Riemann hypothesis may have been solved… for a cool $1 million:

“A mathematician at Purdue University claims to have come up with a proof for the Riemann hypothesis, often called the greatest unsolved math problem, though the work has yet to be peer-reviewed.” (CNET)

“What tricks will BushCo pull to attempt to win the election in November? Well, he’ll probably try something around or before October to swing or steal the vote. Welcome to October Surprise, where you can predict what will happen before the November 2004 election. Take the poll here.” Announcing the capture of Osama bin Laden is currently the leading contender, with around twice the votes as the next most popular alternative. My only question to the poll originator(s) — why are we only allowed to choose one??

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: “Christopher Ricks, the newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, is also the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, where he has a large and elegantly furnished office overlooking Storrow Drive, and he bikes to it every day from his house in Cambridge. The bookshelves contain a complete vellum-bound set of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and copies of the many books Mr. Ricks has himself written or edited — books about Keats, Milton, Beckett and T. S. Eliot; editions of Tennyson, Housman and Eliot’s early poems; anthologies of Victorian verse and of English poetry from the anonymous author of “Sumer is icumen in” to Seamus Heaney. In a corner by the desk there is also a boom box. Mr. Ricks brings this to lectures when he wants to talk about another of his favorite poets: Bob Dylan.

Mr. Ricks, who is 70 and was born in Britain and educated at Oxford, is a professor’s professor, a don’s don. He is courtly, charming and fond of wicked anecdotes about academic backbiting. He is also immensely learned. It’s a tossup whether he or Harold Bloom knows more English verse by heart, but Mr. Ricks surely knows more Led Zeppelin lyrics than Mr. Bloom does, and can recite them on request. His love of Mr. Dylan’s work is not an affectation, though — the pathetic impersonation of an old prof trying to prove how cool he is — but a genuine passion. He has just added to the not inconsiderable body of Dylan scholarship with a book of his own, his longest to date, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press), which devotes some 500 pages to a close analysis, line by line sometimes, of the master’s greatest hits.” (New York Times )

“Although it won’t ship until July, the Express has already lured many gadget fiends into placing early orders. Apple won’t talk numbers, but according to one of the leading online Mac retailers, CDW MacWarehouse, advance orders for Express base stations have been lighting up their Web site.

Clearly, Express’ primary allure is moving digital music off the desktop and into the living room, the office, or wherever a user happens to be. A plethora of consumer-electronics and PC vendors have introduced products trying to do more or less what Apple seeks to do with the AirPort. But, in most cases, configuration remains tricky and a stumbling block for Joe Public.

That usability gap is where the Express truly shines. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Apple has just added some new twists to make the router an extension of the already popular iTunes and iPod famly. A new piece of software, AirTunes, promises seamless synching between a computer — PC or Mac — and any Wi-Fi-ready speakers within range via the Express router.” (BusinessWeek)

“It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid accountability.” — Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch (Washington Post)

Said to Be ‘Victim of Ancient Albanian Jinx’: “While heavyweight pundits ponder the ‘real reasons’ behind CIA director George Tenet’s sudden resignation, a Tirana newspaper on Friday offered a typically whimsical explanation; he fell victim to an ancient Albanian curse.

The Korrieri daily said the CIA chief’s resignation on Thursday fell a day before he had been due to visit Albania.

‘If he had not planned a visit to Albania, probably he would have not been struck by the curse of the Pojan jinx,’ editor Alfred Peza said in his column, citing a supposed evil spirit that jinxed the villagers of Pojan back in the mists of time.

Tenet was clearly felled by the jinx, wrote Peza, as were the late Soviet Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, former West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and others who were demoted or quit after becoming involved with Albania.” (Yahoo! News)

New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV: “TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.” (New York Times)