“Some machines have the patch installed and are experiencing no problems, while others can barely function. It appears this problem is caused by installing this patch on systems with Hewlett Packard’s Share-to-Web software, nVidia shell extension GUID’s, Kerio Personal Firewall, Roxio DragToDisc / Adaptec DirectCD shell extension, or SolidWorkds 3D CAD products shell extension. In addition to this information, the engineer I spoke with was nice enough to email me the current registry workarounds for each problem. I asked him for a URL to this information and he said he didn’t have one because they were working on a hotfix and had not posted this on the web. So I am. Here’s the workaround information provided to me to help resolve this issue…” (claydawg via digg)

One of America’s leading historians assesses George W. Bush. “In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a ‘failure.’ Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s ‘pursuit of disastrous policies.’ In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. ” — Sean Wilentz (Rolling Stone)

“Just anticipating a good laugh is enough to increase the level of feelgood hormones in your blood, a conference has heard.” (abc.net.au)

Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic building blocks of familiar natural shapes…

If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and mysteries.

Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for example. Why are they shaped the way that they are? Why did we come up with As, Ms and Zs and the other characters of the alphabet? And is there any underlying similarity between the many kinds of alphabet used on the planet?

To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other ‘abugidas’, which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words…

The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world.” (Telegraph.UK )