Last week’s issue of Sports Illustrated has an insert section called SI Adventure, and in it, Austin Murphy has a great column about the lunacy and selfishness of people who engage in risky extreme and adventure sports. Most of his examples revolve around people who hike or climb way above their skill level and end up putting the lives of rescuers in danger who are sent in to rescue them; one such group that he missed is the Ohio church group who had to be rescued a second time after failing to complete an Alaskan hike.

I want pictures!

As a pediatrician, numbers like this depress the hell out of me: from 1994 to 1998, the rate of heterosexual sex-related HIV infection in teenage girls rose 117%; over the same period, IV drug-related HIV infection rose 90%. Somewhere, we — society as a whole — aren’t doing enough to prevent the spread of HIV.

When did LexisOne pop up on the net? Between the free case law (between 1996 and now) and the legal news and commentary, this is a killer resource to have on the web.

For a completely moronic view of last week’s protests in Genoa (and last year’s protests in Seattle), just flip to today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page. According to the unsigned piece, what happened in Genoa is Bill Clinton’s fault, and standing in stark contrast, Bush has shown much better control over such situations. What a total load of crap — something that the second-to-last paragraph implicitly acknowledges by saying that those who caused the only real problems at the protests are unconvincable “hooligans” who aren’t even there to protest globalization or world trade. (The reader responses to the piece are pretty funny, though.)

Thanks to Lawrence for passing on a link to an explanation of how to find and punish bad webcrawlers and robots. I particularly like the first one — set up a directory only referenced by the file that robots are supposed to use to know what not to index, and then when something shows up there, you’ve caught it.