The phone rings: another telemarketer. Check your snail-mail box: another credit card offer. Check your e-mail box: another mountain of spam. When will it ever end?!??

Unfortunately, the flow of junk mail/calls/spam is unlikely to ever completely stop, but that doesn't mean you can't do something to cut down the influx. In this article the non-profit World Privacy Forum offers their wisdom on the ten most effective routes you can take to reduce these unwanted intrusions into your life. Some are obvious and direct (the national Do Not Call Registry) while others are pretty oblique (FERPA), but all represent steps toward gaining more control over your time and information.

The NSA sometimes gets a bad rap as a shadowy uber intelligence organization, but the reality is that they do a lot of the boring but important (and often difficult) work to secure national infrastructure for both the U.S. and its allies. Most of that is of hands-on interest only to bureaucrats and security wonks, but every so often something makes it out of Fort Meade that's useful to the rest of us.

These "Security Configuration Guides" provide excellent outlines of some simple steps you can take to secure the computers in your workplace and your home against intrusion. Guides are provided for Mac, Linux, and Windows users, with in-depth recommendations for the major releases of each operating system.

For pretty much anyone who has ever plugged in a computer, a television, or even a telephone, Christoph Niemann's beautifully-illustrated take on the snarl of problems that cables present will be painfully familiar, as well as good for a few laughs along the way.

Holograms are fascinating things. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose, but smaller. If it is cut in half again, each half (now a quarter of the original) will still contain the entire image.

That all seems interesting, but for most of us holography appears an abstract curiosity, responsible for those shiny images on our credit cards and not much else. But what if that's not the case? What if our entire universe is similar to a hologram, with every part containing information about the whole?

This article discusses, in layman's terms, how work by a research team at the University of Paris may point us toward a holographic view of the universe, and possibly change our understanding of reality.

With gasoline prices flirting with $5 a gallon in the past year and oil companies earning $100 billion or so annually, it's a good time to question what really goes into the price of gas. This article from The Consumerist helps shed a little light on the subject by walking us through the economics of the process from the oil well to your corner gas station.

Have you ever wondered why a text message can get through to your phone when a call can't? Or perhaps you've noticed that sometimes your phone's battery only seems to last a fraction of its normal life? This article from the venerable TidBITS Mac journal explains in plain terms how and why cell phones and cell phone networks work the way they do.

As this free online offering proves, arcade-style video games don't have to be just frantic button mashing exercises. Music Catch offers a mesmerizing blend of music, art, and game, good for taking a break out of your day to while away a surprisingly relaxing few minutes. [Requires Flash]

IMing and Twitter aren't for everyone, and believe-it-or-not, it's not just about taking a curmudgeonly luddite stance — there actually are valid, practical reasons for always being marked AWAY (or, indeed, never installing an IM client at all). As Joe Kissell discusses in this thoughtful piece, some of those reasons may make enough sense that even the seriously IM-addicted might want to reconsider their habit.

Cyber-icon R.U. Sirius (co-founder of Mondo 2000) asks ten authors for their thoughts on the impact of the Internet on those who make their living via the written word, with surprisingly varied results.

What costs us $16 billion a year, requires the equivalent of 37,800 semi-trucks a week to deliver, and is virtually identical to something available for next to nothing in almost every American home? Bottled water! This fascinating article from Fast Company outlines the history and practical details of an industry that has sprung up from a marginal curiosity into a billion-dollar mainstay over the last three decades.

A doctoral student in Boston University's cognitive neuroscience program decides to apply theories and techniques from his field to a very practical purpose and becomes a contestant on the popular game show. Did he become a millionaire? Read on and find out...

As the author says: An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A very nicely done bit of web animation. [NOTE: Macromedia Flash required]

In Hong Kong there is a housing complex where each unit is only ten feet square. Photographer Michael Wolf went there and took 100 snapshots of 100 different units, each from the same perspective. The result is a fascinating look into the myriad ways that people arrange their homes and personal space.

This Flash-based site provides a world map broken into time zones and then periodically updates you on new news stories appearing around the world, showing their locations on the map. Beautifully done!

