Around The Horn

"All the Hits the Nits Missed."

Hello Sports Racers, it's time for another edition of Around The Horn, or as Coovo likes to call it, "Roller's News Nits Nockoff".

South Korean scientists have cloned dogs. That glow red in the dark. No kidding. When I first heard of this, it reminded me of a trick we computer geeks use to spin our defects as "features".

User: Why was there an "H" appended to all the information I entered?

Geek: Uh, that's our new "Info+H" feature. Do you like it?

User: Can I fix it by rebooting?

The scientist have inserted "fluorescent genes" into the dogs (this is actually similar to another computer science pattern known as Dependency Injection). The success of this experiment suggests that scientists could inject other types of genes. Said South Korean scientist Jin Fong-du, "Having proven that we can inject genes into a living animal, we can now expand our research to include injecting other types of genes. By 2011, we could have dogs that glow blue, or possibly purple." OK, I made that quote up. Pretty cool, though.


Religious fanatics have denounced the testing, noting that if you spell "glowing dog" backwards, you get "god gniwolg". It's hard to argue with that.

This isn't the most recent of news, but has been on my plate for a while. A little over a month ago, AT&T network lines were vandalized in the San Franscisco Bay area. In two separate locations, someone opened a manhole, climbed down 10 feet and cut some network cables. For most of the next day, there were outages to cell phone, internet, land line and even 911 Emergency access.

Conspiracy theorists were quick to paint this as a terrorist rehearsal for a major nation-wide coordinated attack. But I don't think that adds up, as terrorists most likely would have blown themselves up to sever the network cables.

Lending even less credence to the terrorist theory is the fact that the AT&T's contract with the Communications Workers of America expired about 5 days prior to the "attack". Union leadership downplayed the notion that a union member could have been involved. Right. Because everyone knows which manhole covers lead to AT&T's network cables, and which lead to secret Craigslist parties.

Maybe AT&T should follow Texas' lead in equipment protection. Texas fire ants can inflict up to $1 billion a year in damages to electrical equipment (and those are non-arsen related numbers). The solution? As described in a recent US News article, introduce a South American phorid fly that somehow lays eggs inside the ant. Then when a maggot hatches from an egg it eats the ant's brain. The ant still wanders around for a couple weeks like a zombie, before its head falls off and the fly pops out and goes after another ant.

Awesome! Until next time...