Someone who is "genderqueer," for example, views the gender options as more than just male and female or doesn't fit into the binary male-female system. A "trannydyke" is a transgender person (whose gender is different than the one assigned at birth) attracted to people with a more feminine gender, while a "pansexual" is attracted to people of multiple genders. A "boi" describes a boyish gay guy or a biological female with a male presentation; and "heteroflexible" refers to a straight person with a queer mind-set.

The list of terms ? which have hotly contested definitions ? goes on: "FTM" for female to male, "MTF" for male to female, "boydyke," "trannyboy," "trannyfag," "multigendered," "polygendered," "queerboi," "transboi," "transguy," "transman," "half-dyke," "bi-dyke," "stud," "stem," "trisexual," "omnisexual," and "multisexual."

Doctorow: I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic ... you get the picture. (Also Doctorow's essay on eBooks)

Noon: The idea behind the Cobralingus project is quite simple: could a piece of text be pushed along a similar pathway?

The first task was to create a set of filter gates. These came out of a period of experimentation, playing games on screen, and on paper, thinking up different ways in which language could be transformed. Some of the filters, such as Randomise, Decay, or Explode, break text down, whereas others, such as Enhance, Control, and Find Story, have a more constructive property.

I could also drug the language, using such concepts as Anagramethane, Metaphorazine and Fecundamol. These are not computerised effects; they are imaginary technologies, designed to fire the writer's imagination.

Three chimpanzees, three tapirs, three camels and an elephant have been lost since 24 January.

Tests so far have shown most of the animals were killed with sodium fluoroacetate, a banned rat poison.

On the 20th anniversary of the start of the miners' strike three key points need to be understood. First, on energy policy: instead of being the only European Union country that is self-sufficient in energy and a net oil exporter, in a few years we will join the others in their energy dependency. This time the UK will be at the end of the gas and oil pipelines from Russia, central Asia, Algeria and the Gulf. Windfarms, however welcome, will not save us.

[...]

Second, the economic and social costs of destroying the British coal industry have been huge - at least £28bn. This is nearly half of the North Sea tax revenues of £60bn collected since 1985. Unless further support is forthcoming, the horrendous damage to mining communities will take at least two generations to heal, notwithstanding the work of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and the Coalfield Communities Campaign.

As far as the U.S. government is concerned, that discussion started and ended more than 40 years ago. Regardless of how the world's astronomy community might want to handle first contact, Uncle Sam has ideas of his own. And they rest on the assumption that ET is first and foremost an illegal alien.

But as soon as Blue Note's PR campaign started to pay off, an interesting thing occurred: There was a paradoxical effort to promote Jones as an artist whose success wasn't the result of promotion. She was, we were told, a word-of-mouth phenomenon, someone you could feel good about listening to while you wrote in your journal.

This type of promotion worked well among a crucial part of her fan base: college students, aging baby boomers, and sensitive writer types - people who think of themselves as independent and open-minded. Jones' continuing success will depend at least in part on getting these fans to be as evangelical about Feels Like Home as they were about Come Away With Me.

Level Three Pop or POP-III: What musicologists and classical music folk mean when they say "pop music." Any music that is not art music. Music that is, or that can be, made by amateurs. Depending on your views on jazz, any music that is improvised in whole or in part, or (if you want to include most jazz) which does not proceed from some master plan.