It has come to my attention that in filling out my brackets, I used some
Adobe Acrobat tools that don't show up in older versions of the reader.
If you can't see 'em, I picked Notre Dame over Xavier, Texas over Temple,
and Duke to take it all.
And download a newer version of Acrobat Reader! At work I'm using v3.0 -
from 1997 - on an SGI (unix) and the markups display fine.
2001.03.14
While you're swilling beer, watching the games, here's a new study to contemplate:
Science News:
Sedentary Off-hours Link to
Alzheimer's.
"People who have the memory loss, confusion, and disorientation of Alzheimer's
disease in old age were generally less active physically and intellectually between
the ages of 20 and 60 than were people who don't have the disease ....
"The only single activity in which Alzheimer's patients on average significantly
outperformed their counterparts was watching television...."
2001.03.12
Science News:
Jiggling the Cosmic
Ooze. A new blueprint for all the
universe's mass and energy may be just around the corner.
"To patch these flaws in the standard model,
theorists proposed the existence of some sort of
influence that permeates all of space, weighing
down particles passing through it. This cosmic
molasses is called the Higgs field. A sufficient jolt, like an
extremely powerful particle collision, can set the molasses quivering.
Such a vibration amounts to a particlelike
manifestation of the field -- a Higgs boson."
I'm going to work on my Final Four picks over lunch. I'll have my
brackets posted by Wednesday.
Chris Adler:
Tips for parents of
young fussy eaters.
"I offered, thinking myself excessively optimistic to believe he might
fall for this. Two bowls later, he was burping and asking for some fruit."
[another pointer from Scripting News.]
I still can't believe that they're gone!
2001.03.11
FinalFour.Net:
Stanford, Duke,
MSU, Illinois top men's field.
"Stanford, Duke and defending champion Michigan State were selected as No. 1 seeds
for the NCAA Tournament for the second straight year Sunday, joined at the top of the
brackets by Illinois."
Also --
CBS:
Introducing The Field.
ESPN:
NCAA Tournament sites.
AP:
Car
Audio Systems Toying With MP3.
"Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies Inc., a California-based
research firm [says] ...
`People are continuing to tell the industry that buying a CD
with 13 cuts, of which they only want two or three, is the issue.
You can customize MP3s with the music you really want.'"
Hamster Taxidermy.
[via Scripting News.]
2001.03.09
San Francisco Chronicle:
Cheaper
Ways to Play MP3s.
"For about a hundred bucks, you can get a
radio-frequency transmitter-receiver pair at
Radio Shack. You plug the transmitter into the
headphone jack on your computer and the
receiver into an auxiliary jack on your stereo."
He's ba-ack ...
Houston Chronicle:
Tech job is
Knight's `if he wants it'.
"Two sources familiar with high school recruiting
said Knight has contacted several top prep players
in recent weeks, letting them know he would likely
be back in coaching soon, but he did not mention
Tech as a possibility."
> What kind of a sadomasochist would want to play for Bobby Knight?
2001.03.06
Science News:
Extinctions Tied to
Impact from Space.
"The massive wave of extinctions on Earth 250
million years ago appears to have been triggered
by an impact from space, according to an analysis
of rocks from Japan and China.
The die-offs at the end of the Permian period
exterminated almost 95 percent of the species in
the ancient oceans, as well as many land animals,
and set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs."
Wall Street Journal (subscription):
Judge
Orders Napster to Block All Copyright-Protected Songs.
"Judge Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked on the
order of an appeals court, said the recording industry will
have to notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the
artist and the name of the file containing the infringing
material. Napster ... then would have three business days to
implement a system of blocking access to that file."
2001.03.02
WSJ (subscription):
Napster Tells
Judge It Will Block Copyrighted Music from Its Site.
"Fighting for its life in court, Napster Inc. told a judge Friday that it will
unveil a screening system this weekend that will block users from trading pirated
music through its Web site."
...
"Music fans downloaded 2.7 billion files in January using Napster, and research
firm Webnoize said more than 96 million songs were traded on Feb. 12 -- the day
the appellate court said Napster likely would lose at trial. Napster has an
estimated 50 million users."
CNET:
Soft spots remain
in Apple's new OS.
"`Like most people, I'm not going to be installing Mac OS X until the high-performance
applications are Carbonized,' he said, referring to the process of tailoring the
software to run optimally on the OS."
> I just upgraded to Mac OS 9.1 last month, and I plan to stick with it for the rest
of the year. OS 9.1 runs carbonized mac software, so I can upgrade all my software
before I upgrade my operating system.
> I'm also skipping the current MS Office for Mac -- it's not carbonized. (Although
Microsoft says if you
buy now you can upgrade to the carbon version next fall for the "special" price of
$149.)
SF Chronicle:
Blogging
On: Web loggers bare their souls -- and reading lists -- to the Internet.
"Sure there are a hundred teenage boys typing, `I'm bored. School sucks' every
three hours, but their friends read them -- and that's their intended audience."
[via Scripting News.]
