“In 1916, as the

American daily

newspaper hit its

media peak, a

philosophical

cockroach

named archy

transmigrated

onto the pages of

the New York

Sun. Today, as

the Web hits its

own media peak,

archy’s cousin,

bernie, has

e-mailed his way

into

eXaminer.com”: bernie – the world’s first

cockroach in

cyberspace.

The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]

Navy sonar may have killed whales in Bahamas. [AP via Robot Wisdom]

Dumb and Dumber. To judge from the new crop of men’s magazines, it’s getting harder and harder to be a man’s body even vaguely connected to a brain. Dreck sells, says Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic.

Author George Saunders defends like. ‘There’s an Orwell essay that I love, called “Politics

and the English Language,” in which he says that

language is inherently political. So something like

“like” is a sort of indicator of a larger societal

dysfunction. What “like” does is allow you to join

two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but

associatively linked, without having to go to great

lengths to make the connection. It’s kind of an

impressionistic device. You can say, “The truck was

going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down,

jerk?” I’m sure we stumbled across that sort of

device because we needed it. It’s meaningful.’ [Atlantic]

Public Citizen: did you think the high price of gasoline at the pump was just higher costs being passed on to the consumer??

A plea to let corporations accelerate efforts to buy the rights to attach their names to public edifices and institutions.

One third of Eritreans face humanitarian crisis – UN. “I believe nobody is entirely ready to deal with this scale of disaster, which has grew dramatically in the last 30 to 45 days,” says Carol Bellamy, head of the UN’s children’s agency.

Navy sends agents into gay bars. Washington Post: “Navy investigators are routinely

sending informants and undercover agents into

Washington area gay bars to identify military

personnel among the clients, and then using

sting operations to catch some of them in drug

trafficking, according to Navy officials and

testimony in a recent military court proceeding.”

Number of US Nuclear Targets Has Grown Since 1993. Like I said, if you think the arms race is over, think again. [Manchester Guardian via Common Dreams]

Sovereign Bank Coming To Massachusetts. Thirty years ago I opened a bank account at Harvard Trust Co. when I moved to the Boston area. When it conglomerated with other Massachusetts banks, I had a “Bay Bank Harvard Trust” account. Then they dropped the affiliates’ autonomy and it became a “Bay Bank” account. About two or three years ago, the Bank of Boston bought Bay Bank and my new cards and checks said “BankBoston.” Last month, after Fleet bought BankBoston, they gave me Fleet accounts and cards. And now it appears that, to avoid anti-trust implications, they’re forcing me to become a Sovereign Bank customer. All this without lifting a finger in thirty years.

The sniffing detective. The effort to develop an “electronic nose” that could hone in on the time of death of a decomposing body (by analyzing the chemicals it produces over time) includes getting a graduate student to spend successive nights in a morgue taking vapor samples near corpses. A forensic entomologist objects, saying his approach — analyzing developmental stage of the insect populations that populate a decomposing body — is more accurate. [New Scientist]

Medical Records Sent To Wrong Place. This is probably so common it shouldn’t even be a news item anymore, unfortunately.

RadioShack to Co-Sponsor Moon Mission. “With a new age of commercial space exploration on the horizon, U.S. electronics

retailer RadioShack Corp. hopes to bolster its image and sales by going to the moon.

RadioShack said on Thursday it will co-sponsor the first commercial lunar landing, a robot probe for ancient

ice… “