My friend Sam, who lives around the corner, wrote earlier in the week, “Saturday night Babs Streisand is giving a one time only night at the Village Vangard where she got her start. Can you imagine?” It was her first time back to the club in 48 years: Max Gordon, late owner of the Village Vanguard, liked to tell the possibly exaggerated story of the “little pisher” who hung around the club in 1961, pestering him for a chance to perform. He flicked her away for weeks, but when his...

Bo Peabody in the WaPo: I launched the social networking site Tripod in 1995. By 1998, it was the eighth-largest site on the Web. But Tripod was never a successful business. Social networks aren’t great places to advertise. You can’t charge users for their services. And they never gain enough momentum to survive in the stock market. Indeed, no social network has ever made it as a public company. The standard social networking business model relies heavily on advertising. As millions...

Following up my Kurzweil Was Right post from the other day, The NYTimes today reports on an experiment testing whether electrodes implanted in the eye can restore sight. No miracle cure, and it doesn’t work for glaucoma, the artificial retina produces the sensation of sight. It draws on cochlear implants for the deaf and is partly financed by a cochlear implant maker: The project, involving patients in the United States, Mexico and Europe, is part of a burst of recent research aimed at one...

Philip B. Corbett, the NYTimes deputy news editor, is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. Says he: The folks at Adobe Systems Inc. remind us that “Photoshop” is a registered trademark referring to Adobe’s “digital imaging software products and related services.” It is not, they note, a generic term, and should not be used as a verb to describe the general process of digitally manipulating photographs. As usual in these cases, their proposed alternatives — for instance, “editing...

I have never been a believer in the value of flexible spending accounts. The Baucus Bill calls for setting a $2,500 annual limit on what people can set aside in an FSA, among other restrictions. Ron Leiber reports that “a not-quite grass-roots effort has sprung up, led by companies that administer flexible spending accounts,” to advocate for them. I’ve fought with one of those companies, SHPS, and still carry the raw animosity for it. With that I quote only Leiber’s discussion...

Trending on Twitter, Watch Out, Segway; Honda’s New Personal Transit Device Could Be Next Big Thing: It’s called the U3-X and most people think it looks like a space-age unicycle. And it’s actually fairly striking in its ability to move not just forward and backwards but sideways and diagonally, too. Top speed is 3.7 mph, which for most people would be a power walking pace. The device moves in whatever direction its user leans towards. The Brits are all over this… reports...

That dust storm that blanketed a huge swath of Australia also gave birth to an instant magazine: Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud. So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital...

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2019 we will all be able to experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to our retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), we will be able to remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet. These special contact lenses (available also as eyeglasses) will deliver “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” in three different...

TPMDC’s Eric Kleefeld summarizes findings in a new national survey from Public Policy Polling: The poll found that only 59% of voters believe that President Obama was born in the United States, with 23% saying he was not, and 18% undecided. Among Republicans only, a 42% Birther plurality say he was not born here, 37% say he was, and 22% are undecided. As for the left, check out this question: “Do you think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he...

At the end of today’s Good Morning America story on Gaddafi’s tent, anchor Diane Sawyer observed, “I’ve been in Gaddafi’s tent. In Libya. And it’s perfumed, you should know.” I guess that’s why we pay her the big bucks. And perhaps that’s what’s wrong with television news, says Michael Massing: While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire...

The big tech news Monday was that Netflix announced a winner in its infamous contest to improve the accuracy of its recommendation algorithm, Cinematch, by 10 percent. The $1 million Netflix Prize was offered three years ago. The race ended in a mathematically statistical tie. Under the contest’s complex rules the winners beat the second place team by only 23 minutes: The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers...

The Center for Class Action Fairness: Costco, along with other fuel retailers, has been sued over the way it measures gallons of fuel in some states. The putative class plaintiffs have settled the case–for zero dollars for the class, and ten million dollars for the attorneys… If you also find the settlement objectionable, and are looking for an attorney to assist you with your objection, please do not hesitate to contact me. Via Ted Frank.

