The death of the Media Lab?

Philip Greenspun has posted this scarifying analysis of how the MIT Media Lab pulled in so much corporate money over all those years. The Lab’s problem, of course, is that corporate America has run out of money for that kind of thing. Only the Department of Defense left…

NetNewsWire — the penny drops

I’ve just downloaded NewsWireLite and have had one of those epiphanies. It’s as if the last piece of a puzzling jigsaw has just dropped into place. Am still sorting out my thoughts. More later.

Hitler’s library

Interesting piece by Timothy Ryback. In the spring of 1945, in a German salt mine, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division (now where have I heard that name recently?) discovered 3,000 books belonging to Adolf Hitler. More than a thousand of them are now in the Library of Congress. Ryback claims that the books–and their marginalia–reveal Hitler’s deep and disturbing interest in religion and theology. Hmmm… Pity the 101st didn’t display the same concern for Baghdad’s ancient libraries.

More on hats

One should remember that hats are a big deal in certain cultures, just as moustaches are in others. Texas, for example, takes hats very seriously. Which reminds me of what Governor John Connally (a native Texan) once said about the Bush family after they moved to the Lone Star state and tried to pass themselves off as Texans. “All hat, no cattle” was his terse analysis.

Ed Felten’s summary of state of play on ‘super-DMCA’ bills

This must be one of the most depressing reads on the Web. As Larry Lessig says: “What is so frustrating about this business is not the people (like these governments) who disagree with you. But that their disagreement reveals that they have not done anything to understand the issue. We are over 5 years into this battle, yet these laws look like they have been drafted by people who have lived on another planet these past 5 years.”

RSS for beginners

Terrific how-to article by Search Engine Watch.