Give up Enron money, Dubya.

Many of us first heard of Enron last year when the energy company became infamous for extracting billions of dollars from California electricity consumers. For others, it was Enron’s ever-increasing stock value that drew their attention. But now that Enron has imploded in the biggest bankruptcy in U.S history, the rest of us have been given a crash course in the maneuverings of a company that cheated its investors, duped its employees and freely doled out money to politicians addicted to massive campaign contributions. A few of the politicians who received these ill-gotten gains are rushing to return them to funds for the employees. President Bush should follow suit and return every penny of the $550,000 he received from Enron. ActForChange

Stem cells from embryo created without sperm:

“US scientists have isolated stem cells from monkey embryos created using only an egg. They then coaxed these stem cells into taking on the characteristics of neurons, heart muscle and other tissue types.

The embryos were generated through a process called parthenogenesis, in which the egg is never fertilized, but instead duplicates one set of chromosomes. That duplication is lethal, because two maternal sets of chromosomes are incompatible. But the so-called “parthenote” that results still develops far enough so that the equivalent of embryonic stem cells can be harvested from it.” New Scientist

A tale of one man and his blog: The Guardian UK covers the Blogger Pro rollout, interviewing Evan Williams. The interview goes in an interesting direction here:

“What we haven’t done much of, and what I think is desperately needed in the blogging world, are more tools on the browsing side. We have a tremendous amount of content flowing through our system, all in these little chunks that are separate from their sites. It should be easy to index and aggregate and present to people in all kinds of different ways.”

The dangers of this, of course, are obvious: web-hosting companies have quickly run into trouble in the past when they’ve attempted to seize the rights to re-use their customers’ content. And Williams is quick to agree that users would not condone him publishing their work. What he is interested in is tackling the largely unconnected network of weblogs, introducing network publishing to make it easier for the reader to get to things that might be of interest.

Bears further discussion.

New Scientist ‘copylefted’ article about copyleft and the open content movement.

“Have you ever wanted to pretend that you were someone else? Well, now you can! If you want to, you can use me to send someone else an email…”

Did I watch the wrong channel? ‘The media gushed over an “eloquent” and “passionate” State of the Union address many of us didn’t see.’ Salon