Weaponizing teleportation

A San Francisco Chronicle story about the Air Force-funded study (1.6MB PDF) into the strategic potential of teleportation (previously noted on Buzzworthy) includes this wonderful expert assessment:

Michio Kaku, a noted physicist and author at City University of New York, said "the only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine."

From the scene

What's it like in New Orleans now? Check out this incredible blog by a guy who's holed up in a downtown skyscraper trying to keep his company's data center running. He's also piping out webcam feeds showing the looting and whatnot in the streets.

Humans and hurricanes

Don't blame Mother Nature's wrath over global warming for the incredible devastation wrought by recent hurricanes (damage from Katrina is already expected to reach $25 billion). MIT global warming expert Kerry Emanuel tells Salon that humans share a big part of the blame:

The recent hurricanes in the Atlantic, Emanuel explained, represent a natural fluctuation. Every 20 to 30 years, since records started being kept in the 19th century, there have been big shifts in the frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic. "For example, in the 1940s and '50s, there were very busy years, whereas the 1970s and '80s were very quiet years," he said. "And we've had a big upswing in the Atlantic beginning in about 1995. That's all natural."

The reason violent Atlantic hurricanes like Katrina may strike people as unnatural, and cause them to blame the CO₂ pouring out of their neighbors' Hummers, is not because of their frequency but their destruction to people and places.

"This natural fluctuation occurs in a social environment where there is a huge shift in demographic trends, and this makes a big difference in people's perception," Emanuel said. "In the 1940s and '50s, there were lots of hurricanes in Florida, but there weren't lots of people there. So now that we're having this upswing again, it's being perceived very differently" -- for the simple fact that there is a lot more stuff to be ruined.

... Ultimately, Emanuel said, it's not a vengeful Mother Nature but man's politics that are to blame for the destruction. As long as people insist on erecting homes and businesses, aided by low insurance rates and business lobbyists, in vulnerable areas like the Gulf Coast, there's little scientists can do to prevent the havoc. "I like to say that there is no such thing as a 100 percent natural disaster," Emanuel said. "We have to put stuff in harm's way for there to be a disaster, and we're very good at doing that, and subsidizing people who continue to do it."

The cost of cracking down

Nothing, it seems, can dissuade the music industry from its legal crackdown on alleged pirates.

Except maybe if the people being sued elect to fight back and make the crackdown too expensive, according to Cory Doctorow.

A wartime media hoax

The Chicago Tribune tells the story of an astonishingly elaborate media hoax about a dead soldier who never existed and the young daughter he supposedly left behind. The most astonishing thing: many of those who helped the hoaxer pull it off -- including the amateur actors who pretended to be the girl and her father -- maintain they had no idea that they were involved in a hoax. They thought they were just playing parts in re-enactments for a documentary. (Has the "reality" TV culture undermined our credulity that much?)

The apparent target of the hoax was Michael Brenner, who broke "the story" while a student reporter at the Daily Egyptian, the campus newspaper at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. (The confessed hoaxer insists Brenner was in on it and doubts still linger.) The Egyptian has apologized to its readers ("We blew it.").

You can review the whole saga on its Web site.

(Via Romenesko.)

Musical 'Nerds'

Todd Bishop tells the story behind a new satirical musical called "Nerds" that spoofs, among others, legendary rivals Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The creators' Web site features two sample songs in MP3 format, both poking fun at Gates. Check out Windows Rap, in which he boasts of being the "bitch pimp of the software biz."

Reality for 18-year-olds

Benoit University has released its Mindset List for the Class of 2009, spotlighting 75 things that have always been true for those born in 1987. Some examples:

• They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.
• Al-Qaida has always existed with Osama bin Laden at its head.
• Condoms have always been advertised on television.
• Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars.
• Snowboarding has always been a popular winter pastime.
• They never saw the shuttle Challenger fly.
• America's Funniest Home Videos has always been on television.

Everyday chemistry

Ever wonder just what's in Cheese Whiz or artificial snow or teeth whiteners? Or why new cars smell the way they do? What's That Stuff? is a fascinating feature in Chemical & Engineering News explores the chemistry behind everyday things and products.

(Via MAKE:Blog)

10 years later

Elsewhere, Todd Bishop has put together a nifty retrospective look at the release of Microsoft's seminal Windows 95, which happened 10 years ago today. He suggested that I should share my own perspective on the event, so here goes:

I was a beta tester, privy to an advance peak (complete with advance headaches) at the Modern Windows Experience. It's hard to believe now just how revolutionary Win95 was, but 10 years ago it delivered a quantum leap forward in usability, intuitiveness and attractiveness. Compared to the clunkiness of prior versions of Windows, 95 was positively ... Mac-like. If you don't remember what Windows was like before 95, trust me: you're lucky.

