Why are all these Fox News ads appearing here? Does Google think I want to look at Bill O’Reilly’s face? (I don’t, unless it’s in a coffin.)

Of course, mentioning him here will probably cause even more ads to appear, gendering more snide comments from Yours Truly, causing more ads… it’s like a sick game of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

So apparently Chief Justice John Roberts could officially be said to have epilepsy. That means he’ll need to weigh the possibility of more seizures against the side effects of anti-epilepsy drugs. Those include, apparently, “irritability, mental slowing and forgetfulness.” I don’t see the problem. He’s a Bush appointee, so would anyone know the difference?

The NAACP has weighed in on Michael Vick:

R.L. White, president of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the Atlanta Falcons quarterback has been vilified by animal rights groups, talk radio and the news media and prematurely punished by his team and corporate sponsors.

“If Mr. Vick is guilty, he should pay for his crime, but to treat him as he is being treated now is also a crime,” White said at a news conference. “Be restrained in your premature judgment until the legal process is completed.”

I assume the organization urged the same restraint, and also cautioned against a rush to judgement, during the Duke lacrosse players fiasco case earlier this year. Right?

Read the whole story at Snopes.

Money quote: “I saw that his leg was completely open. It was ripped open. You could see everything inside. And so we knew we had a problem…”

If you’re a woman in the habit of giving away your magazines when you’re done reading them, especially to your officemates, there’s something you should think about:

If you dog-eared an article about how to overcome your problem having orgasms, it’s probably a good idea not to include that issue with those you give away. That kind of stuff tends to spread through an office pretty quickly.

I’m just sayin’.

One of the annoying things about Windows Vista (and there are plenty) is that every now and then I’ll run into a file that doesn’t want to to be deleted. Vista tells me I need permission to do that. As I am a god on my computer — all right, an Administrator — I shouldn’t have to deal with that.

It really got annoying when I wanted to delete a bunch of Vista fonts that were absolutely useless. Nyala? BatangChe? SimSun?

Some went to their deaths quietly, but others stubbornly refused to be taken out.

Finally, I found the answer with a neat Vista command line that basically turns those font files (or, really, any files) into my willing slaves, willing to throw themselves to their deaths on my command.

I simply ran the following commands, one after the other (as Administrator):

takeown /f c:\windows\fonts /r /d y

icacls c:\windows\fonts /grant administrators:F /t

After each one, a command-line dialog box opened, many things scrolled by, and then all was quiet. And when I went back to the fonts directory I was able to delete to my heart’s content.

I am writing this just in case someone searches on “removing Vista fonts.” In fact, those commands work for any Vista file or folder; just replace “c:\windows\fonts” with whatever you wanna take control of.

That is all.

I got a press release the other day, “Congressional support builds for publicly funded research.” And it’s about time. The scientific-journals market is a huge scam being paid for by taxpayers, while the publishers laugh, to be cliché, all the way to the bank.

And bank it they do.

Here’s how it works. Scientists get grant money, quite often from the federal government, to do their research. I.e., you and I are paying for it. I have no problem with that; you can argue over whether a particular project deserves funding, but overall, not being a Libertarian, I don’t take issue with the general idea of government-funded basic science.

But here’s where it gets ugly.

The currency of science is the paper. “Publish or perish” isn’t a catchphrase, it’s the way they live. Getting grant money and a good tenured position — really, getting ahead career-wise — depends on being published in a respected journal.

So the scientists send their papers out, pitching them to journals from the top of the heap (Nature, Science, etc.) on down. (The quality of a journal is measured by several things, including the “impact factor” of the papers it publishes — that is, how often they’re cited, and by whom. It’s not dissimilar to how Google does PageRank.)

When a journal accepts a paper for publication, it usually has editors on staff to do a basic clean up — making sure it follows standard notation, etc. Then it’s published to the Web and then in print.

And then libraries pay through the nose for those journals, whether we’re talking access to the Web sites or the actual printed copies.

