Dowbrigade

As part of the continuing attempt to stage the most pointlessly outrageous
Flash Mob yet, the internet is abuzz with rumors that the enigmatic "Flash
Mob Bill" is planning his final Mob for the McMurdo Research Station
in Antarctica. Watch your email
for invites.

Meanwhile, a Brazilian flash mob has hit the busiest road in Sao Paulo.
Around 100 people gathered in Avenida Paulista and pointed remote controls
at a giant screen, as if they were trying to change channels. After
exactly three minutes they put the controls away and walked off as if
nothing had happened, Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper reports.

from Ananova

The difficulties of policing an area the size of Iraq
are increasingly appearant. Three days after U.S.
troops and engineers reopened a major Iraqi
oil
pipeline
to
Turkey,
saboteurs
blew
it up again. Thamer al-Ghadaban, Iraq’s acting oil minister,
told reporters the 46-inch-wide pipe was blown up early Friday, sparking
a fire that still raged yesterday.

Meanwhile every crackpot fundamentalist with a grudge is making
for Iraq like teenaged Romeos heading for the midway to try to win a
Kweepie Doll for their girlfriends.

The sabotage, as well as continued attacks on U.S. troops,
underscored the vulnerability of America’s efforts to begin rebuilding
Iraq’s government and economy.

from
AP via Newsday

The richest shipwreck in history has been sitting beneath
a half mile of ocean for 300 years. Greg Stemm is sending a robot down
to get it.

In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for
southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and
6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe
to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV.

Greg Stemm is a 21st-century treasure hunter who’s been
researching the Sussex for two decades, and late this summer, he’s planning
to send
a remote-operated vehicle,
or ROV, about the size of a Chevy Suburban down to get it.

By Jeffrey
M. O’Brien in Wired

I confess to being a news addict.  For the past 30 years if I
didn’t start the day with coffee and the New York Times, it was like
my brain wouldn’t boot up.  When traveling or living abroad I was
known to haunt airports’ international terminals, looking to score reasonably
recent newspapers off arriving passengers or pilots.  So it was
not lightly that I recently cut back my daily subscription to the Times
to Sunday only.  The reason was simple – I am in love with my news
aggregator.

I still read the Times everyday, or at least all of the articles that
interest me, but I no longer have to wade through the boring stories
about zoning legislation on Staten Island or the stylishly sexy adds
for wristwatches that cost more than my car.  This is because my
news aggregator selects just the stories I am interested in and presents
the headline and lead for my perusal, just as soon as they are posted
to the Times web site, which is usually many hours before they appear
in print.

What is a news aggregator? Simply put, it is a piece of software that
collects and collates whichever of hundred of commercial and private
news feeds you tell it to watch. Whenever you decide to check it, you
get everything posted recently to the services you are interested, including
the New York Times, the BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, hundreds of topic-specific
feeds, and virtually every Blog available in the Cybersphere.

If you want to check out what a typical News Aggregator looks like,
click on the link called "All
My News Streams" on the right hand margin
of my Blog, the Dowbrigade.
My personal aggregator is built in to Manila, the blogging software in
use at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. If it looks cool to
you, there are many freeware or shareware standalone aggregators that
are easy to
download and set up.

I AM IN LOVE WITH MY AGGREGATOR.  It has not only changed the way
I keep up with the news, it has changed my life.  It is now the
first thing I check on my computer in the morning and the last thing
I check before I shut it down. When news breaks, it is usually on the
aggregator before it hits CNN or Fox.  I follow the latest postings
from Scripting News and Slashdot as they are posted. I follow obscure
and important developments in my field, educational technology.

Ryan
Singel, in Wired, writes that the first time he saw a news aggregator
he felt a rush he hadn’t experienced since he saw his first web page.  I
agree.  I think this technolgy will have a longer and deeper impact
on the emerging information society than Blogs themselves, which will
eventually settle into a role as one more medium of mass communication,
albeit a highly entertaining, individualistic and idiosyncratic one.

But news aggregators and RSS,
the technology that makes them work, have the potential to become the
Uber-medium through which a wide spectrum
of other information formats pass.

At
present, I have but one substantative complaint about my aggregator.  Regardless
of whatever else is going on in my life, it keep aggregating.  After
two or three hours, each new story is pushed down the page until it
disappears into the I-zone, off the radar screen of my cybernetic consciousness.  If
I happened to be doing something in my so-called "real life" (such
as it is), like earning a living or actually interacting with family
members, and can’t get to my aggregator, I lose lord knows how many
interesting, perhaps even crucial stories. (Yes, I know I have a tendency
to take these things too seriously)  How
about a bookmark or cache feature to catch all those features we can’t
afford to miss?

A "Chiste" Among "Compadres"

Cuban president Fidel Castro reportedly startled his Venezuelan counterpart,
Hugo Chavez, with a practical joke when they met yesterday in Paraguay.

He persuaded a Paraguayan MP to warn Chavez to watch out for an ambush
and then jumped out at him from behind a door.

Witnesses said Chavez looked nervous when MP Juaqn Carlos
Galaverna told him about the ambush and even more scared when Castro
made his sudden appearance.

The two leaders then retired to a private salon for a quick game of "52
Pick-up"

from Ananova

The system is designed to automatically
track and analyze the play and betting patterns of every gambler at the
table in real time.

from Wired

Although it’s hard to feel sorry for lawyers as a class, years of
being the butt of bad shark jokes seem to be taking a toll.  A front
page article in today’s Boston Globe highlights a number of local shylocks
who are abandoning the barrister business altogether, citing long-term
trends such as corporate consolidation and a chronic oversupply of
new lawyers exacerbated by the country’s long economic slump
and declining public-sector revenues.

"Generally speaking, being a lawyer today has become much more
demanding, much more stressful, and there is less satisfaction from the
work," said Boston lawyer and former Massachusetts Bar Association
president Thomas F. Maffei.

Counselors at Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers, which helps attorneys dealing
with alcoholism, depression, and other personal problems, say they are
seeing more and more clients whose problem is that they are lawyers. "We’re
seeing stress and burnout in more lawyers than we ever have before," said
executive director Bonnie Waters.

from
the Boston Globe

Honest, honey, I only had one glass of wine!

I admit, I
like big glasses.  In
the morning I take my coffee in a mug the size of a fruitbowl, and when
I
get home
from
work
I drink my iced  tea from
a measuring cup because none of the glasses in the house are big enough.

Now I’ve found a line made for people like me. Each of these wine glasses
holds over 13 normal-sized bottles of wine. Think of the time you
will save not getting up for a refill!

from Maxi Bordeau