End of the Week News

My week ends in about five minutes when I pack for imminent departure to California. I'm being whisked out there (pun intended) to prepare the Thanksgiving gravy for an eccentric couple living in a cabin in a remote mountain area on Thanksgiving. And these people are a bit strange. They recently sent me a picture of the turkey they plan on putting to death and eating. (His name is John Smith.) This should be interesting.

But have no fear, the internet is everywhere. I shall continue to post more than enough for you to consume between courses of cranberry sauce and apple pie, leftovers, winter beer, and good wine.

But the following four items from several different categories are sitting in my in box that I'd like to pass on to you before I start packing...

Firefox 3 exists, but only in a form being used by masochistic geeks and developers. I'm sure the perfected version is going to be great. What we have now is news that the bookmarking system is going to be much improved.

Many of its new features concern bookmarks, an area typically slow to change in the browsing world. You can now add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. And a new "Places" feature lets you quickly access sites you recently bookmarked or tagged and pages you visit frequently but haven't bookmarked. http://www.physorg.com/news114794350.html*

Tagging is everything, isn't it?

And then, these items:

Year-old Storm virus still infecting PCs from PhysOrg.com

Anti-spam experts in the United States predicted the year-old, constantly mutating Storm virus could send up to 500 million messages during the holiday season.

[...]

Bush hails skin cell-stem cell findings from PhysOrg.com

U.S. President George Bush said Tuesday he was pleased to learn that scientists have reprogrammed skin cells into stem cells "within ethical boundaries."

[...]

Astronomers Say Moons Like Ours Are Uncommon from PhysOrg.com

The next time you take a moonlit stroll, or admire a full, bright-white moon looming in the night sky, you might count yourself lucky. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that moons like Earth's - that formed out of tremendous collisions - are uncommon in the universe, arising at most in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems.

[...]

... I knew there was something special about that moon...

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