Okay, this one made me laugh out loud!

THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM MY CHILDREN…

Sometimes people are just unclear on the concept, in my opinion. The following article is exactly like that. Take his first suggestion, for example – make open source software for small businesses. Won’t that make small businesses more productive, therefore requiring them to hire less people?

O’Reilly Network: Can computers help reverse falling employment? [Sep. 29, 2003]

My one great regret is that I didn’t study music more when I was young. I’d still like to study, but I’m too old to really learn it now. Here’s an interesting site from a guy that is trying to teach himself perfect pitch.

Perfect Pitch Ear Training

This is a really good editorial, mixing up Lessig with politics and wrapping it up with a bow.

Saving the Net

It’s nice to know every once in a while that there are people out there way smarter than you. These remarks are pretty thought-provoking, and demonstrate a level of thinking that most people can’t even comprehend, let alone create. Read on to the end, where it gets to the questions and challenges, it’s the best part.

These are really funny. A list of the top 100 hoaxes of all time.

Well, I got the nifty new iDVD 3 that has cool themes and allows chapter references. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to both fix the audio, and import the chapters from iMovie, and I wasted about 3 DVD-R’s playing with it. If I follow the audio fix instructions (see the March 10 entry), I don’t have the chapter markers when I import into iDVD. If I just create a project from iMovie, it re-encodes everything, and the audio sync gets way off about 60 minutes into the movie.

After many frustrating hours, I gave up on the chapter markers, and went with one long movie that has the audio in sync. Crazy!

I actually like to read the physical paper. It’s part of my morning routine, while eating my Cheerios, to scan the headlines and read an article or two. I don’t see doing this online anytime soon.

However, I do get news online too. The best one I’ve found so far is Corante, which sends me a daily email digest of interesting news stories. They have the highest hit ratio of stories that are interesting to me of any new source I’ve found. My other staple is Slashdot, just for the sheer geekiness of it. I don’t spend quite enough time online to bother customizing news sources very much, so I try to find ones that out-of-the-box reflect my interests.

I like this article – more people should know how to be skeptical.

The Chronicle: 1/31/2003: The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.

A cool book review on Slashdot:

The Space Elevator

James Yonan writes “For years, the space elevator concept has been a staple of science fiction fare, popularized by Arthur C. Clark in The Fountains of Paradise, a convenient and plausibly feasible technology for building a vertical railroad of sorts, tens of thousands of kilometers tall, linking earth with geosynchronous orbit. Unsatisfied with the unquestioning consignment of the space elevator concept to science fiction status, authors Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling set out to understand why it could or couldn’t be done. The result is a compelling new book, backed up by voluminous research, which concludes that space elevators are near-term-feasible. Edwards and Westling have not only convinced roomfuls of skeptics of the basic concept, but have also won serious funding from NASA for continuing their work. This book, The Space Elevator, is one of the fruits of their ongoing research.”

The first entry – woo hoo! I’m starting a weblog just to get in on the act, and to preserve some of the cool stuff I see. This is mostly for myself, to see if I find it useful.