Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others,
are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

A nice perspective on the size of our star and its planets.

Friendship among Women:

A woman didn't come home one night. The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friend's house. The man called his wife's 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it.

Friendship among Men:

A man didn't come home one night. The next morning he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend's house. The woman called her husband's 10 best friends. Eight confirmed that he had slept over, and two said he was still there.

Photos of The Firewater Rock and Roll Medicine Show at The Roadhouse Bar in Dacono, CO.

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Insecurity Goes Upscale -- Newsweek

It has been the most egalitarian of all the 11 recessions since World War II. In various ways, it has touched every social class through job loss, pay cuts, depressed home values, shrunken stock portfolios, eroded retirement savings, grown children returning home—and anxiety about all of the above. The Great Recession (as it is widely called) has changed America psychologically, politically, economically, and socially. Just how will be examined and debated for years. Here comes a booming cottage industry of scholars, pollsters, and pundits.

A new study from the Pew Research Center, based on an opinion survey in May of nearly 3,000 Americans and an exhaustive evaluation of economic data, provides a preview. Not surprisingly, it confirms that Americans have become more frugal; 71 percent say they’re buying less expensive brands, 57 percent say they’ve trimmed or eliminated vacations. Life plans have changed; 11 percent say they’ve postponed marriage or children, while 9 percent have moved in with parents.

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Beyond Guns: N.R.A. Expands Agenda -- NY Times

Fresh off a string of victories in the courts and Congress, the National Rifle Association is flexing political muscle outside its normal domain, with both Democrats and Republicans courting its favor and avoiding its wrath on issues that sometimes seem to have little to do with guns.

The N.R.A., long a powerful lobby on gun rights issues, has in recent months also weighed in on such varied issues as health care, campaign finance, credit card regulations and Supreme Court nominees.

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Rural telco serves 17 people, rakes in $300K (of your money) -- ArsTechnica

AT&T was insanely profitable in 2009, with $34.4 billion in revenue and $12.5 billion in net income. The company even returned most of this cash ($9.7 billion) to investors as dividends. So why did the US government direct $435 million into the company's coffers?

Thank (or blame) the Universal Service Fund, which last year collected $7.2 billion dollars from phone companies -- charges that are passed on to consumers, often as a separate line item on their bills. The money amounts to a 14 percent tax on phone service. It pays for four things: telephone service to expensive-to-wire places, subsidies for low-income users, computers and Internet access for schools, and telecommunications services for rural health care providers.

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Citizen journalism not making up for loss of local newspapers -- ArsTechnica

In the US, traditional newspapers have undergone a period of contraction, with many papers shutting down entirely. This has been especially hard on local news, because even those newspapers that survive are likely to be consolidated with former competitors, shrinking the total number of outlets and the reporters that once fed them. At the same time, the growth of the Internet and increasing availability of tools for content production has fueled hopes that citizen journalism -- a combination of blogs and news-focused sites run by members of the community they cover -- might pick up some of the slack. A survey of citizen journalism sites, however, suggests that we're a long way from replacing what has been lost, and the legacy news sites have gone a long way towards adopting current technology and practices.

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Poof! After Wireless, the Computer Mouse Turns Invisible -- Wired

In a magic trick that only geeks can pull off, researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there.

Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.

The project, called “Mouseless,” uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands.

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Linux Doesn't Cost Anything - But Maybe It Should -- LinuxInsider

Discussions, theses, theories and memes abound around Linux's inability to gain traction in the desktop marketplace. Some think the Linux Desktop is too hard to learn (it's not). Others say Linux Desktop is deficient (it's not). Linux elite (or 1337) say Linux wasn't really meant for the general users anyway (not true). Microsoft says Linux in general is evil (see the Halloween Memo) (oh, and by the way, it's not).

I submit yet another theory: Linux isn't expensive enough!

Why, you wonder, when all along we've sung the FOSS praises of GNU/Linux (hereafter referred to as the more simple "Linux," with all deference to Stallman) and that Linux is free? What could be better than free?

If Linux Desktop is free and can't gain more marketshare (estimates range somewhere around 1 percent Linux Desktop market penetration) then one or a combination of the above reasons must be why Linux fails. If Linux passes all points in the opening paragraph, what gives?

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Concert ticket sales decline. Is it the economy or the music? -- CSM

Concert ticket sales are down, says Pollstar, who report that gross revenue for the top 100 tours in North America in the first six months of 2010 is down nearly $200 million from last year.

That's a 17 percent drop in an industry that seemed impervious to the weakening economy just a few years ago. The total haul of $965.5 million was the lowest for the first half of the year since 2005 when gross revenue was $730.9 million.

Ticket sales also were off. The top 100 acts sold an average of 6,951 tickets per show, down about 9 percent from 7,639 during the same period in 2009.

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Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in 'Silent Raids' -- NY Times

The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.

While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the "silent raids," as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.

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From Museum Basement, a ‘New’ Dinosaur -- NY Times

When Nicholas Longrich stumbled upon a fossilized fragment from a previously unknown dinosaur genus in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he rejected the traditions that usually govern dinosaur nomenclature.

Those conventions would have Mr. Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale, name the dinosaur after the area in which it was found, or use a Latin or Greek root for a physically distinctive feature. That is, after all, the method he used for three other genera he has named: Hesperonychus, Albertonykus, and Texacephale.

Instead, over a round of drinks with fellow paleontologists, Mr. Longrich struck upon, almost out of thin air, a name that would end up bringing him more publicity than any of his other discoveries: Mojoceratops.

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What Would Reagan Really Do? -- Newsweek

Grown men don't tend to worship other grown men -- unless, of course, they happen to be professional Republicans, in which case no bow is too deep, and no praise too fawning, for the 40th president of the United States: Saint Ronald Reagan.

His name is invoked by candidates for offices high and low, from aspiring state assemblyman Anthony Riley of Hesperia, Calif., who constantly referred to himself as a "Reagan Republican" before losing in the 59th district last month, to Danny Tarkanian of Nevada, who framed his failed 2010 primary run for the U.S. Senate as Reagan’s "last campaign" and frequently repeated what has to be one of the most tired lines in politics: "We're going to win this one for the Gipper."

For conservatives, Reagan is more than a president. He is a god of sorts: wise, just, omniscient, infallible. Being Republican has long meant being like Reagan -- or at least saying you're like Reagan. The writer Dinesh D'Souza neatly captured the conservative CW when he suggested that the right "simply need[s] to ask in every situation that arises: what would Reagan have done?" Period. Problem solved.

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Definitely an interesting read.

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