There’s apparently a 14-month cycle of increasing tension and slippage in the neighborhood, where the Juan de Fuca and North American plates are colliding. Some geologists think the next megathrust quake will occur during a slippage event, one of which is happening right now.

What most caught my eye about this widely linked piece was its reference to Kohlberg ‘s work about the development of a moral sense. The author cites criticisms that Kohlberg’s structure is gender- and culture-biased, with some evidence to support those criticisms. I found the article to be very interesting, and especially enjoyed this bit:

Similarly, children growing up in deeply religious Mennonite communities distinguish between rules that apply because they are written in the Bible (e.g., that Sunday is the day of Sabbath, or that a man must uncover his head to pray) and rules that would still apply even if they weren’t actually written in the Bible (including rules against personal and material harm).

What I like best is that it clearly indicates that morality is unrelated to religious edict, and even children can detect the difference.

I think the fact that we kept coming up in searches for "forced" plus some other innocent word was causing a number of nefarious folk to include our content in their link-spam pages, which I suspect was causing Google to hate us. So while we continue to love the Forced Perspective, we’re now extra-trendy with mid-cap and all, to try to restore our sparkling reputation.

Or maybe not. At lunch today, some folks at a nearby table were going through a presentation packet whose cover sheet said "Magazine Program Launch". There were no visible "confidential" or "proprietary" markings, just the Costco and Ingram logos. I wasn’t able to see any details of the pitch (other than seeing that a US map was on one page), nor hear any of the discussion, but I can only infer from the evidence I did gather that your local Costco will be getting a newsstand.

Another misheard library book title: Mira Nair: Real Estate Agent. Actually Millionaire Real Estate Agent.

Ushering in a whole new era of exploitation of living organisms, scientists working at Harvard have coerced algae cells to carry tiny polystyrene beads around. When will the enslavement end?

I’m considering getting a Powerbook, in part because of its NeXT heritage, and for some reason that got me thinking about the old Sprint word processor, which is what Borland called Mark of the Unicorn’s Final Word product. I loved FW so much that I bought Sprint during the brief window when it was available. It never made the transition to Windows (as far as I know) — not that that makes me love it any less, but it did hasten the product’s demise.
Thanks, Bill Spitzak, for a fine word processor (and thanks especially for the Emacs mode in Sprint, and providing the means to hack it up to be even more Emacs-like)
Update: I ended up just getting another Dell Inspiron. It’s not as lovely as an Apple product would have been, but I have all this infrastructure in place, and I’m just too lazy to change.

Here’s how to get your boat and possibly your butt into the water around here. I would like to find a nice place to float around in my lifejacket (a little like tubing, but with less stuff to carry in the car). I tried at one park and the lifeguards told me that I had to stay in the swimming area and was only allowed to wear the life jacket in the wading portion. Lame! I want to float all over, though I suppose I would like to avoid being chopped up by a speedboat.

Info on local rivers is out there, too.

Lawsuit! Allegations! The Island is apparently strangely similar to Parts: The Clonus Horror! But is Ewan McGregor in teeny red athletic shorts?

Blockbuster’s late-fee gambit seems not to have paid off. It seemed unlikely that they’d be able to make up in volume the $250-300 million they were losing by discontinuing the fees.