOrg: Surprising fact: Half of gun deaths are suicides
• Wiki: Paper
• Wiki: Papermaking
• 2008/07/01: CBC: Benefits of magic mushrooms may linger: report
• IMSLP: International Music Score Library Project
• 2008/06/26: Rabble: Living in the future with the book of books
• NIST: Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
• Sony: Memory Stick
• Wiki: Memory Stick
• Archimedes Palimpsest
• 2008/06/18: FuturePundit: Male Narcissistic Psychopaths Get More Sex
• 2008/06/16: PhysOrg: AMD Stream Processor First to Break 1 Teraflop Barrier
• 2008/06/12: BBC: Experts unveil 'cloak of silence'
• 2008/06/07: CNN: Divers battled Komodo dragon before rescue
  Five European divers battled Komodo dragon before rescue - Group found at Mantaolan, on the island of Rinca off Komodo National Park - Missing divers included three Britons, one Frenchwoman and a Swede
• What Is My IP Address?
• 2008/06/06: NewScientist: New 'super-paper' is stronger than cast iron
• 2008/06/03: PhysOrg: SanDisk Releases Solid-State Drives Aimed at Ultra Low-Cost PCs
• WWKIP: World Wide Knit In Public Day
• GPI: Global Peace Index
• 2008/05/31: SlashDot: Supercomputer Built With 8 GPUs
• 2008/05/28: Eureka: How fairness is wired in the brain
• 2008/05/28: PhysOrg: Sony to sell golf ball-sized speakers
  Sony says its newest speakers can deliver the sound of a top-notch home-theater sound system even though they're just a little bigger than golf balls.
• 2008/05/27: QuarkSoup: BTO
• 2008/05/28: BBC: Pisa's leaning tower 'stabilised'
  Italy's famous leaning tower of Pisa has stopped moving for the first time in its 800-year history, engineers who have worked to stabilise it say. The man in charge of the team monitoring the 26m euros (£20m; $40m) project says the tower should remain stable for at least another 200 years.
• 2008/05/28: SlashDot: 1TB Blu-Ray Compatible Optical Disc Announced
• 2008/05/25: Paul S. Graham: Utah Phillips - Rest in Peace
• 2008/05/24: News(Au): Mum, daughter climb Everest
• 2008/05/17: Onion: Tomato Genetically Modified To Be More Expensive
• 2008/05/23: TLC: If You Want To Get Lied To...Watch the evening news on television.
• 2008/05/23: TGBeaver: Resist the Siren Song of Factual Accuracy
• 2008/05/22: ChinaDaily: 'Martian Language' heats up among teenagers
• 2008/05/21: PhysOrg: Hungarian student hurls eggs at Microsoft CEO Ballmer
• 2008/05/20: PhysOrg: The Photonic Beetle: Nature Builds Diamond-Like Crystals For Future Optical Computers
• 2008/05/19: PhysOrg: Software designers strut their talent at cost of profit, says new study
• 2008/05/19: Eureka: Engineers demonstrate first room-temperature semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz radiation
• Wiki: Hyperthymesia
• Paleo-Future - A look into the future that never was
• 2008/05/14: NatureN: Shrimp's super sight
• Center for Responsive Politics
• 2008/01/29: CBC: Lawyers take pathologist to task for lies and errors - Charles Smith once lectured colleagues on how to be an expert witness
• 2007/11/15: CBC: Discredited pathologist [Dr. Charles Smith] linked to more possible wrongful convictions
• 2007/12/18: CBC: Pathologist jumped to 'ridiculous' conclusions, inquiry told
• 2007/10/15: CBC: Appeal Court acquits Ont. man jailed 12 years in niece's death
• 2008/05/06: PNAS: Assembly mechanism of recombinant spider silk proteins by S. Rammensee et al.
• 2008/05/05: TC: Tales of futures past - What the future didn't bring
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• 2008/05/01: BBC: Lesbos islanders dispute gay name Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian". The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally. The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians. Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?
• 2008/04/30: BBC: Device 'spins silk like spiders' - A device that partially mimics the process by which spiders produce fine, yet super-strong, silks has been built.
• Erowid: LSD
• Painting with Water
• 2008/04/25: PhysOrg: Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages
• 2008/04/25: BBC: UK couple 'miracle' triplets joy - A midwife has beaten the odds by giving birth to three identical bouncing baby girls
• 2008/04/19: SlashDot: InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May
• 2008/04/16: BBC: US army develops robotic exoskeletons for soldiers
• 2008/04/16: NewScientist: Terahertz speed circuits get closer - the first waveguides that can steer terahertz signals
• FallingRain: Directory of Cities and Towns in World
• Wiki: Natural person
• Wiki: Legal Person aka Juridical Person or Juristic Person
• Wiki: Corporation
• 2008/04/09: Telegraph(UK): William Caxton's prayer book saved by National Trust
• 2008/04/15: Eureka: Getting wired for terahertz computing - A step toward circuits for superfast far-infrared computers
• 2008/04/15: SlashDot: Building a 5-Ton Calculator From 19th-Century Plans [a Babbage Difference Engine #2]
• 2008/04/10: PlausibleFutures: Top 25 potential threats to UK
• 2008/04/11: OLJ: Hope is for suckers
• Understanding USA - Understanding UNDERSTANDING
• Wiki: The Corporation
• Hubble: Monitoring Internet Reachability in Real-Time
• 2008/03/31: Times(UK): Orgies through the ages
• 2008/04/07: PhysOrg: Newly discovered 'superinsulators' promise to transform materials research, electronics design
• 2008/04/07: Guardian(UK): Adults are idiots' :Laurie Anderson
• 2008/04/01: DA: Manifestos, etc. (Accords, Declarations, Calls to Arms, Codes of Practice, Polemics)
• MIStupid - The Online Knowledge Magazine
• 2008/04/01: CBC: Stanley Park's hollow tree gets the axe
• 2008/03/31: CNN: Top 10 April Fools' work pranks
• 2008/03/24: HuffPo: The Democratization of the Music Industry
  [...] Once again, enter the digital age. The Internet has created new media outlets and given everyone global access. [...] Subjectivity and filters have been removed. All music can be discovered, downloaded, shared, promoted, heard and bought directly by the audience itself. It is truly the democratization of an industry. [...] Allowing all music creators "in" is both exciting and frightening. Some argue that we need subjective gatekeepers as filters. No matter which way you feel about it, there are a few indisputable facts -- control has been taken away from the "four major labels" and the traditional media outlets. We, the "masses," now have access to create, distribute, discover, promote, share and listen to any music. Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want. It is then the public, not a corporation that gets to decide what is bad and good.
• 2008/03/12: DailyWTF: You'll Need to Come Downtown
• 2008/03/27: SlashDot: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
• 2008/03/21: News(Au): Children think Winston Churchill walked on moon
• 2008/03/21: SlashDot: Array-Based Memory May Put a Terabyte On a Chip
• 2008/03/10: Onion: Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt
• DigitalHome: Gray-Hoverman Antenna
• 2008/03/14: SlashDot: Hobbyists Create GPLed DIY Super TV Antenna
• 2008/03/14: TerraDaily: Earth's innermost core discovery confirmed
• 2008/03/13: PhysOrg: 21st Century grand engineering challenges unveiled
  The Challenges:
  
  • Make solar energy affordable
  • Provide energy from fusion
  • Develop carbon sequestration methods
  • Manage the nitrogen cycle
  • Provide access to clean water
  • Restore and improve urban infrastructure
  • Advance health informatics
  • Engineer better medicines
  • Reverse-engineer the brain
  • Prevent nuclear terror
  • Secure cyberspace
  • Enhance virtual reality
  • Advance personalized learning
• 2008/03/12: BBC: NZ dolphin rescues beached whales
  A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand.
