Wes Phillips

Honda made the best">http://www.metacafe.com/watch/7521/cool_honda_commercial/">best commercial ever. Now it has made one that's almost as good. Call it a concerto for Civic and chorus.

That's what a newly discovered 1763 copy of an earlier map is said to "prove." Has anybody else out there read Kim Stanley Robinson's alternative history The Years of Rice and Salt? It's a good 'un.

Back in college, I used to spend waaay too much time in the morning contemplating all the text on the label of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. One day I realized that this was a bad way to start the day before coffee and I began to decant the stuff into unlabeled bottles. Still do, for that matter. If you've never seen the original, the quotes are no less random in sequence.

I have to admit I've never even thought about this IP issue.

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Rubber Soul. Looks better than the usual tribute record—especially Ben Harper's "Michelle."

An interesting treatise on anonymity in the Internet age. How much surveillance is too much? How much freedom from it is excessive? If we don't think these questions through for ourselves, somebody else might come up with answers that aren't palatable.

Qwan Wen and Dmitri B. Chklovski, two theoretical physicists, have constructed a model that explains why vertebrate brains typically contain both gray matter and white matter. The gray contains local networks of neurons, wired by dendrites and mostly nonmyelinated local axons, while the white contains long-range axons that implement global communication via often myelinated axons.