When Schoolgirls Attack

You could call it "Girls Gone Wild," South Philly-style, as the Philadelphia Daily News does; or "Attack of the Angry Catholic School Girls," as CNN suggests.

In any case, a group of Catholic high school girls are getting a lot of attention for chasing down and pummeling an alleged serial flasher.

Some choice excerpts from CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's on-air interview with Kelly and Jeanne Simone, two of the girls involved:

COOPER: What did police say when they first came on the scene, Kelly?

KELLY: They were proud of us because they were all girl cops.

COOPER: It was all female police officers and they said they were proud of you?

KELLY: Yes.

COOPER: How badly did this guy get injured? I mean, I guess there were quite a lot of you from this girl's school. What did you do to him?

KELLY: Well, we stormed him. Punched him. And then some guy came up. And then he started running and we all caught him and from what I hear, his tooth fell out.

MSFT + Google = !

If you didn't already catch it on our home page, Microsoft reportedly approached Google about a takeover of the leading search engine, according to the New York Times.

Google said no and plans to pursue plans to go public instead, even toying with the idea of auctioning shares directly to investors. If you want to be cynical, that could be interpreted as a statement that it'd rather be owned by literally everyone else in the world.

For a more amusing take, check out The Motley Fool's Lettermanesque list of Top 10 Implications of Microsoft Buying Google.

(Update: Todd Bishop rounds up some other commentaries on his blog.)

Even jeans evolve

You can't depend on anything these days, it seems. Not even "timeless classics" like Levi's 501 jeans. They, too, have been updated for the times (and, apparently, today's more substantive American consumers).

Why the victim count matters

Numbers can be cold and objective, but they can also be packed with emotion and key to healing and closure.

2,752 is an example of the latter. That's the current official count of how many people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. It went down by 40 this week.

New York Times columnist Dan Barry wrote a moving, evocative reflection on the lasting power and importance of this particular number:

The change in the number is more than a mere adjustment in a dispassionate tally. It reflects the singular horror of the trade center collapse, so thorough in its destruction that the exact number of victims remains elusive more than two years later. It reflects the worst in human nature: that many people, seeing opportunity in disaster, reported fictitious deaths in hopes of collecting benefits.

But it also reflects the best, city officials say, as personified by investigators so intent on determining the true and sacred number of the dead that they properly took their time, even if it meant that a few fraudulent names, or the names of the living, were sprinkled among those of the many dead. Better that, they reasoned, than to exclude the name of one true victim.

Small victories for fair use

The Librarian of Congress has approved four exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on bypassing digital "locks" on copyright material, Wired News reports:

People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

(If you prefer your information in a less concise form, here's the original, official announcement.)

Some fair-use advocates hailed the move. Others were disappointed it didn't go further; the Electronic Frontier Foundation had asked for further exemptions, including the right to circumvent DVD region coding and skip through commercials on DVDs.

Admittedly, I'd love to be able to do both those things, but I'm a little fuzzy on how they constitute "fair use" under the Copyright Act.

Info overload is real

Too much information! It's not just a complaint, it's a statement of fact.

Researchers have determined that the total amount of information in the world increases at about 30 percent a year, so there's now twice as much as there was just three years ago, science writer Tom Paulson notes in today's P-I.

Alas, such a net increase in the sum total of human knowledge doesn't necessarily mean it's a valuable increase -- and a big chunk of it might actually be spam.

"Unfortunately, much of this information being created out there is not very dense in terms of its interest," said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chairman of computer science at the University of Washington. It's mostly boring and of little use to most people, he said.

As this mountain of spam, technical data and other largely useless information continues to pile up at an alarming rate, Lazowska said, the need to find new tools for digging our way out of it becomes even more urgent.

"If we don't do something, the Internet will become useless," agreed [Jim Gray, manager of the Microsoft Research unit in San Francisco.] If you think getting a few hundred spam e-mails a day is bad, he said, imagine getting 10,000 a day.

Too many lies, too few naps

A pair of columns on the Wall Street Journal's CareerJournal site highlight two unfortunate trends in the contemporary office:

• More employers are tempting potential hires with job offers that are more deceptive than descriptive:

  Part of the problem is that job descriptions are written with the slipperiness of classifieds and personals. A brief lexicon from one recruiter: "Character building" means the job stinks, "mentoring" means "you've got a staff so inept you're a babysitter," "expense account" translates into "a bagged lunch so you can stay at your desk" and "team working environment," means noisy cubicles, says Don Steinmann, who used such euphemisms when he put together a team of computer programmers.

