1) 13pt | 13 Days: The World Trade Center: Type the description here.

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2) Discover Current Issue : Cow Parts: To reconstruct the complete cow, you would need to gather countless products from an astonishing array of industries. Some are still close to agriculture— processed animal feed and pet food as well as garden supplies such as blood and bonemeal. But other products have no apparent connection with farming, such as jet engine lubricants and brake fluid from bovine fatty acids, which are derived from tallow, which is itself produced from fat and bone.

The number of uses for beef by-products was once largely a matter of curiosity, of interest mainly to the manufacturers and to renderers. But in Great Britain, the appearance of BSE in the mid-1980s created a critical need for an inventory of beef by-products and their uses to identify which specific cow parts should be banned for use as human food and in animal feeds and fertilizers. The process was slowed by administrative wrangling, so 10 years passed from the time BSE was discovered and the audit was completed. But early in the investigation, scientists identified the cow parts that might carry the risk of contaminating farmers, slaughterhouse workers, employees at rendering plants, butchers, and the public. The most infectious organs— where BSE prions cluster— are the brain and spinal cord, followed, on a less infectious level, by the pineal, pituitary, and adrenal glands, spleen, tonsils, placenta, lymph nodes, ileum, part of the colon, dura mater, and cerebrospinal fluid. Less infectious still are the distal colon, nasal mucosa, sciatic nerve, bone marrow, liver, lung, pancreas, and thymus gland.

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3) Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM?: But what if the two – blogging and KM – got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise? Consider:

-- If experts could use blogging software that was part of their normal work environment, probably part of their browser, to note and annotate web sites they wanted to share as part of their area of expertise (note the expert decides what to share, avoiding privacy problems);

world wide wisdom

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4) How To Tell If Your Head's About To Blow Up: Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis

Although HCE is very rare, it can kill. Dr. Martinenko says knowing you have the condition can greatly improve your odds of surviving it. A "yes" answer to any three of the following seven questions could mean that you have HCE:

1. Does your head sometimes ache when you think too hard? (Head pain can indicate overloaded brain circuits.)
2. Do you ever hear a faint ringing or humming sound in your ears? (It could be the sound of electricity in the skull cavity.)
3. Do you sometimes find yourself unable to get a thought out of your head? (This is a possible sign of too much electrical activity in the cerebral cortex.)
4. Do you spend more than five hours a day reading, balancing your checkbook, or other thoughtful activity? (A common symptom of HCE is a tendency to over-use the brain.)
5. When you get angry or frustrated do you feel pressure in your temples? (Friends of people who died of HCE say the victims often complained of head pressure in times of strong emotion.)
6. Do you ever overeat on ice cream, doughnuts and other sweets? (A craving for sugar is typical of people with too much electrical pressure in the cranium.)
7. Do you tend to analyze yourself too much? (HCE sufferers are often introspective, "over-thinking" their lives.)

5) O\'Reilly Network: Why Michael Schwern is not a Java programmer [July 20, 2001]: I recently had the pleasure (?) of teaching Perl to a 14-year-old. I started with ``Hello, World'' ('This is how you print something and run a program'), moved onto conditional logic ('This is how you print something if something else happens') and then to loops ('This is how you print something a bunch of times'), etc. Each lesson contained only one or two new concepts. Each concept produced a concrete result. Each new lesson built off the last. All with a minimum of hand-waving. Nit picking? Possibly, but it is a symptom of deeper problems. To do anything in Java, even simple things, you've got to roll out all these conceptual cannons. You can't do one-liners in Java (assuming a sufficiently short line). The upshot of that is if you know Java you'll have to learn another language for quick tasks. For some, this isn't a problem, but I'm lazy. I like having one language which handles the vast majority of my daily tasks.

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6) NewsBruiser: NewsBruiser is a simple but full-featured weblog management system. It is almost entirely self-contained, requiring nothing but SSI and Python (1.5.6 or greater) to be happy.

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7) Intermittent Aberrations: Can Mature Companies Innovate?: A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration.

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