The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today lead with President-elect Barack Obama's surprise choice of Leon Panetta to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. By picking the former congressman and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, Obama immediately raised the ire of many who were quick to question why someone with scant intelligence experience would be tapped to lead the agency. The selection will apparently be formally announced within the next few days. The Wall Street Journal leads its worldwide newsbox with Israel vowing to continue with its military operation in the Gaza Strip even as ...

The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts. The post pulls this number from an essay Aaron Swartz wrote more than two years ago, based on some comments by Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia's growth has exploded in the past two years, so today's number would presumably be a lot higher. But Swartz conducted his own study after hearing Jimmy's comments, and his more detailed findings are even more interesting.

Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and ...

Though much of the architectural world focused on massive undertakings at the Summer Olympics, Beijing didn't have a monopoly on the creative buildings of 2008. Of the many structures that graced Cool Hunting's bandwidth this year, a handful stood out from the pack. Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Recently opened at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, the EMPAC fuses the best aspects of...

Photo courtesy of flattop341.

At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart's "mother of all demos" in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the unwillingness of people to work hard to learn new skills. I'm quoting from memory, so the lines below are not exact, and there's no way I can...

Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.

I feel a bit sheepish posting this since I don’t want to come across as bragging, but a promise is a promise, so here it goes… I just recently surpassed $100,000 of revenue. Balsamiq has been in business for less than 5 months, so as you can imagine this level of success goes beyond my wildest [...]

Let's be honest: Who doesn't profit from thinking in the shower?

I imagine we'd be hard-pressed to find anyone reading these words who hasn't had an epiphany, big or small, under the cadence of falling water.

There's something about showering that tends to spawn new ideas which may not occur otherwise. And the frequency with which this occurs seems to suggest that perhaps the occurrence isn't merely happenstance, but instead a decent model for what has been called "creative pause" -- the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged ...

More cases of salmonella related to human contact with dry pet food have been reported.

Private browsing, one of the features that was dropped from the final release of Firefox 3.0, is not that big of a deal anymore. It’s coming to IE, and Chrome already has it (in a very nifty implementation), so forgive me for not being too excited about it.

Still, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can try the latest Firefox 3.1 build which finally has this feature. It’s simple - although not as elegant as in Chrome, which doesn’t require closing your current browsing session - choose “Private browsing” from the “Tools” menu; your current session will ...