Top ranked excuse for ranking: The Boston Globe reports that the Atlantic Monthly slams the usefulness of college rankings - before offering its own. “We put the chart together to illustrate how slippery and often pointless the idea of selectivity is,” says the magazine’s Cullen Murphy. (Which, is sort of why I blogged this: to illustrate how pointless it is to say anything other than the magazine included a “Top Colleges” ranking because it seemed like a good way to sell more magazines.) So, if you can follow the magazine’s circular argument, I think they want you to be sure to ignore this issue.

I’ve heard of this: Here’s a demo of something that’s been just around the corner for my entire life, a wireless videophone (ala Dick Tracy, except not a watch, but a cell-phone.) The demo is in Japanese with english subtitles. In real life, I guess we’ll all just learn Japanese. The phone is from Japan’s NTT Docomo which owns a big chunk of ATT Wireless. The service is dependent upon the deployment of a new mobile broadband network that will be rolled out to a city near you sometime in the future. I have one piece of advice for Docomo, however. If they want to insure that every parent of a teenager will purchase one of these phones, there’s a feature I believe they should add.

This “in the future” timeframe reminds me of a question my son asked me this morning on the way to church regarding the bluegrass gospel music airing on WSM-AM: “Just exactly when is the sweet bye-and-bye?” Next time, I’ll have a better answer: It’s when we shall meet on that beautiful shore via video cell phones.

I do this everyday: Folio:’s Simon Dumenco reels off some rants regarding current magazine cliches. If he had a blog, he could do this all the time: for example. (On a related note, here is a link to the October 2003 issue of Folio:.)