LATEST ADDITIONS

Why can't our high-school students? (Okay, lighten up, I know it's because English makes no sense—I just couldn't resist the straight line.)

The CEA has taken out ads in Capitol Hill papers that tell Congress to learn the difference between pirates and regular citizens employing fair use.

RHIC creates mini-sized versions of the Big Bang. The results are perfectly surprising. Turns out, J. B. S. Haldane was right: The universe is not just stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we <I>can</I> imagine.

Getcher Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and Costa surfaces here!

<I>Locust Street</I> is exploring 1956. Yesterday's post actually manages to connect Stockhausen to Clarence "Frogman" Henry. True, it's a chronological connection, but I guarantee that nobody will contrive an odder coupling in 2006. Great site, worth a regular visit.

Here's a sobering story about computer buying. <I>[H] Consumer</I> went to Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and Fry's Electronics to buy a computer and simply tells us what happened. The money quote: "Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware. Even if a sales rep has all that down, a greater skill is required from them: relating that 64-bit-Lightscribe-GeForce knowledge in a non-condescending, helpful way to someone who is unsure what his hardware needs even are. The potent combo of techie know-how and properly relating it to an 'everyday' consumer is a difficult knack to develop. Most sales reps you’ll encounter are polishing one or the other, if not both of those skills, if they posses them to begin with."

<A HREF="http://blog.hometheatermag.com/markfleischmann/">Mark Fleischmann</A> sends us a cautionary link that argues that our immersion in the technological soup of bleeps, blips, and scattershot images is changing us from critters who think in words to ones that utilize pictures.