Journal

The deal, which adds one year onto the agreement he signed last October, runs through the 2014-15 season and includes a guaranteed $1.97 million for next season, rising to $2.3 million in the final year of the contract. The incentive package from his previous agreement, a maximum of $235,000, is retained in the new contract.

[...]

“I have said this before, but there is no place I would rather be coaching than UCLA,” Howland said. “I grew up a Bruin basketball fan and this is my dream job.”

I can finally remove Office 2004 from my PowerBook.

Fourth? They should have titled it Portishead Knock Off.

[...] consumers will now pay $30 a month for unlimited data service from AT&T, compared to $20 under the plan introduced last year. So even though the phone will now cost $200, consumers will be out more cash at the end of a two-year contract compared to the previous deal.

Of course, that includes faster 3G data service, so the price increase may be worth it. But we should call it an iPhone price increase, not a cut.

I’ll hold on to my iPod touch and cheap cell phone, thanks.

Lovely photo of the famous Woods Hole lighthouse. I will be visiting the area in August.

Good news regarding resveratrol:

Separately from Sirtris’s investigations, a research team led by Tomas A. Prolla and Richard Weindruch, of the University of Wisconsin, reports in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday that resveratrol may be effective in mice and people in much lower doses than previously thought necessary. In earlier studies, like Dr. Auwerx’s of mice on treadmills, the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100 bottles of red wine a day.

Potential complications with the current model:

The Wisconsin report underlined another unresolved link in the theory, that of whether resveratrol actually works by activating sirtuins. The issue is clouded because resveratrol is a powerful drug that has many different effects in the cell. The Wisconsin researchers report that they saw no change in the mouse equivalent of sirtuin during caloric restriction, a finding that if true could undercut Sirtris’s strategy of looking for drugs that activate sirtuin.

Dr. Guarente, a scientific adviser to Sirtris, said the Wisconsin team only measured the amount of sirtuin present in mouse tissues, and not the more important factor of whether it had been activated.

Additionally, all of Radiohead’s music videos are available. Hopefully, their singles and EPs will be posted in the near future. EMI has made all tracks available for individual purchase. I remember the band saying a few years ago that they were holding off on iTunes because they prefer their customers to purchase their work in the album format. Radiohead has since moved on to distributing straight from W.A.S.T.E. and ATO Records/XL Recordings.

Borders Group Inc. eliminated 20 percent of its corporate workforce this week, including 156 jobs at its Ann Arbor headquarters.

Local employees were told this morning, the company said in a statement. The affected jobs involve positions across virtually all corporate departments in Ann Arbor but do not affect workers at the company’s Borders Books & Music or Waldenbooks stores.

One of my friends works for Borders corporate and I hope she still has a job by the end of the week.

BARMY Keith Sorrell is living proof that man can live on Mars – he’s eaten nothing but the choc bars for 17 years.

Keith, 37, munches a dozen a day for his breakfast, lunch and dinner.

He gets through more than 4,000 a year – even having Mars Bar drinks mixed with vodka or rum when he goes to the pub.

DETROIT — With the Stanley Cup only 34.3 seconds from being presented to the Detroit Red Wings, the Penguins staved off elimination with a stunning goal by forward Maxime Talbot and won the game, 4-3, in triple overtime on a goal by Petr Sykora at 12:47 Tuesday morning at Joe Louis Arena.

This was one of the craziest hockey games I have ever watched. I couldn’t believe the Red Wings gave up the game-tying goal at the end of the third. I can’t remember ever watching a game where the empty net strategy worked. And to top it off, Detroit outshot the Penguins in overtime just like in the third period but still lost the game. Game six should be a bloodbath.

Two years ago, the diagnosed rate of chlamydia in Sweden plummeted 25 percent.

That, in and of itself, was puzzling as there had been no public health interventions or sudden changes in the sexual mores of the Swedish populace.

Researchers soon identified a new strain of the bacteria, which was missing the key snippet of DNA that diagnostic tests from Roche and Abbott used to detect Chlamydia trachomatis.

Inter Milan have confirmed the appointment of former Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho as Roberto Mancini’s successor.