Of course, nowadays we're all so used to living with Modern Windows that no one wonders anymore why you have to click the "Start" button to shut down your computer. But back then, people ragged Microsoft about that counterintuitive bit of labeling. (You know, I still haven't heard a particularly good explanation for it.)

I also worked on developing content for the first iteration of what eventually became MSN. But back then, before Bill Gates latched onto the Internet, it was an AOL-style dial-up service called The Microsoft Network. In a way, though, MSN 95 had the same basic mission as MSN 2005: to be a "portal" offering unique content and services to members. (The current implementation works a lot better.)

I helped build Microsoft Network service prototypes for my then-employer, American City Business Journals, and the regional office of the Small Business Administration. Neither effort bore fruit, although I demonstrated the seedlings during a Microsoft dog-and-pony show in Washington, D.C., that August (my one experience as a trade-show shill). The whole project quickly became moot after everyone decided that the Web was the place to be instead.

ACBJ eventually did enter a partnership with Microsoft involving its small-business hub, then called bCentral, and MSNBC.com.

Few people today probably remember The Microsoft Network -- but, astonishingly, you can still read the introductory literature in Microsoft's encyclopedic TechNet knowledgebase. I never cease to be amazed by what you can find in there.

Bloggers face to face

P-I reporter Athima Chansanchai gets up close and personal with the members of the Seattle Weblogger Meetup Group.

Evil among the tech titans

Here's one way to tell the big Internet and tech companies apart:

Google says "We're not evil," and everyone believes them ... for now.

Microsoft says "We're not evil," but no one believes them.

Apple doesn't have to tell anyone it's not evil: its stuff is really cool so that doesn't matter.

Yahoo! might be evil; after all, it does everything else.

No one thinks Amazon is evil; they just want free shipping.

No one wonders if InfoSpace is evil, either; they're just amazed it's still around.

EBay doesn't seem all that evil; it's just faster, easier, more seductive ...

Who'd I miss? Suggestions, additions and amendments for this list are more than welcome.

The future of medicine

Predictive, preventive and personalized medicine -- according to biomedical visionary Leroy Hood, that's the key to extending human life:

My prediction is that within 10 years, we will have a predictive medicine that will have two separate components.

No. 1, it will have the ability to sequence every human's genome for less than $1,000. We will be able to make predictive health histories for each individual from the varying genes that come from that sequencing.

No. 2, we will have a little hand-held nanotechnology device that will prick your finger and make a thousand measurements and by wireless, send that to a server. It will analyze all your past records.

It will say, "Nothing's changed. You're fine. Do it again in six months." Or it will say, "Go see your oncologist or go see your rheumatologist" or whoever might be appropriate.

Your physician would get an e-mail, too.

Open-source DRM?

It seems like there's an open-source alternative for every other kind of software, so why not for digital rights management (DRM), too? Actually, there's a very good reason, as Cory Doctorow explains:

There has never, ever been a DRM implementation that was intended to be user-modifiable. There can't be. It's like trying to make "dry water" or "hot ice." DRM is supposed to keep users from manipulating their players. Open source is supposed to encourage users to manipulate and modify their players. They are utterly incompatible.

Automatic tipping

When you dine out and pay with a credit or debit card, the restaurant could be temporarily charging you an automatic 20 percent tip -- without realizing it, according to P-I consumer affairs reporter Candace Heckman. Blame a default setting in some credit card terminals. The charges are supposed to be reversed within three days or so, but that doesn't always happen.

Nature, nurture and notes

How much of our appreciation of music is innate and how much is learned? The Music Universals Study, an online survey, aims to answer that question and others that are related. See this News.com story for more background on the project.

Covers by Flickr

Here's an interesting tool that generates faux magazine covers, complete with your choice of title and promo text, from publicly available images on Flickr.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Vodcasting how-to

Over at Playlist, Christopher Breen put together a simple, eight-step guide on putting together your own vodcast (aka video podcast). It's Mac-oriented but since the process relies on Apple's cross-platform iTunes 4.9 and QuickTime Pro 7, it should work on Windows as well.

Do floating ads work?

Hard as it is to believe, those annoying "floater" ads that sometimes appear on news sites actually work, according to washingtonpost.com's Robert MacMillan:

It's a fact that Internet users are sick of pop-ups and pop-unders. Despite the widespread adoption of Web browser enhancements that block pop-up ads, news sites continue to host "floating" pitches that don't pop up in another window. Instead, they drift across the page or hang in the middle, but are an inextricable part of it.

