My pot-smoking days are decades behind me and will never be resurrected no matter what, but I still think the nation’s criminalization of marijuana is misguided. An example of how this black-and-white viewpoint creates error is the spill-over against hemp, a perfectly reasonable crop that is outlawed because of its bad-boy cousin.

In Vermont, some legislators [...]

While you hum that vapid song from "Hair"* which the headline lodged in your head, read this How the World Works post, which is based on this paper, which argues that post-Industrial Revolution humanity has made such huge changes to the global environment that it would be appropriate to christen this as a new epcoh [...]

My Telegraph column this week talks about a UMass-Lowell professor who’s named a score or so. They’re all microscopic worms like the Acanthodsys show here, but let’s not get species-ist, OK?
He’s doing his work as part of a Smithsonian Institute project called "Consortium for the Barcode of Life," which identifies species via a snippet of [...]

Manchester police say thieves know to break into cars, looking for hidden GPS units, by the residue left on the windshield from the suction cups that hold them in place.
Finally, I have a good response when somebody says I should clean up my messy car. Now, if I just owned a GPS unit …

A couple of Dartmouth researchers counting words and themes from published speeches of the presidential candidates to bring some quantification to political analysis. Here’s their paper (in PDF) and here’s the university’s press release.
This is the conclusion I thought was most interesting. It says Edwards and Romney were much more critical of their opponents than [...]

As was inevitable: VMware stock fell one-third yesterday because its growth has become less meteoric, says the Globe. Will last November’s $1.4 billion sale of New Hampshire’s EqualLogic be looked back on the high point of the "vm" bubble? (UPDATE: U-L story on the completion of the sale.)
Virtualization is software that lets one computer [...]

Not much tech here, aside from the wild mistrust of All Things Diebold, but as the hand recount of the Jan. 8 presidential primary finds nothing interesting I thought it was time for a final wrapup. There’s one conclusions all can agree on: The justifiable suspicion raised over electronic voting machines (not the optical ones [...]

So says New Hampshire Fish & Game, reporting the results of the 2008 National Mid-winter Bald Eagle Survey during two weeks in January. A record high total of 67 blad eagles were spotted in the state - including 59 (30 adults, 29 immatures) observed on Survey Day, Jan. 12, which is 30 percent more than [...]

The head of Ellacoya Networks of Merrimack says it won’t leave the state just because Lexington, Mass.-based Arbor Networks has bought them. Terms of the sale weren’t divulged.
Arbor is an online security firm, guarding networks against worms, viruses et. al.. Eight-year-old Ellacoya is a broadband "optimization" (ugh, what a word) firm that sells hardware and [...]

Or re-learn, in this case. My father visited over Christmas and found himself having trouble following his high-school grandkids’ math homework, so he just bought himself one of those lectures-on-DVD programs about calculus. He learned it decades ago, but you know how it goes. As long as he’s at it, he got the statistics [...]

The ultimate geek toy - Lego - turns 50 today. Forget Sputnik: That’s a semicentennial worth celibrating!

First web-surfing on airplanes, now WiFi on commuter rail! Or at least, says the Globe, that’s the idea: "Lieutenant Gov. Timothy Murray said the program is a first step towardimproving Internet access throughout the commuter rail system."
Augh! Commutes are about to get a lot worse.

GPS

I’ve been using GPS technology for quite a while now. As someone who is “positionally challenged”, I’ve found it invaluable for minimizing those “where the hell am I and what direction do I go in to find my out of this mess” moments. I should be better at finding my way around. As a young [...]

Pardon a rant here, but I’m annoyed by this story in the Washington Post about a new program that lets pre-cleared people zip through airport security lines. I’m annoyed because it brings back visions of my 1988 tourist visit to the Soviet Union; the most shocking thing to me was the way Communist party members [...]

Years ago, PC Magazine ran an pictorial of the world’s most famous geekcelebrities’ desktops. (Surprisingly, they forgot to include us, but we’re notbrooding.) Some desktops were messy with several icons strewn now here,now there across the screen. Others were orderly and nearly devoid oficons. The point of the pictorial was that you [...]