Media Cloud: A new tool to track how news gets covered
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School: "Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon...Eventually users will be able to compare the top 10 news events covered by Fox News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the BBC, for example, or chart the terms that appear most frequently in The New York Times, compared with leading blogs, or create a world map showing which countries receive the most media attention, or follow the path of a particular report to see if it dominates the news or dies out."

Maps, area codes, phone numbers, zip codes, home sales, climate averages, SIC codes, place names, broadcast stations (Thanks, Barb)
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm
Sample search in place names for Northampton
http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/PlaceNames.asp?inData=northampton

New York Times: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security - "The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say."

John Hanson and John Hancock are among the eight Presidents of Congress (serving one year each from 1781-1789) while the United States operated under the Articles of Confederation. See more at The History Guy:
http://www.historyguy.com/americanrevolution/presidents_of_congress_under_articles_of_confederation.htm

Bulwer-Lytton (where www means wretched writers welcome) 2009 Fiction Contest Winners An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night." http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
Courtesy of Toledo reader
If Microsoft doesn't tweak its Word word processing system soon, the company will be banned from selling it. Yes, that's right. The word processing system that so many of us have come to so use, for better or worse, could theoretically be ripped from the shelves by October. The situation is the result of a ruling made by Eastern District of Texas judge Leonard Davis on Tuesday. Judge Davis held that Microsoft infringed U.S. Patent 5,787,449, held by Michel Vulpe, the founder of a Canadian company called i4i. Judge Davis also assessed Microsoft some $290 million in fines. Click here for a story from PC Magazine; here for a piece from the Houston Chronicle (which links to the Seattle PI); here for Judge Davis's order. WSJ Law Blog August 12, 2009
Oddball Ohio Chicago Review Press, 2004
Firsts in Ohio:
Traffic light
Automated traffic light
Banana split
Wendy’s
American Christmas tree
Manure spreader
Concrete streets
Commercial popcorn popper
Public building in the world to be wired for electricity
All-American Soap Box Derby
Patent for chewing gum called “red rubber”
Hot dog bun
Co-ed college in the country
Modern vacuum cleaner
Cash register
Bar code scanner

Largest:
Geode in the world
Rocking chair in the world
Freestanding cellblock in the world, now used in films such as Air Force One and The Shawshank Redemption
Cuckoo clock
Basket-shaped building
Crystal ball
TO BE CONTINUED