Academy award-nominated film director Kirby Dick has made a film titled This Film is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the MPAA rating system that will be appearing at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and will be aired by the Independent Film Channel (who also backed the film) in 2006. The catch? The MPAA has reviewed the film and rated it NC-17.

Think you've seen every possible idea for a "premier online repository"? Think again.

This fascinating article in The Register tell the story of how the UK banking system could have collapsed in the early 1990's because a department in one of the banks had "gone rogue", cracking ATM PINs and taking money from people's accounts with abandon, and how a junior barrister was able to step in and save the day.

On Friday evening, April 25th, 1986, during what should have been a routine test, things went very, very wrong at the Chernobyl-4 nuclear power plant. This site tells the story, with words and photos, of one woman's motorcycle trip through the resulting devastation.

Addendum: It appears that some portions of the narrative may not be accurate (e.g. she may have traveled by car rather than motorcycle for some segments of the trip). In any event, the photos are still amazing.

"Hm...do I want to take the car today, or the boat?" Are you faced with that tough decision every day? Do you agonize over committing to just one mode of transportation? Your worries are over! Now with the new WaterCar you can travel over water or land, with one vehicle! Able to reach speeds of 45 MPH in the water and 125 MPH on land, your new amphibious vehicle will be the envy of the whole neighborhood! Of course there's always somebody trying to go one better.

In May of 2000, 59-year-old Dudley Hiibel was standing next to his pickup truck on the side of the road talking to his daughter when a deputy sheriff pulled up and asked to see his identification. Hiibel refused to show ID (since the deputy wouldn't say why he wanted to see it), and a few minutes later Hiibel was under arrest for "Delaying a Peace Officer". On March 22nd (2004), the US Supreme Court will be hearing the case.

What exactly happened that day and why? Was the arrest at all justified? You can decide for yourself, because the whole thing was caught on videotape and is available for viewing on this site.

Ever get stuck in a seemingly endless, useless meeting? Yes you have. Herein, Rands In Repose dissects the anatomy of a typical corporate or departmental meeting, and offers some tips on how to escape with your sanity intact.

Textbook prices keep going up and up, and all too often you're now forced to buy a new textbook (instead of used) for no discernible reason. This study done by two student public interest groups provides some interesting insights into this frustrating trend.

Okay, so you got a new Flurbamatic 3000 for Christmas, and no matter what you do, you just can't seem to get it to grommick. There isn't any tech support number (or maybe they're closed because it's a holiday), so you post a question to the Flurbamatic Fanatics bulletin board, but nobody answers. Why? If you read this article by Eric S. Raymond, you'll know, and, more importantly, you'll be able to post a question that will get an answer.

In this CBS MarketWatch article, Chris Pummer gives a rundown of what compensation experts view as the top 10 most overpaid jobs in the US. Office clerks pulling in $136,000 a year? Who woulda thought?

A "cap of silence"? A "mePod"? These are just a few of the ideas that eleven prominent people came up with when asked to describe a technology or gadget they would like to see invented. [free NYT registration required]

Award-winning author Orson Scott Card makes his living from copyrighted works, so you might expect him to have an opinion or two about copyright protection. In this op-ed piece in Greensboro, North Carolina's Rhinoceros Times, Card weighs in on the MP3 file swapping debate, and he's not coming down on the side you may expect.

A nanometer is roughly 1/1,000,000th of the thickness of a US dime. Nanotechnology involves building very tiny machines, on the scale of nanometers. In this article in the New Atlantis, Adam Keiper explains in layman's terms some of the concepts behind and recent developments in nanotechnology, and discusses where it might be headed in the future.

Google is an amazing search tool, but its output is not as objective as you might think. In the article in Slate, Steven Johnson points out three areas where Google, by its very nature, skews the search results it returns.

In this article in the UK's Guardian, some insight is given into the true meaning of irony, the question of whether Germans can, in fact, do irony is discussed, and a bit of confusion between American and Canadian accents is cleared forthwith. Very...um...postmodern.

