Bug sets windows shaking: a British-designed gadget the size of a computer mouse turns any smooth hard surface into a loudspeaker. It’ll plug into a personal audio device with a regular phone plug. They’re working on a bluetooth interface for cell phones. You can use two in your car to turn the car windows into speakers, if you’re not considerate enough to care about sharing your music with everyone you’re passing by. You can even attach it to the back of your skull. BBC

EU says terror war must respect human rights:

“The European Union has told the United Nations’ top human rights body the battle against terrorism must respect the rule of law.

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique has told the UN Human Rights Commission that countries cannot allow terrorism the victory of abandoning principles.

Mr Pique also said the EU would make it a top priority this year to push for the elimination of the death penalty worldwide.

“Ananova

Mickey Kaus: Campaign-finance reform could turn him into a kingmaker. Slate

Sign the petition: “We, the undersigned, in the interest of international harmony and seeking an end to all violence in this world, do hereby call on the president of the United States, George W. Bush, to find a fully consenting adult intern to service his sexual needs…” [via boing boing]

A helicopter attack on a car-sized wasp’s nest 65 feet above the ground in the New Zealand countryside has probably failed to destroy the nest. Ananova [via boing boing]

Targeted Serendipity: a Fast Company feature — among many these days — about the weblogging phenomenon and the weblogging community, but this one prominently features weblogger Rebecca Blood and her forthcoming book, The Weblog Handbook.

“Automatic Text Summarization is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an interdisciplinary area utilising research in Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics, and Cognitive Science. Automatic Text Summarization, attempts to produce computer systems that summarise textual documents. This website contains a number of resourses primarily aimed at those who are new to text summarization. Hopefully, the material in this website will give the reader an understanding of the problem behind text summarization, a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art systems in both academic and industrial circles, as well as a list of published papers to read, most of which can be found in this website.”

U.S. Intelligence and the Cult of the Confidence Man: “The Confidence Man has long huckstered for U.S. intelligence agencies. Keep that in mind in today’s debates about government intelligence, writes Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh.” Chronicle of Higher Education

In a Skinhead’s Tale, a Picture of Both Hate and Love

On the subway, a muscular young man with a shaved head steps on the toes of a college student wearing a yarmulke and glasses. Outside, the skinhead grabs his book, knocks him down and beats him. The scene has the eerie familiarity of a nightmare, but for one jarring detail. “Get up, yeshiva bucher,” the attacker yells at his fallen prey. How many skinheads know enough Yiddish to employ the favored locution for a shy, unworldly boy?

The scene is from The Believer, a film, based on a true story, about an Orthodox youth who becomes a neo-Nazi leader. “When people would ask me, ‘What’s your film about’?” Henry Bean, the 56-year-old writer and director of “The Believer,” said recently over a bagel (naturally) in a New York coffee shop, “I’d say, `It’s about a Jewish neo-Nazi. But it’s not your typical Jewish neo-Nazi movie’.”

NY Times

Meaning?

“It’s not just about some guy eaten up with self-loathing and wanting to kill people,” he explained. “The film is also my love poem to my religion.”

Paul Krugman: Bad Medicine: “Think of it as the collision between an irresistible force (the growing cost of health care) and an immovable object (the determination of America’s conservative movement to downsize government). For the moment the Bush administration and its allies still won’t admit that there is any conflict between their promises to retirees and their small-government ideology. But we’re already past the stage where this conflict can be hidden with fudged numbers. The effort to live within unrealistically low targets for Medicare expenses has already translated into unrealistically low payments to health-care providers. And it gets worse from here.” NY Times