venice

Venice Beach is the home of freedom, abandon, muscularity, and dropping out of society's sad, rational ways.

This ocean-side neighborhood of Los Angeles is a place so outside the norm that a fortune teller there actually told me things she could never have made up.

So why, oh, why is Google -- of all companies -- invading the place with its brainiac gristle?

A shocking expose in The New York Times describes how grown men with vastly overgrown guns are weeping on the beach in frustration.

Why? Because they fear that they will soon be cast aside in favor … Read more

Venice again faces a centuries-old danger: It is continuing to sink. And scientists now warn that the lagoon city is even slowly tilting slightly to the east.

The warning, carried in the March 28 issue of Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, contradicts earlier research that argued that the process of subsidence had stopped during the 2000s. This followed a decision by the city to stop pumping groundwater from beneath the city.

In the Venetian lagoon, which surrounds the city and protects Venice from the Adriatic Sea, sea levels have been rising at a rate of … Read more

VENICE, Italy--Not far beyond this famous city, just at the border between the Venice Lagoon and the Adriatic Sea, a group of concrete behemoths is under construction. A lot of very smart people think they will be part of the solution that could save the island town from drowning.

The notion that Venice is sinking has been around for a long time, and in fact, it has lost 23 centimeters of land over the last 100 years. But these days, it faces a troika of what may be more insidious challenges: rising tides that each year bring more and more … Read more

PARADISO, Italy--I'm sitting in a comfortable seat, looking out at the foothills of the Italian Alps. High on the hilltops the houses are grand, and below them, small terraced vineyards offer the promise of a leisurely glass of wine and some terrific linguine al vongole.

Not long before, Lake Como had sparkled out the window, and though George Clooney is said to have sold his villa there, it's hard not to go by and imagine him and his Hollywood friends getting the best out of life amid one waterside mansion after another and more glamor than most people … Read more

Well, you don't really need to totally disregard this episode, but that is what 10-12 means in CB radio talk. And the news is light. Although we do learn that the head of MI6's Speedo is not a state secret. But it SHOULD be!

MI6 boss in Facebook entry row http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8134807.stm

Small towns and farms to get Net Neutrality http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10278484-94.html

Apple orders up a ton of … Read more

-- Skype founders name new video start-up Joost. The once-named "Venice Project" now has a real name. The service, which has been in private beta since this summer, aims to bring free, high-quality Internet programming through a Web-based interface. (News.com)

-- Putting a squeeze on Net video. Internet media technology company On2 has some exciting new codecs that could mean streaming high-definition video on services such as YouTube and Google Video in the near future. (News.com)

-- DMCA complaint with YouTube dropped. A controversial DMCA complaint about a video on YouTube has been dropped after the … Read more

It might be Christmas Eve, but the blogs are still abuzz--mostly with speculation about the big changes in the tech scene that we may or may not be seeing 2007. Over the past couple of days, momentum has been building on a number of stories that are starting to paint what might be one of the first concrete trends we see for '07. Will the coming year be the year of the "killer," the year when big and not-so-big companies join forces to try and topple the products that seem to have a stranglehold on certain niches of … Read more