One of the minor irritations of being an adoptive parent is the probing, too-personal questions that strangers feel like they’re entitled to ask you. I usually find these questions easy to deflect, but some parents get really upset by them. So, if you’re an adoptive parent and you get angered by the

Growth is inevitable, therefore, it “should be channeled into already urbanized areas.” Thoughtful ideas here: Coastsider: Letter: Smart Growth and the Coastside

Sept 14 is World Hearing Voices Day: Can hearing voices in your head be a good thing?

The similarities between YouTube and Napster are uncanny. Copyright-infringing content, sudden popularity, a seeming direct connection to the pulse of popular youth culture, scandals, a San Mateo address. (I’m not the first one to notice this.) But the similarities run deeper. YouTube is architectur

Ben Schott, author of the entertainingly eclectic Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany, charts the past 5 years: Five Years of Consequence

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