All the windows open, pasta with tomato and vodka sauce, Negra Modelo, and baseball on the radio — spring has sprung, and I couldn’t be happier.

There have been some interesting goings-on in the space where sports and the media meet. Last year, the NBA sued the New York Times over the latter’s sale of images that were taken by photographers at basketball games, arguing that news outlets are only permitted to use images of NBA games for news coverage, not commercial sale. Yesterday, the two settled the lawsuit for what seems to be a pittance — the Times agreed to link to NBA.com from the website selling the images. At the same time, though, Major League Baseball is going after media outlets over the same issue; it remains to be seen how this settlement will effect this effort. (The New Yorker currently has an article on the baseball issue, but I doubt that the link will work next week.)

Found at MetaFilter: UNC techies were having a bear of a time finding a server on their network — it was responding to network traffic, but could not be physically located. After tracing wires a bit, it was found — sealed behind a wall.

The people at iRobot are doing something very cool, both with robots and with programmatic concepts. Instead of building robots that are programmed to perform single tasks independently, they’re building swarms of robots which are programmed to work together. Instead of each of them having discrete information, they all contribute to a pool of information, and feed off of the same pool to make decisions. Very, very cool.

Predictably, there were some incredible sites submitted to the 2001 5K website design contest. My snap-judgment favorite right now is SoundPad; that could change as I make my way through them all.

Merrill Goozner has some interesting points to make about the justifications used by big pharma to price their drugs as high as they do, and restrict them from markets in which they are direly needed.