long bet that's winona

 The April 2002 issue of WIRED featured something called Long Bets. Quasi-celebs of the tech-biz variety bet on extreme incidents in the future such as by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes or the universe will eventually stop expanding or by 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event or by the year 2020, the tickets to space travel, at the least to Moon, will be available over the counter or at least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150. If you clicked on any of those, you see that Long Bets is actually a website and a foundation. There's even one between Ted Danson and the editor of Time about baseball and soccer.

 I don't believe it. That is NOT Winona. Guess I'll find out for sure on Thursday.

 The Computer Wore A Turban And Played Chess is a nice reminder from CNN about a hoax chess master machine that stymied Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Babbage.

 Berkeley is offering a course on blogging.

 New Yorker Festival, anyone?

 Cool action figures at Kid Robot.

 Yope, I'm going to see Beth Orton tonight.

 Slate.com parody for Michael Kinsley.

 Maxim gets in the hair-coloring business.

 Napster has officially filed for bankruptcy.

 Death by EverQuest? It reads like parody. "Scattered around him, police reports say, were dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers, dozens of empty pizza boxes and chicken bones thrown haphazardly to the floor.... The only signs of what had been on his mind were a few scribbled names and terms related to EverQuest, the online virtual reality game he'd been playing for well over a year. Based on those and other clues, Liz Woolley suspects her son killed himself after being jilted online."