Ponca City, We Love You writes "Bite a hot pepper, and after the burn your tongue goes numb. The Baltimore Sun reports that Capsaicin, the chemical that gives chili peppers their fire, is being dripped directly into open wounds during highly painful operations, bathing surgically exposed nerves in a high enough dose to numb them for weeks. As a result patients suffer less pain and require fewer narcotic painkillers as they heal. 'We wanted to exploit this numbness,' says Dr. Eske Aasvang, a pain specialist who is testing the substance. Capsaicin works by binding to C fibers called TRPV1, the nerve endings responsible for long-lasting aching and throbbing pain. Experiments are under way involving several hundred patients undergoing various surgeries, including knee and hip replacements using an ultra-purified version of Capsaicin to avoid infection. Volunteers are under anesthesia so they don't feel the initial burn."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've all seen the practice of somewhat sleazy "opt-out" offerings on things. You sign up to buy something at an e-commerce site and you have to uncheck a box or you'll get bombarded by promotional emails for the rest of your life. However, Jeremy Wagstaff is pointing out one that's even more questionable. Apparently, on a Lenovo page for journalists, it includes two confusing checkboxes. The first says: "Please use e-mail to send me information about other offerings." The second says: "Please do not use this data to send me information about other offerings." They're checkboxes (not radio buttons), meaning that you can check none, one, the other or both... which raises some interesting questions. What happens if you check none or if you check both?

Luyseyal writes "IBM has developed a process for scrubbing waste silicon wafers clean, allowing the otherwise highly secret waste to be sold. The silicon quality usually necessary for solar production is very high and the cost of solar panels reflects it. Recycling this waste should help bring down the cost in the long run and add a new profit vector for chip manufacturers. The article notes that IBM has such a high profile in the chip business that this recycling tech should spread rapidly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nytimesriver is on the first page of results when you search for "NY Times" on Google.

http://google.com/search?q=ny+times

I find that amazing. Maybe because we don't sell links (or take ads).

Larry Sanger writes "Citizendium, 'the Citizens' Compendium' — a free, non-profit, ad-free, wiki encyclopedia with real names and a role for experts — has just announced that it's celebrating the one-year anniversary of its wiki, an occasion for which I wrote a project report. Make up your own mind about whether 'we've made a very strong start and an amazing future likely lies ahead of us.' We have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding, but we've still proven a lot, such as that a public-expert hybrid wiki is consistent with accelerating growth and leads to high quality, or that eliminating anonymity helps remove vandalism. Signs are good that we are starting into a serious growth spurt. Might the Web 2.0 umbrella be expanded to include real name requirements and roles for experts? It's looking that way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the past, casual video games have often been referred to as "bored housewife" games, as they were thought to mostly be popular with older women, rather than the traditional video gaming market, which most people considered to be popular with younger guys. However, it seems like that breakdown is a bit misleading, as a new study shows that men are just as likely to play casual video games, they're just a lot less likely to admit to it. Anyone wonder if that's true in the other direction as well? Perhaps a lot more women enjoy playing first person shooters and don't like to admit it. Either way, this really just highlights that game makers probably should stop worrying about "games for women" or "games for guys" and simply focus on making games people like. The success of the Nintendo Wii seems to support that plan. As for the bored housewife description... perhaps we can just change it to bored employees and be happy.

Google hasn't sworn him to secrecy so he can speculate on what Maka Maka is.

The PMDA (PhotoImaging Manufacturers and Distributors Association) today announced that Phil Askey of dpreview.com will receive its 'Person of the Year' award for 2008. This award will be presented at the PMDA awards dinner just before the PMA show in Las Vegas on 30th January 2008. The PMDA has members such as Casio, Canon, Kodak, Fujifilm, HP, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax and Samsung.

Yesterday we wrote about the minor glitches spotted thanks to computers not knowing that Congress moved out Daylight Saving Day. However, there was an odd time glitch over in the UK that is worth examining. Apparently, at Gatwick airport, computers were all screwed up because they hadn't changed times properly. You see, in the UK this past weekend was the conclusion of British Summer Time, the equivalent of our Daylight Saving Time. So what happened here? My guess is that the systems that run the computers at Gatwick were patched... for the US change. In other words, while the computers would have made the change properly beforehand, somehow there was some confusion and a patch meant for US users was applied (or some other setting indicated that it was a US-based computer system), meaning that the computers didn't switch -- not because of confusion over the date of the hour shift, but because the system had been patched for the wrong country.

