May, 2002

  1. MacSlash.Com Screwed by Apple’s Spam FIlters

    Wow. Everybody was up in arms at Metafilter, Slashdot and other places over the alleged domain hijacking of MacSlash.Com, which is now a generic Dotster “coming soon” page. The MacSlash folks insisted their domain name had not expired which had me worried because I’ve been relying more and more on Dotster. Turns out, Dostser did…

  2. Suicide Advocate Was Not Terminally Ill

    It looks like Australia has their own version of Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, of course, earned the moniker “Dr. Death” for helping terminally ill people kill themselves. Kevorkian was sent to jail a few years ago for violating Michigan’s law against assisted suicide. For someone like myself, who supports assisted suicide, Kevorkian was an unmitigated disaster.…

  3. Who’s Afraid of CT Scans?

    Well, some doctors and other public health officials. Over the past few years, the cost of computed tomography (CT) scan equipment has fallen dramatically. The price is so low, in fact, that there are now a number of companies which sell CT scan services directly to consumers. Gina Kolata writes in The New York Times…

  4. Better Living Through Chemistry: Bring On Melanotan and Provigil

    Some people just can’t stand seeing other people happy — especially if that happiness is “unnatural.” In Wired, for example, Wil McCarthy takes on the wonder drug Melanotan. Melanotan has chemical properties that sound like a pharmaceutical marketer’s dream come true. The drug’s major effect is to create a deep, healthy tan. And it also…

  5. Altogether Now, Can We Say “Selection Bias”?

    Theory three — anecdotes are not evidence. Maureen Dowd was pushing this lamebrain idea about female whistleblowers awhile ago. It actually makes a lot of sense provided you ignore male whistle blowers. Plus it is a lot more fun to turn out hackneyed theories based on limited evidence than do a Google search for whistleblowers.…

  6. Robert Horry and the Lakers

    Robert Horry’s clutch 3 pointer in yesterday’s NBA playoff game is the reason I occasionally still watch the NBA. Having that opportunity and actually making the shot is the sort of thing that kids on playground fantasize about endlessly, and watching Horry actually make that shot was exhilirating (yes, I was on my feet shouting…

  7. Colleen Rowley’s “Bombshell Memo”

    Time magazine has appropriately called FBI counsel Colleen Rowley’s memo to FBI director Robert Mueller “The Bombshell Memo”. The most disturbing thing about the memo has to be that the higher ups that Rowley dealt with in the FBI were so dismissive of the Minneapolis field office’s views of the risk posed by Zacarias Moussaoui,…

  8. Examples of Multiple RSS Feeds

    Seth Dillingham posted URLS for some of his RSS feeds. I had sent a message to Jon Udell about the ease with which multipe RSS feeds can be created with Conversant. So, I spent about 15 minutes creating a few at my animal rights site: AnimalRights.Net RSS Feeds

  9. Why Not Hundreds of RSS Feeds From a Single Weblog?

    Seth Dillingham writes about a conversation he had with Jon Udell weblogs and RSS feeds about “the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they’re stored on.)” But…