That means universities have to pay to access the very research done by their scientists. Furthermore, that research was in may cases funded by taxpayers, who also have to pay to access it.

The release comes from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Here’s a snippet:

The House and Senate spending bills require that NIH-funded researchers deposit an electronic copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central online archive upon acceptance for publication in a journal. Articles would be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. 

But get this:

Under the current voluntary NIH Public Access Policy implemented in May 2005, individual investigators have deposited less than five percent of eligible manuscripts.

Shockingly, it seems, voluntary action on the part of these publishers isn’t working.

Why should it? It’s an incredible scam. I should know; I used to work for the American Chemical Society and was privy to some of the discussion.

These companies charge a premium for doing essentially a light edit on this work and putting it in a nice printed edition. The entire value the American Chemical Society or Elsevier or any of these publishers delivers is the brand name. And if you saw the location and amount of real estate the ACS owns in Washington DC, not to mention the salaries it pays its executives, you’d realize what a lucrative scam it is.

Some scientists (and many librarians) have complained about the setup for a long time, not surprisingly. Scientists are the ones who need access to those journals, and the last thing they want to hear is a librarian say, “Sorry, we don’t get that journal” because they couldn’t afford it.

The Public Library of Science was formed for this very reason. It charges scientists a nominal fee to publish their work (if it’s accepted; PLoS journals are also peer reviewed), but makes the papers accessible to anyone. It’s a great and proper model.

It’s taken Congress a long time to realize what’s going on, not the least because the ACS and other publishers have lobbyists on their payrolls. They want libraries to have to pay them for access to publicly funded work. But now, maybe, Congress will finally realize the breadth of the scam and demand that publicly funded research be made available to the people who paid for it.

I’ve been experimenting with and reading up on the idea of embedding news and info from other sources into a site (not necessarily this one, but a site in general). The idea is that I could make a mini Google News of sorts by pulling in links to specific content.

I’m able to do that thanks to Yahoo News, which not only lets you search the world’s news based on keywords, but also lets you save those searches as RSS feeds — the same technology that makes it easy to read blogs.

Another nifty piece of software is the venerable Magpie RSS. If you own your Web site (i.e., if you can edit the code directly), you can use Magpie RSS to scoop up any RSS feed and insert it into your page.

So instead of a blogroll, for example, I could have a blogroll with links to each blog’s latest entries. In this case, though, I simply searched for “roanoke” on Yahoo news and saved the result as an RSS feed, then used Magpie to insert it into my site.

I then did the same thing with Google News (which also allows you to save keyword searches as feeds), and then Technorati, which lets you see what bloggers are saying about something.

End result is a proof-of-concept page I created that’s a one-stop shop for news about, in this case, Roanoke.

Now, what to do with this, I’m not sure. But I like the idea of creating a site about something and being able to populate it with links to more content. Hmm.

I was thinking about newspapers.

I’ve written before that they are incredibly profitable businesses — in the top three or five market sectors in the world, right up there with pharmaceuticals, with an average profit margin of about 20 percent.

That’s huge; petroleum companies (your ExxonMobils and the like) have single-digit profit margins. They make a lot, but they spend a lot. Reporters are cheap.

All that said, newspapers certainly feel like they’re in trouble. Part of that comes from looking down the road. The 18 to 20-somethings that used to read the paper somewhat regularly aren’t interested, and that’s for several reasons worth noting.

1. They can get major news from just about anywhere: CNN, USA Today, ABC, NBC, CBS, and so on. Maybe one will have it a few minutes before another, but in general they all have the same stories. If something explodes, it doesn’t really matter which one you turn to.

2. Mainstream news sources are boring. Really. The style of your typical newspaper is bland, thanks in large part to much of it being written by the wire services. AP news is boring. Sure, it’s got your five Ws, but only rarely does a gem come out. It’s fine for giving people the basic info, but it’s not going to keep ’em coming back.

