Cheyenne Mountain is being closed down? How sad. Maybe they’re afraid of the WOPR.

Roger Ebert’s 1986 review of SpaceCamp pulls no punches. Nothing he says is wrong.

“[I]t would be a lot easier to accommodate allergies graciously if I felt like I could tell the rationally neurotic parent with the extremely allergic kid from the crazy neurotic parent with the slightly allergic one. And I can’t.”

Last year, Anil Dash got married: “The defining trait of marriage in these contexts is that the commitment comes first. It doesn’t occur to most people to get upset that they don’t get to choose their siblings; You just love your brother or sister, or you try to, and you fight sometimes and you disagree, and then you get over it, and that’s what family is about. And in some ways, marriage can be like that, too. There’s a liberation in knowing you don’t have an easy out: You know you’re going to make it work, and you’re not going to give up.”

Whatever happened to baseball cards?

When I was in Ann Arbor in 2004 Adam took me to Zingerman’s Deli, a fascinating place with yummy food, and I noticed signs for additional Zingerman’s businesses such as ZingTrain, which I found interesting, but never really followed up on. Now Kottke has posted a 2003 article about Zingerman’s that sheds a lot of light on the business and its philosophy. I like it.

Some Entirely Realistic Suggestions Following the Failures of the Quixotic “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror.”

I’ve just re-read a 2002 interview of Neal Stephenson by _Reason_ magazine, and recommend it. Stephenson is, as always, an interesting subject. Choice bit: “Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.” If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.”

Jacob Weisberg argues that the _NYTimes_ should not have published its story about CIA tracking of transactions made through the international bank clearinghouse known as Swift. His points are sound, but I suspect part of the reason the _Times_ and others published the story over government objections was because they’ve heard the same objections time and again to stories about programs that are less effective, far more legally questionable, and much more impactful to the public discourse. By playing all their cards in defense of programs far more pernicious (and less legal), the government lost any standing it had to reasonably argue for this story to be killed.

Derek Lowe, on behalf of scientists everywhere, asks that photographers stop “sexing up” science with colored liquids and fancy backdrops. Each comment is more hilarious than the last. Who knew scientists were, collectively, so pissed off about this?

SvN makes me want a Woodflame grill. It uses a very smart design to turn tiny amounts of wood into fuel for a large grilling surface area.

Current and former Berkmanites Derek Bambauer, William McGeveran, and Tim Armstrong are blogging up at storm at their newish Info/Law blog. Its too much for me to keep up with on a regular basis, but their commentary is interesting and informative. If you’re interested in law related to tech and the internet, give it a looksie.

“In the Good Old Days, people used to just shut up and take whatever the [television] writer shoved at them[…] But these days, everyone wants their personal favorite character to get elected prom queen every episode. And not only that, they have online petitions and probably clever rhyming slogans.”

Check out Doctor Who’s cool new Time Lord specs. Classy!

A new study says that condom use does prevent HPV. That plus the newly approved vaccine for children is very good news on this front. And puts another nail in the coffin of any _logical_ argument about the usefulness of abstinence education.

In my final post on this issue for now, Mark Pilgrim responds to John Gruber and makes some excellent points about long-term data retention. As someone worried about data life, I really should have been thinking about these things when I wrote my post. I’m still kicking myself for saving all my music in AAC rather than MP3 (since still no one but Apple is really supporting AAC), not to mention all the old documents in various formats that I can’t open anymore. Conclusion: good arguments all around, Mark’s are more compelling, in my view and coming from my specific mindset, but may not be more compelling to others, and still on balance I am sticking with the Mac and just doing what I can to avoid lock-in to proprietary formats.

Gruber’s post on Mark Pilgrim’s defection to Ubuntu is far more useful than mine (and also far less succinct, but that’s par for the course). The end bits about Apple’s attitude on openness are particularily interesting.

Elastic tabstops actually soulds like a decent idea, its certainly the first *new* idea I’ve heard in the tabs vs. spaces debate for source code formatting.

JWZ says _Superman Returns_ sucks. So maybe my first impression wasn’t so crazy after all.

Frank Bruni’s comments on booking and changing reservations at high-end restaurants are interesting, but things get really neat when you start reading the comments. Jessica, get on it.