Did the NPR really say, âoe... investigated by a coalition of 11 state attorney generalsâ? The NPR has editors and proofreaders, they know that itâ(TM)s not âoeattorney generalsâ but âoeattorneys generalâ, plus they know that DC is not a state. What their article said was, âoeNow, 10 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia are taking on the issue with an investigation into eight national fast-food chains.â

Copy/paste is your friend.

You can purchase a BioLite camping stove that has USB charging today. We have one at our office for emergency off the grid charging. In our test we recharged an iPad and and iPhone.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-10-16/

Booths need:
Magic tricks
Special effects
Raffles
Booth babes

From a 2002 slashdot story:

mccalli writes :
"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic [copy of the] domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much."
Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.)

I always say California has first world taxes and third world roads.

According to Alive Past 5 .com

The Top Five Causes Of Unintentional Injury involving children:

1. Car Accidents: Kill 260,000 children a year and injure about 10 million children. They are the leading cause of death among children and a leading cause of child disability.
2. Drowning: Kills more than 175,000 children annually. Up to 3 million children each year survive a drowning incident. Due to brain damage in some survivors, nonfatal drowning has the highest average lifetime health and economic impact of any type of child injury.
3. Burns: Fire-related burns kill nearly 96,000 children a year.
4. Falls: Nearly 47,000 children fall to their deaths every year, but hundreds of thousands more children sustain serious injuries from a fall.
5. Poisoning: More than 45,000 children die each year from unintended poisoning.

Looks like there is a whole lot more that needs to be banned, or re-labeled. Think of the children.

I posted this in January 2005:

Drakes formula allows some kind of estimate as to the number of intelligent societies there might be "out there".

The following is from a great book by A.K. Dewdney: Yes, We Have no Neutrons.

The formula is N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

For which:
R* = number of new stars that form in our galaxy each year
Fp = fraction of stars having planetary systems
Ne = average number of life-supporting planets per star
Fl = fraction of those planets on which life develops
Fi = fraction of life forms that become intelligent
Fc = fraction of intelligent beings that develop radio
L = average lifetime of a communicating society

The formula has appeared in several popular science magazines with the values set to:

N = 10 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 0.01 x 0.1 x L

So, N = 0.01 x L

The only numbers in the formula which anything other than a guess can be made are R* and L. Based on current observations most set R* at 10. Everything else in the formula would be a wild guess, except for L. More is known about L than any other part of the formula, since we are a communication society. Since we receive more and more of our communication from satellites, cable, and the internet, we are broadcasting less and less away from the earth. In the near future we will likely go dark as a significant source of radio/broadcast signals capable of being detected from space. If we say that our source of signals is about 100 years, drop the 100 back into the formula and you get 1. That must be us.