• Wiki: Planetary engineering
• Wiki: Lagrangian point
• 2008/03/08: BBC: English Auschwitz survivor dies
  An Englishman who survived the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz and dedicated his life to telling the story of the Holocaust, has died, aged 97
• 2008/03/07: NewScientist: Quantum dot memory may be 'Holy Grail' of computing
• 2008/03/05: Register: Malaysian woman jailed for worshipping teapot
• 2008/03/02: Overclock3D: OCZ prepares Neural Impulse Actuator for shipping next week
• 2008/02/26: NYT: History Survey Stumps U.S. Teens
• 2008/02/28: BBC: Fisherman swims 10 hours to shore
  A fisherman swam for more than 10 hours to find help for the two companions he left behind after their boat sank off the east coast of Australia
• 2008/02/27: SlashDot: Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet
• Wiki: List of countries by GDP (nominal)
• 2008/02/25: Times(UK): [Book Review] _Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present_ by Lisa Appignanesi
• 2008/02/25: BBC: Adobe fuses on and offline worlds [Air]
• 2008/02/20: BBC: Brain control headset for gamers - Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone
• Wiki: Areopagus
• 2008/02/21: Sandia: One million trillion 'flops' per second targeted by new Institute for Advanced Architectures
  "Exascale" computing envisioned by Sandia and Oak Ridge researchers
• 2008/02/20: GDuartes: Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
• 2008/02/17: WaPo: The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading
• 2008/02/17: WaPo: The Dumbing Of America - Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
• 2008/02/18: SST: America the Illiterate
• 2008/02/19: BBC: 'Hacker' [Jon Lech Johansen] launches iTunes copying - A firm run by a notorious Norwegian hacker offers software to make sharing music and films easier
• The Domesday Book
• Theoi Greek Mythology -- Exploring Mythology & the Greek Gods in Classical Literature & Art
• The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA)
• Engineering's Grand Challenges
• 2008/02/14: Guardian(UK): Ginsberg first recording [of Howl] found after 50 years
• 2008/02/13: BBC: Nanowires allow 'power dressing'
  "Power dressing" may soon have a very different and literal meaning. Scientists in the US have developed novel brush-like fibres that generate electrical energy from movement. Weaving them into a material could allow designers to create "smart" clothes which harness body movement to power portable electronic gadgets.
• 2008/02/11: CBC: CRTC to hear applications for new over-the-air HDTV stations
  Canada's federal broadcast regulator will start hearings Tuesday on whether it will allow two new entrants in the over-the-air television market with the unique provision that their signals would be in high definition. Toronto businessman John Bitove has proposed to start the first over-the-air high-definition TV network with stations in Canada's eight biggest cities. Another entrant, Yes TV, wants a licence to operate a station for the Toronto market. The proposals have drawn stern opposition from television's big players such as CTV and Global, which argue that they are gearing up for the advent of HDTV, and competition for advertising dollars is already overly tight.
• 2008/02/04: RDC: Red Dot Campaign reminds consumers to take advantage of Canada Post's Consumer Choice Option to Refuse Junk Mail
• Red Dot Campaign - Say NO to Junk Mail
• 2008/02/11: Yahoo: Website promotes little-known option to stop Canada Post delivering junk mail
  With just a few seconds of effort, anyone can easily shrink their impact on the environment by telling Canada Post to stop delivering junk mail - but only two per cent of Canadian homes have done it. Canada Post says it's because people want to get flyers and ads delivered at their door. Vancouver's Beth Ringdahl begs to differ. Ringdahl's website, www.reddotcampaign.ca, spells out a simple two-step process to block junk mail: It's as easy as filling out a downloaded form and leaving a note on your mailbox. For more than a decade, Canada Post has been quietly acknowledging such requests, halting junk mail deliveries and marking a homeowner's internal file with a red dot - hence the name of Ringdahl's campaign.
• 2008/02/06: SciDaily: New Process Makes Nanofibers In Complex Shapes And Unlimited Lengths
• 2008/01/30: UIUC: New process makes nanofibers in complex shapes and unlimited lengths
• 2008/02/08: PhysOrg: Apparently Immaculate Komodos Hatched
• 2008/02/06: BBC: Holograms could soon be helping monitor surgical procedures after a faster way to make the 3D images is discovered
• Wiki: Roger's Profanisaurus
• 2008/02/04: ChinaDaily: Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth
  Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real. The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth. And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.
• 2008/02/04: BBC: Chips pass two billion milestone
  The first chip to pack more than two billion transistors has been launched by silicon giant Intel. The quad-core chip, known as Tukwila, is designed for high-end servers...
• 2008/02/03: Guardian(UK): Call to seize secret church abuse files - Victims urge judge to demand access to archives
  An Irish judge has been urged to seize confidential church files on child abuse which have led to a dispute between two of Ireland's leading Catholic clerics. Victims of clerical sexual and physical abuse from Ireland's notorious industrial schools last night urged Mr Justice Ryan to demand access to 5,000 documents relating to sexual abuse by priests and, crucially, members of the religious orders.
• 2008/02/01: BoomanTrib: Our Corporate Overlords Don't Like Atheists
• 2008/01/29: Section15: Viola Desmond unintentional revolutionary
• 2008/01/29: IHT: From the Berbers to Bach by Yo-Yo Ma
• 2008/01/25: TreeHugger: Driver Sues Dead Cyclist for Damage To His Audi
• 2008/01/23: AngryBear: Pharma research versus 'admin/marketing' costs
  From this new estimate, it appears that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on R&D. These numbers clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, contrary to the industry's claim.
• 2008/01/21: CBC: Algae could be key to computer chip breakthrough - biological nanofabrication of chips
• 2008/01/18: CBC: A circuit for the eye
  U.S. engineers have successfully implanted an electric circuit into a contact lens, a technology that might eventually let users see data while leaving their regular vision unchanged. "Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating, superimposed on the world outside," Babak Parviz, a University of Washington electrical engineering professor, said in a release.
• 2008/01/18: LNFB: How Not to Do a Time Capsule
• 2008/01/10: DotEarth: Living With Fluorescent Light (or No Light)
• 2008/01/09: SlashDot: Plastic Fiber Could Make Optical Networking a DIY Project
• WWI: Transcripts of British soldier Harry Lamin's letters from the first World War
• 2008/01/08: BBC: Intel predicts the personal net
• 2008/01/06: NYT: What This Gadget Can Do Is Up to You
  "HACKERS, welcome! Here are detailed circuit diagrams of our products --- modify them as you wish." That's not an announcement you'll find on the Web sites of most consumer electronics manufacturers, who tend to keep information on the innards of their machines as private as possible. But Neuros Technology International, creator of a new video recorder, has decided to go in a different direction. The company, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or "hack" the device --- and then pass along the improvements to others. The OSD is a versatile recorder. Using a memory card or a U.S.B. storage device, it saves copies of DVDs, VHS tapes and television programs from satellite receivers, cable boxes, TVs and any other device with standard video output. Because the OSD saves the recordings in the popular compressed video format MPEG-4 (pronounced EM-peg), the programs can be watched on a host of devices, including iPods and smartphones.
• 2007/12/11: Discover: Copernicus the Surprise Genius - The man who proved heliocentrism never thought his ideas would amount to much
• 2008/01/04: PhysOrg: Man Awake, Talking After 47-Floor Fall
• 2008/01/02: CanWest: Big firms are too powerful, poll finds - Informed, wired citizens want greater controls
  The majority of the world's most informed, engaged and connected citizens believe large corporations have too much influence over government decisions and wield more power than governments, according to a poll conducted by Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
• 2007/12/22: TBO: Polk Needled, Noodled In Evolution Flap [with Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster]
• Wiki: Ralph Steadman
• Wiki: Hunter S. Thompson
• 2007/12/23: Deltoid: The first Christmas revisited
• 2007/12/22: APOD: Tyrrhenian Sea and Solstice Sky
• MIT: OpenCourseware
• 2007/12/20: PhysOrg: Ireland to beam ancient solstice 'clock' to global audience
• 2007/12/20: Eureka: Myth of a cultural elite -- education, social status determine what we attend, listen to and watch
• 2007/12/20: CSO: The Top 10 Data Breaches of 2007
  Stolen hard drives, websites infected with malware and Social Security numbers as passwords--the most brilliant lunacy of a year full of security disclosures.
