A mixed bag from all over the place to share, but I just gotta do it…

Mark’s band The Phoenix Trap, is on iTunes. Awesome!

For an addictive video game that is so simple and small it will blow your mind, check out BallDroppings. I love this thing. Under 1 meg!

There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration’s claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right — but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.

Read the rest in the The Things They Carry (NYTimes).

NASA’s “Spirit” mission to Mars has been breathtaking. Spaceflight Now is the place to go for rapid updates.

First we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. I certainly won’t. There’s no reason to bother. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.

But that’s old news. I merely refer to it now to set standards.

Today, of course everybody knows that ?Hardball,? ?Rivera Live? and similar shows are nothing but a steady stream of guesses about the future. The Sunday morning talk shows are pure speculation. They have to be. Everybody knows there’s no news on Sunday.

Read the rest of Michael Crichton’s 2002 speech to the International Leadership Forum.

Ever wonder how those free-speech zones get set up (SFGate)?

Like to develop an Internet Explorer toolbar with .NET (The Code Project)?

Yahoo is going to dump Google (Slashdot).

GWBush’s latest move of political genius looks compassionate and kicks the low skilled American worker’s ass (Yahoo). Isn’t it the gun lobby who said we don’t need new laws – just the current ones obeyed?!? That’s George Bush for ya – President for hard working, tax paying, law abiding Americans!

Oh, and btw, Dolphins are evolving opposable thumbs (Onion) and are due to become the dominant species on Earth.