University of Toronto researchers have constructed a “metamaterial” lens, with properties that appear to confound traditional physics. I read a couple years ago about somebody having constructed a material with a negative index of refraction, and this appears to be more of the same. Freaky shit.

After becoming irritated by the number of bloggers linking to New York Times and Washington Post articles, which require cookie configurations I’m unwilling to allow on my browser, I’ve found a workaround: Google News surfs those papers, and if you can figure out a good search string from the citation you have, you can get to the articles. The NYT Google results come back with a link you can use anywhere, but the WP apparently wants your “referrer” header to be from Google. Of course, once Google News becomes a subscription service I’m screwed again.

In other news, people continue to die from SARS. The CDC has a contrary view to earlier reports that it might be a member of the paramyxovirus family. If transmission of this thing were just a little bit easier, I suspect we’d all be fucked.

According to the BBC, “The ceremony was being broadcast live in the US on TV network ABC, but it also broke off from the event to relay the latest news on the war in Iraq.” Since I wasn’t watching the packaged-for-domestic-consumption product, I didn’t have to endure that. It’s a shame Michael Moore isn’t more articulate when he doesn’t get final cut. I mean, “fictition”?

Those who have seen the “Chicken of Tomorrow” short on MST3K will perhaps find interesting resonances in this story about a retired chicken sexer.
Update: sorry, the link’s gone all subscribers-only, so the tales of keeping fingernails exactly the right length to pry open newborn chicks’ nether regions are lost to us.
I don’t recall either "Chicken of Tomorrow" or the Atlantic piece mentioning the vast amounts of chick shit the sexing process involves (gotta clean out the cloaca, you know).

Maybe it’s a really bad flu, but it doesn’t look like they think so. Anyway, people are dying, and we’re not sure why. On a purely selfish note, I’m especially disturbed by its presence in BC and GA.

This seems like the kind of project my co-blogger might get into. We already own a complete set of the similar cards produced by Betty Crocker at about the same time.

The FP collective has been advocating the policy of swapping shopper ID/discount cards at every opportunity. This guy has taken that idea in an interesting direction: send him mail, and he’ll send you a sticker to put over the barcode on your Safeway card so that you’re contributing to his shopper record. I’m thinking I’ll do it.

Get your artificial hippocampus now. Designed entirely through black-box analysis: “Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals millions of times, until scientists could be sure which input produced a corresponding output.”

It’s not news that we’ve been dropping leaflets all over Iraq (at least in the no-fly zones), but I hadn’t been aware that the contents were being published by our friends at U.S. Central Command. I found this one particularly heart-warming. I’m touched at our concern that the livelihoods of Iraqi citizens will be Ruined if anything happens to the Iraqi oil industry, so they damned well better leave it intact for us — I mean, for the sake of their future, of course.