Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Do They Swim Clockwise or Counter-Clockwise?

Bright story in the NYTimes about inspired penguins in SanFran: Penguin experts are a bit mystified as to why the arrival of six strong swimmers would prompt 46 other penguins suddenly to spend their days underwater spinning around each other like an errant, tuxedoed rinse cycle.

Well, Duuuuuuhhh

Let me get this straight: Fox is going to test our intelligence? CBS would be one thing, but Fox? The network that brought us “Married with Children” and the Fox News Channel? (Sunday nights is an aberration. What with the “The Simpsons,” someone outside the network must be programming Sundays.) Could be worse, I suppose. […]

… And the Old Hats Applaud …

The usually fine AtNewYork newsletter has an odd item today. Seems that AOL’s news server has been screwed up for a week, with the result that Usenet posts from AOL members have not been propagating to the Net. Here’s how they blurbed it: EXCLUSIVE: A propagation problem which prevented AOL customers from broadcasting messages to the […]

Cell Phones: Theaters Are the Least of It

Remember the New York City Council’s bill to ban cell phones in theaters and other public performances? Just wait ’til they hear about this. A Hong Kong health club chain has banned mobile phones from its locker rooms. Why? Because some new phones come equipped with cameras. Oops. Think that’s bad? A chain of casinos […]

Who’s Making Domestic Policy?

If you’re wondering who to blame for the domestic policies coming out of the Bush administration, you probably already know about Karl Rove and Andy Card. Here’s a name you might not have heard before: Josh Bolten. A NYTimes profile by Elizabeth Bumiller says Bolten pretty much controls who gets to see the president during the […]

The Power of Belief

Bigfoot, it turns out, was a hoax — the creation of a gent named Ray Wallace. We know because Wallace ‘fessed up. He passed away around Thanksgiving at the age of 84, and his family has come forward. But here’s the funny part: believers in Bigfoot refuse to believe Wallace’s family, and insist that Bigfoot really does exist. […]

Drop the I

Story in the NYTimes about an author who’s daring to lowercase the “I” in Internet. About time. I tried to do it seven years ago when I was editor of NetGuide. My theory, like Turow’s, is that we don’t capitalize the commonplace — and that seven years ago, the Net (excuse me, the net) was […]

Watching the Detectives

One of the fun things about running this weblog is seeing who’s looking for information about what. Don’t worry: I can’t see that Person A is reading Page X. But when people click through to OTE from a Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask search, I know what they’d been looking for. For a long while, someone each […]

Georgia on Your Mind?

Ever get a tune into your head that you can’t get rid of? New research shows where in your brain you process music — and why music is such an emotional experience. It turns out that music isn’t a left-brain or a right-brain functoin. The study, conducted by Dartmouth professor Petr Janata shows that you […]

Wake-Up Call

NYCity tickets coffee roaster for stinking up its industrial neighborhood. Methinks someone’s had too much caffeine. From the NYTimes: “From time to time,” he said, “what can be normal smells that one might appreciate in the city can be, if they continue for hours and hours, considered noxious by some people. We’ve given these violations […]