In Brief

KNOWLEDGE TO GO
The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica (founded 1768) announced last week that it would make its entire contents--all 44 million words--available on the popular Palm VII handheld computer, via the Palm VII's wireless Internet connection and a free program called Britannica Traveler (downloadable at ). Surfers already have access to the encyclopedia at . Now, with the pocket-size Palm VII, they'll be able to browse all 32 of Britannica's volumes wherever they go, from Aachen to Zwickau.

RACK 'EM UP
Do those wobbling, teetering stacks of CDs on your desk and shelves make you nervous? Julian Brown, the award-winning British designer of the famous Hannibal tape dispenser (you know, the one that looks like an elephant), has a simple solution: the CD2 ($12.50 at Counterpoint, 888-545-5073), a simple, elegant little rack that comfortably cradles 10 CDs at a time at a pleasingly jaunty angle. It's so unobtrusive, you hardly notice it. CD2 comes in six colors, from translucent orange to grass green to metallic aluminum, and when you don't need it, it cleverly folds up to the size of a single CD.

TETRIS OF TITANS
Talk about your big game. Last week students at Brown University turned one wall of the university's 14-story Sciences Library into a giant outdoor version of the popular video game Tetris. Powered by an ordinary PC running Linux, the installation uses 10,000 Christmas lights. It took the 30 residents of Tech House, a dorm for nerdy types, more than five months of planning, programming, hammering, soldering and debugging to put it all together. Even so, it's not the largest Tetris game of all time. Back in 1995, students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands pulled the same stunt with a 15-story building.