jimcofer.com

OK, I’m having a bit of writer’s block… so let’s do some news!

New York City is going to clone 25 “historical trees”. Why? To save them, I guess. This article doesn’t mention anything about the trees being sick, or in danger of being cut down to build condos. The trees are historically significant, though: one of the trees is a 230 year-old St. Nicholas elm that George Washington is thought to have walked under, and “several” of the trees date back to the time of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer and architect of Central Park.

Congress is asking drug maker Pfizer why they think that Dr. Robert Jarvik is qualified to pimp Lipitor. They’re even questioning whether Jarvik’s ad breaks the law (since the ads run nationwide, is he legally giving medical advice in states where he doesn’t have a medical license?). The most interesting thing in this article about the issue is the biographical information about Jarvik: he attended Syracuse University as an undergrad, where his grades were so subpar that he wasn’t even interviewed to go to a medical school in the US. So he attended the University of Bologna in Italy, then transferred to the University of Utah, where he graduated. He did not do an internship, nor has he practiced medicine, however. Far from being the “super doctor” I always thought him to be, NBC’s science expert Robert Bazell last year wrote that while Jarvik is an M.D., “he doesn’t have the strongest credentials”.

If you’re in Maryland and a customer of Allegheny Power: check your bill! It seems that the company is sending their customers boxes that contain 2 compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs… and charging you 96¢ a month for it! The company sent the bulbs to almost 220,000 customers, and is threatening to cut off their power if they don’t pay for the bulbs, even if they return them to Allegheny Power or refuse to accept them from their letter carrier. I don’t know whose idea this was at Allegheny Power, but I can tell you what it is in two words: mail fraud! Read the whole vile story here.

And lastly, from the “What Are The Odds?” Department… a pair of British fraternal twins that were separated at birth met later on in life… felt an unbelievable attraction to one another… and ended up getting married! This became news this week because of changes that some lawmakers are pushing with regards to birth data in the UK. Currently, only the mother has to be named on a birth certificate in the UK, and birth certificates also are not required to identify “births that result from IVF or to identify the sperm donor”. British lawmakers want to tighten up the laws, so things like this don’t happen in the future. As for the twins feeling an “unbelievable attraction” towards each other… well, if I remember my anthropology correctly, then this is actually quite common. And not only is it just “attraction”, people that experience this sort of thing report an almost unstoppable sexual attraction to their birth mates. In fact, all kinds of bizarre behavior has been reported by twins who were separated at birth at meet up later in life!

Wow – I’ve got a lot of stuff for today… so let’s just get right on it!

The latest craze in Japan? “Dakigokochi”, or bags of rice shaped like babies. When a woman gives birth in Japan, it’s a big deal – much like it is here in the US. However, instead of just sending pictures of the newborn to family and friends that couldn’t be there for the birth, Japanese parents order a dakigokochi. It’s a bag filled with rice. The bag is carefully weighed to match the baby’s weight, and the newborn’s picture is printed on the front of the bag. Relatives can then “hold” the baby and love on “it” as if the baby were there with them. And when the relatives are done cuddling the baby, the bag is opened and the rice is eaten. That so typically Japanese: completely sensible on one hand, yet totally unsettling on the other.

Imagine how awkward it would be: your wife just isn’t “cutting it” anymore. You’re a man with needs. So you pay a little visit to the local brothel for a little “somethin’ somethin'”… and find your wife working there! It happened in Poland recently. The wife told the husband that she was working at a store in a nearby town for some spending money. He believed her… until he walked into the brothel and saw her there! The couple, which had been married for 14 years, is divorcing.

Former Talking Head David Byrne has written an excellent article at Wired.com about the future of the music industry. In short, Byrne envisions a world where record companies are far smaller, yet still exist. Because technology has reduced the cost of recording music to almost nothing, Byrne feels that musicians will have their choice between signing a “traditional” record contract and going it all alone – with several options in between. The article is all about finding a happy balance between “selling out” to the labels to take advantage of their mighty marketing machine or going it alone and having 7 people visit your website every month, only 1 of whom buys the CD (and that visitor is your Mom). It’s a really good read, especially considering that it’s written by a man that was in a band, owned his own record label, and looks forward to receiving publishing payments as a kind of “pension plan”. You should really read it!

The town of Peterborough, England offers trash bins to its citizens, much like many cities in the U.S. do. For some reason, however, people love stealing the ones from Peterborough. The city council recently announced that 2,351 of the bins have been stolen over the past couple of years at a cost of £70,000 ($137,585) to local taxpayers. From now on, residents will have to pay £30 ($60) for a new bin, or £20 for “a ‘pre-used’ bin that has been steam-cleaned”. Anyway, my point behind telling you all this is that this article about the bins notes that stolen bins have been spotted “as far afield as Bulgaria”. Who the hell steals a trash bin in the middle of England and ships it all the way to Bulgaria?

You’ve heard of the “No Fly List, right? It’s a giant database that contains the names of people that are suspected of various crimes, mostly terrorist activities. You’ve probably also heard stories about people that have the same name as someone on the list and all the hassles they have to go through to get this names off the list. But check this out: 5 year-old Matthew Gardner and his mother were flying out of SeaTac airport. Poor Matthew has the same name as someone wanted by ICE, so the family was stopped by TSA. The TSA agents, instead of realizing that this was just a silly coincidence, subjected the two to an extensive search. And during the brouhaha, Matthew started to cry, so his Mom went to pick him up… only to stopped by the TSA agent and told that doing so would be a “national security risk”. After putting him down, she was even searched again, to make sure that Matthew hadn’t “passed materials” to his Mom. This is why I don’t fly any more, people. Watch the local news clip about it here.

And lastly for today, you geeks out there might want to check out this article over at Engadget, which has the first pictures (that I’ve ever seen) of a USB 3.0 device. USB 3.0 is significantly faster than USB 2.0 (4.8 Gbit/s, as opposed to 480 Mbit/s for USB 2.0). USB 3.0 will also include intelligent power design that shuts off power to unused devices (which is neat) and will also sport plugs that have a slight depression on the top (so you’ll be able to tell which side is “up” by feel only – something looooonnng overdue in my book!). Sadly, we’ll have to wait until 2010 for this technology to be unleashed.

I hate British TV personality Jeremy Clarkson. He’s just so damn… smug. He’s a jerk in the same way that Simon Cowell is, only he’s somewhat quieter and he lacks Cowell’s wit. He’s an America-basher that finds fault with anything my country does, yet he (apparently) feels that Britain is heaven on earth. He comes across as one of those Britons that still longs for the British Empire, and deep down he probably thinks the Union Jack is still flying over Bombay.

Anyway, as you might of heard, there have been several incidents lately where the British government has lost sensitive data. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 160,000 children. The week before that, the British government admitted that a government contractor had lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 3 million people with learner’s permits. And shortly before that incident, the government admitted that it had lost a packet of CDs that contained the names and banking information of over 25 million people – almost half the population of the UK!

As you might imagine, privacy activists in the UK were (and are still) livid over all this. In response to the activists, Clarkson recently published a newspaper article about how the activists’ fears are overblown. He called their cries “a bunch of palaver” (idle talk) and called the whole thing “a storm in a teacup”. And to prove that all this privacy paranoia was a bunch of nonsense, Clarkson put his real, actual bank account number in the article.

Almost as soon as the article hit the newsstands, someone hacked into Clarkson’s account and transferred £500 to the British Diabetic Association. This article from The Guardian notes that Clarkson, “in a rare moment of humility”, admitted that the stunt had backfired:

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again. I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake.”

He also added: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer jerk!