I was hit with a deep and profound thought this morning: Altoids tins have replaced Sucrets tins in American culture. Will Altoids tins be phased out in the future, prompting collectors to bid for them on eBay? I have twelve of them. Any takers?

Wonderful followup article in Wired about the Norman Nie study I (and I’m sure tons of other people) mentioned yesterday. It replaces “dogs” for “Internet” with very amusing results. “Americans who have dogs spend the time with their dogs instead of said time watching TV, visiting with friends, sleeping, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and doing nothing.” And the ending point which had me on the floor laughing: “and a full 92 percent (of dog owners) go on the Internet specifically to interact with other dog owners.” Oh no! The horror. The horror.

From the John Markoff in the New York Times: Portrait of a Newer, Lonelier Crowd Is Captured in an Internet Survey. Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University, states “the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings”. He asserts that “the Internet is creating a new wave of social isolation in the United States, raising the specter of an atomized world without human contact or emotion.” I completely disagree. What about the fact that the Internet brings people together from the far reaches of the world and bridges the gaps of distance and between cultures? Sure there are people who should spend more time away from the computer screen and out in the sun, communing with people in the flesh, but in general, the Internet has broadened our capacity for reaching out to others, not lessened our social interactions. Hmph.

Big letdown. As instructed, I checked back with @Home last night to hear the results of the Sunnyvale rollout and “it didn’t happen”. They have no idea when they will try again. And the guy didn’t have as good of a sense of humor as the guy I spoke to last time, so he didn’t seem to be amused by my mock crying. Ah well. I guess I should set a deadline for latching onto DSL.

Yay! AT&T; @Home, the cable modem service, is being rolled out in Sunnyvale, CA starting today. I confess that I have phoned @Home almost every month for the past three years to ask if they were servicing my area yet. I don’t know why I got so attached to the idea of having the Internet delivered over my cable wiring, but ever since a friend of mine got their service as a beta tester years ago, I have been enamored of the idea. I’ve heard it’s not terribly secure (with neighbors showing up on your Network Neighborhood) and that speeds decrease with more people on the same wire, but there’s just something about it that feels really cool. Maybe it’s the idea of retrofitting something on top of a TV delivery mechanism (uh, wouldn’t that be “a kluge“?). Maybe it’s the horror stories friends tell about getting DSL, losing their regular phone service, and having terrible transfer speeds. Maybe it’s a glamourized notion that AT&T;’s customer service (even if it did used to be TCI) has got to be more responsive than PacBell’s. At any rate, I’m planning to sign up. I can always cancel it if I don’t like it. I’d rather my cable TV stopped working than my phone. (I’d get more things done!)

How many home furnishing ecommerce sites can the market support? There’s a bunch already: HomePoint.com, HomePortfolio.com, MyHome.com, GoodHome.com, living.com, Furniture.com. Then there are related sites such as OurHouse.com, Tavolo.com, SurLaTable.com. Will the online shopping economy support lots of places to buy furniture online or will there be an eventual consolidation into one or two?

The new Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History is ready to greet the public and, as you can see from these night photos, it’s a real beauty. “The Planetarium, as well as the ‘Big Bang Theater’ — a dramatic re-creation of the first minutes of the origins of the universe — is situated inside a sphere 87 feet in diameter, which appears to float in a glass-walled cube.” It is part of the new Rose Center for Earth and Space. A beautiful structure for an awe-inspiring subject.

From House & Garden magazine: “The newest nonstick material on the market is Cybernox, an alloy developed for the French aerospace industry.” This material isn’t as effective as usual non-stick coatings, but it will stay non-stick for a lifetime and you can clean it without worrying about scratching off the coating. I’ve been looking for a new non-stick pan since mine has given up even the pretense of being non-stick. I am leaning towards just paying $30 for a cheapy one, but cheap stuff just isn’t made as well as it used to be. Where have the decent quality mid-priced products gone?

This Economist article on the biology of music is fascinating. It describes various experiments which have analyzed how our brains process music. These have shown that music and language are processed independently of each other and that the processing of music is broken down into several tasks handled in different parts of the brain. Perception of rhythm and pitch are handled in separate areas. Being a musician, I was especially intrigued by the study done on musicians and nonmusicians which found that blood flow increased to the left brain of musicians but not nonmusicians when they listened to music. A musician’s training affects the way she perceives harmony. I definitely listen to music differently if I want to “pay attention” to how it is constructed, and as I learned more about music theory I found it harder to turn off the thinking part of my brain when listening to music. The last part of the article discusses the connection between music and emotions, stating that the place where music has its most profound effect is in the brain’s emotional core—the limbic system. When men and women were asked why music was important in their lives, “emotion turned out to be not merely an answer. It was, more or less, the answer.” It has been proven that music elicits emotions, not merely expresses emotions that people recognize. Another study showed that music’s emotional and conscious effects are completely separate. I’ve always been facinated by how tightly music is interwoven into my emotional state of mind. And I’m always taken aback by people who don’t seem very emotionally affected by music. Surely they’re missing out on one of the profound wonders of the human mind.

Apparently it’s not enough that I get spam email as a result of my Network Solutions registration info. Last night I got a spam phone call. Argh. Bulkregister.com (I’m not even going to give them the benefit of a link and I’m not going to look at their site!) phoned with an Important Service Announcement for Network Solutions Customers (so official sounding, yes?). They wanted to let me know that thanks to new legislation I can now register for my domain names with them instead. Yes. I know. And I’m definitely not going to now!