simply stunning landscape photos from Brazilian photographer Alex Uchôa. (Via InstaPundit)

of the impact this will have, but it’s very interesting:

The UN staff union, in what officials said was the first vote of its kind in the more than 50-year history of the United Nations, was set to approve a resolution withdrawing its support for the embattled Annan and UN management.

Annan has been in the line of fire over a high-profile series of scandals including controversy about a UN aid programme that investigators say allowed deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to embezzle billions of dollars.

But staffers said the trigger for the no-confidence measure was an announcement this week that Annan had pardoned the UN’s top oversight official, who was facing allegations of favouritism and sexual harassment.

(Via InstaPundit)

I started clicking the “Next Blog” link on the top of blogger/blogspot blogs and thought I would see where it took me. I’ve looked through a few hundred blogs in the last few days, and most of them are, as I said before, not worth even a few seconds of my time. What I found:

• A bunch of blogs set up just to advertise stuff. It’s the spammer’s way of getting high Google rankings. Most of them are just post titles with keywords for the products and links, but here’s an interesting one; it has a title for the product it’s advertising, then a snippet of what looks like a Greek tragedy (Update 11/19/04: Actually, the Greek tragedy bit is apparently from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and it seems the rest are random bits from Shakespeare’s collected works), and then a link to the product it’s trying to sell. Strange.
• A bunch of foreign-language blogs, mostly in Spanish, though I found some in Portugese, French, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Japanese. There may have been some Polish and Tagalog ones in there, but as I wouldn’t know either language written, I can’t be sure if that’s what they were.
• A couple of educational blogs; that is, blogs used for classes to toss around assignments, paper proposals, etc. An excellent use of the service.
• A few exceptionally badly-written blogs.
• A whole lot of mediocre blogs.
• And some interesting ones:
  • World Class Cuiscene: a blog with Filipino and other recipes.
  • Jeff Seale: This blog’s author was suffering from some kind of cancer, and had started the blog as a way to keep his family and friends up to date on his situation. The last post was dated October 14th, two days after he had surgery to remove some cancerous lymph nodes. I have no idea whether he made a full recovery or not.
  • K.J.R.: The first Japanese blog I came across in my search, this one was started just yesterday. I haven’t puzzled through all of the posts yet, but I find it interesting not because of the content, but because it’s in Japanese and would be great translation practice for me. Woo!

A little joke:

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

latest Media Hack column talks about Dow Jones’ recent acquisition of MarketWatch and the potential for more such media buyouts.

From Wired:

Researchers have identified stem cells in brain cancer tumors that replenish the tumors and keep them growing.

Snuffing out these cancer stem cells could lead to a raft of new treatments for various cancers, according to researchers who published their findings in the Nov. 18 issue of Nature.

Scientists previously identified cancer stem cells in breast cancer tumors, and in leukemia tumors. But no one had found proof of cancer stem cells in other solid tumors until now.

we beat X-Men Legends last weekend. I now have my life back, but am kind of sad that the game is over. Now that the extreme gear is unlocked, though, maybe I’ll start over again? But not for a while, though; I’ve got some serious catching up to do on Netflix.

Here is Wired’s generally positive review of Jak III.

Not as much as you’d think, according to this editorial. I’m not sure if this is true, but it certainly seems plausible. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy)

Jay Rosen of PressThink was recently at the Online News Association conference in Hollywood, and he writes in part about how people in the journalism industry are dealing with the fact that “[t]he news, as ‘lecture,’ is giving way to the news as a ‘conversation’” (Curley). In particular, he mentions Tom Curley, President and CEO of the Associated Press, who gave the keynote address at the conference. Curley is taking the AP in a radical new direction to adapt to the profound change that is beginning in news distribution and consumption today, and spoke of the need for all of the journalism industry to do the same. Read it.