Self-taxation

Yes, you are supposed to pay state sales tax -- or, rather, use tax -- when you buy items at yard sales or on eBay.

Don't dump that PC

Remember: As of this Saturday, Oct. 1, it'll be illegal to dump old computers and other unwanted electronics in the trash. You'll need to recycle them instead.

Seeking permission

In case you ever wondered what would happen if you actually wrote to Major League Baseball seeking "express written consent" to show your personal recording of a game, our sports guys ran a test. See the hilarious results (PDF).

Mike Thompson mentioned this on his M's blog, too, although the user comments quickly started going far, far afield, as usual.

Messy traffic

Inspired by the problem-plagued evacuation of the Houston area as Hurricane Rita loomed last week, Slate's "Explainer" column explored the physics of traffic jams and what they mean for evac plans elsewhere.

An historic seat

You can find anything on craigslist -- even Seattle World's Fair icons like the control chair for the Bubbleator.

According to our story, the current owners want to sell it to the Museum of History and Industry -- if it (or a beneficent donor) can come up with the money.

Now showing on JetBlue ...

Why did JetBlue allow passengers on board a plane making an emergency landing to watch their own drama unfold through on-board TV sets? News.com's Daniel Terdiman provides an interesting answer: the company trusts passengers to use their own judgment when it comes to the tube.

Bryan Baldwin, a JetBlue spokesman, told CNET News.com late Wednesday that the airline generally does not stop its passengers from watching the satellite television.

"Our general policy is not to censor the programming pretty much under any circumstance," Baldwin said. "That's our general policy across the board. We provide customers information on how to make the screen dark if there's something they don't want to watch."

Curses!

Nothing's certain in life except death, taxes ... and swearing?

Yup, according to language experts consulted by the New York Times:

Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.

Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "The Power of Babel," and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia. ...

Celebrity smarts

On a lighter note, MSNBC.com posted a 10-question interactive quiz to help you measure your entertainment I.Q.

No papers = no help

In case you wondered, no, illegal immigrants displaced by Hurricane Katrina don't qualify for most of the official aid offered to other evacuees. Salon looks at their plight.

Parking scams

Consumer affairs reporter Candace Heckman looks at game-day parking scams in the neighborhoods surrounding Safeco Field and Qwest Field.

The story includes a handy infographic offering tips on how to tell if a potential spot is on private property or city-owned land. It can be hard to tell because some streets in Sodo don't have sidewalks.

Candace tells me that the only way to tell for sure is to look at aerial photographs of the neighborhood and overlay them with tax parcel boundaries using King County's iMap service. But that's probably not something most people are equipped to do while hunting for parking.

Legacy

Susan Paynter: What if your father were one of Seattle's most notorious convicted killers?

[Kristin] Pang is the kind of caring and indomitable daughter any dad would be proud of -- even though she is anything but proud of her own father.

If the name and even the face seems familiar, Pang is used to that. Yes, she is the daughter of the infamous killer-arsonist Martin Pang.

She was 10 years old when her father torched his parents' Mary Pang Food Products warehouse, named for Martin's mother. He did it for the insurance money and four Seattle firefighters -- Randall Terlicker, Walter Kilgore, Gregory Shoemaker and James Brown -- died in the inferno. ...

Kristin is an animal rescue volunteer who plans to head down to the devastated Gulf Coast to try and save pets left stranded and starving in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

When pastries get taxed

Consumer affairs reporter Candace Heckman inaugurates a new weekly Q&A column today by tackling that perennial puzzler, Why do coffeehouses tax us on muffins?

As usual, the answer's a lot more complicated than you might think (or hope).

Dig a very deep hole

I love this Google Maps hack: If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop?

Pick a starting point and it tells you where you would emerge if you were to dig a hole straight through the planet.

Over at the Stanford Captology Notes blog, Matt Markovich observes:

While it may seem like a silly time-killer to some, it highlights how creative tinkering with new technologies can result in some amazing, and potentially useful educational applications.

A sign with impact

I drive past this striking warning sign up on Broadway all the time. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's wondered if it's a "real" -- as in officially sanctioned -- sign.

