Links

Greenspan’s defence. On why he couldn’t have raised interest rates earlier and prevented the bubble.

ABC News managed to smuggle uranium into the US. Reminds of when George Stalk was talking about the security checks in India being much tighter than in the US. He was body-frisked twice, and barely escaped a third random check.

andersja talked to a spammer. Some insights into the spamming world.

Professional news feeds. A treasure for RSS news junkies.

Beautiful backrounds with a bar-code theme. In Russian. But the pictures make sense. And yes, there’s an English version.

Programmers: learn from this. Laymen want documentation they understand. (Wish someone told me 5 years ago.)

An interesting application of genetic programming. Two people at the University of Sussex wrote this genetic program to make a circuit produce sound. The circuit became a radio instead.

Vice Fund is a mutual fund investing in vices. Tobacco companies, casinos, etc. I do hope it’s not a hoax. Such a nice idea…

I’ve seen the Economic Times server have lots of problems. But this is a new one on me. (Didn’t last long, though…)

Good summary of superconductivity at kuro5hin.

I’m trying Mozilla. It has native SOAP support. So I can make a web page that has dynamic Google searches (and Amazon booklists, etc) without a web-server.

Google toolbar: experimental features.

America’s population ageing seems to be less than was expected, thanks to more kids per couple. kuro5hin has a good discussion.

Garth is working on audio-blogging tools. Given the amount of poetry I see among bloggers, this might unleash a host of blog-singers.

Google-watch is against Google, because they’re unfair, and don’t respect privacy (via Salon). I still don’t mind, as long as I get good search results. But this “unfair” part I kind-of agree with. Wish Google would search recently updated sites better. And they’ve also got a point about the ordering. Sometimes, I would like to see the “less important” (low pagerank) sites on top.

Ever since I started using NewsIsFree.com, I manage to run through my morning news much faster. Now, I’m trying to use some of these RSS newsreaders to see if they can speed it up even further. (Note: Though I read news faster, I’ve ended up spending more time on it, not less!)

India’s first eunuch mayor has been dismissed because he/she was occupying a seat reserved for women.

Deepti: a Hindi chatterbot (sic). Apparantly, it’s downloadable, but I couldn’t find it.

Progress on the polynomial-time computability of prime numbers.

Asimov’s Foundation was translated into Arabic. Title: Al-Qaeda. The Guardian explores the link between Asimov and bin Laden.