Mike's Minutiae

Pope John Paul II shooed a dove — a symbol of peace — out his apartment window Sunday, chuckling with children who watched in delight as the bird flew back into his room overlooking St. Peter's Square.... The white birds, perhaps alarmed by Rome's unusual cold spell, almost immediately darted back into his studio.

Laughing, the 84-year-old ailing pontiff seemed determined to set the symbol free. He grabbed one of the doves as an aide returned the birds to the window sill, and he shooed it out the window and playfully patted the boy on the head.

After a quick flight over the square, the bird quickly fluttered inside again.

The program does not distinguish between legal and illegal copies. It is up to the user to determine whether the files found by the program have been acquired legally, or if the material should be deleted.

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

I have purchased your TurboTax software in the past. However, I just read about your Sunset provisions on older Quicken products, which disables functional older versions of software to force users to purchase upgrades.

I doubt this would affect any software I might make--tax software is inherently outdated each year--but on general principle I decided against purchasing any more products from Intuit. In other product categories, I have dealt with companies trying to convert customers from "purchasers" into mere "renters" and I have an extreme distaste for that attitude.

You might defend the practice as resulting in "a better customer experience for millions of Quicken users" but I don't think the person who is happily and effectively using an older version of your product would see it that way.

Thanks for your past tax assistance. Goodbye.

They're announcing on Mosul TV that the names of the people in the lists of the elections will be announced soon! Imagine, you have elections, you have 3 days till the elections, and you still don't know who you're going to vote for! I don't know, is this really abnormal? Or am I a little confused?

Dr. Rubin said that if criminals did eventually duplicate his students' work, people could block eavesdroppers by keeping the key or Speedpass token in a tinfoil sheath when not in use.

All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it.

An executive with the Texas Instruments division that makes the systems did not dispute that the Hopkins team had cracked its code, but said there was much more to stealing a car than that. The devices, said the executive, Tony Sabetti, "have been fraud-free and are likely to remain fraud-free."

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.

James Logan, a research student at the BBSRC-sponsored institute Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, has found that some people give off "masking" odours that prevent mosquitoes from finding them. His research builds on earlier studies on cattle at Rothamsted Research, led by Professor John Pickett, which showed that the number of flies on a herd depended on certain cows being present. The scientists found these key unattractive individuals gave out different chemical signals from the other cows. When these individuals were moved to another field the number of flies afflicting the herd increased.

James, working in collaboration with Professor Jenny Mordue at the University of Aberdeen, tested the behavioural reaction of yellow fever mosquitoes to the odour of the volunteers. James said: "The mosquitoes were placed into a y-shaped tube and given the choice of moving upwind down either branch. The air flowing down one branch was laced with odour from the volunteer's hands."

An Oklahoma senator hopes to revive cockfighting in the state by putting tiny boxing gloves on the roosters instead of razors.

The Oklahoma legislature outlawed the blood sport in 2002 because of its cruelty to the roosters, which are slashed and pecked to death while human spectators bet on the outcome.

But State Sen. Frank Shurden, a Democrat from Henryetta and a long-time defender of cockfighting, said the ban had wiped out a $100-million business.

To try to revive it, he has proposed that roosters wear little boxing gloves attached to their spurs, as well as lightweight, chicken-sized vests configured with electronic sensors to record hits and help keep score.

"The Rev. John H. Thomas, general minister and president of the UCC, welcomes SpongeBob Squarepants to the UCC's national offices in Cleveland. [January 2005] Randy Varcho/UCC Photo"

A New York radio station apologized on Monday for repeatedly airing a joke song that ridiculed victims of the recent tsunami in South Asia and used racial slurs, saying the piece was in poor taste.

New York FM radio station WQHT, or HOT 97, ran the segment on its "Miss Jones in the Morning" show. The piece used racial slurs to describe people swept away in the disaster, made jokes about child slavery and people watching their mothers die....

The piece drew wide criticism from Albany to New York's City Hall, with many lawmakers calling on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to fine HOT 97.

