Dylan Tweney

How philosophy can help create secure databases — or, more likely, create massive non-data maintenance headaches: Cryptography | The non-denial of the non-self | Economist.com

Target’s “Franklin Roosevelt” action doll looks curiously anachronistic for a mid-20th century President…

I love the loud jazzy text-movies of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which has been around for a few years and continues to produce funny, engaging new works in the same vein. Granted, their use of Flash technology doesn’t sound like a recipe for entertainment: words flash on-screen in stark black

I’ve been having a hell of a time getting Technorati to recognize the “haiku” tags I add to every original poem posted on tinywords, the haiku site I publish. I’ve tried everything I can think of: tinywords is a registered blog on Technorati, every haiku carries an internal “haiku” tag link as well

Guess again: The #1 video sharing site is Yahoo Video, followed by MySpace Videos, with YouTube in the #3 spot. That’s according to numbers from MediaMetrix published by Erick Schonfeld. Of course, with 16.1 million monthly visitors to Yahoo’s 21.1 million, YouTube is not far behind at all — and it’

They came for the small, icy planets, and I said nothing, because I was not a small, icy planet… Pluto is a Planet Protest

“If an unsafe building collapsed and killed 1,000 people, we wouldn’t blame the building’s manager, or its maintenance crew, or the rescue squad… We would blame the architects.” Army Corps of Engineers is the real culprit behind Katrina | Grist Magazine

Recording phone interviews is relatively simple: Get an $18 mini recorder control from Radio Shack and plug one end into your phone, the other end into your tape recorder. But what if you’re doing the interview on Skype? Hot Recorder ($15) seems like a slick solution, and it works, up to a point. Yo

I loved Gopher so much I included a map of gopherspace in my 1994 book, The Traveler’s Guide to the Information Highway (long since out of print). Nice to see this retrospective: Six Apart – Digging up info on Gopher

The WSJ discovers that the library is a great place for business info. (Especially true of the gorgeous brand-new library we have in San Mateo.) WSJ.com – Big help for small businesses at the library

“You can’t teach a human,” said Bill in our last lesson. “… You can tell them, you can show them, you can warn them, but in the end all you’re doing is putting the information in front of them so they can figure it out for themselves.” Dervala.net: Practice

The Haiku Apprentice, by Abigail Friedman (Stone Bridge Press, $15), is both a gentle introduction to the art of haiku and a charming travelogue. The author was a diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Japan, when she stumbled upon a haiku-writing group. The book describes how she was welc