System 13

Giving up email? I can see where he’s coming from. I don’t get huge amounts of email like many people, but it still takes up a bit of my time. Having said that, I won’t be giving it up; I have too many friends on the internet who wouldn’t be able to afford to call me all the time (and vice versa).

Wikipedia is an amazing thing. With such excellent articles on thousands of topics, it’s a bit disconcerting that apparently, many folks are simply using it to read up on penises, oral sex, and Family Guy.

This is one big hole. It’s an open pit mine near Mirny, Russia, East Siberia. A few stats: 525m deep, 1200m in diameter. For those of you who don’t do metric very well (like me): that comes out to a little over .3 miles deep, and .75 miles in diameter.

I read about this yesterday and thought it pretty cool: the New York Times is now offering TimesSelect to university students and faculty for free. With TimesSelect, you get access to op-ed columnists, news columnists, and “The Archive”, which consists of the New York Times all the way back to 1851. All you need to sign up is an email address ending in .edu. Check it out.

Speaking of the New York Times, here’s an article from today’s paper about Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, who was the chief interpreter for the Nuremberg war crimes trials of the leading Nazis in 1945-1946. It’s interesting to read what Sonnenfeldt said about some of the top leaders, like Goering or Speer: that they were just like people you’d be meet on the street.

Here’s a (mostly complete) transcript of Will Wright’s talk at SXSW. It’s pretty long, but worth the read. And, if you don’t know what Spore is, you can read more about this video game here. And, if you’re now interested in Will Wright and the Spore video game (and you should be), here is an interview with Will Wright about the game.

In one of my previous Asteroid Belts, I linked to some stuff about a tomb being found, which supposedly held the remains of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their family. Here’s a bit more about it.

What if the asteroid that killed off dinosaurs had missed? (via the link maniac, kottke.org) There’s even a bit of speculation that dinosaurs might have evolved like humans, but most scientists (and me as well, as an aside) think that’s nonsense. While it’s hard to predict how life on earth would have evolved, in short: dinosaurs probably would have continued to rule the joint, getting bigger and smarter. Humans might have popped up on the radar for a bit, but most likely, we wouldn’t have stuck around too long.