• 2007/12/17: WSJ: Sock It to Me: Competitive Knitters Get Deadly Serious
• 2007/12/18: PhysOrg: IBM Reveals Five Innovations that Will Change Our Lives Over the Next Five Years
• 2007/12/17: NYT: Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
• 2007/12/13: PhysOrg: Brain-computer link systems on the brink of breakthrough, study finds
• 2007/12/04: Snopes: Computer Storage (1956) [IBM 305 RAMAC]
• 2007/12/10: AngryBear: Vocabulary lessons, add to spellcheck
• 2007/12/08: Guardian(UK): A hunger for books
  Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet
• 2007/12/06: BBC: Light to shrink computer clusters - Supercomputers may one day be the size of a laptop thanks to research by IBM
• 2007/11/19: MPilgrim: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
• OpenStreetMap
• WikiMapia
• 2007/11/29: Guardian(UK): Not dead yet: the newspaper in the days of digital anarchy
• 2007/11/19: BostonGlobe: Young people reading a lot less - Report laments the social costs
• 2007/11/: DRB: Retro-Future: To The Stars! [retro-futuristic graphics]
• 2007/11/26: BBC: A new scanner has been unveiled which can produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing radiation by as much as 80%
• 2007/11/26: Guardian(UK): Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock
  'Cultural guerrillas' cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop in Pantheon
• Wiki: Joel Fuhrman
• 2007/11/18: BoingBoing: Science and carbs - A big fat lie revisited
• 2007/11/17: SlashDot: In The US, Email Is Only For Old People
• 2007/11/15: NewScientist: Dew-harvesting 'web' conjures water out of thin air
• 2007/11/15: BBC: Colossus cracks codes once more - For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer is cracking codes at Bletchley Park
• eTools
• eScience
• 2007/11/07: SlashDot: Whose Laws Apply On the ISS?
• Global Incident Map Displaying Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News
• 2007/10/26: Wired: Terabyte Thumb Drives Made Possible by Nanotech Memory
• 2007/10/23: BBC: Super-strong body armour in sight
  A new type of carbon fibre, developed at the University of Cambridge, could be woven into super-strong body armour for the military and law enforcement
• RepRap: How to build RepRap 1.0 "Darwin"
• RepRap
• Break The Chain - Stop Junk E-mail and Misinformation
• 2007/10/17: PhysOrg: Innovations in Light-Emitting Wallpaper & Design
• 2007/10/15: BBC: Drive advance fuels terabyte era
  A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi
• 2007/10/15: CBC: Hitachi says shrunken disk drive heads will boost data storage
• 2007/10/09: PhysOrg: Discovery of retinal cell type ends 4-decade search
• 2007/10/08: SlashDot: Scientists Deliver 'God' Via A Helmet
• 2007/10/05: Telegraph(UK): Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar
• 2007/10/04: Eureka: U-M research: New plastic is strong as steel, transparent
• Wiki: Gran Colombia
• 2007/09/30: AFP: 50 years on, Sputnik achievement remains undimmed
• 2007/09/29: BBC: British Library books go digital
  More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library. The programme focuses on 19th Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions. The library believes online access to the titles will help teachers. "If there are no modern editions teachers cannot use them for their courses," said Dr Kristian Jensen, from the British Library. "What we can read now is predetermined by a long tradition of what has been considered great literature," he added. At full production approximately 50,000 pages per working day will be scanned
• Wiki: Jeri Ellsworth
• Wiki: Slide rule
• 2007/09/26: TStar: Manitoba holiday named for Riel
  Manitoba's new February holiday [the third Monday of February] will be called Louis Riel Day.
• 2007/09/25: BBC: Germany to build maglev railway
  Germany has come up with the funds to launch its first magnetic levitation - or maglev - rail service. The state of Bavaria is to build the high-speed railway line from Munich city centre to its airport, making it Europe's first commercial track
• 2007/09/23: AFP: Veteran mime artist Marcel Marceau dead at 84
• 2007/09/16: Eureka: Penn engineers design computer memory in nanoscale form that retrieves data 1,000 times faster
• DigiBarn: Computer Lib/Dream Machines [by Theodor H. Nelson] Retrospective
• 2007/09/14: SciDaily: Startling Number Of Students Are Being Battered, Sexually Abused Or Stalked
  A startling number of high school and college students -- both female and male -- are being battered, sexually abused or stalked by their dates, according to a Kansas State University professor. "Approximately 30 percent of college students have been in relationships that involve physical aggression. Even more have been in relationships that are emotionally abusive," said Sandra Stith, director of the marriage and family therapy program at K-State and a nationally recognized expert in domestic violence. Likewise, approximately 25 percent of high school students who are in relationships are subjected to abuse, according to Stith.
• 2007/09/14: SMH: Forgiving Amish help killer's widow
• 2007/09/13: SlashDot: "Lifesaver Bottle" Filters Viruses Out of Water
• 2007/09/09: PhysOrg: Techies Ponder Computers Smarter Than Us [The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity]
• 2007/09/07: SF Chronicle: Public meeting [The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity] will re-examine future of artificial intelligence
• 2007/09/03: PhysOrg: Science should be 'as exciting as science fiction' says [British astrophysicist, Stephen] Hawking
• 2007/08/29: TerraDaily: The Man To Contact When Calling Home From Across The Galaxy [Frank Drake]
• 2007/08/29: Eureka: Writing with pictures: toward a unifying theory of consumer response to images
• 2007/08/29: DerSpiegel: Scientist Call for Earth 'Backup' on Moon
  Scientists hope to put a library of human civilization on the moon in case of a cataclysmic, civilization-annihilating event. It would protect against the wholesale loss of human achievement.
• 2007/08/29: Guardian(UK): Trapped miners survived on diet of coal, urine and wife jokes
  Two Chinese miners, who were given up for dead after a tunnel collapse, dug their way to the surface on a six-day diet of coal nuggets and urine, a local newspaper reported today. In the latest example of the dire safety standards in Chinese mines, brothers Meng Xianchen and Meng Xianyou emerged exhausted and starving - but unscathed - from an illegal colliery on Friday, four days after rescue efforts had been called off.
• Ars Mathematica
• 2007/08/22: BBC: PlayStation to record digital TV
  PlayStation 3 (PS3) users in Europe will soon be able to record and playback digital TV on their console. Sony has unveiled a TV tuner which plugs into the PS3 and turns it into a personal video recorder...
• 2007/08/20: Kaourantin: What just happened to video on the web?
• 2007/08/14: BBC: Paper battery offers future power
  Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers. They have produced a sample slightly larger than a postage stamp that can release about 2.3 volts, enough to illuminate a small light. But the ambition is to produce reams of paper that could one day power a car
• VL: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
• CM: Canadian Holidays
• The Open Library
• 2007/03/14: MKaku: The Physics of Extraterrestrial Civilizations - How advanced could they possibly be?
• 2007/07/28: BoingBoing: Aluminum sea-urchin espresso maker
• 2007/07/24: BBC: Antique engines inspire nano chip
  The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers. The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago. Writing in the New Journal of Physics, the scientists say the machine would be built from nanometre sized components, just billionths of a metre across. Chips based on the design could be used in places, such as car engines, where silicon can be too delicate, they said. "What we are proposing is a new type of computing architecture that is only based on nano mechanical elements," said Professor Robert Blick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the paper.
• 2007/07/23: EnergyBulletin: The seven habits of highly subversive people
• 2007/07/22: CNet: Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
• EHL: Evolution of Human Languages - An International Project on the Linguistic Prehistory of Humanity
• 2007/06/26: BritannicaBlog: 10 Ways to Test Facts
• Science Videos Search Engine
• Instructables - How to make cool DIY projects
• 2007/06/30: NYRB: Our Biotech Future by Freeman Dyson
• 2007/06/23: Space: Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target for the 21st Century
• 2007/06/21: SciDaily: 'Super' Stainless Steel Developed - new alloys offer superior oxidation resistance
• Wiki: Popol Vuh
• 2007/06/18: NewScientist: Extreme empathy leaves people really touched
• 2007/06/07: BBC: Wireless energy promise powers up
• 2007/06/06: PhysOrg: Philips launches world's first one-terabyte external hard drive
• 2007/06/06: Eureka: How to lose weight and not go hungry: HU researcher develops drug that mimics feeling of 'fullness'
• 2007/06/05: SciDaily: Making Water From Thin Air [WatAir]
• 2007/06/04: SciDaily: Scientists Achieve Atomic Spectroscopy On A Chip
• 2007/06/04: HuffPo: Honesty: The Most Powerful Weapon In Business
  The secrets to success in business leadership aren't secrets at all. They're principals and lessons most of us already know, but ignore. Tell the truth. Simple is better than complicated. Work is a verb -- get to it. Share the credit. Listen more than you talk. Open your mind. They're in plain sight, staring us in the face, fundamental and familiar...