In this fascinating article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James M. Lang gives us an insightful overview of one aspect of the life cycle of that common but little-studied species found throughout the continental United States, the North American Professor.

Purportedly written from Baghdad, the personal weblog Where is Raed? gives an often bitter, sometimes funny glimpse into daily life in Iraq.

So you've always wanted to fly like Superman? Now may be your chance! Trek Aerospace has developed a working one-person VTOL flying rig, and they're auctioning off the prototype on eBay. For those who are skeptical, they offer photos and even a movie of the unit in action!

Each year since 1995, Transparency International has asked policy wonks from more than 100 countries about political and economic corruption in their corner of the globe, and then used the results to assemble a picture of the state of corruption around the world.

This year the United States ranked 16th, but that will likely change next year as the effects of Enron et al reverberate. (TI uses data from the past three years to determine the rankings.)

In this article, noted technology columnist Dan Gillmor paints a succinct picture of the current battle between a tiny Hong Kong company and three large media/software conglomerates, the outcome of which will almost certainly eventually affect our everyday lives.

l am DR. ELVIS ANYIM, the Procurment Manager and Financial Controller of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Because of my position and that of other strategic officials who are heads in their departments, we have in our possession, since 1997 the sum of US$800M Dolllars (Eight hundred million United States Dollars)...

This fascinating and often hilarious collection documents one man's efforts to turn the tables on the infamous Nigerian 4-1-9 e-mail scam perpetrators.

Since 1989, the Rolling Stones have generated 1.5 billion dollars in gross revenue -- more than any other band or musical artist on the planet. This article in Fortune gives us a look inside Mick and Keith's money-making machine.

What if a candidate running for congress was supported by a groundswell of support from Internet users, rather than corporations and special interest groups? Could this represent a new force in the political arena?

Given the shift of agencies like the FBI from "investigating crime" to "preventing crime", is this really a surprise? Police in Delaware are now maintaining a database of "future criminals", i.e. people who haven't committed a crime but who they suspect are likely to do so.

Janis Ian (At Seventeen, Society's Child) has been recording and performing music for a living for more than 35 years. In this article she gives a very plainspoken and personal view of the effects of music downloading, and how the RIAA is responding to it.

This very timely article in Popular Science takes you through the day of a graphic designer in Chicago, showing how and how often his actions are being tracked and his privacy invaded. A must-read for anyone concerned at all about our rapidly-disappearing privacy.

You've probably already got high-speed (broadband, like DSL or cable modem) Internet access at home or would like to get high-speed Internet access at home, and with the highly competitive, consumer-friendly history of the Internet, it seemed like only a matter of time until high-speed access would be available to everyone at a reasonable price. That may no longer be true.

This article in Salon gives an excellent overview of current efforts by the FCC that will likely provide the major cable TV companies and the four big "Baby Bells" with a lock on the future of Internet access in the US. So much for your local neighborhood ISP.

Google is now beta-testing a service where you can post a question, assign a dollar amount ($4-100) to it, and have the question answered by a human being (in exchange for that dollar amount). Or on the other side of the coin, for those who enjoy digging up information and want to make a few bucks on the side, you can join the team of people who are answering the questions.

In this article, Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, talks about the many ways people attempt to manipulate services offered by a large-scale web company like Yahoo!, and some of the things Yahoo! does to fight back.

A Japanese researcher has come up with a simple way to bypass those high-tech fingerprint readers, using a fake fingerprint made of gelatin. "After it lets you in, eat the evidence," he writes.

This article in Technology Review offers some interesting insights and some hard numbers on what makes new technology successful.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, many old FBI files are available, and some of the more interesting ones (such as Albert Einstein, John Lennon, and ... Lucille Ball?) are viewable on this site.

Doing research on human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland, computer science professor Ben Shneiderman has learned some things that make it unlikely that there will be a HAL in our future. Of course, some questions about HAL still remain unanswered.

Mathematica co-creator Theodore Gray gives us a periodic table you can really use as a table.

Of course, that's not the only way to get creative with the elements.

