This New York Times article says that Russia, Thailand and Hong Kong have joined the others in banning all imports of U.S. beef. Also, McDonald's, Burger King and Wal-Mart Stores quickly said they did not believe they had received meat from the animal.

An interesting coincidence? From the same New York Times article:

The diagnosis in Washington State came just a week after a federal appeals court in New York revived a lawsuit brought by an animal rights group that says that the Agriculture Department has not done enough to protect consumers from mad cow disease. The group, Farm Sanctuary, maintained in a 1998 lawsuit that the government's policy of allowing the slaughter of animals that cannot walk poses a significant health risk to consumers. A judge threw out the suit, saying the danger was remote, but the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned that decision last week.

There's a cow in Washington state that is infected with Mad Cow disease. But don't worry, it's only one cow. And don't just take my word for it, this excerpt from CNN includes the following:

"Consumers should continue to eat beef with confidence," the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said in a statement. "All scientific studies show that the BSE infectious agent has never been found in beef muscle meat or milk and U.S. beef remains safe to eat."

I guess Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan don't trust the nice people at the NCBA, as those countries have already banned all imports of U.S. beef.

The NCBA released this statement today.

If you ever need to call Amazon, here's the number for their Customer Service department:

(800) 201-7575

This was found by an NPR reporter while looking through Amazon's SEC filing.

Usability News recently conducted a study on website usability, with the goal of gathering information on where designers should place logos, search boxes, and ads.

They studied eye movements of people using three well-known newspaper sites - The
Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. Participants in the research were asked to complete a number of very simple tasks on the three sites.

People learned very quickly where advertisements were likely to appear on a site and subsequently ignored those areas of the page when browsing. For example, while people viewed the adverts on the right hand side of the Guardian home page they rarely, if ever, looked to the right hand side of subsequent pages on the Guardian site - they had ‘learned’ that this area was reserved for advertising and therefore not of interest to them.

Michael Jackson has more to worry about than being charged for allegedly molesting a young boy. Why, you ask? Because he's extremely underweight. The charges filed against him today in court show the following stats on Michael Jackson (bottom of the last page).

Enter his info into a BMI calculator and you see that a 5'11" person weighing 120 pounds has a Body mass index (BMI) of 16.7, which is way below the 18.5 to 24.9 range of a normal, healthy adult.

Found this randomly. Here's what you do:

1. Click this link
2. Pick a football team (click on one of the helmets)
3. Campbell's will donate one can of soup on behalf of the NFL team you selected

There's nothing more to it, they don't ask for your name, they don't ask for an email address, there's no sign-up - nothing. Just go to their site and pick a team. Their goal is to donate 5,000,000 cans, right now they're at 4,331,024.

Odds are that nobody will find this useful, but Apple has made System 7 and System 7.5.3 available for free download. Even less useful would be the free availability of System 6. Just for grins, I used to have an original set of System 6 install disks. The entire OS was on two 800k floppies, and included two more 800k floppies with optional stuff.

From this week's Onion:

Amid a barrage of commercials for new diet dog and cat foods, many owners say that their pets are being held to impossibly high animal-body standards perpetrated by the media. "I don't care what anyone says, my Sassy looks good," said Janice Guswhite, owner of a Persian longhair that cannot climb the stairs to her home's second floor without becoming short of breath. "Who's to say how big a cat is supposed to be, anyway?"

...they kill tigers that eat little boys.

Jeez, whatever your views are, shouldn't you at least be consistent?

From CNN: An attorney for the family of former U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on Monday confirmed that at the age of 22, Thurmond fathered a child with a teenaged African-American housekeeper in 1925.

Wired article

Spider-man II won't be released until July 2004, but the trailer is out.

Have you ever wanted to extract, view and map your own DNA? Just buy this fabulous kit to analyze DNA from the comfort of your own home! Sadly, I am not kidding, this is actually available for people who, like, want one. Check it out.

Spain and Morocco say they have agreed to build a 39-kilometre rail tunnel beneath the Mediterranean Sea, to link Europe and Africa. full article

A co-worker just shared his brilliant idea of writing an emacs plug-in to support vi commands. I have no idea how difficult that would be, if it would be possible, or if anyone would even use it, but damn it would be funny. Of course, emacs is such a gigantic piece of bloat that I half-expect somebody to email me and tell me that vi emulation has been supported in emacs for years.