• 2007/05/25: DailyMail: Razor-thin TV screen you can wear as a T-shirt
• 2007/05/21: Eureka: In a first, scientists develop tiny implantable biocomputers
  Molecular devices' remarkably precise scans of cellular activity could revolutionize medicine Researchers at Harvard University and Princeton University have made a crucial step toward building biological computers, tiny implantable devices that can monitor the activities and characteristics of human cells. The information provided by these "molecular doctors," constructed entirely of DNA, RNA, and proteins, could eventually revolutionize medicine by directing therapies only to diseased cells or tissues.
• 2007/05/18: CWorld: Is speech recognition finally good enough?
• 2007/05/18: BBC: Chinese writing '8,000 years old'
  Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought. State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters. Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.
• 2007/05/16: Eureka: Inexpensive 'nanoglue' can bond nearly anything together
• 2007/05/11: PhysOrg: ESA presents the sharpest ever satellite map of Earth
• Fab@Home
• 2007/05/10: Tyee: The Self-Destruction of the CBC - New programming makes CBC look like an old person in a Fubu sweatsuit
• 2007/04/24: RobotWisdom: Warum ich so weise bin - I often complain to interviewers...
• 2007/04/28: AFP: "Star Trek" actor's [Scotty, aka James Doohan] ashes blast off for final frontier
• 2007/04/22: BostonGlobe: To end a romance, just press 'send' - Instant messaging altering the way we love
• 2007/04/23: PhysOrg: Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar
• 2007/04/23: Eureka: Bucky's brother -- The boron buckyball [B80] makes its debut - Materials scientists find stable, spherical form for boron
• Deviant Art
• 2007/04/20: SoS: Social Engineering Notes
• 2007/04/17: EmpireBurlesque: Doing the American Jump: Dylan in London
• 2007/04/18: BBC: Space shield to block radiation - British scientists are planning to see whether a Star Trek-style deflector shield could be built to protect astronauts from radiation
• 2007/04/13: Register(UK): New Laws of Robotics proposed for US kill-bots - Droid-on-droid mayhem OK'd; machines to ask before snuffing humans
• 2007/04/14: BBC: US students attending sexual abstinence classes are no more likely to abstain from sex than those who do not, according to a new study
• 2007/04/12: EmpireBurlesque: Kilgore Trout Has Left the Building: Kurt Vonnegut Dead
• 2007/04/12: PhysOrg: IBM Extends Moore's Law to the Third Dimension
• 2007/04/06: Xinhuanet: Joan of Arc relics fake, smell like vanilla
• 2007/04/02: CDreams: Another Inconvenient Truth
  The inconvenient truth is that a system of government of the people, by the people and for the people is well down the road to becoming a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.
• 2007/03/26: MUNews: Women of All Sizes Feel Badly about their Bodies after Seeing Models
• 2007/03/14: KKelly: The Maes-Garreau Point
• 2007/03/18: SlashDot: Scientists Demonstrate Thought-Controlled Computer
• 2007/03/16: People's Daily: CNN founder, Ted Turner apologizes for saying "chinaman"
• 2007/03/15: SciDaily: New Magnetic Switching Method Could Dramatically Speed Up Data Storage
• 2007/03/14: NetworkWorld: Research focused on enabling desktop computers to see the light
• 2007/03/14: PhysOrg: Research project could help create computers that run on light
• 2007/03/13: TechRev: Minsky on AI's Future -- To move artificial intelligence forward we must unpack human mental states
• Harvey The Invisible Rabbit's Pooka Page
• 2007/03/09: PhysOrg: Progress toward Artificial Photosynthesis?
• 2007/03/10: BBC: Subliminal images impact on brain
  The brain does register subliminal images even if a person is unaware they have seen them, UK researchers report.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill by Kenneth Rexroth -- A Memorial for Dylan Thomas
• 2007/02/28: BBC: Push for open access to research
  Internet law professor Michael Geist takes a look at a fundamental shift in the way research journals become available to the public Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement - called an open access principle - would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe. Despite scant media attention, word of the petition spread quickly throughout the scientific and research communities. Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world.
• 2007/02/27: PhysOrg: Scientists invent real-life 'tricorder' for chemical analysis
• 1953//: DesignObserver: (slideshow) The Good Citizen's Alphabet by Bertrand Russell
• 2007/02/24: TechRev: The Promise of Personal Supercomputers -- What will it take to put thousands of microprocessors in cell phones and laptops?
• 2007/02/19: TSR: The other side of the Fermi paradox
• Wiki: Fermi paradox
• 2007/02/14: StrangePaths: Interstellar Ark
• 2007/02/11: PCPer: Intel's 80 Core Terascale Chip Explored: 4GHz clocks and more
• 2007/02/09: PhysOrg: 3-D model shows big body of water in Earth's mantle
• 2007/02/05: Eureka: MIT 'optics on a chip' may revolutionize telecom, computing - Research integrates photonic circuitry on a silicon chip
• 2007/01/31: PhysOrg: Research cracks puzzle of why the bumble bee can fly so well
• 2007/01/30: BBC: PC World says farewell to floppy
  The time has come to bid farewell to one of the PC's more stalwart friends - the floppy disk. Computing superstore PC World said it will no longer sell the storage devices, affectionately known as floppies, once existing stock runs out.
• 2007/01/24: TechRev: Ultradense Molecular Memory -- Researchers develop a large-scale array of nanoscale memory circuits. [100 gigabits/cm^2]
• Godchecker: Your Guide To The Gods
• 2007/01/18: Guardian(UK): So much space, so little time: why aliens haven't found us yet
• 2007/01/18: Guardian(UK): Obituary - Robert Anton Wilson
• 2007/01/13: Wonkette: Guns & Dope Party Founder R.A. Wilson Is Dead
• 2007/01/12: HuffPo: Literary Loss [RAW]
• 2007/01/05: SciDaily: Super Slurper: From Laboratory Bench To Library Shelf
• 2006/12/29: CSM: When a Teacher of the Year takes on a failing school
• 2007//: Edge: The Edge Annual Question, 2007 -- What are you optimistic about? Why?
• 2006/12/: LifeBoat: Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism about the Human Future
• 2006/12/22: TechRev: What's the Best Q&A Site?
• 2006/12/23: SlashDot: Vending Machine For Books Coming Next Year
• Hacker's Dictionary: Sturgeon's Law
• 2006/12/13: Telegraph(UK): Computers 'could store entire life by 2026'
• Wikiquote
• 2006/12/10: SciDaily: Researcher's 3-D Digital Storage System Could Hold A Library On One Disc
• 2006/12/01: BoingBoing: Cory's future-of-books Forbes op-ed
• 2006/11/29: BBC: The delicate workings at the heart of a 2000-year-old analogue computer [Antikythera Mechanism] have been revealed by scientists
• 2006/11/24: TechRev: High-Definition Carbon Nanotube TVs - Motorola's new nanotube display technology is almost ready for prime time.
• 2006/11/25: NewScientist: How to live long and prosper [agings stats]
• JBaez: Tales of the Dodecahedron
• 2006/11/14: IBM: Build a Web spider on Linux - A simple spider and scraper collects Internet content
• 2006/11/09: Wired: Supercomputing's Next Revolution
• 2006/11/08: NewScientist: Wave-powered 'ducks' could purify [desalinate] seawater
• 2006/11/08: SlashDot: DARPA Starts Ultimate Language Translation Project
• 2006/11/01: BBC: Westerners 'are more promiscuous' -- People in western countries tend to have more sexual partners than those in the developing world, a study says.
• 2006/10/27: BDL: The Pace of Technological Change
• 2006/10/25: PhysOrg: Team develops DNA switch [nanoactuator] to interface living organisms with computers
• 2006/10/24: EnergyBulletin: Reasons to prepare for potential future disruptions (other than peak oil)
• 2006/10/24: UPI: Report finds sex always on men's minds
• 2006/10/23: TechRev: Cheap, Transparent, and Flexible Displays
  New high-performance transistors could lead to windows and helmet visors that double as high-quality displays.
• 2006/10/06: SlashDot: Creating Water from Thin Air
• 2006/10/06: PhysOrg: Toward Terahertz Detectors on a Single, Conventional Chip
• 2006/10/03: SlashDot: Magnetic Ring Could Launch Satellites, Weapons
• 2006/09/22: Wired: Grow Your Own Limbs - Darpa is spending millions investigating limb regeneration.
