This is an ugly, smoggy, hot day in Seattle. Beautiful.

Web Sites That Shorten Long URLs: "The following free web sites can take a long URL and give you back a shorter URL without requiring registration. Any of these services will do a good job, but if you want to study them before you pick one, here is an informal survey of the competitive landscape."

Bob Hope one-liners on politics:

"Richard Carlson: 'A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.'
Hope: 'You mean like Democrats?'
— from 'The Ghost Breakers' (1940)

Nydia Westman: 'Do you believe in reincarnation, you know, that dead people come back?'
Hope: 'You mean like Republicans?'
— from 'The Cat and the Canary' (1939) "

Poynter Online - The Design Desk: "Are you feeling uninspired? Maybe your work has become routine and doesn't hold your interest. It may be time to get back in touch with the things that first inspired you. The life you build and things you do outside the newsroom are key to being creatively charged in your job. "

Poynter Online - The Design Desk: "If you're still using the Web-safe color palette of 216 colors, here's a better solution -- More Crayons. More Crayons is a site developed by Kirk Franklin that expands the Web-safe palette to a 'Web-smart' palette of 4,096 colors. "

Newspapers should let reporters blog away, says OJR editor: "Online Journalism Review editor Michelle Nicolosi would love to see Orange County Register science reporter Gary Robbins get into blogging. 'He knows so much, he's finding things out all the time' and many items that don't get into the Register would make good blog entries. Nicolosi tells Dan Rohn: 'More papers should think about setting up reporters with blogs. Working on them should be optional -- not mandated -- and reporters should be given the freedom to have a little personality in their blog, to link offsite, to post pretty much as they see fit. If they do a bad job, cancel it.'"

“If hypertext really becomes available, especially in the fancy versions now being talked about -- where words, sounds, video, computer graphics, simulations and more are available at the touch of the screen -- well, it’s hard to imagine anyone capable of preparing the material. It will take teams of people. I predict there will be much experimentation, and much failure, before the dimensions of this new technology are fully explored and understood.” -- Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things (1988)

How to make a "Golden Section."

What's the "Golden Section"?

Mark Hollis (1998): "Before you play two notes learn how to play one note -- and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." [via chim chim]

Yet another sharp observation from Robert Scoble: "This is business fundamentals 101. Tim Bray calls it 'sharecropping.' Dave Winer calls it 'building a trunk.' Macromedia calls it 'Flash.' Adobe calls it 'Acrobat.' Microsoft calls it 'Windows.' Intuit calls it 'Quicken.' Borland calls it 'Delphi.' Apple calls it 'iPod.' Sony calls it 'Playstation.' The SF Giants call it 'Barry Bonds.' Wall Street calls it 'revenues and profits.' Mom and dad call it 'stock price went up.'

"No matter what you call it, if you have a ton of happy customers using your stuff and paying you money, your shareholders (er, investors) get happy. So, show me how your requests will help me get more customers. And help me keep the ones I already have."

This war ain't over.

[Your choice] of mass destruction

Am I the only fan of "CBS News Sunday Morning," one of the last watchable news programs on free television? Sure, it's totally soft feature/human interest/arts stories, but isn't that about right on a Sunday morning? A perfect visual accompaniment to reading The New York Times every Sunday morning. The pace of the studio segments, the length of the features, and the quality of writing, all make for a great alternative to all the political talk show blather going on the rest of the morning.

This morning, there was a fascinating story about the Central Park "hawkwatchers," a passionate group of birdwatchers dedicated to following the exploits of one "Pale Male."

The "evil" drug companies:

My wife used to work for an executive at a very large pharmaceutical company during the 90s, and the same assaults were being made against them then. Doug Bandow has some interesting observations on the topic:

"This assault is not new. Drug companies have been under pressure for a decade. When the Clinton administration attempted to nationalize American health care, it sought to demonize the drugmakers as well as most doctors and hospitals.

"Unfortunately, years of demagoguery advanced for political profit are having an impact. Public opinions of the industry have been falling sharply....

"Yet new pharmaceuticals are responsible for almost half of the reduced mortality among different diseases between 1970 and 1991. Columbia University's Frank Lichtenberg figures that every new drug approved during that time saves over 11,000 life-years annually. And the benefits continue. He estimates that fully 40 percent of the increase in average lifespan between 1986 and 2000 is due to new drugs."

Clifford D. May continues: "Precisely which part of that statement isn't true? The British government did say that it believed Saddam had sought African uranium. Is it possible that the British government was mistaken? Sure. Is it possible that Her Majesty's government came by that belief based on an erroneous American intelligence report about a transaction between Iraq and Niger? Yes — but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and members of his Cabinet say that's not what happened.

