DanKohn.com

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.

Clever NYT article on the nightmare of modern home theater systems:

N artificial intelligence, they have the Turing Test: Can a computer impersonate a human well enough to fool a researcher? In magic, they have the Book Test: Can a magician mind-read well enough to divine a word chosen at random? And in the home-theater field, they have the Baby Sitter Test: Is your system simple enough that a guest can turn on the TV unaided?

Unfortunately, only my best friend and I know how to operate my home theater system, but I haven’t been willing to invest the time to record all the macros necessary to make it user friendly (no babysitters come over to encourage me).

Congressmen in the pocket of Hollywood have proposed a histrionically absurd bill to enable the music and movie industries to hack into people’s computer who they think are illegally trading music: “Under the bill, companies would not be required to warn users in advance of their actions. A user wrongly attacked could sue only if he or she suffered more than $250 in economic losses and obtained the U.S. attorney general’s permission to file a lawsuit.” Kudos to AP for mentioning how much Hollywood bribed — I mean donated — to the bill’s backers.