• 2006/09/06: BBC: Google opens up 200 years of news
• 2006/09/04: Register: Sandisk unveils V-mate MPEG-4 recorder
• Wiki: Tom Keating [1917 - 1984, famous art forger]
• 2006/08/31: BBC: 'Gym pill' for a no-work six-pack
  Scientists are racing to develop a muscle drug that could allow people to stay toned without exercising.
• 2006/08/25: BBC: Smart fabrics are back in fashion
• 2006/08/28: PhysOrg: Philips showcases production-ready Lumalive textile garments
• 2006/08/25: CNN: China-Russia plan joint mission to Mars
• 2006/08/17: SlashDot: $100 Laptop Takes Flight in Thailand
• 2006/08/17: Guardian(UK): Coming soon: 'smart' clothes with MP3 players [how about cameras & cell phones?]
• 2006/08/07: Guardian(UK): Lost document reveals Columbus as tyrant of the Caribbean
• 2006/08/06: BBC: How the web went world wide - Fifteen years ago web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee published details of his technology online.
• 2006/08/04: ArsTechnica: Holographic storage a reality before the end of the year
• UK Nat Archives: Domesday Book
• 2006/08/04: BBC: The Domesday Book has embarked on many varied journeys in its 920-year lifetime. Its latest stop is now the web.
• 2006/08/02: BBC: X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets - A series of hidden texts written by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being revealed by US scientists.
• 2006/08/02: BoingBoing: HOWTO sleep better
• 2006/07/31: TechRev: An Ultrasonic Tourniquet to Stop Battlefield Bleeding - The Pentagon is committing $51 million to creating a tool for acoustic cauterization.
• 2006/07/31: BBC: The secrets of animal attraction - Biologists have found evidence that people can sniff out the chemical signals of sexual attraction.
• 2006/07/26: UCI: UCI researchers "text mine" The New York Times, demonstrating ease and evolution of potent new technology
  Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.
  The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.
• 2006/07/26: BBC: Geckos inspire 'super-adhesive'
• 2006/07/19: DailyMail(UK): 19 minutes - how long working parents give their children
  A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday. The startling research shows the devastating impact that working full-time has on children who hardly see their parents. With less than 20 minutes spent with their parents every day, this is only enough time to eat a quick breakfast together or have a couple of bed-time stories. The Office for National Statistics looked at nearly 4,950 people over the age of 16 in Britain to find out what they do all day.
• 2006/07/12: Arxiv: Physical limits on information processing
• 2006/07/12: NSU: Bionic brains become a reality - Devices to help paralysed patients work computers set to get even faster.
• 2006/07/11: Eureka: Hopkins scientists show [psilocybin] hallucinogen in mushrooms creates universal 'mystical' experience
• LACMA: The Legacy of Genghis Khan
• 2006/07/12: BBC: Brain sensor allows mind-control
  A sensor implanted in a paralysed man's brain has enabled him to control objects through just the power thought.
• 2006/07/09: TLC: Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Artificial Blood Product
• 2006/07/08: Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Hit
  The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry -- from music to movies to TV -- will never be the same.
• 2006/07/08: PhysOrg: MIT researchers create visionary optic fibers
• 2006/07/06: Cornell: Researchers create a broadband light amplifier on a [silicon] chip
• Barcodepedia
• 2006/07/06: SlashDot: Handheld Device Reads Printed Words to the Blind
• 2006/06/28: SciDaily: Breakthrough In Silicon Photonics Devices
• 2006/06/26: Eureka: How to build a better brain - Helping children in earliest years is most cost-effective use of public funds, authors say
• 2006/06/26: BBC: Computers 'set to read our minds'
  An "emotionally aware" computer system designed to read people's minds by analysing expressions will be featured at a major London exhibition.
• 2006/05/08: How to Build a Low-Cost, Extended-Range RFID Skimmer by Ilan Kirschenbaum, Avishai Wool
• 2006/06/: ACM: The Rise and Fall of CORBA
• 2006/06/20: EETimes: IBM's 'frozen chip' claims speed record [500 GHz]
• 2006/06/13: BasqueRes: An adaptive interface for controlling the computer by thought
• 2006/06/09: Register: What's this 'scotomisation' in The Da Vinci Code?
  "Scotomisation" is the psychological tendency in people to see what they want to see and not see what they don't want to see - in situations, in themselves, in anything, even in a painting - due to the psychological impact that seeing (or not seeing) would inflict.
• 2006/06/07: PhysOrg: Video goggles turn iPod into virtual full-size TV
• 2006/06/05: Wired: GNU Radio Opens an Unseen World - Universal Radio Grabber: the USRP
• Wolfram: Poincaré Conjecture
• The Cephalopod Page -- Octopus, Squid, Cuttlefish, and Nautilus
• 2006/05/22: CDreams: Pass the Bread by Bill Moyers If the world confuses you a little, it confuses me a lot. When I graduated fifty years ago I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers questioned, and the odds are that you can look forward to being even more perplexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment. If your parents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I suspect they would tell you life confuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would.
• 2006/05/23: BBC: Hard knocks make gullible adults People who suffer hard knocks during childhood are more likely to become vulnerable adults, according to a new study by the University of Leicester. Scientists discovered that rather than becoming tough and streetwise, those who had suffered a troubled childhood and adolescence were easily misled. The physiological profiles of 60 volunteers were studied over six months as part of the research. It found early positive experiences make people stronger in later life.
• 2006/05/11: WorldChanging: Worldmapper: A New World View
• 2006/04/06: Pharyngula: Why the wingnuts hate Plan B
• 2006/05/07: BBC: UFO study finds no sign of aliens The 400-page report was kept secret for six years A confidential Ministry of Defence report on Unidentified Flying Objects has concluded that there is no proof of alien life forms.
• 2006/05/05: SciDaily: Lying Is Exposed By Micro-expressions We Can't Control
• 2006/05/06: Guardian(UK): [Obituary] Robert Walter Timbrell, sailor, born February 1 1920; died April 11 2006
• 2006/05/05: BBC: Angkor temple reopens to public - Archaeologists in Cambodia have completed the first part of what has been called the world's largest jigsaw puzzle.
• 2006/05/05: Guardian(UK): Greek gods prepare for comeback It has taken almost 2,000 years, but those who worship the 12 gods of ancient Greece have finally triumphed. An Athens court has ordered that the adulation of Zeus, Hera, Hermes, Athena and co is to be unbanned, paving the way for a comeback of pagans on Mount Olympus.
• 2006/05/03: BetterHumans: Quirkyalones amongst us
• 2006/04/28: Yahoo: Neutron Analysis Instrument Fired Up
• 2006/04/27: NSU: Artificial eye built to spy all - Self-building insect eyes could be used in cameras for wide-angle vision.
• 2006/04/26: SciDaily: Water And Nanoelectronics Will Mix To Create Ultra-dense Memory Storage Devices, Researchers Say Though a scheme for the dense arrangement and addressing of these nanowires remains to be developed, such an approach would enable a storage density of more than 100,000 terabits per cubic centimeter.
• 2006/04/27: BBC: Insect eye inspires future vision An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US. The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye.
• 2003/08/13: EGullet: Knife Maintenance and Sharpening
• 2006/04/26: CPunch: The Rich Life of Jane Jacobs
• 2006/04/24: SciDaily: Scientists Reveal How A Novel Ceramic Achieves Directional Conduction
• 2006/04/23: Guardian(UK): Let us spray Billed as libido in an atomiser, PT-141 will finally offer women the chance to turn on their sexual desire as and when they need it. Or so the science says. But there are concerns. Will sex in a spray usher in an age of 'McNookie' - quick easy couplings low on emotional nutrition?
• 2006/02/17: IEET: Universal Superlongevity: Is It Inevitable And Is It Good?
• 2006/04/19: BoingBoing: Canned, fruit-flavored luxury oxygen on sale
• 2006/04/12: TheCellar: Ellsworth AFB foam test
• 2006/04/14 CNet: A high-tech way to defrost
• Clay: Millennium Prize Problems
• 2006/04/13: BBC: Natural light 'to reinvent bulbs' A light source that could put the traditional light bulb in the shade has been invented by US scientists.
• 2006/04/12: NSU: Let there be light - Organic LEDs use fluorescence to pump up efficiency.
