PlasticBoy

Keanu Reeves will star in A Scanner Darkly, based on the Philip K. Dick novel. Richard Linklater is in talks to direct. The film will employ the same technology Linklater used in Waking Life: it will be shot live-action, then animated.

GNOME 2.6 is out. There are nice reviews here and here. I’ve been running the betas and I especially like spatial Nautilus and the new file chooser.

Air America, the new progressive radio network, debuts today at noon with Al Franken’s The O’Franken Factor.

No time to blog today so I thought I’d point you to my Bookmark Blog. I needed a nice central repository for my bookmarks so I started this up last week.

President Bush on Friday proposed 2007 as the goal for universal availability of high-speed Internet. That’s cool, but I want fiber. When do I get fiber?

A new study on the health benefits of martial arts.

In their study, Douris’ team examined the overall fitness of 18 individuals between 40 and 60 years of age. Nine of the study participants had been practicing soo bahk do, a Korean martial art similar to karate or tae kwon do, for about three years. The other nine participants maintained a more or less “couch potato” lifestyle. Overall, the soo bahk do devotees “were much more flexible, had more leg strength, less body fat, better aerobic conditioning and better balance” compared to the sedentary study subjects, Douris reports.

NPR is demoting Bob Edwards from host of Morning Edition to senior correspondent. From his comments it sounds like he won’t stick around.

Kuro5hin: Switching from PHP to Zope/Python.

James Kenneth Galbraith debunks the Economist on globalization.

Confronting the problems of the stricken Third World will require a balanced approach. What the poorest countries need perhaps most of all is sustainable finance, permitting them to build their infrastructure, their human resources, their public health systems and their industries — both for domestic consumption and foreign trade. This is an old formula. But it is one with a track record: It worked in Europe after World War II, and then in Japan, Korea and in China, each of which saw decade after decade of sustained growth and industrial transformation. Here’s the rub: Pursuing these goals will require placing the world’s private financiers under a degree of regulation and control — such as we used to have in the real golden age of development, from 1945 to 1970. That, of course, is not on the Economist’s agenda. But it should be on ours.

A study finds that humans evolved genes to offset high cholesterol and chronic diseases assocated with a meat-rich diet.

“Meat contains cholesterol and fat, not to mention potential parasites and diseases like Mad Cow,” he said. “We believe humans evolved to resist these kinds of things. Mad Cow disease — which probably goes back millions of years — would have wiped out the species if we hadn’t developed meat-tolerant genes.”

Buy a 2000 square foot, 3 bedroom, 2 and a half bath house made from recycled shipping containers for $76k.

Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen listed his top twelve reasons for the growth of open source software at the “Open Source in Government” conference:

1. “The Internet is powered by open source.”
2. “The Internet is the carrier for open source.”
3. “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.”
4. “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.”
5. “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”
6. “Incentives around open source include the respect of one’s peers.”
7. “Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants.”
8. “Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel.”
9. “Embedded devices are making greater use of open source.”
10. “There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren’t software companies.”
11. “Companies are increasingly supporting Linux.”
12. “It’s free.”

Doc Searls’ trials and tribulations with Linux on the laptop.

Yes, Dan said, IBM will be offering both a Linux desktop and a Linux laptop–this year. IBM, Dan reported, has 15,000 house testers using Linux on the desktop. When Jeff said this was “going to make Doc very happy”, Dan replied, “Anything we can do to make Doc happy is okay.”, or words to that effect. The quote comes from Jeff’s own memory of the conversation.

Software luminaries discuss the future of programming in Salon.

Today’s software world is simply too “brittle” — one tiny error and everything grinds to a halt: “We’re constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe.” Nature and biological systems are much more flexible, adaptable and forgiving, and we should look to them for new answers. “The path forward is being biomimetic.”

“Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).” This is even cooler than Textile. I just wished they’d used the standard stars for bold and underscores for emphasis.