[NY Times]
So-called "intelligent design" presumes a particularly stupid designer.

[American Scientist Online]
Essay that echoes much of my own thinking on identity and purpose (though I don't necessarily share all of the author's personal values).

[Technology Review]
Instead of fixing or abandoning the Hubble Space Telescope, a group of astronomers and rocket scientists have come up with a third, better option: replace it using the HST’s spare parts. The Hubble Origins Project seeks to use spare parts from the Hubble and the original design, plus the new scientific instruments that were built for the servicing mission, and put up a new Hubble for less than $700M-$1B. This represents a safer, cheaper option than repair. Plus, you get a telescope that doesn’t have spherical abration and that has 21st century computers, rather than 20-year old computers from the 1980s.

[The New Republic]
Steven Pinker responds to the reaction to Harvard President Lawrence Summers's remarks at a conference on gender imbalances in science, in which he raised the possibility of innate sex differences, noting among other things that the psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo—the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them—is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense.

[New York Times]
IBM, Sony and Toshiba announce details of their newest microprocessor design, known as Cell, which is expected to offer faster computing performance than microprocessors from Intel and AMD.

[News.com]
Six companies, including Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics, have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which will let consumers conceivably put a terabyte (1TB) of data onto a single optical disc. Or, in human terms, a few hundred movies.

[American Psychological Society]
Reaction time and IQ may predict long life.