Author Michael Crichton’s speech to a public policy center.
Sounds boring, but it isn’t. Some points…

He starts with his assumptions about Chernobyl.

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, [...]

According to The Associated Press, the US National Security Agency has been placing permanent cookies on visitors computers. The cookies aren’t enabled to expire until 2035.

A NSA spokesperson says it was a mistake that was shipped in some software.
Hmmm.

The Religion Newswriters Association put up the top religion stories of 2005.
Which leads me to ask, what did we think were the top religious stories in 2004? 2000?
I’m not a paying member so I won’t find out from the Association archives.
via: The Revealer

A pilot was a passenger on Alaska Airlines Flt.536 out of Seattle when there was a loud pop and cabin decompression occurred.

Thing is, he had a camera, and he has a blog.
The plane landed safely, and according to Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine, pilot and blogger Jeremy Hermanns posted about the incident and put up [...]

Recently I read somewhere that China employs 45 thousand people full time to monitor the internet.
Over Christmas, The Sydney Herald carried an interesting article on China’s bloggers.

But with anything between 2 million and 8 million active web logs, Chinese blogging has moved far beyond vicarious sex into important political issues. “Mu Zimei showed me what [...]

It’s been a hard couple of days for people I care about.

I got a phone call yesterday from a friend who had just taken his wife into emergency.
She is a nurse, he was a pharmacist. They were concerned she was experiencing tia.’s, after vision problems started Christmas night.

It was a long afternoon. His wife will [...]