Air’s latest ‘Talkie Walkie’ is deliciously pretty multilayered romantic pleas for love and romance, and for an end to living as if it were ‘just another day..’. It’s much more Pop than I was expecting, but it remains distinctly Air. Reviewed at Canada’s own Exclaim!

I’ve decided to take up the challenge and learn php, provided I can find a way to learn that suits me. These manuals and tutorials lay out everything too linear for me. Building knowledge on fact after fact, without a larger context, doesn’t work. I think I learn better through reverse engineering. I might try to reverse engineer WordPress since I legally can -it’s licensed under GNU - . My brother and I are talking about building a web application and php seems the way to go.

Every time I hear Ursula Rucker my ears open just a little wider and a thought process is engaged. She is solid. No waffling on anything she sings about. Listening to her latest ‘Silver or Lead’. This is powerful messaging, with more jazz sophistication than tracks I’ve previously heard her remixed on; Jazzanova, New York Future Lounge, 4 Hero.. - Interviewed at Canada’s own Hour.

Here’s a scathing critique of news writing in the US. It’s a play by play of war cheerleading and dissent hushing in influential newspapers. It shows the US press to be complicit in the US attack on an unaggressive country. The lack of any weapons of mass destruction or any credible evidence for attacking Iraq should be (aside from being incredibly shaming) a warning to the public to be skeptical when reading newspapers and listening to government speaches. - it won’t, articles like this one are too long for their attention span…The New York Review of Books: Now They Tell Us

Three versions of a US cross-border police chase of an American citizen into Canada that resulted in a Canadian woman’s death. - interesting that the American newspaper is the most informative.

Scientists Accuse White House of Distorting Facts:

Together, the two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

“Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front,” the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had “misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies.”

A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said today he had not seen the text of the scientists’ accusations. “But I can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science,” he said.

John Robb points out that work has some intrinsic value. It creates new social networks to a quote from Daniel Gilbert’s article at Edge: AFFECTIVE FORECASTING…OR…THE BIG WOMBASSA

..social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness—much more so than money is. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks. What’s interesting to me is that while money is weakly and complexly correlated with happiness, and social relationships are strongly and simply correlated with happiness, most of us spend most of our time trying to be happy by pursuing wealth. Why?

Individuals and societies don’t have the same fundamental need. Individuals want to be happy, and societies want individuals to consume. Most of us don’t feel personally responsible for stoking our country’s economic engine; we feel personally responsible for increasing our own well-being. These different goals present a real dilemma, and society cunningly solves it by teaching us that consumption will bring us happiness.

Society convinces us that what’s good for the economy is good for us too. This message is delivered to us by every magazine, television, newspaper, and billboard, at every bus stop, grocery store, and airport. It finds us in our cars, it’s made its way onto our clothing. Happiness, we learn, is just around the corner and it requires that we consume just one more thing. And then just one thing more after that. So we do, we find out that the happiness of consumption is thin and fleeting, and rather than thinking to ourselves, “Gosh, that promise of happiness-by-consumption was a lie,” we instead think, “Gosh, I must not have consumed enough and I probably need just one small upgrade to my stereo, car, wardrobe, or wife, and then I’ll be happy.”

We live in the shadow of a great lie, and by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have become irrelevant consumers, and a new generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great chain of shopping.

+ Honesty in British Columbia’s sex education, compared to our neighbours in Washington state, seems to be working very well. A commentary by Seattle Post Intelligencer editorial board makes mention that ‘just by going north to British Columbia, where health education is more comprehensive, teen birth rates drop off by 50 percent.’

+ In part of a Link Worthy (Web) Log link collection, John posted an interesting link worthy topic: Cuba, with quotes from Global Exchange’s reprint of a CBSNEWS.com article titled Critics Assail Fidel Castro’s ‘Sickening’ Grip on Hollywood Celebs’.

+ The Tyranny of Copyright., a NYTimes article. via Shanness’s brain dump. Talks about the evolution of copyright, and a future where potentially every experience will be preceeded by a financial transaction.

+ John Morgan’s music for the EA Sports game SSX3 is up for an award at DanceStar USA.

+ Bizzare Love Triangle looks like a cool feature length animated film. It seems to be in production still. [via NothingIsTrue]

+ From Moscow News

Campaigns: The Seamy Side. - Presidential elections can land you an apartment or - a conviction for hooliganism

recent State Duma election, Viktor Nikolaevich Kubyshkin, my next-door neighbor, bought a winter set of tires for his Moskvich sedan. His wife, Vera Pavlovna, bought herself a new pair of shoes and a fur hat. All residents in this section of the building know where the elderly couple’s extra income came from. Throughout last fall, the neighbors had been sweeping out election campaign leaflets promoting the Social Justice Party that the couple had been distributing.

+ Investigators for the record industry multi-nationals (Universal, Mushroom, EMI, Sony, Warner and BMG) raided the offices of Kazaa in Australia. Investigators have federal court permission to fish through 12 premises for evidence that would indicate possible copyright infringement. - Sharman Networks, makers of Kazaa, has already been released from liability for what their users do with it’s software, in both the US and the Netherlands. - The laws that normally protect corporations are working against corporations.

+ Don’t forget to use Ad-aware. It will ’scan your memory, registry, hard, removable and optical drives for known datamining, aggressive advertising, and tracking components, Ad-aware will provide the user with the confidence to surf the Internet knowing that their privacy will remain intact. Let Ad-aware protect your privacy.’

+ Problems with XP suddenly slowing down to a crawl when browsing folders containing video files? While in the middle of the slow down open your task manager (right click your bottom toolbar). Click Task Manger. Click the System tab. Does the graph show 100% CPU usage? Click the Processes tab. Does explorer.exe show a large two digit number under the CPU column? Check the folder you were browsing when the slow down started. Is there an .avi file in there? If so, that’s your problem. You need to edit your registry to change how windows deals with .avi files. To do that go to Start >> Run >> type in ‘Regedit’ >> this is your registry editing tool. ~ Be careful using this program. ~ Browse to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREClassesCLSID{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850D C73E}InProcServer32′ and delete the key. The problem is that XP reads entire files before allowing access to them. An improperly coded .avi file can’t be read and causes a CPU overload, slowing down the machine. Deleting the key prevents shmedia.dll from trying to read avi files. more via tweakxp.com