Water, water, everywhere

As if "Dark Water" wasn't creepy enough, now comes news of a woman charged with a water bill of $74,000. Gah.

Fun with science, part IV

More specifically, William F. Buckley, Jr. believes in God, but not the scientific method. To quote his contribution to "This I Believe":

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature.

This I wonder: has Mr. Buckley, Jr. ever taken penicillin, a drug whose antibiotic effects were deduced and demonstrated by the very methods he seems to have no confidence in?

Krazy kable hijinks

So, last Wednesday, I came home late after a long day in lab. Looking forward to the two episodes of "The Inside" that I had programmed my VCR to tape, I noticed that my cable had gone out (no signal on my cable modem). My first thought was, "OK, maybe the signal just went out so maybe the VCR was still able to tape it." No such luck. Rewound the tape and all I had was static. Called the cable company and got the "We are experiencing outages due to inclement weather" message. (To be fair, Hurricane Dennis was approaching the Gulf Coast. The crappy weather was kind of like the way the Silver Surfer used to announce the arrival of Galactus. Except that no one's homeworld got eaten for lunch.) Finally got through to a human operator and was told that they would send someone over to take a look. To sum up: came home tired, no TV, no Internet connection. Oh well, maybe I'll read a book. (Actually, I think I watched "Hellboy" again.)

Came home the next day, still no TV signal or Internet connection. Spoke with another representative at the cable company and this time, after a little snooping, he concluded that someone was trying to steal my cable because none of my neighbors were having problems with their cable. He said he'd put in a request for someone to come over to the building and fix my cable connection. The score thus far: still no TV, still no Internet connection, and I had missed "Beauty and the Geek" not once, but twice. Crap.

OK, so now it's Friday. Came home and saw that my Internet connection had been restored. So far, so good. How about the TV? Turned on the TV only to discover that I was receiving less than half the channels I had been receiving for the better part of a year and a half. And of course, leave it to my luck that the channels that I was no longer receiving were the ones I watched the most (e.g. - Cartoon Network, SciFi Channel, ESPN, the History Channel). Called the cable company yet again. Turns out that I wasn't supposed to be receiving those channels at all since I had signed up for the basic subscription rather than the extended basic subscription. Damn. I guess the Man caught up with me.

Final score: Internet connection is back. TV viewing is now restricted to broadcast channels plus Chicago's WGN Superstation (which will come in handy if I'm interested, say, in the weather in a city from which I moved away almost two years ago). I think I'll start paying a lot more attention to PBS from now on, especially since I joined Georgia Public Broadcasting a couple of months ago.

Once again, the cable company wins. Down with the Man!

Supreme Court Justice O'Connor to retire...

... Supreme Court nomination battle to begin sooner than expected.

With Justice O'Connor's announcement of her resignation, it became clear that President Bush's choice to replace her would represent not only an opportunity to maintain the current ideological balance in the Supreme Court but actually shift it towards the right. At stake, once again, is the fate of Roe v. Wade. With the imminent departure of Justice O'Connor, conservative opponents of Roe are already mobilizing to take advantage of what they perceive to be a golden opportunity to overturn Roe. In the words of Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

We in the conservative movement have been waiting for over a decade for this moment in time to see a philosophical shift in the Court and we will seize this opportunity... We will be mobilizing over 20,000 churches across the nation through a variety of means. We are in communication daily with over a million people through our website. We have brought on new staff just for this battle that is pending.

So, in other words: "Gee, we can't wait to turn this country into a misogynistic theocracy!" Good times.

Fun with science, part III

Granted, we haven't reached a point akin to Galileo's experience with the Inquisition, but who knows what the next three and a half years will bring, let alone the next presidential election.

And while I'm on the topic of bacteria, the National Academy of Sciences has thumbed its collective nose at the Department of Health and Human Services in proceeding to publish the PNAS article analyzing the ease with which the US milk supply could be contaminated with botulinum toxin and the subsequent harm that would be inflicted on the public.