The last word on copyright was written more than twenty years ago, by someone you've never heard of. (via Cory at Boing Boing)



Chris at Signal + Noise (best. tagline. ever.) waxes romantic about a public enthused over science, and in the process makes me nostalgic for my own feeble forays into amateur astronomy. Good reads, as Alton Brown might say.



A little bright spot: critter comeback.



I haven't been able to write about the latest obscenities in Tha War on Terra™, because it twists my gut to think about it. As usual, Teresa has made as much sense as can be made of the awfulness, and lists the same must-reads as I was planning to.

After you read that, be sure to cheer yourself up (you'll need it!) with some of Teresa's Particles, such as the official H2 salute, the One Eater, pretty glass arthropods (they're not all insects!), BeoWatch, the dildo of death and this superb experiment (measuring the speed of light with marshmallows -- no, really, it works!)



Via Metafilter (a blind pig that still, even in its dotage, turns up more than its share of acorns; the RSS feed avoids the comments, which are a pit of bilious inanity), an overview of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Thrilling and depressing all at once.



Excellent news: lunatic Ten Commandments Warrior Roy Moore is considering a run for the presidency. Not only will he bring down much-needed ridicule upon the Christian hard right, but he's set to be the GOP's very own Nader and is hitting Bush where it hurts by claiming he's not Christian enough. Moore is just insane enough to pull support from Bush's psychofundie base, a pack of slavering American Taliban assholes for whom there can be no such thing as too much public piety. Eat each other, you scumbags.



Speaking of Shifty George, he was recently "unable" to think of any mistakes he's made, so the Center for American Progress has put together a short list for him to choose from.



More watching the watchers: Media Channel ("the global network for democratic media") and its executive editor's weblog News Dissector can't be worse than CNN et al. Following the money (scroll down to #8) doesn't raise any obvious red flags.



Finally, a nod to this "science" stuff I keep saying I'm going to write about. Apparently, mammals have at least two biological clocks, one of which is sensitive to light. Miseries like jet lag are visited upon us when the clocks get out of sync. The article is in Current Biology; here's the abstract.