Transportation reporter Jane Hadley says that the answer is yes, and tells the story behind the project. It's part of a City of Seattle pedestrian safety campaign.

Similar signs have been sited all around the city. Here's the preliminary list of locations (PDF).

All for love

Robert L. Jamieson Jr.'s latest column for the P-I updates us on what happened to John Griswold, the fan who rushed the field out of love. It's a good story, which I neglected to spotlight last week.

The pros of dating

The Case for Going Steady: Studies Say Teen Dating Habits Affect Marriage Skills. Huh.

Getting ideas

I can't help but think that this site might prove useful at some point: All Known Idea Generation Methods.

(Via Rebecca Blood.)

Numbers game

If you've dialed 1-800-RED-CROSS, then you probably discovered that it doesn't connect you to the American Red Cross. At least, not until the FCC issued an emergency ruling last Friday handing control of the number to the relief agency, "plucking it from the hands of corporate digit-squatters," as Wired News put it.

(The transfer apparently still hasn't taken place, however. I tried calling just a few minutes ago.)

For the record, the number for the Red Cross' toll-free donations and volunteer line is 1-800-HELP-NOW.

Update, Sept. 8, 2:47 p.m.: The Red Cross is apparently accepting calls at 1-800-RED-CROSS now.

Eternal question

On the (much!) lighter side of the things, Snopes.com tries to settle the eternal question of what Gilligan's full name was. If you'd heard that his first name was "Willy," well, it's not quite that simple ...

Top podcasts

Popcasts is a handy site that aggregates the lists of most popular podcasts from several different directories and ranking sites. Not much overlap between them.

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."

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

Eat these weeds

Who needs weed killer when you can just get goats?

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."

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.

Pioneer papers online

The Washington State Library is now making available online digital reproductions of the state's oldest newspapers. You can read more about the project in this P-I story.

The archive is starting off with The Columbian (the then-territory's first newspaper, founded in 1852), the Washington Pioneer and the Walla Walla Statesman. The special browser plug-in you need to view the archive, LizardTech's DjVu plug-in, allows you to zoom in up to 1,200 percent -- quite useful since the images, taken from old microfilms, often aren't of very high quality.

The papers that ultimately combined to become the Post-Intelligencer, the Gazette and Weekly Intelligencer, are among those on the library's list to be "added next."

Death hanging in the air

The accidental electrocutions at this year's Boy Scout Jamboree of four men whose tentpole touched a power line raises an obvious question: Don't power lines have insulation?

As Daniel Engber explains at Slate:

No, they don't—at least the ones that run aboveground. Most of the hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines in this country are made solely of metal—either aluminum or aluminum wrapped around a steel core. Adding a layer of insulation to every line would be pricey and has been deemed unnecessary given how high the lines are off the ground. (Underground lines are insulated, both for the safety of the walkers above and to protect the lines from shovels and the like.)

Evil is as evil does

Silly quiz time: How evil are you?

Worst writing of 2005

The winners (?) of this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for worst-written English-language sentence are out.

The grand prize goes to Dan McKay of Fargo, N.D. His (fortunately) peerless prose:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

If you're really in the mood for more bad prose, the contest site lists 45 other winners, runners-up and dishonorable mentions in a variety of categories.

Energy-saving time?

Slate answers the timely question, Does daylight-saving time really save energy?

Voice vs. text

The sound of a human voice can convey so much than mere written words, no matter how powerful the composition. Witness Hsiao-Ching Chou's podcast reading of her column today, a powerful tribute to her late father.

Loving Greg Nickels

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels may be building a fan following overseas, judging by this commentary in The Guardian by Caroline Hodgson:

I'd nearly given up hope of finding an American politician I could admire. They all seemed spineless, their resolves only stiffened by corporate dollars and the lust for re-election. But then I discovered that American mayors are revolting - and it's all Greg Nickels's fault. ...

(Thanks to Dave in Winchester for the link.)

How credit scores work

Syndicated columnist Michelle Singletary delves into the mysteries of the credit-scoring algorithm.

World affairs, Unix-style

The War on Terror (as viewed from the Bourne shell) is an inspired bit of geek humor.

