Those of us with a few grey hairs have always been shocked (and always have and will be) by the attitudes and frame of reference of callow youth. From lisnews.

Relevant here, both because it's inherently interesting and because It would come under the remote sensing/photogrammetry/geomatics umbrella, is the Aerial Reconnaisance Archives. It was announced a while back but the server was swampled. You can finally get in! What the archive is is recon photos from WWII. From their site: "During World War II, photgraphic reconnaissance played a major part in the intelligence war. The advanced photographic techniques developed, gave intelligence officers the ability to view the enemies activities in 3D, and make highly accurate assessments. Discover a new way of looking at our history, and our future at evidenceincamera." From lisnews.

The arxiv eprint archive has a new section on qualitative biology here, including sections on Biomolecules, Cell Behavior, Genomics, Molecular Networks, Neurons and Cognition, Populations and Evolution, Quantitative Methods and others. There's not much there yet, but this is a very positive development for a growing field. More information here. From George S. Porter via STS-L

Although I have generally and heroically (I hope) resisted the tempation to blog about blogging (Frodo's struggles may be relevant here), this one from the Blogger home page was just too amusing (in a delusion-of-grandeur sort of way). It's about how to squeeze a mega book deal out of your blogging addiction.

Guess what? Engineers work in offices, too, not just in labs or in the field. If engineers understand how offices work, they will be happier and healthier in those environments. An interesting and enlightening exploration of office culture for engineers is in the latest IEEE Spectrum, (v41i1 jan 2004). It is: "Anatomy of the Office - Newly minted engineers will get a leg up if they understand the complex dynamics of the workplace." by Carl Selinger. Spectrum kindly maintains a careers website for young engineers here. The Selinger article is part of the Career Strategies section, archived here.

Lucius Shepard's review of LOTR: ROTK has to be the most sensible I've seen, especially in terms of his esthetic approach to the trilogy as an operatic epic. From Locusmag.

IEEE Software has a special issue (v21i1 jan/feb 2004) on Open Source software with many interesting articles.