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Via Eolake Stobblehouse: David Pogue and CBS have a video story on the TED conference:

I’ve blogged about TED several times … It’s a truly outlook-changing four days of talks, each 18 minutes long, from experts in every field of human endeavor — much more than Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED).

Among the participants in Pogue’s video piece are cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, astronomer Cliff Stoll, better known as the author of The Cuckoo’s Egg, and musician Peter Gabriel.

You can watch or download videos of some of the TEDTalks. I haven’t done much exploring, but it looks worth checking out.

When Richard Nixon died in 1994, there were demonstrators outside his funeral.

I never cared much for Mr. Nixon, but the idea of protesters picketing a funeral just seemed disgusting. “He’s dead, you morons! It’s over!”

Oh, but that was a more innocent time, and I was young and idealistic. Now we know that it’s never over, and death is only another opportunity to pick a fight.

An anti-gay minister from Kansas has gotten himself a lot of publicity by traveling around the country and protesting outside funerals — including the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

James Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the den.

Nearly three weeks after James Brown’s funeral, the “Godfather of Soul” is yet to be buried, and his former partner is contesting his will in a bid to receive half of his estate.

An old-time rock-n-roll star makes a comeback.

The son of “the Big Bopper” has hired a forensic anthropologist to try to answer questions about how his father died in the 1959 plane crash that also took the lives of famous rock-and-rollers Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.

Bush signs a law to evict a dead veteran from Arlington National Cemetery.

The remains of a man convicted of murdering an elderly Hagerstown, Md., couple will be removed from Arlington National Cemetery as part of a bill signed into law by President Bush. …

The bill … requires the Secretary of the Army to remove the cremated ashes of Russell Wayne Wagner, who was convicted of murdering Daniel Davis, 84, and Wilda Davis, 80, in 1994. …

An Army private who served during the Vietnam War and was honorably discharged in 1972, Wagner was eligible for parole at the time of his death, which made him eligible for an Arlington service. He was buried with honors in August 2005.

Even in Rome:

The doors at the neighborhood church remained firmly shut … while mourners stood on the square outside at a lay funeral for a paralyzed man who had a doctor disconnect his respirator. Hundreds kissed his coffin and tossed flowers on it.

The Roman Catholic Church denied Piergiorgio Welby a religious ceremony on the grounds that he sought to end his own life…

When I was young, the old folks would sometimes scold me about goofing off and say, “There’ll be rest enough in the grave!” Hah!

The final week of 2006 brought us the deaths of James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein and the 3000th uniformed American to be killed in Iraq.

Death was really big in 2006.

Every December, the year-in-review pieces seem premature to me. Isn’t it possible that the “defining moment” of a year could happen in the final days, or even the final minutes of the year?

But now it’s January. Now we have perspective on 2006.

Slate has the Bill of Wrongs — their picks for the top ten civil liberties violations of 2006. There were so many to choose from.

It starts with the president’s complaints about “activist judges,” and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts’ authority to hear whole classes of cases–most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees–almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties.

That, of course, is exactly why they attack the courts.

PERRspectives has the Top 10 GOP Sound Bites of 2006:

Smash hits with a great beat you could dance to like George Bush’s thumping “Stay the Course” and Tony Snow’s haunting “Adapting to Win” are gone from the charts altogether. While the RNC classic “Cut and Run (No Surrender)” is still hanging on at #7, newer melancholy tunes from the President’s team, including “New Way Forward” (#1), “Surge” (#2) and “Fresh Eyes” (#4) now top the charts.

Soon Bush will announce his new way forward. My prediction: new lyrics, but the song remains the same.

Via Liberal Oasis, DMIBlog looks at some of the best and worst in public policy. Some of the worst:

This year, Congress tried to tie a modest increase in the minimum wage to a cut in the Estate Tax, otherwise known as the Paris Hilton tax. … It didn’t pass, but legislation to use $21.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to build a fence on the Mexican border that won’t do a damned thing to address the real reasons that immigrants come here and stay here, did. The Bush administration made it harder for women on public assistance to count higher education as workfare credits, even though a college education is proven to be the most effective way of moving women on welfare out of poverty permanently. The White House gave nurses “promotions,” making the ineligible for union membership (thanks!), while also requiring parents to present proof that their children are United States citizens before qualifying them for Medicaid. And, unfortunately, here in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg continued down a path of making it as difficult as possible for sick Ground Zero heroes – the first responders and clean-up workers – to file claims for lost wages and medical bills, a microcosm of the larger ways in which access to justice is being cut off for millions of injured Americans.

