Um, input please.

"Have you ever read Frankenstein? ... Then you know that Frankenstein wasn't the monster; society was the monster." - Dr. Jack Kevorkian, 1990 interview with Don Gonyea on NPR

Dr. J. Craig Venter, mastermind and founder of Celera and the J. Craig Venter Institute, has just announced with his usual bravado (a day after the Synthetic Biology conference in Zurich) that he has successfully transformed the genome of one bacteria, into another.

Big deal. That's what cloning & gene transformation is all about. So why does this freak me out? Ira Flatow this afternoon seemed pretty chill about the whole thing.

Possibly because Venter's eventual goal is to be able to re-engineer an organism in such a way that its genetic library (which, by the way, he applied for a patent a week ago) is comprised only by the genes he selects. Why isn't this illegal? Is there any government oversight on this? We're not talking little switcheroos of puny genes here - this is the creation of whole species.

hometown Baghdad

I've been watching a web documentary recently called hometown Baghdad which follows the lives of 3 Bagdad residents, each about our age, and each with lives both scarily incomparable, and yet sometimes strikingly reminiscent of our own. It provides an interesting and informative view of the social and political state of Iraq these days that you don't really get to see elsewhere.

Google is watching you...Andy!

I don't know when it appeared, but when googlemapping this morning I came across the "Street View" option, a new feature that allows you to have a 360 degree panoramic view of the street level. You can be a little yellow man and walk along Central Park, or even better check out the Yemen King next to Andy's apartment (here) and see if Eric bought toilet paper yet. Apparently localized to highly-populated areas (NYC, San Francisco, Miami) so far, this great new app lets you pre-walk your route in full-rendered glory in case you're reaaaallly bad with directions.

It also scares the crap out of me that Google has this kind of power, and that Big Brother comes in the form of a nerd named Ryan wearing a yellow sphere over his head (video here). At least when they take over the country I hope they call our new ruling body a Googlement, and that it's a Googlocracy. Next up: Google Body Cavity Search!

I Wanna Make It

New Queens of the Stone Age Album! Era Vulgaris! The whole thing can be heard here: http://www.qotsa.com/news/default.aspx?nid=8085.

This transcribed from my conversation with Josh about the song I Wanna Make It Wit You, during which he vanished in fear...

Josh: nice

I wanna make it wit chu made it on

4:04 PM me: yeah i saw that

Josh: And they made it as drawn out as it's supposed to be.

me: i love that song

4:10 PM me: oh man

4:11 PM

this is just what i want it to sound like

4:12 PM its supposed to be sexy

and it is

yet sexy in a way that implies raunch

as if this song is making gentle love promises to its betrothed

4:13 PM but around the corner is a grinning skull having sex with a sleeping bear

you know it's around the corner and it colors the event, but you can't see it and don't want to

that dirty guitar tone is the faint growling you can hear from the bear

josh homme's voice is the lilypad the entire event is occurring on

4:14 PM the drums are the wall preventing you from seeing too much