Hey! What happened to my All-Star Newspaper??? I loved this spin-off of Brill’s Content, having given it the prime spot at the top of my IE Bookmarks “News” category folder; now, it redirects to the main Brill’s Content page. (Strangely, though, it’s still in the header navbar there.)

Why is this the first time I’m reading the thread on the old Userland discussion group where Dave Winer broadly banned people from crawling the group and generating an email list out of it? My interest stems from the fact that the reasons he uses to spell out why he doesn’t want people to do this can all be thrown back at his new product, Radio Userland. Radio crawls weblog syndication files and throws the content onto people’s desktops — even if you aren’t done editing it, which is what Dave’s panties seem all tied up over.

I have to tell y’all, reading Greg Knauss is a pleasure that’s difficult to top. EOD is either a journal-sans-detail or a weblog-sans-links… but either way, it rocks. Go there. Now. (Update: after deeper perusal, I found that it does have links occasionally. I apologize for misleading you all.)

This weekend, I went with my parents to our yearly seder event (we have to act Jewish sometime), and they brought along a present for my four-year-old cousin, a puzzle game named Rush Hour Jr. What a terrific game — it involves sliding pieces around a grid in order to get a car out of a blocked-in space, and it requires pretty good concentration skills and deductive reasoning. It’s rated for a minimum of six-year-olds, but my cousin (who’s damn smart, mind you) had no problem with a lot of the layouts. If you’ve got a young child, buy the game. Trust me. (If you’ve got a PalmPilot, you can also download a version that someone wrote. I’m now an addict.)

Meanwhile, I’m also now addicted to the online puzzle site that’s run by Binary Arts (the maker of Rush Hour). I don’t think I can do a single puzzle that’s under the advanced header…. ouch.

Fascinating: in Singapore, an operation to separate a set of conjoined twins is continuing into its third (now probably fourth) day, with the surgeons swapping in and out so that they can rest. The twins are joined at the head, and share vascular supply to their brains (the article doesn’t mention if they do or don’t share actual brain tissue as well).

And while on the subject of brains, who would have predicted that Wired would have a good article on the controversies surrounding the concept of brain death?