• Fewer businesses are letting employees nap during work hours. If yours does, this piece offers some useful tips on how to take more effective naps. If yours doesn't, it offers some useful tips on how to get away with it.
  

Readers feel less safe(?)

The polls we run on the home page every weekday are informal, unscientific and generally meant to be fun. But we also try to get a sense of what SeattlePI.com users think about the bigger issues of the day.

Case in point: Yesterday's poll was the third time we asked if people felt safer than they did six months or a year earlier. It's interesting to compare the most recent responses with what we recorded previously:

Oct. 24, 2002 Overall, do you feel safer today than you did a year ago? 11.8% Yes 40.3% No 46.3% About the same 1.6% Not sure Total Votes: 1983

May 8, 2003 Overall, do you feel safer today than you did six months ago? 21.5% Yes 37.6% No 39.9% About the same 1.1% Not sure Total Votes: 2750

Oct. 27, 2003 Overall, do you feel safer today than you did a year ago? 12.7% Yes 47.0% No 39.3% About the same 1.0% Not sure Total Votes: 3341

What conclusions can be drawn from this? Maybe none, since the respondents are a self-selecting group and the question is pretty broad. Still, it's an intriguing reminder that it may be easier to beef up security measures than it is to boost peace of mind.

Top picks, top clicks: 10/20-26

Apologies for the delay in getting last week's "most popular" lists posted; we had some technical problems. But here they are:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Pearl Jam thrills Benaroya throng
2. Seattle a soaked, soggy mess
3. UW scandal stuns NCAA's expert
4. Deal puts EMI Music's catalog online
5. Contest will pick the greatest facial hair on Earth
6. PCC's 'premium fish' was wrongly labeled
7. Woman breaks both legs protesting loud music
8. Action figure makers are toying with President Bush
9. West Seattle PCC rehires fired checker
10. A victim's chilling prophecy fulfilled

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Elliott Smith, 1969-2003: Found fame in 'Good Will Hunting'
2. Spam has e-mail by the throat, study says
3. People in the News: Ouch! Gellar explains her scar
4. Seattle a soaked, soggy mess
5. Woman breaks both legs protesting loud music
6. Pearl Jam thrills Benaroya throng
7. Give blood at Archie McPhee, get a gargoyle
8. UW scandal stuns NCAA's expert
9. Quarrel may have led to Vashon teen's
10. Yanks' Cashman calls Seattle GM job a dream position

The physics of traffic jams

Ever wondered why traffic slowdowns can persist for hours on a certain stretch of highway, only to end abruptly once you move a little further down the road?

Theoretical physicists have studied such questions, and they've found answers, Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley reported recently. (Someone generously posted the entire column onto Usenet for non-subscribers.)

Theoretical physicists began delving into traffic in the late 1990s, siccing equations of nonlinear dynamics and models of cellular automata (yes, they are as opaque as they sound) on such mysteries as why stop-and-go traffic can, for no evident cause, start zipping along again. Although the research has yet to produce a practical way to eliminate congestion, it has shown that there are empirical causes for such miseries as traffic slowing to a crawl even when there is no accident or rough pavement in sight.

TXT ADDCTN?

Can you become addicted to text messaging? The Priory clinic in London has reportedly started treating people who can't keep themselves from thumbing communiques on their cell phones.

But, Wired News points out, the answer seems to depend on just how you define addiction:

A spokeswoman at a leading substance abuse clinic in Southern California reported that no patient had yet been admitted for an addiction to mobile phones. She did note, however, that it was the clinic's policy to require patients to check their devices in upon admission. "People literally detox from their phones," she said. "Text messaging, games -- these are all sources of isolation, a way to zone out."

This statement reflects the fact that treatment in such clinics aims to remove a dependence that is used by the patient to escape. But does it signal the entrance of the mobile phone into the arsenal of addictions? Are the Priory patients exhibiting genuine signs of addiction to their cell phones, or is it merely that the thought of being locked up with more run-of-the-mill addicts makes text-messaging friends on the outside a welcome consolation?

