Rough Drafts

“Stardust,” NASA’s comet dust-collecting satellite, will return to Earth Jan. 15. Its flight path will take it over northern CA and NV, but should be visible almost as far south as Las Vegas and as far north as Portland (though it will be pretty low in the sky at the northern and southern extremes).

Hypothesis: Over time, BoingBoing and The New York Times will gradually converge in style and coverage, until they are nearly indistinguishable. I’m not as crazy as you may think. For this to happen, the Times would have to start acting more blog-like. Many newspapers and magazines are already doing

The following “comment” appeared on one of my posts recently. Bizarrely poetic. Where the heck do they get this stuff? The puissant Lord was somewhat of the form of Vishti.[1828] He besworne in some respects the biscainers of the sub-title, and in some a mass of strong-blooded phenternine. We inspan

Here’s what it looks like in Pacifica today: rock stacks and surfers!

Jeremy Zawodny points out that Gmail’s spam filtering has gotten pretty good. (Using Gmail as My Spam Filter (by Jeremy Zawodny)) Combine its spam filtering with the ability to download your Gmail messages into an ordinary mail client (like Thunderbird) via POP, and what you’ve got is a pretty kick-

As bloated as I’ve gotten on christmas cookies and candy over the past few weeks, I’ve started yearning for a better snack food. OK, honestly, I’m not all that bloated, despite the huge quantities of delicious treats that our many loving friends and family members sent to us. It’s just that I can’t

Buddhist Tradition Thickens Parts of the Brain Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception — the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for

My latest story for Technology Review (on their brand spankin’ new web site, which is about 30 times faster than the old one): Esperanto for Toasters The ZigBee wireless standard could teach a common language to your lights, appliances, doors, and even your cell phone.

Sure, intelligent design is bad science, because its central propositions can’t be tested — more precisely, there is no test that could show them to be false. But doesn’t it give you an extra frisson of schadenfreude to know that ID is also bad religion? J. M. Tyree points out ID’s theological under

My first freelance article since leaving Mobile last month is out, and it’s for Technology Review: Eyes on the Prize If hefty technology prizes like DARPA’s $2 million Grand Challenge prize push technology forward faster, why not create more of them?

Andrew Orlowski is unusually clear-headed this week, pointing out the phony slump in movie revenues: Listening to our old friend Lawrence Lessig and former MPAA boss Jack Valenti debate each other on National Public Radio last week, it became clear. The dears sounded like a couple of senior citizens

The newly-discovered 10th planet, Xena, turns out to have a moon. They’re calling it Gabrielle, of course.