Based on my interviews with editorial and advertising staff at several Web sites, these ads won't go away anytime soon. The reason ... is that most readers haven't bothered to complain, and some may even like the ads.

And they click and do business with the advertiser. MacMillan cites as an example Wachovia Bank, which is currently running a floater campaign on washingtonpost.com. The bank has signed nearly 6,000 new customers through it since July 31 and a spokeswoman calls it "one of the best-performing placements on washingtonpost.com."

Side note: SeattlePI.com general manager Lee Rozen is quoted on the second page of this column.

Science and faith

A front-page story in Monday's New York Times provided -- dare I say it -- a rational discussion of the debate over intelligent design.

A story in today's Times looks at how scientists deal with faith -- especially in their own ranks.

RSS's identity crisis

Since I was on vacation last week, I missed the opportunity to weigh in on the Microsoft web feed controversy (although all I would've done was point out that they didn't coin the term and it's always been controversial). However, whatever you think of the name "web feed" -- I find it really clunky -- a new Nielsen/NetRatings survey indicates that the folks in Redmond are probably right in thinking that RSS needs a name that's easier to understand:

Nielsen/NetRatings polled 1,000 members of its research panel who read blogs. It found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents either never heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or did not know what the technology is used for. The study found only 11% of Web log readers use RSS to monitor blogs.

Bill Burnham cites an even more compelling anecdotal example of the problem:

Fact is, if you wander just a little bit outside of Geek-centric world of tech-related and VC-related blogs what you quickly discover is that RSS feeds are few and far between. Take political blogs for example. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that one of the political blogs I enjoy, which also happens to be in the top half of the Top 500 feeds, didn't appear to have an RSS feed. I contacted the author and asked him if he had an RSS feed and he asked me "What's an RSS feed?" ... Now remember, this guy is a professional blogger doing numerous posts a day and trying to earn a living off of his blog (and judging by his ranking on the Top 500, doing a better job of that than most), but RSS wasn't even on his radar and even after having the supposed benefits described to him, he hasn't been motivated enough to do much more than the bare minimum.

Here's another way to look at it: an acronym whose meaning changes with each version is almost by definition too complicated to explain easily.

Amazonian myth-chief

When Amazon.com started letting customers post their own photos of products in its catalog, you just knew people would start having fun with it.

Witness this mythological staging of Plamobil's Sea Serpent Nessie with Viking playset.

A geek and a priest

During the several months she spent at the P-I under an Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship, Malini Goyal, an editor from India Today, wrote some great stories about the experience of Indian emigres to the Seattle area.

She focused on the dichotomy that defines their community, defined by polar extremes of affluence and struggle, of clinging to traditional culture while embracing new dreams.

Nowhere is that dichotomy better illustrated than in her final story for us: a fascinating profile of Mahesh Upadhyay, a Microsoft engineer who moonlights as a Hindu priest.

Startups get sober

The Times looks at the new discipline that characterize today's dot-com startups in the wake of the bubble bursting. As Jobster founder Jason Goldberg sums up the change: "Web 1.0: arrogance. Web 2.0: humility."

Five years after the technology bubble burst and two years into its recovery, the hubris that shaped the 1990s tech startup is noticeably absent.

So are the five-figure signing bonuses, piles of stock options, lavish launch parties, $800 Herman Miller office chairs and the flawed assumption that a New Economy driven by technology was somehow immune from the old rules of business.

As the tech economy revs up again, a post-recession character emerges:

Drunken optimism is out; sober reality is in.

Job hopping is out; loyalty is in.

Living to work is out; working to live is in.

Greed is out; gratitude is in.

In short, the old-economy workplace is new again.

It's reflected in everything from more cautious hiring to smaller pay raises and fewer stock grants. It shows up in slower business growth, saner work schedules, and an almost violent rejection of the jackpot mentality that dominated tech companies when the economy was in full boil.

One case study cited in the story is digital.forest, a local ISP known for staying lean and mean even during the Bubble Years. As the company's principals -- whom I've known for years -- tell the Times, their frugality ethic was hopelessly out of step with the VC-backed competition several years back. But unlike those rivals, digital.forest is still around after 11 years -- "little mammals amongst the dinosaur bones."

Mob piracy? Maybe

Is organized crime responsible for massive CD and DVD piracy? So claim the RIAA and the Los Angeles police, but Wired News has trouble finding much to support that claim.

Evolution in action

Snopes.com fact-checks a list of purported 2005 Darwin Awards winners.

Black box alternatives?

