I love the comparison, but maybe that's because it appeals to my geeky side.

"For now, the biggest news in the exploding realm of online video is not much more than a news release. Still, the recent announcement from the News Corporation and NBC Universal of a new online video venture shows a big change in how traditional media companies are trying to confront their digital futures without looking like dinosaurs dodging comets."

Try reading the paragraph again without the proper nouns, and you find that this could apply to any industry that is threatened by the web:

Who says blogs aren't good for nuthin? Nearly two weeks after we first posted about a Discovery Channel job ad seeking a male host for a new science TV series, the Discovery Channel is pulling the ad from craigslist and investigating to find out exactly who placed the ad. Discovery said they didn't place the ad themselves, so was it someone at Darlow Smithson Productions/IMG Media? This sudden announcement by Discovery was prompted by a 'secret friend' of Pat, from FairerScience blog, who writes,

We have an update on that Discovery Channel job posting for a male host (the ideal). A new friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, took action. Here is what she found out:

"A recent telephone call revealed that the ad was not placed directly by the Discovery Channel. Investigations are underway as to who placed the ad and it will be pulled in its current format. Sources also expressed some horror at being informed of the wording of the job posting, and added that they would love to find a female engineer. I don't know if they will run a replacement ad on Craigs List, so I would encourage anyone interested to apply now through the current posting and again if or when the new ad appears."

What if, instead of merely picking the top two or three universities listed on the U.S. News annual rankings of America's colleges and universities, you could find the schools that best fit the criteria that matter most to you? Geoff Davis, mathematics Ph.D. and founder of the website PhDs.org, has created a new graduate school rankings system that does just that. Using data from the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Education Statistics, Dr. Davis' system allows users to rate criteria such as average number of faculty publication citations, average number of grants, and time to degree. The ratings are then used as weights in a customized search to find the schools that best match the user's criteria.

If you didn't get around to downloading the IPCC Working Group II Report "Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability" yet, here are some handy links for you. For a quick overview, see the video of the Brussels press conference, where the WGII Co-Chair Martin Parry gives a slide presentation of the main findings of the report.

• IPCC Homepage
• Video of the Brussels press conference (April 6, 2007)
• More info and info about the WG2 authors
• Download Summary for Policymakers

The Ridge2000 program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is designed to gather scientists from many different disciplines to study the geological, hydrothermal, and biological processes at few carefully selected mid-ocean spreading centers, also known as ridges. Now, thanks to the magic of the internets, you can learn everything you want to know about mid-ocean ridge research on the newly redesigned Ridge2000 website. The site is divided into separate categories for scientists, teachers, and the general public. You can find ridge-related fellowships or academic jobs. Or you can download data through the Ridge2000 data portal (some of which may be access restricted). The general public link leads you to Venture Deep Ocean, which features general interest articles about recent research activities at the integrated study sites. Prof. Emily Klein from Duke University is currently leading a Ridge2000 expedition to sample rocks from an overlapping spreading center segment at the East Pacific Rise using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Jason. The cruise, which began on March 23 and runs until April 27, has its own website with background information and a daily log with pictures and videos.

While much of the East Coast is currently getting soaked, you can keep up with the weather on the National Weather Service website, which has a new Precipitation Analysis page that provides rainfall data for the last 24 hours. You can also find live dopplar radar imagery, weather warnings and forecasts, and more frequently updated individual rain gauge measurements, like this one after the jump from the Passaic River just west of New York City, which is currently near flood stage.

Academics, media hounds, and ordinary people around the country are asking whether Cho Seung-Hui's violent writings could have, or should have, predicted his murderous rampage this week at Virginia Tech. So what is the difference between Cho Seung-Hui and a successful horror novelist like Stephen King? In his latest essay On Predicting Violence, Stephen King writes,

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.

• How to Green Your Wardrobe
• How to Green Your Work
• How to Green Your Lighting
• How to Green Your Water
• How to Green Your Car

It's not often that the media finds an opportunity to write about scientists' sex lives, but when they do, you can be sure they'll make the most of it. The cover story of the current issue of Texas Monthly discusses not only the salacious details behind NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak's psychological meltdown, but also explores what the Nowak affair reveals about the dirty laundry lurking inside NASA--and we're not just talking about the diapers:

If the story of the Nowak-Oefelein-Shipman love triangle allowed an unusual and occasionally bizarre view of the traditionally opaque NASA subculture, it offered something else too: a peek inside the world of America's space agency in the dying days of the shuttle program and in the shadow of a disastrous crash--Columbia, in 2003--that illustrated in excruciating detail just how fundamentally purposeless, money guzzling, overpressurized, and phenomenally dangerous the shuttle was 26 years after its first mission.