Note: Familiarity with Unix required.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Mapping the personals

This was inevitable: HotOrNot + Google Maps.

No more froggy evenings

Horrors! The WB has given spokestoon Michigan J. Frog the hook!

Our own "TV Gal," Melanie McFarland, recalls the highs and lows of his five-decade career in a nice obituary.

Still a secret

Sure, we now know who Deep Throat was but Colonel Sanders' fried chicken recipe remains one of the best-kept secrets of the 20th century. As the Associated Press reports:

Only a few people know the recipe and are sworn to secrecy. Some are KFC employees, but the company won’t reveal their names. Two companies supply the herbs and spices, but each formulates only part of the ingredients, Dedrick said, and neither supplier knows the other’s identity.

The Colonel’s own handwritten recipe is tucked away in a safe at KFC headquarters, with portions locked away in safe deposit boxes at undisclosed locations as backup.

Of course, some claim to have unraveled the mystery.

See this article at Top Secret Recipes for more on closely guarded corporate culinary treasures.

One path to success

I've always been fascinated by the often convoluted and singular paths that lead entrepreneurs toward creating businesses that gain attention in the media or the marketplace.

Case in point: Erna Portteus Patrawke, biochemist, vintner and now maker of all-natural soaps.

Like many enterpreneurs, she started young, running an Anchorage lemonade stand at age 13 -- that was shut down by the police because she didn't have the proper licenses! Clearly, that little setback didn't stop her.

Roots of terror

An interesting -- and important -- foreign policy insight, courtesy of Fred Kaplan at Slate:

Three new studies, by very different authors taking very different tacks, reach much the same conclusion about modern terrorism: that its practitioners, especially its foot soldiers, are motivated not so much by Islamic fantasies of the caliphate's restoration and the snuffing of freedom, but rather by resistance to foreign occupation of Arab lands.

Nothing about this conclusion makes terrorist acts more justified, or less abhorrent, or a slighter assault on the bonds of civilization. Understanding is not the same as excusing. Still, understanding can be a useful tool for devising a cogent response and an effective policy. ...

Costco's art dealer

Yes, you can buy an original Picasso on Costco.com. WSJ.com tells the interesting story behind that.

Geopolitically speaking

danah boyd finds some entertaining parallels between Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, and various 20th-century nation-states:

Microsoft is Germany. They did some pretty evil things a while back but you don't remember the details, you just know that you really hate them. Even though they're really no worse than any other large corporpation/country, you can't help but distrust them permanently because, well, you always have.

Yahoo is Japan. It had an economic crisis that almost destroyed it and it plays too nice with all of the other evil empires, supporting the most evil endeavors. It hasn't really innovated for a while, but it tries to improve on known products to support average people. It's currently trying to sell culture in the form of animated cutesy iconic images which you kinda like and kinda despise.

Google is the United States. It has never seen trouble on home turf. It is arrogant and loved by the elite. You know you're supposed to respect them for being better than everyone else, because they think they are, but you actually kinda resent them for being so rich and powerful. Yet, you really like their cool toys.

Also see how her readers pick up the idea and run with it.

To the Moon ...

Google Moon is an amusing interactive tribute to the first manned lunar landing 36 years ago today. Using the same interface as the terrestrially oriented Google Maps, it offers a zoomable, pannable map of the Moon's surface, highlighting the sites where the six Apollo missions touched down.

For the amusing bit, zoom in all the way on one of those sites.

Oh yeah, the answer to Question No. 4 on the FAQ offers a (cough, cough) rare glimpse at Google's far-future expansion plans.

Political placeholders

In Washington, D.C., at least, you can make decent money standing in line in the halls of power.

Dreams in the last days

Newsweek takes a fascinating look at the dreams people have before they die:

As a hospice chaplain for 10 years, the Rev. Patricia Bulkley confronted the raw emotions of the dying—their terror at the approaching end, their unresolved family problems, their crises of faith. ...