Two scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with new filament technology that may increase the efficiency of a standard incandescent light bulb from 5% to 60%. This may give us light bulbs that run cooler and use only a small fraction of the electricity, but an even more exciting application of the technology may be photovoltaics that are four times more efficient than those currently in use.

This paper by Brian Hayes, columnist for the American Scientist, presents an interesting look, based on statistical analysis, at the causes of war.

Nature magazine reports on technology developed by a team in the Netherlands that could allow you to paint an LCD display (a screen similar to those used by laptop computers or flat-screen TVs) onto a wall of your home, or even incorporate LCD displays into an item of clothing.

This is also being reported on by AP via CNN.

Not Atlantis (wrong ocean), but an ancient underwater city has been discovered off of the coast of south-eastern India.

Ever receive a message from a mailing list that reads something like "I agree." and then have to dig around to figure out what the person is agreeing to? This short article presents a practical discussion on how best to quote text when replying to an e-mail message.

Selwyn Wright, an engineer at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, UK, has taken the technology used in those noise-cancelling headphones you see people wear on planes, and used it to create a device that can provide quiet for a whole area. Not quite what The Chief had in mind, but we're getting there.

Upstart search engine Teoma is taking on Google for king of the web search hill.

Update (4/1): Google strikes back with their superior patented search result ranking technology, even surpassing their previous efforts.

In this article, Jamie Zawinski (one of the original Netscape developers, who is now in the interesting position of being both a programmer and a nightclub owner), explains in fairly plain English some of the realities of music copyright law and practice, and what proposed changes to both will mean for the future of Internet radio.

So, you're developing image recognition software and you need a way to test it. What better application than building a smarter cat door?

In this op-ed piece, San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor speaks out against the growing trend toward a few conglomerates controlling almost all mass media, and those same conglomerates' recent attempts to take control of the Internet and your computer.

Unfortunately, a similar grab for control is taking place outside the U.S. as well.

Most of the items sold only through television ads are of questionable value, at best, but every now and then one comes along that really does look useful. But is it too good to be true?

This Does It Work? page on the KRBC (NBC affiliate out of Abilene, Texas) site attempts to answer that question, with weekly hands-on reviews of new late-night TV gadgets. If nothing else, some of the lengths they go to in testing manufacturer's claims are quite entertaining.

Vischeck, developed by two researchers at Stanford University, allows you to upload an image or specify a web page and see how it looks to people with various types of color blindness. Enter a few of your favorite sites and get a better idea of how others see the world!

Business 2.0 presents its list of the worst moments in the business world over the last year or so. Some of them are obvious and not-all-that-amusing (i.e. Enron), but quite a few would make for great urban legend material, if they weren't already true.

A zen video game for the 21st century? A file clerk's nightmare, turned into a web site? Your guess is as good as mine, but it is kind of interesting.

[Flash player required]

This good non-technical article by Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain gives a concise overview of some of the issues surrounding the control of digital content (i.e. TV, movies, music, etc). If you have a computer at home, this will be affecting you in the next few years.

[NYT free registration required]

Not meeting your weekly quota of monkey-related news? Subscribe to Monkeywire, the premier source of monkey- and ape-related articles, columns, and reviews! If you had been subscribed to Monkeywire you would have been among the first to know how monkeys are really party animals.

This study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project surveys how Americans are using the Internet, and what effect that use is having on their lives. Surprisingly (or not, depending on your expectations) it paints a picture of e-mail and the Web already becoming an integral part of the average American's daily life.

First there was Tubcat, now this. Where will it end??

This New York Times Op-Ed piece presents an interesting view of the Saudi Arabian reactions to September 11th. (Osama Bin Laden may have been behind the attacks, but fifteen of the hijackers were reportedly from Saudi Arabia.)

[NYT free registration required]

And now for something completely different: Monty Python alumni Terry Jones gives us a typical trenchant Python commentary on the latest efforts in The War On Terrorism.

Your friends decide they want to get married and it's 3:30am and there's no clergy in sight...what do you do? Visit the Universal Life Church web site, of course!