• 2006/04/12: Eureka: High efficiency flat light source invented [OLED: organic light-emitting device]
• 2006/04/11: Eureka: Waterproof superglue may be strongest in nature - Bacterial adhesive is 2-3 times stronger than common commercial glues
• 2006/04/02: PhysOrg: Japan launches digital TV on cellphones
• 2006/03/26: EETimes: InPhase claims data storage density record [holographic data storage]
• 2006/03/24: GizMag: New data transmission record [2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link, equivalent to] 60 DVDs per second
• 2006/03/22: NSU: 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere
• 2006/03/19: NYT: This Essay Breaks the Law
• 2006/03/17: Scotsman: 20lb gold coin [struck in the reign of King James VI of Scotland] put up for auction
• 2006/03/18: BBC: Scientists make 'bionic' muscles - Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen
• 2006/03/15: Eureka: Saved by 'sand' poured into wounds [QuikClot, Bioglass]
• 2006/03/12: BBC: Total home control within reach - Smart homes are still expensive. But some items are becoming more affordable...
• 2006/03/03: KKelly: Speculations on the Future of Science
• 2006/03/05: IBM:DevNet: Better networking with SCTP
• 2006/03/05: THP: The Liberation of Meaninglessness
• POMO: The Postmodernism Generator
• 2006/02/28: BBC: 'Pompeii of the East' discovered
• 2006/02/28: BBC: [UK] Spending on books dwarfed by ICT [Information & Communication Technology]
  Schools spend more than five times as much on computer-based resources as on books, an analysis suggests [£150m on books, £426.3m on ICT]
• 2006/02/27: BoingBoing: Benjamin Franklin's 13-point plan for virtuous living
• The Coming Dark Age
• 2006/02/20: BoingBoing: Fun with liquid nitrogen
• 2006/02/16: Wired: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone
• 2006/02/19: Cornell: On the wings of dragonflies: Flapping insect uses drag to carry its weight, offering insight into intricacies of flight
• 2006/02/13: PhysOrg: Tabletop nuclear fusion device developed
• 2006/02/13: Eureka: 'Double crystal fusion' could pave the way for portable device
• Goodbye Babylon
• 2006/02/09: Eureka: NJIT professor discovers better way to desalinate water [a membrane distillation process]
• 2006/01/31: LS: Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams
• JTG: John Taylor Gatto - Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling
• 2006/01/28: ICH: The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
• 2006//: Rand: 50 Books for Thinking About the Future Human Condition
• 2006/01/25: SciDaily: Magnetic Spin Details May Lead To New Devices
• 2006/01/25: SciDaily: First Impressions Of Beauty May Demonstrate Why The Pretty Prosper
• 2006/01/25: BBC: Time changes modern human's face - Researchers have found that the shape of the human skull has changed significantly over the past 650 years
• WikiMedia [400,000+ files]
• 2006/01/21: Wired: Screening the Latest Bestseller [Sony Reader]
• 2006/01/12: Asia Times: Medium-speed maglev train developed
• 2006/01/11: Eureka: Memory design breakthrough can lead to faster computers - Team improves infinitesimal rings for speedy, reliable, efficient magnetic memory
• 2006/01/02: Scotsman: Search gets under way for the seven modern wonders of the world
• 2006/01/07: DeseretNews: Shall we enhance? Transhumanism says we're a species in flux
• UA: DrugBank
• 2006/01/02: NewScientist: 13 things that do not make sense
• 2005/12/24: PCWorld: The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years
• 2005/12/25: WashPost: Literacy of College Graduates Is on Decline - Survey's Finding of a Drop in Reading Proficiency Is Inexplicable, Experts Say
• 2005/12/22: AIP: A Scalable Quantum Computer Chip
• 2005/12/22: PhysOrg: Old TVs to follow typewriters to dustbin under US Senate bill
• 2005/12/20: BBC: 'Intelligent design' teaching ban
  A court in the US has ruled against the teaching of the theory of "intelligent design" alongside Darwinian evolution.
• Wiki: Hilbert's twenty-three problems
• 2005/12/16: PF: The 25 most important scientific questions
• 2005/12/12: Eureka: Tiny self-assembling cubes could carry medicine, cell therapy
• 2005/12/09: SciDaily: Movement Of Earth's North Magnetic Pole Accelerating Rapidly
• 2005/12/08: BBC: Geologists witness 'ocean birth' - Scientists say they have witnessed the possible birth of a future ocean basin growing in north-eastern Ethiopia.
• 2005/12/02: PhysOrg: Scratches no match for Nissan's new car paint
• 2005/12/06: MSNBC: Google: Ten Golden Rules
• 2005/12/05: Eureka: Mathematician's insight helps unravel knotty problem - Rice topologist Shelly Harvey discovers new pattern in Poincaré's paths
• 2005/12/01: PCMag: Eleksen Introduces Electro Fabric
• 2005/11/29: BBC: Romantic love 'lasts just a year' - Some couples may disagree, but romantic love lasts little more than a year, Italian scientists believe.
• 2005/11/28: BBC: Science 'must teach experiments' - The UK's competitiveness could be threatened by a lack of practical science teaching, a report says.
• 2005/11/25: NewScientist: Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame [300 gig capacity]
• 2005/11/09: Onion: I'm Very Interested In Hearing Some Half-Baked Theories
• 2005/11/21: EETimes: Maxell, In-Phase team on holographic disk [1.6 terabytes per disk and data rates as high as 120 megabytes per second]
• 2005/11/14: SMH: Unto us the Machine is born [Kevin kelly on the web]
• UCSB: Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
• 2005/11/18: BBC: Butterfly wings work like LEDs
• 2005/11/17: GlobeTech: Requiem for Usenet
• 2005/11/17: BBC: UN predicts 'internet of things'
• 2005/11/15: SciDaily: UCSB Researchers Develop Hybrid Silicon Evanescent Laser
• 2005/11/: RedPepper: The future is geek
• 2005/11/09: RTC: Patents Chilling Science?
• 2005/11/09: BBC: Tech guru Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0
• 2005/11/08: Wired: History's [10] Worst Software Bugs
• 2005/11/01: Foresight: Foresight Nanotechnology Challenges
  1. Meeting global energy needs with clean solutions
  2. Providing abundant clean water globally
  3. Increasing the health and longevity of human life
  4. Maximizing the productivity of agriculture
  5. Making powerful information technology available everywhere
  6. Enabling the development of space
• Book a Minute
• Transliterature, A Humanist Design
• 2005 Science Photographs
• 2005/10/21: PhysOrg: World's First 10.1" Flexible Electronic Paper Display
• 2005/10/21: CBC: World's top writers recruited to rewrite ancient tales
• 2005/10/20: Eureka: Stronger than steel, harder than diamonds - FSU researcher developing numerous uses for extraordinary 'buckypaper'
• 2005/10/14: BBC: Flea protein [resilin] may repair arteries
  A protein responsible for fleas' astonishing jumping power could be harnessed to repair damaged arteries.
• 2005/10/10: MadPenguin: Sun Microsystems' Florian Reuter: will the real XML please stand up!
• 2005/10/04: NSU: Nanotubes refine computer memory - Manufacturers gear up to mass-produce unconventional chips.
• 2005/08/: CLIR: Survey of Reissues of U.S. Recordings
• 2005/10/02: Times(UK): So what do you have to do to find happiness? Are we wired up to be cheerful, or are some of us destined to languish in abject misery?
• 2005/10/03: BoingBoing: Internet Archive and Yahoo announce open scanned-in-book index
• 2005/10/03: Eureka: Finding rewrites the evolutionary history of the origin of potatoes
• 2005/10/03: BBC: Yahoo is taking on Google with its own digital archive of books, audio and video.
• 2005/10/03: BBC: A school in Arizona, US, has thrown out its paper-based text books and is relying solely on laptops and digital material to teach its pupils.
• Rhetoric
• 2005/09/: JRS: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
• 2005/09/22: Economist: The paperless library
• 2005/09/27: UPenn: A Beam of Light on a Path of Gold to a Miniaturized World: Penn Theorists to Create Optical Circuit Elements
• SecHum: The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles
• 2005/08/15: GEx: Cuba and Venezuela propose 'Miracle Mission' in which sight is restored to the blind
• 2005/09/20: Guardian(UK): Art detective exposes hidden images to fuel Da Vinci Code conspiracies
• 2005/09/17: SciNews: Forever Young: Digging for the roots of stem cells
• 2005/09/16: BoingBoing: Color photos of the US 1939-1945
• 2005/09/14: SciDaily: Abused Children Stay Highly Attuned To Anger
• 2005/09/13: Eureka: NIST improves accuracy of 'watt balance' method for defining the kilogram
• 2005/09/12: SciDaily: Supersizing The Supercomputers: What's Next?
