Today, I got an email from Jon asking what the hell the Match is; I guess I never explained myself. The Match is the yearly ritual whereby fourth-year medical students (such as myself) come into their residencies. In October, we all submit our applications to the programs that interest us. They decide who to interview (and correspondingly, who not to interview). We go on all the interviews, and think long and hard about what we want out of our training. Then, come February, both the candidates (us) and the programs all turn in a Rank List, which for the candidates, is a list of the programs at which they would be satisfied, in order of preference; for the schools, it’s similar, but ranking the candidates. At that point, the National Resident Matching Program’s computers take over, matching the candidates to programs. March 16th (We’re here! away) is when we all find out the programs to which we’ve matched.

Stephen King’s new book is now (only) available online; it’s described as “a ghost story in the grand manner.” I haven’t read it yet. (I found out that it was released from a BBC news story, but apparently, the BBC has not figured out that they can put actual URLs in their stories instead of launching users onto a hunt across the Internet.)

This morning, NPR reported that U.S. Representative Bob Franks is trumpeting a bill requiring all New Jersey public libraries to install Internet blocking software. They interviewed Franks, who said, “For those who think that this software will block access to breast cancer sites as well as pornography, you don’t understand that this software is now mature enough that it just doesn’t do that.” He clearly hasn’t visited PeaceFire lately; it’s shameful how much legitimate content blocking software still blocks. (Of course, most of the software also blocks access to PeaceFire itself.)

Piglets, piglets everywhere! I love that one of the piglets is named Dotcom.