In praise of bad habits: This is the outline of a lecture by Peter Marsh to the Institute for Cultural Research in London, November 2001. "In the Western world we live in an age that is, by all objective criteria, the safest that our species has ever experienced...[yet] we have, ironically, come to fear the world around us as never before. In the absence of real risks, we invent new and often quite fanciful ones." He talks about the rise of 'coercive healthism' we find around us, and the religion of health.
The end of men: "Scientists at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago have devised a way to create "artificial sperm" from any cell in [the] body which can be used to fertilise another woman's egg."
Women attracted to men who smell like dad: "A T-shirt sniffing test has revealed that women unwittingly prefer the smell of men who have similar genes to their dads. But this is no Freudian Oedipal complex." Will we then find the scent our fantasies under our own arms? Wait, does this only work for females? from AntiPixel.
Businesses: Think twice before re-designing your website.
The word on the street is that Google will soon be introducting a pay-per-click product that will replace the current CPM-based AdWords on the right hand side of the results page.
The Case Against Knowledge Management: "At a company where I worked many years ago, circulating correspondence was an everyday practice. It was also one of the simplest and best knowledge management techniques I've ever seen."
How the Wayback Machine Works: "the Wayback Machine, currently there are 10 billion Web pages, collected over five years. That amounts to 100 terabytes, which is 100 million megabytes. So if a book is a megabyte, which is about what it is, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books, that's 20 terabytes. This is 100 terabytes. At that size, this is the largest database ever built. It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS. It's the largest database ever built. And it's receiving queries -- because every page request when people are surfing around is a query to this database -- at the rate of 200 queries per second. It's a fairly fast database engine. And it's built on commodity PCs, so we can do this cost-effectively."
Jon Katz reviews Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat Linux. Cam says, "Think about how easy it would be for AOL to distribute an AOL-customized version of Linux with an AOL-customized version of Mozilla (Netscape 6) all on a single CD, along with a mail client (an AOL-customized version of Netscape Mail) and AOL Instant Messenger. All of a sudden, AOL is free of Microsoft's tentacles. By shipping a unified OS, web browser, email client and IM client, AOL is going down the same path Microsoft has been going down for some time now."