"They say, according to Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper, that their claim was based on 'extra material, separate and independent from that of the US.'

"I suppose you can make the case that a British-government claim should not have made its way into the president's SOTU without further verification. But why is that the top of the TV news day after day? Why would even the most dyspeptic Bush-basher see in those 16 accurate words of President's Bush's 5,492-word SOTU an opportunity to persuade Americans that there's a scandal in the White House, another Watergate, grounds for impeachment? "

Byron York on Iraq & Democrats & WMDs on National Review Online: "The ad calls for a bipartisan investigation of the issue. It was produced by a group of veterans of the Clinton/Gore administration and several Democratic campaigns.

"The ad begins with the words, 'In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat — ' It then cuts to a video clip of the president saying, 'Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'

"The ad omits the first words of Bush's statement, which read, in full, 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'

"The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it stands behind its intelligence assessment of the African uranium issue."

AP: Dean faces new challenges as campaign picks up momentum: "Raising $7.5 million for his Internet-fueled campaign was the easy part. Now Democrat Howard Dean says he must urgently expand his political machine, broaden his message and soften the rough edges of his personality.

"Although two of his rivals, John Kerry and John Edwards, have collected more money overall, and others have put more cash in reserve, Dean's fund-raising haul from April to June has shaken up a race that now has three distinct tiers of candidates - but no front-runners.

"His foes for the Democratic nomination are sharpening their rhetoric as Dean tries to ensure his momentum doesn't outstrip a relatively immature campaign based in Burlington, Vt."

Newsweek: "You’d think that Howard Dean’s rivals would start attacking him—big time—now that his Internet-based fund-raising prowess has elevated him to what amounts to front-runner status in the Democratic presidential race. But each leading contender has his own strategic reason for laying off, at least until the fall, if not beyond—a scenario that could backfire by allowing Dean a free ride until it’s too late to stop him."

Letter to the SF Chronicle: "Editor -- The constant loss of U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- after the war is 'won' -- is a tragedy. However, if this is what it takes to retire the Bush administration at the next election, the sacrifice is justified." --ARIE L. BLEICHER

Ann Coulter: "Columbia history professor Eric Foner claimed Radosh's book on the Rosenbergs violated the canons of historical scholarship. As any infant knows, one of the canons of historical scholarship is to mindlessly hold as an article of faith the manifestly absurd belief that the Rosenbergs were innocent. It is an affront to good scholarship to suggest otherwise. Most devastatingly, Foner – once president of the American Historical Association – accused Radosh of 'liberal anti-communism.' Other historians have even stooped so low as to call Radosh a 'conservative.' One editor said he believed Radosh was a CIA agent.

"American college students are learning history from people who believe the Rosenbergs were innocent idealists and Radosh is a CIA agent. (How are the grades for students who write term papers saying the Rosenbergs were guilty?)"

Dennis Miller's rant about Democratic presidential field: "And that brings us to Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, who would like nothing better than to mallet a maple syrup tap into the U.S. treasury and spot-weld the valve wide open. Dean can roll up his sleeves in public all he wants, but as long as that heart tattoo with Neville Chamberlin's name in it is visible on his right forearm, he's never going to get off the pad. Please, please nominate Howard Dean. Because he'll get his ass handed to him quicker than somebody who just got outpatient liposuction surgery.

"Well, that's the view from the kid's table. Tune in and watch their next debate. The Dems say it's a big tent, and you'll be surprised how many clowns they can fit in that one little car. Got that? I'm Dennis Miller."

Liberal Democrats' Perverse Foreign Policy (Krauthammer in the WPost): "There are the usual suspects, Jesse Jackson and the New York Times, but the most unapologetic proponent of the no-Iraq/yes-Liberia school is Howard Dean, Democratic flavor of the month. 'I opposed the war in Iraq because it was the wrong war at the wrong time,' says Dean, but 'military intervention in Liberia represents an appropriate use of American power.'

Why? In terms of brutality, systematic repression, number of killings, relish for torture and sum total of human misery caused, Charles Taylor is a piker next to Saddam Hussein. That is not to say that Taylor is a better man. It is only to say that in his tiny corner of the world with no oil resources and no scientific infrastructure for developing instruments of mass murder, Taylor has neither the reach nor the power to wreak Hussein-class havoc. What is it that makes liberals such as Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia?"

Gizmodo : Bone conduction headphones: "You might recall those swimming goggles with a built-in MP3 player we mentioned a few weeks ago that worked by vibrating the sound directly into the skull. Now there's a line of headphones from GrabIT called Vonia that do the same thing using special bone conduction transducers. Looks promising, though they're going to have to change the name of the technology; we'd guess that 'bone conduction' will just sound way too freaky for most people to feel comfortable using it."

Blogs in the Workplace: "For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log."