LATEST ADDITIONS

Formats and audio trends come and go, but some components are timeless. What component have you changed least often in your system?

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I was ruminating on the Dave Barry "On Hallowed Ground" essay, wondering if there was another example of great war or crisis writing I could link to, when I thought about A. J. Liebling's WWII work for <I>The New Yorker</I>.

Yes, it's the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and the media coverage is relentless. However, despite all the hoopla, the solemnity of the day can still sneak up on you&mdash;it happened to Jeff Wong and me this morning as we completed out daily bike ride and came upon a memorial service for firemen and policemen from our neighborhood who died that day.

As Dave Barry points out, there apparently <I>is</I> something worse than driving while talking on a cellphone.

Even though the calendar year starts January 1 (or, if you're in the electronics industry, with the January CES), many of us still think of Labor Day as the beginning of the year. That's when school always started&mdash;or, again if you're in the electronics industry, the week after is when CEDIA's (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) Expo takes place. As the show has grown over the years, it has also become the kick-off to the important (and, hopefully, lucrative) end-of-the-year sales season, with many companies debuting significant products they hope will make <I>their</I> Q4 profitable.

My eyes were inexorably drawn to a surprising headline this morning: "New Studies Say Universe Younger than Objects In It." A study by Indiana University's Michael Pierce has just been published establishing a new value for "Hubble's Constant" (the ratio of velocity to distance for distant, receding galaxies) which suggests that the universe may be as young as 7 billion years old; at the same time, researchers at Harvard are saying that the universe is somewhere between 9 and 14 billion years old. Quite a discrepancy! (A billion here, a billion there&mdash;pretty soon you're talking <I>real</I> age.)