Just when it looked like no one could top the insane patents some Internet companies are granting comes word that Smuckers has a patent on the good old peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Actually what they specifically have is a patent on a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich (i.e. the edges are crimped so the peanut butter and jelly is enclosed entirely within the bread).

A Michigan company, Albies Foods, that has long made pasties started selling crustless PBJ sandwiches to its customers and got hit with a cease and desist order from Smuckers.

The Smoking Gun has outdone itself this time with a collection of letters donated to the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library by none other than the Unabomber himself, Ted Kaczynski. The letters are a fascinating insight into the media circus — they consist of pitch letters from television personalities wanting to interview Kazcynski and were donated to The University of Michigan along with other correspondents and documents to and from Kazcynski.

For the most part, the television reporters are more than willing to kiss Ted’s ass to get an interview. Greta Van Susteren lets Kazcynski know that she thinks, “You are an extremely smart man.” A letter from a 20/20 producer informs Kazcynski that an interview with Barbara Walters will allow the Unabomber to clear up “what you think are misconceptions about you.”

But the most disgusting of the letters has to be from that bane of all existence, ABC-News’ Good Morning America. GMA correspondent Dan Dahler wants to convince Kaczynski that just because the Unabomber hates all technology doesn’t mean giving a TV interview would be compromising his principles,

I know I represent a form of technology abhorrent to you, but I also know from reading excerpts from your journal (released by the government – so I wonder if they’re accurate representations??) and descriptions of the intricately made explosive devices that you have a talent for using anything at hand for your purposes.

And journalists always wonder why people dislike their profession so much.

Today’s USA Today had a small blurb about HeroMachine.Com. Hero Machine is a nicely done application using Flash that lets users generate artwork of super hero, fantasy and science fiction characters using a mix and match interface reminiscent of an electronic version of paper dolls. There are other programs out there that do this, but they’re not free, as Hero Machine is for the moment, and they don’t usually have the superb artwork that Jeff Herbert has created for Hero Machine. The superhero stuff is a lot of fun.

Ironically, it is one of most annoying aspects of comic books that landed Herbert’s site in USA Today — the exaggerated and almost always absurdly out of proportion breasts that comic arts give female characters. Herbert’s female characters are well endowed, but apparently that isn’t good enough for some folks who keep writing him asking for move cleavage. I liked Herbert’s response to those folks.

Exaggeration is part of the genre, but it’s always bugged me. You’re supposed to be this athletic figure; how would you do all that if you had these breasts flopping around in the wind? I’m not going to have ‘Superboobs’ here – it’s just a personal point of honor.

(For what it’s worth, I always assumed the big breasted super heroines had bras made out of some as-yet-discovered super alloy).

Anyway, I hope Herbert finds a way to make money off his venture as Hero Machine is a great application.

Normally I am a big fan of high tech jargon. I have no problem telling my wife I need to run off to update my blog. But there’s one word that is driving me nuts that seems to be catching on. That word is “cloud.”

Most of the time I don’t even know what these people are referring to when they use that term. The first time I remember hearing the term was in a fluff magazine piece on LoudCloud.Com, which was going to revolutionize how Internet infrastructure was managed.

More recently I’ve seen people use “cloud” as jargon for “network.” If a file on your server is updating a file on my server, I fail to see why we need to start reaching for weather metaphors to describe what is happening.

CNN is running what has to be the worst story line yet in the ongoing power crisis in California. According to CNN an audit of the largest electrical utility in California, Southern California Edison, made about $5 billion in profits from 1996-2000.

Now, of course, as the price that SCE has to pay for electricity has skyrocketed, while the price it can charge to consumers has remained the same by statute, SCE is in big trouble and is in debt just about $5 billion.

So what is the conclusion from these two sets of facts? According to Democrats such as California Senate President Pro Tem John Burton it is that, “Basically they took the money and ran.” If they’d kept those profits in SCE rather than sending the profits to SCE’s corporate parent, Edison Electric, SCE would have broken even.

Not. If SCE makes $5 billion in profits from 1996 to 2000 and then lose $5 billion from November 2000 through January 2001, it hasn’t broken even but rather has lost hundreds of millions of dollars since the capital sunk into SCE would have been a lot better off spent in some other sector of the market where it could earn a normal rate of return. With the situation described by CNN, SCE doesn’t even keep up with inflation.

This is exactly the sort of talk that makes companies not want to invest in California since what Burton and others are really saying is that it was wrong for SCE to want to make a profit. Instead of making profits, SCE should hold any surpluses it has to cushion the blow when the California legislature screws up again.

Source:

Audit: California utility reaped $4.8 billion dividend before power crisis. CNN, January 30, 2001.

It seems everybody is up in arms — and for good reason — over a report by MSNBC that N2H2 is selling data about students’ web surfing habits.

N2H2 sells web filtering software to schools. It’s been a business failure in that market so it decided to sell aggregated data about what sites students are visiting. N2H2 says it doesn’t sell what specific sites a given student visits, but rather say information on how many time students in a school district visited CNN’s home page, for example. This is very valuable information even when it is aggregated in this way.

Is this legal? Is it ethical?

Actually this would seem to be a pretty clear case of a human rights violation. Once N2H2 takes the aggregated data of the students and begins turning it into reports which it then markets to other companies, it is engaged in research and the students are human test subjects.

There are stringent rules and regulations about the treatment of human test subjects, especially when they are captive audiences such as school children are. Where I work, for example, we do a lot of research asking kids about their opinion of their schools. The data is aggregated as N2H2 does, so what a particular student thought about his school is never reported back.

