In true "flash mob" form, Arista won't reveal precise times or places for Lavigne's appearances until 48 hours before each event. (The secrecy is meant to build excitement for the new record, according to the spokeswoman.)

The secrecy also will help build a fan database. Those who wish to be notified about the concerts must provide their e-mail addresses at Lavigne's Web site (www.avrillavigne.net). They'll receive an e-mail or, if they choose, an automated voice mail message with the time and location of the free concert. Of course, details also will be announced on radio stations and on AOL's Digital City Web sites.

Just think about the choices we make every day, whether it is the food we buy from supermarkets, with their 300,000-plus lines; the schools we choose to send our kids to; the cars we select to drive; the phone service we opt for; the healthcare plans; the pension options; where to take a holiday - the multiplicity of choices means that we have to research, consider and decide what we want. Choice has become an all-consuming task, but it doesn't necessarily improve the service or the product. Take telephone directory enquiries, for example. It used to be so simple - one number, one service. And it worked. Now we have a number of services, none of which seem capable of finding the number you need.

"I've attempted to explain why and when an excess of choice becomes a problem," Schwartz says. "When you have all these choices, you have an enormous problem gathering all the information to decide which is the right one. You start looking over your shoulder, thinking that if you'd made a different choice, you'd have done better. So there's regret, which makes you less satisfied with what you have chosen, whether or not there's good reason to have regrets. It's easy to imagine there was a better option, even if there wasn't really, because you can't possibly examine all of them."

If the "death penalty" in the game is too severe and your character is permanently destroyed - "permadeath," in designer parlance - you may stop playing the game and, even worse, stop paying the monthly subscription fee for it. But if the penalty is too light and you reappear with all your high-tech weapons and health intact, what's to stop you from engaging in reckless behavior, undermining the credibility and fun of the virtual universe, and then growing bored and dropping out anyway?

Don't you hate reviews by writers with fancy degrees who have seen the movie and have informed opinions? Now's your chance to fight back!

The debate over whether information could still exist after falling into a black hole has been around for years. Famed scientists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill even made a bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it. Hawking's research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as the "information paradox."

[...]

"The problem with the classical theory is that you could use any combination of particles to make the black hole -- protons, electrons, stars, planets, whatever -- and it would make no difference. There must be billions of ways to make a black hole, yet with the classical model the final state of the system is always the same," Mathur said.

That kind of uniformity violates the quantum mechanical law of reversibility, he explained. Physicists must be able to trace the end product of any process, including the process that makes a black hole, back to the conditions that created it.

Kurt Gottfried, chair of the UCS board and a Cornell University professor emeritus of physics, told Muckraker that his organization's report was itself based on the principles of scientific study:

"In science, if you examine a lot of events, you can infer a pattern connecting them that has meaning -- even if you don't have a clear formula or equation explaining them. In this case we examined a large set of incidences -- not a small set -- and there is a certain commonality to them [revealing] that the Bush administration consistently [censors] scientific evidence and opinions that run contrary to its goals."

The year was 1998. India had thumped its chest and declared itself nuclear. Indians brimmed with pride. The world reacted with anger, threats and sanctions. All that flew over the heads of gleeful Indians. Fuad too was euphoric-- but he stopped dead in his tracks one day, while watching a Jay Leno Show on TV. The burly wit had said something to the effect, "Indians can build nuke bombs but they can't build decent toilets." It hurt. And yet, as with the best of humour, how true!

[...]

What [Fuad] didn't quite know about himself was that he was a Yankee style entrepreneur. Jay Leno uncorked that. Fuad's obsession began that moment: "I will build world class public toilets!" It is obvious that such a resolve would invite ridicule in India. His loving wife Mehru and daughter Sanaa were 'deeply concerned'! But an obsession must run its course