AT&T’s EDGE network is down in the midwest U.S. today.  They seem to think that it might be back today, or might take until February 5.
In the old days, back when there was just The Phone Company, they maintained better than five nine’s reliability.  Nothing would cause a widespread outage, and local outages didn’t last [...]

Using carbon nanotubes, scientists have created a new drug to treat radiation sickness, and it is thousands of times more effective than previous drug.  It has to be administered before the radiation exposure, but the scientists seem optimistic that they can develop a variant that will work after exposure.  Note that even a pre-exposure drug [...]

I went to a party with some of my coworkers.  As I was about to sit down, I noticed some sort of purple goo on the cushion of the chair, so I took a different seat.  At first I thought someone had spilled raspberry jam or the like, but someone else at the table explained [...]

Books that make you dumb: a chart of Average SAT scores vs. most popular books among college students [h/t Boing Boing]. Some aren’t surprising to me, such as Freakonomics, Catch 22, and Atlas Shrugged being near the top. On the other hand, I’m astonished at Fahrenheit 451 appearing near the bottom.
There are also charts [...]

Yoytek the bear served in the Polish army, having been given a name, rank, and serial number and enlisted.  There’s a campaign to build a memorial.

A friend and I went to the airport.  I had a ticket to fly to another city, but had decided not to use it.  I wanted to get the frequent flier miles without flying, so I tried to check in without boarding the aircraft.  I was told that the flight was overbooked and that I [...]

University of East Anglia researchers have received a grant of half a million dollars to develop lip reading software.  [h/t Slashdot Science]

I need a 3/16″ thin-wall nut driver, and found that Wiha appears to make what I need. I’ve been happy with other tools from Wiha, so I ordered one from Chad’s Toolbox on January 2, with normal ground shipping. They notified me that they shipped it on January 4, and I’ve been waiting [...]

Lately I’ve been getting more spam for internet gambling, promising that just for signing up I’ll get $2400 free.  If there was any doubt in my mind that many internet gambling operations are completely fraudulent, this has removed it.  Assuming for the sake of argument that such an operation was legitimate, if it had so [...]

In a 60 Minutes interview, President Musharraf of Pakistan said of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto “for standing up outside the car, I think it was she to blame alone — nobody else. Responsibility is hers.”
Am I crazy, or wouldn’t it be reasonable to put at least some of the blame on [...]