While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.

In 2002, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sent an open letter to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.com, which has a market for used books in addition to selling new copies. "If your aggressive promotion of used book sales becomes popular among Amazon's customers," the letter said, "this service will cut significantly into sales of new titles, directly harming authors and publishers."

The RIAA/MPAA mess we're in right now is going to be nothing in 10 years when you can buy a plastic printer for under $1000 and bootleg GI Joe figures at home.

Reading Between the Lines of Used Book Sales

The federal government announced yesterday it has developed an improved genetic method to supersize supermarket trout.

Government Plans to Supersize Trout

Here's a challenge for you: Using only what you can find lying around your house, put together an experiment to test a question in science that's never been answered.

Researchers have dreamed up some ingenious experiments using odds and ends onboard the International Space Station

Decius wrote:

The mantle in gas lanterns, the small cloth pouch over the flame, is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. When bombarded with neutrons it produces uranium-233, which is fissionable. David bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and blowtorched them into a pile of ash.

To isolate the thorium from the ash, he purchased $1000 worth of lithium batteries and cut them in half with wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium ash together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. This purified the thorium to at least 9000 times the level found in nature, and up to 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.

Teenager builds fission reactor in Mom's shed out of household parts. Seriously.

One of my colleagues at the PDL -- John Griffin -- (now at IBM) was "the" guy for the Boy Scouts Atomic Energy Merit Badge and was interviewed for the UK documentary for this.

RE: The Radioactive Boy Scout

IT was the sort of confession that a decade ago might have been scribbled in a teenager's diary, then quietly tucked away in a drawer: "Somewhat recently," wrote a boy who identified himself only as Zach, 16, from Tennessee, on his personal Web page, "I told my parents I was gay." He noted, "This didn't go over very well," and "They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they 'raised me wrong.' "

But what grabbed the attention of Zach's friends and subsequently of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world who came across the entry, made on May 29, was not the intimacy of the confession. Teenagers have been outing themselves online for years, and many of Zach's friends already knew he was gay. It was another sentence in the Web log: "Today, my mother, father and I had a very long 'talk' in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays."

Finally, in 2000, the APA formally rejected this nonsense.

Gay Teenager Stirs a Storm - New York Times

] Dimensions change drastically as your clump grows from a
] fraction of an inch to a monstrous freak of nature.

Boingboing keeps talking about this so I picked up a copy. Its only $20. If you were ever wondering what it would be like to take LSD while Japaneese, this is your chance. Its a happy, non-violent game with great music and interesting, funny worlds to explore. I recommend it. That is unless you have a problem with flashbacks.

I believe they demoed the sequel to come out later this year at E3 a few weeks ago.

Katamari Damacy

New York University is moving to close down its graduate students union at the end of the summer, the labor movement's only toehold among graduate students at private universities.

N.Y.U. Moves to Disband Graduate Students Union

"It's terrible," De Raadt reportedly said. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realise how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

Talk about sour grapes...

Linux wins because of its community, not because its the best technology. Making statements like this on a regular basis is why everyone hates Theo. I've seen him flame people on public mailing lists that was shockingly unprofessional in its extent. OpenBSD looses because of Theo.

Theo de Raat: Linux is for Losers

] Nintendo of America has announced the Nintendo World
] store, located in the heart of New York City%u2019s
] Rockefeller Center, will open on May 14, 2005. Nintendo
] World will celebrate with a grand opening block party
] outside the store in Rockefeller Plaza.

That's this Saturday, apparently.

Nintendo to Open Store in New York

] The Public Radio Exchange is a nonprofit service for
] distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio pieces.

The Public Radio Exchange