we used to be three and not just two

weary
Coming off two days of downtime -- some sort of viral thing knocked me on my ass. Timing could have been a bit better, but I don't think I missed anything too crucial at work; I'm just two (or more) days behind. Actually, probably three days behind, because most of tomorrow is going to be taken up with assessing where I am on various projects and revising goals and such. And that, of course, is assuming I make it in -- at the moment, I'm thinking I can do it, but we'll have to see what the body says in the morning.

think of it as evolution in action
More news on the cloning front; it's shaping up to be an interesting couple of years in the human reproductive sphere. Prediction: one of the loudest howls about this is going to involve the notion that people with reproductive problems are somehow "weakening the breed" by passing on their genes via these types of mechanisms.

geek gathering
Hey, anybody in the DC area going to the CMS evaluation event next Wednesday? I'm thinking about going, but am sorta on the fence about it...

the bacterium that ate pittsburg
This is sort of cool, in a completely apocalyptic way: there's a distinct (although slight) possibility that micro-organisms from Mir could survive re-entry, and go on to cause some big problems to the Earth's ecosphere. Andromeda Strain, anybody?

bitter ironic humor dept.
One of the better signs I saw at the Dupont Circle Inauguration protest is featured in this picture, from Declan McCullagh's gallery of Inauguration protest photos.

browsers
Some recent discussion over at Flutterby prompted me to give Opera a go. After about fifteen minutes, it became clear that the question wasn't "ditch Mozilla for Opera, or not?", but rather "Spring for the full version of Opera, or put up with the ads?". Either my standards for decent web-browsing software have slipped a lot over the last year, or this is a startlingly good piece of work; it looks like others agree.

last time, i promise...
...but somebody had to say it: all your cookies are belong to us.

aaas report
Jerry Pournelle has a summary of this year's AAAS meeting. Gosh, with focused, detailed writing of this sort, it's hard to see how Byte went out of print! (</sarcasm>)

march madness
If you run a college basketball pool, you might be interested in the Bracket Pool Manager, which basically automates all the nasty gruntwork.

The more paranoid among you are welcome to theorize about how this makes it trivial to identify people disposed to gamble; information useful both to bookmakers and law officers.

caught
Caught is the Consortium Against Unnecessary Graphics and Hypertext Tags. Dig that manifesto, baby! Oh yah, I feel another redesign coming; it's time to swing back towards the minimalistic layout...

visitors
Hey, it looks like Nanette is headed our way. Any of the DCblog crowd want to volunteer to set up some sort of gathering when she's in town?