If airlines can give passengers high-speed Internet access in the air, why can't they just transmit flight data to the ground instead of relying on black boxes that could be lost or destroyed in case the plane crashes? Good question, and News.com's Declan McCullough has the answer.

Disk vs. disc

In case you ever wondered what the difference is between a computer disk and a computer disc, Apple posted a helpful explanation.

Future of podcasting

Over at Between the Lines, Dana Gardner posts some provocative thoughts about the future of podcasting -- or whatever we end up calling it once the medium outgrows the MP3 player paradigm:

I suspect that "podcasting" is destined to be a global mass medium much more quickly than any of its current constituent parts can scale up. Not individual shows, mind you, but the medium in total in all its garrulous and granular glory. In order for the medium to scale to its potential, the endpoints for accessing and managing these audio creations need to expand in numbers faster than MP3 players, portable PCs/PDAs, and iTunes can.

... we may need to soon drop the "pod" part of podcasting in favor of "mobile"- or "cell"-casting. Because despite the phenomenal growth of iPods, the ultimate device for listening to podcasts will soon be cell phones. The only way the iPod will remain true to the podcasting name is if it gains wireless broadband IP support, in which case it's a trussed up cell phone anyway. And someone other than Apple will run the network, no doubt. (Here's a thought: News Corp. buys Apple and SkyiPod is born! Steve Jobs takes the reins from Rupert and Pixar gets a new distribution partner to boot! You read it here first.)

This could finally be the carriers' revival, err … dominance play. The mobile device makers and carriers have been waiting for a killer data application for years. And while I've always been tipping off the edge of my seat waiting for the next $3 riotous ringtone to download, the killer data app need has not yet been met. And, yes, while a few rather weighty things need to happen before my cell phone-as-IP-audio-time-shifting-endpoint vision is realized, it is nonetheless inevitable. The only question is who actually puts the whole package together in a consumer friendly way at reasonable cost (and gets an acceptable advertising model in there).

By gump! Give me wireless broadband, a better battery, a 250-GByte hard drive, and an easy interface through which to find, subscribe to, and manage my audio in my cell phone, and I'll give you, Verizon Wireless, another $20 a month. I'll need unlimited air time too, so I'll probably upgrade not just my handset but my service plan too. Oh, and I'd like a USB port and/or bluetooth so I can use my PC for something, in this case to … Well, screw the PC all together. Just let me hook up my handset to a keyboard, and monitor — as well as my car! — when I want to.
Yes, I can hardly wait to watch over the next few years as IT vendors, handset makers, media companies, and mobile carriers court and confound one another. They will dance and spin trying to make my vision a reality. Some providers will cordon off content (ala AOL of years past), others will offer you the entire audio world while calling the other solution a crass commercial loser. May the best wireless broadband IP audio solution win!

Catching up

And now, we resume our regular programming.

I'll begin by catching up on a few interesting items that appeared last week, while I was off ...

A brief intermission

I'm taking a few days off. Updates will resume next week.

Blinding images

Another helpful public-service announcement from New Scientist:

Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along – erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners’ calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents.

The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as “emotion-induced blindness”.

Ploys for the people

Wikipedia exploited for viral marketing purposes? Horrors!

Clues point to GoogleNet

Business 2.0's Om Malik connects the dots between some of Google's recent moves, from buying unused fiber-optic cables to sponsoring a public hot spot, and comes up with an intriguing theory:

What if Google wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America? And what if it had technology capable of targeting advertising to a user’s precise location? The gatekeeper of the world’s information could become one of the globe’s biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop. ...

(Via Paid Content.)

The social cost of extra chopsticks

How hard can it be to change the eating habits of millions of Chinese? Health officials in Hong Kong are finding out, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Chinese health officials are trying to change the way people eat, pushing a utensil they hope will stem disease outbreaks: an extra pair of chopsticks.

At restaurants and homes, Chinese meals are dished up family-style, with serving platters in the center of the table. Most diners pluck their dumplings and stir-fries out of the platters and onto individual plates or bowls of rice. They use the same chopsticks to put the morsels in their mouths, often going back to the serving platter for seconds and thirds.

Following an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, two years ago, officials worried the habit can transmit diseases. ...

Serving chopsticks aren't new to China. Usually, they look exactly like regular chopsticks, although they sometimes come in different colors. They have long been used for special occasions like business dinners or banquets, or by families who eat their meals more formally. But most Chinese eating at home or at restaurants shun them.

In China, sharing food is all about strengthening family and business bonds. Using a separate pair of serving chopsticks can be a bit of an affront -- a little like showing up at the family table with a surgical mask. A few diners stake out a middle ground and flip their chopsticks when they serve themselves or others at the table.

