In my daily quest to avoid work from 3-5pm, I read The Sports Guy*s Mailbag on Page 2 of ESPN.com. Here*s the highlight from today*s column:

Q: Is there a recorded instance of someone playing Golden Tee at a bar and then picking up a girl from the same bar on the same night?
–Michael R, Richmond, VA

SG: Good question. Sadly, the Elias Sports Bureau doesn*t keep track of something like this, although they cover just about everything else. In fact, after Mark Blount*s historic triple-zero last week — 0 points, 0 rebounds and 0 blocks in 22 minutes — I e-mailed Rob Tracy at Elias and asked if that was a record for centers. Within two minutes, Rob e-mailed me back saying that Greg Foster submitted a quintuple-zero (0*s for points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks) in 23 minutes back in 1999.

So that got me thinking: Wouldn*t it be nice to have Elias covering your entire life? Like, you could be sitting around one day thinking, "What was the name of that girl who made out with me at Chuck LaPosta*s wedding back in 1994?", and then Elias would scurry off to find the girl*s name, plus give you the cup sizes of every girl you ever hooked up with at every wedding, along with the average cup size numbers for you and all your friends? And this would happen in like 3 minutes? Maybe someday.

What makes this brilliant is that Simmons knows his audience as well or better than just about anyone alive. So when he makes his reference to the Elias Sports Bureau and the depth of statistical information they have at their disposal, he doesn*t try to explain it. Simmons trusts that the people who scroll through 2/3 of his column to see a question about the correlation between golfing arcade games and women don*t need him to explain what Elias does.

On a side note, it would be freaking cool to know a dude at Elias who could answer questions like the one about Mark Blount.

For those of you who care.

The RSS feed of the blog content and comments have been tidied up so that it should appear correctly in your feed readers. I am using an odd mix of bb code and html tags when I post and the feed generator didn*t like it before.

Well, not quite pocket sized but close. Set for release in July and priced at $699 this little wonder makes me want to take up a lecture circuit just to have an excuse to use it.

Certainly rating as one of the smallest projection units out there, the new Mitsubishi PocketProjector is a tiny 14oz powerhouse of a projector. A unit small enough to fit in your hand, run off batteries or car adapter, yet create a 20″ screen with only one foot of throw.

Read the whole review.

No long rants on this today. Just some scientific research to report from First Monday. A new study published online entitled Artists* Earnings and Copyright. The study looks at the income streams of English and German musicians and composers and tries to understand whether copyrights are actually helping those they were intended to help.

Has digital distribution benefited creators financially?

The evidence here is contradictory. The oftenï¿œmade claim that copyright supports the creative basis of a society is empirically doubtful. There is a suspicion that copyright underpins vastly unequal rewards.

Creator and investor interests are not the same. Copyright suits investors (music publishers, labels) who are incentivised to market and distribute the works they exclusively control. Copyright also suits creators with a track record of hits who can extract favourable terms from investors.

Copyright does little for new and niche creators who often sign away their bargaining chips cheaply. In the absence of alternative compensation schemes, digitisation so far appears to have brought few financial benefits from disintermediated distribution.

Boing Boing today mentions a classic case of why the Open SOurce movement offers a legitimate model for software development, distribution and support. Mozilla and Firefox patch fixes exploit, 12 hours later.

Yesterday, I blooged about a new exploit that attacked internationalized browsers and made it easy to run “phishing” attacks against them.
…
Now you can permanently protect your browser from IDN miscreants.” As Waxy points out, that took about 12 hours.

I*ve had this argument before with folks who don*t grasp the concept of a robust open source product. The claim I hear over and over is “who will support it?” The answer is that there are more developers looking at Firefox (or php, or mySQL, or Linux) code than there are looking at Microsoft or Oracle code. They may not all be full time employees but the aggregate energy of the open source community means that updates and fixes happen in rapid response to discovery of a problem. The open source model also means that there is a lot of varied thought processes feeding into the product which leads to creative and elegant solutions. Not always the case when a room full of programmers is constrained by corporate policy.

Neal Stephenson author of Snow Crash, The Baroque Cycle, and Cryptonomicon is still one of my favorite folks to follow. His obsessive researching on a wide range of seemingly dissimilar topics gives him a unique perspective on our world and culture. I don*t always agree with him, but anything he does is thought provoking. Today*s interview comes from Reason magazine.

At bottom, anyone who asks questions like ￜWhy does the universe seem to obey laws?ￜ or ￜWhy does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?ￜ is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics. Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read.

Kuro5hin today offers a brief tutorial on how to start your own blog. Unfortunately, some of this sounds all too familiar.

5. Spend the next seventeen hours creating a functioning website from scratch. If using Microsoft FrontPageTM, relocate all children and elders to a safe area out of your “profanity zone”.

6. Complete your self-made blog template by clicking on the “Publish Website” command in Microsoft FrontPageTM.

7. Watch in shock as the aforementioned seventeen hours of hard work gets permanently deleted off your hard drive by Microsoft FrontPageTM.

8. Swear so loudly all dogs within a five block radius begin running in circles and howling.

Follow these 51 easy steps and you too can go insane.

Just hang around 10 minutes, it will change.

So far its been a pretty mild winter. Plenty of days of above normal temperatures and sunny weather. But, as is alsways the case with weather in the Midwest, we did not escape the winter months unscathed.

A few scattered flakes flew this morning but not enough for anyone to notice. What I did notice was that the overcast sky was coupled with a temperature range which means snow. To cold to melt it but not too cold to keep it from coming down.

So around 1 this afternoon the flakes started to fly in earnest and by 2 things were looking pretty dangerous outside. The weather hounds in the office began to report accidents and I could hear the sirens coming in quicker intervals outside my office window.

God bless my employer who decided about that time that we should all go home at 3. We didn*t even make it that far. About 2:45 we buttoned up the shop and bailed. Of course, the drive home took three times longer than normal. But its a small price to pay to be home with the family all safe and snug and not having to worry about the five o*clock corporate rush home.

Wikipedia is a wonderful and dangerous thing. While making the previous post I was reading through the entry on Snow Crash and it led to an entry on Active Worlds which is inspired by the Metaverse illustrated in Stephenson*s work.

The end result is not as fluid as its fictional counterpart. For one thing, we don*t have consumer level 3D VR displays yet. So the end result is something between a first person shooter and the Sims. But the concept is there and the idea is eerily appealing to me. Enough so that I am seriously wondering if I should pay for citizenship and begin building my own place.

NOTE:
I must share Jason*s comments upon recieving this link from me.

Oh dear god. Why must you do this to me, you bastard? Like I don*t
have plenty to make my free time disappear already??

My work here is done.

New from Google and now in beta Google Maps. I*ve glanced at it and the interface is all but revolutionaly. Instead of reloading a clicked image when you wan to scroll or zoom, Google Maps lets you click and drag the interface allowing for a really smooth journey through the map. The interface is a bit naked at this point and finding busineses near an address didn*t work so well for me but its easy to see where they are going with this.

Add to all of this Google*s aquisition of Keyhole last year and there are some stunning possibilities on the horizon. Keyhole makes a prouct that allows users to view satellite images of an area with incredible resolution. Put all of this together and within a few years its easy to imagine an application similar to the “Earth” app in Stephensons Snow Crash.

Heady stuff indeed.