How funny — apparently, TRUSTe violated its own policy regarding the notification duty of a website that has contracted with a third-party which is gathering data about visitors to that website. Slowly, it’s becoming clear that the self-policing privacy model sucks.

I’m not sure why, but this story about a flight attendant who was victimized by a large-breasted woman and a malfunctioning airline door amused me.

William Saletan has an interesting analysis of the current strategies of both political parties, concluding that Bush moving from stressing issues of character to issues of policy is what will eventually undermine people’s belief in his past, and future, ability to lead.

What a horrible situation — a judge in England has ruled that one conjoined twin must die in order to save the other, against the wishes of the parents. The crux of the problem is that there’s no way to separate them and have both live; they share only one set of lungs and one heart, an unusual variation on the “normal” conjoined twin anatomy. I’m not sure how something like this would play out in the United States.

Over the past eight years, Clinton has designated over four million acres of land as national monument territory, including groves of redwoods and sequoias older than our nation, sections of the Grand Canyon, and Indian ruins. This week, Dicky Cheney remarked that, under a Dubya administration, many of these monument designations would be subject to review and possible rescinding. Business wins again; damn the environment.

I’m sick of reading news articles and opinion pieces in the computer trade press that include a sentence parenthetically saying something like, “Inevitably, the Microsoft/DOJ case will end up before the Supreme Court no matter how the current issue plays out.” Does anyone have any proof of this? I find it pretty hard to believe that the Supreme Court will get involved in this; it seems more to be a case of the press believing their own hype. Just because writers and editors are devoting billions of inches of column space to the story doesn’t make it as Earth-shattering as they want it to be…

I don’t know why, but I have really been enjoying repairing lacerations in the ER. Last night, I had a kid who had unsuccessfully tried to jump a chain-link fence and ended up with a nasty gash on the back of his leg; it was a complicated repair in that the wound was rectangular, and thus the skin edges couldn’t just be pulled together (or else there would have been weird bunched-up skin at each end). What do you do in that case? Anesthetize and actually extend the laceration to make it elliptical, which makes it much easier to repair and leaves a much better cosmetic result.