"It cost me less than $300 to discover the geographic distribution my patrilineal kin in Europe. I obtained all this personal genetic archaeological information by swabbing the inside of my mouth for a sample of my DNA, sending it to Oxford with a check, waiting for 3 months for my Y chromosome "haplotype" results, and then submitting a query form on a haplogroup database web page after filling in 5 blanks with the test results."

CodeCon: wish I was there...
Some coverage... and some more

Hey! Leggo my Mojo! -- The future of micropayment/crypto-based distributed resource sharing.
Well, maybe not, as they seem to be a victim of the dot-crash... mnet is the heir apparent.

A great parody of ad-based revenue business models.

AlteredPage

Tub Cat
Fat Mouse

Domain name ownership street map of San Francisco.

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Correspondence between Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound

'President Bush has not been forthcoming about progress in the war on terrorism or about a "secret government" operating since Sept. 11, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Sunday.'

Noam Chomsky on Private Tyrannies -- Corporations

The name of this blog was inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
I originally read the story as a teen (as part of an amazing high-school English class), and have just re-read it for the first time tonight. It is every bit as good and magical as the first time I read it.

Doomsday Clock Creeps Forward

"...the United States cannot support a court that lacks the essential safeguards to avoid a politicization of justice." --Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in a comment made in opposition to the proposed international court in The Hague, completely ignoring the lack of, or lack of effectiveness, of the same safeguards in American courts.

HOWTO: Use gzip to do computational linguistics

Mr. Einstein, meet Mr. Godel

Hermits, hermits everywhere...

Teen murderers in idyllic Vermont: "They are us, and they are ours."

Dan Simmons (of "Hyperion" fame) wants to demolish the wall between genre and mainstream fiction.
What does he mean? Is he serious? And who is he to talk?

"One Book, One City", the latest American groupthink initiative:
"All Together Now" column at mobylives
"It's a novel idea..." from the Guardian
"Pick a book with depth..." from the Sentinel