"At a time when virtually the entire world has come together to help in the tsunami tragedy relief, employees of HOT 97 have come up with this song," said New York State Assembly member Jimmy Meng, a Democrat from Queens. "We are disgusted and demand immediate action by the FCC."

Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman has hit out at the quality of current films and theatre productions.

The star of Rain Man and Tootsie said the film culture was "in the craphouse" at a press conference on Tuesday.

The 67-year-old also said he stopped working a few years ago because he lost his "spark" for acting.

"After the success of 'Titanic,' soundtrack albums were made for every film, and songs were crow-barred into films," Robert Kraft said during a panel discussion at the Midem music market. "Soundtracks were bogus. Songs are often just marketing vehicles, and the music gets forgotten. The music must serve the film."

The Grammy-nominated song soundtrack to the movie "Garden State" has been a recent success, but Kraft said it was because the featured tracks were particular to the film. "The director (Zach Braff) picked all the songs himself," he said.

A generation after the birth of portable tunes on the Walkman, technology has made music available nearly everywhere for today's on-the-go consumer — and the recording industry sees a new wave to ride.

Music industry veterans admit the Internet has democratized music, offering consumers the chance to be selective about songs without having the middleman of a record company producer decide for them.

"It's become a trilogy: Elvis, the Beatles, the iPod — that should really be a band in that third spot," said Dean Hill, an artist manager who runs the Web site www.tourdates.co.uk. "The next revolution's not in bands anymore, and I find that quite sad."

"The most fundamental change is that people are experiencing this (music) without being tethered to a phonograph, a PC or a laptop," said [Ralph] Simon, who represents acts like U2, Justin Timberlake and Shania Twain.

"A compact disc is a bit like a Kleenex these days: You take it, use it and throw it away. Finished. On to other things," [bassist for French rock band 'Leon' Manu] Fleury said.

People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video. And you do want the richness, the graphics that only the PC can provide. Now we need to make it very easy to setup, we need to show this kind of simple user interface can be provided there. The PC has more software, more competition, more richness than anything else. So making it simple and rich, that means the PC will be the key device.

Misery is expected to peak on Monday, as 24 January has been pinpointed as the worst day of the year.

January has been long regarded as the darkest of months, but a formula from a part-time tutor at Cardiff University shows it gets even worse this Monday.

Foul weather, debt, fading Christmas memories, failed resolutions and a lack of motivation conspire to depress, Cliff Arnalls found....

The formula for the day of misery reads 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.

Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas.

Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.

They're housewives, workaholics, PTA members and ... rock stars? Women fighting to shatter the stay-at-home-mom stereotype and rediscover their youthful voice are forming bands, such as Housewives on Prozac in suburban New York, Frump in Dallas and Placenta in Oakland, Calif.

These moms are rocking the house and the cradle, singing about breast-feeding, exhaustion and making kids do their chores.

"I feel like what we do is remind people about their passion and that sense of importance and that sense of vitality," said Joy Rose, a 47-year-old mother of four who founded Housewives on Prozac in 1997. "Life is really short and it's important to live colorfully."

The actors who voice The Simpsons for Mexican TV are involved in a dispute over the use of non-union labour.

The performers, who have worked on The Simpsons for 15 years, fear losing their jobs because the dubbing company is seeking cheaper actors.

The dubbing company for The Simpsons says it has asked the cast to continue but needs to hire other actors....

Nancy Mackenzie, the voice of Marge Simpson, said: "You get to the point where you care deeply for your cartoon character.

"You love them. You go to bed with them at night. It's a sad state, and not because of the money. It's for love."

"But it now appears the warming from greenhouse gases has been offset by a strong cooling effect from dimming - in effect two of our pollutants have been cancelling each other out."

We are all seeing rather less of the Sun, according to scientists who have been looking at five decades of sunlight measurements.

They have reached the disturbing conclusion that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has been gradually falling.

Paradoxically, the decline in sunlight may mean that global warming is a far greater threat to society than previously thought.

"We're going to be in a situation unless we act where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up.

"That means we'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Dr Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards.

That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable.

