A WSJ reporter plays with the chat feature built into the in-flight entertainment system on the new fleet of Virgin America.

Judging by what other people are saying about this, I think it may take a while to catch on. The idea is variously intriguing and infuriating.

In-Flight Chat on Virgin America

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.

MemeStreams could put this to good use.

SIMILE | Timeline

If you liked the story, Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions, recommended last month, or today's thread, Men want hot women, study confirms, then you might be interested in this article from 2005, in which Steven Pinker reacts to the hubbub over controversial statements by then-President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers.

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Sex Ed: The Science of Difference, by Steven Pinker

If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup.

If you move to San Francisco, the peer pressure ... will [keep you alive].

When startups die, ... I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized.

Startups almost never get it right the first time. But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate.

As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track.

The number one thing not to do is other things.

If you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

How Not to Die

The tools that modern central banks possess to address liquidity problems can only directly address such runs inside the traditional banking sector, and do not directly touch the non-bank financial sector, which has been hardest hit by the current credit crisis.

James Hamilton, a professor at the University of California, warned that – as in old-fashioned bank runs – sudden demand for liquidity can lead to a firesale of assets that depresses their price, making otherwise solvent institutions insolvent.

Paul McCulley, managing director of Pimco, said there was a “run on the shadow banking system”.

Credit turmoil ‘has hallmarks of bank run’ | Financial Times

The administration believes that by focusing on the alleged ties between IEDs and Iran, they can link the Iranian government directly to attacks on US forces in Iraq.

"This is viewed by some in the Bush Administration as sufficient justification for taking military action against Iran."

Some in the administration have continued to make a case for limited or surgical strikes inside Iran, and that preparations are well underway for such an operation to occur before next year’s presidential election.

“If you were to report that a US surgical strike against key targets in Iran were to happen sooner rather than later, you would not be wrong."

Some officials speculate that the administration is trying to provoke the Iranians into an incident that will justify an air strike in response.

“They still need a trigger and I would not be surprised if we will see some event in Iraq which implicates the Iranians,” said this source. “They need a pretext.”

Hawks seek to tie Iraq bombs to Tehran

Every Shiite gangster should note that Iran’s envisioned future is not one of coequal mafias, but rather a mere concession in the south that takes orders from the real bosses in the north. The jury is still out on whether it is true that Arab Shiites are Shiites first, and Arabs second or third. But at some point someone will start to figure out that Iran also gave arms and aid to al Qaeda to kill Iraqi Shiites.

...

No Iranian in a gas line wants to learn that his scrimping went to pay for rebuilding the atomized apartment buildings of Arabs in Lebanon.

Don't Bomb, Bomb Iran | Victor Davis Hanson

Online shorthand like this arose, of course, because it's so hard to type full English words on a cellphone's number keypad.

Uh huh. Right.

Among the new ones he offers:

* WLF -- with the lady friend
* SIK -- sorry, iPhone keyboard

David Pogue, on the Alleged Origin of 'Online Shorthand'

WSJ hints at unschooling.

If indeed the Web and microprocessors have brought us to the doorstep of a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Milton Friedman world of individual choice as a personal ideology, then record companies, newspapers and old TV networks aren't the only empires at risk. Public-school systems run by static teachers unions may find themselves abandoned by young parents, "accessing" K-8 education in unforeseen ways.

Big media and big politics are all flying through an electronic meteor shower just now, and not all will survive.

Media Showers

Richard Rhodes, from the introduction to The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians:

It was epic in scope, in numbers of people and scale of investment and construction; epic as well in its daring transfer of physical and chemical processes directly from the laboratory to the huge enrichment and separation facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. I can think of no other major new technical process that has been industrialized in so short a time--testimony to how dangerous the new weapons were understood to be, capable even of turning defeat into victory if it came to that.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. It came instead to a decision, more controversial now than it was in the summer of 1945, to use the first two bombs against Japanese cities in the hope of shocking the Japanese into surrender before the invasion of their home islands, scheduled for November, took an even greater toll of American and Japanese lives. That decision is discussed in The Manhattan Project by experts; I would only remind you that destroying Japanese cities with firebombing--destruction fully as total as the atomic bombings brought--had been underway for months, and that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would already have been burned out by August 1945 had they not been removed from the U.S. Air Force's target list. The moral decision to use terror bombing against civilian populations had been made two years earlier, in Europe, and it was fully implemented in Japan in the last months of the war, until only cities with less than 50,000 population (excluding those on the atomic bombing target list) remained untouched.

These hard choices and decisions, following as they did from a great, and in the long run humane, work of human collaboration, are much of what gives the Manhattan Project story its almost mythic resonance.

Walter Isaacson calls it "fascinating"; Jennet Conant (whose work appears in the book) calls it "remarkable ... compelling ... and horrifying"; Bruce Babbitt was "enthralled."

The Manhattan Project: A Great Work of Human Collaboration