July, 2001

  1. I Said, “Kill Me!”

    Courtesy of CrimeNews 2000 comes this bizarre story about Florida man convicted of murder. At his sentencing hearing, Ricardo Gill, 32, maintained his innocence (although he had plead guilty to the murder) but pleaded with a judge to execute him rather than send him to jail for life. The judge opted for a life sentence.…

  2. The Pentagon’s Cover-Up of Its Missile Defense Failures

    I am an ardent supporter of a national missile defense shield, but the latest spat between the Pentagon and MIT’s Theodore Postol is yet another example of why something this important cannot be left in the hands of the Pentagon. Postol was the researcher who proved that the Pentagon flat out lied about the effectiveness…

  3. A Google Search Could Have Saved Woman’s Life

    The media has often trumpeted the fact that there is a lot of health misinformation and downright quackery on the Internet, but today’s New York Times features a tragic story about a woman whose life might have been saved if medical researchers had only run a Google or other Internet search engine search. Ellen Roche,…

  4. You Say Tomato, Middlesex Drug Warriors Say Marijuana

    A helicopter swooped over Glen Coberly’s tomato patch in Middlesex, Virginia, while 6-7 officers sprang upon him with guns drawn and ordered him to the ground. Convinced they had spotted Coberly harvesting marijuana plants, they were about to make a big bust. Unfortunately for them, their would-be score went bust itself when it turned out…

  5. Is Information “Real”?

    Once again the good folks at Blizzard released some changes to Diablo 2 that weren’t properly tested resulting in many people losing items that their characters had accumulated while playing the game. The game uses one data packet for character information and a second packet for items that a character owns, and the bug causes…

  6. The Cult of Celebrity on News Shows

    Yesterday NBC News had a couple stories about the controversy over stem cell research. The stories were prompted by George W. Bush’s meeting with the Pope wherein the Pope expressed his view that stem cell research is immoral. I happen to support stem cell research, but I was appalled at the short piece NBC News…

  7. Casualties in the War on Cheese

    Supposedly there’s this free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, but that doesn’t stop the United States from fighting a war on illegal imports of a clearly dangerous product — cheese. Due to protectionist laws in the United States, cheese is very expensive here. As the Associated Press notes, a wedge of cheese…

  8. You Outta Know

    Today’s USA Today has a brief blurb quoting Alanis Morrisette, of all people, as being concerned about music “conglomerates apply[ing] their same business practices to the Net” which would apparently result in only a few popular artists getting radio airplay and selling lots of albums. Which is a bit odd coming from someone who is…