Wes Phillips

PBS has posted a site dedicated to Nikola Tesla, my candidate for coolest scientist ever. Among other things, it includes a virtual tour o the Niagara Falls electrical generating plant and a fascinating hint that Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was created out of fear that the USSR had perfected his charged-particle beam weapon (you see, there's this huge controversy over what happened to his papers after his death).

Jeff Wong passes along this 2003 article on the fine (and in this age of compression, almost lost) art of disc mastering.

Cool simulations—especially the acoustics package.

Does music represent the pleasure of counting without the burden of numbers? John S. Allen makes a strong case—sort of.

Another reason to love The Onion.

You'd think I would have learned to trust Matthew Polk by now, but I attended an NYC demonstration for his new SurroundBar 360 with relatively low expectations. That's because there's a current vogue for low profile, multichannel "bars" that give flatscreen monitor viewers a low profile, single-mount solution to the "problem" of all those extra speakers a multichannel A/V system requires.

I loved the first six volumes of Tales of the City, although the recently published Michael Tolliver Lives sounds pretty dire. Still, few writers have ever written more lovingly about the city by the bay.