Any DJ can spin vinyl records, but it takes creativity, determination, and a serious retro streak to become a real Cassette Jockey.

Nothing like being insulted by the Bard himself...

The Internet Movie Database, started twelve years ago by a film fan to keep track of which movies he's seen, has become an everyday part of doing business in Hollywood.

It walks like a compact disc and talks like (or almost as well as) a compact disc, but it's not really a compact disc, according to consumer-electronics maker Philips, one of the creators of the compact disc format. And you may have already shelled out your hard-earned cash for one of these inferior almost-CDs without even realizing it.

At the Global Ideas Bank, people come up with socially innovative non-technological ideas, and other people rate those ideas. The presentation could use a bit of polish, but a bit of digging can reveal some pretty interesting and innovative approaches.

Anders Henriksson, professor of history at Shepherd College, gave a basic 27-question quiz to ten randomly-chosen college students in New York City. Only one of the ten got a passing grade.

Caesar was assassinated on the Yikes of March, and declared, "Me too, Brutus." Who knew?

[free NYT registration required]

On average, people in the industrialized world spend more time watching television than they do on any other activity other than work or sleep. This article in Scientific American digs into the whys, wherefores, and hows of Television Addiction, and some of the parallels between television and (other?) addictive drugs.

This must be the twenty-first century. Some enterprising beer drinkers at Bristol University have developed a wrist watch that uses GPS to tell you where the nearest pubs are.

In this first-person account of life on a Silicon Valley assembly line, Raj Jayadev, editor of Silicon Valley Debug, paints a picture that could just as well be set in a nineteenth-century sweatshop.

From the other side of the coin, this article in the New York Times (free sign-up required) provides some insight on how the situation looks to those who have to answer to the shareholders.

After more than ten years of bring back to us amazing images from the moons of Jupiter, the NASA spacecraft Galileo will make its 33rd and last pass on January 16th.

Attorney Mike Godwin has been involved in online legal issues pretty much since there became an "online" to have legal issues with. In this article he discusses the "Content Faction" (the music and movie corporate giants) and the "Tech Faction" (Microsoft, IBM, and other computer-related companies) and their battle over Digital Rights Management, and what that battle may mean for the rest of us caught in the middle (possibly the end of the general-purpose computer).

For their 20th anniversary the venerable German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has come up with a hack truly worthy of their pedigree: They have rigged the lights in each of the eighteen windows in the top eight floors of a house in Berlin to be under computer control, so the house can be used to display animation, and then (and here's what propels this into the legendary realm), they've rigged it so that you can play Pong on the house by dialing in with your cell phone and controlling the paddles with the buttons on your phone! Take a look at the animated GIF clip on the site -- it has to be seen to be believed.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is a molecular biologist, a Research Professor at the State University of New York, and chair of the Federation of American Scientists' Working Group On Biological Weapons. In this succinct paper she offers evidence and commentary on the post-September 11th anthrax mailings. Section 9 is particularly interesting, offering a "Most Likely Hypothesis" for the source and motives behind these abominable acts.

Economists and pundits agree that the U.S. economy is going through a rocky stretch, but why? And how can we fix it? In this column from the Washington Monthly, Karen Kornbluh looks at some significant trends in the last year that may have alot to do with the economic slowdown, and what might be done to turn things around.

(Ignore the article subtitle -- it's actually about recent events in the telecommunications industry, rather than some sort of political commentary as the headline would suggest.)

Lauded political cartoonist and commentator Ted Rall has spent some time in central Asia, including a stretch last year in Turkmenistan (as a guest of the U.S. State Department, no less). In this article on AlterNet.Org, an independent media support project, he paints a fascinating picture of life in the region, and then gives some insight into how it may be linked to current U.S. military efforts.

This summary chart of the surveillance provisions in the proposed new U.S. "anti-terrorism" legislation is useful, regardless of your opinion on the bills.

(Seeing the proposed legislation laid out clearly does make one question obvious: Why are so many of these new surveillance provisions directed at American citizens, when the participants in the tragic events of September 11th were all foreign nationals?)

