From Jeff Sigmund’s “Newspaper Web Site Audience Increases More Than Ten Percent In First Quarter To 73.3 Million Visitors” (Newspaper Association of America: 23 April 2009):
Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73.3 million monthly unique visitors on average (43.6 percent of all Internet users) in the first quarter of 2009, a record number that reflects [...]
Posted on April 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):
… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Twins Suspected in Spectacular Jewelry Heist Set Free” (Spiegel Online International: 19 March 2009):
Saved by their indistinguishable DNA, identical twins suspected in a massive jewelry heist have been set free. Neither could be exclusively linked to the DNA evidence.
German police say at least one of the identical twin brothers Hassan and Abbas O. may [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Errol Morris’ “Whose Father Was He? (Part Five)” (The New York Times: 2 April 2009):
I had an opportunity to visit the fossil collections at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. It was part of a dinosaur fossil-hunting trip with Jack Horner, the premier hunter of T-Rex skeletons. Downstairs in the lab, there [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bill Katovsky’s “David Foster Wallace: A Profile” (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: November 2008):
“I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, ‘Just east of [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Ellen Messmer’s “Symantec takes cybercrime snapshot with ‘Underground Economy’ report” (Network World: 24 November 2008):
The “Underground Economy” report [from Symantec] contains a snapshot of online criminal activity observed from July 2007 to June 2008 by a Symantec team monitoring activities in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Web-based forums where stolen goods are advertised. Symantec [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Pat Holt’s “The Ten Mistakes: Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)” (Holt Uncensored: 17 November 2008):
EMPTY ADVERBS
Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally – these and others are words that promise emphasis, but too often they do the reverse. They suck [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
From a licensing perspective, the vast majority (typically 60-70%) of all open source projects are licensed under the GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
…
GPLv3 was published in July 2007, some 16 years following the creation of [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
Cumulatively patents have been doubling practically every year since 1990. Patents are now probably the most contentious issue in software-related intellectual property rights.
…
However we should also be aware that software written from scratch is as likely [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “Researchers Find Massive Botnet On Nearly 2 Million Infected Consumer, Business, Government PCs” (Dark Reading: 22 April 2009):
Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the U.S.
The botnet, which appears to be larger than [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” (Rolling Stone: 13 April 2000):
The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David G. Post’s “Jefferson’s Moose” (Remarks presented at the Stanford Law School Conference on Privacy in Cyberspace: 7 February 2000):
In 1787, Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the “complete skeleton, skin & horns of the Moose” shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his hotel. One can only [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China – that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.
The first source of tension arises from the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious. For instance, there are verses in both the Old and New Testament that seem to show that the earth [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Dan Shelly’s “Former News Radio Staffer Spills the Beans on How Shock Jocks Inspire Hatred and Anger” (AlterNet: 17 November 2008):
To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premier: September 1996):
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “Laughing With Kafka” (Harper’s Magazine: July 1998, pg. 26):
… the really central Kafka joke – that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
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Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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