I've held off commenting on the Abu Ghraib photos and the Nick Berg video.  This reader email to Andrew Sullivan sums up my thoughts exactly.  "I see the true nature of what we are up against, and am more committed to winning this thing than ever before."

Okay, last night's Lakers - Spurs game was the best basketball game I've ever seen.  Three lead changes in the last 11 seconds?  Two in the last second?  Are you kidding me!?  Wow.  I'm happy the Lakers won, but lets face it; they escaped.  After winning most of the game handily, including especially the 3rd quarter, when they seem to find their high gear, they almost gave it away in the 4th.  Only 10 points in 15 minutes is not going to get it done (at one point they were 2 for 18 shooting).  Now the series comes back to L.A. - if the Lakers don't win game 6 at home, they're going to have a hard time winning game 7 in San Antonio.  I still think the winner of this series will go on to win the whole thing.

You just never know what you'll find out there - on the 'net, or in space; Astrobiology interviews Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of Meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.  Among other things he talks about the juxtaposition between religion and science, and the probability that we'll encounter alien life.  Fascinating!

Katie Hafner in the NYTimes: The Do-it-yourself Cineplex.  Or how to convert a garage into a home movie theater, on a budget of $3,000.  Excellent stuff.  [ via Dave Winer ]

BTW, I happen to believe that in the future all middle class homes will have a home movie theater, only it will be an "experience room".  All the walls and the ceiling will have full-length LCD panels, and the room will feature surround sound.  Interactive games which run in these rooms will be a huge business.

Why you should never put your picture on the Internet.  The Photoshopmanship here is impressive, and hilarious.  [ via Glenn Reynolds ]

Andy Budd takes An Objective Look at Table-based vs. CSS-based Design.  I'm a big fan of tables, unfashionable though they may be; they're easy to explain and use, and they work in all browsers.  Every time I try something cool with CSS, I discover it doesn't work the same way under IE as it does with Safari. 

I honestly think there's a snob factor operating here.  Web designers and other techies are drawn to the precision and complexity of a more complicated approach, but the good old simple way ends up with overwhelming adoption.  The same thing is happening with the RSS vs. Atom wars in syndication.  The more complicated technology is adopted by the cognoscenti (CSS, Atom), while the simpler technology is adopted by the masses (tables, RSS).

Speaking of RSS (I was); the RSS advisory board has a new look.  Alongside founder and longtime RSS advocate Dave Winer, the board now consists of Rogers Cadenhead, Adam Curry, and Andrew Grumet, replacing Brent Simmons and Jon Udell.  The function of this board is essentially conservative, it is not a standards body, and the RSS specification is frozen.  Meanwhile the IETF and the W3C are debating which standards body will represent Atom.

An RSS-related note; the RSS weblog interviews Luke Hutteman, author of SharpReader, which happens to be my RSS reader of choice.  "I'm nothappy with the standards wars and resulting competing formats.  A single, well specified, extensible spec would certainly have been preferable over the current situation of RSS vs. Atom.  Since Atom won't replace RSS, it will just be yet another syndication format to support."