The Washington Post published Against Depression, a Sugar Pill Is Hard to Beat recently, covering an “…analysis [of] the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades…”. It seems positive thinking, or believing that you’re taking a pill to make you feel better, is more likely to cure your depression than actually taking an anti-depressant, many of which have terrible side-effects.

“… new research suggests that the placebo may play an extraordinary role in the treatment of... [More]”

ZNet published Chomsky’s Dýyarbikar Speech on March 25th. He discusses several interesting topics, mostly giving a fascinating history and framework on which to hang U.S. and British behavior in the last century (and into this one). In all cases, he goes out of his way to mention that the U.S. is simply behaving like any other empire would and the repression and conquering outside its borders should be lamented, but not come as a surprise.

The history runs from British terrorism in the... [More]

You probably know one, a pen-spinner. One of those tricks that looks so easy, so cool, so non-chalant. The kind of trick that makes you throw your pen across the room when you try it, so you have to skulk, hunched over and mortified, to pick it back up.

Pentix to the rescue.

This site has detailed, illustrated instructions for the most popular pen-spinning tricks, (like the Normal), usually accompanied by a movie of the technique.

Lawmeme has posted the Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, which has coverage of a recent interview “with Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting (an AOL Time Warner company)”. He recently made news for this interview for the rather remarkable claim that:

“[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad- supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re... [More]”

Don’t think the choice of an NVidia card is cut-and-dried yet. Sure, the latest Radeon offerings from ATI are slightly slower than the Nvidia cards, but what about the visual quality? Speaking of visual quality, an old hand at making slow, nice-looking graphics has a new technology, called Parhelia. The Matrox site has pages of information, with screenshots and vidoes galore. They hope to lose the “slow” reputation with this one.

Ars Technica has an article, Aiming High at Matrox with some... [More]

U.S. Treasury predicts September 11!

Take a $20 Bill and fold it 3 times to get hidden warnings from the U.S. government! They knew about it all along!

The Register ran MS in Peruvian open-source nightmare. Peru is considering a bill to require that all public offices use only open-source software. Once Microsoft got wind of this, Señor Juan Alberto González, General Manager of Microsoft in Perú issued a stern warning against doing so and provided the usual raft of logic.

In an extremely well-written reply, and possibly the most eloquent and accessible defense of Open Source software I’ve seen, “[Peruvian Congressman... [More]”

Wil Wheaton published Now I’m Pissed, a raw response from a Californian to Enron. It seems Enron was responsible for the collapse of California’s energy market. And deliberately so. They exploited every loophole they could find, with cute-sounding strategies like “Death Star” and “Get Shorty”. Recent memos found in Enron documents, are a “smoking gun”. The SFGate’s article Enron memo describes how traders drove up state’s power prices says:

“Referring to a strategy called “Death Star” by Enron... [More]”

Noam Chomsky has been interviewed several times over the last 2 months with regard to the unfolding situation in Israel. The situation has garnered a lot of attention in both the U.S. and World press, but anyone with a good amount of familiarity with the situation there would fail to see any new developments. The level of violence has escalated, but not to previously unseen levels, and certainly there have been no ideological shifts on the part of any of the major players.

In an interview, Noam... [More]

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is visiting Cuba over the next five days and has been heartily welcomed by Cuban President Fidel Castro. The Newsday reports in Like Old Friends… that his visit is ostensibly to talk privately about Cuba’s human-rights record, but is also being interpreted in the usual rhetoric from all sides of the political spectrum. Of particular interest to many is the lifting of the almost 50 year old economic U.S.-led Western embargo of Cuba.

Recent statements by the... [More]

Another exciting product announcement at the Apple Developer’s Conference is Dreamweaver MX, from Macromedia. In fact, you can download an OS X or Windows version right now. It has a lot of new functionality, including better support for PHP/MySQL. Future testing will determine whether that support includes design-time data.

CSS, XHTML, XML and any other buzzword you can think of are all supported. Most of the automated design tools can be run in a standards-compliant mode, so it doesn’t stick... [More]

The Apple Developer’s Conference is full of cool announcements. First, and most importantly, is the impending release of OS X 10.2, called Jaguar. Apple has a A Look Inside Jaguar covering the major points. The most exciting is Quartz Extreme:

“Jaguar dramatically improves the performance of Mac OS X with Quartz Extreme hardware-based graphics acceleration. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of the OpenGL 3D graphics engine to make the entire desktop a fully accelerated OpenGL scene. A supported*... [More]”

The latest in a long line of great Q3-engine games arrived in stores almost 2 months ago. If you’re looking for a good game to get you ready for Attack of the Clones, which debuts on May 16th, this is it. Reviews have been very favorable, with only some of the more bizarre and pointless puzzles drawing criticism. The GameSpot U.K.‘s review:

“However, Jedi Outcast soon transforms from a typical first-person shooter to an exceptional Star Wars action game that contains some of the best combat... [More]”

id Software Partners With Activision on DOOM III™ at Yahoo Finance News officially announces DOOM III, the latest and greatest game from id Software. The game will be shown at E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo), but probably to a limited audience. Still, we can hope that a video emerges soon after.

“DOOM III will change what people expect to see and experience in a PC game,“ said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. “We couldn’t be more psyched about DOOM III, and are thrilled to debut the... [More]”

Here’s a great reference site with scanned images of currencies from all around the world. It’s called Ron Wise’s … Paper Money. Clicking through the continents, there seems to be unbelievable coverage here, with over 70 bills just from Tonga alone, for example. The one to the left is the beautiful 50 Gulden note (back side) from the Netherlands, which is, of course, no longer legal tender in that country with their conversion to the Euro. If you look at the replacement, you’ll have to agree... [More]

The contents of this article have been moved to the new section, Web Design.

