“Wow. That’s really interesting.”

These are words you don’t want to hear from the ultra-smart techie who’s examining the dozens of crash reports logged by your MacBook. But those are the words I heard when I took my laptop in today. The techie doesn’t think my many problems are due to bad software. He didn’t see any particular pattern, but suspects there may be some bad RAM in it somewhere (although I’ve run a RAM checker, and so did the shop the last time it was in).

He expects to have it for a week. And so for the next week I’m thrown back into the waiting arms of my Thinkpad, which, thankfully, I never upgraded to Vista. [Tags: macintosh taleof_woe]

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John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center have an editorial in a Turkish newspaper arguing for keeping the Net open and free:

Turkey is among those places in the world that are facing a choice. Does one choose to embrace the innovation and creativity that the Internet brings with it, albeit along with some risk of people doing and saying harmful things? Or does one start down the road of banning entire zones of the Internet, whether online Web sites or new technologies like peer-to-peer services or live videoblogging?

We admit to a clear commitment: We think that a free and open Internet is, on balance, a very good thing for democratic societies.

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I’m on the road and haven’t heard George “Mr. Metaphor” Lakoff’s reframing of the Democrats, in an interview with Dave Winer, but I hear it’s good. [Tags: politics geoerge_lakoff dave_winer democrats ]

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From a presentation I heard this morning. I didn’t catch the attributions:

2.1% of worldwide power is used by data centers

The power consumed by Google’s servers could power Chicago for a year, and equals the carbon sequestering of 250,000 trees.

Apparently, Dole puts a code on its produce that you can enter into a Web page to see a Google Earth image of the farm that produced it

[Tags: global_warming ecology data_centers organic_pineapple ]

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Ethan Zuckerman presented his “cute cat” theory — how repressive gov’ts use Web 2.0 to further their repressive aims — at eTech. You can read Wired’s coverage here.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman web_2.0 twitter politics censorship etech ]

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Seb Schmoller has a really interesting post about the taxonomy of a museum of cutting-edge tools.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy museums seb_schmoller ]

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Since there are no (?) instances when we are encouraged to scratch ourselves for health reasons (exception: to dislodge bugs from our various pelted patches?), why did natural selection favor near-hairless mammals who scratch themselves inappropriately?

Bonus question: Since it’s well known that we cannot tickle ourselves, why does scratching ourselves feel so darn good? Ahhhh….. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Tonight, a 8:50pm, this is CNN’s list of “latest news”:

Sigh.

[Tags: news cnn journalism media ]

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Jesse Dylan, who directed the Will.I.Am “Yes we can” video, is coming to the Berkman Center at 10:30am on Thursday. The event is not physically open to the public, but it’ll be webcast then here. From the Berkman site:

Jesse Dylan, the director behind Will.I.Am’s Yes We Can video, and Rob Holzer, CEO of Syrup NYC, will discuss the next stage of their attempt to build a movement geared around the Hope|Act|Change web site (hopeactchange.com)

I’m kicking myself that I’m going to be in Orlando, giving a talk, instead of here. I am a big fan of the Obama videos.

[Tags: berkman jesse_dylan will.i.am ]

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authenticity: An industry consortium “sponsored” a course at Hunter in which students were supposed to create a fake blog to discourage people from buying knock-off fashion items. Jeesh!

[Tags: authenticity marketing cluetrain blogs sockpuppetry ]

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