• 2005/09/09: Eureka: Old people aren't rude, just uninhibited: new research
• 2005/09/09: SciDaily: Novel Material May Demonstrate Long-sought 'Liquid' Magnetic State
• 2005/09/08: EETimes: Carbon nanotube TV demonstrated
• 2005/09/06: Wired: The Next Mother Lode: Mars
• 2005/09/03: BoingBoing: Singapore's cool-ass hard-drive video-players
• 2005/08/23: Slate: Crack Then. Meth Now. - What the press didn't learn from the last drug panic
• 2005/08/26: BostonGlobe: Who'll mind the mainframes? Few students are learning to run decidedly unsexy, but vital, systems
• 2005/09/: TechRev: Holographic Memory
• 2005/08/21: Observer: How a novelist's twist sparked academic feud
• 2005/08/19: BoingBoing: Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows
• 2005/08/18: PhysicsWeb: Nanotubes make perfect diodes
• 2005/08/18: SciDaily: How Butterflies Fly Thousands Of Miles Without Getting Lost Revealed By Researchers [UV light]
• 2005/08/17: BBC: A strange 525 million-year-old fossil creature is baffling scientists because it does not fit neatly into any existing animal groups.
• 2005/08/03: NatGeo: The Human-Techno Future: How Weird? How Soon?
• 2005/08/13: BBC: Scientists aim for lab-grown meat
  An international research team has proposed new techniques that may lead to the mass production of meat reared not on the farm, but in the laboratory.
• 2005/08/08: SlashDot: Quantum Information Can be Negative
• 2005/08/08: BBC: Sign of the Times - Dixons to end 35mm camera sales
• 2005/08/04: Eureka: Study may expand applied benefits of super-hard ceramics
• 2005/08/02: Eureka: A new spin on silicon - 'Orbitronics' could keep silicon-based computing going after today's technology reaches its limits
• 2005/08/01: SciDaily: How Butterflies Fly Thousands Of Miles Without Getting Lost
• 2005/07/12: People's Daily: Egyptian-Italian papyrus lab opens in Cairo: daily
• 2005/07/30: Telegraph(UK): It knows where you are...[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Planet]
• 2005/07/27: NewScientist: First measurements of Earth's core radioactivity
• NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts -- Funded Studies
• 2005/07/26: NewScientist: Japan plans mind-boggling number-cruncher
• 2005/07/25: CNN: Japan to build world's fastest supercomputer
• 2005/07/26: Guardian(UK): How 10 quadrillion sums a second will make computer the world's fastest
• 2005/07/25: BoingBoing: Promise TV -- PVR records a month's worth of shows from all channels
• 2005/07/22: BoingBoing: More on the CIA's evil genius, Dr. Sidney Gottleib
• 2005/07/14: Guardian(UK): Scientists predict brave new world of brain pills - Common use of drugs to improve the mind poses ethical challenge
• 2005/07/12: BBC: Universe 'too queer' to grasp
  Scientist Professor Richard Dawkins has opened a global conference of big thinkers warning that our Universe may be just "too queer" to understand.
• 2005/07/11: SlashDot: Attack of the Corporate Weasel Words
• 2005/07/07: NWO: Fundamental limitation to quantum computers [spontaneous decoherence]
• 2005/07/05: BBC: TV 'may stunt toddlers' learning'
• 2005/07/01: Science: 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century
• 2005/06/30: Eureka: What don't we know? Science presents the great unsolved scientific mysteries of our time
• 2005/06/15: NOP: World Culture Score Index Examines Global Media
• 2005/06/03: KoreaTimes: Scientists Develop Next-Generation Memory Chip
• 2005/06/01: Eureka: Researchers develop new concept for single molecule transistor
• 2005/06/01: SciDaily: Nanotechnology Combined With Superconductivity Could Pave The Way For 'Spintronics'
• 2005/05/31: SciDaily: Face Value: Hidden Smiles Influence Consumption And Judgment
• 2005/05/27: Better Humans: The Case for Human Enhancement
• 2005/05/24: NASA: Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier
• 2005/05/23: MSNBC: Television Reloaded
• 2005/05/23: BBC: Wormhole 'no use' for time travel
• Snopes: The Unsolvable Math Problem
• 2005/05/22: SciDaily: Archimedes Manuscript Yields Secrets Under X-ray Gaze
• 2005/05/20: SciDaily: Learning Software Developed By Rutgers-Newark Scientist Helps 450,000 Students With Reading
• 2005/05/12: BetterHumans: Experimental Pill Boosts Smarts - Helps brain cells communicate better with tiredness
• 2005/05/09: PhysOrg: Motorola Debuts First Ever Nano Emissive Flat Screen Display Prototype
• 2005/05/09: ZDNet: Motorola builds nanotube-based display
• 2005/05/08: New Scientist: To conquer Venus, try a plane with a brain
• 2005/05/06: SciDaily: NNSA/LLNL Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record: Exceeds 100 Teraflops
• 2005/04/: BBC: Reith Lectures
• 2005/04/25: SciDaily: Optical Computer Made From Frozen Light
• 2005/04/22: BBC: Mice have been placed in a state of near suspended animation, raising the possibility that hibernation could one day be induced in humans.
• 2005/04/21: SciDaily: Spintronic Materials Show Their First Move
• 2005/04/20: CBC: Morning-after pill switches to non-prescription in Canada
• 2005/04/12: SciDaily: Solar Sail Technology Could Use Sun's Energy For Future Space Missions
• 2005/04/: FM: Piercing the peer-to-peer myths: An examination of the Canadian experience
• 2005/04/11: NewScientist: World's fastest transistor operates at blinding speed [604 GHz]
• 2005/04/06: LR: WASP Micro Air Vehicle (MAV)
• 2005/04/06: EETimes: Firm demonstrates 'control-by-thought' chip [Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. "BrainGate" interface]
• 2005/04/04: Eureka: Ophthalmologists and physicists team up to design 'bionic eye'
• 2005/04/04: SciDaily: Growing Your Own Replacement Teeth? Not Science Fiction!
• 2005/03/30: NSU: Materials library has the right stuff
• 2005/03/31: BBC: A paralysed man in the US has become the first person to benefit from a brain chip that reads his mind.
• 2005/03/31: Guardian(UK): Chip reads mind of paralysed man
• 2005/03/28: ET: Photonics Startup Pegs Q2'06 Production Date
• 2005/03/26: BBC: France's Maud Fontenoy has become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia.
• 2005/03/26: WorldChanging: FabLab Future Salon
• 2005/03/20: SciDaily: Quantum Computers May Be Easier To Build Than Predicted
• 2005/03/21: BBC: Confusion over high-definition TV
  Thousands of flat-panel TV sets have already been sold as "high-definition", but are in fact not able to display HD.
• 2000/05/24: Claymath: Millennium Problems
• 2005/03/17: New Scientist: 13 things that do not make sense
• 2005/03/15: Wired: Need a Building? Just Add Water
• 2005/03/16: PPARC: World's Largest Computing Grid Surpasses 100 Sites
• 2005/03/14: WorldChanging: Biological Engineering
• 2005/03/14: New Scientist: Mechanical chip promises huge data storage
• 2005/03/01: BBC: Kenyan school turns to handhelds - school textbooks have been digitised
• 2005/02/28: Nature: Engineers devise invisibility shield
• 2005/02/27: SlashDot: Nano-Scale Memory Fits A Terabit On A Square Inch
• 2005/02/27: BBC: Digital radios outstrip analogue Sales of digital radios have outstripped the demand for traditional sets for the first time, leading UK high street store Dixons has said.
• 2005/02/25: BBC: Mobiles 'part of social fabric'
• 2005/02/16: BBC: Intel unveils laser breakthrough
• 2005/02/15: BBC: Millions buy MP3 players in US - One in 10 adult Americans - equivalent to 22 million people - owns an MP3 player, according to a survey.
• 2005/02/07: BBC: Digital music downloads are being included in the main US singles chart for the first time.
