j's online notebook

WHITEBOARDS
Cool. I should put this somewhere on my site.

THE SNICKER TEST
Copy Protection is not a black and white issue. "Copy Protection Is a Crime against humanity... Society is based on bending the rules... Fairness means knowing when to make exceptions." [Wired] {An excellent article by David Weinberger that brings some common sense to the issue of the piracy of intellectual property while revealing the complexity of it all.

ROOTCELLAR
Good blog. What blogs originally were, before they became online diaries.

CHIMPS ARE HUMAN TOO
A new gene study implies that chimps are human. [New Scientist]

THE DULLEST BLOG IN THE WORLD
"Mr. Walker has raised dull blogging to an art form by meticulously chronicling mundane events in his life: checking e-mail, turning his head to the right, walking past the ironing board, and thinking about making some food. His minimalist musings have attracted something of a cult following... [His] deadpan reports are delivered with the economy of haiku, quietly celebrating the humdrum." [New York Times] (requires registration, but it's free and easy). A parody, of sorts, of boring online diaries.

The room was quiet so I tapped the arm of my chair. It wasn't a particularly interesting noise, so I stopped after about 4 taps and sat in silence.

Some workmen had dug a hole in the road in order to maintain some essential services. A barrier and warning notice had been placed around it to prevent the general public from falling in.

I was at a meeting and became aware that I had nothing of any interest to add to the discussion. So I said nothing, and the discussion continued.

Each entry is accompanied by a thread of (usually less adept, but nonetheless) interesting comments. Worth checking out.

Black holes are gravitational relics of dead stars. They are, quite literally, bottomless pits in space and time that are capable of swallowing any amount of material. Everything a black hole swallows gets compressed into an unimaginably tiny central region called a singularity. According to our current knowledge, this singularity is infinitely dense, and infinitely small.

...
A super-massive black hole with the mass of a billion Suns might be the size of our Solar System, but the Earth could be a black hole too if you packed it into the volume of a marble. Even a person will do, although you'd have to cram them into the space occupied by a single electron.

...the exact manner in which a black hole dies may give us a view into higher dimensions in space. The most recent theories about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of our universe suggest that there were more than the four (three of space, one of time) we normally experience. For some reason, the other dimensions didn't expand with our four, and remained "rolled up" at very small scales. These extra dimensions might still be important, and directly felt, in regions right around the central singularity of a black hole. In fact, these higher dimensions might solve the mystery of what a singularity really is. Instead of truly being an infinitively small and dense point, there might suddenly be a whole lot more room provided by extra dimensions that only act on tiny scales.

Good flash site. Lots of creativity here, and lots of links to more.

Free speech v. governments' privilege not to tell you. Can government prevent a writer from publishing his research? Well, of course they can. But should they?