As Bulkley reveals in a slender but powerful new book, "Dreaming Beyond Death," many people have extraordinary dreams in their final days and weeks. These dreams can help the dying grapple with their fears, find the larger meaning in their lives, even mend fences with relatives. Yet all too often, caregivers dismiss them as delusional or unworthy of attention. Not Bulkley, who often discussed dreams with patients at the Hospice of Marin in California. Her experiences were the inspiration for the book, which she coauthored with her son Kelly Bulkeley, a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. It is the first volume devoted to the (paradoxically) life-affirming power of pre-death dreams. And though the research is still preliminary, the authors inject level-headed analysis into an arena often dominated by seekers of the paranormal.

Rating games

Is the system for rating video games any less arbitrary and capricious than the one that seems to be used for rating movies? You probably already guessed the answer to that, but Slate delivers the gory details.

His job really is ...

Over the weekend, P-I "TV Gal" Melanie McFarland's been blogging some great tidbits from the midsummer press tour. For instance:

Night two was HBO’s outdoor “Rome” themed event. Artisanal cheeses you could drizzle with honey...but, why? Uncomfortable seating. Fabric remnants left over from the HBO central office’s interior renovation, offered to us as togas. Middle aged guys stumbling around in those togas.

The night’s most memorable star? A white horse some poor soul led around the party that a) was male and thinking about a sexy mare, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down; and b) full of fiber, which he proved by raising his tail a few feet away from a buffet table. An employee had to run up to Mr. Ed's backside with a bucket. That made me feel a lot better about my job.

I speak you for many of us there, Melanie.

A 10-year-old's mantra

Courtesy of Todd Bishop: the meaning of life (MP3), according to 10-year-old Arfa Karim Randhawa, the world's youngest Microsoft Certified Professional.

Road rage from remotes

Our own TV Gal, Melanie McFarland, is blogging from the Television Critics Association summer press tour this month. No encounters with a drunken Lex Luthor so far this year, but she did share this interesting theory about the origins of road rage from classic TV comedian Sid Caesar:

Television brought an awful lot of things to our lives, but one thing it brought to our lives was the remote control. The remote control changed everything... The remote control took over the timing of the world. That's why you have road rage, you have people who have no patience, because you got immediate gratification. You got click, click, click, click, if it doesn't explode within three seconds, click, click, click, click, click, "Ah, nothing on."

The brain as iPod

Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod is the you-can't-pass-this-up headline on a fascinating New York Times story about musical hallucinations.

Experts suspect the condition, where people hear songs playing in their heads even if they're deaf, is often undiagnosed.

Update: On a related note, here's an interesting item on why those voices some people hear tend to be sound male.

Calling up a book

I've always been puzzled by how few information services there are for cell phone users that use text-to-speech technology.

So I was pleasantly surprised to discover Amabuddy, which Cory Doctorow highlighted on Boing Boing. If you have a book's or CD's ISBN number, you can dial a toll-free number (888-937-4462), type it in and get pricing and customer-rating information on it from Amazon.com.

Here's what Amabuddy told me (MP3) about a randomly selected book I read recently.

ICE in your pocket

Here's an interesting idea: storing emergency contact info on your cell phone for the benefit of paramedics and other aid workers.

Sensing bombs not enough

Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an unsettling piece looking at why even perfect detection of hidden explosives may not reduce deaths from suicide bombings:

If, for example, a suicide bomber walked into a crowded plaza, "standoff" bomb detectors might well pick up an unambiguous signal. A terahertz imaging system could spy the telltale wires and explosives in 30 milliseconds, and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy now in development could sniff out the trace vapors emitted by the ethylene glycol dinitrate in the plastique. Let's say the sensors alerted a security guard, who spotted the terrorist and yelled to the crowd, "Run, it's a bomb!"

In this scenario, the explosives-detection technology worked perfectly. An alarm sounded before a detonation. People were able to run or throw themselves to the ground. But when the bomber exploded, the casualty toll might not have been any less than if the sensors weren't deployed. Even worse, in some situations the intervention -- "Run!" or "Get down!" -- could lead to more casualties, conclude Edward Kaplan of the Yale University School of Management, New Haven, Conn., and Moshe Kress of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif., in a new study.

