WebCetera

Want to protect your privacy from Google's prying? Here's your chance to go to the opt-out village.
How are your farming, medical and burial skills?


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Okay, it is news from The Onion, so... but it works for me.

Saturday Night Live's take on getting a degree online. Funny. And not funny.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/101506/saturday-night-live-university-of-westfield-online

With all the talk about Apple and Steve Jobs introducing a tablet today (the worst kept secret in tech so far this year), I thought it would be fun to look back. It was 26 years ago this month that Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh. It's fun to watch the video and compare - Steve in his jacket and bowtie and that Mac with its amazing (by 1984 standards) graphics and sound that look so primitive now.

Before a crowd of 3000 people who treat the little Mac like a rock star including a five minute ovation.

The Year of The Tiger doesn't begin until February 14th 2010.
Drama, intensity, change and travel are keywords for 2010
along with world conflicts & disasters which tend to occur in Tiger years.



The Year of the Tiger will bring far reaching changes for everyone.
New inventions and incredible technological advances are certainties.
Of all of the Chinese horoscope signs, this year is one to be active in –
seize opportunities and make the most of your personal and
individual talents.

Everything happens quickly and dramatically in a Tiger year.
Blink and you could miss the chance of a lifetime.

You can track Santa at www.noradsanta.org starting at 2am ET on December 24.

You'll see a Google Map that will display Santa's location over the course of the day.

To visualize Santa in Google Earth, click "Track Santa in Google Earth" and you'll see St. Nick flying through Google Earth in your browser. (If you don't have the Earth plug-in, click here — it will be installed automatically when you download Google Earth 5.1.)

NORAD's Santa-tracking dates back to 1955, when a Sears and Roebuck magazine ad in Colorado Springs accidentally directed readers to call NORAD instead of the "Talk-to-Santa" hotline they were advertising.

The elves at NORAD provided callers with Santa's location according to their radar and have tracked his journey ever since. When I was a kid, you would see it on the evening news on Christmas Eve.

In 2004, Google started with their "Keyhole Earth Viewer" to display Santa's voyage around the world using a single machine and getting 25,000 users following the sleigh. Last year, it was more than 8 million...

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The real NORAD site is at http://www.norad.mil. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a bi-national United States and Canadian organization charged with the missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control for North America.

In what will certainly be my only post about Tiger Woods on Serendipity35, I pass on this little curiosity news item I spotted this morning.

Some observant reporter noted that there was a book in Tiger's smashed Cadillac on that disastrous day. It was a physics book. Looks like he was reading Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin.

That little news nugget sent the book’s Amazon sales rank from 396,224 up to 2,268. That may be better than an Oprah appearance.

It's a general intro to physics book, so we don't know what Tiger was looking to find. What is the golf connection to quarks, antiquarks, string theory, or the Schrödinger's Cat paradox?  I haven't seen much speculation online. Now, after all that has happened since that crash, perhaps Tiger is thinking more about quantum and actual uncertainty or about how a career can go into a black holes or how to wiggle your way out of a spot using superfluidity.

“The obvious speculation is he saw the words ‘get a grip’ and thought it would help with his golf grip,” Gribbin joked to  The Wall Street Journal.

From the way the book's entry look on Amazon.com, I think it's out of print. If you have a copy on your university office shelf gathering dust, now is the time to sell it!