It isn't necessary to be a cocaine addict to concede that communication devices are compulsive. We can surely all recall moments when we have been unable to resist sending that extra e-mail, instant message or SMS, or hold back from making one more phone call. This "compulsion" to communicate remotely has driven the telecom industry for its entire 100-year existence and fueled the development of the Internet. Every graph depicting traffic volumes over time is the same shape: an upward curve. And that's whether the traffic tracked is text messages, mobile minutes or international voice calls.

Other rules to live by

Have you heard of Despair, Inc.? I hadn't, until I got its catalog in the mail the other day.

If you're tired of all the inspirational graffiti littering the workplace, Despair offers an alternative: calendars, posters and other items emblazoned with amusing "demotivational" messages. Each is accompanied by an emblematic photo. Some of my favorites:

• Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us.
• Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it rocks absolutely, too.
• Success: Some people dream of success. Other people live to crush those dreams.
• Consulting: If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

Taking back your time?

Today is national Take Back Your Time Day, dedicated to challenging "the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."

Reporter Rebekah Denn wrote a roundup of local tie-in events the other day.

Confession: I'm honoring the occasion by telecommuting on what should be my day off.

Entertaining tidbits

I don't usually write much about entertainment in this blog, but a few developments caught my interest today and, hey, it's Friday:

• If you can't please everybody, then just placate the ones that really matter, appears to the message as the MPAA relented partially on its ban of awards-show screeners. Only members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote for the Oscars, will get traceable videotaped copies of nominated films -- under strict conditions holding them accountable for whatever happens to them. Other groups are locked out, and a lot of people still aren't happy.
• All publicity is good publicity, goes the old adage. That's one way to interpret the news that Jim Caviezel, the star of Mel Gibson's controversial new movie, "The Passion of Christ," was struck by lightning during filming. Of course, a lot of people are probably looking at a different interpretation.
• An awards show honoring reality TV shows might have been a nifty idea, but it's been scuttled because of real-world network rivalries.

Amazon's super-search

Amazon.com has rolled out a much-anticipated feature that lets customers search the full text of books, and see scans of the pages where the search terms appear.

"Search Inside the Book" is integrated into the main book search, with its results appearing right beneath the blurb for each book in the form of an excerpt, with a link to a search page that shows further references and lets you refine your search. (One quibble: The "See more references" link appears even if there's only one reference in the book.)

The feature I actually like most is the ability to browse through the books on screen. Amazon lets you view scans of several pages around each citation using an interface similar to the one it uses for restaurant menus.

Right now, you can search "only" 120,000 books but the company reportedly plans to add many more. Gary Wolf explores the broader implications of Amazon's move -- e.g., is Jeff Bezos building an Alexandrian library for our age?) -- for Wired magazine. He also gets insight from the technology's inventor and tackles the question of whether this will actually help sell more books. Answer: Yup.

... Amazon's scheme would never work if users really wanted their books in digital form. The magic of the archive lies in the assumption that physical books are irreplaceable. The electronic text is simply an enhancement of the physical object.

Previously in Buzzworthy: Amazon: Search this book

Living with spam

Spam: How it is hurting email and degrading life on the Internet is a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that examines junk e-mail's very real effects on daily life -- and that tackles the question, Is it killing e-mail?

Some 93 percent Americans now use e-mail, Pew says. Most can identify spam immediately and, surprisingly, a third actually respond to it although only 7 percent said they bought something. Men are more likely to respond to spam than women. Young people -- aged 18 to 29 -- are more likely to see spam as no big deal than older folks.

P-I reporter Kristin Dizon talks to some real people around Seattle to see how they feel about the growing spam problem. Not surprisingly, their experiences back up what's in the Pew study.

The li'l bloodsucker that could

I wrote recently about the Pentagon's efforts to improve battlefield medicine via high tech. NPR's "Morning Edition" reported today that a decidedly low-tech solution for stemming blood loss has won a thumbs-up after successes in the field.

QuikClot is an inert powder that rapidly absorbs moisture from wounds, concentrating the clotting factors in blood. Its success climaxes a textbook story of a lone inventor with an idea he struggled to have taken seriously.

Listen to the segment here.

No sex please, we're Dutch

While perusing today's photos from the Associated Press, I stumbled across yet another glaring reminder that life can be quite different in other parts of the world.

This was the caption on a photo accompanying a story on trends in Dutch TV programming:

Bridget Maasland, host of "This Is How You Screw," is seen in this undated publicity photo. Teen-oriented public broadcaster BNN has stopped running the sex education series. According to the Netherlands' Institute for Classifying Audiovisual Media, sex programs are losing their audience.