Even under the best-case assumption of sensors that are perfect, covert and cheap enough to deploy at every city intersection or throughout plazas, early detection unambiguously lowers the casualty count only if the bomber fails to detonate. Ensuring that outcome probably requires ubiquitous deployment of perfect sharpshooters, says Prof. Kress.

Early detection can backfire because of the grisly fact that human beings act as human shields. "There is a trade-off between crowd size and crowd blocking," says Prof. Kaplan. A large, dense crowd puts more people in harm's way, but "the probability of being exposed to a bomb fragment declines exponentially with the size of the crowd." As a crowd flees, there are fewer people near the bomber to absorb the fragments (as when a soldier falls on a grenade) and more people, unshielded, farther away. Simple geometry shows that you can hit more people at a radius 20 feet from a bomber than you can five feet from him.

Whither the monorail?

Our transportation reporters compiled an FAQ with answers for common questions swirling around the future of the Seattle Monorail Project.

Example:

If the project were abandoned, would I get my tax money back?

The bad news is: Sorry; you wouldn't. The worse news is: Not only that, but the 1.4 percent motor vehicle excise tax would continue to be collected, perhaps for about two more years, to pay off the agency's obligations. Those include a debt to the Bank of America that now stands at $110 million.

Locking up your $$

Ever thought about putting your money in prison? CNBC's Jane Wells looks at why some people do:

What if you could invest in a hotel that’s guaranteed to be sold out every night? Well, that’s what a prison is, except it also has bars and armed guards.

It may not sound as exciting as flipping condos in Miami, but some see investing in prison development as a good opportunity.

Real estate relativity

Proving that everything is relative, a San Francisco real estate investor describes Seattle real estate as "depressed and cheap" in a Wall Street Journal overview of our local land rush (no registration required on that link).

(Thanks to Carl for the tip.)

Tom Cruise ascendant

Salon offers one of the more interesting theories I've seen to explain Tom Cruise's uncharacteristically odd behavior of late:

... the buzz in some Scientology circles is that Cruise may have reached one of the highest echelons of the Church of Scientology. While not a lot is known about this level, known cryptically as OT-VII, Scientology observers say that attaining it could explain Cruise's behavior in recent months. ...

According to experts and the church's own literature, OT-VII ("OT" stands for Operating Thetan, "thetan" being the Scientology term for soul) is the penultimate tier in the church's spiritual hierarchy -- the exact details of which are fiercely guarded and forbidden to be discussed even among top members. It is where a Scientologist learns how to become free of the mortal confines of the body and is let into the last of the mysteries of the cosmology developed by the church's longtime leader, science fiction novelist and "Dianetics" author L. Ron Hubbard. This cosmology also famously holds that humans bear the noxious traces of an annihilated alien civilization that was brought to Earth by an intergalactic warlord millions of years ago. ...

Stephen Kent, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta who has published articles on Scientology and Hollywood, also said that Cruise's behavior strongly suggests OT-VII.

Cruise is acting as though he "feels he's more in control over his environment and can convince more people to look into the organization," Kent said. "In the high OT levels one supposedly gains the skills to master one's universe. One is removing countless entities that have been holding people back. Cruise feels that he has freed himself from thousands of errant thetans, and he seems to be in a kind of euphoria he hasn't experienced before."

Overwork is bad

In case you know someone who needs it, WSJ.com's CareerJournal provides a handy outlook of ways that working too much can be bad for your career, and your life:

Approximately 2,500 years ago, Confucius told his students: "To go too far is as bad as to fall short." Excessive work, he said, is as undesirable as laziness. As simple as this advice may sound, most of us still fail to grasp it, thinking that the only downsides of overwork are fatigue and burnout. In reality, the side effects can be much more serious. Especially for managers, hard work can become toxic at extreme doses and "poison" a career.

First, working excessively long hours can mask weaknesses. These may surface too late, when problems are no longer easily fixed. Consider the manager who routinely does the work of her assistant because she failed to recruit the right person and train him properly. Her superiors may not notice the problem if she's willing to work hard enough. The individual may not even grasp the extent of her problem, as she will probably be busy praising herself for working harder than anyone else.

