Garrison Keillor to Debut New Opera, 'Mr. and Mrs. Olson,' on May 24-26. See also the Program Notes from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

I'm technolusting after the Sharp Zaurus SL-5000, a Linux/Java PDA that's also a portable Ogg player.

Ballads for the Age of Science (late 1950s / early 1960s), by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer; brought to the Web by Jef Poskanzer. The CD version has also been found at one of his geocaches.

Hidden messages of Communism in the stories of Dr. Seuss!!

5th annual North Cambridge All Arts Open Studios
Saturday & Sunday, May 4 - 5, 2002, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm
North Cambridge, MA

UFO Group Claims to Intercept E.T. Pop Song. Let us hope it's not the Alien Song.

From MIT Technology Review: "IBM aims to solve speech recognition's nagging problems":

Some experts are skeptical. Real-time meeting transcription is still “lab stuff right now,” says Steve McClure, vice president at technology market researcher IDC in Framingham, MA. “I’ve seen IBM demos work fine one time, and another time the damn application wouldn’t work at all.”

Tired: UFOs -- Wired: KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects)

The Puddlejump Players Children's Theatre Group presents "Splat Frankie" on May 10, 11, 12 -- "Adventures in two dimensions have never been wackier!"

Donate to:

• The Working Assets Middle East Victims' Relief Fund
• the refusnik movement within the Israeli Defense Forces
• B'Tselem: Urgent Humanitarian Aid to Palestinian Residents of the Occupied Territories

Urge your representative to cosponsor the Compassionate Care for Female Sexual Assault Survivors Act, which requires hospitals to provide access to emergency contraception for survivors of rape and incest.

Why settle for ordinary Topic Maps when you can have Quantum Topic Map particles?

Tired: P2P -- Wired(less): M2M. From the April 16 edition of Nokia's Developer Network Newsletter:

"The M2M platform, while designed for applications requiring no human intervention, includes tools that allow humans to interact with the application."

Maintaining backward compatibility with the carbon-based units, for now...

Other People's Pain, by Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited". Recognize anyone you know?

The 15 Most Famous Transcendental Numbers, by Cliff Pickover, author of Computers and the Imagination: Visual Adventures beyond the Edge

content-wire.com: "Apprentices of God vs Earth’s devotees" is an English translation of an article originally in Spanish: "Los aprendices de dioses y los devotos de la tierra".

Scientific American: April 2002: "The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery"

unionvoice.org: Send a fax to Enron and its corporate creditors Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of New York. Tell them to support full severance packages for laid-off Enron workers.

PeaceAction: Freeze US Military Aid to Israel until Israel lifts the current siege of Palestinian territory.

From icSouthlondon: "Cloned baby is 'son of rich Arab'":

The Sunday Telegraph reports Giancarlo Calzolari, a journalist with Il Tempo newspaper in Rome, says Dr Antinori called him on Friday. He said: "He told me it was a clone of an important, wealthy personality. However, he was vague when I asked him the name of the woman and to at least describe the father. He would only say he was a grosso personaggio (a big cheese).The doctor added, 'I have at my disposal whatever amount of money is needed to reach the result.'"

You don't suppose... no, it couldn't be...

FUNIX -- Foreign Languages Made FUN! What a Bunny Day! It's Elbow Knee Toe!

From Yahoo News: Court Rules Colorado Bookstore Can Withhold Records:

In a case closely watched by police and civil libertarians, Colorado's highest court ruled on Monday that The Tattered Cover Bookstore did not have to give police the name of a customer who bought a "how to" book on making illegal drugs. [...] The case stemmed from a March 2000 raid on a suspected methamphetamine lab in a trailer home in suburban Denver. During a search police found the drug lab as well as handguns and two books, "The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories" by Jack B. Nimble, and "Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic Manufacture" by Uncle Fester

AI USA: Send messages to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and Hamas leader Shaykh Ahmad Yassin, urging them to end the violence and human rights violations in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Must read: Topological Geometrodynamics (TGD)-INSPIRED THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS WITH APPLICATIONS TO BIOSYSTEMS, by Matti Pitkänen

Tired: cybersex -- Wired: e-impregnation -- for only $29.99 (plus $5 S&H)

Tired: global warming -- Wired: climate weapons

Loch Ness an Inter-dimensional Gateway?

Boston Globe: Rally is held [April 6] to denounce the plight of Palestinians.
Next:
Protest at the Israeli consulate - Boston
Monday, April 8, 2002, 5:30-7:00 PM
Park Plaza Sq., Stadtler Office Building, St. James St.

Yahoo! Groups: Boycott Israeli goods and tourism until Israel withdraws from the Palestinian territories and begins negotiations on implementing the Arab League peace plan.

Israeli Soldiers Shoot and Kill a US Citizen as She Holds Her 9-Month-Old Baby in Her Lap

ACLU Action Alert: Don't Criminalize Actions of Caring Relatives and Friends:

The Teen Endangerment Act (HR 476) would make it a federal crime for anyone other than a parent -- including a grandmother, aunt or older sister -- to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion unless the young woman has already met the obligations of her state's parental involvement law.

Amnesty International USA: Ask the Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S. and your U.S. Representative to save the life of Amina Lawal Kurami and condemn the execution of women in Nigeria by stoning:

"Harsh criminal punishments such as stoning, amputation of limbs for theft, and flogging have been introduced into the legal code in a majority of Nigeria's Muslim northern states over the past two years under Islamic law or Sharia. A sharia court recently sentenced Nigerian woman Amina Lawal Kurami, to death by stoning for alleged adultery."

From theherald.co.uk: "Mother freed as another faces death by stoning":

"The sentence was based on her own confession and the evidence of the baby she had," an unnamed official said. "The man she said lured her into having sex denied it." Ms Kurami has 30 days to appeal the sentence. The judge also ordered that the death sentence should be delayed for eight months to allow her to breast feed her baby.

April 22 - 28 is TV Turnoff Week.

iabolish.org: Take Action: Stop Slave Labor in the Amazon

Stop the War At Home and Abroad! March on Washington DC April 20th. See also PeaceAction's a20 page.

At Long Bets, you can watch Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor bet against each other (for $20,000) on whether a computer or machine intelligence will pass the Turing Test by 2029. Or cheer on Danny Hillis and Nathan Myhrvold as they put their money where their mouse is ($2,000) over whether the universe will eventually stop expanding.

From NYTimes: "The Star's Costume? Nature's Eye-Catching Design", by BEN BRANTLEY:

Twenty seconds. That, give or take a few seconds, is how long the beauteous movie star Kathleen Turner stands stark naked in "The Graduate," the weary new comedy that opened last night at the Plymouth Theater. [...] With top seats for "The Graduate" going for $76.25, those 20 seconds cost close to $4 each for theatergoers interested only in full-frontal star gazing.

Is your name being used fraudulently on an extreme, anti-gay petition?

From EqualMarriage.org:

Public hearing on SuperDOMA ["Defense Of Marriage Act" -- the proposed Massachusetts state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage] is set for April 10. It will be at 10:00am in the Gardner Auditorium at the State House.

Amnesty International: Tell Bush "Do Not Unsign the International Criminal Court Treaty"

Nationwide White House Call-In/Email Campaign on Palestine -- TODAY

Questioning Techniques for gifted students can also benefit the rest of us giftedness-challenged trogs.