Here's the full story, if you're curious.

Piracy pits Hollywood vs. Hollywood

One of the more interesting anti-piracy battles recently has all the classic elements: it pits creatives vs. suits, has big corporations flexing their muscles, and leaves indiscriminate collateral damage.

The twist is that this one has been fought between entertainment industry insiders. And it illustrates just how complicated and messy even perfectly logical and seemingly non-litigious anti-piracy measures can get.

The battle was drawn over "screeners," copies of movies nominated for the Oscars and other major awards that are sent out on VHS and DVD to eligible voters "for their consideration," as they say. In recent years, screeners have become commonplace. Besides Oscars voters, members of the Directors, Writers and Screen Actors Guilds get them, too; so do the Golden Globe-selecting Hollywood Foreign Press Association and other critics' groups, E! Online notes.

That extra exposure has been considered key to the number of big-award wins racked up in recent years by independent films that don't play in many theaters.

Unfortunately, the flood of screeners also provided ample source material for pirates looking to get their hands on films which had yet to come out on video. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, cited some stunning numbers for Entertainment Weekly: "My antipiracy department experts saw that of the 68 titles sent out, 34 were pirated, and all of them were traced back to screeners."

To deter further piracy, the MPAA last month announced a ban on screeners, effective immediately, and major studios went along with it.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. Independent filmmakers denounced the move because it would effectively knock them out of the running for awards. Prominent actors and directors publicly decried it, too. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association even canceled its annual awards in protest.

In the face of such vehement opposition, the MPAA is backing off -- to a point. A compromise plan expected to be announced this week would let studios send specially watermarked screeners to eligible Academy Award voters -- but not to those who vote in other awards contests.

As Entertainment Weekly put it: "Message from the Motion Picture Association of America to Academy Awards voters: We're not so worried anymore that you all may be potential pirates. Everyone else in the industry is still suspect, however." (Subscription required.)

Of course, this compromise sets up a new battle over "the prospect of dividing the film community between screener haves and have-nots," the Hollywood Reporter points out.

Stay tuned, as they say.

(Oct. 24 update: The MPAA did announce that videotape screeners would be made available to members of the Academy in a "one-year experiment" designed to hold recipients accountable for whatever happens to their copies. However, that hasn't entirely quelled the dissent within Hollywood, Reuters reports.)

Blogs and journalism

Maybe it's a fad, maybe it's a major sea change. In any case, Weblogs have proliferated on professional news sites this year. And just how they fit into the Big Picture of what we do is a topic that has sparked lots of discussion in journalism circles.

College professor and press critic Jay Rosen has posted two thought-provoking lists: Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism and What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism?.

They point out not only how much Weblogs have changed things (readers are now collaborators, not just consumers) but also how many things have stayed the same (credibility and accuracy still count for a lot).

Has-Been House

Fame. Once you have it, you can't stop wanting it.

Apparently, so many has-been celebrities were interested in doing the second season of The WB's "Surreal Life" that they're going to have a rotating houseguest of the week, AP reports.

They'll have to put up with Tammy Faye Messner and Erik Estrada as regular residents.

Peacock fashion physics

Apropos of nothing, but kind of interesting, nonetheless:

Chinese scientists have figured out the secret of all the iridescent colors in peacock feathers, National Geographic reports:

Researchers found that the feathers' bright colors are produced not by pigments, but rather by tiny, intricate two-dimensional crystal-like structures. Slight alterations in the spacing of these microscopic structures cause different wavelengths of light to be filtered and reflected, creating the feathers' many different iridescent hues.

Redesigning reality

Is form winning out over function in contemporary design -- or are the two blending in unforeseen ways?

Top-rank design firms like IDEO are busy redesigning ... well, reality as we know it. Or, at least, all those bits of reality that we move through and interact with as we go about our lives, Newsweek reports.

IDEO is at the forefront of a radical shift in the very concept of design, moving from inventing objects to analyzing and reshaping the way environments and customs mold our experiences. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm now applies the open-eyed, open-ended process it uses for coming up with new products to rethink the placement of signs in a store, the positioning of seats in an airplane, even the way a company treats customers and suppliers; it’s obliterating traditional distinctions among designers, architects and business-strategy consultants.

