] We found that heavy coffee consumption substantially
] reduced the risk of Type 2 diabetes in both men and women

Oh, this is great news!

As Balls Deep suggested, I'm a great guinea pig for this study. I'm predisposed to type2. If I'm like every other male on my father's side, around 30 I gotta start watching the sugar levels..

CBS News | Coffee Cuts Risk Of Diabetes | January 5, 2004 20:13:38

This article tells the story of David Hahn, who in 1995 built a breeder reactor in his backyard shed.

This is really an amazing story.

How to build a breeder reactor

] The FBI demanded Las Vegas hotels turn over their guest
] lists leading up to New Year's Eve to check against a
] U.S. master list of suspected terrorists, a law
] enforcement official said on Sunday.
]
] The demand for "patron information" went to all major
] hotels in the Nevada casino and entertainment city, said
] the official who declined to be named.

What was the money line in all the recent Vegas advertising? "What happens here, stays here." Well, not this New Years..

] A second U.S. government official said to his knowledge
] only one hotel had balked at providing its bookings list.
] Newsweek, the first to report the FBI demand, said one
] big hotel had refused and was "slapped with a subpoena."

I would really like to know what the hotel was that required the subpoena.

Wired News - FBI obtains ALL Las Vegas Jan 1 room lists with no court auth.

This is a lengthy article out of Rolling Stone about the "environmental crimes" of the Bush Administration (and in general the whole Heritage neoconservative cabal). If you are looking for something to get your blood pressure up, this will do it.

There are a few points in this article I thought may have been overstated a bit.. For instance, forest thinning is a _GOOD IDEA_ under certain circumstances. Really! Especially in forests close to populated areas. Its a really good example of how environmental issues can get really cloudy. There is a place were these things are good (or at least not bad) for the overall health of the forrest, but there are also cases where its just a way to guild logging activity. There isn't really a way to make it a clear cut thing. Now, are Bush's thinning plans actually in the "good idea" category, or were they language games played to get some more logging? I have no idea. Ok, so I'm predisposed to think that these Bush plans are probably environment killers, but I also have not seen the forests effected or talked to anyone in the know about the issue.

That being stated, this article contains a lot of good information.. Just read between the lines. The environment is a topic that we all should be much better educated about, however as a whole we really don't have much of a clue because every study or suggested action is always seen thru some politically shaded lens. Read enough of these articles and you will surely have two things going on: You will be an environmentalist (fine) & You will be completely clueless and confused every time any kind of environmental legislation comes up (not-fine).. Which one of these do you think the current administration was more interested making you?

RollingStone.com - Crimes against Nature

Here it is folks, the 2003 usage statistics for Memestreams.net!

As you can see, the site is continuing to grow. Its worth comparing this with the statistics from 2002, which are at http://www.memestreams.net/awstats.html

The monthly usage graph is drawn to scale, so keep in mind that the usage in Jan 2003 is greater then the usage in Dec 2002. Scale the graphs in your head and you can see the progression. We are still trucking forward, and yet we are still very much in the early part of a network effects curve. This years Unique Visitors number is just a little over an order of magnitude larger then last year's. I hope to see another order of magnitude increase next year.

An interesting thing occurred in September of 2003. We got referral spammed. This means that a group of people set up robots which hit our site and claimed to be a web browser which came in from a link on a site that these people are trying to advertise. As a result I can't show you the statistics for referrals from other websites. They are spammed out. This also means that there was a bit of a spike in the overall numbers in September. The later months of the year were also impacted by the holidays. People simply tend to use the internet a lot less over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In any event, hope you find this all interesting, and Happy New Year!

Statistics of www.memestreams.net for 2003

Balls Deep & D.L. Loonabide, hear the drugs.

Western_Wear.mp3

] Thus, at least according to this court, the more uncommon
] (and provocative) the context of the remixing, the less
] likely it is legal. Of course, this raises the question
] of how new contexts can ever become legal. Presumably, at
] some point in history, no one framed art. Then the first
] person came along and put a painting in a frame. Under
] the theories in Mirage and Munoz, that person would have
] been historically guilty of copyright infringement
] because the context of their remix was uncommon at the
] time.

This article is interesting and also deeply troubling. Apparently recontextualization of someone else's artistic work is a copyright infringement EVEN IF YOU PAID for the copy that you are recontextualizing unless there is a specific fair use exception. This is copyright law preventing artistic expression for no financial reason, but strictly to prevent expression.

LawGeek: We fought the Kuleshov effect and The Law won?

The Iron chef of filmmaking. Casts and crews are given the ingredients and have 9 hours to produce a 4 minute movie.

Sounds interesting..

cinemasports

] No bullshit, no hassle, and no need to pay extortionate
] collector's prices for rare live performances.
]
] Here are the collected bootlegs of Bill Hicks live shows,
] available to download for free in mp3 form. We'll be
] adding to this archive with background information and
] further mp3s we can unearth, but in the meantime these
] files should provide a few further hours of listening
] entertainment for those of you who have already greedily
] devoured all of Bill's commercial recordings. Enjoy.

We need another Bill Hicks. I'm not going to be able to survive this war on terrorism without one.

The download site appears broken (overloaded?) right now, but I'm meme'ing the main page anyway so I remember to check it later. Its probably down because it started getting linked everywhere.. I'm going to give it a few days. Its worth waiting for.

Bill Hicks Bootleg Downloads

] Open-source developers have long done their work in the
] public eye. Now they're doing it under an academic
] microscope.
]
] Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at the
] University of California at Irvine's Institute for
] Software Research, has been looking at open-source
] projects from an analytical perspective, studying the
] open-source model in an ongoing, 10-year project that
] draws some comforting conclusions for open-source
] sponsors and developers.

] People are breaking away from the tradition of the
] individual artist, saying there's another way to build
] upon the work of others.

Open source under the microscope |CNET.com