What its like on the ground in Afghanistan – Discussing military tactics for capturing and killing Taliban fighters. An interesting read.

Maureen Dowd wonders about the lasting effects of the women’s lib movement and the plight of the modern day woman: “Maybe we should have known that the story of women’s progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.”

Schools across the country are banishing Halloween celebrations for a variety of reasons, including “political correctness” agitators who think the holiday is unfair to poor students, but mostly, it appears, due to strongly religious parents who object to the “satanic” roots of the holiday and choose to (or threaten to) keep their children home from school.

Danny Hillis has finished work on the second prototype of the Clock of the Long Now. Standing nine feet tall, this functioning clock provides a close approximation of the current plans for the full-size 60 foot version that will eventually reside in a mountain cave in Nevada. Hillis is still exploring many different ideas for how to construct the clock and what types of displays it will contain (how do we map our notion of hours, or centuries?) I plan to make the trek to visit the clock when it is finished, and I expect that the end result will be equally beautiful to this prototype, but very different.

Meanwhile, Barry Obama publishes his own podcasts and syndicates them through iTunes!

Dennis Hastert’s new “unfiltered” blog sounds like its been written by a PR flunkie, but maybe he just talks like that.

If this random study someone linked to on Slashdot is to be believed, usage of Internet Explorer in the last year has stayed constant and Firefox’s growth comes at the expense of AOL, Mozilla, and Netscape. Which is pretty disappointing, if you ask me.

The only debate on Intelligent Design that is worthy of its subject

Chevron’s new ad campaign attemps to “humanize” our looming energy crisis. While I’m not impressed by some of the ads, I am intrigued by what they’re trying to do, and the obvious thought, effort, and money ($40 million, by some estimates) that they’ve put into this campaign and the associated web site, willyoujoinus.com. Is it sad that Chevron is the group pushing the discussion, and it is the President of the United States who is fighting it? Yes, yes it is. But it makes sense for oil companies to be concerned about this — the oil industry is one that thinks in longer time horizons than many others, and they are in a good position to see the looming crisis and what it will do to their bottom line.

Center point focus-recompose considered harmful – Wow, that makes a lot of sense, and explains a lot.

100 oldest dot com domains – Sad how few of the companies still exist.

Google advertising? – This is the first time I’ve ever seen an ad for Google’s services anywhere.

Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of Ivy League admission practices really makes you think, and leaves me feeling very conflicted about the whole thing. As I spend time working at Harvard, I continue to reflect on the strange phenomenon of Ivy League institutions, how they admit students, and what it says about the students, the institution, and our society. Says Gladwell: “Elite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience — an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an elite — and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.”

JotSpot looks like a very slick web publishing/wiki platform – It lets you add structured data and search it, email pages, do instant online collaborative note taking, “and more.” Sounds sort of like what Infogami is promising to do…hopefully they have something different and exciting up their sleeves. If not, well…they might be a little late to the game.

A fascinating article in the Times about the Judy Miller case and how she and the Times handled it – You can just feel the tension dripping from the pages. Amazingly enough, this article about the Times, written by Times reporters, printed in the Times, feels objective.

Anil Dash says the Web 2.0 conference on the future of the internet consists entirely of white people. Today’s Startup School was not all white, but it was about 99.5% male, meaning that out of 500 people there were probably 2 or 3 (or 2.5) girls in the whole place. Especially apparent during intermission when everyone went to the bathroom.

Your telephone number may be in breach of Magnus-Opus’ copyrights – Buy your licenses today!

JP posted some interesting thoughts on worldwide trends in Internet filtering to coincide with the release of the ONI Burma report.

A. J. Jacobs of Esquire submits a first draft article about Wikipedia to Wikipedia to be edited – The transformation is pretty neat, and their version is way better than his original. The original and the final version are going to be published side-by-side in December’s issue.

A. J. Jacobs of Esquire outsources his life to India – No, seriously, he really does. He has his Indian assistants do his shopping, write his correspondance, fight with his wife, and read to his kid. One of the funniest (or is it saddest?) things I’ve read in a long time.