NewsCloud writes "Since last December, Facebook has grown from 12 to 47 million users and third-party developers have launched more than 6,000 applications with its API. While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends. Microsoft's recent $240 million investment in the company gives it all the capital it needs for further growth. Last August, Wired published two unusual stories describing how consumers might link together a variety of third-party services to emulate Facebook, and ultimately calling on the open-source software community to build alternatives to the service. Inspired in part by Wired, I've posted some ideas describing what would be needed for an open source architecture for social networking."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

poet sends us to Computerworld for a story on the intention of the OpenDocument Foundation to drop support for Open Document Format, OASIS and ISO standards not withstanding, in favor of the Compound Documents Format being promoted by the W3C. The foundation's director of business affairs, Sam Hiser, dropped this bomb in a blog posting a couple of weeks ago. Hiser believes CDF has a better shot at compatibility with Microsoft's OOXML, and says that the foundation has been disappointed with the direction of ODF over the last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest news in the patent dispute between Sun and Network Appliance is that Sun is trying to move the case to California. NetApp filed the lawsuit in east Texas, a favorite location for patent holders, since the judges there are known for fast trials that almost always end with the patent holder coming out on top. Even if companies have no real presence in east Texas, they figure out how to get something resembling a presence there in order to file the lawsuit there. Amusingly, patent reform in the early 80s was designed to stop this type of jurisdiction shopping at the appeals court level, but all it seems to have done was push it down to the district court level. In trying to move the case, Sun points out that both it and NetApp have headquarters approximately 10 miles away from each other in California -- and there seems to be no reason whatsoever to have the case filed in east Texas unless you were jurisdiction shopping. There's been some talk lately suggesting that the folks in east Texas are getting a little annoyed at their reputation for being so friendly for patent holders, so hopefully they'll agree that this case really belongs in California.

Google85 writes in with a brief Enquirer piece reporting on an announcement on a German site that SlySoft claims to have cracked BD+, the extra copy-protection layer in Blu-ray. Here is the German original.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I got past the initial screen this time, but, well listen to this Twittergram for an update on where I'm stuck this time. :-(

http://mp3.twittergram.com/davewiner/gram02286.mp3

Any help on how to get a stuck disk unstuck in a Wii would be much appreciated.

For the past week or so, I've been blacklisting PR flacks from my email inbox. Anytime I get a press release that doesn't interest me, I add the domain name of the PR agency to my killfile list.

I just found out that Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief, has been doing the same thing.

He's also published his long, long list of banned flacks. Good for him.

I've had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn't spam (Cloudmark Desktop solves that nicely), it's PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching.

Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month's list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking. If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it--turnabout is fair play.

There is no getting off this list. If you're on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.

Link (Thanks, Barry!)

Donovan, singer of such fantastic 60s tunes as "Mellow Yellow" and "Sunshine Superman" is opening his own Donovan University in Scotland where students will all practice transcendental meditation. He's working on the idea with his surrealist film director pal David Lynch. From the Associated Press:

"The Maharishi told me during that 1968 visit that I should build a university in Edinburgh. I went to my room and drew a beautiful dome-shaped place of learning," he said Friday...

Donovan and Lynch, Oscar-nominated director of "Blue Velvet," "Mullholland Dr." and "The Elephant Man," are part of a tour to promote transcendental meditation as a means of reducing violence, crime and stress in schools and colleges...

"For a country the size of Scotland it would take only 250 students meditating to protect Scotland from its enemies and to bring peace, to stop violence and drug abuse," Lynch said. "That is just a byproduct of the students meditating together."

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

AdamWill notes a Mandriva press release with the news that the government of Nigeria has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use in a nationwide pilot. About 17,000 machines will be involved at first. We can only wonder at the maneuvering and negotiations that went on with the OLPC project. The latter had its first announced order for 100,000 XO machines, from Uruguay, with a potential for 400,000 over time. The bigger news out of OLPC is that Microsoft is porting XP to the platform, and chairman Nicholas Negroponte says that's fine with him: "It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Production has wrapped on the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth. The 10th movie adaptation of a PKD story, the indy movie was directed by John Alan Simon and stars Alanis Morisette. According to Simon, the total shoot took just 24 days and "the entire budget of the picture was less than the majors spend on catering." David Gill has more news over at the Total Dick-Head blog including promise of an interview with the director.
Link to Total Dick-Head, Link to buy the book Radio Free Albemuth