It's part of a big package, Design 2004: Meet the Titans of Taste, that takes over Newsweek's Oct. 27 issue.

Top picks, top clicks

The most popular stories for the week of Oct. 13-18, 2003:

Top picks (most e-mailed)

1. Go 2 Guy: Huskies football, 113, R.I.P.
2. Nethercutt hails Iraq's recovery
3. No wonder Bush doesn't connect with the rest of the country
4. Tanning booths may raise cancer risk by 55%
5. Cougars turning region upside down
6. Online classes paying the way
7. As tribes prosper, they need lawyers
8. Java jolt: Grocery clerk canned for a cup of coffee?
9. Crabbing industry faces a sea change
10. Episcopalians' tenuous unity shattered

Top clicks (most read)

1. Nethercutt hails Iraq's recovery
2. Ridnour's wait comes to an end
3. No wonder Bush doesn't connect with the rest of the country
4. Go 2 Guy: Huskies football, 113, R.I.P.
5. On the way to Black Angus, a humiliating traffic stop
6. Only restrictions facing M's in GM search are self-imposed
7. Seibu Lion's Matsui headed for majors ... and Mariners?
8. People in the News: Benet's ex: Tension made them do it
9. Java jolt: Grocery clerk canned for a cup of coffee?
10. It's Wizards vs. Pokemon as ex-partners square off

Power to the P2Pers

Entertainment Weekly has released its annual "Power List" of the 101 most powerful people and other entities in the world of entertainment. The list is divided between "creatives" (performers, writers, et al.) and "suits" (executives and behind-the-scenes folks).

Coming in at No. 50 on the "suits" list: "Average CD-Pirating Kids," further described as "Thieving, Amoral Slackers":

The RIAA's lawsuit rollout scared some Kazaa users straight, but only stiffened the resolve of many hardcore file sharers, who already knew they were breaking the law and find the odds of getting sued highly in their favor. These kids' power plays have resulted in (a) the successful advent of iTunes; (b) Universal's across-the-board CD price drop, and (c) annual industrywide 10 percent-plus sales drops for two years. Talk about sticking it to the man! But the question remains: Why can't Johnny be ethical?

If you're a subscriber or newsstand buyer, you can peruse the complete list -- which includes Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos at No. 18 -- at EW.com, or pick up the Oct. 24 issue.

Meet the Fake Detective

All retirees need a hobby. For Ed Lake, of Racine, Wis., it's exposing salacious photos of female celebs as digitally manipulated fakes, Wired magazine reports:

Lake, a 66-year-old retired Air Force weather observer, is the self-described Fake Detective, defender of Hollywood babes. Every day ... he scours the alt.celebrity newsgroups for doctored photos of starlets in various stages of undress. The hoaxsters behind these operations: a breed of hackers known as fakers who pride themselves not on their ability to crack code but on their skill at creating a new kind of postmodern art.

Wired also tracked down Lake's arch-nemesis, a Dutch faker known as Trillian, who sheds some light on his craft:

"There's nothing erotic when you're working at the level of pixels," he says. He likes the simple nod to a task well-done - something missing from his daily life. "You can seek recognition at work, but you will be disappointed," he says. ... "That's part of faking: 'Look at what I've done.' You get cheers or boos. You get recognition."

Who's the most popular "fakee"?

Gillian Anderson. She has all the ingredients: girl-next-door accessibility, sci-fi geek cred, and, most important, a symmetrical face that's easy to manipulate. Britney Spears is not symmetrical, Trillian explains, making her difficult to flip. Sandra Bullock is almost perfect. Same for Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt. "Their heads glue on almost every body," he says.

So yes, there is a downside to having a symmetrical face, even if it does make you more attractive.

The great HVAC fraud

At last it can be revealed: the office thermostat you keep adjusting may very well be a fake.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg explains:

Fed up with complaints from sweaty men and shivering women, HVAC technicians install dummy thermostats to give workers the illusion of control. In some leased buildings, even the corporate tenants don't know the thermostats are useless. Other times, it's the companies themselves, barraged with calls from workers, who ask the landlord's HVAC technicians to "fix" things.

... Outrageous! As if we haven't been living enough business lies, now this. Thermo-fraud threatens to make more of us look like fools than the New Economy and the disco era combined.

That's not all, Sandberg notes: the "close door" buttons in elevators and "walk" buttons at intersections don't really work, either.

