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.
If you're stuck on where to go for vacation this summer, perhaps this site will be a great guide. The attractions are sorted by state and province, as well as alphabetically. It also includes a Gallery of Huge Beings, which was a life-changing experience for this reviewer.
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
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.
Google Groups has made about 700 million usenet messages fully searchable from groups.google.com. They've also got a spiffy timeline of memorable historic posts. On a related note, The Register has offered up what it feels are the best fake usenet posts its readers can write.
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!
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.
The friendly designers at k10k (www.k10k.com) have just released Moodstats. Moodstats is an application that allows you to quickly record & rate how your day has been in six different categories.... Moodstats ... generate[s] multi-colored graphs & statistics showing you exactly how your moods have been over the last week, month, two months, six months or year. Moodstats is share/free ware and is available for Mac and Windows users.