Yahoo reports the Arctic ice cap will melt in 100 years.  Now that's special.  "Since 1978, the ice cap has shrunk by nearly three or four percent per decade.  At the turn of the century there will be no more ice at the North Pole in summer."  (Click pic at left for a cool satellite picture of the North pole.  Pun intended :)

Remember the Island Chronicles, about the journalists who moved from Los Angeles to Rarotonga?  Check out the First Day of School.

I know from personal experience how heart-breaking it is when you move your kids and they miss their friends.  You feel guilty, but what can you do?  And they don't understand why you can't just move back....

Naval writes about TruckWidth.  "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs speeding down the highway."  Yeah, Netflix is cool now, but history will record it as an intermediate technology, until broadband video services became mailstream.

Speaking of digital threats to traditional media (and we most emphatically were, that's what Netflix represents), the RIAA can now worry about A P2P outpost in a Palestinian refugee camp.  I am not making this up.

Meanwhile Microsoft premiered their online music store - in Europe, with partner OD2.  Surprise, surprise, it integrates with Windows Media Player 9.  The key metric is the price per track - $1.13 (translated from Euros).  About 2X too high for liftoff, IMHO.

BW has a great interview with Jim Clark, one of the founders of Netscape (and star of The New New Thing).  "I have been out of Silicon Valley for five or six years.  I go there for board meetings, then I split.  I find the place depressing...  We're now developing real estate in south Florida."  Hmmm... would that make real estate the Newer New Thing?  Or the Oldest New Thing :)

Here's something cool: the shiny balls mirror, from Danny Rozin, who also brought us the fabulous wooden mirror.  "Shiny Balls Mirror is a large physical object made of 900 hollow metal tubes with polished chrome balls placed in them...  Each hollow tube and shiny ball are one pixel in the display.  This pixel has the ability to change its brightness by moving the chrome ball in (darker) or out (brighter) of the tube."  Really cool!

Want to make a 3D display out of your laptop?  You can use the polarizing properties of LCDs and cellophane...  Excellent.

John Robb asks: has anyone used one of these new WiFi phones?  I haven't, but I bet I will - seems like a really good idea.  Especially combined with VOIP services like Vonage...

There's blogosphere buzz aboutNutch, an open-source search engine.  Business 2.0 says Watch Out Google!, but that's probably premature.

I continue messing around with eclipse, and ant.  Do people know building cross-platform Java applications for the desktop is this straightforward?  I don't think so.  They should!

I don't know what to call samorost?  A game?  Entertainment?  It is sort of a flash-based "Myst in Space"...  And it is way cool, check it out!  [ via Interconnected ]

It really seems like Flash has - finally - delivered on the uniquitous "write once, run anywhere" multimedia which Java promised when it first came out...