On consumer choice

My colleague, Todd Bishop, blogged about Microsoft's response to Apple Computer's rollout of iTunes for Windows yesterday.

Dave Fester, GM of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division, doesn't think much of iTunes because it limits users to Apple's technology and Apple's online music store. He declares that "this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device."

Fester's comments sparked a lively discussion among readers on Todd's blog. I'll add my two cents' worth here:

Sometimes, too much choice can be a bad thing. Consumers may well prefer having a limited number of simple, reliable choices to having a bewildering range of options. That's probably one reason why people order a pre-fab lunch special in an Asian restaurant instead of picking and choosing from among dozens of entree options. Or why ice cream parlors still sell lots of vanilla and chocolate, even when they have dozens of flavors ready to go.

The decision-makers at Apple understand that; it's been the company's guiding product philosophy since Steve Jobs retook the helm. Keep it simple, make it elegant, and try to make sure that it works like it's supposed to. That's enough choice for many technology consumers.

The stealth PDA

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs has a justly earned reputation for being perhaps the world's greatest salesman. I've seen him do new product announcements and demos, both live and via video, and I have to say that his stage presence is spellbinding -- and his sales pitches always sound utterly convincing (at least while they're in progress).

But Jobs seems to understand that the soft-sell approach is sometimes the way to go. Take Apple's stealth entry into the PDA market, better known as the iPod. A million people have bought iPods to play music on the go, but Apple has kept adding features, and encouraging third-party add-ons, that turn them into very versatile pocket computers.

iPods can now store appointment calendars and notes, double as alarm clocks, back up digital photos, record voice memos, even play Solitaire. Plus, they're cool to have. That should cover many people's needs for PDAs.

(Full disclosure: I don't have an iPod. I own a Palm Vx, which I sometimes use in lieu of a laptop while traveling.)

New ways to fend off sleep

Will sleep become something that we can switch on and off, just by popping a pill? Looks that way, judging from a fascinating Wired magazine story about current efforts to develop new drugs that can suppress, or trigger, our desire to slumber. And they do it with few side effects -- i.e., no "highs" -- and little chance of addiction.

Patriot Act and e-commerce

Add to the list of unintended consequences of the USA Patriot Act a chilling effect on e-commerce.

Philip Bevis, chief executive of Arundel Books, is one merchant who says that customer concerns about how their information could end up in the hands of federal authorities has changed how he does business:

... his customers' concerns about the anti-terrorism law have forced him to severely curb the amount of customer data he retains, and to alter his marketing as a result. Because he no longer keeps information about customer purchases -- so as to avoid the possibility of having to disclose it to the government -- he can no longer discern his patrons' buying habits and offer them advertisements for books they may like.

Wake up, you're in surgery

A new study found that 100 patients wake up during surgery every day in this country because of anesthesia failure, USA Today reports.

The study was funded by a company that makes a device to monitor how deeply patients are sedated. Many anesthesiologists have resisted using them, the newspaper reports.

Canines for Hitler?

A German man who taught his dog, Adolf, to do the Hitler salute has been charged with violating laws banning use of Nazi slogans and symbols.

Going ga-ga over gadgets

You're not imagining that there are thousands of "like new" electronic gadgets up for sale on eBay. It's just human nature, Katie Hafner reports for the New York Times:

People acquire these things — hand-held personal digital assistants, flatbed scanners, compact disc copiers and a host of other objects — because they promise to make life more efficient, more fun, or, some confess, simply because they appear to help them keep up with what their "wired" friends and neighbors have.

But many such products are simply too complicated for their own good. And all too often, the buyers find that they cannot really change their lives just by acquiring something new and different.

I've bought my fair share of gadgets over the years, although I don't think I'm a classic "serial acquirer," to use Hafner's turn of phrase. There were a few duds -- most notably, a small network router that I never really needed -- but I've actually managed to put most of them to good use. Some have even become indispensable: the digital camera, the scanner, the PDAs, the Wi-Fi gear, the 5.8GHz cordless phone system, the TiVo (it really does change how you watch TV).

Feds on privacy

Oct. 3 was the ostensible deadline for federal agencies to turn in privacy impact reports on databases they maintain. Not all of them made it, Wired News reports.

So much for 'personal' touch

Are you more likely to use a Web site that lets you personalize it; that is, to create a "MyThisSite.com" that reflects your personal tastes and interests?

