This link goes to the USGS web page on the quake, with lots of technical data and charts that various news organizations will reference without linking.

See also http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Maps/region/Asia.gif (before it changes) to see some of the biggest shake boxes ever...

Merry Christmas South East Asia!

[

Merry Christmas all!

-k]

Merry Christmas

] Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users
] around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a
] unique perspective on the year's major events and trends.
] We hope you enjoy this aggregate look at what people
] wanted to know more about this year.

I always meme this. Interesting that sco is the most searched for company. Still too many geeks on the internet.

Google Press Center: Year End Zeitgeist

Mark Dery, author of "Escape Velocity," has a blog...

Shovelware: Mark Dery's Blog

] The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of
] course that helps. It is not hard work or experience,
] though they help, too. The secret to programming is
] having smart friends.
]
] Once we had a plausible way to ship, Apple became the
] ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was
] willing to help us. We got resources that would never
] have been available to us had we been on the payroll.

Totally Amazing. Gold Star!

Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

] Coke vending machines are everywhere. They're getting
] more and more like regular computers with LEDs that show
] little "ICE COLD" messages and whatnot. Well, there's a
] lot more to those little built-in computers than you may
] think. Included in the low-level operating system that
] these babies run on is an actual debug menu that gives
] you access to all sorts of machine information and
] possibly gives you free cokes in older machines.
]

[NLhiphop] Hacking Coke Machines

] The secretary's approval rating has fallen from 71
] percent in April 2003 at the height of the U.S.-led
] invasion of Iraq to 41 percent in the new survey.

What is the value of these polls?

If you repeat "Rumsfeld bad" in the press over and over and over again for a month and then take a poll of what the American people think of Rumself, they are going to tell you "Rumsfeld bad." Why even ask? Is this just a litmus of how well the media system is working? Can we get some correlation between this infomation and data about news media opeds?

CNN.com - Poll: Rumsfeld losing public's support - Dec 20, 2004

] There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on
] the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle
] farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit
] design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school
] dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.

This is kind of a cool story, although I continue to be frustrated by the propagation of Richard Stallman's lie about the definition of the word hacker.

The work hacker, in computerdom, orginally (ie in the 60's) meant a poor programmer, or someone who broke into a computer. It was in the 70's that the word was applied with respect. In the 80's Stallman attempted to separate the word as it is applied with respect from the word as it is applied to people who break into computers. Its hard to apply this split consistently, (for example, which one is Woz?) because what Stallman meant to do was separate boomers and Xers. This has resulted in endless fallacies, such as people who parrot the phrase "hacker in the original meaning," the concept of "white hat and black hat hackers," etc... More infuriating to me is "The Hackers Conference," at which self proclaimed "good hackers" have created a closed and reculsive culture that serves no one but themselves, while so called "bad hackers" have create a wide open culture that is vibrant and reaches out to anyone who has an interest in the subject matter...

Stallman's damage to the word must be repaired.

The New York Times - A Toy With a Story

Kind of a neat look at pleasure as *the* motivating factor:

"Ian Sample talks to the scientists teasing out why we strive so much for pleasurable experiences - and why, when we have it all, we risk everything for more excitement."

Guardian Unlimited | Life | The new pleasure seekers

Winter Solstice Dec 21 2004 7:42 AM EST

For those of us on the east coast, the sun will be at its closest about a half hour after it rises.

The reason for the season