Since its birth in 2001, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia from the Wikimedia Foundation, has grown to include more than 1.1 million entries. The English-language version alone has nearly 444,000 entries, all written for no compensation by members of the Wikipedia community.

The project has grown to such an extent that it is sometimes mentioned as an alternative to other resources like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But with that growth, questions about how credible Wikipedia is, whether it can be respected by the academic community and how it might change are more important than ever. And as Wikipedia continues to expand, at about 7 percent per month, many wonder if the project can stay true to its core principles of openness and co-creation.

[...]

To academics like Danah Boyd, a graduate student and instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, that is precisely the problem: Wikipedia, for all its breadth of coverage, cannot claim that each and every one of its entries meets any bottom-line standard for accuracy.

"Usually there's only one or two people involved in writing the entries," Boyd said, "and you don't know anything about who they are."

To Boyd, who said she finds the project "an exceptionally valuable tool," the problem is that while some entries, particularly those about technology, are well-read and edited by many community members, countless others have received little or no scrutiny.

The mission of the Burt Reynolds and Friends Museum is to preserve the history of the cultural contributions of Burt Reynolds, and provide educational opportunities to young actors and filmmakers.

Our historical mission is to research and preserve the history of the state of Florida including the location, interpretation and preservation of Florida historical sites.

"Ninety-nine percent of the things in here are Burt's idea. He and I hung a lot of the pictures, and he's a real good picture hanger," said Kreig "Mo" Mustaine, a friend of Reynolds since they played football together in junior high school.

• Jon Voigt: "You don't know what a pack rat is until you see the Burt Reynolds Museum."
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor: "Burt Reynolds is one of the most considerable actors of today. His sense of wicked wit mixed with vulnerability equals pure enchantment."
  
  
• Charles Nelson Reiley [sic]: "I can't tell you enough about how he loves to help young people. It takes my breath away. He is a superb teacher."

If history is any guide, not all government pledges of aid will be fulfilled. By some measurements, nations promised upwards of $1 billion to help rebuild Bam, Iran, after it was devastated in a December, 2003, earthquake. But only about $17 million of that money has actually arrived, according to the Iranian government.

Karina Gonzalez, a sophomore at Newtown High School in Queens and a regular sender of instant messages by computer, had her phone confiscated by her mother after her text messages resulted in a $150 phone bill, triple the usual amount. "I cried," she said. "I felt like I lost a piece of me. You can send a million instant messages a day, and it won't cost you anything. If you send one text message, it can cost you like a phone call."

(from a NYT article about mobile & texting sticker shock)

* Isn't the word "e-commerce" so charmingly dated? Makes me weepily nostalgic for those days when people would throw together a series of links as an "e-mall" and expected people to simply do all their shopping there. Ha!

The Los Angeles Times dropped the daily version of "Garfield," the most widely distributed comic in syndication.

"Garfield" has received mixed reviews in recent years, but the Times is one of the few papers to ever dare pull it. Reader reaction? "We are getting complaints," said Jennifer James, a Times editorial aide, but she declined to reveal how many.

The Times dropped the daily "Garfield" effective two days ago -- while keeping the Sunday "Garfield" -- to make room for "Brevity," a new comic by Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry of United Media.

An eight-nation report in November revealed that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and that the North Pole could be ice-free in summertime by the end of the century. Around the Arctic, salmon are moving up into more northerly waters, hornets are beginning to buzz and barn owls are appearing in regions where indigenous people have never seen a barn. The Arctic report said polar bears were "unlikely to survive as a species" if the ice disappeared and they were left to compete with their better-adapted brown and grizzly cousins.

What is for some an environmental catastrophe might be a great commercial opportunity. Diamond finds in Canada's Nunavut have fired a mining rush and propelled the country into the ranks of a top-three producer. Ottawa is counting on tapping what the Government suspects are major natural gas reserves in the Beaufort Sea, the frigid zone bordering the Yukon and Alaska, where diplomatic swords were crossed with the US when it tried unsuccessfully to auction the area to oil companies last year.

