“When all you are becomes defined as the amount of information traceable to you, what are we then? What have we become, in a world where there is no separation, no door, no filter beyond which we can say, ‘No. This is my personal space. Not yours. Here I am alone with my thoughts and free of any outside influence or control. This, you cannot have.’ I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out.” Who said it? The answer is at the end of this post. Now on to the links! … “We missed the boat then, and lord knows we’re missing it now” … “I’m sorry, but a poor computational knowledge engine, no matter how powerful, is not capable of providing a simple answer to that question” … “Qwest appears to be on the block” … “Today’s football players have an edge that no athletes before them have possessed” … “The project will deliver fiber to the home speeds at up to 1 gigabit per second” … “Terry Pratchett says he is ready to be a test case” … “Michael Wright became the first African-American champion in USA Diving’s history” … “There’ll be a lot of data to analyze—1.5 terabytes each day” … “Supporters say the move would make Iceland an ‘offshore publishing center’ for free speech” … “Who’d have thought that prog rock opuses from King Crimson, Tangerine Dream and Genesis were born in the sounds of the maestro of shlocky kitsch” … “A human placed unprotected on Mars’s red sands would gasp painfully in poisonous carbon dioxide air only one percent as dense as Earth’s air, pass out in seconds, and perish within two minutes” … “The initial figures we have obtained show that our mineral deposits are worth a thousand billion dollars” … “The Great Transition has already begun” … “Dear Firefox, I’m not sure what is going on, but after installing an update a few months back, you’ve been sucking pretty hard” … “We are seeing treatment of our military being contracted out to state agencies whose employees take crash courses in how to treat psychologically wounded veterans” … “Whenever I think of what it was like to be 20 years old, I will remember Fieger and four minutes and three seconds of rock ‘n’ roll salvation” … “I was concerned at the lack of radio play that Latin jazz artists receive on so-called mainstream jazz programs” … “We live in an age where jazz is a thing, a codified idiom” … “He could have gone up against Ella Fitzgerald in the ’50s and still won” … “The idea that California could someday have historical jurisdiction over a fragment of the moon’s surface seems genuinely astonishing” … “A new study tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs” … “Alan Zweibel will receive the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing” … “It’s like we’re back in 2003!” … “Education Secretary Arne Duncan apologized for saying that Hurricane Katrina was ‘the best thing’ for the New Orleans school system” … “I hope you enjoy this look into some people’s work lives around the world”/”Once more, I’ve collected some of these photos, composing another global portrait of we humans at work” … “The Iranian economy has changed the Revolutionary Guards as much if not more than they have changed it” … “An 18th-century account of how a falling piece of fruit helped Isaac Newton develop the theory of gravity is being posted to the Web” … “Tobacco plants could help wean the world from fossil fuels” … “Big dreams for expansion, less than a decade later it would be abandoned” … “Citizen involvement is the holy grail of exoplanet science” … “When the same company produces the programs and runs the pipes that bring us those programs, we have a reason to be nervous” … “The most powerful and highest space nuclear test ever conducted emitted a flash visible over much of the Pacific” … “There just aren’t enough eyeballs on these races to do the critical analysis” … “Some female soldiers live in fear of being attacked by one of their own” … “Should great figures be entitled to the same protection of privacy as private individuals?” … “Our secret war is essentially kept secret from us” … “I’d rather run away far unto outer planets than be extinguished by narrow-minded humans on this forsaken world” … “A rare and intimate look at the dignity of military funeral rites” … “The Orange Revolution’s leaders were overthrown by the same voters whom they empowered” … “Are students ready for the real world at 17?” … “You absolutely HAVE to click on that picture to do it justice” … “‘This is a touchy subject,’ King said, laughing at his unintended pun” … “We like to think that artificial intelligence is replicating human smarts, but in reality it does something quite different” … “The ancient text has no known title, no known author, and is written in no known language” … “The animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter” … “First Nation Chiefs transport the Olympic Flame“/”Searchlights shine brightly in Vancouver’s night sky” … “I’ve never regretted stopping when I did” … “This is a post I’ve been dreading writing for almost six years” … This issue’s quote was from Martin Bosworth … And finally, “I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.” ∞