US students have trouble enough keeping up with their counterparts in foreign countries in mastering the sciences. In biology, they should not have to contend with religion-based efforts to introduce misinformation into their classes.

Creationists at the gate

Are people really free if they're always reachable?

WiFi is Fine. Just Say No! to the Nokia.

Wired weary

And so the deal is done. Who's next?

Local phone giant SBC Communications Inc. has agreed to acquire AT&T Corp. for roughly $16 billion in cash and stock.

The deal has been struck, and boards of both companies were planning votes Sunday afternoon.

SBC to Buy AT&T for $16 Billion

It is that simple.

The Geo-Green Alternative

As your once and future agent will kindly tell you, 2005 will be remembered as the year that remembrance agents went mainstream.

This essay by Steven Johnson appears in the Sunday NYT Book Review.

If the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today's writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think.

The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

Tool for Thought, by Steven Johnson

All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it.

Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of 'Thiefproof' Car Key

NYT publishes a contrarian review of "Collapse."

Taken together, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation.

They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care.

All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong.

How the World Ends

A Fox News anchor flips out when a guest dares to question the nature of Bush's elaborate 2nd inauguration.

Frank Rich wrote: "Judy Bachrach, a writer for Vanity Fair, dared say on Fox News that the inaugural's military ball and prayer service would not keep troops 'safe and warm' in their 'flimsy' Humvees in Iraq. She was promptly given the hook."

Fair and Balanced Inauguration

A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984.

SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy AT&T

This is an ad for the Macintosh around 1989.

k wrote:
] Kind of a neat blast from the past.
] Sometimes we forget that there was a time when "Copy" and "Paste" were brand new concepts.

Matt Groening Apple Ad