If you answered no, you're hardly alone. A new Jupiter Research report says that personalization doesn't work, people don't use it and it costs a lot of money.

News.com notes: "More than 25 percent of consumers surveyed by Jupiter said they avoided Web site customization because of concerns that marketers would misuse the information. A similar proportion avoided registering with a Web site, for the same reasons."

What would make consumers more likely to use a site? According to Jupiter, faster-loading pages and better navigation top the list.

Priorities, priorities

A quick roundup of some things that have people worked up today:

• Should the alarm that reminds you to buckle your seat belt sound for more than eight seconds? Under federal regulations, it can't. But the National Academy of Sciences has studied the matter thoroughly, and thinks that they should.
• A judge has ordered a bilingual man to speak mainly English around his daughter as a condition for visitation rights.
• Convenience store operators are divided on whether the "Simpsons" character Apu reflects well or poorly on their industry, according to an interesting sidebar in a Chicago Sun-Times article on new quick-mart products.

Killers or coders?

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? is an interactive quiz that shows you photos of 10 real men and challenges you to pick out who hacked code from who hacked people.

It's quick, fun, educational and just a little bit twisted. What more could you ask for?

I got 8 out of 10, by the way; mostly by wild guesses.

(Read about this at J.D. Lasica's New Media Musings.)

Tower of babble

Web-based translation tools, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish and Free Translation, can prove handy in a pinch. More likely, though, their clumsy efforts are just good for a laugh.

No one would ever try to use one of those tools for real work, would they?

Well, the small German town of Homberg-an-der-Efze did just that with a tourism brochure -- and ended up having to destroy all 7,500 copies, BBC News reports.

Sabine Reul, who runs a Frankfurt-based translation service staffed by humans, explains why the online tools fall so far short:

"Beyond simple sentences, the online process simply doesn't work because machines don't understand grammar and semantics, never mind idiom and style."

"Language is not a system of signs in the mechanical sense of the word", says Reul. "It is a living medium that is used to convey thought. And that is where machines fail. Human input is indispensable as long as computers cannot think."

Just for fun, I ran the text from Reul's German-language home page through Babel Fish. Apparently, his firm employs "a first-class team of nut-linguistic technical translators."

Copy protection with a twist

A British computer game maker is trying out "a radical new anti-copying strategy," New Scientist reports.

Dubbed Fade, it causes illicit copies of a game to gradually degrade over time although they work fine at first. For example, with a new snooker game, "gravity is progressively turned off so the balls start behaving oddly and end up floating over the table." That not only discourages copying but encourages people who get hooked on the defective copies to go buy the real thing.

Macrovision, which incorporated Fade into its SafeDisc anti-piracy system, is also introducing a related product called SafeDVD. According to New Scientist, that will cause illegally copied DVDs to stop playing at critical points in a movie's plot. Now, that sounds very interesting. What moments in your favorite films would make good cliffhangers?

Top picks, top clicks

For the week of Oct. 6-11, 2003:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Companies, careers built or lost one conversation at time
2. Backfire ignites dog, dog sets grass fire
3. In the Northwest: Gas drillers poised along Rocky Mountain Front
4. Airborne is moving out
5. Changing tactics speed growth of Jehovah's Witnesses
6. Grizzly mauls, kills a bear 'expert'
7. The smell of success: Macrina among the upper crust of local bakeries
8. Go 2 Guy: The softer side of Holmgren
9. Mount Rainier's slopes are ablaze with fall colors
10. Sitting on volcano, Yellowstone 'like a living, breathing thing'

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. People in the News: Moore gets the news off her chest
2. Lewis breaks out
3. People: Keanu Reeves is hit hard by sister's diagnosis
4. Sonics' top pick out for season
5. ALCS Notebook: Fan: Ball was foul by six inches
6. Kent slaying suspect lived 3 doors down
7. People in the News: Hannah won't let Playboy skate
8. The Couch Slouch: Cubs, Sox fans should suffer in silence
9. Analysis: Collison injury wasn't a given
10. People in the News: Michael and his new pal: 'Just friends'

High-tech healing

A vaccine against pain, battery-powered bandages that speed skin repair, a sensor that can tell if you've been poisoned just by looking at your eye.

They're all ideas which are moving from science fiction to real-world battlefield medicine -- with potential civilian applications, too, Wired News reports.

