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“I Have The Feeling About 60% Of What You Say Is Crap.” David Letterman, the usually apolitical host who's generally much more concerned with making his guests look good, loses it when guest Bill O'Reilly takes Cindy Sheehan to task on his show. You may remember O'Reilly having a similarly awkward encounter with Jon Stewart earlier this year.
comment posted at 10:25 AM on Jan-4-06
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ExtraTasty, Please Hope Me! I'm throwing a party, but I've little more than vodka, a marshmallow and some cocoa. No problem! The idea is simple enough. Search by tags, by beverages or just enter the current contents of your bar to discover user-submitted combinations and cocktails. The offerings are a little paltry right now (only three entries for vermouth?), but I'm confident that further exposure to the right crowd will result in a massive alcoholic corpus not seen since the Potent Potables section of The Library At Alexandria fell into ruin. (A new idea from the people who brought you Threadless T-shirts.)
comment posted at 6:41 AM on Jan-4-06

When you pick up the newspaper this morning, the headline is likely to read something like "12 trapped miners found alive in 'miracle,'" when in all actuality, there was only one survivor. Fingers are already starting to be pointed at who could be at fault for the "miscommunication," meanwhile, newspapers whose printing deadlines have already come and gone, such as the Beaver County Times (more), will hit doorsteps and newsstands across the nation with incorrect headlines, parallel to the infamous Dewey Defeats Truman headline.
comment posted at 6:43 AM on Jan-4-06

Microsoft takes down chinese language blog critical of Beijing This was on the global (.com) site not a .cn site. Meaning this policy affects all Chinese speakers all over the world, including in the US. Interestingly, the pressure seems to have been commercial, as a commercial Chinese blogging company took Microsoft to task for allowing the commentary. Is globalization exporting censorship?
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Jack Abramoff to plead guilty in corruption case. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo is the place to go for up-to-the-minute analysis, because he's been following the case closely for years now. The Washington Post has a handy chart, giving an overview of who is in the crosshairs.
comment posted at 2:16 PM on Jan-3-06

Meet Retrievr... Web 1.0 surrenders. Draw a sketch, and instantly, Flickr images that look like your sketch magically appear. It works so well, it's a little disconcerting. Prizes awarded for people who can generate the most inappropriate search results.
comment posted at 9:52 PM on Jan-2-06

Patch Windows now. The Windows Metafile exploits are beginning to look like one of the worst-ever Windows malware epidemics. It is a true drive-by exploit - infection with a whole raft of insidious malware just by looking at a web page with IE, or reading an email or IM with an image (depending on the program you use). It will really explode tomorrow when all the business PCs go back online, because as of now there is no good prevention with firewalls, anti-virus or IDS. The SANS Internet Storm Center handlers have been the most up to date source of information (first link above). The DSL Reports thread has good signal-to-noise. Insight and advice actually comes close to outweighing the usual microsoft-bashing in the latest /. thread on it. But Ilfak Guilfanov has outdone everyone with an unofficial patch (source included - admire the code - he is expertly patching a closed-source binary).
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At 7 PM EST today, 80 cesium-based atomic clocks around the world will stop for precisely one second, to take into account the gradual slowing of the Earth's axial rotation.
comment posted at 12:06 PM on Dec-31-05
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"Champagne" in a can. An offer you can refuse?
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"[E]ven though you couldn't predict exactly what animals would look like if you started evolution over on earth, or it happened on another planet -- with a given gravity and density of their tissues, the same basic patterns of their design would evolve again." A new study models all forms of locomotion -- swimming, walking, flying by muscle or flying by 747 -- in one physics theory, and stultifies Stephen Jay Gould's conjectures about the "contingency" of evolution. [mi]
comment posted at 3:44 AM on Dec-30-05

A Disturbance in the Blogosphere: Publishing the UK/US/Uzbekistan Torture Memo. Braving arrest, bloggers have broken the UK’s law of silence with the truth about torture. Bloggers are mass publishing the leaked UK/US/Uzbekistan Torture Memos. The memos are from the correspondences of Craig Murray who was the United Kingdom's ambassador to Uzbekistan. These memos are evidence and a memorandum of record outlining the rendition and torture of US-arrested prisoners in Uzbekistan. From Craig Murray's Memo: 12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the [UN] Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." 13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful.
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What would Tübingen look like if you traveled through it at the speed of light?
comment posted at 11:10 PM on Dec-29-05

Honoring the fallen is bad for business. Magnetic yellow "ribbons" on the SUV, good! Actual numbers, double-plus ungood!
comment posted at 7:56 AM on Dec-29-05
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PICTURE THIS: A folksy, self-consciously plainspoken Southern politician rises to power during a period of profound unrest in America. The nation is facing one of the half-dozen or so of its worst existential crises to date, and the people, once sunny, confident, and striving, are now scared, angry, and disillusioned. Through a combination of factors -his easy bearing chief among them (along with massive cash donations from Big Business; disorganization in the liberal opposition; a stuffy, aloof opponent; and support from religious fanatics who feel they've been unfairly marginalized)-he wins the presidential election. Ripped from today's headlines? Nope. Sinclair Lewis, Circa 1935: "It Can't Happen Here" has been recently reissued. But you can read it here (with free registration) at American Buddha (possibly NSFW). first link via Arts & Letters Daily
comment posted at 11:20 PM on Dec-28-05

"A Brief Survey of the Various Foreigners, Their Chief Characteristics, Customs, and Manners." Israelis, "They were personally responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire, the 1929 stock market crash, and the loss of World War II by a prominent European country." On Canada, "It is thought to resemble a sort of arctic Nebraska." It's okay because it's both unapologetic and National Lampoon circa Animal House. Harvard boys in the 60s were original ironic hipsters!
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