Did September 11th, 2001 mark the beginning of a new era in world affairs? In this article from the New York Review of Books, Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann discusses the geopolitical changes the WTC tragedy may be triggering or bringing to light.

A worker on-site offers a first-hand account of the current state of activity in the World Trade Center disaster zone. A telling detail giving some perspective on the magnitude of the destruction: three weeks after the tragedy, with crews working around the clock to clear the rubble, there are still piles of rubble eight stories high where WTC buildings 1 and 2 once stood.

A serious gee whiz factor! Sony introduces a new 2x4x3-inch "camera" that records movies, takes still photos, and allows you to send e-mail and browse the web, all over a wireless connection using the new Bluetooth secure communication format. Dick Tracy would be envious.

Sometimes help comes at the worst moments from where you least expect it. A young man who worked at the World Trade Center gives his account of that morning.

This editorial, written by a Canadian journalist in 1973, offers a few points about the United States that don't seem to come up very often.

This article on Wired offers an interesting perspective on updating your computer use for a networked world, discarding some of the old stand-alone computer paradigms.

Lego hacker starpoint has built a Lego Mindstorm robot that solves a Rubik's Cube.

Cryptographic researcher Niels Ferguson is afraid to publish his results (with good reason) because if he does it'll anger certain companies and it may get him thrown in prison the next time he steps foot in the United States. In this concise article he explains his fears and some of the issues involved.

In this short but timely article, insurance portal insure.com gives an inside look at what kind of data auto insurance companies examine when determining your rates, and where they get that data. (Your auto insurance rate may be linked to your credit rating!) Also included at the bottom of the page are several links to other stories about insurance company data usage, including one about health and life insurance.

Ars Technica offers a useful article for budding digital photographers on how to take better pictures.

(Article may not display correctly with Navigator 4.xx.)

Stanford law professort Lawrence Lessig offers an article that explains in plain english the threat of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, as demonstrated in the FBI's recent arrest of Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov when he came to the United States to give a talk about commercial data encryption issues.

(Requires free NY Times registration.)

Need to chill that six-pack of beer but don't have a refrigerator handy? Build a jet engine to do the job! If you were in search of hard evidence of the ingenuity (and wackiness) of New Zealanders, look no further.

The Washington Post offers an in-depth article on the NSA's new director and the agency's struggles to adapt to the post-cold-war Internet age.

The Cartoon Network presents an entertaining approach to encouraging people to return their library books on time. (Requires Flash Player browser plug-in.)

Usenet and online publishing pioneer Brad Templeton offers an interesting and useful look at the practical application of copyright law.

In a somewhat odd twist of new car technology, IBM has developed an electronic "artificial passenger", that tells jokes and engages you in conversation, with the goal of preventing accidents caused by drowsy drivers. Among other measures, if the artificial passenger decides you're dropping off to sleep it may decide to open the windows and spray you with icy water. Yikes.

The winners of the annual Webby awards for the best web sites have been decided.

Also, the Los Angeles times offers an interesting look on the Webbys, in part analyzing how many of this year's winners no longer exist and what those that do have in common.

The New York Times offers a fascinating article by Michael Lewis on the real impact of the Internet on our everyday lives. Hint: It has nothing to do with the NASDAQ.

(For those who don't want to register with the NYT, here's a link to the story on Yahoo.)

Based on recent satellite imagery and other evidence gathered over the years, the world's leading aviation archeological group is launching an expedition next month to a tiny island in the Pacific to find out if the 64-year-old mystery may finally be solved.

The winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where writers from around the world vie to come up with the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels, are now available online.

Feed it ink, toner, and paper (the same sort you would buy at your local office supply store) and it'll take a digital file and turn it into a printed, bound, trimmed book in a matter of minutes. Costing about $30K and no bigger than a commercial photocopier, Jeff Marsh's new machine may very well be the future of publishing.

The ACLU calls it "Zero Intelligence": The Las Vegas Weekly reports on the story of a 14-year-old middle school student being jailed for ten days and then expelled from school for making the wrong offhand remark and fitting the wrong profile (i.e. well-groomed, well-liked, and gets good grades).

