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January 14, 2008

Baby & the pols; LPs are back; 1 Laptop Per (U.S.) Child?; Darwin Awards; Colts choke

Darren Garnick
New Mexico governor Bill Richardson holds writer/filmmaker Darren Garnick's 5-month-old daughter Dahlia. Richardson ended his bid for president after the New Hampshire primary.

Wonderful: The Baby Primary: Can I get my 5-month-old daughter photographed with every presidential candidate?

Yes, she can -- Darren Garnick lives in New Hampshire -- and the slideshow, with captions describing each political encounter, is at Slate.

Tech note: How to advance to the next photo in the slideshow is not obvious. At the bottom left of each photo, you'll see a variation of

Beginning| < 1 of 11 > | End

Click that ">" to advance the series.

But not in cars: Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back. Time Magazine.

LPs generally exhibit a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs and digital downloads. MP3 files tend to produce tinnier notes, especially if compressed into a lower-resolution format that pares down the sonic information. "Most things sound better on vinyl, even with the crackles and pops and hisses," says MacRunnel, the young Missouri record collector.

Charity begins at gets around to home: One Laptop Per Child Project Extends to American Students

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally aimed at developing nations to needy students in the United States.

Related: OLPC CTO founds own company, aims at $75 laptop

Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project, has formed her own company and hopes to produce a $75 laptop. Jepsen also plans to commercially market the unique multimode display technology that she developed for the OLPC XO laptop. Her company, which is called Pixel Qi, will work closely with the OLPC Project and provide hardware for the organization at cost.

Ignorance can be fatal: 2007 Darwin Awards: "...the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it." The manners of death are generally gross.

Colts choke: Bob Kravitz: The end was sudden, but not surprising. The Indy Star columnist is bitter about the defending Super Bowl champions' meltdown:

What else could they have wanted, facing an eight-point underdog in their own building, coming in completely healthy while the opponent was beaten up, coming off a physical playoff opener against Tennessee?

The Chargers arrived here with their extraordinary tight end, Antonio Gates, playing on one foot. Then their all-world running back, LaDainian Tomlinson, got injured and sat out after just seven rushes. Then their young but coming-of-age quarterback, Philip Rivers, injured himself near the end of the third quarter, and had to sit out the tense fourth quarter.

You know who beat them when it mattered in the fourth quarter? Billy Volek. Michael Turner. Vincent Jackson. Legedu Naanee.

Peyton Manning, photographed above by AP at a post-game news conference, and posse lost 28-24 to San Diego.

Nobody is more surprised than we Pats fans.

So San Diego comes back to New England next week. (Pats beat them, 38-14, on Sept. 16.)

Wonder how they'll like January here? Long-term forecast is for a "cold northwest flow."

Machine intelligence: Mind Reading Is Now Possible: "A computer can tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone is thinking about a hammer and not pliers." Sharon Begley in Newsweek.

If what your brain does when it thinks about an igloo is almost identical to what mine does, that suggests the possibility of a universal mind-reading dictionary, in which brain-activity pattern x means thought y in most people.

It is not clear if that will be true for things more complicated that pliers and igloos, however. "The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea," says Haynes. "We're much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine."

How far? The (Carnegie Mellon University) group is determining the brain patterns that encode abstract ideas (honesty, democracy), words and sentences, a big step toward a mind-reading dictionary.

 
AP
Guatemala's new president, Alvaro Colom, left, and vice-president Rafael Espada take office today.

Spiritual healing: Unusual Pair Takes Over in Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala's new president, Alvaro Colom received training as a Mayan priest. His vice president is a heart surgeon.

As the two men prepare to take office on Monday, Guatemalans are hoping for some healing.

After a 36-year civil war, and still plagued by poverty, corruption and street gangs, "Guatemala is sick, very sick, in intensive care," says Vice President Rafael Espada, who gave up a decades-long medical career in Texas to return to Guatemala last year as Colom's running mate...

...Colom is best known for his work with the Guatemalan government and the U.N. to bring home more than 40,000 refugees, mostly Mayan, after the civil war ended in 1996 and invest hundreds of millions of government dollars in the areas that were hardest hit by the war. The refugees honored him by training him as a minister in their religion.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 1:03 AM | Permalink

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