3. They just don’t care about local news. Despite the continuing efforts of the current administration, things in this country are pretty much just fine. So who cares whether the city council votes to increase the rates of downtown parking meters, or a new store is opening at the mall, or a local company just made a big sale to the military? Answer: Not most young people. If it doesn’t affect them directly, they couldn’t care less. If it does affect them directly, they’ll hear about it from friends. That’s the power of blogs and social networking sites — only one person needs to read about something and it can spread quickly.

Newspapers see this trend, and it worries them. They’re already being clobbered by the Internet left and right: Craigslist decimates classified-ad revenue when it comes to town. Mainstays like real estate and automotive ads are hurting big time, as more customers are turning to the Internet for information, where there are not only viable alternatives, but better ones. Why browse the newspaper for houses that went on the market two days ago, when Realtor.com will have today’s listings? So papers have to lower their ad rates to deal with the competition that didn’t exist a few years ago.

Hate your local paper? Here’s how to hurt it bad: Start an advertising material distribution service — that is, deliver advertising flyers door to door. They go by different names: “Circular distribution services” or “door to door ad delivery.” Check out HMG Distribution.

Companies, especially local grocery stores, pay a mint to the local newspaper to have their materials delivered to subscribers. When an ad distribution service comes to town, they can easily undercut the paper because they have much less overhead. Like Craigslist, these services are a nightmare for newspapers.

Inexpensive mapping technology and easy access to demographic databases means people can offer advertisers a lot more than the local paper does. Newspaper carriers will deliver to their entire circulation area, or possibly break it down into a few ZIP codes. But an independent delivery firm can deliver to everyone, not just subscribers. And they can be much more specific when it comes to neighborhoods.

In short, it’s a trying time for papers. Not that we didn’t know that.

So newspapers are scrambling to remain relevant. They see competition from all over, but so often get it wrong why these things are competition.

Bloggers, for example, are certainly not competition because they’re better journalists. Sure, some of them are very good journalists, but by and large the blogging community relies on mainstream journalists to do most of the work for them.

Bloggers are competition because they understand what newspapers don’t: Bland, opinionless copy doesn’t sell. Newspapers put their collective nose up and say that true journalism must be objective. Which is fine and good … but it doesn’t get you readers.

That’s for two reasons. First, it’s boring. It’s dry and featureless. The unwritten policy of too many papers is “Never offend anyone,” so scared are they of getting angry letters or of losing some readers. (In fact, almost all people who cancel their subscriptions in a huff renew them fairly quickly.)

Secondly, too many papers equate “objective” with “equal” — that is, they’re happy to give you both sides of a story, but they don’t bother to tell you which one has the facts behind it. It’s more important to be balanced than to be informative. Creationists have learned to take advantage of this by enlisting the media to help present its arguments. Afraid to appear to take sides, much of the mainstream media treats evolution and creationism as if there’s equal weight to both sides.

In fact, the scientific support is so far to one side as to make it laughable that people think there’s a controversy.

So you often get the media quoting celebrities or religious leaders or “men on the street” and other know-nothings to support one “side” of an argument, whatever that argument is, in the name of balance.

Bloggers toss this out the window. So does Fox News. So do many magazines. They’re willing to give an opinion — to take sides and tell you X is right, Y is wrong. And they don’t care if they offend anyone.

And people eat it up.

Newspapers have regular readers. Magazines have loyal readers. Bloggers and columnists — think Keith Olbermann or Bill O’Reilly — have fanatics.

Newspapers just don’t get it. Instead, they focus on particular demographics (“women with children in the home” is the new target for the Roanoke Times, for example), or they throw all sorts of multimedia out there. (“They aren’t just photos — it’s a slide show! With music!) And people just aren’t interested.

Newspapers are going to be around for a while because they still do the best journalism out there. But they’re going to have to realize that what they’ve been offering all along was fine once upon a time, but in this new world people have seen alternatives, and newspapers are looking downright stodgy.

I’m messing around with the blog’s database structure, so things might come and go for a bit. Not that you care, but just in case you see something disappear and reappear, you’ll know why.

Much more to come, of course.

