Brad De Long has written a brief look at the progress of Project Gutenberg. The piece nicely illustrates how dramatically the Internet has shifted expectations into high gear.

De Long writes,

Thus Project Gutenberg has inched ahead at a snail’s pace. In its 32nd year of existence, the collection has only 6,267 etexts.

Only 6,267 free etexts? Certainly it’s far short of its ultimate goal of 1 million online texts, but almost 6,300 online public domain books is still a pretty impressive accomplishment in my book (especially since it was accomplished with donated labor — there are quite a few publishing companies who don’t average 195 books a year over a 30 year period).

Moreover, De Long leaves out the important part of the story — that as scanning technology becomes more widely available and more people have come online, the number of books Project Gutenberg adds every year is accelerating quickly. For example, more than half of those 6,267 free etexts were added to Project Gutenberg in just the last two years. Based on that, I’d say Project Guenberg has a very bright future.

Aside from watching all of the experts pick the Raiders (did they learn nothing from the Giants/Ravens matchup a few years ago?), the best moment in the hours of pre-Super Bowl coverage had to be Warren Moon’s explanation on ESPN that he would have had several Super Bowl rings if he hadn’t had so many teammates who sucked.

On the one hand, it’s fascinating to see how driven many of these athletes are to win a Super Bowl, but a little scary at the same time to see someone like Tom Jackson intone year in and year out that his failure to win a Super Bowl ring will haunt him for the rest of his life (and like Moon, Jackson has no problem blaming his teammates who — at least according to him — were more interested in partying than preparing for the two Super Bowls he played in and lost).

Tom’s Hardware has an in-depth look at the first standalone DivX player. This sucker plays DVDs, CDs, and CD-R/RWs & DVD-RWs encoded with DivX, MP3, or even JPEG images.

The KiSS DP-450 is manufactured in Denmark and currently available in many European countries. No word yet on availability in the United States (and this will almost certainly face an MPAA challenge, just like the first MP3 players faced a legal challenge from the RIAA).

No, I haven’t given up on weblogging. I’ve just been working 70-80 hours a week ever since two positions in my area of responsibility were eliminated and those duties were shifted to lucky old me! I’ve been training a couple part-timers to take over most of that, but in the meantime I haven’t had much time for anything except work-eat-sleep-repeat.

Imagine if an entire school system of 46,000 students decided to set aside one day and have a pro-life teach in. You know, invite people in to talk about how having an abortion stops a beating heart, show kids pictures of fetuses that don’t look all that different from newborns babies, and bring in a couple of fire and brimstone conservatives to talk about the evils of our death worshipping culture.

But Oakland, California, sees nothing wrong with this sort of approach for indoctrinating children about a possible war with Iraq.

As an aside, the interesting thing is how these things also tend to backfire. My daughter attended one of those Project D.A.R.E.-style events at her school which was supposed to warn them about the evils of drugs, alcohol and smoking. Instead, she and her friends were apparently very impressed by the image of a smoking doll that one of the presenters used. Thanks a lot, folks.

New Scientist has a report about two researchers who apparently have become the first to directly measure the speed of gravity. The measurement confirms Einstein’s contention that gravity traveled at the speed of light.

The scientists used an interesting method to measure the speed of gravity,

[Fomalont] Kopeikin found another way. He reworked the equations of general relativity to express the gravitational field of a moving body in terms of its mass, velocity and the speed of gravity. If you could measure the gravitational field of Jupiter, while knowing its mass and velocity, you could work out the speed of gravity.

The opportunity to do this arose in September 2002, when Jupiter passed in front of a quasar that emits bright radio waves. Fomalont and Kopeikin combined observations from a series of radio telescopes across the Earth to measure the apparent change in the quasar’s position as the gravitational field of Jupiter bent the passing radio waves.

As New Scientist notes, one of the main effects of the discovery is that it will undercut theories that postulate additional dimensions in the universe beyond the usual three.

Source:

First speed of gravity measurement revealed. New Scientist, January 7, 2003.

Via Boing! Boing! comes a link to the coolest toy I’ve seen this month — Cuboro (here’s another page that outlines what these do)!

Stackable wooden cubes that have a grooved track for making elaborate marble tracks. Excellent. And, of course, way too expensive for my budget.