nrvous, org.

In Nagoya, a nondescript, industrial community 160 miles west of Tokyo, fans resolutely march toward the monolithic venue under the blazing sun. Sumo matches are an all-day affair: the doors open at 8:15 a.m. and the wrestling continues until 6 p.m. The highest-ranked wrestlers, or the makuuchi, wrestle during the last two hours of the day, which is when the level of excitement reaches a fever pitch. Until then, sumo is a languid affair, with observers munching on their bento box lunches, sipping beer and napping in their masuseki, or box seats, waiting for the real action to begin.

There are quite a few news apps already, but the whole experience has been far from optimal. There are visually pleasing magazine apps, which ask you for $5 every month (or every week), and then there are RSS-based news aggregators that look like your second inbox.

Pulse, developed by two Stanford graduate students, hopes to fill this void by providing the flexibility of news aggregators while maintaining solid aesthetics. It incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your favorite websites. What it doesn’t do is tell you that you have 397 items left to be read, and that you can only read this edition of the magazine.

While a traditional RSS reader is usually about consuming as much content as possible, Pulse is all about leisurely enjoying your daily news, with a cup of coffee.

I do both actually. My friend, Miss Tina, says I have a "high level of expressed emotion"!! You know when I am happy, you now when I'm sad, and when I am angry you will think I'm sad, because I cry then too.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head.

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.