This might be the hottest day of the year. It feels like a hundred degrees out there. It's really hot. On what might be the hottest day of the year, all of our bus and subway systems — connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and, of course, New Jersey — were absolutely crippled.
Sam Leith gets the spa treatment.
On the advice of Gavin J. Grant, who is guest-blogging <A HREF="http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2007_08.php#011539"><I>Blog of a Bookslut</I></A>, I read Margo Lanahan's "Singing My Sister Down" this morning. Now I can't stop thinking about it.
Flowers, it seems, have secrets that the honeybee's ultraviolet vision reveals.
It's stupid because I stood there looking at the subwoofer, thinking to myself, "Now, how should I get this thing out of the box?"
<I>The New York Times</I> is ending its TimesSelect program, which charged subscribers $50/year for access to "premium" content, meaning most of their regular columnists. We're going to hear a lot of piffle about how the <I>Times</I> only had about 250,000 subscribers because the content was so widely pirated, but I think that's horse-hockey.
Mitochondrial DNA research reveals some interesting facts about the Black Death.
S. L. Price writes about his initiation into the newspaper business. "I was, as everybody there can attest, an instant master—at overwriting, at missing deadlines, at trying to invest my stories with an importance they didn’t deserve. But with another daily paper in town, I had to hustle or lose, and fear of humiliation was only one reason I got better. The fact is, battling on a beat is one of life’s few, clear-cut, post-athletic competitive venues. Each morning, readers open up a newspaper to see who won the game. Each morning, sportswriters open up a newspaper to see which writers won the battle for the best lead, best quotes, best information, best kicker, best assessment of that game. I lost often and won some, too, and spent a bit of each day wondering if I’d be fired."
"Much of the science being done today in many fields will turn out to be wrong. Being wrong is an essential part of investigating the universe."
Aka the physics of <A HREF="http://myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/index.asp?sec=2&too=100&eve=8&dat=8/1/2007… bubbles</A>.