I'm taking a few weeks off. Updates will resume in July.

Ever heard of a quixotic movement whose leaders were realistic, even fatalistic, about their chances of success? Well, that describes the spelling reform movement, the folks who advocate replacing the English language's irrational spelling with rational, phonetically based rules -- i.e., spelling words the way they're actually pronounced.

"It probably won't happen," says Edward Rondthaler, the father of the modern American spelling-reform movement, chairman emeritus of the ALC and a founder of the International Typeface Council. Mr. Rondthaler is 102 years old and lives on the bank of the Croton River in New York, in a Sears Roebuck house he bought for $7,000 in 1941. After a lifetime spent at the helm of a movement that has made no significant progress, he is still an advocate of spelling reform.

"I have always known it would not happen, but I worked for it anyway, because it should happen," he says. "We have 42 different sounds in English, and we spell them 400 different ways. Isn't that a rather silly thing to do?"

His pragmatism is well-founded. Critics of spelling reform have some pretty strong arguments against it, including the fact that phonetic spelling don't take into account how pronunciation differs between English dialects, and the movement's lack of agreement on a single simplication scheme.

Still, the reformers can claim one great victory, according to the Journal:

The movement reached its apogee on Aug. 20, 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt, a terrible speller, officially changed the spelling of 300 English words.

What seemed like a good idea -- changing "through" to "thru," and so on -- turned into a humiliating disaster. Newspapers mocked him as "Rozevult." Congress voted 142-24 to overturn the order.

Here's a list of the 300 simplified spellings approved by Roosevelt. Some of them -- e.g., ax, catalog, fantasy, jail -- are actually the widely accepted spellings today. Others are recognizable as "Americanized" spellings of British "standards" -- e.g., labor for labour. Some, however, just seem weird: clapt for clapped, for example, or the potentially confusing mist for missed.

Sean M. Carroll wrote a fascinating (and fun) piece for Scientific American: Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe--hot, dense, homogeneous--is completely different from today's--cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity. ...

It's come to this: crooks are stealing used kitchen grease from restaurants.

Processed fryer oil, called yellow grease, is easily converted into biofuel. That makes it a valuable commodity, one whose value is at all-time highs. Eight years ago, it was trading for 7.6 cents a pound; on Thursday that had risen to 33 cents a pound -- about $2.50 a gallon.

So it's clear why petty crooks might covet the stuff, but they're not the only possible culprits, our story notes:

The suspects in a growing number of grease infractions include do-it-yourself environmentalists worried about their carbon footprints, warring waste management firms trying to beat each other on the sly, and petty thieves who are profiting from the oil's rising value on the black market.

American Journalism Review delves into the many reasons why mainstream U.S. news media coverage of the war in Iraq has fallen precipitously. First, it sums up the background:

During the first 10 weeks of 2007, Iraq accounted for 23 percent of the newshole fornetwork TV news. In 2008, it plummeted to 3 percent during that period. On cable networks it fell from 24 percent to 1 percent, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The numbers also were dismal for the country's dailies. ... A daily tracking of 65 newspapers by the Associated Press confirms a dip in page-one play throughout the country. In September 2007, the AP found 457 Iraq-related stories (154 by the AP) on front pages, many related to a progress report delivered to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Over the succeeding months, that number fell to as low as 49. A spike in March 2008 was largely due to a rash of stories keyed to the conflict's fifth anniversary, according to AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Silverman.

The main causes, according to experts and news executives interviewed by AJR:

• Domestic economy and the unusually combative presidential campaign have "sucked oxygen from Iraq."
• War fatigue has set in: "Over the years, a bleak sameness has settled into accounts of suicide bombings and brutal sectarian violence."
• The high cost of keeping correspondents in Baghdad is getting harder to justify, especially for the financially beleaguered newspaper industry.

And the implications:

The public tends to take cues from the media about what is important. If Iraq is pushed to a back burner, the signal is clear -- the war no longer is a top priority. It follows that news consumers lose interest and turn their attention elsewhere. The Pew study found exactly that: As news coverage of the war diminished, so too did the public interest in Iraq.