Reality bests game skills

From our sister paper, the Albany Times Union, comes empirical evidence that no, all those hours you spent playing "Grand Theft Auto" won't actually help you evade police during a high-speed car chase.

Decor tips for Goths

As Xeni Jardin oh so eloquently puts it, Gothic Martha Stewart is a home-decorating site offering "helfpful tips on how to make your house a darker, more depressing place."

We're No. 16!

Despite its leftie reputation, Seattle ranks a mere 16th on the list of America's most liberal cities, according to the Bay Area Center for Voting Research.

As P-I political reporter Neil Modie put it in his story today:

Shocking news: granola-munching, monorail-worshiping, gay-rights-preaching, church-shunning, flannel-wearing, book-devouring, vegan-dining, obsessively recycling, salmon-protecting, pinot noir-sniffing, latte-sipping, war-protesting, bluer-than-blue-voting Seattle is not America's brightest beacon of liberalism.

That would be Detroit, which is first place. If you're wondering, Provo, Utah, is dead last at No. 237.

The ranking was based on voting patterns in the 2004 presidential election.

No giant red planets here

By the way, if you know anyone planning to set out the lawn chairs to see a gigantic Mars light up the night sky Aug. 27, tell them not to bother. It's all another Internet hoax.

Pricing pratfalls

The most implausible-sounding stories can turn out to be quite real, once you factor in, well, human stupidity. Witness this account from Snopes.com about the veracity of tales about store clerks mistakenly scanning the wrong side of a CD whose cover art shows a bar code, ring up a lower price:

In 2005, Sony BMG released a 3-CD set entitled Electric 80s. The cover art for this compilation of "the greatest Eighties electric hits" featured a reproduction of a UPC bar code, with the title "ELECTRIC 80s" placed in the space at the bottom of the bar code where the human-readable numbers corresponding to that code would usually appear. (The real bar code — the one used for scanning the price of the item at checkout counters — was placed in a corner on the back of the packaging, as it is for nearly every similar item.)

Unfortunately for some retailers (such as Tesco supermarkets), the machine-readable version of the bar code used for the CD compilation's cover art was scannable by their systems, and sales clerks at those outlets who mistakenly passed the CD's cover (rather than its back) over point-of-purchase scanners ended up ringing up sales for £9.77, (US $17.46) considerably less than the set's listed price of £14.97 (US $26.76). Often the mis-scanning resulted in stores' mistakenly recording sales of singer Jack Johnson's new (and significantly less expensive) CD, In Between Dreams, instead. ...

Steal a Segway and ...

So, what exactly do you do with a stolen Segway? Not much, it seems:

The burglars who wheeled 10 Segways away from a Concord [N.H.] truck dealership in April apparently couldn't figure out what to do with them. Concord police officers found all the motorized scooters stowed in a garage in Manchester last week, collecting dust and in perfect condition.

"Right from the beginning, we questioned how they would move these things around," said Concord Detective Todd Flanagan. "It seemed like it would be difficult for them to get rid of them. And that seems to be what happened." ...

"I think the burglary was very well thought-out," Flanagan said. "I think what wasn't thought out was how they were going to profit from this. It's sort of comical, actually."

(Via Romenesko's Obscure Store and Reading Room.)

Measuring an AI's IQ

New Scientist reports that a pair of scientists have devised a universal IQ test for artificial intelligences:

Traditional measures of human intelligence often won't be appropriate for systems that have senses, environments and cognitive capacities very different from our own. So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano have drafted an alternative test that will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions.

Sword vs. Taser

Swords, chain mail and big wooden mallets are just no match for one of those newfangled Taser things.

Explore that job

If you're interested in learning about alternative occupations, and you have (quite) a few minutes to spare, check out Golden State Career Videos. It's a collection of QuickTime videos profiling 196 different jobs. Each is "designed to give you a 'snapshot' of the job and to help you, as a career investigator, 'try on' an occupation."

The scale of spam

Sure, Microsoft's lawyer can call the $7 million settlement the company reached with spammer Scott Richter "something of a turning of the tide against spam," but as P-I editorial cartoonist David Horsey points out today, it's still a pretty strong tide:

Pacemaker for the brain

P-I health reporter Julie Davidow looks at the controversy around the Vagus Nerve Stimulator, an implanted device recently approved for treating severe depression.

Temporary textbooks

To the best of my knowledge, I still have every one of my college textbooks (somewhere).

Even so, I think I would happily have purchased less expensive e-book editions of many had they been available at the time -- even if the e-books expired after a few months. That's the business model being tested this fall by 10 schools across the country, News.com reports.