From ReadWriteWeb, In Exactly 100 Words: The Real-Time Web is a paradigm based on pushing information to users as soon as it’s available – instead of requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates. It can be enabled in many different ways and can require a different technical architecture. It’s being implemented in social networking, search, news and elsewhere – making those experiences more like Instant Messaging and facilitating unpredictable...

The other day Matthew Yglesias pointed to the Treehugger for a good summary of a new report finding Contraception Five Times Less Expensive Than Low-Carbon Technology in Combating Climate Change: The report concludes that when taken purely as a method of reducing carbon emissions, family planning is far more cost-effective than the current leading low-carbon technologies. Between 2010 and 2050 each $7 spent on basic family planning can reduce emissions more than a ton; to achieve that same level...

Some areas in this region of climate change skeptics have received as much as 20″ of rain since Friday. Three Interstates are closed. There are detours around detours. There have been six deaths of drivers swept off roads by water. And a 2-year-old was swept out of his father’s arms in the rushing current: Just months ago the region was suffering from a massive, two-year drought that left rivers and lakes more than a dozen feet below average… Meteorologists said the rain is caused...

This is all over the blogosphere today. It’s ridiculous on it’s face. Do we agree? The speaker is Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) chief of staff Michael Schwartz. His topic is “the new masculinity” in a breakout session at the Values Voter Summit on Saturday. Andrew Sullivan says, “His interlocutor is Pat Fagan, of Heritage, who once described using contraception as turning heterosexual sex gay.” Our own Michael Stickings calls Schwartz The Craziest Conservative of the...

In recent weeks a friend has been suffering a severe bout of asthma. With him in mind I perked up when I heard the story of Jasper Lawrence — “a modern-day entrepreneur whose passion for hookworms stems from lifelong battles with allergies and asthma” — in this fascinating Radio Lab hour on parasites. Lawrence believes he has been able to keep his asthma and severe allergies in complete check through the use of hookworms as a Helminthic therapy. He now harvests hookworms from...

And not even 1 calorie per hit. From CBS Sunday Morning and The Tomorrow Show. Mo Rocca on the past and future of candy… RELATED: Sweet Old World, The humble origins of American candy dynasties.

Electric cars are quiet. That’s a potential problem for pedestrians and cyclists. The LATimes: Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a “beautiful and futuristic” noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or “spinners” — that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller based on a Philip K. Dick science fiction novel. “We decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make...

If you, like me, missed Micheal Pollan’s OpEd in the NYTimes last week, it’s worth a read: No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still...

Georgia congressmen Sanford Bishop and David Scott are both ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats. And both are being put to the test by the raging health care debate. McClatchy Newspapers: While both men say they’re comfortable balancing the fiscal conservatism and strong support for the military that the Blue Dog Coalition advocates with the black caucus’s socially progressive platform — which includes pushing for a strong public health option — the health care debate has made it tough for them...

Happy Friday! A collection of kisses from the Boston Globe: A kiss – a simple act that can convey a diverse array of meanings. A kiss can be intimate and private, or meant for public display, it can convey love and affection, or simply provide comfort. Its use as a greeting is under fire in our current climate of H1N1 fear, as the French government has begun encouraging citizens to forgo “la bise”, their traditional cheek-to-cheek kiss, for health reasons. Gathered here are 33...

ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar says of the device: It’ll be “bigger than Facebook.” It grows: No real animals were hurt during the filming! When I’m an old codger I expect a relational robot will watch over me; he’ll be my friend, bring me my pills, take my blood pressure and call 911 in an emergency. Pishevar’s TechCrunch visit was in reaction to being dissed by Michael Arrington for not dreaming big enough: In my humble opinion (which was shared by one of the...

Max Cleland’s new book, Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed, and Karl Rove, has an October 6 publication date. The AJC’s Political Insider, Jim Galloway, has been paging through it: Cleland rose in Georgia politics in large part because of that irrepressible grin and a persona that beamed indefatigable optimism. No little grenade was going to stop him. “Heart of a Patriot” (Simon & Schuster, $26) has much of the dark stuff that “Strong at...

David Hume Kennerly sees fakery: The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line — “Is Your Baby Racist?” — should have included a sub-head, “Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?” Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something...