More Americans are obese than ever -- a third of all adults, or roughly 72 million people, between 2005 and 2006, according to the CDC. And that's creating new problems for those in the business of transporting patients to hospitals.

Reporter Hector Castro notes that studier gurneys and ambulances with wider doors are among the ways they're compensating. Air ambulance service Airlift Northwest now wants hospitals to fill out a special form for patients who weigh 250 pounds or more; it lists extra information like "the measurements of the patient's abdomen when lying down."

He explains the rationale thusly:

First, the flight crews, consisting of a pilot and two nurses, need to know if they will physically be able to move the patient safely or if they're going to need help.

"None us want to injure our back lifting these patients," [Jeff Richey, a regional manager for Airlift Northwest,] said.

Second, crews need to know whether patients will be able to fit into the helicopters.

Your brain is a giant search engine, whose index gets less efficient and more subject to corruption as you age. That interesting analogy is drawn by one of the experts interviewed by WSJ health columnist Melinda Beck for her column on The Science of Senior Moments:

Even in normal aging, there's a general slowing of cognitive function, starting in the 50s and 60s. Neurotransmitters, the chemicals that allow nerve cells to communicate, diminish. The brain itself shrinks. White matter -- the fiber tracks connecting the front of the brain to storage areas -- changes so that information takes longer to process. It's like a computer that freezes temporarily as it tries to call up a file.

Names and dates that take time to retrieve "generally aren't well-archived," says [P. Murali Doraiswamy, chief of Biological Psychiatry at Duke University Medical School]. You may not have paid much attention to them in the first place -- especially if you were multitasking. "Your brain has an inexhaustible amount of storage, but you can't have too many programs running at the same time, or it's hard to attend to them," says Gayatri Devi, a psychiatrist and neurologist who runs the New York Memory Center. That may explain the in-one-ear-and-out-the-other phenomenon that plagues some people.

Paying attention is critical to laying down memories, which scientists now think are distributed all around the brain. What a rose looks like, smells like, the pain of the thorn and emotions attached to it are all in different parts. When you think of a rose, "it's like your frontal cortex does a Google search through every part of your brain for an association with 'rose' that's been stored," says Dr. Doraiswamy.

YouTomb is a fascinating project from MIT Free Culture that chronicles just why videos are pulled from YouTube. The stated purpose is to track how many are taken down for alleged copyright violation.

As of this writing, YouTomb is monitoring 226,550 "top videos". Most are still up, but almost 20,000 have been removed for one reason or another. The exact reasons are pretty interesting -- and not what you might expect.

Only 24 percent of videos that vanished were taken down for alleged copyright violations. The majority -- 46 percent -- were pulled for violating YouTube's terms of service; the remainder were pulled by the users who uploaded them, for whatever reason. (For posterity's sake, there are currently 4,688 takedowns for copyright reasons, 9,056 for TOS violations and 5,992 user withdrawals.)

That's not to say that media companies aren't sending YouTube requests left and right. The current stats show that 362 different copyright holders requested the takedown of 4,688 cumulative videos.

David Brook's New York Times column, The Alpha Geeks, is a fun examination of how the smart kids became cool and, in all seriousness, changed the world:

Geeks not only rebelled against jocks, but they distinguished themselves from alienated and self-pitying outsiders who wept with recognition when they read "Catcher in the Rye." If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.

Brooks also notes that "George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he's energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30."

ReadWriteWeb has a great post revisiting how stupid the wisdom of crowds can be, jumping off of how an ambitious SitePoint e-book giveaway was torpedoed by one untrue comment on Digg.

SitePoint's experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.

The experience prompts Josh Catone to reiterate ReadWriteWeb's excellent set of four rules for harnessing the wisdom of crowds -- and mitigating against the stupidity of the herd. Briefly:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints
2. Not everything can be democratic.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it.

See Josh's original post for further details and its comments for a thoughtful discussion.

Robert X. Cringely's two most recent columns tackle interlinked subjects that I'm sure will resonate with many modern information workers: Why corporate (and government) IT departments often run so poorly, and how big-name IT consultancies like Gartner Inc. enable that dysfunction.

