Nathan set up his ant farm this week, and to our glee the ants are digging holes! 

Discovered this Seattle radio station today: KEXP 90.3 FM - where the music matters

They play alternative music and have a great web site that tells you their playlist in real time. I heard a song by Jem that sounded pretty good and I may buy.

President Bush's speech at the RNC this week was interrupted by protesters. How can that possibly happen, in a place with such tight security?

Well, here's one explanation. A woman from an activist organization called Code Pink somehow pretended her way into getting an alternate badge as part of the California delegation. She got her seat, just 50 feet from the President, when former Gov. Pete Wilson offered it to her, obviously thinking she was just another tired Republican who needed a chair.

We'll be spending the Labor Day weekend here at home, with a few guests coming on Saturday and Sunday.  

I'm not convinced by the conclusions of a study released in the latest issue of the journal Radiology which is reported with headlines like "Yearly full body scan ups cancer risk from 1 in 1200 to 1 in 50"

This is not a study of actual CAT-scan patients. It's just a study of the dangers of radiation exposure, period, and the researchers happened to apply it to the levels commonly found in CT Scans. Like every other medical procedure, it does little good to talk about the downsides (radiation exposure) without talking about the upsides (early diagnosis of potential problems). Even the "1:50 odds of cancer" stressed in the headline only applies if you get a scan once a year for 30 years. But what are the odds of finding an anomoly that can be treated early? If the chances of a good outcome are greater than 1 in 50 -- and I bet they are -- then regular CT scans are a good idea.

Hey cool! It's about time somebody thought of this. Here's a site that bundles Magazine Subscriptions: Your favorite magazines in Take 5 for $30

They seem to have most of the titles people like me want: Wired, New Yorker, Time, etc.

Is this for real? According to Slashdot, there is a new service coming 9/1 that lets you spoof CallerID. Called *38, you apparently need a subscription, but when you want to fake a call you enter the new number on their web site and it dials you back to give you a line with the fake number--which you can then call from.

I'm not one of those conspiracy theorists who think Big Business, like the drug and food industries, prevent any useful health guidelines from being published by government agencies. I generally respect the impartiality of the government, as well as mainstream non-profit organizations like the American Heart Association. But when the U.S. advisory panel that created the food pyramid, updated its guidelines to include Fewer Grains, More Veggies [subscription required], I think you have to remember that any committee will have the weakness that it requires a lot of consensus. Many things about diet are just not understood well enough to be 100% emphatic all the time, so no matter what recommendation they put forward, somebody can show good scientific data that refutes or moderates it. The net result is a least-common-denominator conclusion.

I've been looking for an adapter plug for my HTC PocketPC Phone Edition. I need something that lets me plug in a stereo headset, and I think I found a Pocket PC Phone Edition web site that reviews all my options. Looks like the Radio Shack 2740373 is what I need.

Kevin Kelly says Sureglow is the best place to buy
Glow Bracelets.

They cost on the order of 10 cents each, or $10 per hundred. Might be fun to have a few hundred for a kid party sometime.

One of my favorite Blogs, Engadget, has this great tutorial on how to make Make 3-D photos with an ordinary digital camera.

The concept is pretty simple: take two photos from slightly different angles, then lay them on top of each other after changing the color channel info in each. You can do it by yourself in Photoshop or other editing programs, or use the free .Net software app called Callipygian that does the work automatically.

NASA publishes an amazing photo of Earth at Night, a composite of hundreds of satellite photo that clearly show cities and developed regions of the earth's surface.



The Eastern United States, Western Europe, and Japan are thick with lights, while most of Africa, Australia, Siberia, and the interior of South America are dark.

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

[subscription required]WSJ.com - Venture Capitalists Revive Tech-Sector Duds: "Venture capitalists backed 8,101 new companies between the start of 1998 and the first half of this year, according to VentureOne, a Dow Jones & Co. publication that tracks the industry. (Dow Jones also publishes The Wall Street Journal.) Excluding companies that were acquired or went public, 1,924 were shut down by venture capitalists or went out of business, costing investors at least $36.4 billion, according to VentureOne.
Of the 4,672 that still are alive, about half initially were funded at the top of the market in 1999 and 2000. Many now are being recapitalized or relaunched with a new business model as 'restarts' as venture capitalists pick through those with the most promising technology -- and least risk -- to see if they can turn a profit. They often can get a larger stake in a company on the cheap."

One of my VC friends points out that VCs typically don't like to reinvest in failed startups, on the assumption that there are enough new ideas out there that it's not worthwhile to go after the old ones twice. If it failed, assume the idea was bad and move on.

But I never agreed with that. Companies fail for lots of reasons besides "bad or unworkable idea". The Bubble failures especially--how many of those companies went under purely because they were associated with the general bad feelings about "dot com bombs"?

The NYTimes quotes The New York Times > Technology > Seeing Google With the Eyes of Forrest Gump: "Tim Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies initial public offerings", on the price of Apple stock over time. If you had bought AAPL at its IPO and held it five years, you would have lost 30%. If you held it to the mid-90s, you'd have merely doubled your money -- while the S&P 500 beat you.

Scoble gives several reasons why Blogs provide great feedback to a product team. Anytime you really want to know what users are doing, set up a blog and collect comments.

Theresa Heinz Kerry speaks five languages! But as this WSJ [subscription required] article chides, they're the romance languages that don't really count. If you know Spanish, you're most of the way to French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Now Japanese, on the other hand...

Looks like Japanese is cool! The Wall Street Journal [subscription required]has a front-page article on the growing numbers of people who study Japanese for fun, not business.

In the fall of 2002, the number of students studying Japanese in U.S. institutions of higher education rose to 52,238, a jump of 21% over 1998, when the previous survey was conducted. There were 34,153 students studying Chinese, an increase of 20%