I've heard of warchalking and wardriving before, but this is the first time I've seen anything about warflying.

On December 10, 2003, we went out Warflying over Los Angeles and Orange counties. Not5150 was the pilot of the 4-seater beechcraft and Kallahar was the laptop/gps/antenna operator. In a 75 minute flight from Pomona to Los Angeles to Santa Monica to Long Beach to Orange and back to Pomona, 2013 access points were found.

Yes indeedy, a Danish company has discovered a new exploit in Internet Explorer (it appears to only affect Windows versions of Internet Explorer, not Mac). The idea is that I can make a link to a website, say www.microsoft.com, and from all that you can see, you would think you're about to visit www.microsoft.com. But I can make your browser go anywhere I choose.

For instance, here is a regular link to www.microsoft.com, no funny stuff, click it and your browser will take you to www.microsoft.com, as you would expect.

Now try this one: www.microsoft.com. After you click it, you browser will show you the content at www.yahoo.com (note that I could make you go anywhere I want) but the address bar will say you're at www.microsoft.com.

Nice, huh?

By the way, if your browser didn't show that you were at "http://www.microsoft.com" for both of the above examples, then you were not using a vulnerable browser. AFAIK, this only affects Internet Explorer on Windows.

Even though SCO would still have the world believe they're innocent, it seems that their wave of B.S. may finally be catching up to them. Check out these recent articles at The Salt Lake Tribune, TheStreet.com, and The Motley Fool.

In this interview with Steve Jobs, he makes an interesting comment about why record companies don't make much money, and why successful recording artists are peeved that they don't see bigger profits. Here's what Jobs has to say:

After talking to a lot of people, this is my conclusion: A young artist gets signed, and he or she gets a big advance -- a million dollars, or more. And the theory is that the record company will earn back that advance when the artist is successful.

The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And they get upset. So what's the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits -- we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.

This utility lets you quickly find a color palette for your website (or anything else really).

Even though Windows is not my OS of choice, here are a few nice tips that I've gotten used to over the years.

1. Bring up the "Run..." menu by hitting Windows-R (where "Windows" means "the Windows key")
   
2. Lock your console using Windows-L
   
3. Minimize all visible windows with Windows-M
   
4. Open the Task Manager with Ctrl-Shift-Escape
   
5. Bring up the System Properties window with Windows-Break
   
6. Open a command prompt by right-clicking on a folder name from Windows Explorer
   
7. To save a file without the application appending an extension for you, type the name as "whatever" - and be sure to include the quotes - this will force the application to use the exact string of characters as the full filename, and it won't append ".txt", ".jpg", etc..
   

It has taken years to happen, but finally some of the large food corporations are facing the reality that they produce unhealthy foods. For instance, PepsiCo no longer uses trans fats in its snack foods, which includes all of the chips sold under the Frito-Lay brand name. And the FTC has announced that it will start cracking down on all of the bogus weight-loss programs out there.

This is more good than bad, but we're still at the foot of the mountain with a long way to go. Even if there were no trans fats in today's foods, there would still be a gigantic selection of high-calorie foods with little or no nutritional value. Anyway, I thought this was interesting, and I'm curious to see what happens next.

I had heard a number of different things about Bowling for Columbine before finally watching it myself. I didn't expect it to be what it ended up being. Like any documentary/expose on a touchy subject, there are many people and opinions that challenge, criticize and reject parts (or even all) of the movie. I think that's to be expected. Nowhere do we see the precedent established that an individual can take a stand on something controversial and find an entirely captive, willing, non-critical, non-challenging audience. It's not normal for everyone to simply listen to what another person has to say, accepting their words as total truth. Sure, some people, maybe even many, might be content to believe what another says, but there are always those who will challenge and question what they hear. And so it is with this movie.

