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Couch Potatoism

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.

Hollywood Versus the Internet

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).

BlinkenPong

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!

Anthrax Taken from a US Government Lab?

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.

Multi-Colored Moods

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.

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