Wow.  AT&T sues eBay, PayPal over patent.  "The patent, according to an AT&T release announcing the suit, describes 'transactions in which a trusted intermediary securely processes payments over a communications system such as the Internet'."  Am I the only one who thinks this business process patent IP stuff is completely out of hand?

Want to know where candidates are getting their money?  Here you go, maps!  [ via Dave Winer ]

David Burbridge goes Once more into the breach, and counterfacts the message of IQ and Populations by arguing that international comparisons of IQ do not necessarily indicate genetic differences between populations.  David knows more about this than I do, but I still think there's ample evidence for the hereditability of IQ.  (At best he weakens the case.)  I do agree that "nation" is a bad unit for studying populations, given the immense social and genetic differences between people within some nations.

This is cool: New Whale Species Announced by Japanese Scientists. "According to the description in Nature, B. omurai has an adult body length of less than 40 feet (12 meters) long, a relatively broad and flat skull, and a mouth that tapers from its base."  The last new whale species was discovered in 1913!

Andrew Anker's version of Future Shock: Accelerating Acceleration.  A good summary and I found this interesting, "Early adopters will become a big enough group to serve on their own."  Bodes well for Tivo, for example.

And in fact, Loss shrinks, sign-ups grow for Tivo.  Are they crossing the chasm, or just milking early adopters?

Matt Webb is excited about Me++.  "A couple of things that really got me: Cyberspace bleeding into the physical world, the undermining of physical distance, and the new ethics that come out of this."  Excellent stuff.

Jens-Christian Fischer finds Interesting things happening on the AI front.  You never know when you'll meet a salacious 'bot in a Yahoo chat room...

Lore Sjöberg notes Science According to Google.  "By averaging the Web's consensus, we can state unequivocally that Jupiter has 15.7075 moons."  I love it!

Jon Udell discusses Working with Bayesian Categorizers.  Excellent stuff.  If you suffer from spam all you need to know is "buy Matador" (or some other Bayesian filter).  But if you are interested in probability distributions (e.g. if you work on image pattern recognition :), check out Jon's article...

[MPAA President] Jack Valenti Predicts Movies Online by 2005.  He obviously hasn't discovered MovieLink or CinemaNow (to say nothing of Kazaa); Ole predicts movies online *now*.

Do you have a geek on your Christmas list?  (Or are you a geek making a Christmas list?)  Then check out Scientific American's Sci/Tech gift list.  I like the binary clock :)  And of course there's always the USB watch...

CNet: .NET explained again - and again, and again...  I am not making this up.  Sigh.