STEVIE NICKS - Enchanted box set (Atlantic)

Miscalculation. I found this relatively cheap and figured it was about exactly as much solo Nicks as I needed: curiousity would drive me beyond the singles whether I liked them or not, but I definitely didn't need to plan on buying all the individual albums.

And this is indeed the right amount of material to get comprehensiveness without completeness, but the poor sequencing makes it a swamp. As I kind of expected, several songs whose names I didn't recognize turned out to be the subjects of inexplicably-suppressed childhood radio memories, but they were scattered over the first two discs, and I couldn't tell whether the gunk between them was immature-bad or past-peak-bad.

But my experience with the Mac canon has been that Buckingham's songs got to me faster, while a Nicks track I didn't already know often needed an extra spin. So I'd be inclined to give this another chance were it not for the awful way it ends: a seven-minute solo-piano "Rhiannon" from 1998 with the rhythm perverted into squared-off lockstep. When Nicks calls Rhiannon's name this time, she sounds like an assistant principal.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

In the early 90s, a group of experts issued fascinating, detailed recommendations on how to mark a site containing radioactive waste so that it would go undisturbed for the 10,000 years the waste would take to become harmless. Read this. (That page is excerpted from Appendix F to the full report, available here.) When you get to the drawings of some of their ideas you'll see that (though they didn't actually have one on staff) one type of expert whose wisdom would be useful in a project like this is "video-game designer".

Equally ambitious but less grave, and perhaps more optimistic, are the Long Now Foundation. LNF has much more going on than the last time I checked, including a beautiful chart showing the group's expenditures and projects over time that (perhaps because of inflation) takes the shape of several slim cones of light beaming into the distance, and the information that only one in seven LNF web denizens believes students will learn how to defend themselves against robots in the year 2150.

(WIPP links via laboratorium.)