'Spamford' revisited

Wired News catches up with Sanford "Spamford" Wallace, once the most notorious, perhaps most detested, person in cyberspace. Back in the day, his company was single-handedly responsible for 80 percent of all the spam on the Internet, according to some estimates.

Wallace retired from spamming several years back. What's he up to now? Running a night club in New Hampshire where he's also the head DJ.

Tech that deserves to die

What do light bulbs, land mines and manned space missions have in common?

They all made author and futurist Bruce Sterling's list of Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die because they've outlived their usefulness in one way or another.

Here's what he has to say about another "relic" of 20th-century technology, nuclear weapons:

Nowadays, a well-organized state can deftly obliterate any conceivable target with exquisite GPS accuracy. Conventional “daisy cutters” and cluster bombs can be scaled up to any size or potency that the military might need. This leaves nuclear bombs with only one ideal function: terrorism. They are excellent weapons for nongovernmental predators to deploy against centers of government. They are quite useless for governments to deploy against terrorists.

Music can make you spend

A restaurant's background music can affect how much you spend when eating out, British researchers have found.

As Reuters puts it, "a bit of classical music can persuade diners to buy more fancy coffees, pricey wines and luxurious desserts."

The study involved having a restaurant alternating silence, pop and classical on 18 nights. Sales of "luxury" foods rose when the dining experience was accompanied by Beethoven, Mahler and Vivaldi.

In an interview with The Washington Post's Margaret Webb Pressler, music psychologist Adrian North, the lead researcher in that study, expands on how retailers and restaurateurs use background music to influence patrons.

"If you want your shoppers to move quickly -- spend less time in a restaurant, say -- if you want to do that you've got to play fast music, because customers are going around the store more quickly," North said. "If you want to slow them down, put in slow music. They'll shop more, and put more in their basket."

(Thanks to Tracy for pointing out the first story.)

September's top comics

Correction: The list I originally posted was wrong because of a recordkeeping error. Cornered didn't make it onto the list after all.

Instead, the list of most popular comic strips on seattlepi.com in September is even more like the one for August:

1. Zits
2. Funky Winkerbean
3. Sherman's Lagoon
4. Hagar the Horrible
5. Mallard Fillmore
6. Non Sequitur
7. Dilbert
8. Mutts
"
9. Beetle Bailey
10. 9 Chickweed Lane

Bloggers a breed apart?

Richard MacManus ruminates on the much-hyped promise of blogging going mainstream and concludes that it's probably not going to happen.

One of the main reasons blogging has "taken off," he points out, is because the technology now makes it very easy to publish online. But that merely removes an obstacle for those who want to blog; it doesn't give most people a reason to blog in the first place.

"How many people have cottoned onto the read/write revolution? How many people actually have a reason or the inclination to publish their ideas and thoughts to the Web?"

Personally, I think MacManus has a point: sustaining any kind of ongoing publication takes concerted effort -- a "will to publish," as he puts it. A few years back, lots of people put up personal home pages, and many stopped updating them after a while. I doubt it will be different with blogs. Even if aspiring bloggers do have something to say, I suspect a lot will find that they just won't have the time to say it.

Krispy Kreme kraziness

Believe it or not, an ongoing topic of debate in journalism circles is whether the opening of the first Krispy Kreme in a new market deserves the blowout coverage it usually gets from local media. Is it really legitimate news or just giving in to hyped-up marketing? (The P-I's as "guilty" as anyone in this regard.)

American Journalism Review's Jill Rosen explores the issue, interviewing journalists on both sides of the fence.

Most newspapers, TV newscasts and radio programs find it hard to ignore the opening of a new Krispy Kreme outlet. Actually, they probably don't even try. When a store comes to town--any town--it's treated like a news event, from the time its plans pass the zoning board to its meticulously razzmatazzed grand opening.

And this is no ordinary coverage. Objectivity goes out when the "hot now" sign goes on. This is ecstatic coverage. Enamored, awestruck and charmed. ...

Rosen's interview subjects offer a variety of theories to explain why journalists seem to love covering Krispy Kreme. My favorite is an engagingly cynical explanation from Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow:

In Krispy Kreme, journalists see the brass ring, the way to reach the Everyreader. "We want to prove we're not this big, corporate, cold, lefty newspaper--we're a newspaper of the people," he says. "And what shows this more than getting excited over a donut shop."