Donald F. Murray passes on an important lesson he's learned from life.

Many of the commuters around me have the white plastic implants shoved into their innocent ears. All sorts of sounds come slithering out as we hold onto stainless steel. The F train sings a different song.

<I>Business Week</I> lauds 12 modern products that so perfectly encapsulated new manufacturing techniques or materials that they remain classics years later. It's a strange list.

Elma G. Farnsworth, wife of electronic TV's inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, is dead at 98. She has been called the "mother of television" because of her technical drawings of the early Farnsworth experiments, which are now ensconced in the Smithsonian.

Cliff Clavin 'splains it all.

Unless it's produced according to the Reinheitsgebot of 1516, your beer may contain betaglucanase, ammonia caramel, rhoiso-alpha acids, sulphur dioxide, protease, amyloglucosidase, or propylene glycol alginate. Yum!

A demonstration of the art of manualism. The well known winter holiday tune "Sleigh Ride" by Leroy Anderson is played simply by squeezing air through the hands.<P ALIGN=CENTER><embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvp.video…; allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" wmode="window" salign="TL" FlashVars="playerMode=embedded"> </embed>

I've come to the conclusion that birthdays really aren't a whole lotta fun. I mean what's to like? You're another year older, fatter, dumber; in short, whatever detriment is plaguing you at the time is magnified by yet another a&#0241o.