CanadArm 2 is alive! (Another great picture is here; unfortunately, they’re both Yahoo News pictures, which will expire at some point.)

Damn, sometimes I love my referrers log. Today, I found pleonasm through the log, which has some pretty great photo archives and is based on the no-tables, pure-CSS three-division layout that makes me drool. Nice, nice work, Matt.

I cannot even begin to understand how someone managed to program both a chess game and an automatic computer player into an under-5K web page.

The Institute of Medicine has finally released its long-awaited report, and has concluded that there is no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The IOM committee is an impressive group of people who were all carefully screened to eliminate even the smallest tinge of bias; automatic exclusion criteria were any prior research on vaccine safety, any prior receipt of money from vaccine manufacturers or parent companies, or time served on any vaccine advisory committees. Of course, the cynic in me realizes that this won’t quiet the rather vocal group of people who insist that the link exists; that being said, it may help prevent parents from believing them.

And in semi-medical related news, the Supreme Court today let stand a lower court ruling that will allow Terri Schiavo’s husband to have her feeding tube removed, ending her life and his struggle to stop life-sustaining treatments against her apparent wishes..

Due to the request of a friend, there’s now a super-lightweight version of Q Daily News (perfect for AvantGo usage, for example). If you would like to use it for AvantGo, you can click here to automatically create the custom channel subscribing your handheld to the page.

Yesterday, New York Yankee Paul O’Neill hit a game-tying home run in the tenth inning, something that isn’t terribly unique. What was unique was his reaction to the home run — when the ball left his bat, he reacted with disgust, as if he had hit a ball straight into the hands of an infielder. It was priceless when he looked up and noticed Red Sox outfielder Darren Lewis backing against the wall, and watched as the ball dropped into the crowd. Two batters later in the lineup, David Justice hit the game winner, and the Yanks redeemed themselves against a Red Sox team that has opened the season well.

It’s sad that Dubya’s handlers weren’t able to slip that meeting in with him when they would have explained that the language spoken in the nation south of our own is named “Spanish.” (For those uninterested in picking through the article to find the quote, Bush was asked if he’d answer questions; his response was that he wouldn’t, not “in English, French, or Mexican.”)

Why do otherwise-ordinary people use pseudonyms on the web?