Haute dogs and hot balls

It's Memorial Day in the U.S., when thoughts turn to such national pastimes as baseball games and outdoor picnics. In that vein, here are a couple of relevant pieces from the Wall Street Journal:

• Why Hitting Curveballs Scores More Homers; How Pedro Proves Rule: Researchers have found that the conventional wisdom that a fastball is more likely to be smacked over the fence is simply wrong.
• Dear, the $9 Hot Dogs Are Burning: "For America's nationwide cookout this weekend, the new crucial accessory isn't a top-of-the-line grill or a fancy laser thermometer. It's the kind of pedigreed beef, pork and fowl associated more with three-star restaurants than with backyard spatula jockeys."

Logging on to lie

Just passing along an insight from B.J. Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab:

Chatrooms thrive because lots of people enjoy manipulating others through deception. They find it thrilling. Thanks to chat technology, people can indulge in this deviant behavior without facing serious consequences (um, usually). If deception weren't an option, the market for chatrooms would wither.

From Strawberry to Apple

Author Strawberry Saroyan offers some advice to Apple Blythe Alison Martin (Gwyneth's little girl) on what to expect if you grow named after a fruit. Apparently, it helps if you're raised among other artistic, creative types whose children also have unusual names -- but the other kids still make fun of you.

Romance, BlackBerry style

The New York Times' Jennifer 8. Lee offers a fascinating case study in how technology is transforming social interactions -- and how those inside the Beltway really do live in a different world:

In the high-tempo, socially incestuous world of Washington politics, where more than 60 percent of Congressional staff members are single, the BlackBerry — a wireless e-mail device introduced five years ago by Research in Motion, a Canadian company — has become indispensable to social life. Thanks to the lobbying firms, political campaigns and government agencies that issue BlackBerries, a critical mass of wireless-enabled romantics can now boldly clip them to their belts or discreetly tuck them away in purses in preparation for the evening's adventures. The chipmunklike thumb action associated with "Berrying" is now as readily observed in smoky bars on late nights as it is in Congressional hearings.

"Once the Hill staffers got the Berries, the social dating scene was revolutionized," said Jano Cabrera, the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "Suddenly they have gone from earnest policy wonks and flacks who leave at the end of the day to mini-keyboard Lotharios."

Something's phishy

"Bank robbery with an electronic twist" is how the Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Wagstaff describes the current threat posed by phishing scams as spammers, virus writers and con artists cooperate to steal access to victim's online accounts:

Security consultants and law-enforcement officers say members of the three groups have joined to steal hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars using a scam known as "phishing" -- the art of duping computer users into revealing their passwords and other private data.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group, a U.S. industry association, counted 1,125 such attacks in April, up 180% over March. MessageLabs, a U.S. e-mail security company, reported an 800-fold increase in such attacks in the past six months. "This is a huge increase," says Dan Maier of the Anti-Phising Working Group. "Each unique attack sends out anywhere from 50,000 to 10 million spam/phishing e-mails."

But while most attention has focused on e-mails that try to lure the unwary by imitating respected financial institutions, the "phishing" scam -- pronounced "fishing," and named for its technique of luring prey with convincing bait -- has already mutated into something more dangerous, security experts say. Such attacks now sometimes include code that hides on a user's computer to capture log-in names and passwords, which means even careful computer users could have their information stolen.

One recent attack was able to take snapshots of a user's screen when they logged onto their banking Web site, security experts said.

Fingerprinting fiasco

Did the FBI's arrest of Portland lawyer Brandon Mayfield based on an erroneous fingerprint match shake your faith in the reliability of fingerprinting? If not, it should, says public defender David Feige. In a Slate piece, Printing Problems -- The inexact science of fingerprint analysis, he argues that the century-old forensic standard is more subjective pseudoscience than irrefutable evidence.

The Zambian hen affair

OK, this takes the cake for the weirdest news story of the week. In fact, I'm not even going to bother looking for any others:  
Man commits suicide after having sex with hen.

How to use the phone

E-mail use is quite common nowadays but you can still find handbooks on how to use it. In a similar vein, Clay Shirky points to a reference work from an earlier time, the 1940s, that explains how to make proper use of that era's new-fangled communications technology, the telephone.

Some of the advice it offers may sound oddly familiar to Netizens:

Over the telephone ... you voice -- and your voice alone -- is you. It's not just what you say but how you say it that results in making friends and and that smooths the way for the quick, pleasant transaction of the business at hand.