Denim's downfall

Also to Slate, Michelle Leder says the denim bubble is about to burst:

The $110 million "premium denim" market is beset by signs of excess. Consider the $128 jeans—for toddlers. Or the 400 percent markup: A pair that costs $60 to make retails for $300. Or the race to rush new brands into the stores: Seven for All Mankind, followed by Citizens of Humanity, followed by Stitch's …

Meth mouth myths

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer debunks some widespread myths about the causes of meth mouth. He also takes the opportunity to make some salient points about moral panics and the hysteria they engender.

How long is Amazon's tail?

One of the most stunning numbers cited in Chris Anderson's seminal The Long Tail was the contention that less than half of Amazon.com's book sales came from its 100,000 best-selling titles.

Well, never mind. Anderson acknowledges that the estimate, based on a "forensic economics process" devised at the MIT Sloan School, was way off the mark. He invited Morris Rosenthal to try and estimate the true length of Amazon's tail using a different methodology. Rosenthal's answer is quite different, yet still significant:

The bottom line: his research with aggressive assumptions puts the Long Tail (titles beyond the top 100,000) at 36% of Amazon’s book sales. Conservative assumptions, meanwhile, put it under 20%. Cross-checking it against Amazon’re book revenues seems to suggest something in the mid-to-high twenties. In either case, it’s certainly less than 57% and even 39%. But the Long Tail still appears to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of Amazon’s book business, which is a significant fraction by any measure.

Plumpy'nut to the rescue

You may never have heard of Plumpy'nut, but it's saving the lives of starving children in Niger.

Lost technologies

CNet has put together an interesting list of top 10 tech we miss:

Good technologies and products usually survive; poor ones usually go extinct. But not all of the technologies and tech products that have swirled down the drain of the tech gene pool deserved their fate. Here are some big, and some small, ideas that we thought we'd have with us forever, but that unfortunately have gone the way of the dodo.

The list ranges from manned space exploration to the original Napster to the elegant, featuritis-free, first-generation PalmPilot. Most amusing entry: the Newton, "because what it thought we meant was often far more interesting than what we were really trying to say."

'Miracles' of science

Flying is safer and crashes more survivable than you might think, the Christian Science Monitor notes:

While people used words like "miraculous" to describe the fact that everyone got out alive of the Air France jet that crashed upon landing in Toronto this week, aviation experts are also crediting 20 years of advances in technology, training, and safety practices.

From improved fire retardants in the cabin to slow the spread of flames and smoke so people can be evacuated to "phenomenal" weather tracking devices that can alert crews to wind shear and violent storm cells, the combined efforts of the federal government and the aviation community have made flying far safer than ever before.

Twenty years ago, the chances of surviving a crash were indeed minimal. While the accident rate has declined only slightly since then, the seriousness of the those crashes has declined significantly.

Indie casts and iTunes

For the record, the iTunes Music Store started listing podcasts on June 28, 2005. Yet just a month later, its list of top 100 podcasts has become the emerging medium's de facto standard of success, akin to the Billboard charts or the New York Times best seller list (and, to a lesser extent, Amazon sales rank).

BusinessWeek assesses how Apple Computer has, once again, upended things and completely changed the podcasting landscape:

In one of the shortest trajectories yet for a new Internet technology, podcasting has gone from the hands of indie developers to media giants in less than a year. Credit Apple. With typical finesse, it has created a centralized, easy-to-use service on iTunes that makes it a snap to find and listen to podcasts, the audio recordings that can be downloaded from the Net and played on a computer or portable music player. Apple also put out a new version of the iTunes software, which makes it easy for people to create their own podcasts, and invited all to post their creations on the site. Indie podcasters such as [Cinecast's Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren] rejoiced, ready for the mainstream to embrace the technology they had championed.

But the reality isn't so simple. Apple's service, though just over a month old, is already changing the dynamics of the field. It has helped legitimize the medium, drawing traditional giants, from Ebert & Roeper parent Walt Disney to Dow Jones and News Corp. As they join iTunes, they're squeezing out many of the do-it-yourselfers who evangelized podcasting. Once a podcast drops off the top 100 list, it's almost impossible for a casual visitor to find it. For Kempenaar, the future is clear: "It will be harder for a new indie podcaster to get an audience."

The article goes on to outline the tactics indie 'casters are using to market themselves beyond iTunes, and even offers some tips on how they might carve out successful niches.

On a related note, comments to Heather Green's post on this subject at BusinessWeek Onine's Blogspotting point out that traffic for indie podcasts has still gone up because of Apple, even if they don't draw as big an audience as corporate brands.

