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Tuesday, December 20, 2005 |
ReplayTV Is Coming to Your PC. DVR pioneer gambles on computers becoming home-entertainment hubs. Plus: Turn your Xbox 360 into an Atari 3600. From the Wired News blog Gear Factor. [Wired News]
10:42:03 PM 
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6000 people Clifford Pickover would like to meet.
Psychedelic mathematician Clifford Pickover, author of "Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves" and Godlorica blogger, is slowly posting a list called "The Six Thousand: 6000 intriguing people you want to meet online before you die." So far, the list includes the likes of extropian Natasha Vita-More, astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi, artist Stelarc, USA National Memory Champion Tatiana Cooley, and our own Xeni Jardin! Link
[Boing Boing]
10:39:00 PM
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US judge bans intelligent design from science lessons. World: Victory for parents on teaching of evolution · Theory ruled to be religion by the back door [Guardian Unlimited]
A Win for Seriousness in Science Education.
AP: Judge Bars 'Intelligent Design' From Pa. Classes. Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.
[Dan Gillmor's blog]
Federal judge rules on Dumbass Design: science wins.
Boing Boing reader Jim Tyre says,
A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled today that the Dover Area school board violated the Constitution when it required that Intelligent Design be taught as part of the biology curriculum.
But more than that, the judge apparently found that the school board members who supported the policy lied about their true motives: "We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote in his 139-page opinion.
Pending a thorough review of those 139 pages, it is unclear whether there was an mention of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Link to news story.
Joshua Shapiro adds,
The Dover "Intelligent Design" trial is over, and the good guys won! The Pennsylvania ACLU has excerpts and the full decision on their site: PDF Link. The judge fully recognized the absurdity of the ID proponents. Oh, that and acused them of lying. Not that he had much choice in the matter; they were pretty blatant. Link.
 [Boing Boing]
10:37:49 PM
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Because civilization is a barn we never finish raising.
Speeches are plates of spaghetti, thrown at a wall. Some stuff sticks, some doesn't. The slide above, from my closing keynote at Syndicate, stuck with Mamutong, the blog of Nick Nichols, who lives in the Philippines and consults that country's energy sector. His practice (at that last link) is a blog too. He sources from all over the place, including Brian Millar (London) and Jeff Jarvis (New York).
Don Thorson sources the same point , adding,
The model used to be, you developed a product, froze it and shipped it and then immediately began work on the next product version. Today the model is, build it, ship it, improve it, ship it, Š Or better yet, build it, ship it and let your customers improve it on their own. The company that can learn to build, listen, learn, integrate the fastest will have a sustaining advantage over their competitors.
Accordingly, marketers will come to understand that the story now needs to be liquid. They too, need to learn how to listen in order to be in the conversation about the product they are promoting. It's more about dialogue than proclamation.
Yep. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
10:36:51 PM
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CPUShare: buy and sell CPU cycles.
from Download Squad:
CPUShare is an interesting and ambitious distributed computing venture. As with most distributed computing projects, you share your computer's spare CPU cycles. With CPUShare, however, you get rewarded in "CPUCoins," which you can pay other users with to buy CPU cycles for your own projects. Moreover, you can sell your CPU cycles for real money. The project is in its infancy, and as such there's really nobody buying, but if it's able to gain some critical mass it could become an interesting new marketplace. [Smart Mobs]
6:16:41 PM
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Top 10 books of the year. From a coming-of-age story set in Japan to the biography of a legendary crooner, we pick the most pleasurable reading experiences of 2005. [Salon]
12:02:56 AM
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Free 411 service.
I know this has been around for a while, but I finally added 1-800-FREE411 to my cell phone's speed dial. My wife and I were spending up to $30 a month on Cingular's 411 service, which charges $1.29 per call. I'll never pay for 411 service again (it works on landlines, too). The catch? You have to listen to a 12 second advertisement if a related business has bought advertising. I'm willing to put up with that. Link
[Boing Boing]
12:02:53 AM
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Universal access to clean water is one of the fundamental Millennium Development Goals, and inventors have come up with a variety of solutions for making non-potable water clean and drinkable. Some are 