Unfortunately this is not an April Fools' joke.

Wired reports on efforts by Soluz, Inc., who for the last six years (and by whatever means necessary -- often via horseback) has been installing solar panels in homes in Honduras and the Dominican Republic that are otherwise without electricity.

The popular search engine Google offers a fascinating glimpse into what people are looking for on the Internet. The most common mispelled query is...amtrack?

Heavy.Com recasts the video game classic Tetris as a food fight between sumo wrestlers in Iron Stomach, a beautifully-crafted bit of addictive web silliness.

Note: Requires Shockwave player (you'll be directed to the appropriate site if you don't have it installed) and can take a while to load if you have a slow connection.

San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art brings to us a fascinating interactive look at fifteen works of modern art, complete with artists' biographies, critiques by historians and poets, and QuickTime movies of the artists themselves.

Google has introduced a new search engine for images. A surprisingly useful addition!

A corporate online privacy auditor gives a brief but eye-opening interview to U.S. News & World Report.

The Los Angeles Times reports on Cyc, an artificial intelligence system under development by Cycorp, Inc for the last 17 years, that will finally be making its debut later this summer.

United States Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is calling for radical revisions to Social Security and championing a revision of the US tax code that would eliminate taxes on corporations, and apparently the White House is behind him. More detail can be found here and a transcript of the interview is here.

In a related story, FAIR asks a good question: Why wasn't this front page news?

A recording-industry professional presents a dissection of long-term record sales figures and comes up with some very interesting conclusions.

(Data is also made available for those who want to do their own (or further) analysis.)

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has released a report that includes internal oil company documents that raise serious questions about whether recent gasoline price hikes are a result of deliberate anti-competitive practices on the part of the oil companies.

Pressure from privacy advocates who are concerned about the practice of tracking your online movements has pushed the advertising industry into forming a trade group called the Network Advertising Initiative. The NAI is offering a web page that allows you to request that seven of the top web advertising companies stop tracking your web surfing habits in their databases.

It's not an ultimate solution, but it is a start. If you have your browser configured to restrict cookies in any way you will need to turn off those restrictions while opting out (and of course turn them back on afterwards), as the opt-out mechanism stores information in cookies intended for use by each of the advertising companies.

With the release of Disney's new Pearl Harbor blockbuster we're all about to be deluged with psuedo-historical hype, but along with the hype there's bound to be a bit of substance, as National Geographic demonstrates with this Remembering Pearl Harbor online feature.

Greg Palast, reporter for the London Observer, takes a look at who is reaping the benefits of President George W. Bush's new energy plan.

Hint: it's not your average tax-paying utility customer.

Reportedly William Shatner will be hosting an American version of the bizarre Japanese cooking show Iron Chef in the fall. This could elevate the Kitchen Stadium to a whole new plane of surreality.

Red Herring publishes a seven-part series investigating some of the shady shenanigans that went on during the extended Internet IPO frenzy that started with a loud bang back in 1998 and ended with a painful whimper last summer.

Paul May, at the University of Bristol in the UK, proves that chemists do indeed have a sense of humor with his Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names page.

Also of interest and maintained by May is Molecule of the Month, which has a list of links to pages with more information than you thought possible about a few molecules that may be encountered in daily life.

Peter Maass writes in The Atlantic about the current situation in Mogadishu, where businesses reign unfettered by any sort of bureaucracy or regulation at all.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the FBI, IRS, and other government agencies doing what some consider an end-run around the Privacy Act of 1974.

Rusty, founder of the neo-weblog site Kuro5hin, has written a very interesting article on social realities, capitalism, and community. Some portions of the discussion it has sparked (farther down the page) are as thought-provoking as the article itself.

This multimedia-enhanced reference page will help insure social success and make you the life of the party!

CD sales went up by 3,600,000 units this past year. This item on Slashdot gives a good summary / reality check on the RIAA's attempt to put an anti-Napster spin on the $14,323,000,000 the record labels made in 2000.