No more mail, please

The idea was to keep Seattleites from dodging a required monorail tax, but a seemingly simple requirement that people register their cars using their primary residential address sparked an unexpected furor, the P-I reports today. A lot of people apparently don't want to have mail sent to their homes anymore, citing concerns about mail and identity theft.

The requirement has been suspended while the state Department of Licensing upgrades its computers to let vehicle owners list alternate mailing addresses on their registrations.

Bad science, bad movie?

Climate and weather scientists from the University of Washington did not have kind words for "The Day After Tomorrow," the global-warming disaster movie opening today. "Shameless scientific prostitution" is how Gerard Roe, a professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, described it after taking in a sneak preview with his colleagues.

P-I film critic William Arnold had somewhat nicer things to say about the film, which he gives a B-. That seems to be more or less the consensus opinion of other critics.

Blogging: a new addiction

Can you get addicted to blogging? The New York Times' Katie Hafner examines the question and finds that for some very devoted bloggers, the answer is yes:

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes ... quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.

Just curious: How many of you Buzzworthy readers maintain blogs of your own? And do you post regularly, occasionally or, dare I say it, obsessively? Feel free to include the URLs for your own blogs if you want to answer.

Dinosaurs' fiery doom

Stories about giant asteroids striking Earth are perennial favorites with our readers, for some reason. So, some of you might be interested in reading about a new theory that the dinosaurs may have died a quick, fiery death after an asteroid impact superheated the atmosphere worldwide. That contradicts the prevailing theory that they perished over months or years as a "nuclear winter" changed the global climate.

Death to worm writers

Writing on Slate, Steven E. Landsburg presents the economic argument for executing people who write computer worms. Yes, there is one:

Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved, with a value—again a high-end estimate—of about $10 million apiece. (The closet thing to a consensus estimate in the economics literature is about $7 million per life. I am rounding up.) So let's say the benefit of executing a murderer is roughly 10 times $10 million, or $100 million—and that's probably at the high end.

Compare that to the benefit of executing the author of a computer worm, virus, or Trojan. There seems to be no good name for such people, so I'll make one up—at least until some reader sends in a better suggestion, I'll call them "vermiscripters." It's estimated that vermiscripting and related activities cost the world about $50 billion a year. So if a single execution could deter just one-fifth of 1 percent of all vermiscripting for just one year, we'd gain the same $100-million benefit we earn by executing a killer. Anything over one-fifth of 1 percent, and any effects that last beyond the first year, are gravy.

Even if you don't buy Landsburg's tongue-in-cheek argument -- well, I'm pretty sure it's tongue-in-cheek -- you might be interested in his enlightening explanation of just how economists came up with those valuations for human life.

Top toilet touted

There's an award for everything. The one for America's nicest restroom goes to the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisc., CNN reports. It's given out by Cintas Corp., described as a major provider of restroom hygiene services.

You are not just your data

SF Gate columnist Mark Morford offers a, um, rather intense "sanity check" for those worried about compromising their privacy when they take part in the online economy:

This is the gist. I have left an enormous e-trail of purchases and site visits and account data. My credit card number is lodged in a hundred different company servers, if not more. I have doubtlessly generated some sort of meta-profile somewhere that indicates which ads I'd like to see more of and which products might interest me and I'm probably the target of a thousand advertisers who think they can reach me in some significant or profound way.

But this is what gets lost in the morass of e-commerce and credit cards and alarmist privacy concerns: They cannot touch me. They cannot actually reach me in any significant manner, ever. I am protected and secure and absolutely, thoroughly immune, forever. And you know what? So are you.

No go on this nickname

Shanaaz Ismail, of South Africa, picked up the nickname "Nazi" as a baby and has used it for most of her 34 years. But when she put it on a personalized license plate, the complaints started rolling in.

Bomb threat unintentional

Yes, it's apparently possible to make an accidental bomb threat. A Florida man said he was busy playing the videogame Grand Theft Auto when he blurted out "There's a bomb in the building. There's a bomb in the building. Everyone needs to get out!" over the phone to a restaurant co-worker. Now he's in jail for making a false report about planting a bomb or explosive.

A self-finding golf ball

Here's an idea for how to get RFID technology into the hands of ordinary people: a golf ball that you'll never lose.

