What do you do when you need a hooker, and you need one now?!

That's right! Just say, Where's my ho?

According to this newsflash from cyclingnews.com, Manolo Saiz - team manager for the professional cycling team Liberty Seguros (and former director of ONCE, one of the biggest cycling teams ever) - has just been arrested on doping charges.

He was arrested along with four others, including the former Kelme team doctor (remember Oscar Sevilla? Is there any correlation to his great results with Kelme, and his virtual non-existence in the years since?).

This is pretty big news, not only for cycling in general, but mostly because Saiz was the team director behind Roberto Heras when Heras won the Tour of Spain in 2005. A lot of people were pretty suprised (myself included) to hear that Heras was stripped of the 2005 title - he was shown (after the race) to have failed a doping test on the second to last stage. But none of that seems so strange now.

I think performance-enhancing drugs are a bit annoying. On one hand, there's a big push to catch the cheaters and keep the field clean. But on the other hand, current and former professionals come forward all the time with claims that "everyone" is taking drugs. That's one of the most popular bits of "evidence" against Lance Armstrong - despite having tested clean again and again, surely he must have taken drugs because "everyone else is".

But you know what? If everyone is taking drugs, then it's a level playing field. Nobody will have an advantage, because they're all cheating. So screw the tests, forget the doping controls, skip all of the legal battles. All we have to do is change the rules to say that riders are allowed to take drugs (which they're presumably doing anyway). Then we can just watch some great bike racing, and do away with all of the drama.

There's a new Apple Store in New York on Fifth Avenue (and it will be open 24 hours a day, too). I don't live in New York, so it's not that important to me. But the website for the new store is pretty cool. They've got a time-lapse video for the first 24 hours. Neat stuff.

Everyone rates computers against obvious metrics: speed, power consumption, price. I recently had to carry my PowerMac G5 to/from the office while my PowerBook was in the shop for motherboard repairs. Carrying that monster around made me realize there's another important criteria for computer comparison: physical weight.

The weight of a PowerMac G5 computer is somewhere between 44.5 and 48.8 pounds, depending on your configuration choices (according to G5 Technical Specifications).

The weight of a Mac Mini (w/Core Duo) weighs a scant 2.9 pounds (according to Mac mini - what's inside).

If you have the "lightest" PowerMac G5, you'll save 44.5 - 2.9 = 41.6 pounds with a Mac Mini.

The unfortunate experience of lugging a ~45 pound computer to/from the office made me wonder about system performance vs. physical weight. I found the following factoid interesting:

Weight-wise, one (1) PowerMac G5 computer is equivalent to fifteen (15) Mac Mini computers.

Clearly, it would cost you much more to buy 15 Minis (in total, it would be almost $12,000), so instead, you buy one Mac Mini to get a super-portable machine with pretty decent processing power. And you will easily be able to carry it around without fear of injuring your back.

Why not get a laptop? Lower cost, more versatile display options, substantially lighter weight come to mind. One display at home and another at the office would work very nicely for a portable Mini solution (although an obvious problem is that a Mini can't go to sleep at the end of the day, so you'd have to shutdown/restart much more frequently than a laptop).

For many years I've been critical of the education system in this country. The shortcomings and deficiencies seem obvious. The goals of education are good - to learn, to grow, to broaden our minds. But learning, growing and mind-broadening usually do not happen if you're forced. On the contrary, it's a normal part of human nature to rebel and turn away when forced, rather than being pulled further in. It's curious that our schools and education system don't recognize this, opting to force-feed material that most students could not be any less interested in learning. How many adults reading this remember anything specific from their high school math classes, or the facts and details about most historical events? It takes very little energy to show that most adults (and even the kids still in school) do not retain much of anything that they "learned" in school. I wish I could cite the study that stated the average U.S. adult did not know enough basic math to balance a checkbook. That's pretty shocking; we're talking about addition and subtraction!

So what kind of learning, growing and mind-broadening are we accomplishing? It seems plainly clear that schools do not help you learn, but instead teach you how to memorize, how to follow rules, and how to conform.

In Students Say High Schools Let Them Down, more than 10,000 high school students were questioned about education. The results make a compelling statement about the worth (or worthlessness) of public education in the United States.

What kinds of things did these 10,378 teenages say?

• they said they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting
  
• they do not believe their school has done a good job of challenging them academically or preparing them for college.
  
• their senior year would be more meaningful if they could take courses related to the jobs they wanted
  
• many students said they felt their schools did not do a good job teaching them how to think critically or analyze problems
  
• of the 11% who dropped out of high school (or are considering it), only 1 in 9 said it was because "school work too hard". The greatest percentage of dropouts (36%) said they were "not learning anything", and 24% said, "I hate my school"
  

If all of this is true, it brings up the obvious question, "How do you fix it?" I'm with John Taylor Gatto - it's not fixable. The entire education system is beyond repair, and all of the energy/time/money/politics is just a waste.

Scrap it and start over.

This is a pretty interesting read...

From Men's faces show paternal potential

Men's faces can reveal their interest in having children, according to psychologists who claim women subconsciously pick up on the subtle cues when choosing a partner. In a controversial study, researchers used photographs of men who had been quizzed on their fondness for children, to see if women could identify those more likely to want a family. The researchers found that not only were women often able to rank men by their fondness for children, but those who appeared more keen on kids were rated as more attractive prospects for long-term relationships.

I received email a few days ago about a Vonage IPO happening, and it said I could participate in the IPO since I'm a customer. Initially, I stated in this post that this was a phishing scam. However, I retract that claim, and I no longer believe it to be a scam.

The confusion was over their dumb interface which prompted you to log in if you were an existing customer (presumably an existing customer of Vonage, which I am). But the authentication information is different for the vonageipo.com website, so you log in with your valid vonage.com info but it gives you an error. Try again with valid info, still get an error. Classic phishing behavior.

I don't know if they added text later (this was confusing enough that it was a topic on slashdot earlier today) or what, but I did the new sign-up (shouldn't everyone be a new sign-up, then? why offer "new users" vs. "existing users"? how dumb is that?) and it found my info based only on my account id.

So there you have it. Vonage is indeed doing some sort of IPO participation for existing customers, and the url is www.vonageipo.com. It's just a sucky interface that is liable to confuse you.

Phew, it's finally over.

Beatles label loses apple logo case to iTunes

The music company owned by Apple Corps today lost its legal battle against Apple Computer over the US firm's use of an apple logo for iTunes.The high court in London ruled that Apple Computer - makers of the phenomenally successful iPod music player - had not infringed upon Apple Corp's trademarks by selling music through its iTunes Music Store.

Click to enlarge

(Btw, if you care, the chart represents the overall increase in traffic during the year 2005).

It's about damn time.

Makers of Soft Drinks Accept Ban in Schools

The nation's largest soft drink makers, under pressure from parents and health advocates, agreed Wednesday to halt almost all sales in elementary and middle schools.Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Cadbury Schweppes will sell only water, juice, tea and low-calorie drinks in schools under a deal brokered by former President Clinton and the American Heart Assn. The companies will limit soda sales in high schools to diet drinks, Clinton said.