MAD magazine has its own list of the 20 Dumbest People, Events & Things of 2006. Some of it’s pretty juvenile — what did you expect from MAD? — but some of it stings. They include the Cheney hunting accident (“You’ll be blown away!”), Floyd Landis (“Pedaling Dope”), Ann Coulter’s Basest Instinct, and Bush’s Assault on the Constitution, illustrated with a Pirates of the Constitution poster. Their #1 pick is the Iraq War (Mish-mosh Accomplished), illustrated with a fake ad for “The Iraqi Quagmire Chess Set”:

OUR GUARANTEE:

With Quagmire Chess™ “the violent last throes” will go on forever.

I don’t think we should be playing this game.

John Hodgman, the Daily Show’s “resident expert,” and the PC in those new Macintosh ads, is also the author of a book, The Areas of My Expertise. There’s an audiobook version of the book available on CD, and for download from Apple’s iTunes Store.

Now, via Boing Boing, here’s the part that’s hard to believe:

I just discovered that the audio version of John Hodgman’s excellent The Areas of My Expertise (read by the author), which I’m reading and loving right now, is available FREE on iTunes! Do get it now, while you can.

Aww… it’s abridged. Only six hours and 58 minutes. Just like the CD. Obviously, the whole audiobook thing is just a clever ploy to get me to buy the book.

Still, can’t beat the price. I’m guessing it’s a limited time offer, so hurry!

A few years ago, I got a very formal-looking letter from Marquis Who’s Who, the publishers of the famous directories of prominent people.

They were considering me for inclusion in Who’s Who in America, the letter said, and they sent along a little questionnaire to help fill out my biographical details.

“They must have the wrong guy,” I thought. But I do have an elevated opinion of myself, so for a while I wracked my brain, trying to think just what I had done to merit consideration for Who’s Who. I had a pretty good job, high enough in the pecking order that my boss’s boss would surely have been in Who’s Who. But me? I just couldn’t see it.

Near the end of the letter, Marquis explained how I could buy my own copy of Who’s Who in America. (I had been freeloading for years, using the library’s copy.) The price might have been chump change to a prominent person, but I certainly wasn’t prominent enough. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “It’s a profit deal!”

I was reminded of this when I learned that I have been named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year.” I’ll bet you’re jealous, huh?

It’s a great honor, of course, but it’s not going to make me buy the magazine. Not when I can just go down to the library and make photocopies.

InfoWorld blogger Bob Lewis on confidence vs. arrogance:

In general, I figure confident people are comfortable acknowledging the good ideas and insights of others, where arrogant people, never being wrong, rarely acknowledge that anyone with a different perspective is ever right … and usually won’t have any basis for evaluation, since they rarely waste their time listening to anyone else.

Try this on for size: Confidant people figure they’re one of the capable people in the room. Arrogant people each figure he or she is the only capable person in the room.

Uh oh…

I know a little something about computers. Maybe I should volunteer to help CNN fix this persistent bug in their polling software. Time and again, their “QuickVote” polls seem to be missing at least one option. In this case, for example, where’s the “It’s none of my business” option?

I’ve been using Macintosh computers since about 1989, I think, and I’m an unabashed fan. Sometimes when I hold forth about the glories of the Mac, I see eyes rolling and resigned, weary sighs from my rapt listeners, and I wonder: Am I wrong? Am I crazy? Do I carry this thing too far?

It’s a source of comfort to me when I see something like this, from The Omni Group blog:

Michaela brought in some pillows that her friend Roberto spent the last several months crafting for her. Mac nerds can’t be content with a row of regular pillows on the couch, no, no way. Our decor needs to resemble graphical user interfaces whenever possible! Behold, Michaela’s dock in cushiony fabric form!

Or this hand-made oak clock, called the Macintock.

See? I’m not the most obsessive person in the world. Really!

Or maybe it’s just that I’m really, really lazy, and making those things looks too much like work.

The New York Times remembers Pearl Harbor with “a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II“:

In 1942, Robert Trumbull, The Times’s correspondent at Pearl Harbor, detailed the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack. These articles did not run because of wartime censorship, and are available to the public for the first time.

The articles are in a series of PDF files, which show images of the reporter’s typed pages. There are also excerpts of Trumbull’s reports as normal web pages.

You can make George W. Bush look talented, but it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work:

Over on the Al Franken Show’s blog, Eric Hananoki asks the uncivil question:

What should we call the Iraq war if we refuse to call it a “civil war”?

E.g. “that thing over there.”

There’s a link where readers can submit their suggestions.

