May 2003
Friday, 30 May 2003
Stem cell ‘immortality’ gene found: “It has been christened Nanog”
Handsome men have the best sperm: “A separate study by UK researchers has revealed that women with the most alluring voices have the most attractive faces.”
Tax Law Omits Child Credit in Low-Income Brackets: “House Republicans, who acknowledged the gap on the child credit, blamed the Senate…”
Thursday, 29 May 2003
Word Magazine: Did you hear t.A.T.u.’s version of “How Soon Is Now?”
Morissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don’t know much about them.
Word Magazine: They are teenage Russian lesbians.
Morissey: Well, aren’t we all?
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
My friend Eric is mildly obsessive about solitaire games. He just released his first shareware title for the Palm, Eric Snider’s Solitaire. I’ve been playing it a lot. It’s missing the all-important weasel graphic of previous games he’s worked on (“Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire”), but is otherwise way cool. Check it out.
Tuesday, 27 May 2003
FCC proposal on ownership demands public debate: “Time was, broadcasters had to regularly reapply and show public-interest programming to earn continuance. Now they mail the FCC a postcard every eight years that nobody reads.”
Monday, 26 May 2003
The War Against Boys: “Scores on almost any intelligence or achievement test are more spread out for boys than for girls – boys include more prodigies and more students of marginal ability.”
Saturday, 24 May 2003
Stocks Are Looking Up. Bond Traders Look Askance.: “he last time this streak occurred, he noted, was in the early 1930’s.”
There was a young fellow called Bright…: “Because the jump would be sudden, it could not be predicted by observing the leading edge of the pulse. In other words, it might be used to convey information at superluminal velocities. But nature seems to have thought of that one. The group’s latest experiment, which Dr Gauthier told the conference about, showed that the jump is not accelerated in the same way that a smooth crest is, but travels only at c. The details of why the jump causes the pulse to slow down are not well understood.”
Pygmies beg UN for aid to save them from Congo cannibals: “In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, and genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted down as though they were game animals”
THE SHAVING INDUSTRY LIES: “As for electric shavers… bah, I never liked ‘em. Besides, I want to know that if things in life get really bad, I’ll be able to rip out one of my razors and end my life quickly.”
Irrational Physics: More experiments in superluminal light
The Economist has a story about light travelling faster than the speed of light, although the story appears to actually have to do with which parts of a lightwave travel at the speed of light and which parts do not (and appear to be irrelevant to special relativity).
Thursday, 22 May 2003
3G Farce Stings mmO2: “Analysts welcomed the carrier’s delay as an indication that the market is at last setting itself achievable targets.”
Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women: “Eight years ago, when Carnegie Mellon first discovered that the number of men named Dave outstripped women, the university decided to tackle its Dave-to-Girl ratio head on, with surprisingly good results.”
Warren Buffett: Dividend Voodoo - “And our receptionist? She’d still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to”
Wednesday, 21 May 2003
The RSS feed has been moved. Please update your subscriptions.
Blog eats blog: “This isn’t about not liking blogs. It’s about not liking unaccountable concentrations of influence” - Yes, and right now millions of people across the world are having conversations in which they recount ‘facts’ and have opinions with the potential to influence each other. These conversations must be criticized! (Speaking of criticism, one would think a serious journalist would have the time to research the difference between professional investors and analysts.)
Saturday, 17 May 2003
The Conet Project Pages - “What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the ‘Swedish Rhapsody’ Numbers Station use a small girls voice?”
Ocean’s great fish all but gone
Friday, 16 May 2003
New Led Zeppelin live package brings fans piece of ‘Heaven: “Page rummaged through the Albert Hall footage he had lying around and discovered it was in brittle shape, and that much of what had been filmed was missing from his own collection. So he put the word out to bootleggers that the band was on the hunt for the footage, and would pay top dollar for it. He wound up buying back nearly the entire performance.”
The Galloway affair - The fake left continues to rot: “Isn?t it that much of the left, or more accurately the pseudo-left, no longer defines itself positively, in terms of what it is for? No longer measures political organisations, classes and regimes by how they relate to what we ourselves fight for? Instead, the ‘left’ defines itself negatively, by what it is against. It is against capitalism. Against imperialism. Against America. It is on the side of whomever at any given moment is against them ? on the side, even, of those who are worse. Saddam Hussein?s Iraq was certainly worse.”
Thursday, 15 May 2003
My review of The Matrix: “you have to wonder if this movie is an intentional parable to modern life – a parable which deconstructs itself to imply that the mere act of going to a science fiction sequel in fact carries a subtext of your flat learning curve”
Saturday, 10 May 2003
Carnegie Mellon Graduate Has Wallet Marked “BMF”: “Ralston, an avid outdoorsman and expert climber from Aspen, Colo., was on a day hike April 26 when a boulder shifted onto his arm. Out of water and unable to move the boulder after days of trying, Ralston used a pocketknife to cut off his arm.”
Friday, 9 May 2003
No words to describe monkeys’ play - “towards the end of the experiment, their output slightly improved, with the letters A, J, L and M also appearing. However, they failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word.”
Andrew Stuttaford on Walter Duranty & Pulitzer: “As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he ‘had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found’. Well, at least he didn’t refer to it as a ‘final’ solution.”
Wednesday, 7 May 2003
Cheney is still paid by Pentagon contractor: “Mr Cheney sold most of his Halliburton shares when he left the company, but retained stock options worth about $8m.”
Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard: for those of you who find RPS too predictable.
Tuesday, 6 May 2003
High-tech CEOs confront new reality: “primary efforts to deal with this new reality include reducing senior management staff, narrowing research and development efforts, improving cash management and optimizing production”
David Sedaris: You Can’t Kill the Rooster - “A stranger might reasonably interpret my brother’s language as a lack of respect and view my father’s response as a kind of shameful surrender. This, though, would be missing the subtle beauty of their relationship.” - contains vulgarity best experienced in a backwoods North Carolina accent.
Sunday, 4 May 2003
Firms Want Refunds Of Tax on Fake Profit: “That money is coming directly from shareholders.”
Friday, 2 May 2003
Archived Memepool Post: May 2, 2003
May day may be as over as communism, but it isn’t too late to bring the people’s revolution to your shower with communist anthems. (Posted to Politics)
Thursday, 1 May 2003
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: “You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it’s not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it’s just a convention of the genre).”