DanKohn.com

The NYT reports on Korean teens spending all their time on broadband gaming (instead of wholesome sex, at least according to the subtext of the opening paragraphs):

More than half of all Korean households have high-speed Internet connections — compared with fewer than 10 percent in the United States — and the exploding Web culture has driven economic growth and spawned civic movements that have powerfully affected everything from politics to consumer culture.

Promising news for Pedestal Networks. The story also includes a great, uncredited Timothy Leary homage: “Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.”

Scott Adams has some evolution zit humor.

Out-conveniencing convenience stores: ‘One bystander muttered about “dehumanizing technology,” but most oohed approvingly as the bin swung back to deposit the razors and cream….’

Great article on cryptographer Bruce Schenier in the Atlantic. I’ve been a subscriber to his newsletter Cryptogram for the 5 years he’s been writing it. The article includes some superb advice about the inability for technology to replace human judgement, which is one of the themes of Habeas.

Geekcorps volunteers in Ghana.

Awesome NYT piece on the two Voyager craft:

In 1990, as its last act of planetary observation, Voyager 1 turned its camera on the receding scene of its triumphant journey and snapped a sequence of pictures of most of the Sun’s family. A mosaic of the pictures showed six of the nine planets in orbital array like diamonds laid out on black velvet. From 3.7 billion miles out, Earth was barely the size of a single pixel, or picture element.

Then both craft turned their attention forward, to the heliosphere and beyond. The Voyagers are expected to survive millions of years of interstellar travel, steadfast as ever. But silent, their computers and radios dead and the Sun receding into cosmic insignificance, the two spacecraft will have long since lost touch with their makers and the home they left behind in 1977.

WSJ reports on the absurdity of publishers opposed to deep linking: “If they didn’t want to call it the World Wide Web, they’d call it the World Wide Straight Line,” says Mr. Adelman. “This is the Web, kids, get used to it.”

From long, painful experience, I can tell you that if you’re getting a company logo made, you need to have the graphic artists send it to you in 3 formats: GIF, WMF, and EPS. Note that everything else can be converted from those (e.g., GIF->PNG, WMF->SVG, and EPS->PDF).

Many folks aren’t familiar with WMF, which stands for windows meta file. It’s a vector file format (unlike GIF and TIFF which are raster formats) and so prints out well at any resolution (curves are represented by mathematical equations rather than dots). It also does a nice screen preview (unlike EPS), and so is perfect for inserting into powerpoint and word docs.

Generally, you want to get the logo in both color and B&W versions. You might also want the original FreeHand source, in case you decide to ever do a derivative logo, but GIF, WMF, and EPS should meet all corporate needs.

I like this insight from the WSJ:

Just as people grow up to become their parents, companies morph into the firms they spent their formative years fighting.
Sun Microsystems, for example, now looks a lot like Digital Equipment of the early 1980s, clinging stubbornly and perilously to a strategy made out-of-date by cheaper machines.

Microsoft seems to have become like the IBM of old — moving at a glacial pace with massive self-serving software “architectures,” apparently unmindful of the PC being a lean, grass-roots machine. (There’s a sly name for these sorts of .NET-style strategy announcements that are heavy on marketing but light on specifics: “marketecture.”)

I’m especially pessimistic on Sun.

The NYT compares Death by Asteroid with more pedestrian forms of terror:

Thank goodness! Another killer asteroid is on the way, just in time to take our minds off the stock market and foreign affairs. Asteroids, in fact, are just about the perfect peril — a lot less scary than a close encounter with a shark and a lot more reliable than Saddam Hussein….

Meanwhile we are free to worry away at our leisure. It’s a lot more fun than fretting every time Tom Ridge or John Ashcroft warns us that terrorists are out to do us in, at a time and place unspecified. At least with asteroids, those who issue the warnings know where the terror rock is and can calculate where it is headed.

More on death from above.