It’s one of those windy, rainy days here in New York, and no matter how big your umbrella, you get soaked. Fun fun fun.

Oh, this is precious.

Doctors in Canada are reporting success in transplanting pancreas cells in humans, reversing type I diabetes. This is a pretty huge step in the treatment of diabetes; the article doesn’t say, though, if the eight patients require oral antihyperglycemic medications, or immunosuppressants to stave off rejection of the transplants.

Congress is facing a class-action lawsuit by a group of custodians, all women, who make over a dollar less per hour than men on the same custodial staff. Interestingly, the lawsuit is only possible due to the 1995 Congressional Accountability Act, an act which finally required Congress to comply with the same civil rights and labor laws that apply to the rest of the country.

Oh, the geek in me thinks that this rocks. Amazon sells the book The Story About Ping, a 1933 children’s story about a duck named Ping who learns a few life lessons. On the review page, though, someone has written the following, in by far the most popular review of the book:

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix’s most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.
 
The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

Was anyone else aware of the fact that, during the height of the Cold War, the U.S. developed plans to set off an enormous nuclear blast on the moon to demonstrate our superiority in the arms race? Darwin was right, and it’s only a matter of time before our potential idiocy kills us all.

I love my referrer logs. I found Considered Harmful in them yesterday, and from there, found VisiBone’s websafe color pages, which are the best I’ve ever seen. I’ve already ordered a few copies of the laminated card and mousepads.

The Shuttle is spaceborne! The Shuttle is spaceborne! (Why am I such a space geek???)