Physorg.com is featuring a story asserting that hydrogen is economically infeasible as a replacement for our current energy sources. The premise is that isolating and converting hydrogen into a usable energy source takes up a great deal of energy to begin with, and that subsequently that hydrogen fuel is only useful in about 25% of our economy. Apparently, the increasing scarcity of water is going to make hydrogen too costly and just as politicized as oil. From the article:

[Fuel cell expert Ulf Bossel's] overall energy analysis of a hydrogen economy demonstrates that high energy losses inevitably resulting from the laws of physics mean that a hydrogen economy will never make sense. The advantages of hydrogen praised by journalists (non-toxic, burns to water, abundance of hydrogen in the Universe, etc.) are misleading, because the production of hydrogen depends on the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare and may become political issues, as much as oil and natural gas are today."

The American Mathematical Society is featuring an article with an in-depth explanation of the type of mathematical operations that power PageRank. Because about 95% of the text on the 25 billion pages indexed by Google consist of the same 10,000 words, determining relevance requires an extremely sophisticated set of methods. And because the links constituting the web are constantly changing and updating, the relevance of pages needs to be recalculated on a continuous basis.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Russell Seitz indicates that the electrons constituting the flow of information on the internet weigh about 50 grams, or less than two ounces. Of course, this doesn't factor in the weight of the computers and physical networks themselves. From the article:

Forbes publisher and blogger Rich Karlgaard recently lamented his $1,200 monthly home utility bill. That's a lot of PG &E , but the yearly power bill for the global internet is just $3 per capita- a bargain even by third world standards. Yet looking at my ISP bill I'm not too happy - a dollar a day seems a trifle high when you reckon the weight of the penny's worth of electricity my computation consumes. My daily fix of electrons in motion costs me about half a billion dollars a pound.

According to AppleInsider, Apple is not only working on a cellphone + mp3 player iPhone, but is working on a second model designed to be a smart phone, highly integrated with Mac OS and .Mac. The smart phone has gone through several iterations, as the notoriously demanding Mr. Jobs ordered the elite team working on the phone to redesign and re-engineer their prototypes. Capabilities are reported to include Front Row interface, syncing contacts and iCal with .Mac, "call ahead", iChat video conferencing integration, WiFi, and a slide-out keyboard. Too good to be true?

The New Yorker writes that Nintendo is fine with third place. Between Sony and Microsoft both trying to build the most comprehensively next-generation console, and barely breaking even in their efforts, Nintendo decided to go a different route. Wii doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it focuses on simple fun playing games--a strategy which turns out to be much better for Nintendo's bottom line and stock prices. From the article:

A recent survey of the evidence on market share ... found that companies that adopt what they call "competitor-oriented objectives" actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focuses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do.

This sounds like the strategy that Apple adopted out of necessity a few years back.

200000 psot!

Forget Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Galactica, Der Spiegel reports that an "Encyclopedia of Jihad" set of online textbooks has been making its rounds online since at least 2003. The Encyclopedia resembles the old Anarchists Cookbook, geared for aspiring jihadists around the world. Now that it has found a home on the internet, the Encyclopedia has gained a life of its own. From the article:

Al-Qaida's Afghanistan veterans were apparently the first to publish the "Encyclopedia" on the Internet... Over the years, volunteers repeatedly revised and updated this original encyclopedia. After the "Second Electronic Version" appeared, it became almost impossible to determine who exactly was responsible for these ongoing revisions.

The Washington Post is carrying a story critiquing the use of anti-terror laws in prosecuting disaffected teens planning to attack their classmates. Prosecutors are claiming that the Columbine attacks are just as much terrorism as the World Trade Center attacks. From the article:

At first blush, it's just outrageous. Across the country, teenagers are being tried as terrorists for plots to shoot their enemies in the lunchroom. In many cases, they have been charged under terrorism laws intended to keep us safe from al-Qaeda, not from anguished Goths with dreams of grandeur.

After reading the news everyday in the US, I was suddenly hit with a realization, the Simpsons predicted the response in 1996, 5 years before 9/11 in the episode Much Apu About Nothing. Basically a bear ends up in downtown Springfield and the town goes nuts and spends tons of money on things such as stealth bombers despite the fact that Flanders stated that this is the first bear in over 30 years. Of course the people get upset about the cost but refuse to get rid of the over the top protections, so the mayor decides to placate them by shifting the blame to illegal immigrants.
Remind you of the American response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11? It was the first time it happened in a long time, we went way over the top to prevent another attack, and of course when that all inevitably went south, the government shifted focus towards illegal immigrants who of course, like Apu, tend to work harder than your Homer Simpsons.....

The Washington Post explores the role of YouTube in documenting the violence of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. From the article:

In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds.

Although video-sharing websites can provide users with a first-hand and unfiltered look at aspects of the conflict, there is a significant problem with determining the authenticity of the uploaded content. Supporters of citizen journalism argue that while verification is not yet easily done, that eventually there will be a way to make identification easier for uploaders.

Reihan Salam at Slate examines the current state of futurism, an easily derided but fascinating field. The author calls for adoption of techno-realism, as opposed to the techno-utopianism that has long dominated speculative futurism. From the article:

For every prediction that comes true, about 20,000 more do not. Just take a look at some of these forecasts from the 1970s: an economically vibrant Soviet Union will put America to shame, a new Ice Age will cause mass starvation, and a single eight-track cassette will hold all human knowledge.

The New York Times features a story in which Shaun Alexander, running back for the Seattle Seahawks, voices his criticism of EA Sports' Madden football series:

"You should be able to make a team and play together with your friends. Like if you have 10 friends, you could all play different positions and be in 10 different houses and play together over the Internet. Or maybe you just have like five people, and you control the skill positions and the program controls the other guys."

Making multiplayer games collaborative rather than competitive seems to be the new trend, following the long dominance of Counter-Strike and the rise of World of Warcraft. EA refused to comment on whether team-based play modes would be included in their next installment, but they have released NFL Head Coach which has greater focus on team-building aspects of sports gaming.

The New York Times reports that in two weeks, the board of Time Warner Inc., which owns America Online, will hear a proposal from Jonathan Miller, AOL's chief executive, calling for a near halt in marketing for AOL's 17-year-old Internet access service, price cuts for existing customers, and thousands of layoffs. His goal is to devote all of AOL's energy into building its free Web-based services. For the past few years, AOL has simply tried a strategy of milking revenue from its existing customer base without investing any of its money, according to the article. Miller believes that trying to "wring every last dime" from its dialup service is preventing AOL from being able to aggressively compete with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. Under the new plan, almost everything AOL offers, including AOL-only content, software, and AOL.com e-mail addresses, will be available for free.

The New York Times reports that female admissions to U.S. colleges is increasingly outpacing male admissions. Moreover, a greater proportion of academic honors are going to female students. Boys still excel in math and science tests, and dominate fields like computer science, engineering, and physics. Still, with men representing only 42% of college students, some are asking whether this a boy's crisis, or whether this just how things will look as sexual discrimination fades?

A planned attack on the Holland Tunnel in New York was reportedly foiled by FBI agents who monitored chat rooms frequented by extremists. Lebanese authorities captured an Al Qaeda member who confessed to the plot, and stated that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had pledged financial and other support for the operation. Although the planning for the operation was not far along, according to U.S. officials, they had already been monitoring the plot for a year.