Dowbrigade

A
Nativity sculpture made out of 42 tons of ice has gone on show in
the European Culture Capital 2003.

The sculpture was created on Friday under the direction of Austrian artist
Gert Hodl in what has become an Advent tradition in the city of Graz.
The blocks used weigh roughly two-and-a-half tons each and had to be
cut in half during construction.
from Ananova

The Harvard Uber-Blogger, Philip
Greenspan, has really out-done himself.
Of course, he is always the Numero Uno on the Berkman
Hit List, and deservedly
so, but today he is in the process of ringing up a record – 17,783
so far, over 20 times the next individual’s blog! What’s all the fuss
about? Check out the title and opening para….

Why pretend to care about others when we have professional therapists?

A friend criticized me for being unsympathetic regarding a concern
of hers that I thought was irrational. She believed that a friend ought
to care
simply because another human being is apprehensive, even if that apprehension
is not justified. During this exchange it occurred to me that there is
actually no reason for the layperson to be sympathetic or emphathetic
in any modern situation.

Go Phil!…..from Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Regular readers may have noticed a decline in the frequency and profundity
of the posts to the Dowbrigade. This is due to the didactic and administrative
demands of the end of the Fall Semester. The exams, evaluations, essay
rewrites, project presentations, Faculty Annual Reports, Student Evaluations
of Teachers, conferences and recap reports will all be over by the end
of next week, and readers can expect a comprehensive and creative upgrade
in both content and format. If we make it to the end of next week……

Somewhere High in the Andes….

With
hundreds of millions of investment and marketing dollars flowing into
the sector, downloadable music could be the most active online commerce
category. And with the activity comes a risk that it could resemble the
Internet
bubble
of 1999, though on a smaller scale.

"And that’s where this gets interesting," he added. "You’ve
got a portable music player that can fit 10,000 songs on it? Come on. No
one
will spend $1 a track filling it.”

from the New
York Times