Mourinho, who was sacked by Chelsea in September, has been out of the game since then, biding his time until finding a suitable role to take.

The Serie A champions finally parted company with Mancini last week after months of speculation and the Portuguese boss, a Champions League winner with Porto in 2004, has signed a three-year deal at the San Siro.

Mourinho will be unveiled tomorrow at a press conference at 11.30am local time.

I bet Mourinho’s first act as manager is to acquire Didier Drogba from Chelsea.

DETROIT (AP) - Ford Motor Co. officially unloaded its storied Jaguar and Land Rover businesses on Monday - netting the cash-strapped automaker a $1.7 billion boost that’s a mere third of what it paid for the two luxury brands.

India’s Tata Motors Ltd. said it had completed the purchase of the brands in a deal first announced March 26.

In 2007, according to Nielsen SoundScan, nearly 1 million LPs were bought, up from 858,000 in 2006. Based on to-date sales for 2008, that figure could jump to 1.6 million by year’s end. (According to the Recording Industry Association of America, CD shipments dropped 17.5 percent during the same 2006-07 period.) Sales of turntables — which tumbled from 1.8 million in 1989 to a paltry 275,000 in 2006, according to the Consumer Electronics Association — rebounded sharply last year, when nearly half a million were sold.

The creator and director’s answers to the question are exactly the reason why I’m rooting for Indiana Jones to win out at the box office this weekend:

The quick answer is no. But “Sex” creator Darren Star has another theory.

“Their girlfriends are going to take them,” Star said. “And they’re going to like it.”

Or at the very least, pretend to like it. Director Michael Patrick King suggests that men who want sex ought to see “Sex.”

“I think if you’re in a relationship with a woman and you take her to this movie, she’ll feel very happy … and open,” King said.

Reviews of the film have been negative, with Daniel M. Kimmel’s my favorite so far:

…it’s like being trapped in a dentist’s office with nothing to read but an old issue of Vogue.

Changes include revisions to automatic term mapping (ATM) and a new citation sensor that will match citations with searches.

UCLA Medical Center and its most accomplished liver surgeon provided a life-saving transplant to one of Japan’s most powerful gang bosses, law enforcement sources told The Times.

In addition, the surgeon performed liver transplants at UCLA on three other men who are now barred from entering the United States because of their criminal records or suspected affiliation with Japanese organized crime groups, said a knowledgeable law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

[...]

There is no evidence that UCLA or Busuttil knew at the time of the transplants that any of the patients had ties to Japanese gangs, commonly called yakuza. Both said in statements that they do not make moral judgments about patients and treat them based on their medical need.

Stem cells are the fountain of youth–or the tools of Satan. It depends on whom you ask. Somewhere in between are pioneering companies making incredible strides in medicine. And while it may be decades before an injection will repair a damaged spine, over the next few years we’ll see stem cells speed drug development, eliminate unsafe medicines and create better diagnostic tests. In this special report, Forbes takes a look at the growing promise of this miraculous science.

Lately, I’ve been running into an annoying trend on mainstream news sites — publishers are sectioning articles into multiple pages. They will tell you that they do so to improve readability, page loading times, etc., but what it boils down is page view counts and advertising impressions. However, I’ve noticed that a lot of these sites will break a relatively short article into 4+ pages, with each page being around 4 paragraphs in length. Give me a break. When I run into these kind of articles, I read the first page and move on. Mike Davidson sums up the situation nicely:

Over the last several years, many publishers have convinced themselves that breaking up stories into sometimes as many as ten pages is an acceptable way to present content on the web. The realistic ones at least admit that it’s a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard.

Additionally, I’ve seen a number of sites run top ten list-style articles, with each item in the list getting its own page. This format really breaks down when the list contains a lot of entries, such as the top 100 places to live in America, 2008.

From the hog’s humble beginnings on the cover of Floyd’s 1977 album Animals to its recent unpiloted escape from Coachella, the creature has become a pop-culture icon (it even merited a reference on an episode of The Simpsons). The man who dreamed up the floating swine, Roger Waters, shared the tale behind the pig, from its origins in the late Seventies to its future plans.