What a great photo.

Damn UrbanFetch — despite having the option unchecked which would allow them to send me ads via email, they sent one out today. I called, and they said it won’t happen again…

In my quest for a nice MP3 player, I’m now looking at the Sensory Science rave:MP 2200, which looks pretty cool. (I’ve given up on looking for a good one that uses CompactFlash, since it doesn’t seem that one exists.)

Law.com has two great articles this week on the intersections of law and medicine.

The first is about a labor and delivery nurse whose religion prevents her from assisting in the termination of a pregnancy, and a court’s refusal to allow her to proceed in a lawsuit against UMDNJ for failure to accomodate her religious beliefs. The court’s position: that people in her position can’t make unilateral demands for special treatment, but instead themselves need to be accomodating in a solution to their problem. My feeling: if you hold beliefs such as these, then you have no right to make demands about what your job entails. Instead, you need to find yourself a job that doesn’t conflict with your beliefs.

The second article details a study that demonstrated the inability of judges to tell scientifically-valid studies and testimony from junk science. This is pretty scary, and is why things like silicone breast implants have legal verdicts against them despite the lack of any good data linking them to harm; it is also the shield behind which crackpot websites that spread misinformation and potential harm to millions of web surfers do their dirty work.

The Dinkism of the Week:

“I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking.”

Mental note: think about whether or not to disable Frontier’s auto-update feature, since this week’s security alert and fix broke two of my installed Frontier applications. Didn’t take long to fix, but still…