Oz has just come back from a visit in upstate New York with a new sitter, because his usual sitters were abandoning him for a vacation with his parents. While there, his sitter kept a journal and took some pictures There was also a photo shoot back in March, as well.

I was referred by Plastic from Time To Pay The Piper to this amusing parable by William F. Buckley on the National Review called A Parable: The Tenth Man. In it, he poses the current tax situation and relative tax burdens of various members of society as a group of ten men eating dinner. Each man represents a tenth of society. It’s supposed to educate you about last year’s tax cut. I’ll reproduce it here for you:

“Every night, ten men met at a restaurant for dinner. At the end of the meal, the... [More]”

With the President still enjoying huge ratings in most polls, others are feeling much more confident in taking the “with us, or against us” message to new fronts. Former Secretary of Education, William Bennet, has founded Americans for Victory over Terrorism. The aim of the organization is to “take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing”, or basically, to educate America’s citizens about their wrong-headed liberal views. It’s principles... [More]

Iraq is due to be rolled on next. It’s been almost ten years since all-out war there. Bombings are still going on there now (“…in 1999/2000, according to the Pentagon, the US flew 24,000 “combat missions” over Iraq”). What have the sanctions been like there? John Pilger published this article on March 21st, 2002 about the state of Iraq today, after over a decade of sanctions. He discusses the supreme irony of the U.S. and Britain, two powers with plenty of blood on their hands, imposing... [More]

Wired Magazine’s April issue has Peace Is War which covers in detail the degree to which the U.S. military stranglehold exists.The author, Bruce Sterling, attributes much of the power to not just an immense arsenal, but also to multifarious space-based military capabilities. In fact, he’s christened the Persian Gulf War as Space War I and the Yugoslavian carpet-bombing as the Second Space War. Space War III is in its final stages right now and was exacted upon Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense... [More]

Next stop for the War on Terror Express? Iraq. Why? Ostensibly because Iraq refuses to allow inspectors into the country to look into the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. Forget the incredible irony of the double-standard at work here. Forget that Iraq has been under crippling sanctions for over a decade. Let’s just take for granted that fewer weapons of mass destruction in this world is good.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the agenda of the U.S. The previous unalloyed statement needs a... [More]

In an announcement that has simultaneously stunned the auto world and silenced vocal critics, Porsche AG issued a recall yesterday on all 911 models. The recall covers all model years from the 1982 Coupe and Targa to the present day Coupe, Targa, Cabriolet, Carrera, and GT2.

Citing numerous incidents of vigilantism that ended up destroying several vehicles in the New York City area and endangering consumer’s lives, Porsche has determined that the model name’s stigma now “…constitutes a real... [More]”

The Mac Expo last week announced the latest IMac. I think Mark Morford summed it up best in Please Lick This iMac:

<q>It looks like a big vanity mirror stuck atop a large scoop of white rice. It’s utterly annoying in that whole getting-it-right sort of way. It forces you to justify instant feelings of rabid consumerism. It makes you want one. Immediately.</q>

The New York Times had an equally delirious article, For Apple, to Be Flat Is a Virtue.

<q>In other words, Apple’s new design manages... [More]

Cassandra Claire has written the definitive, behind-the-scenes diaries kept by the stars of the the Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings). The diaries are scattered throughout her(?) online journal, but have been gathered together very nicely here* and, if that site’s not working, here. As both pages mention, the diaries are the most fun when read in order. The diaries are rife with homoerotic humor, but it’s mostly pretty funny. My favorites are Ringwraith #5 and Legolas (still the... [More]

If you’re in the market for a new display system, there’s an extensive review of the latest and greatest video cards on the Tech Report called ATI vs. NVIDIA: The next generation…. The first 4 pages are just geeky pictures of the video cards themselves (though, being a geek, I think the cards look pretty nice). The ‘contest’ begins on page 5, with basic system specs for the test harness and raw throughput numbers for each of the cards. The cards compared are the “Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce4 MX 440... [More]”

Quantum Picture develops image-recognition technology. Their proof-of-concept is an ingenious automated cat-flap that prevents kitty from bringing in any unwelcome guests (as cats are wont to do). It’s called the Flo Control Project. You can see a picture of Flo standing in front of her high-tech door, which is commercially available as Cat Mate, to the left.

Basically, the setup has a digital camera and a lamp, the lamp projects a silhouette of the cat’s head onto a screen, then the camera... [More]

The American Mathematical Society recently published a paper titled All Questions Answered (PDF):

“On October 5, 2001, at the Technische Universität München, Donald Knuth presented a lecture entitled “All Questions Answered”. The lecture drew an audience of around 350 people.”

Donald Knuth is the grand old man of programming. He published the The Art of Computer Programming Vols. I-III (with the fourth one on it’s way, believe it or not) and invented T_EX and METAFONT, the definitive document... [More]

Kodak is hosting a feature called On the Road: American Mile Markers. Matt Frondorf drove across the country from New York City to San Fransisco, taking a picture every mile out the passenger side window of his car. The camera was hooked to the odometer and fired every mile, but every 36 miles, he’d have to change the film he didn’t pull over or stop.

“I would count the miles,“ he says. “As soon as the thirty-sixth came, I would change rolls, put the exposed roll in a canister, enter its number... [More]”