Mixed mindsets

Slate editor at large Jack Shafer explains why he doesn't trust the mainstream media audience anymore:

Your average reader is not to be trusted because he just doesn't know his own mind. ... When asked how important it is to them to live in a country in which they can criticize the government, a resounding 81 percent of respondents say "very important" and 14 percent say "somewhat important." The verdict is almost unanimous.

Now, one would assume that what's good for the individual—rip into your government the best you can—would also be good for journalists, who are paid to watch-dog politicians. But the average reader can't keep a consistent thought in his head for two minutes. When the same Annenberg survey asked if government should have the right to limit the press in reporting a story, an appalling 68 percent said either "always," "sometimes," or "rarely." Only 29 percent said "never." Let's hope the First Amendment never comes up for a vote.

Daily dinosaurs

Bob Cauthorn explains why The Seattle Times is doomed.

(As for the P-I, it sounds like we might just be on the right track with our new Seattle-centric focus.)

Christian commerce

Lynn Harris writes about an interesting trend in retailing for Salon:

... an apparently growing number of small- and medium-sized-business owners ... are proudly hanging out their shingles with the word "Christian" -- or at least with a telltale symbolic dove, fish or Bible verse -- prominently displayed. There are now Christian real estate agencies, cellular and long-distance services, financial planners, computer repair guys, furniture stores, bed-and-breakfast associations, diets, yoga and karate instructors, and goat breeders. These companies -- in contrast to religious bookstores, for example -- do earthly things in, they say, a Christian way.

Unlike Curves, Domino's or Coors, for example, which have been criticized for tithing their earnings to archconservative causes -- and unlike the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain, closed on Sundays because of its founder's religious beliefs -- these Christian companies link their work directly and overtly to their missions. ("Christian," in these cases, is generally taken to mean "born again," in which the business owner has a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" that guarantees eternal life, and the responsibility to offer others the same opportunity.) The mission statement of Houston-based auto-repair franchiser Christian Brothers Automotive ("Christian" as in Christian, not a surname), for instance, reads: "To glorify God by providing ethical and excellent automotive repair service for our customers, according to Colossians 3:17, 'And whatever you do in word and deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father.'"

Such enterprises are "a byproduct of multiculturalism," says Alan Wolfe, author of "The Transformation of American Religion" and director of Boston College's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, noting that identity politics are not the exclusive domain of the secular left. "You identify who you are, take pride in your subgroup. It's no different in that sense from a business that caters to African-Americans or Hispanics. It's part of the general trend of segmentation in American life."

Personally, I'm all for anything that gives auto shops an incentive to provide better-quality service ...

Guns 'n' poses

P-I reporter Jake Ellison tells the interesting story behind the noirish portraits of gun-toting Whiskey Women that adron the walls of The Whiskey Bar in Belltown:

"Every chick who comes in here wants to be on that wall," says Jenna Curtis, 27, whose figure along with that of another woman was added recently to the bar's wall.

"I think it's sexy as hell, but maybe that's because I'm in two of them," says Curtis, a bartender at The Whiskey Bar and a hairstylist. "It kind of feeds an ego I wasn't sure I had."

When rivals get stupid

Rob Enderle lists the many ways in which Apple and Microsoft are learning the wrong lessons from each other. As he sums it up, "It really feels like both firms have shifted to drinking 'stupid juice' and really need to go back and reassess their goals and directions."

On shooting first

Over on Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin has assembled a nice roundup of thoughts and feedback concerning the International Association of Chiefs of Police's new recommendation that officers shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.

How to identify a suspected suicide bomber, you ask?

The police organization's behavioral profile says such a person might exhibit "multiple anomalies," including wearing a heavy coat or jacket in warm weather or carrying a briefcase, duffle bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires. The person might display nervousness, an unwillingness to make eye contact or excessive sweating. There might be chemical burns on the clothing or stains on the hands. The person might mumble prayers or be "pacing back and forth in front of a venue."

The police group's guidelines also say the threat to officers does not have to be "imminent," as police training traditionally teaches. Officers do not have to wait until a suspected bomber makes a move, another traditional requirement for police to use deadly force. An officer just needs to have a "reasonable basis" to believe that the suspect can detonate a bomb, the guidelines say.

Security expert Bruce Schneier, who assessed the wisdom of a shoot-to-kill policy last week, highlights the obvious constitutional question raised by this new policy.

'The most ...'

We're beta-testing a new feature on SeattlePI.com. The Top 20 page lists:

• The most popular stories during the past hour.
• The most popular stories for the past 24 hours.
• The most e-mailed stories for the past 24 hours.
• The most printed stories for the past 24 hours.