Starbucks' morphing mermaid

Deadprogrammer's Cafe presents an illustrated history of the increasingly sanitized Starbucks mermaid.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Where's that bus?

Seattle Bus Monster is an incredible -- and incredibly useful -- Google Maps hack that helps you navigate Metro's bus system. Among other things, it can:

• Locate bus stops near any intersection
• Get a bus' real-time location along any route
• Gives the next bus's estimated arrival time at a given stop
• Notify you by e-mail or SMS when a bus is x number of minutes away
• View images from state DOT traffic cameras

Creator Chris Smoak warns that the site is new and still buggy, but he's working on it and plans to add many more features in the future.

If you're interested, here's the technical explanation of how the magic works.

(Thanks to Dustin for the tip.)

Free money online

Does the state of Washington owe you money? Check here.

That useful link comes from a story today by P-I consumer affairs reporter Candace Heckman, who explains that those "unclaimed property" letters people are getting in the mail aren't a scam:

Last month revenue officials began sending 5,000 letters a week to people who have more than $75 sitting in a state fund waiting to be claimed.

The state plans to send 100,000 letters with claim forms asking people to provide their Social Security numbers and a copy of their driver's license to receive the funds.

Scam artists send similar letters as a ruse to get consumers' personal information. But as long as people send the forms to P.O. Box 47477 in Olympia, they'll get paid, said Patti Wilson, a manager of the state's unclaimed property program.

Green sites bloom

Environmental reporter Robert McClure surveys the boomlet of "green" Web sites based in the Seattle area, including the Webby-winning Grist.

Gmail delete button

Yes, Gmail users, you can get a "delete" button. All it takes is Firefox, Greasemonkey and this script.

Whether "deleted" messages actually cease to exist in any conventional use is another matter entirely.

(Via SiliconBeat.)

An unusual pose

Saddam Hussein gets an inadvertant "celebrity photographer" treatment in this striking photo that moved over the AP wire yesterday. (It was originally in color but I first saw it in today's newspaper in black and white, like you see here.)

It makes him looks rather like the morose author of some very important and well-reviewed book that nobody reads, doesn't it?

Digital camera wisdom

David Pogue offers a list of 10 tips everyone should know about using a digital camera.

Born to be bee champs?

Noting that five of the past seven Scripps National Spelling Bee champions have been of Indian descent, the Wall Street Journal's Tunku Varadarajan ponders just what it is about their culture that produces such excellent spellers:

As scientists will confirm, there are reasons why empirically observable patterns occur: In the case of the little Indian-American spelling champs, an arguable one is that this ethnic group has pushier parents than any other tribe, all very eager -- no, make that desperate -- for their kids to succeed at school, or at anything that looks remotely like school.

This attitude draws on a particular Indian cultural trait, bequeathed to broader Indian society by the Brahminical upper stratum: Success at letters is the sweetest sort of success, the achievement nonpareil. ...

There are certain cultures -- particularly Asian ones -- that produce child prodigies. Relentless parents, goading their children to success at the youngest possible age, are but one explanation. These are all cultures in which, traditionally, children have begun work early, in which childhood as we know it in the West is an alien idea. Indian kids are potty-trained by two. In America, that would be regarded as precocious. Pressure is brought to bear much later on purely American children than on those kids whose parents persist in old-world child-rearing ways long after they immigrate to America.

And here, perhaps, is the last piece in the Indian-American spelling-bee jigsaw. Educationally, Indian-Americans are the cream of the crop of a fifth of humanity, thanks to U.S. immigration laws, which, for decades, let in only doctors and engineers and mathematicians. So these children are the kids of parents who themselves competed -- probably at a ferocious level -- to get into the best Indian schools, and then to get here.

(Via Obscure Store and Reading Room.)

Call-center quality checks

You've probably phoned customer service somewhere and heard a recording tell you that "the call may be recorded for quality purposes." That's nice, but do supervisors really review those recorded calls?

Probably not, Howard Lee, a former Disney customer-service supervisor, tells P-I reporter John Cook:

"The dirty secret is that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all those calls are actually listened to," said Lee, who while at Disney oversaw three call centers and 800 customer-service employees. "You are lucky to get five calls per month evaluated per agent."

