April 2004
Friday, 30 April 2004
Molecular basis for Mozart effect revealed: “Patients with Alzheimer’s disease perform better on spatial and social tasks after listening to the sonata. And playing Mozart for severely epileptic patients quietens the electrical activity associated with seizures, while other kinds of music do not.”
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
Robbers Die Trying to Hold-Up Suicide Bomber: “A Hamas official said that whatever their intention, the two should be considered agents of Israel. ‘Anyone who tries to stop a fighter from doing his work is a collaborator,’ he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.” - You can’t make this stuff up.
The Stock Market: “If you really think of it, when a stock doesn’t pay dividends, there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between a share of stock and a baseball card.”
Friday, 23 April 2004
The biggest moving mountain ever surfed: “Surfers refuse to measure waves in metric.”
Thursday, 22 April 2004
Losing Our Edge?: “We can’t wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.”
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
Number of spam messages received since posting my gmail address here: 1.
Time between posting my gmail address here and first spam message arriving: ~3 days.
Sunday, 18 April 2004
Company’s Mad Cow Tests Blocked: “USDA officials say that they sympathize with Creekstone and similar operations hurt by the bans imposed by Japan and other nations, but that agreeing to the company’s request could imply there is a safety issue with American beef and usher in an era of expensive testing that has no scientific justification.”
Friday, 16 April 2004
Blatant Friend Promotion: check out the new Alloy Trex CD.
Thursday, 15 April 2004
If you are not a bot you probably won’t care about testing spam filters. You might care to help fight against offensive search results for the word “Jew”.
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
FDA Approves Human Brain Implant Devices
Tuesday, 13 April 2004
Data Disclosure Contradicts Feds: “To see if the system could work, the TSA asked American Airlines to share passenger information to help its contractors.” - Sir Francis Bacon is spinning in his grave
A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer: “security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails”
Gothamist Interviews: Clay Shirky, Internet Technologist: “I don’t know if there’s a DSM-IV category for it, but a lot of New Yorkers are exhausted by excellence.”
Wednesday, 7 April 2004
Options Wars: “From the financiers’ point of view, an option is better than a direct grant of stock. If the ideas fail, the option holders will have no claim on the residual assets of the company.” - worth reading if you’re paying attention to the options expensing argument (pdf)
Woman gives herself a Caesarean
Tuesday, 6 April 2004
Under God and Over: “In his intervention at the Court, Justice Stevens recalled a devastating point from the fascinating brief submitted in support of Newdow by 32 Christian and Jewish clergy, which asserted that ‘if the briefs of the school district and the United States are to be taken seriously,’ that is, if the words in the Pledge do not allude to God, ‘then every day they ask schoolchildren to violate [the] commandment’ that ‘Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord in vain.’ Remember, those are not the Ten Suggestions.”
Monday, 5 April 2004
Atheist Presents Case for Taking God From Pledge: “I am saying I as her father have a right to know that when she goes into the public schools she’s not going to be told every morning to stand up, put her hand over her heart, and say your father is wrong, which is what she’s told every morning.”
British Concorde Heads to Flight Museum
There Goes the Neighborhood: “As a result of all these changes, Fannie and Freddie went from buying mostly mortgages for low-end homes to those of the middle- and upper-middle class. And the share of the nation’s conventional mortgage debt which they insure has swelled, to more than 70 percent today, double its share in 1990.”
Saturday, 3 April 2004
Rich folks eating fish feed on mercury too / ‘Healthy diet’ clearly isn’t: “Of 89 people Hightower used for her statistical evaluation, 89 percent had mercury levels exceeding the 5 parts per billion recognized as safe by the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences. Sixty-three people had blood-mercury levels more than twice the recommended level, and 19 had blood-mercury levels four times the level considered safe. Four people had levels greater than 10 times as high as the government recommends.”
Accounting Board Wants Options to Be Reported as an Expense: “David M. Blitzer, a managing director of Standard & Poor’s, said he thought the added flexibility in the new rule would allow many companies to report values that are lower than the ones they now disclose in footnotes to their annual reports. ‘The basic issue is that when you have employees you should pay them, and you should tell your shareholders how much you pay them,’ said Mr. Blitzer. He said he hoped the rule would be adopted and that it would be embarrassing if European companies that follow international standards wound up with better accounting than American ones.”