"Wikipedia is offering an interesting feature: compile articles into books, and get it printed by "PediaPress." Alternatively you can get the book as a downloadable PDF or OpenDocument. Rad! I can imagine some pretty awesome/hilarious collections; what book would you make?"

"The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research."

"20% of Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal."

"it would take more than 400 OLPC laptops to cover the same area and they would all have to be spaced out perfectly. We also have the possibility of using 500mW radios and 16 dBi antennas for even longer range in rural areas. When we consider the fact that a single failure in one of the mesh nodes due to battery drainage, moving out of range, software hang will cause the entire mesh scheme to break, there simply is no way to get around the centralized architecture."

"The government has forfeited its monopsonistic (i.e. sole employer) buying power over government-funded jobs killing people and breaking things, so the taxpayers are having to shell out much higher pay, either to Blackwater mercenaries or in six figure re-enlistment bonuses to U.S. military servicemen to keep them from going over to Blackwater. From the taxpayers' point of view, it's a ridiculous situation. This is not a unique case restricted to the military. Much of the demand for privatization of traditionally governmental jobs comes from government employees themselves who want a competitive job market for their skills. For example, the folks who run state lotteries have been working for years to get the state lottery business privatized so they can transfer from a civil service job to a "private"-sector job ... running a state-licensed monopoly. It's the best of both worlds!"

"a crack team of whipsmart librarians. Armed with some guidelines and an organizational zeal, they’re able to maintain consistent tagging rules on our daily output. They and their predecessors have been doing this for our material all the way back to 1851. While we are not able to share all of that metadata with the general public, metadata is available for all our electronic Web content from 2001 onwards. To see an example of this in action, view the source of a story like New Coast Guard Task in Arctic’s Warming Seas, and you will find the following metadata tags inside (but not all of them used):"

"Reichek’s samplers include embroidered reproductions of a Web page, Seurat’s portrait of his mother sewing, an Attic frieze, quotations in needlework from Freud and Colette, Charlotte Brontë’s favorite collar patterns with a paragraph from “Shirley,” and an extract from Darwin’s journals. Her needlework literally gives depth to the texts and images that she translates. “Unlike a pen or a brush,” she said, “a stitch pierces the surface that it covers and belies its flatness, becoming part of the supporting structure.”"

" Mormons for Equality and Social Justice (MESJ), for example, is made up of Latter-day Saints who are "anxiously engaged" in "furthering the cause of Zion by working for the gospel values of peace, equality, justice and wise stewardship of the Earth in a spirit of Christlike charity and concern." "

" “We think our paper is the first to bring external semantic context to the problem of object recognition,” said computer science professor Serge Belongie from UC San Diego. The researchers show that the Google Labs tool called Google Sets can be used to provide external contextual information to automated object identifiers. The paper will be presented on Thursday 18 October 2007 at ICCV 2007 – the 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Rio de Janeiro, Belongie. Google Sets generates lists of related items or objects from just a few examples. If you type in John, Paul and George, it will return the words Ringo, Beatles and John Lennon. If you type “neon” and “argon” it will gi"