] From her front porch, Alice Dembowski has watched her
] city change, one tidy house at a time.
]
] "Chinese, Polish, Bosnian, Polish, Bengali,"
] she recites, her finger moving down the block. "They
] were all Polish at one time."
]
] "I've made friends. I go to their weddings.
] (But) we're losing our tradition and I'm
] getting mad," Dembowski said. "If they're going to live in America, why can't they be more
] American?"
]
] Next month, Hamtramck will become one of the few cities
] in the United States where the Islamic call to prayer is
] broadcast onto public streets. The impact of that
] decision is reverberating across the nation.

This is HUGE. But Mrs. Dembowski's quote is priceless given that Hamtramck has been *the* bastion of Polish society in the US for generations.

Cultures collide in diverse Hamtramck

] "People over 65 grew up in more of a mechanical world and
] if you do something wrong things break and they can't be
] undone," said Tom Tullis, senior vice president for human
] interface design at Fidelity Investments in Boston, which
] has watched elderly people interact with computers in
] usability labs. "Your toaster doesn't have an undo button
] on it. If you burn the toast, it's burned."

Great article about seniors and the Internet.

The Net's Late Bloomers

] My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on
] the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to
] come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at
] least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been
] meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but
] the longer I waited the more interesting the situation
] became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these
] pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a
] tour of our house.

This is truly amazing. Guy catalogs his mothers addiction to ebay. There is very little of this house not covered in stuff. Worth a look.

The Awful Forums - My mother is insane (~5M of photos)

] Collection of Dean outburst remixes...

some of these are pretty good!

Dean Goes Nuts

Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.

I don't have a law, but the typically edge.org collection of the smartest people on the planet is here and they've all got one. Many are fairly enlightening. I feel sooo uncool...

OK, here is a shot:

Given a set of similar products, the one which is least technologically sophisticated will be the most successful in the marketplace.

What's Your Law?

] Fast surfers, Broad scanners and Deep divers
] personality and information-seeking behaviour

Research on types of information literacy

You know it's true. How many televisions do you have? Do you even know? How many channels do you get? Do your kids refuse to watch black-and-white programs? No one had a VCR in 1970. Now 240 million of us do, but VCRs are history now that Wal-Mart is selling DVD players for $29.

Fortune.com - Value Driven - Admit It: You, Too, Are Paris Hilton

] When the final part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy
] opens next week, it will ratchet the franchise's
] box-office receipts up to several billion dollars - and
] mark the final triumph of all things geeky over what we
] used to think of as cool. Xan Brooks investigates how it
] happened

We are all nerds now

] Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to
] be old-fashioned Northerners?
]
] The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it
] may have something to do with how the South got to be the
] Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the
] Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched
] wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in
] particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee,
] Knoxville was described with horror (by a
] Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city
] in the world without a single chapel of any denomination.
] But later, in that respect, the South became more
] Northern than the North.
]
] A related native of the North was prohibition. The
] American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in
] the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee,
] but they weren't successful in a big way until after
] Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than
] one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South
] seem as if it was behind the times because unlike
] some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have
] prohibition.

A very interesting observation on the collective psychology of the South.

The Old North

] A study released Sunday found that 31 percent of
] Americans are "highly tech-savvy" people for whom the
] Internet, cell phones and handheld organizers are more
] indispensable than TVs and old-fashioned wired phones.

interesting

Survey places nearly one-third of Americans in 'tech elite'