Personaly I LIKE PAPER school book. But in California kids will have ONLY Digital Textbooks .....this is quite sad.

WHY ..........

Last year, the state earmarked $350 million for school books and other instructional materials. Imagine the savings schools could realize by using these high-quality, free resources.[ I dont think ist free......] Even if teachers have to print out some of the material, it will be far cheaper than regularly buying updated textbooks.
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 Good to know

The question "The tomato: is it a fruit, or is it a vegetable?" found its way into the United States Supreme Court in 1893. The court ruled unanimously in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is correctly identified as, and thus taxed as, a vegetable, for the purposes of the 1883 Tariff Act on imported produce. The court did acknowledge however that botanically speaking, a tomato is a fruit.

A Farewell to Jan Kaplicky

There are groups who claim Kaplicky was knackered. People spend the day after his death by medially challenging his opposers. Truly, hard to say whether the dispute around the Blob library shortened his life, or if he died from happiness that his daughter Johanka was born to be a strong and healthy kid. At least he died very, very happy. I feel sorry for his wife, who is going to celebrate her daughter’s birthday with bitterness from now on.

European Union plans to ban plasma TVs???

 EU is planning to outlaw the most power-hungry televisions, which effectively means that many plasma TVs will be illegal. The reasons for this totalitarianism are described thus:

Different makes and models of television vary in their use of power, but a 42in plasma television may use some 822 kilowatt hours a year, compared to 350kWh by an LCD flat screen of the same size. A 32in CRT, the biggest available, would use 322kWh.

Power consumption goes up as the screens increase in size, so the trust says that a big plasma model could use four times as much electricity and be responsible for the emission of four times as much carbon dioxide as the biggest CRT; they now account for twice as much as a fridge-freezer.

Now European governments are finalising a mandatory EU regulation to set minimum standards for televisions. The worst performers will be phased out, and the rest will have to be labelled with energy ratings which, says Defra, “will make it easier for consumers to identify the most and least energy-efficient televisions available”. The scheme is modelled on an existing one for fridges and other white goods which has greatly increased their efficiency over the past decade.

more about LCD vs Plasma

This really made me laugh

The Ig Nobel Prizes 2008 honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

NUTRITION PRIZE. Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.
PEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. "The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake" 
BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and  Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.
CHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.
LITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations."