Have you heard the one about the guy who burned his frank n' beans using his laptop? No, it's not a joke, it's a story that was reported by British medical journal The Lancet. As Wired News describes the event, it sounds a lot like an urban legend:

The victim, a 50-year-old scientist, was so engrossed in writing a report that he ignored the hot sensation in his crotch until the next day when he noticed his privates had become red and irritated...

After a few days, the unnamed scientist's penis and scrotum was blistered. The blisters popped, became infected and generated an "extensive" amount of pus before scabbing over...

Among the many questions Wired poses to the story: "How could a man — who was dressed in 'trousers and underpants' — obtain such an injury after just one hour of laptop use?" Marc Schnitman, a computer repairman from California, offered a sly theory:

Maybe he wasn't being completely honest with his physician... Maybe he didn't have his clothes on. Maybe he wasn't even using a computer ... people do all kinds of perverted things these days.

Professor Darryl Macer of the University of Tsukuba, Japan, has proposed a mighty enterprise: to create a map of all the ideas in the world, with the prospect of using it to reconcile the different beliefs and values around the planet and use it as a guide to developing international policy. Leave aside the size of such an udertaking for a moment; Robyn Shapiro, director of the Center for the Study of Bioethics, voiced the most interesting criticism to Macer's plan when she considered how this project suggests that there's a finite number of ideas out there: "I think that's inaccurate and depressing and certainly not what drove us to move from Galileo to Jamie Thompson [the first scientist to isolate stem cells]..."

I'd like to side with Shapiro and believe that humankind is a perpetually curious species, that we have unlimited resources for inquiry and innovation. But if Shapiro is convinced of such unbound capacity, why not let Professor Macer proceed with his plan and fail on his own? Maybe the heart of the matter is that Macer's idea is dangerous because it could turn out to be right. Maybe there really are just a limited number of ideas going around, and if he could map them we would be unable to deny it any longer. We'd be shown the walls within which we're confined.

According to Terence McKenna, the end of time will occur in December 21, 2012, as signaled by the last day traced by the Mayan calendar. Macer's "idea map" project is still in the proposal phase, with no starting date. If takes off, I have a good idea when it might be complete.

Following the breadcrumbs I found the homepage of Nic Wolff, hacker. He's got a clever utility there that allows to strip Salon's homepage from all ads, with an even cleverer comment next to it: "Salon (hardly worth reading these days)."

Is this ad-removal OK? Of course it is! Ad-blocking software has been around for some time already, so this is no biggie. And Nic's a honest guy: he warns his users that "there is some Salon content that you can only get by joining Salon Premium."

But Nic, if Salon's not worth the effort of browsing, why bother with this hack at all?

Jack Shafer writes in Slate about the New York Times' unrelenting coverage of the Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit females. With Novemer 25th's news item, CBS Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta (by Alessandra Stanley and Bill Carter), the Times has published its 40th entry on the subject since July. This will not do for Shafer, who vent his dissatisfaction thusly:

...The fact that the network is still silent isn't big news today any more than it will be big news tomorrow, even if the Times were to contrive a story titled "CBS Stays Silent: Day 150." This sort of churning and whisking of yesterday's topic, adding new ingredients in incremental proportions in story after story until you build a 12-foot tall meringue isn't news coverage, it's blogging!

The readers are excused to pick up their jaws after they dropped in disbelief.

Maybe this is part of Slate's vision of blogging. When Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen had their freaky Vulcan mind-melt on the topic of weblogs, Sullivan mentioned that one of their virtues is they allow the weblogger to constantly pound against their chosen victims—er, subjects, forcing them to respond. As an example, he pointed to Slate's blogger-in-residence, Mickey Kaus, and his "guerrilla warfare against Bob Reich, the American Prospect, or Howell Raines."

But that brand of blogging seems like a trait of warblogs and "pundit-blogs," and a nasty one at that. Methinks the Slate bunch need to let their hair down and look for some new blogs to read.