Talk about crop circle mania. The History Channel is talking about crop circles now on their show "History VS. Hollywood." They also created an artificial crop circle with their own station symbol.
7:54:50 PM    

Don't Link to Us! "links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them." [Scripting News]

Why do people think they have the right to choose who links to them and how? Like I've said before, it's easy to control how people link to you using a technological solution, so why do they go to so much effort to enforce linking policies through non-technological means?
7:28:57 PM    

Today I saw TLC's program "Unmasking The World's Greatest Deceptions." They attempted to debunk a number of famous cases of deception around the world. The only one that really interested me, however, was their piece on crop circles. Most intriguing of all was their recreation of a crop circle. Over at Swirled News, they weren't very happy with the program [here]. They bring up some good points. This one in particular rang true for me:

To your credit, your propaganda program has worked very well. Since it aired once before, several months ago, I can't count the number of people I've talked to who saw it and are now convinced that all crop circles are hoaxes. I have no doubt TLC knew, going into this project, that it would work because you knew most people would never take the trouble to investigate the phenomenon any further. I also have no doubt TLC knew that most people tend to think "Well, if it's on TLC, it must be true".

The program may not have answered every mystery surrounding crop circles, but for me it answered one very important question; can people create elaborate crop circles? The answer is an undeniable "yes". Does this demonstration end the debate? Probably not, but it makes the cases for alien or natural sources much less likely, IMHO.
6:30:53 PM    

I was doing some research on the Google search engine today (using Google) and found this piece on DaveNet.

Quietly, without much fanfare, Google is upgrading the Web.

They're indexing lots of weblogs, including Scripting News, every day.

So, I did a little test. I went to Scripting News and noticed that the page was last updated "Saturday, August 03, 2002 at 2:56 PM Pacific." I then used my Google Toolbar to look at Google's cache of the same page and the cached page shows that it was updated "Friday, July 05, 2002 at 2:05 PM Pacific." It so happens that my weblog was also cached by Google on July 5th and so was Wired. So, if Google is indexing Scripting News on a daily basis, they aren't caching the reindexed version of the page. Are you sure about this, Dave?
6:08:20 PM    

NASA has released a new press release confirming the biological origins of magnetite in the Alan Hill meteorite [here] [Slashdot post here].

In the latest study of a 4.5 billion-year-old Martian meteorite, researchers have presented new evidence confirming that 25 percent of the magnetic material in the meteorite was produced by ancient bacteria on Mars. These latest results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Though I would love to believe this claim, I will remain skeptical until a little more evidence is presented.
10:19:16 AM    

ABC News has a piece on crop circles [here] and National Geographic has another [here]. Apparently, there is some film footage where some crop circle artists have shown how they did it. However, the debate rages as believers dispute the veracity of the artist's claims.

One thing that has caused me to doubt any natural source for crop circles is that fact that they have become progressively more complex over time. That suggests some intelligence behind their creation. Since I don't generally support theories of extra-terrestrials visiting the Earth, that makes me doubt that any of the circles are made by anything other than people.
12:24:11 AM