Lorie Byrd is, well, sad.

Writing on Examiner.com, she shares with us the tale of the site she’s created that will “keep track of questionable news stories.”

Amusingly, her column itself is full of glaring inaccuracies and hearsay. It’s yet another example of right-wing bloggers trying whatever tricks they can to expose the Evil Left-Wing Media — outright lies being A-OK.

See, if you’re going to write about media errors, it’s kinda important to use an example of a real error. (Say, the media reporting about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)

But the example Byrd uses is this:

[I]n 2006 The Associated Press ran a story about six Sunnis who were doused with kerosene and burned alive while nearby Iraqi soldiers watched and did nothing. The source for the story was identified as Capt. Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police force. The story received wide coverage and the alleged event was even cited by NBC News as the tipping point that led it to begin referring to the conflict in Iraq as a “civil war.”

Investigation by bloggers (beginning at a blog called Flopping Aces) revealed that not only was the story not well-substantiated, a “Capt. Jamil Hussein” could not be found, even though The Associated Press had cited him as the source for more than 60 other stories, most about Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq.

Eventually, in reaction to questions from bloggers, much of the “Sunni burning six” story was retracted and it was later learned that “Capt. Jamil Hussein” was a pseudonym.

Sounds bad, huh? But Byrd has the story completely wrong.

In reality, the story was never retracted.

In reality, Capt. Jamil Hussein was located.

In reality, that wasn’t a pseudonym — at worst it was a misspelling (his name is Jamal Hussein).

In reality, it was the right-wing bloggers who retracted their claims:
“The AP reported that the Ministry of Interior in Iraq has now said a Captain Jamil Hussein does work in the al Khadra police station. I regret the error,” wrote Michelle Malkin.

So right off the bat, the woman who wants to keep track of media inaccuracies is showing us that she has no clue what she’s talking about.

Pathetic.

If you ever want a laugh, you may know that Craigslist is a good place to go — just check out your city’s casual encounters section.

Along those lines, while looking for a local company called (I thought) VAMP, I stumbled upon the Vampire Meetups page for Roanoke.

Twenty-eight people have posted there looking to meet other… well, looking for different things. A selection:

LadyRaven
Roanoke, VA · June 27, 2007
 ”I want these local Meetups because I am interested in meeting others who are kindred to me. My history is extensive and I’m interested in finding any I may have known in the past and meet new kindred souls as well. Until the night…LadyRaven”

* * *

Krysta
Elliston, VA · September 10, 2005
“Hey, im a 18 yr old female, i love to dress sexy and seduce guys, i love blood and im intrested in meeting others who enjoy and need blood as much as i do”

* * *

Tiffany
Narrows, VA · July 11, 2006
“I want local Vampire Meetups because I love vampires.They are just so interesting.I just really want to meet one.”

* * *

Tala
Lynchburg, VA · August 8, 2006
“Hey, I’m very new to the Lynchburg area, and looking for others like me. Although sadly enough, I am not a vampire, but my girlfriend is. The thing of it is though, I am a lycanthrope, not sure how welcome that will be. Let me know.”

* * *

lordwolfen
Frankford, WV · June 13, 2007
“pleaes right me back if you guys are meating hir”

“Early iPhone owners are overwhelmingly happy with their devices, a survey out Friday says….”

So begins a story in USA Today.

I’m not surprised. Not because the iPhone is a fine phone (ahead of the curve on interface, behind the curve on features), but because it’s an obvious conclusion.

When people spend a lot of money on something, they’re always happy with it.

As one mosquito expert said to me regarding $400 mosquito traps that she was iffy about, “I think if I spent $400 I would claim it worked anyway.”

And think about it: Do you know many people, if anyone, who doesn’t like their car? When you shell out $15,000 or $20,000, the chances of you admitting, “Gosh, it really isn’t very good,” is slim.

Ditto when you overpay for a phone. And, of course, there’s the fanboy angle: If their iPhones exploded, they would probably say, “But chicks did the scars it left me with. Thanks, Steve!”