Lee has started a new company called HyperQuality to change that. It's already "low-cost labor in India" to analyze more than 40,000 recorded conversations a month for six corporations, John notes.

Bridges for beasts

Here's an idea to combat the roadkill problem: build bridges for animals across the freeway.

It'd be safer for good Samaritans, too.

Arabic left him tongue-tied

Robert Lane Greene wrote an interesting piece for Slate exploring just why Arabic is so difficult to learn.

Logical link?

The San Francisco Chronicle's Neva Chonin applies some "Earth logic" to the reported contention by Toronto police that there's a strong correlation between child exploitation and "Star Trek" fandom:

"Maybe it's that they're capturing geeky criminals," suggested one Corante.com poster, "and that type of geek is into popular SF, and will have some 'Star Trek' stuff based on sheer popularity and extent of franchise." Again with the earth logic! This poster, I think, hits the heart of the matter. Toronto's Child Exploitation detectives conduct most of their investigations online, where child porn has become a noxious underground economy. And though more regular joes have found their way onto the Internet (if George Bush can manage it, anyone can), it remains a kingdom of nerds.

Conclusion: When in Rome, many pedophiles will be Roman; when online, many pedophiles will be nerdy. And nerds traditionally like science fiction and fantasy. If the detectives had been savvy enough to look beyond the 'Star Trek' connection, would they also have found other, equally geeky similarities between their perps? Robert Heinlein books, perhaps? Comics? Collections of oversize T-shirts? Acne medication?

Need I say more research is needed? Because dudes, scapegoating is too damn easy. Subcultures and minorities are always blamed for aberrant social behavior, whether it's goths taking a hit for Columbine or peaceable Rastafarians being labeled cult members.

After lightning strikes

Being struck by lightning isn't the worst of it. Nope, the hard part comes afterward, according to Slate:

Lightning survivors sometimes have trouble convincing friends and family—even doctors—that they've been struck. Unlike garden-variety electrical shock, which finds the quickest route directly through the body, lightning can flash over the outside of a victim, sometimes blowing off clothes without leaving so much as a mark on the skin. The high-voltage electricity that zips through the body does its damage in just a few milliseconds. In many cases, there are no visible burns, though temporary fernlike bruises called Lichtenberg figures sometimes appear. Medical tests like MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays usually come back normal. But those are anatomical tests of how the body looks, not functional tests of how it works, and they can be deceiving. Zap a computer with an electrical surge and its hardware will appear unchanged, but that doesn't mean it'll still be able to run Leisure Suit Larry. The same is true of humans.

About 70 percent of lightning-strike victims are afflicted with a bizarre collection of disorders that remain almost a total mystery to medical science. ...

Stamper looks back

The Seattle Weekly's Nina Shapiro catches up with former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper in a compelling profile. Stamper's law enforcement career ended after the WTO riots in 1999 -- an ironic denouement, as Shapiro notes:

"That was a defining moment," he says, when he realized the scale of the fiasco before him. The whole mess—complete with charges that the city had become a "police state" and emblematic images of officers decked out in Darth Vader armor—was also a strange and impossible-to-predict defining moment for the career of a man who, up until that point, had been known as a radical visionary who wanted to take policing into new, touchy-feely territory.

"That's my legacy," Stamper says with resignation. ... "Thirty-four years in the business—with my passions around domestic violence, community policing, citizen oversight, true partnerships—and for me, it's WTO. It's kind of funny. But I do see the irony."

Data law's broad sweep

MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan points out that a new federal law requiring anyone who handles others' personal information to dispose of it properly affects many more people than you might think:

Got a nanny? Or a tenant? Then you probably need a paper shredder. Or at least a wood-burning stove. ...

Recycling the paperwork isn't good enough -- it must be destroyed, the rule says, rendered useless to anyone who might stumble upon it.

The disposal rule, developed by the Federal Trade Commission, covers, all employers, large and small -- even those with only one employee.

"You might be surprised," warned FTC attorney Catherine Armstrong. "If you hire a contractor or a nanny, you are covered by this law."

