Robbers Rediscovering the Small-Town Bank: "Professor Weisheit, co-author of a 1999 book on crime and policing in small-town America, said that in 1990, the robbery rate in the nation's largest cities was 54 times that of rural areas; in 2000, it was 27 times as high. Just 1.4 percent of robberies in big cities were of banks, compared with 3.5 percent in cities with fewer than 10,000 people."
How to see Comet Ikeya-Zhang: "To find Comet Ikeya-Zhang, look in the western sky shortly after sunset and locate the planet Mars -- that will be a red point of light about 18 degrees up from the horizon. (An outspread hand at arm's length covers about 15 degrees, so Mars is a bit higher than one hand-span.)"
The Christian Family Tree: "Short portraits of main families and communities within Christianity, particularly those in The Middle East, Europe, and North America. The descriptions provide some primary characteristics and a method of categorizing Christianity into fifteen families."
The Social Life of Paper: "Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking."
Top-100 Links from Weblogs: "Listing the Top-100 pages linked to by the weblogs who pinged Weblogs.Com in the last three hours."
The Blue Flash: "John Ivers got tired of waiting in line to ride a roller coaster so he decided to build his own...the Blue Flash!"
New Saddam Hussein novel: "Baghdad press announced on Wednesday that two new novels, which Iraqi writers believe to be written by President Saddam Hussein, will be issued soon. The papers did not identify the writer, but gave a heavy clue by saying they were the third and fourth works of an anonymous author whose previous books bore the legend: 'A novel by its author.'"
Who let the blogs out? "The bureaucrats and censors in China who block and monitor websites will be hard pressed to try and control the future flow of weblogs both in and out of China due to the number and diversity of this new information platform. Having met actual Internet content censors from China, they are decent people but come from a different time and different place in terms of technology. They don't really get it yet since weblogs remain a concept difficult for them to understand for now."
37-cent stamp coming: "The postal service is set to raise the price of a regular first-class stamp to 37 cents from 34 cents this year, with approval for the increase expected as early as Friday at a meeting of the independent Postal Rate Commission."
Mercury News: Google restored some of the anti-Scientology links.