Whether the listener challenges one detail or the entire movie, it is likely that it will stir up questions or criticisms. I think that's the what the director wanted, to get people thinking and talking about the subject material. In any case, there are certain, specific facts about the behavior of people living in the United States of America, and I think the film tries to shed light on some of this. There are certain things that people in this country do that people in other countries do not. Whatever the reason, whether you blame it on this group or that individual, or some other person's political persuasion, there are certain things that just are in the U.S. and quite simply aren't in other countries.

Of the many interesting things this movie tries to communicate, I found that one of the most interesting points came from a short interview with Marilyn Manson. He said that we live in a country of fear and consumption, that we're afraid our breath will stink so we buy Colgate, that the boys are afraid they won't be attractive to the girls if they've got pimples so they buy zit cream. Manson says we're afraid of many things, and the solution is to buy products. That got me thinking about all kinds of other things that we (collectively speaking) are afraid of - death, theft, car accidents, gaining weight, losing your hair, being un-cool, looking too trendy, settling on a career, losing your job, finding a job, buying a house, dealing with retirement, etc. What are you afraid of? What about the people you know?

I just threw those out off the top of my head, but I realize there are many others, some of which sound totally strange and kind of silly. For instance, there are parents who won't let their kids wear backpacks (because backpacks might cause back problems), and instead make the kids bend over while pulling small rolling luggage bags filled with books. Or the parents who won't let the kid wear clothes with holes in the knees because it makes them look poor. But who really cares? If your kid is rough in his clothes and gets holes in the knees, so what? If you're poor, you're poor; if you're not, then what are you worried about? And who had the idea that it's a good thing for a kid to drag a suitcase filled with books? Having seen kids walking (clumsily, I might add) home from school, bent over, wheeling a suitcase instead of wearing a backpack, I cannot imagine that those kids will be any more immune to back problems than if they were wearing backpacks. Here's a bright idea: why not leave the heavy textbooks at home or at school? If the kid has to get the books to and from school every day, buy him a bicycle with a rack and let him pedal himself to and from school (statistically, that kid could use the extra caloric expenditure anyway).

Whatever the issue, whatever the topic, there's something to be afraid of. The funny thing is, Marilyn Manson is onto something, because all of the "concerns" and "fears" we live with on a daily basis all have quick solutions that we can pay for.

Here's an interview with the director on the Charlie Rose Show.

The search is on for the 41^st Mersenne prime number. The 40^th, written as 2^20,996,011 - 1, was found on November 17, 2003, two years after finding the 39^th. The actual value of the 40^th Mersenne prime contains 6,320,430 digits, officially making it a gigantic number. The 35^th through 40^th numbers were found after more than 7 years of effort by the distributed computing project that's open to all. And their search seems a bit more useful than (though possibly not as cool as) hunting for aliens.

Seeing as it's flu season right now, I just did a little fact searching to answer a few questions. This page from the Centers for Disease Control has some interesting details about past outbreaks.

It's been a long time since I looked at Bushisms, but I'm happy to see that there are plenty of great quotations out there, including this gem:

"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill." - George Bush, Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

I would like to personally thank the President for clearing that one up.

Have you ever wanted to convert from one number to another? Google's calculator can help. It can tell you how many miles are in a kilometer, or the number of kilometers in 372 miles. You could even find the conversion from stones to pounds, or square feet to hectares. Wanna do obscure conversions? How about converting acceleration from meters per second per second to fathoms per fortnight per month. And it will also do all kinds of math functions, like 1 + 1, 200 mod 7, or 15!. More details here.

End draws nearer for Moore's Law

Found this article titled "How Do I Get the People Who Will Most Benefit From CRM/SFA to Embrace It?". Kinda interesting, because it goes on to say things like, "to increase adoption and usage, management teams must review the benefits of the systems through the eyes of a salesperson." But the article doesn't address the very real possibility that CRM hasn't caught on because it simply doesn't work. Said another way, if I design a widget that I think is super, but I cannot get anyone to use my widget even after I've spent several years trying to convince the world that my widget is awesome, shouldn't it occur to me that perhaps people simply do not need my widget? There are plenty of great ideas which unfortunately lack the right mix of practicality, usefulness, and simplicity; so why is the CRM "solution" to work harder at convincing the world that they need to use CRM apps? Talk about trying to push a square peg into a round hole...