Soon I must embark upon a Quest… for the Holy Grail… of beer:

Two American Web sites, Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, rank the strongest of Westvleteren's three products, a dark creamy beer known as "the 12," best in the world, ahead of beers including Sweden's Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter and Minnesota's Surly Darkness. "No question, it is the holy grail of beers," says Remi Johnson, manager of the Publick House, a Boston bar that has Westvleteren on its menu but rarely in stock.

Witness the power of a free press: Whose phone rang? Judge jails 46:

Later in the afternoon, after being told reporters were calling, the judge ordered the defendants released.

Yeah, I got your cell phone, yer honor, I got your cell phone *right here*...

So *that's* what Alban Berg was up to during all those late nights at the conservatory: The Secret Love Affair Behind the 'Lyric Suite'. I always wondered about those tempo markings: "Adagio appassionato" followed by "Presto delirando" -- I get ya now, Alban.

Have we sealed the universe's fate by looking at it?

We may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, which is thought to be speeding up cosmic expansion.
[...]
At the quantum level, whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock and stop it decaying - something known as the quantum Zeno effect. Our measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the false vacuum’s decay clock to zero - back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving [instead of collapsing to a lower-energy vacuum state] was falling exponentially over time. “In short, we may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay,” says [Lawrence] Krauss [of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio].

Oops! Damn that quantum Zeno effect! Now we're gonna have to hire somebody (or something) to keep measuring it continuously!

Given a system in a state A, which is the eigenstate of some measurement operator. Say the system under free time evolution will decay with a certain probability into state B. If measurements are made periodically, with some finite interval between each one, at each measurement, the wave function collapses to an eigenstate of the measurement operator. Between the measurements, the system evolves away from this eigenstate into a superposition state of the states A and B. When the superposition state is measured, it will again collapse, either back into state A as in the first measurement, or away into state B. However, its probability of collapsing into state B, after a very short amount of time t, is proportional to t^2, since probabilities are proportional to squared amplitudes, and amplitudes behave linearly. Thus, in the limit of a large number of short intervals, with a measurement at the end of every interval, the probability of making the transition to B goes to zero.

Let the games begin: Senator Chris Dodd Calls on Mukasey to Investigate McClellan Charges of White House Cover Up. Paging special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald...

Listen to Electronic Music from HYMNEN ("Anthems") by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen. I especially like what he does with (and to) "Deutschland Uber Alles" in the track titled "With Soloists, Region 2: 1st Centre: DEUTSCHLAND - Lied".

From One Laptop Per Child: Give 1 Get 1:

Starting November 12, One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give 1 Get 1 Program for a brief window of time. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home.

Web Address: http://www.xogiving.org/

A truly subversive (and great) idea, IMHO.

Buy Nothing Day is Nov 23rd. Can you do it?

Health Blog : Bristol's Abilify Gets FDA OK for Teens:

"Bristol got in hot water for promoting the drug in kids without approval just a few months ago. In [a] six-week study of kids that Bristol and its partner Otsuka did to gain approval, weight gain of more than 7% was seen in some 5% of patients on Abilify compared with 1% on a sugar pill. "

I guess the check must have just cleared.

From The 2008 IT Salary Guide:

"Job Title: Senior Web Developer 2008 average salary range: $76,250 – $108,250.
• The 2008 salary range is an increase of 6.6% over this job’s 2007 salary range, which was $71,000 – $102,000.
• The 2006 salary range was an increase of 1.1% over this job’s 2005 salary range, which was $68,000 – $96,750.
Add 10% for Java development skills,
10% for Java Enterprise Edition development skills,
5% for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/PERL) development skills,
5% for AJAX development skills,
5% for Microsoft Sharepoint skills,
5% for Cold Fusion development skills,
7% for Web services development skills,
5% for Active Server Page development skills,
10% for DCOM/COM/ActiveX development skills,
12% for C# development skills,
10% for Visual Basic .NET development skills, and
5% for WebLogic clustering administration skills. "

Tech Salaries: From High to Low: