Larry’s blog entry links to both a video and a transcript.

Every year I get sick of hearing Valentine’s Day radio ads for jewelry stores. I’m sick of being told that if I don’t buy my sweetheart a diamond, I’m a despicable lowlife schmuck.
A few days ago I heard an ad explaining how a particular jeweler had come up with a way to give your [...]

My previous post mentioned a problem with a way to decide how to vote on ballot propositions.  I guess it’s not surprising that they should be a source of confusion to people.  As Marcus Schmidt observes in Institutionalizing Fair Democracy: The Theory of the Minipopulous:
It is highly improbable that a comparable kind of error could [...]

On the De Anza College campus yesterday, I happened onto a pile of leftover Easy Voter Guides.  While in general I think it was a well-prepared and useful guide, I did find one suggestion in it rather funny.  Under “How to Decide Which Way to Vote on a Proposition”, one method they suggest is “Find [...]

Scientists have discovered that there is a genetic basis for some people being early risers and others being night owls. [h/t Technocrat]

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 [...]

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.

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