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If you’ve seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow then this won’t sound too out-of-this-world. Literally.

Ever wonder what the big deal about Scientology was? Here’s a quick and entertaining overview of why you might want to stay home and stare at your roommates fish collection instead of going to one of their meetings. Good exposé from TIME mag as well. Oh and the Southpark episodes of it have been great.

Via TuckerMax.

What are the odds?

As a kid I used to collect baseball cards. And I loved perusing the monthly card guides (e.g. Beckett) to see how much each one of them was worth. Well, come to find out that these were suggested prices based on a culmination of various statistics aggregated from numerous sources such as trade shows. They were originally designed to help amateur’s barter with professional card dealers — to even the playing field. However, if you’ve ever tried to sell your cards to a dealer you’ll find out a couple of things. First, dealers are usually only looking for specific types of cards and second they have their own subjective evaluation of what a card is worth.

While this topic deserves some professional investigative attention (especially in terms of inflation, scarcity and what Upper Deck “accidentally” did years ago), this is not the reason for the post.

This is about my favorite social networking site, Facebook. Apparently they are up for sale and recently turned down $750 million. They want $2 billion. Now while some pundits may claim that the entity is not worth this, the reality of the situation is, they are only worth as much as someone is willing to buy them for (e.g. Subjective Theory of Value).

A quick history of headline purchases in 2005:

eBay buying Skype for $2.6 billion (plus another $1.5 billion over 3 years).
News Corp buying MySpace for $580 million.
AOL buying Weblogs Inc. for $25 million.

And who could forget Yahoo buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion back in 1999?

So the multibillion dollar question is, are these firms worth it? Is there some objective metric for such valuations? Interestingly enough, I know someone who is finishing up a book on this very subject — on adding real substantive value to a business prior to selling it. I’ll keep you posted on that.

And my own personal opinion as an avid user of Facebook, I think they still have time to seperate themselves from other me-too copycats but their time is limited. Many moons ago I noted several features that would certainly keep users logged in throughout the day (such as adding the ability to upload resumes and interact with potential employers), unfortunately they have not been implemented. Ignoring these innovations only leads to leaving money on the table. I don’t think it takes a graduate student to point out that the millions of college users want a job some day and what better place would it be to try and network with companies than a college social networking site?

Nope, instead the managers and directors decided to “branch outâ€? and let highschool students in. This smacks of a desperate attempt to increase unique users rather than increasing the amount of time a user spends on the Facebook — it is a vein attempt to copy sites such as MySpace. I predict it will not only fail to achieve higher numbers than its rival, but that in the process will disenfranchise the core users: one of the draws for me and everyone I know is that it is exclusive to the collegiate realm. No offense to the demographic group, but I don’t have a strong desire to socialize with a bunch of highschool students; hence one of the reasons I do not goto the mall or hang out at Starbucks. And I really have no desire to do so virtually either.

This is a great video showing just how much “Aggie Spirit” the Old Army has at times…

It’s that time of the year again on campus. So here’s a sneak peak at my killer campaign:

If you’ve read the series, you might find this CROWS system a little dejavu-ish.

Those poor film producers, have somehow gotten the German populace to help fund their movies. Of course, stranger things happen, like paying for a war that ended over 100 years ago.

Before someone can answer who owns “the Internet” one must first answer, what is “the Internet.” This is not a post that will answer those questions, rather this is a stub — a place holder for that discussion that will take place many moons from now. If you are interested in some commentary. geekoid Sean Lynch tackles some of the propertarian issues in light of claims from Doc Searls.

And to wet your mouth a little more, some network engineers put together a map of nearly 135,000 routers and who owns them. This is routers, and not actual fibre or cabling which could be owned by someone else.

An associate pointed me to yet another gem from Forbes, Is College Worth It? The conclusion is simple, unless you goto a nationally recognized brand-name institution like Yale, Harvard or 20 some odd schools the answer is no. One of the most interesting points the author notes is that,

Search engines such as Google have ushered in the era of open-source learning. Society is rapidly progressing to the point where any Googler is on equal footing with a Widener Library pass-holder.

When I was an undergrad (history/economics) I found many of the works we discussed in class to be available online for free (e.g. all of the Western Classics are in the Public Domain and can be found in digital libraries like Project Gutenberg). The other two main points he makes are worth reading as well, so leas.

The Associated Press also ran an interesting story discussing the uptake of podcasts at institutions of higher education across the country, specifically one liberal arts school. The moral of the story, innovative faculty members at a State-university in Georgia have created easy to use supplements for students or as administrators call it: value-added. This is just another continuation of the digital university meme.