• 2004/12/16: ITF: 30% of all new car warranty issues are microprocessor-related
• Wiki: Atlanta Nights
• 2005/01/28: PRWeb: Science Fiction Authors Hoax Vanity Publisher
• The Cuddly Menace
• Wiki: Timeline of evolution
• 2005/02/03: SciDaily: New Language Points To Foundations Of Human Grammar
• 2005/01/29: BoingBoing: How computers change writing
• 2005/01/24: SciDaily: Linguistics May Be Clue To Emotions, According To Penn State Research
• 2005/01/22: SciDaily: Nanoscale Electron Island Could Lead To New Efficient Flat-panel Displays
• Composites-By-Design
• 2004/12/13: BetterHumans: Working the Conscious Canvas
• 2004/12/10: BBC: Robotic pods take on car design
• 2004/12/09: Eureka: Identifying top quality CD and DVD media for archiving
• 2004/12/07: BBC: 'Brainwave' cap controls computer
• 2004/11/30: Eureka: Spider silks, the ecological materials of tomorrow?
• US Census Bureau: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
• 2004/11/29: Independent(UK): Knights Templar seek papal apology for 700 years of persecution
• 2004/11/08: FS: Future Salon with Doug Engelbart: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution
• 2004/10/28: SciFi: Lost Ed Wood Film Unearthed
• Cornell: Nanophotonics
• 2004/10/27: BDL: Cyborgs III - Direct brain-to-machine connections
• 2004/10/25: New Scientist: Brain prosthesis passes live tissue test
• 2004/10/25: New Scientist: New display 'as clear as a glossy magazine'
• 2004/10/21: Wired: Magazine Makes Gadget-Making Fun
• 2004/10/06: UR: Under the Surface, the Brain Seethes With Undiscovered Activity
• 2004/10/08: SciDaily: Researchers Find Chemosignal That Encourages Women's Sexual Desire
• 2004/10/06: BoingBoing: Kahle: Universal access to all human knowledge is possible
• 2004/09/17: AIP: An Antenna for Visible Light
• DIR: De Imperatoribus Romanis: An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors
• 2004/09/16: BBC: Kids create new sign language
• 2004/09/15: SciDaily: Children Follow Same Steps To Learn Vocabulary, Regardless Of Language Spoken
• Interpol: Recently Stolen Works of Art
• 2004/09/10: Wired: Cell Phone TV Is Coming
• 2004/09/10: SciDaily: Yale Scientists Bring Quantum Optics To A Microchip
• 2000/05/24: ClayMath: Millennium Problems
• 2004/08/25: BBC: Door open for silicon replacement [silicon carbide]
• 2004/08/23: Optware: 1 TB Holographic Versatile Disc
• Rosetta Project
• 2004/06/21: FFI: Resist Road to the 22 nm Technology Node
• 2004/08/21: BBC: C5 owners converge on town
• 2004/08/11: BBC: Japan unfurls solar sail in space
• 2004/08/10: SciDaily: Japan Deploys Solar Sail Film In Space
• 2004/08/09: JAXA: ISAS Deloyed Solar Sail Film in Space
• 2004/08/05: SciDaily: Tech Researchers Get $5 Million To Smooth Out Kinks In Electromagnetic Propulsion
• 2004/08/05: BoingBoing: Wooden postage stamp from Switzerland
• 2004/08/04: CSM: Space Law - Writing the rules to govern the cosmos
• 2004/08/03: Nature: Could astronauts sleep their way to the stars? - Space agency plans studies on human hibernation.
• 2004/08/03: RPTT: Photonic chips go 3D
• 2004/07/28: BBC: Squirrels emit 'silent scream'
• Psychedelic Library
• 2004/07/27: Engadget: How-To Turn your iPod in to a Universal Infrared Remote Control
• Kübler-Ross' Stages of Dying
• 2004/07/21: Eureka: What are babies thinking before they start talking?
• 2004/07/15: SciDaily: Los Alamos Pressure Process Makes Pure Zirconium Glass
• 2004/07/15: SciDaily: USC Scientist Invents Technique To Grow Superconducting And Magnetic 'Nanocables'
• 2004/07/08: RE: University Develops 12Tbyte Nano Memory
• MathWorld: Amicable Pair
• 2004/07/05: BBC: 'Magic ink' that makes metal grow
• 2004/07/03: BBC: Artificial bone hope for face ops
• 2004/06/28: SciDaily: Yale Scientists Decipher Odor Code
• 2004/06/27: People's Daily: China to set up longevity gene base
• 2004/06/26: NSU: Recipe unearthed for 'glassy metal'
• 2004/06/24: BBC: Norwegians try out TV on mobiles
• 2004/06/26: Guardian(UK): Sports supplement that holds the key to a woman's libido [DHEA]
• 2004/06/17: SciDaily: Emory Researchers Study The Effects Of Zen Meditation On The Brain
• 2004/06/11: BBC: 19th Century news going online
  More than a million pages from 19th Century British newspapers are to be put online by the British Library.
• 2004/06/12: Guardian(UK): Made in Japan: a perfect night's sleep
• 2004/06/10: Wired: A Jet-Powered PDA for Astronauts
• 2004/06/08: BBC: Eco glass cleans itself with Sun
  A revolutionary kind of glass that needs little cleaning could mean soap and chamois are binned for good.
• 2004/06/02: SciDaily: NASA Researchers Customize Lab-on-a-chip' Technology
• 2004/06/02: Eureka: Revolutionary antenna technology reduces size dramatically
• 2004/06/02: SciDaily: World Mental Health Surveys Find Mental Disorders Highly Prevalent And Often Untreated
• 2004/06/02: SciDaily: Nearly One-third Of The Calories In The US Diet Comprised Of Junk Food, Researcher Finds
• UN:WHO: Ultraviolet radiation: global solar UV index
• 2004/05/27: Eureka: New theory suggests people are attracted to religion for 16 reasons
• 2004/05/19: New Scientist: Nanobacteria revelations provoke new controversy
• 2004/05/18: CBC: Morning-after pill will be available without prescription across Canada
• 2004/05/13: Eureka: Satellites see shadows of ancient glaciers
• 2004/05/06: BBC: Tiny robot walker made from DNA
• 2004/01/12: Eureka: Chemists crack secrets of nature's super glue
• 2004/01/14: Wired: Transforming Thoughts Into Deeds
• 2004/01/14: Eureka: A possible new form of 'supersolid' matter - Frozen helium-4 behaves like a combination of solid and superfluid
• 2004/01/19: SciDaily: Evidence That Memories Are Consolidated During Sleep
• 2004/01/28: Yahoo: Scientists Create New Form of Matter [fermionic condensate]
• 2004/01/29: BBC: New form of matter created in lab
• 2004/02/10: SciDaily: MIT Team Discovers Memory Mechanism
• 2004/02/06: Cell: (abstract) Translational Control by MAPK Signaling in Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity and Memory
• 2004/02/26: NYRB: A Passion for Evolution
• 2004/02/11: NYT: Intel Says Chip Speed Breakthrough Will Alter Cyberworld
• 2004/02/13: Eureka: Communicating with machines: What the next generation of speech recognizers will do
• Smart Dust - Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter
• BLEEX: Exoskeleton
• 2004/03/02: Wired: The Masters of Memory Lane
• 2004/03/08: BBC: Science closes in on perfect lens
• 2004/03/05: SciDaily: Researchers Create Terahertz Magnetism From Non-magnetic Materials
• 2004/03/12: New Scientist: 100-metre nanotube thread pulled from furnace
• 2004/03/24: BBC: Centre opens to 'save' languages [Hans Rausing Endangered Languages project]
• HRELP: Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project
• NASA: Stardust Technology: Aerogel
• 2004/04/07: BBC: Scientists seek 'map of science'
• 2004/04/12: Eureka: New molecule heralds breakthrough in electronic plastics
• 2004/04/15: Eureka: Brain areas identified that 'decode' emotions of others
• 2004/04/17: BBC: Trekkie communicator ready to go
• 2004/04/19: BBC: Move to end need for injections
• 2004/04/23: SciDaily: Stacked, Packed Nanowires Hold Triplexed Megadata
• 2004/04/27: BBC: 'Laser vision' offers new insights
• 2004/04/29: ABC(Au): Meet Dr DNA, your own nanocomputer
• 2004/04/29: BBC: DNA computers to fight diseases

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Last modified July 29, 2010