FM2030 (nee F. M. Esfandiary), who changed his name based on his absolute belief that he would live to the age of 100, died this past Saturday, done in by “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ” (his pancreas).

I know this shocks everyone out there, but Big Brother sucks. I actually tried to watch another five minutes the other night, and didn’t make it halfway through.

Holy crap. Lance Armstrong, winner of last year’s Tour de France and testicular cancer survivor, turned a six-minute deficit into a four-plus-minute lead in one stage of this year’s race. That’s a pretty dramatic, almost unheard-of climb in the ranks; I really hope that Armstrong is able to hold on through the end.

I had no clue that scientists are building a habitat on Antarctica that simulates the structure that would have to be built on Mars as support for a human mission. Kinda cool, actually.

Working on a floor of the hospital where patients require frequent blood and platelet transfusions, I can tell you about this blood shortage firsthand.

This could be interesting — the vaccine that has been able to prevent the lesions of Alzheimer’s disease in mice progressed smoothly through phase-one testing in humans. The most interesting part of this is that it’s not well-known what the vaccine is vaccinating against, just that it decreases the formation of the amyloid plaques seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Likewise, it isn’t known if vaccinating against the plaques will impact the course of the disease. The future will tell…

A new company has announced technology to inflict annoying ads on the MP3-listening crowd, turning them into the same ad-riddled media that everything else on the web is. (Maybe that’s why I like weblogs so much — for the most part, no ads.)

Serious question: when people complain that [X] is bad because “it weakens the institution of marriage,” what is the overwhelming harm that’s implied by that statement? To clarify my thinking right now, it’s not that I don’t understand why marriage is good, it’s that I fail to understand why something like Vermont’s civil union law, or other country’s similar laws which extend protective benefits to what are considered non-traditional relationships, isn’t good in similar ways. (Likewise, does the current increasing rate of divorce threaten the institution of marriage in a similar way?)