Yesterday, Apple announced that 100 million iPods have been sold since the release of the original 5GB iPod on November 10th, 2001.

That’s an average of 50,607 per day (or a bit better than one every two seconds).

For comparison, Sony sold about 150 million Walkman cassette players between 1979 and 1995 (when they started to die off in favor of the Discman CD Player). That’s 50% more Walkman players in 16 ½ years than the iPods sold the less than 5 ½ years they have been on the market.

In the original press release announcing the iPod in 2001, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying:

“With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go. With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”

It sure looks like he was right.

Congratulations, Apple!

A year ago, my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my Vice President had shot someone. Ah, those were the good ol’ days.

– President Bush, at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner

Watch him (badly) tell jokes someone else so obviously wrote below:

This BBC story from Wednesday is pretty disturbing. The city of Middlesbrough has installed talking CCTV cameras to curb “antisocial behavior.”

Camera operators can talk to people on the street, scolding them for littering, fighting, or other offenses.

You know what that reminds me of?

The instructress had called them to attention again. ‘And now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Right over from the hips, please, comrades. One-two! One-two! . . .’

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.

– Part 1, Chapter 3 of 1984 by George Orwell

I have to keep up with the news for my job. At the same time, I like to know what news everyone else is keeping up with. My favorite tool for this is the Yahoo! list of most popular news stories.

This feature puts the news stories, columns, and pictures that people click the most on one page, along with the most emailed and highest-rated content. So on this one page, I can see what people are reading and sharing most on the most popular news site in the world (as ranked by Alexa).

Sometimes this page can be surprising (like when an obscure science story makes it to the top of the list), sometimes it can be disappointing (when both lists fill up with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “news”), and sometimes it can be downright bizarre.

A few minutes ago, it was a mix of the last two. The most emailed story was headlined Keith Richards: `I snorted my father’ while the most viewed was Couple fights to name baby ‘Metallica’. These were joined on the list by some real news, a few cute animals, and the requisite nearly-naked women.

So there you go: in one place, you can learn about secret jails in Ethiopia, doggie yoga, where to buy the car from Knight Rider, and of course the above story of a rocker mixing his father’s actions with cocaine. And the best part is, you can see how much people care about all of these things.

It’s a quite enlightening exercise.

Here’s the article and the video:

(This was mainly a YouTube embedding test)