Associated Press: Teenager thrown 25 feet in air from Jeep grabs overhead wires until rescued.
Which OS are You?
> Mac OS X is based on a BSD variant, ya know.
Scientific American: Four-Winged Dinosaurs and the Dawn of Flight.
"Paleontologists have recovered from deposits in Liaoning, China, dinosaur fossils that exhibit evidence of flight feathers on their hindlimbs as well as their forelimbs. The specimens are said to represent a long-sought intermediate stage in the evolution of birds from flightless theropod dinosaurs...."
Email from a German geophysicist --
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History of a Moment
... interstellar distances too great for wars ...
Inspired by your news:
Oh, I wished Saddam would rule some dune-planet in NGC157 while Dubbya would sit on a frozen lump of crude oil hurling around Betelgeuse!
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> I like your worlds, Kurt. Recently our own is much too dreary.
Humorist Dave Barry has a blog.
Doonesbury: We still have an EPA?
An essay on science fiction --
Kuro5hin: A History of the History of the Future.
"Science Fiction tends to equate spaceships with sea ships, other planets with other countries; but the economics of spaceflight could well be too different for this assumption to be true. It could be that space flight will always be too expensive for interstellar colonization; interstellar communication too slow for sustainable Empires or Federations; interstellar distances too great for wars."
Now I know: I am an alien!
From the editor of the Weekly Standard, an editorial in defense of SUV's --
Wall Street Journal: The Scarlet SUV.
"My SUV, assuming Hummer comes out with a model for those who find the current ones too cramped, will look something like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels. It'll guzzle so much gas [that] as I walk out to my driveway there will be squads of Saudi princes gaping and applauding. It'll come, when I buy it, with little Hondas and Mazdas already embedded in the front grillwork."
Hey, it looks like the desktop icons on this international version of Windows XP are much more interesting than on the domestic version of the software.
Slate: Today's Papers. [two weeks old]
"Lloyd Grove notices a new drink offered by the Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in D.C: The `Trent Lotte.' The $3.25 item consists of `separate but equal parts of coffee and milk.' Customers are encouraged to mix them together."
Sydney Morning Herald: Giant squid attacks boat.
"A French yacht taking part in the Jules Verne round-the-world sailing trophy has been attacked by a giant squid in the mid-Atlantic, its skipper announced by radio link."
> During a Jules Verne, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," contest? Doesn't that seem a little too coincidental?
New Scientist: Probe of Africa's break-up blasts off.
"Since Saturday, over 70 scientists from Europe, the US and Ethiopia have detonated 19 explosions across and along Ethiopia's Rift Valley. Project EAGLE is Africa's largest ever seismic survey, and the world's biggest ever three-dimensional seismic survey."
> Hyperbole aside, this sounds like a great experiment.
Political link from someone with a different viewpoint --
John Chuckman, Palestine Chronicle: It's Not About Oil.
"Yes, of course, Bush's light-truck constituency cares about oil, and Iraq's reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia's. But the notion that a great power needs physically to control sources of a plentiful raw material is simply outdated. The nationalization of oil reserves, a world-wide phenomenon of a few generations ago, is something not likely to be undone, and, besides, a very comfortable modus vivendi has grown up between producing and consuming governments."
Johnny Cash covers Nine Inch Nails "Hurt"
WSJ (subscription): Employees Only Think They Control Thermostat.
"HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) experts acknowledge what millions of office workers have suspected all along: A lot of office thermostats are completely fake.... Fed up with of complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control."
I'm slowly drawing the past year to a close --
Science News: Science News of the Year 2002.
"Luckily, not every follow-up study contradicts earlier work.... Yet many of the 2002 scientific findings that we list below challenge earlier results. Mars may not have had a continuously warm, wet past. Neutrinos have mass after all. Diamond isn't the sturdiest material. So, what you learned in school years ago -- or what you read just last year -- doesn't necessarily correspond to today's scientific conclusions."
Proof that the World's Cup is a manly game.
[via /usr/bin/girl]
This looks neat, especially if you already have a Wi-Fi network --
News.com: Gadget takes iTunes to the living room.
"The device ... uses a built-in wireless networking technology called Wi-Fi to connect to a wireless-equipped Macintosh or PC.... The HomePod downloads songs one at a time and plays them either through a stereo or by connecting directly to speakers."
> I'm sure the sound quality would be about 10 times better than what I'm getting with my in-home radio station. However, it would be tied to the main stereo system in my den, not "accessible" from anywhere in the house.
Science News: Mapping with GRACE. Twin satellites chart changes in Earth's gravitational field.
"For more than 30 years, scientists have been monitoring the planet's tug with several dozen satellites and sensitive instruments carried into the field. But the global gravitational model that they've compiled from that data has just been rendered obsolete by a pair of satellites that were launched last March."
Nature: Warming planet shifts life north and early.
"Two massive studies have charted the impact of an average rise in global temperature of 0.6 degree C in the last 100 years on plants and animals around the world.
"They conclude that global warming has moved ranges northwards and shifted spring events earlier, as many individual observations of single species have been hinting over the past decade.... And, they worry, the picture is set to get worse if warming reaches the 6 ºC that some have predicted by 2100."
Having just watched The Fellowship of the Ring, I thought this was pretty good --
If LotR had been written by someone else, what would it look like?
> I didn't read all 20 pages, of course.
Science News: Getting Warped. A new exhibit on Albert Einstein dissects his slippery science.
"Einstein never stopped his search for a unified theory [of electromagnetism and gravity]. The day before his death on April 18, 1955, from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, Einstein asked his secretary to bring to the hospital a pad of paper on which he had been working. That very sheaf of papers, which Einstein smothered with calculations, serves as send-off as visitors leave the exhibit."
Nature: Speed of gravity and light equal.
"Einstein's theory of relativity only holds if the force of gravity acts at the same speed as light. Until now this was merely an assumption..."
Nature: Physicist proposes deeper layer of reality.
"Returning to Einstein's nagging doubts about quantum mechanics, Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University has begun to outline a way in which its apparent play of chance might be underpinned by precise physical laws that describe the way the world works."
I know this shows how hopelessly out-of-touch I am, but --
I just heard the Rage Against The Machine cover of Bob Dylan's Maggie's Farm.
Wow. That was cool.
Along those same lines: for decades I have been wishing that some punk band would put some effort into improving one of the all-time cheesiest Beatles tunes - The Fool on the Hill.
Houston Business Journal: Houston hangs on to heavyweight title.
"For the third year in a row, Men's Fitness magazine has named Houston the `fattest city' in the entire country."
Suburbanite news --
Houston Business Journal: Joint venture buys up acreage in The Woodlands.
"Located on the southwest corner of Woodlands Parkway and Kuykendahl, Regency is planning to build a 78,132-square-foot H-E-B store on the land."
New World Trade Center Designs.
> I like the United Architects design (Firm F), pictured here. The slide presentation is overly maudlin, though.
Walt Mossberg, WSJ (subscription): These Gizmos Improve Wi-Fi Trouble Spots.
"Essentially, the first device transports the Internet connection over your home's electrical wiring from a wall outlet near your DSL or cable modem to an outlet in the distant room where wireless reception is poor. The second device, located in that distant room, takes the connection from the outlet and broadcasts it wirelessly via a built-in transmitter. The signal is strong because the transmitter is right in the room."
