February, 2001

  1. XFL Ratings Continue Downward Slide

    After last week’s XFL ratings were released, there were a number of stories with quotes from Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol trying to spin the low ratings. I wonder how they’re going to spin the fact that the overnight ratings for this weekend’s game on NBC was a dismal 2.9. Of course that rating couldn’t…

  2. Gore Still A Loser

    The Miami-Herald recently completed its own recount of the Miami Dade “undervote” totals. The result? Al Gore would have netted no more than 49 votes if a manual recount of Miami-Dade’s ballots had been completed, according to the review, which was sponsored by The Herald and its parent company, Knight Ridder. That would have been…

  3. Project Entropia Beta Signup Begins March 1

    The MMORPG Project Entropia will begin taking applications for beta testers beginning March 1. I mention this primarily to clarify something I wrote many months ago questioning the legitimacy of the game. Specifically, the game has a pseudo-banking functions which lets you exchange real money online with other players in an interesting attempt to create…

  4. Of Course We Went to the Moon

    Last week Fox ran a science-challenged “documentary” claiming that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration faked the 1968 moon landing. The claims were so absurd that no rational person with an understanding of physics would buy their arguments. But then somebody I thought knew better linked to this site which offers a video purporting to…

  5. Forcing Kids to Pledge Allegiance to the State

    It’s kind of amazing that the idea of forcing kids to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance keeps coming up, but it does. Virginia state SEnator Warren Barry wants to make Virginia one of 22 states that require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even though such laws are clearly unconstitutional. In the…

  6. Deja Users Whine Over Google Acquisition

    Many years ago, Deja News began archiving all Usenet feeds and making its archive publicly available. Back when Deja first started there was a lot of hype about how valuable owning a complete archive of Usenet would be. In fact Deja was just one of several companies who were talking about building a business on…

  7. Concept Maps Are Confusing

    An Associated Press story about concept mapping is making the rounds and getting a lot of attention from the usual suspects. The story discusses work at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition designed to find a better way to browse information on the web. IHMC associate director Alberto Canas wants to know, “Why should…