Friday, January 20, 2006

Mission to Pluto - a search for the meaning of life?. comment []  trackback []  10:29:41 AM

Nutjob offers $100 bounty to UCLA students who wiretap lefty profs. Cory Doctorow: A radical right-wing group has compiled a black-list of progressive UCLA professors and it is offering a bounty of $100 to students who record their lectures; the group intends to use these lectures "expose" the professors as "radicals." The Bruin Alumni Association posted the offer of the bounty to its website; its finances reportedly come primarily from a $22,000 gift from its founder, Andrew Jones. The move has spooked many of the group's advisors, three of whom have resigned in disgust. One of the resigners is hardly a stranger to extremist politics: former Republican congressman James Rogan was one of the ringleaders of the Clinton impeachment circus, but even he doesn't have the stomach for this. Jones told Reuters that he is out to "restore an atmosphere of respectful political discourse on campus" and says his efforts are aimed at academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal. "We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies and unprofessional classroom behavior," Jones said on his Web site. Jones' site describes his campaign as "dedicated to exposing UCLA's most radical professors" and his list of the university's "worst of the worst" singles out only professors he says hold left-wing views. Link [Boing Boing] comment []  trackback []  9:48:11 AM

George Takei To Play Star Trek's Sulu Again. Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that George Takei has agreed to play Hikaru Sulu in an upcoming episode of the fan series Star Trek: New Voyages. He's the second actor from the original Star Trek series to come onboard; another episode will feature Walter Koenig as Pavel Chekov. And here's what really makes this news great: Takei's episode will be written by none other than David Gerrold, the SF writer who also brought us Star Trek's Tribbles." [Slashdot] comment []  trackback []  9:44:09 AM

Riya photo search site open to public in February. Using face recognition and text recognition technology, the photo search service identifies people and text in digital photos and tags them accordingly. [Computerworld News] comment []  trackback []  9:40:35 AM