When I was in junior high, my friend Andy Needleman had a joke of sorts. He would ring your doorbell, and if you asked “Who is it?” he reply in a deep, guttural voice, “Avon lady.”

For a 12 year old, it was hilarious.

This came to mind when I got the following spam the other day, where the text and the sender don’t seem to sync very well:

I was thinking about overcrowded cities, and how a friend of mine, Ian Mackenzie, once commented that the only people who complain about the world being too crowded are people who live in crowded cities.

So I finally went and did the math.

Figure six billion people on Earth, and imagine them standing in a space three feet on a side. They aren’t bumping one another, but it’s close.

6 billion * 9 square feet = 54 billion square feet

Sounds like a lot, for sure.

54 billion square feet = 1937 square miles

Hmm. Let’s translate that into something more tangible.

The state of Delaware (second smallest in the US) covers 1954 square miles. So every human on Earth standing shoulder to shoulder, front to back, wouldn’t fill the state of Delaware.

In fact, 1937 square miles is essentially a box about 44 miles on a side.

If you put every human on Earth together, you could drive your car (at 60 mph) around the horde of humanity in less than three hours.

Let’s see… the Earth has almost 200 million square miles of surface. Take the water and non-arable land out of the equation and you’re left with only 7.7 million square miles of arable land.

Know what? That’s 35,777 square feet per person on the planet.

For some reason, that doesn’t seem nearly so crowded.

There’s nothing quite like asking strangers, “Is five squares of toilet paper enough?” But I got to do just that for my story today on Kimberly-Clark’s new electronic toilet paper dispenser, which gives out five squares at a time.

According to a Kimberly-Clark study, bathroom visitors used 20 percent fewer squares “per event” with an electronic dispenser than with a manual one. That’s good news for restaurant owners and facilities managers. But the company may have a harder time impressing end users.

[snip]

Although [restaurateur Chip] Moore’s restaurants don’t get nearly the crowd that the civic center does, he also said he liked the idea in principle, but was wary of the details — specifically, that the machine only doles out five squares at a time.

“They’d have to do better than that,” he said. “Five sheets ain’t much. It would have to reload pretty quickly or you’d be in there all day.” It’s more important in a bar than a restaurant. “[In] an active bar, the ladies’ room is gonna roll through some TP,” he explained.

How many do you use?

…and other things I learned doing a story about keeping your car cool in the summer. My goal: Making the kind of story that we’ve all read before into something a little more fun and new.

Lemme know if I succeeded. :)

“Unfortunately named authors.”

Ladies and gents, meet Michael K. Brandow.

(Big hat tip to Gnomic!)

Update: The guy’s famous.

From Above the Law:

Michael K. Brandow, of the Chicago firm of Brady Connolly & Masuda, P.C., is an irresistable-force, immovable-object, Chuck-Norris-like-awesome worker’s compensation attorney. How does he do it? By sucking the life force out of his opponents and anyone else who might stand in his way with his creepy stare.

On Metachat, one person wrote, “Did we already have the conversation about what the photographer must have told him to say? Maybe it was ‘cheese,’ and he hates cheese.”

And on Trickeries, responding to a comment that Brandow is legally blind:

Myself and the rest of the blogosphere have been having a laugh at his expense ever since the famous photo came to light. So if he is blind why in the hell did someone not tell him how [bleeping] crazy he looked in the picture? Why couldn’t someone say, “We need to take this picture again, you look like a damned lunatic.” This means that everyone from the photographer on down to the webmaster who posted it were either giggling to themselves, or ignoring the crazy looking blind elephant in the room, because they were too “polite” to mention it.

My story on combating mosquitoes with smarts and technology is on the front page of today’s Roanoke Times. I’m particularly proud of my lede:

Mosquitoes, like vampires, won’t go near running water.

That’s one thing to keep in mind as mosquito season gets in full swing.

The final graf is also pretty cool. I had a whole bunch of terrific sources for this one, and it shows.