To do this we have to follow strict rules that are overseen by a review board on human experiments. The key thing we have to do which N2H2 is unlikely to have done is give students the ability not to participate in the study. If they don’t want to tell us what they think of their school, that is their right.

Similarly, although N2H2 may have a legitimate contract to block students from accessing certain web sites, if it is going to collect and aggregate data about what students are viewing on the web it has to give every student the right to opt out and exclude his or her web surfing behavior from the aggregated data.

If I were a student at a school that uses an N2H2 product I’d consider a lawsuit on the grounds that N2H2 is acting in contravention to numerous laws protecting the rights of test subjects to be informed and to decline to be the subject of research.

After watching cover all week long and for interminable hours on Sunday, I think the media in general, and CBS in particular, were extremely unfair to Baltimore Ravens middle linebacker Ray Lewis. While Lewis certainly deserved his share of moral censure, CBS seemed intent on building up his role in last year’s post-Super Bowl murder to a point that the facts don’t support. Specifically several CBS commentators said before the game that two men were tragically murdered after last year’s Super Bowl, but that Lewis has never told the truth about the incident. The first claim is certainly true, but the latter claim is an outright lie.

Lewis, in fact, testified in court in early June about the events that transpired after the Super Bowl. According to Lewis, he went with friends Reginald Oakley and Joseph Sweeting to an Atlanta nightclub. While hanging around outside the nightclub, Oakley was hit in the face with a champagne bottle and as Lewis testified, “all hell broke loose.” Oakley and Sweeting were eventually charged with murdering Jacinth Baker and Richard Lollar in the ensuing brawl (Baker, according to testimony at the trial, was responsible for throwing the champagne bottle at Oakley).

Lewis testified that he had seen Oakley and Sweeting each brandishing knives the day before the fight. During the fight Lewis testified that he saw Oakley vigorously kicking one of the victims while a second person held the victim down.

Furthermore, Lewis testified about an extremely incriminating conversation he had with Sweeting after the brawl. Lewis said he asked Sweeting what happened. Sweeting, while making slashing motions with a knife he was holding in his fist, said, “Everytime they hit me, I hit them.”

Was Lewis actively involve in the brawl? Possibly, but certainly not to level of murder. Although the prosecution had promised that it would call witnesses to testify that they had seen Lewis throwing punches, when placed on the stand those witnesses said that in fact they had not directly seen Lewis hitting anyone. The only prosecution witness who testified to seeing Lewis actively hitting and kicking people turned out to be a convicted felon who was in jail for identity theft at the time of Lewis’ trial. The most damning point of the trial for the prosecution was when a witness prosecutors had claimed would testify that Lewis punched one of the dead men in fact testified that he heard Lewis screaming numerous times for everyone involved to stop fighting.

The case against Lewis was so weak, that it’s hard not to believe that the point of prosecutor’s including him in the indictment was to rattle him enough to strike a deal as he eventually did, pleading guilty to obstruction of justice.

On that count, Lewis’ behavior was extremely shameful. Lewis may not have murdered the two defendants, but he instructed several witnesses not to talk to police about what they had seen that night. If that had been the focus of the media scrutiny — Lewis’ abject irresponsibility in the immediate aftermath of the brawl — that would have been fair enough, but in fact many in the media seemed intent on intimating the Lewis himself might have had a direct role in the murders, which was completely contradicted by every bit of evidence at his trial.

Finally, media commentators intimated that it was Ray Lewis’ fault that to date nobody has been jailed for the two brutal murders. In fact the responsibility there rests largely with prosecutors. Even with Lewis’ extremely incriminating testimony, a jury found both Oakley and Sweeting not guilty on all charges. Why?

Because the prosecutors vastly overplayed their hand. Even though the evidence against Oakley and Sweeting was compelling to most observers, the prosecutor had walked in on day one and said this was an open and shut case. Then they had to drop Ray Lewis as a defendant, most of the witnesses recanted or modified their stories substantially, and in a few cases prosecutors misrepresented exactly what some witnesses had told police.

On top of that, prosecutors never managed to locate a witness who would testify they saw Oakley and Sweeting stab the victims. The resulting lack of eye witnesses to the murder itself combined with the prosecutors’s lack of credibility in the eyes of the jury resulted in the likely murders going free. Although it was a very self serving comment, in many ways Lewis wasn’t too far off the mark when he said earlier in the week that prosecutors were so intent on bringing down Lewis as a celebrity that they forgot about the case in front of them.

I don’t think it’s the best movie ever made (probably not even in the top 10), but there’s no movie I’d personally rather watch than The Wizard of Oz. A few weeks ago I bought a copy of the movie on DVD and watched it with my daughter. And watched it and watched it and watched it some more. I think we’ve watched the film at least 30 times this month.

She’s become a complete Oz addict, the depths of which struck me only this morning. While deeply slumbering this morning after staying up too late watching post-Super Bowl coverage, I felt a little hand patting on my back and a soft voice asking to watch “the movie with the dog in it,” which is code for the Wizard of Oz. As long as she gets dressed first, my wife and I let her watch a little TV before going to her pre-school. Usually she gets to watch up until “Over the Rainbow” before it’s time to head out.

Not on this day, however — I glanced at the clock and realized to my horror that it was only a 4:45 a.m. Oy! Right, I’m thinking even Barney is preferable if that’s what it will take for a break from the Wizard of Oz.