Thursday, July 21, 2005

Maybe you were wondering why Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, and Jennifer Anniston were pictured in the science journal, Nature, illustrating a Letter on neuroscience. The Scientist has the answer, and it has to do with conceptually invariant neurons that appear to demonstrate there's a sparse, explicit, and invariant region of familiar, visual percepts in the human medial temporal lobe. 1:45:00 PM    comment []

Boy in Bubble Reviews NYC's Fashionable, Trendy Restaurants [bOing bOing] 8:17:07 AM    comment []

Post-tsunami Aceh: It takes a woman to rebuild a village. In one village, 270 survived the tsunami, but just one-third are women. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 8:16:42 AM    comment []

Website.com domain sells for $750,000. This is the highest reported sale of the year so far. Press release here. On another, lesser, issue I posted below that .net values are increasingly robust. Further confirmation of that this week: Synergy.net sold for $16,255 and CaliforniaRealEstate.net went for $12,056. Even "wholesale" (i.e. domainer) prices for .net are firmer than ever. Simple example: I acquired autoresponder.net using Snapnames exactly 60 days ago for $1,575 and easily flipped it this morning for $3,000. By Andrew Moulden. [Jottings.com] 8:16:04 AM    comment []

R.I.P., Gerry Thomas: Inventor of the TV Dinner dies at 83. On CNN [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] Gerry Thomas, Who Thought Up the TV Dinner, Is Dead at 83. Gerry Thomas, who designed clever packaging for a frozen meal and called it the TV dinner, died on Monday in Phoenix, Ariz. He was 83. By LOUISE STORY. [NYT > Business] 8:11:30 AM    comment []

Harry Potter and the Magical Cliff Notes.  Check out my fellow Salon blogger David Harris whose interests combine science, literature and journalism (kinda like me!). He's got the goods you want today: summaries of Harry Potter book chapters....Book 5 Order of the Phoenix, in case you forgot where we left off....and starting to unfurl now as he reads Book 6 The Half-Blood Prince. Thanks David! A real community service. [Girl in the Locker Room!] 8:11:27 AM    comment []

Maybe they can find a way to continue to levy the tax on the middle class while saving the wealthy from it? Tax Panel Wants to End Alternative Minimum Tax. President Bush's commission will recommend abolishing the alternative minimum tax, which was established to prevent wealthy people from taking advantage of tax breaks. By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM. [NYT > Business] 8:11:20 AM    comment []

Ready for a GM Beer?. If you travel through Sweden this summer, don't forget to try the first genetically modified (GM) beer in the world. According to CNN.com in this short article, the Kenth beer contains "corn that has been genetically modified to protect it against pests." Sometimes, corn is named maize in Europe, and the brewer chose to use this unusual Bt maize to 'spice up' his beer. Of course, his goal is to produce a great new beer, but he also wants to introduce new technologies that will be good for the environment without compromising the consumers' health -- I guess he based his assumptions on a 'reasonable' number of bottles on a very warm day... Anyway, GM food products have been approved by the European Union since April 2004 -- if they're properly labeled. So you might find this beer outside Sweden anytime soon. Read more for other details, references and a photo of a bottle of this brand new beer. [Smart Mobs] 8:11:08 AM    comment []

Title Insurers Agree to $23 Million Settlement of Kickback Charges. The three largest title insurers in the country agreed yesterday to pay $22.8 million to settle charges that they paid kickbacks for business referrals, as investigations into the title insurance industry continue in more than a dozen states. By JOSEPH B. TREASTER. [NYT > Business] 8:10:49 AM    comment []

It Gasps, It Yawns, It Even Listens: Furby Is Back, Kilobytes to Spare. Remember Furby? The furry little electronic toy is back in a new version that has 500 kilobytes of memory, six times as much as the original, and uses voice recognition to respond to its owner. By ANDREW ZIPERN. [NYT > Technology] 8:10:09 AM    comment []

Seth: "Prediction Markets" and GIGO. I've been commenting on law professor Cass Sunstein's guest-postings at Lessig's blog, regarding aggregation and "prediction markets". (for whatever good it does ...). My general view is summed up by the old quote: "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ``Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage But I see an underlying idea in some evangelism now, that we can put into the "machine" wrong figures, and through the program WISECROWDS, the right answers will come out. But as the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out", and usually aggregating a bunch of wrong answers leads to a wrong answer. There are indeed some extraction procedures which can find a signal amidst noise. However, accurate information can't be created if it was never there in the first place. I'm not the only person to point this out. Several other commentators are doing so too. There's plenty of material. But I can see that skepticism is fighting the appeal of punditry. For all the supposed wonders of interactivity, there doesn't seem to be much good in going against the hot fad. [Infothought] 8:05:52 AM    comment []

3 Biologists Question Evidence in Sighting of Rare Woodpecker. Experts made the claim in April that they had sighted an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird presumed to have vanished from the U.S. By ANDREW C. REVKIN. [NYT > Science] 8:04:39 AM    comment []

Some Disappointed Nominee Won't Add Diversity to Court Federalist Affiliation Misstated [Washington Post: Top News] 8:02:15 AM    comment []

The Titanic Files, at The Smoking Gun, show the tragedy through records including SOS transmissions and lists of property lost by a well-to-do passenger. 12:22:06 AM    comment []