What no one disagrees with is the riches that would come from the thaw creating a north-west passage. The centuries-old bane of Arctic explorers could become a reality thanks to global warming, cutting thousands of miles off the shipping routes between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and delivering a windfall to any country able to tax its users.

• Mission:

  Better Roads is the most authoritative source of information for highway/bridge construction and maintenance, project management, design and engineering, safety, equipment and trucks utilized by governments and contractors, winter maintenance, vegetation management and roadside landscaping, and related projects. (link)

  Unlike trade magazines of many other industries, I like how this one doesn't feel the need to continually kiss the ass of its readers (like frequently telling them that they have "vision" for reading the magazine). The readers of Better Roads are no-nonsense; they're the best at winter road maintenance and vegetation management, and don't need some egghead magazine writer to tell 'em so.
  
  
• How they fancy themselves:
  
  
  • For the government/contractor project team (link)
  • Where the government/contractor teams of highway professionals meet for information about topics of mutual interest (link)
  
  Sounds rather like a sordid tryst, doesn't it? And, in many cases, government contract work is very much so.
  
  
• Target Demo:

  The 39,000 highway professionals receiving Better Roads are part of the government/contractor team who manage, build and maintain North America’s highways and bridges. (link)

  Note that they don't claim that anyone is actually reading the publication--only "receiving" it. Makes a great mat on which to wipe one's road-salt-encrusted work boots!
  
  
• Upcoming events:
  
  
  • Feb. 13-17: The National Asphalt Pavement Association's 50th Anniversary Annual Convention "Pavement Paradise." The Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii. (link)
    
    
  • April 17-20: The American Public Works Association's North American Snow Conference ("The Show for Snow!"). Kansas City, Missouri. (link)
  
  I'm all over that "show for snow," although those weary road professionals get to reload their mental asphalt mixer in Hawaii. Aloha snowplows!
  
  
• Didja know?

  Producers of asphalt are one of the fastest growing audiences of the Better Roads, and their thirst for information and ideas is boundless. (link)

  Boundless, I tells ya!

Bank of America Corp. has agreed to give up its rights to put its name on the FleetCenter, freeing the arena's owner, Delaware North Cos., to open up a bidding war for naming rights to the home of the Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins.

Bank of America will pay an undisclosed fee, likely in the range of $2 million to $3 million, to get out of the final six years of FleetBoston Financial Corp.'s 15-year, $30 million contract that put its name on the FleetCenter. Bank of America bought Fleet for $48 billion in April, acquiring the naming rights in the process. The arena is expected to keep the FleetCenter name only until Delaware North can find a new buyer for the naming rights.

On July 21, 1976, administrator Wang Chunqing returned to Qinglong County. He reported on the Tangshan conference, highlighted the talk given by scientist Wang Chengmin [about the strong possibility of an imminent earthquake], and included updated information from the county's 16 lay monitoring stations. Public officials of Qinglong County took the report very seriously and acted upon the information immediately.

School classes were relocated and held outdoors several days before the eventual earthquake....

By July 26th, temporary earthquake tents were set up. Led by County Secretary Ran Guangqi, who moved into an earthquake tent himself, over 60% of Qinglong County's more than 470,000 residents moved out of their homes. Those who did not move were instructed to keep their doors and windows open at all times to avoid being trapped in case of an earthquake.

Encouraged by a milk industry study that shows children drink more dairy when it comes in round plastic bottles, a growing number of schools are ditching those clumsy paper half-pint cartons many of us grew up with.

Already more than 1,250 schools have switched to single-serving bottles. While that is still a tiny fraction of the nation's schools, it is a significant jump from 2000, when there were none, according to the National Dairy Council....

Jeanette Kimbell, food service director for schools in Nashua, New Hampshire, tried bottled milk at the city's three middle schools last year after earlier efforts -- including offering milkshakes -- had failed to get children to drink more milk.

Now the district's 3,300 middle school children are drinking 10 percent more, and they are telling Kimbell bottled milk tastes better. And lunch program participation is up between 8 percent and 18 percent at each of the schools.