From The Independent comes a sobering article (one of many I’ve come across of late and have posted about before) detailing the shockingly rapid melting of the arctic ice pack and the imminent fate of the polar bear—not to mention humanity’s now very near-term fate. LINK→

A good capsule review of one of my all-time favorite SF novels. The conclusion of this article states that a copy of The Stars My Destination should be nailed to the retro Hugo voting board, to which I wholeheartedly agree. It is way past time that this novel and its author, Alfred Bester, get the recognition they so richly deserve. His work was lightyears ahead of its time. I’m amazed that no one has ever turned The Stars My Destination or his other classic work, The Demolished Man, into films—both books are so cinematic. LINK→

cameron i/o calls this design aesthetic “exposed XHTML.” I’m not sure I’d ever use it myself but it’s certainly unique. LINK→

“The move to 64-bit computing has been hyped for years now. As we head into 2008, the hype may have died down, but the reality is starting to sink in for IT shops: move away from the 32-bit town, and into the 64-bit city, or get left behind.” LINK→

Another nifty clock that uses Flickr images of digits to display the time. Note: The site takes a few seconds to load the digit images the first time you visit and will prompt you for permission to store about 1 MB worth of digit images in your browser’s cache for faster performance in the future. They even offer a screensaver version. LINK→

A slick little online dictionary with a minimalist interface and lightning fast lookups. It even keeps a history list of your past lookups. Very nice. LINK→

I just came across mention of this site on TechCrunch and absolutely love it! Word, words, words…my kind of site. A lot of people seem to think it is a silly concept for a social website but, if you’re a word lover like me, the site is a blast. A very minimalistic, zen interface. “Like Flickr, but without the photos.” LINK→

An excellent article on William Gibson and his new book Spook Country, which I’m eager to read. I loved Pattern Recognition. LINK→

A good tutorial on how to get WordPress to auto-style your posts based on category so that each type of post (video, photo, link, quote, etc.) has its own visual style in the manner of a tumblelog without having to manually code DIVs each time you post—which is what I do here. I’ll have to give this a try, as I’m already using something very similar for the category icons on the permalink pages. LINK→

Ars Technica reviews the new alpha of Opera 9.5. “And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer.” LINK→