But some Web visitors quickly found that most of the "secret" message is included in the site's source code. [Doh!]

The message was: "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways."

"They did crack the code," said Rob Peterson, a communications manager at GM.

In other news, Welcome to Database Nation. Please drive through.

Feeling a sense of deja vu, but can't pinpoint the date and time you were last in this exact location? Just ask your car.

Your car knows what you did last summer.

Web Surfers Crack GM's Mystery Ad

For today's NYT, the editors were compelled to dwell at great length on the insidious behavior of school boards and administrators in Cobb County and in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Whereas earlier coverage simply tended toward comic uncordiality, the tone now has shifted from a mocking of harmless idiocy to a biting castigation of the curricular debasements in Cobb and Dover.

May the strongest survive? One can never be certain. But in this round of Alien versus Predator, it's clear enough that America's children are the defenseless prey.

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

The first sentence sounds like a warning to parents that the film they are about to watch with their children contains pornography.

The third sentence, urging that evolution be studied carefully and critically, seems like a fine idea. The only problem is, it singles out evolution as the only subject so shaky it needs critical judgment. Every subject in the curriculum should be studied carefully and critically.

A leading expositor of intelligent design told a Christian magazine last year that the field had no theory of biological design to guide research, just "a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions." If evolution is derided as "only a theory," intelligent design needs to be recognized as "not even a theory" or "not yet a theory." It should not be taught or even described as a scientific alternative to one of the crowning theories of modern science.

The Crafty Attacks on Evolution

After watching all three of my children play soccer for 12 years, I can say that one of the best things about hockey is that it's not soccer.

The Life of a Hockey Dad

Now let us have a little talk with Jesus
Let us tell Him all about our troubles
He will hear our faintest cry
He will answer by and by
Now when you feel a little prayer wheel turning
And you know a little fire is burning
You will find a little talk with Jesus makes it right

I recommend Loretta Lynn's recording on "The Gospel Spirit".

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=20459287&selectedItemId=20459346

Just A Little Talk With Jesus

Right hand, meet left hand.

R: "You look familiar somehow. Have we met before?"
L: "We've got a lot of catching up to do ..."

Pennsylvania is home to the full continuum of the biosciences -- world-class basic research, emerging companies, mature industry and global pharmaceuticals. Through Pennsylvania Bio these organizations interact to create a unique and vibrant community. It is through the interactivity of this continuum that bioscience companies are spawned, are able to attract experienced managers and a talented workforce, and are able to grow and partner for advancement.

It’s all part of our mission: to be the catalyst to ensure Pennsylvania is a global leader in life sciences by developing a cohesive community that unites the region's biotechnology, pharmaceutical, research and financial strengths.

Pennsylvania Bio advances the companies and research institutions that are developing ground-breaking therapies, devices, diagnostics and vaccines for once untreatable diseases and debilitating conditions, providing hope for millions of patients.

Pennsylvania Bio

It seems that to New Yorkers, following this story is a horrible forbidden amusement, like watching a dog fight, or a cock fight, or something. Beyond the shock value of the violence, it provokes questions like "people still do that?" How quaint.

At last, Georgians and their textbook stickers are not alone; they have been joined -- one-upped, even -- by a handful of ID proponents in Pennsylvania, where district administrators have taken it upon themselves to enlighten their students.

2 School Boards Push on Against Evolution

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone."

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

"We're not going to rely on agency pissants."

You may recall, in a time not so long ago, at a press conference not so far away ...

"You asked, do I feel free?

Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.

I've earned capital in this election -- and I'm going to spend it for ... fighting and winning the war on terror.

I'm looking forward to it, I really am."

The Coming Wars

Here is the more difficult version of the "US geography" test. In this version, you must correctly place each state onto an otherwise blank map of the US.

As expected, this test is considerably more difficult to "ace" than the test in which the states pile up on the map as you place them.

The order of the states is still random, but it doesn't matter as much in this version of the test.

On my first run-through (after having "warmed up" with the other test), I got a score of 70%, with an average error of 39 miles.

If you pass this test with flying colors and have a need to feel humbled, try the World Countries tests for Europe, Asia, Africa, and South & Central America on level 8 ("expert geographer"), in which you have to rotate the countries into place. (However, the map does not go blank after each country.)

Place The State - US Geography Quiz

This White Paper, China's National Defense in 2004, is published to illustrate China's national defense policies and the progress made in the past two years in its defense and army building.

China's National Defense in 2004

The excerpt below is taken from the preface of "The Metaphysical Club," Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Winner for History.

It is a remarkable fact about the United States that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in its form of government.

The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life. That struggle is the subject of this book.

There are many paths through this story. The one that is followed here runs through the lives of four people: Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey. Their ideas changed the way Americans thought -- and continue to think -- about education, democracy, liberty, justice, and tolerance.

If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

The belief that ideas should never become ideologies -- either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it -- was the essence of what they taught. They taught a kind of skepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-marketed society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have become attenuated, and to have been replaced by more impersonal networks of obligation and authority. But skepticism is also one of the qualities that make societies like that work. It is what permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on.

This book is not a work of philosophical argument; it is a work of historical interpretation. It describes a change in American life by looking at a change in its intellectual assumptions. Those assumptions changed because the country became a different place. As with every change, there was gain and there was loss. This story, if it has been told in the right way, should help make possible a better measure of both.

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America