Other things going on in the news around the reports of Saddam Hussein’s capture:

• Modern art pieces are being added by MoMA in anticipation of its completed new building, including a Jasper Johns piece, as well as some Picasso.
• The New York Times runs out of superlatives praising The Return of the King. As Jackie Harvey would breathlessly report, can Oscar’s call be far behind?
• And, in a nod to other current events, I note the Truth Laid Bear is following the reactions of webloggers—conservative webloggers—to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Including a Jackie Harvey-esque touché to those who opposed the war, in which TLB misreads the opposition as wishing for the continued sovreignty of Saddam. I’m sorry, Mr. Bear: you must have missed the part where the President lied to our allies, the UN, and us about the reason for the war. No, Saddam does not deserve to be returned to power. But nor does he deserve to be trumpeted as the successful culmination of President Damn-the-Constitution’s fight against terrorism, while GIs are dying daily in Iraq, while al-Qaeda grows ever stronger, and while the architect of the single greatest act of war committed on US soil remains at large.

Oops. Guess the last one slipped in...

Another quick link check round:

• My home state, known for magnificent hams, stands up to SPAM—of an entirely different kind
• That’s outsourcing of an entirely different kind (thanks, Greg)
• Bush’s team shows their international relations competence, of an entirely different kind
• Hopefully this wonderful new game from Lucas will be an Indiana Jones game of an entirely different kind
• NATO shows military courage of an entirely different kind

Weblogs.com hit a new high water mark yesterday; at the peak during the day, 4,851 weblogs updated in a three hour period.

Note the high R-squared value (0.953) for this log normal plot, based on fitting the data with an exponential curve. Compare against the linear R-squared value from the last high water mark in October, which had fallen to 0.784. Based on the data and the steadily decreasing R-squared value for the standard linear regression, I think it’s now safe to say that the data confirms that the high water mark grows at an exponential rate. Source data, as always, is available here under a Creative Commons license.

Fabulous thread on Slashdot about Kermit (the file transfer protocol and application, not the Frog). I remember, back in the day (like, 1993), when using Kermit over a modem was the only way one could deal with the truly astounding line noise on the local phone lines in Charlottesville. Mind, this was over a 2400 baud modem, to which I could actually send Hayes modem codes to improve performance. Remember that? No, of course not. It was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead (Marlowe).

The other thing is, I can’t remember the name of the Macintosh program that I used Kermit over. I know there was a MacKermit, but there were other tools as well, including some that supported the long-demised Communications Toolbox. Man, those were the days.

As pointed out by Tony Pierce (see his “Nooooooo” at the bottom of the entry) and BoingBoing, BlogShares has gone the way of all websites. Seyed Razavi, BlogShares’ creator, says he came to the decision after recent technical difficulties illustrated for him that keeping the service online required an active developer and operator, and that revenues from the site were declining.

I enjoyed playing the game for a while, but recently only checked in on my portfolio once every few months.