If you're interested in seeing what other users are reading, saving or passing along, please give it a look. We welcome your feedback.

And yes, we plan on adding "most" lists for other types of content in the future.

Inescapable influences

Here's another example of how thoroughly competitive reality shows have wormed their way into all walks of modern life. Xavier University professor Karim M. Tiro tells the campus magazine that his new course on "The History of the Pig in America" will include this Trump-inspired project:

Students will design a web site or museum exhibition devoted to the history of the pig in America. I’m a fan of "The Apprentice," so the class will be divided into competing teams. I’m looking forward to seeing what names they give themselves.

Tone your brain

From Wired News:

Among people who work with older adults, the concept of "cognitive fitness" has become a buzzword to describe activities that stimulate underutilized areas of the brain and improve memory. Proponents of brain-fitness exercises say such mental conditioning can help prevent or delay memory loss and the onset of other age-related cognitive disorders.

Cinema by scientists

How about this as a way to get more kids interested in science: train real scientists to write screenplays for Hollywood movies?

That's the goal of $25,000 in Pentagon research grants, according to The New York Times. One person who's trying to make the career change, biophysicist Valerie Weiss, points out that scientists are actually well-suited for the movie biz:

"They're inherently creative, and willing to take more risks than other people," she said. "They're searching for the unknown, they're compensated very minimally, they're going on blind faith that what they're searching for is going to pay off. And filmmaking is exactly the same way."

Eat these weeds

Who needs weed killer when you can just get goats?

What links Microsoft and eBay

What to Microsoft and eBay have in common? San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus' surprising answer:

Phone sex.

And pet psychics.

The two West Coast tech titans ... are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.

Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.

Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay ...

Scan and stun

New Scientist's Barry Fox reports that someone has patented a scanning wand for airport security guards that doubles as a stun gun:

If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret – a transformer which steps the detector’s battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.

If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger’s neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is “temporary and reversible”.

Advice for bloggers

Inc.'s list of the top 10 things you should know before you blog is aimed at small businesses, but most of the advice applies to just about everyone. One item in particular: "Know why you're blogging."

Spacebound simplicity

Sounds like NASA is embracing the KISS principle in a big way in planning the successor to the space shuttle. The New York Times reports that the space agency's next generation of launch vehicles will consist of more traditional rockets with payload and crew modules high above the fuel tanks that have proven some problematic for the shuttle. Different vehicles would be used for manned flights and unmanned cargo runs.

Left lane: passing only

Yes, it's actually against the law in Washington state to stay in the left lane of the highway if you're holding up traffic. It's only for passing other vehicles. This tidbit courtesy of today's Getting There column.

Expanding on infinity

Infinity: It ain't what it used to be.

A recipe for success

Although 64 percent of Americans aren't really sure what a "podcast" is, David Pogue's pronouncement in The New York Times last week that "Apple has just mainstreamed podcasting" might seem a tad premature.

Yet he's probably right. As Pogue puts it so eloquently, adding podcast support to iTunes and its online music store is yet another example of "the same essential formula" that has led Apple to one success after another over the past several years:

Find an exciting new technology whose complexity and cost keep it out of the average person's life. Streamline it, mainstream it, strip away the geeky options. Take the credit.

Identity control

One Login to Bind Them All is an interesting Wired News piece that looks at current, and forthcoming, attempts to give people more control over how their personal information is disseminated online -- and over all the miscellaneous services that depend on unique identities:

Identity 2.0 is the idea that people should have precise control over what others know about their personal data. As online shoppers know, we are expected to part with significant amounts of information to process even simple transactions online -- from names and addresses to credit card numbers and mothers' maiden names. And once the data has been sent off into the ether, it's anybody's guess what becomes of it.

According to Dick Hardt, CEO of Vancouver-based Sxip Identity (pronounced "skip"), this reflects a fundamental discrepancy between the way identity is handled in the online and offline worlds.

In the online sphere, he said, "We currently have a model that's ... very opaque." If you go into a liquor store to buy alcohol, he points out, there's a clear, standard protocol: You show your license and, if you're old enough, the clerk sells you the booze. The worker doesn't look up your name on some hidden system and accept or reject the transaction for no discernable reason -- though that is how business is conducted online, Hardt contends.

As an alternative, Hardt and others have proposed a system that is more transparent to the user, based around individuals maintaining their own repositories of personal data.

According to their vision, a company like Amazon.com would no longer demand that you hand over tons of personal information before giving you an account and selling you a book. Instead, you, as the would-be purchaser, would offer Amazon whatever information you feel comfortable giving out -- such as your name, address and payment details -- and the retailer would be put in the position of accepting or rejecting your purchase.