Links for 2009-08-26

  • “Personally, I don’t see any major college or professional sporting events being canceled as a result of H1N1,” said Bronson Hilliard, a spokesman for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where eight probable cases of the virus have recently been identified. “Right now, the virus is smaller in its impact than the seasonal influenza. I mean, every year we have the seasonal influenza, and we don’t cancel basketball games because of it. Still, if we were considering canceling an event, that decision would be made on health considerations for all and not on the revenue or size of the sport coming into play. We wouldn’t say, for example, we can cancel the lacrosse game but not the football game.””
  • “Dennis Cooper discovered something magical about the “statistically improbable phrases” that Amazon.com provides for its books. “What Amazon doesn’t tell you is that, in the case of fiction, their SIP feature does not merely hint at important plot elements but MAGICALLY DISTILLS THE ESSENCE OF THE WORK.” “
  • “At last year’s Space Elevator Conference, pioneer researcher Bradley Edwards said the first elevator could be built within 15 years, at a cost of $7 billion to $10 billion. The speakers at this year’s conference took a far more sober view of the financial and technical resources that would be required. “They’re not the rosy numbers that you hear,” said Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation, who manages two NASA-backed contests for space elevator technologies.”