Choice Excerpt No. 1:

The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture. It's the AV kids from school versus the "normal" kids. IT organizations often disrespect users and users often disrespect IT. This is not good for either group. ...

Choice Excerpt No. 2:

The truth is that there is no IT "profession." Most of what IT managers know about IT they learn from vendors, consultants, and folks like Gartner. Because they feel isolated, and because the IT vendor/consultant/media system encourages them to worry about such things, IT managers tend to feel they must have their important decisions validated and Gartner is the most popular place to find validation. Yes they wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.

As you may have noticed, we've started using Brightcove to serve our videos.

The online video-hosting service -- partly owned by our parent company, Hearst Corp. -- offers a number of advantages over the DIY approach we've been taking.

It's now (finally) easy to embed seattlepi.com videos on your own blog, or to e-mail links to your closest friends. Both features are standard in the Brightcove player's interface.

With Brightcove, it's also easier for us to organize video content into lineups or channels, and even offer RSS feeds for them.

Brightcove also makes it easy for us to invite users to upload and share their own videos on our site. We've done this a few times before, most (in)famously with our Bob Dylan imitation contest, using a system we built in-house.

Brightcove's customers include a number of TV networks -- FX, HBO and TV Land among them -- as well as quite a few newspaper and magazine publishers.

Just 37 percent of the people who ride state ferries use them to commute regularly, according to a surprising new survey.

In fact, as Chris McGann, our state Capitol correspondent explains, 35 percent of the 26,000 ferry riders polled said they take fewer than seven trips a month. The majority of riders are "people traveling for reasons including medical appointments, social occasions or special events."

It's no surprise that Indiana Jones' exploits aren't exactly an accurate portrayal of the typical archeologist's workday. What is surprising is how there's actually a grain of historical truth in his adventurous field work.

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones

The Wall Street Journal had Brian Fagan, emeritus professor emeritus of anthropology at UC-Santa Barbara, share his thoughts on how Indy's work compares to that of his real-world colleagues. To be sure, Fagan finds Indy's professionalism about as lacking as James Bond's tradecraft. "Indiana Jones's unchanging skills are those of an artifact hunter and adventurer," he writes. "His professional ambitions revolve around quests for spectacular finds. He'd never risk his life for something as unglamorous as a scatter of potsherds or stone artifacts."

Yet, Fagan notes, that profile pretty much describes what real archeologists did during the 19th century, although such antics were long obsolete by the prime years of Indy's career:

Early explorers were no stranger to the snatch-and-run tactics favored by Indiana Jones; up through the 1860s, archaeologists were treasure hunters first and foremost. The best-known example of such an operator was Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin. He removed the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon at Athens and sold them to Parliament, which gave them to the British Museum in 1816. The Greek government has fought unsuccessfully for their return for years.

In 1871, Schliemann smuggled a spectacular collection of gold Trojan artifacts from Turkey. They now reside in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, despite the Turkish government's cries of foul. By Indy's time, our hero's methods would have been impossibly antiquated. By the 1930s it was common practice to carefully control excavation and pay attention to small artifacts, painstaking techniques Jones never quite has the time for.

On a related note, another WSJ story looks at the murky history behind the real-life crystal skulls that inspired the latest Indy flick's plot. They're fakes but, interestingly, museums still find them of historical and/or social value:

"The crystal skulls are legitimate artifacts, just not what they purport to be," says Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, who has studied 10 skulls since the Smithsonian received one as an anonymous donation in 1992. "We have to think of a new way of describing them. It's hard to call them fakes; sometimes I call them inventions," she says.

Dan DeLong / P-I

David Goldberg pushes a shopping cart of belongings up a hill while helping his son Joe Goldberg move four blocks without burning any fossil fuels.

Imagine moving a family of four to a new home without using a single motor vehicle.

That's what Seattleites Joe Goldberg and Venessa Brown did this weekend, in a "zero-carbon move" done entirely under people power. Jessica Langston tells the full story.