IT MAKES YOU wonder: with all the fat cables running into our homes—and the fat checks we write to pay for them—why isn’t it possible to just hit a button on the remote and instantly call up a film? The cable industry thinks it has the answer in a new technology called video on demand.

yeah... new.

Couch Potato Heaven

I want these for my car!

Hokey Spokes - Bicycle Safety Lights with LED spoke lights for your bike

Researchers at Dartmouth are getting closer to understanding how some melodies have a tendency to stick in your head or why hearing a particular song can bring back a high school dance. They have found and mapped the area in your brain that processes and tracks music. It's a place that's also active during reasoning and memory retrieval.

Melodies In Your Mind: Researchers Map Brain Areas That Process Tunes

Will the price of international telephone calls continue to decline? And will more people choose wireless technology over land lines? The answers lie in whether new technologies continue to rival existing ones in the coming year.

This is an interesting article with some great facts in it (like how it took 100 years for the telephone to eclipse the telegraph). But the ultimate theme is that telecom will eat itself.

Web Calling Roils the Telecom World

NYTimes articles about the ideas that shaped 2002. Free reg required.

Memes of the Year

In life-sciences establishments around the world, the laboratory rat is giving way to the computer mouse—as computing joins forces with biology to create a bioinformatics market that is expected to be worth nearly $40 billion within three years

Bioinformatics - the new Telecom

General Motors Chairman Richard Wagoner and Jeremy Rifkin make strange allies. Wagoner, a captain of industry, and Rifkin, an activist who has predicted that capitalism's best days are far behind it, agree that hydrogen could end up becoming the dominant way of powering vehicles and perhaps the economy.

I still think that the automotive industry will not be the ultimate catalyst for this technology, that it will be the home consumer.

Fuel Cells Starting to Gain Steam

When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In our time—in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum dread and well-founded paranoia—no literary divinator gets it righter than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick.

When Worlds Collide

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My next set of wheel

Bueller? Bueller?

While I totally agree with almost every word that Ben is saying, I find it ironic that this is a man who appeared in a movie that glorified #1, #4, #6, and #7. But what's a little hypocracy, huh?

How to Ruin American Enterprise. By Ben Stein.