Some of the responses are in a later post. A few of my favorites:

Mark M = Ongoing celebratory gunfire

Alex C = Cross Cultural Exchange of Gunfire

Jim B = CSI – Everywhere

There are also suggestions in the comments of both posts. One commenter suggested “That thing we do.” Before you venture into the comments, be warned: there’s some strong language there.

Maybe I’ve been paying too much attention to the ongoing saga of If I Did It.

That’s the title of O.J. Simpson’s book and TV special, in which he talks about the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in June 1994. Nicole was O.J.’s ex-wife and the mother of two of his children. She was butchered just outside her house while the two children slept inside. Goldman, apparently returning a pair of glasses Nicole had forgotten at a restaurant earlier that evening, was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and was stabbed over and over and over.

In If I Did It, O.J. tells just how the two murders would have happened if he had done them, which he didn’t, but if he had, it would have been like this.

What an imagination!

This week, responding to public outrage, Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on both the book and the TV special, even though his companies had reportedly already paid Simpson $3.5 million for them.

As I mentioned, I’ve been following this closely. I wonder how this cancellation will affect my own books. See, I’ve been working on a series of detective adventures featuring O.J. Simpson.

After the criminal trial, Simpson famously pledged that he would never rest until he had tracked down the real killers. Nobody took him seriously. Not long after the trial, when Simpson was seen playing golf, Jay Leno joked, “He must suspect a caddy.”

In fact, Simpson is relentless in pursuit, and that’s the premise of my novels, with the series title “O.J. Simpson, Manhunter.”

See, I happen to know that ever since the murders, no matter where the killer has gone, O.J. Simpson has always been right there.

Knowing that, I really don’t know how the killer sleeps at night.

A Connecticut woman tried a unique court-packing scheme:

Cookies mailed to the U.S. Supreme Court last year contained enough rat poison to kill all nine justices, retired member Sandra Day O’Connor said at a conference last week.

Barbara Joan March, a 60-year-old Connecticut woman, was sentenced last month to 15 years in prison. She sent 14 threatening letters in April 2005 — each with a baked good or piece of candy laced with rat poison — to a variety of federal officials: the nine Supreme Court justices; FBI Director Robert Mueller; his deputy; the chief of naval operations; the Air Force chief of staff and the chief of staff of the Army.

Any justice who had succumbed to March’s poisoned treats would have been replaced by a nominee picked by George W. Bush.

The letters did not seem to pose much of a real danger since the threatening note told the recipients the food was poisoned. In court papers submitted with the plea agreement, prosecutors said each of the envelopes contained a one-page typewritten letter stating either “I am” or “We are” followed by “going to kill you. This is poisoned.”

And nobody took even one little bite? But it looked so irresistable!

You know, something about Ms. March’s plan sounds awfully familiar. I can’t quite put my finger…

Quick! Call the FBI! We need to find out whether Don Rumsfeld helped plan this.

I’m not a football fan, but I feel as if I live right in the heart of darkness, just about a mile from the Ohio State University’s famed horseshoe-shaped football stadium.

Whenever there’s a home football game, the whole neighborhood goes into lockdown. Fans from all over take every single parking space for miles around the stadium and litter our yards with their cans and bottles. On nights before a really big game, it’s difficult to get any sleep. The revelers arrive early and make a lot of noise, blaring marching band fight songs and shouting “O-H! I-O!” all night long.

The biggest game of the year is always the Ohio State – Michigan game, a classic rivalry dating back to the early years of the 20th century. This year the game is bigger than ever, because both teams are undefeated, and polls rank Ohio State as #1 in the nation, and Michigan as #2. I just went out to get some lunch, and already High Street is at a virtual standstill.

The Ohio State – Michigan rivalry is often represented as a face-to-face showdown between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, even though it’s been many years since either man coached. While I was out getting lunch, I picked up a copy of a free local paper called Columbus Alive. Right about now, I’ll bet they’re wishing they could take back this cover.

Bo Schembechler died today while taping a TV show about tomorrow’s game.

Oh, it’s a miracle for sure! From Boing Boing:

I got up this morning, and looked out the window I look out for hours every day. I looked up at the birdfeeder to the spot where a limb was chopped off and saw Charles Darwin.

In the wake of this discovery, breathless rumors circled the globe that anyone who touched the bark of the tree experienced heightened powers of observation and logical reasoning. Science fans around the world made plans for a pilgrimage to the site. Most of the plans were called off as, one after another, the potential pilgrims realized, “Really, this is kinda stupid.”

Interest in the enormous figure of a Native American listening to an iPod, carved by ancient Martians in the hills near Medicine Hat in Canada — that continues unabated.