] I'm not sure why it's so compelling right now, but it is.
] Sometimes, a thing swells into a scale so tasteless, so
] grotesque, it crosses a magical threshhold and becomes
] beautiful. Like matter to antimatter. Beauty from
] antibeauty.
]
] How did a place so full of decay become an emblem of
] growth? The future is here. But I'm not sure what that
] future is.

One of the most interesting BoingBoing entries ever.

Boing Boing: The Fertile Valleys

] Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium
] for politically motivated attacks. With the same First
] Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are
] increasingly gaining influence.

CBS reports the FEC plans to regulate political speech online. The tone of this article is very defensive. Imagine, bloggers having the same first amendment rights as newspapers. Disgusting!

CBS News | Blogs: New Medium, Old Politics | December 9, 2004 18:59:43

Of interest, sort of... The Find Later feature is interesting in that you already have a key word that will always produce the data you are looking for again.

Fat Pickle - Your Search Just Got Personal

] Our goal here is to provide you information on who gave
] what to what political party this last election cycle.
] There are many factors which will eventually pertain to
] the "Blue-approved" label, however with buying season
] upon us, we quickly wanted to give people SOMETHING to go
] off of. Political donations and their effects are but one
] of many factors we will look at when a company is taken
] into consideration.

When I first saw this I kind of blew it off, but they have put together a fairly interesting list here. I recall a conversation with JLM years ago about political soft drinks. It begins.

Buy Blue Current Campaign

] Read it to me is AppleScript software that lets you
] sync audio versions of content to your iPod via Apple's
] Text-to-Speech and iTunes. Created by Adam Tow and Alex
] King.

Darn, turns out I don't have to. This program pulls RSS content and pushes it into iTunes so you can play it on your iPod. Download all your favorite RSS feeds in the morning and listen to them in the car on your way to work...

alexking.org: Software - Read it to Me

] FeedSpeaker translates text RSS Feeds into badly spoken
] MP3 files.

Hrm! Here is my project for tonight, when I really should be working on the MemeStreams Schema: Can I port this to OSX in under 30 lines of perl? Stay tuned for the exciting results!!

FeedSpeaker Blog - Screenshot And Shoutouts

] The Handbook was reprinted (5th printing) in August 2001.
] The publisher made all the various minor changes and
] updates we submitted.

While this reference is a bit more academic then Schneier's book, it is quite useful, and now its available for free online. Enjoy!

Handbook of Applied Cryptography

] Pierre Honiball, whose missing 14 year old son was found
] after 2 days, says the system works. Undoubtedly
] there is a way to find somebody with whatever he uses and
] I can tell you this is the truth he found Andre within 25
] minutes. Jos Chadinha's frantic search for his
] missing daughter ended 90 minutes after providing strands
] of her hair. He found her ... and he found her
] simply using the instruments.

Step 1: Kidnap someone.
Step 2: Setup a "technology company" that can find people using only a dna sample and s3cr3t satellite stuff.
Step 3: Profit.

SABCnews.com - south_africa/general

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.

NNDB

] The good news is that we may have figured out how to
] solve the moral problem that's been holding up stem-cell
] research. The bad news is that the solution will
] introduce a whole new kind of horror.

An interesting and informative take on the problem.

Monster Farming - The creepy solution to the stem-cell debate. By William Saletan