Office space shrinkage

If your office seems to be getting more cramped, it might not be your imagination. "From advertising agencies and law firms to insurers and industrial giants, the corporate work station is shrinking," the New York Times reports. Cost-saving isn't the only reason; experts say that equating spacious digs with status is on the outs.

Gaining on Google

The gap between Google and competing search engines is narrower than you might think, according to a new study that found Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, MSN and Lycos returned results almost as good. CNN/Money has the details -- and notes that in that context, the famed simplicity of Google's interface may be a big selling point.

Meanwhile, SearchEngineWatch summarizes some recent findings on a little-studied topic: the behavior patterns of search-engine users.

Can that camera

J.D. Lasica has compiled a great roundup of what folks in the blogosphere and the mainstream media are saying about a reported ban on camera phones at U.S. military compounds in Iraq.

I can understand the views of those who are upset at the prospect that military personnel might no longer be able to document possible malfeasance or evidence of official dissembling, but I have to wonder: Is the Pentagon's banning cameras really different, in principle, from a private employer doing the same?

After all, as Todd Bishop noted in his blog last fall, readers felt Microsoft was well within its rights to fire a contract worker for taking and posting unauthorized photos of Apple computers arriving at the shipping dock.

(Update: Wired News clarifies the situation: the Pentagon isn't banning phonecams exactly, but is telling commanders to clamp down on recording devices that don't meet official security requirements, such as encryption.)

What price Gmail?

One of my newest online guilty pleasures: seeing what nifty things people are offering on Gmail Swap. If you haven't seen it, the site's a clearinghouse where people who covet accounts on Google's still-in-beta free e-mail service can try to entice current users to invite them to join.

Turns out that people will give just about anything from a piece of the Great Wall of China to their soul. Some of the more interesting proposals I've seen so far include someone's complete spam collection, 70 minutes of "crazy ramblings of a humanities teacher," the location of Atlantis and " ".

What offers get takers? They range from novelties such as a cameo in a comic strip or your name written in a string of DNA, to practical stuff like 40 hours of professional copy-editing lessons. Well, it's nice to see that someone out there values copy editing.

You're full -- psych!

A "pacemaker" for the stomach could be the next big thing in weight-loss technology, Wired News reports. The implanted device stimulates nerves with electrical pulses to make patients feel like they're full even if they aren't. It won't help binge eaters who don't worry about little things like appetite cues, however.

Dog data

Seattle's gone to the dogs. According to a P-I analysis of pet licenses, canines outnumber felines in the Emerald City 27,989 to 21,346 (although there are undoubtedly many more unlicensed animals).

Other data points: Labrador retrievers are the most popular breed, and the most popular dog names are Max, Lucy, Maggie, Buddy and Molly.

The ties that sicken

Doctor's neckties are really unsuspected germ farms, a new study warns. It's easy for the dangling bits of ornamental fabric to get contaminated, especially since most men don't clean their ties as often as they do other articles of clothing. Yet another blow to the formal workplace.

Pop! goes the culture

A quick roundup of some interesting items from the world of entertainment:

• When celebrity bloggers became published authors, does it mean old media has firmly embraced the new, or just co-opting it? Or maybe, as The New Yorker explains, it's simply because one particular talent agent is a big fan of the blogosphere.
• The New York Times' Kate Aurthur examines how, and why, "American Idol" may be fundamentally broken. In a related sidebar, Sarah Hepola dishes on "Idol's" fascination with oldies -- and no, it's not because more recent songs are too costly to license, at least not entirely.
• Also in the Times, Robert Levine uses "The Simpsons'" 15th-season finale, which aired Sunday night, as a launch pad for analyzing the long-running series' distinctive narrative structure.
• Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have drawn flak for naming their new daughter Apple. But it's far from the worst monicker celebrities have inflicted upon unsuspecting children, the Arizona Republic notes.
• Leslie Gornstein, E! Online's Answer B!tch, explains how rappers get their odd-sounding stage names. Many, as it turns out, started as childhood nicknames originally given in derision. Keeping them displays humility and confers street cred.
• In "The Prisoner of Azkaban," Harry Potter starts growing up -- and so do his movies. Newsweek delves into new director Alfonso Cuaron's reinterpretation of the (now) teen wizard's world.
• Slate film critic David Edelstein waxes poetic as he reflects on the sheer terror and majesty that is the original "Gojira" (bastardized on these shores as "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"): "It's the most emotionally authentic fake monster movie ever made."

Hiatus over

After two months off to play full-time dad, I'm back at the keyboard.

We now resume normal programming.