Taking peer-to-peer file sharing to a new level, ShareSniffer Inc. has a product that searches the Internet for accessible computer hard drives and makes the files on them available for the average user to download. SecurityFocus has the story.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sends a letter to Congress about Network Solutions' efforts to sell its domain registration database to direct marketers.

The Atlantic Monthly offers an excellent non-technical article on privacy in the Internet age.

With Napster being shut down and no viable legitimate alternative on the horizon, some key lawmakers in Washington are talking about altering copyright law to allow music to be sold online without the consent of the record companies. The Washington Post has the story.

Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and.....umami? This article in Red Herring discusses the recently-acknowledged fifth element of taste, umami, which is a prominent component in the flavors of aged beef, scallops, and asparagus, among many other foods.

The New Republic offers a well-researched article about the recent battle between Amazon and the Amazon employees who have been working to form a union.

Discover Magazine offers an article by Jaron Lanier, noted researcher and originator of the term Virtual Reality, on the probable outcome of the path currently being taken in the legal battle over the controversial music-sharing software Napster.

John Gilmore, co-founder and board member of civil liberties advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offers a well thought out editorial rant on the impact of the efforts by a corporate consortium, lead by Intel and IBM, to embed content control mechanisms into the next generation of consumer and computer electronics.

The watchdog group Privacy International is now accepting nominations for its annual U.S. Big Brother Awards of government agencies, companies, or initiatives that have done the most to threaten personal privacy in the last year. The awards will be given out in a ceremony to be held on March 7th at the 11th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Web design guru Jakob Nielsen reviews the Bush administration's new www.whitehouse.gov in an interview with Wired News.

Not getting your daily ration of pandas? Now you can watch giant pandas live over the web via the Smithsonian National Zoo's new PandaCam.

Inside reports on the MPAA's attempt to force the next generation of televisions to include technology that will allow Hollywood to control what, where, and when you can watch something on your TV.

The National Gallery of Canada has posted images of 110 works from its collection on the Internet, in an attempt to determine whether they were part of the plunder gathered by invading Germans during the Nazi era.

Sites like the Albuquerque Journal are now trying to charge people who link to pages on their site. Wired News reports on this new approach to revenue generation.

Australian IT reports that the new "Southern Cross" Internet link has gone live, providing a connection between Australia and North America that has 120 times the capacity of the old link.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN -- the central authority for Internet domains) has announced the proposed new Top-Level Domains (TLDs -- e.g. '.com', '.net', '.org') that are being considered for addition.

Paul McCartney, Elton John, Barry Manilow and Phil Collins were among the stars taking part in a campaign last week to support National Red Squirrel week in England. More than 200 stars contributed to the Scribble A Squirrel campaign to help save red squirrels in England from extinction. The sketches are available for auction during the next two weeks at auction site QXL.com. (No, really.)

Suck, that bastion of ultra-cynical hipster geek commentary, delivers a pointed and alarmingly plausible wake-up call for the online masses.

The Internet Geography Project maps various fundamental attributes of the Internet to geographical regions, providing some much-needed perspective on who is really wired in and where the fastest Internet-related growth may be occuring.

Napster certainly raises some thorny issues, but what other alternatives are there to the traditional music distribution system? A company called Fairtunes.Com is offering one: pay the artists directly at your discretion. An article on Music Dish provides some details.

Jakob Nielsen, web design guru (rated number 6 on ZDNet AnchorDesk's list of "The Web's 10 Most Influential People") weighs in on WAP (the technology being used on these newfangled cell phones to allow you to browse the web from anywhere), and the forecast is not good.

Frustrated by the endless deluge of unsolicited commercial email (aren't we all?), Walter Dnes has come up with a pretty effective solution, at least for those with the technical know-how to put it in place.

It looks like some of the class space opera devices like "force fields" and "plasma shields" may actually become a possibility, as a researcher at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia demonstrates a very early prototype.

Robert X. Cringely delivers a startling new view on the FBI's "Carnivore" Internet surveillance effort. If you read this, read it all the way through to understand the full import of what he's saying.