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Via Information Week: It’s no surprise that most of the cross-browser issues out there center on Microsoft(MSFT)’s Internet Explorer and the Mozilla browser family — mainly Firefox.

Love it or hate it — and let’s face it, most of us probably either hate it or manifest mere tolerance for it — Internet Explorer is here to stay, the way Windows itself is probably here to stay. According to the most recent W3Schools report, IE in all its incarnations commands about 58% of the browser usage pie, down from its high of 90% or more, but definitely still large enough to matter. read

From StandByBert: So. I’m relatively new to Myspace. Someone, at some point, probably my publicist at Little, Brown, said, You should get a page on myspace. I didn’t really know why other than this general ‘promotion’ header. At this point I’ve got pages all over the place, amazon, friendster, here, and soon, WBEZ (which I feel sure is the one place people will actually hang around for a few minutes), and it’s a little hard to keep up, so basically, the Bert is still the best place to find me. All I knew about myspace was that it was very popular with bands and teenagers and the creepy older people who like them. So a couple of months ago I posted a profile and kind of left it alone, thinking if anything was going to happen it would just happen spontaneously. Nothing happened, which didn’t surprise me. Maybe a month ago I started poking around on the site a bit and discovered my friends and fellow writers Bryan Charles and Amanda Stern were on there. So I invited them to be my friends, and they agreed, and for a while I had just the two friends, which Myspace likes to remind me by saying on my page, “Elizabeth has 2 friends.” The digit “2” being in a much larger font than the “Elizabeth has friends.” Still, I didn’t take this too deeply to heart until finally, maybe a week or two ago, I started poking around again. The mind began this sort of thing: “Hm, let’s see who Bryan’s friends with. Wait, how does Bryan have three hundred friends? I have two books, and I’m ten years older than him. Hey, I know so and so. Hey, I’d like to be friends with that writer. Hey, this so and so keeps turning up on everyone’s page, let me see what they’re all about. Hey, I haven’t checked myspace in an hour, maybe I have a new friend. Hey, I have no new friends – why? Hm, I wonder if I should maybe be writing or something right now.” Then I start poking around some more. more…

youtube sources here, google video here

Via EDN: The most basic and simplest gesture is pointing, and it is an effective method for most people to communicate with each other, even in the presence of language barriers. However, pointing quickly fails as a way to communicate when the object or concept that a person is trying to convey is not in sight to point at. Taking gesture recognition beyond simple pointing greatly increases the type of information that two people can communicate with each other. Gesture communication is so natural and powerful that parents are increasingly using it to enable their babies to engage in direct, two-way communication with their care givers, through baby sign language, long before the babies can clearly speak (Reference 1). http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6466206…

Funny…

Via the NYT: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. more…

Funny..but remember only one perspective.

Via OPB: This film explores real love stories — of marriage, parents and children, romance, brotherly love, altruism, divine love, love of community, even the love of war. more…

Myspace is a social networking website created for preteens and teens as a way to further isolate themselves from their parents and sexualize themselves more quickly. Myspace allows these children to create an entire web page dedicated to themselves and they generally decorate it accordingly. Many kids who think they’re “hip” and “cool” use Myspace and spend hours looking at other people’s profiles, endlessly posting poorly written messages and waiting for the love of their life to come online. more…