Even if you ordered a background check on your kid's coach, or nanny, or -- as is the latest trend in online dating -- on a prospective blind date, the law applies to you.

Our era in a nutshell

I just love this throwaway phrase in Thomas E. Weber's Wall Street Journal story comparing different online to-do list services:

Of course, anything you can do with a 10-cent pencil can also be accomplished with a 3-gigahertz computer chip.

Space pic facelifts

If you're at all interested in digital imaging, check out the Slate "Explainer," How Do Space Pictures Get So Pretty?

One way to limit comments

Quality control (or, if you prefer, troll control) is an ongoing problem for online publishers who invite comments from the audience. Maybe we should take a lesson from this confessional site that Sarah Boxer reviewed for The New York Times:

Online confessors are like flashers. They exhibit themselves anonymously and publicly, with little consideration for you, the audience. Browse some of the confessionals on the Web: grouphug.us (a simple log), notproud.com (organized by deadly sin) or dailyconfession.com (where you can barely find the confessions for all the promotional stuff). You can see for yourself.

One online confessional, though, breaks the mold. At PostSecret, found at postsecret.blogspot.com, the confessions are consistently engaging, original and well told. How come? The Web site gives people simple instructions. Mail your secret anonymously on one side of a 4-by-6-inch postcard that you make yourself. That one constraint is a great sieve. It strains out lazy, impulsive confessors.

Continuity cops

Todd Seavey wrote a very interesting commentary for Metaphilm on "fictional universes and the fans who rationalize them":

For you see, any story must have a certain amount of internal coherence if we are to achieve suspension of disbelief. And we must achieve suspension of disbelief. For most people, that just means that a given fictional universe must hold together for the space of two hours: if the main character in a conventional romantic comedy, possibly some movie for girls featuring Meg Ryan or someone like that, says at the beginning that she is an only child, she should not have a sister present at her wedding at the end of the movie. Stories like that—about boring, conventional people with their petty love affairs and their tawdry sex antics, people whom one could not trust when the chips were down and an Imperial Battle Droid were attacking your spaceship!—are relatively easy to keep consistent. It is only the grandeur and majesty of a fictional universe the size and complexity of one like the Star Wars universe, the Star Trek universe, the DC Comics universe, or the Marvel Comics universe (and perhaps soap operas) that is truly difficult to maintain.

Yet sometimes the editors and writers responsible for such series barely care about maintaining continuity, so busy are they with more mundane tasks such as writing entertaining dialogue and coming up with interesting new characters. That is why such universes desperately need the obsessive, crank-like fan, the fan willing to concoct rationalizations that make sense of the apparent continuity errors. Indeed, without such fans, I question whether the continuity of these universes could be maintained at all. The fate of entire fictional worlds, the very cohesion of the space-time continuum, hinges on the selfless efforts of fans like myself to keep track of what the hell is going on and explain the slip-ups by the so-called “professionals”!

(Via Boing Boing.)

Greatest TV themes

retroCRUSH has compiled a list of the 100 greatest TV theme songs based on "over 2 years of reader feedback, and expert research."

The descriptions are filled with interesting trivia, random bits of analysis and lots of links to fan Web sites whose existence you probably never suspected.

Scrolling through the list -- which is broken up into four pages listing 25 songs each -- I can't see anything that's obviously missing. However, I do think it's a bit of a cheat to award a second-place tie to both "The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan's Island."

Unknown but not forgotten

For Memorial Day today, P-I military affairs reporter Mike Barber recounts the story of Seattle's own unknown sailor, a victim of an Army freighter shipwreck in 1947.

Torture (n.)

What, exactly, is torture? Slate explains.

Ripped from his headlines

TV crime procedurals like NBC's "Law & Order" franchise routinely use plots that are "ripped from the headlines." Logically, more than a few working journalists have likely recognized that their stories and research formed the basis for an hour of dramatic television.

However, I don't think many write up "DVD-style" commentaries on the shows after they air. But Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin wrote a very chilling, compelling "recap" of "Law & Order: SVU's" season finale, which he explains was based on reporting he once did on the psychological side-effects of an anti-malaria drug used by the U.S. military.