Notes

Finally, a politician has the stones to declare, publicly, that he doesn’t believe in God: Stark’s atheist views break political taboo

One way to make science more interesting is to make it more relevant. Rocket scientists and astrophysicists have gotten pretty good at this lately: For instance, when they land a spacecraft on Mars they toss off a carefully crafted folksy analogy, such as “it’s like hitting the back of someone’s hea

Door to door magazine subscription sellers–debt slaves, strung out on meth, beaten if they don’t sell enough: For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews

The ultimate Web 2.0 service: You give them a bunch of personal details when you sign up, and in return you can edit your account info all you want. Uselessaccount.com

Ignore their advice. Lie to them, saying that you took the advice. Kiss their asses. And then, years later, brag about how you put one over on them. Choriamb: What to do when an editor asks one to revise (NB: if a writer did this to me, and I found out, they’d be blacklisted for […]

So Wikipedia is adding nofollow tags to all its links? Fine, then. We’ll all just add nofollow tags to all of our links that point to Wikipedia. (And yes, there’s a WordPress plugin.)

Quick: what’s the difference between the average gadget blog and PR Newswire? There’s more hype on the gadget blog. Ex-Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson is tired of it.

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.” NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger on the Times’ Internet plans. (via Nicholas Carr)

Interesting article by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker on Google’s massive book-scanning project: Google’s Moon Shot

363 tons of $100 bills were flown to Iraq under Paul Bremer’s watch. That’s $12 billion in cash. And he has no idea where it went: When Will Media Deeply Probe U.S. Corruption in Iraq? – Yahoo! News

Frank Luntz has some excellent advice for the environmental movement – seriously: GOP strategist Frank Luntz argues enviros are failing — and they’re mean to boot

Doing some research into the global PC industry, I discovered that 82.6% of notebooks are made by Taiwanese companies. By 2010, it will be 92.5%, according to a mid-2006 press release from iSuppli. These Taiwanese companies, known as original design manufacturers, don’t just build notebooks–they des