Burnout

A (somewhat) long, but interesting article about burnout: Can’t Get No Satisfaction (via Slashdot).

Environmentally-Friendly Light Bulbs

The NY Times has a good article about Walmart trying to sell more environmentally-friendly light bulbs, but meeting a variety of obstacles: Wal-Mart Puts Some Muscle Behind Power-Sipping Bulbs (via Slashdot and Metafilter).

I have one of these light bulbs (given to me by Seattle City Light) and its lasted at least 18 months (and it's in a lamp that is on most of the time that I'm home). Unfortunately, I still have 3/4th of a package of regular light bulbs to use up before I get more.

Linear Algebra And Google's PageRank

The American Mathematical Society has a good article, How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web's Haystack, which explains how Google ranks the importance of each web page. There's lots of linear algebra, but its fairly accesible.

[Via Slashdot].

Building a Better Voting Machine

Building a Better Voting Machine is a short and interesting article about voting machines (via Slashdot).

I've been meaning to print a copy of Rivest's Third Ballot Voting System and read it while I take the bus to work, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Interesting Articles

A few interesting articles:

• Google's unknown artist has huge following [CNN] via Slashdot


• This cabbie needs no map [Toronto Star] via Funkaoshi


• Tut's gem hints at space impact [BBC]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Defending liberties in high-tech world [MSNBC] is a good description of what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is all about. (Via Slashdot)

How To Be Silicon Valley

Another interesting Paul Graham essay: How To Be Silicon Valley (via Slashdot).

His link to an urban sprawl photo (and the photo's caption) made me laugh.

Assorted Interesting Articles

• I finished reading The World Is Flat this weekend. I thought it was good book. So I found BBC's brief comparison of China and India (as well as the US), which shows things like GDP, population, literacy, etc. with projections out to 2050, interesting.


• The Chess Olympiad started this weekend in Turin. I can't find any results on the "offical" website, but an Austrian site has a good level of detail - Team Canada Results shows them at 1-1 after 2 rounds and the individual results are given for each round.


• New York Times: Slim Margin Seems to Signal Montenegro's Independence. The EU and Serbia & Montenegro decided to use 55% as their threshold for separation. This reminded me about the whole debate surrounding 50% + 1 during Quebec's last referendum.


• Slashdot has an article Bloggers are the New Plagiarism complaining about bloggers who quote large blocks of text and don't add value. Sometimes I do that [1], but most of the time I do not [2 and 3]. My thinking is that I only quote blocks from the original article, when I think it's an valuable article, but it's from a news article that is likely to disappear (i.e. Checkout all the broken links to the LA Times in [1]). Without a copy of the pertinent parts of the article the post has no context or value. Is that a reasonable rationale?

Patenting Thoughts

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you. The entire genome of the hepatitis C virus is owned by a biotech company. Royalty costs now influence the direction of research in basic diseases, and often even the testing for diseases. Such barriers to medical testing and research are not in the public interest. Do you want to be told by your doctor, "Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?"

Michael Crichton has an editorial, This Essay Breaks the Law in the New York Times (via Slashdot). It addresses a patent case before the US Supreme Court that will decide whether thoughts and relationships are patentable.