Even better would be if my phone could just switch to Wi-Fi and make VoIP calls whenever possible.

But all these things involve involve giving the customer more and better choices, something cellular phone manufacturers and service providers seem reluctant to do.

I first noticed this at Barnes & Noble, when I was going into the music department. When the bells went off, the guard standing watch next to multi-disc collections was just glad to have something to do. He was certain the explanation would be in my pockets, but free of wallet, cell phone, and keys I still beeped. (Since then I’ve learned that CVS, Star Market, and Kmart employees aren’t as vigilant.)

The picture is about life-size, which says something about my powers of observation, because the first time I got around to looking for the tag, I couldn’t find it. I expected it to be sewn between layers or maybe inside of a seam, not staring me in the face, saying “REMOVE.”

So does this really prevent theft? I—mostly upright and honest citizen—am probably the only person who didn’t know about the tag. I’m sure the pro shoplifters will leave them strewn about the changing room floor, just like they leave their CD cousins in between rows of CDs. And these jeans tags don’t even require a razor blade to slice out.

So my advice to Old Navy: make the tags really hard to find. It might actually deter shoplifting, and people like me who get a little embarrassed at other stores won’t feel like morons for not noticing them earlier.

Two years ago, Verizon offered the best deal among wireless plans. Their coverage has been excellent, but after seeing their poor customer service (when I changed addresses they mistakenly charged me a $300 early termination fee, and it took months and hours on the phone before they corrected their mistake), and after seeing friends with Treos surfing the ‘net for only a few bucks a month, I can’t wait until I’m free. Can you hear that? Good.

They describe it as pretty neat as well as being scientifically interesting, and useful. After listening to some compositions and creating a few random ones myself, I must agree that it is. And anyone who has listen [sic] to the radio the last few years could certainly use some unique music.

Scientifically interesting, maybe. But after playing around with it, the best “compositions” I heard could hardly rival Muzak. Curiously, the site’s FAQ has a comment about “meaning”:

Can WolframTones compositions have meaning?

That’s a complicated philosophical question. There’s some discussion of meaning in the computational universe in A New Kind of Science. It’s probably fair to say that objects in the computational universe–and WolframTones compositions–develop meaning as they get connected to other things. In some ways WolframTones compositions are like objects in nature: their features emerge from specified underlying rules. So if the form of a sunset, a tree, or a mollusc shell is meaningful, then so can a WolframTones composition be.

Right. And that’s why rule-generated music is unlikely to mean much to its listeners–you’ve eliminated half of the human component in the communication process. It’s more like the sound of a babbling brook than a symphony.

While it’s true that human musicians incorporate rules into their compositions, they do so reflexively, so that various parts of the piece respond to other parts of the piece. The composer responds to and adjusts the music according to how it achieves certain criteria (such as beauty), criteria that are difficult to make into algorithms. When the computer is aware of how its composition makes it feel and changes the piece accordingly, then we’ll be getting somewhere.

Williams, 26, knew that forcing compressed air through a hole in the middle of a pipe causes hot and cold air to flow from opposite ends, a phenomenon known as the Ranque-Hilsch vortex-tube effect. No one is quite sure how the separation works, but feed the cold air into a container, he reasoned, and you would have an icemaker and a freezer, which would have zero operating costs and would be environmentally friendly, since it wouldn’t require chemicals and the jet of air could be generated via a compressor powered by wind, water, man or animal.

At least that was the idea. Tinkering with heat-transfer equations, Williams tried to determine how much energy it would take to yield a block of ice. “It had been a while since I’d done real math problems. I had to break out the old textbook,” says Williams, a product-development consultant with his own firm, Dissigno, in San Francisco. After eons of number crunching, he hit on the right formula and built a prototype. It isn’t very efficient; his device uses 35 times as much energy as an electric fridge to make 1 kg of ice. But its simplicity could yield a killer app in Third World villages, where Williams hopes aid groups will distribute his icemaker as an economic-development tool. He aims to field-test it in Haiti later this year.

Check out this image taken from the Spirit Mars Rover. Having landed in January 2004, Spirit’s still trucking along, and it’s just beamed back this picture from atop “Husband Hill.”

Both rovers have lasted about 17 months beyond their original mission. And Spirit is in especially fine form, operating at a power level of 950 watt-hours of electricity per day. That is only 10 watt-hours less than it had after it landed – gusts of wind have probably blown accumulated dust off its solar panels to keep them operating well.

Cellular phone providers said their service was severely limited, at best, in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast, and they encouraged people to use text messages instead of making voice calls.

And the National Guard is using couriers. Why don’t they have radios?

In storm-ravaged southern Mississippi, the national guard was doing things the old-fashioned way.

“We’ve got runners running from commander to commander,” said Maj. Gen. Harold Cross of the Mississippi National Guard. “In other words, we’re going to the sound of gunfire, as we used to say during the Revolutionary War.”