People suck, and that's my contention. We're a virus with shoes.

—comedian Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there's much to recommend Hicks' notion that people are viruses with shoes. It's a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, "Darwin's Surprise":

Fifth-Century Greek philosopher Democritus, the putative founder of modern science and atomic theory, who laughed constantly and lived more than one hundred years, once had occasion to ponder our sense of smell. It was, he theorized, the result of our nose reading the shape of airborne particles. Democritus called these particles “atoms,” and he thought sweet atoms were “round and of a good size,” while sour ones were “bulky, jagged, and many angled.”

This “shapist” theory of smell, or olfaction, continues to this day. It boils down to the essential concept of tiny pieces of things being “read” by receptors in our nose. Democritus called these piece “atoms,” but he had no sense of atomic theory in the modern sense, which asserts that these pieces are, in fact, molecules. But that's just a theory, and the truth is that no one really knows how our sense of smell works. The shapist theory has many inconsistencies and demonstrated limitations. Molecules with the same shape produce different smells; inversely, two molecules with completely different shapes can produce the same smell (sandalwood).

Edward "Baron" von Kloberg
January 9, 1942 - May 1, 2005

Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo got its name in 590 AD, after St. Gregory the Great, while leading a procession to pray for the cessation of the plague, saw the archangel Michael sheathing his sword on top of the fortress. This vision, he believed (accurately, as it would turn out) announced the end of the plague.

It took only about four seconds for Edward von Kloberg III, another kind of plague altogether, to travel from a parapet atop Castel Sant’Angelo to his unfriendly end on a street 52 yards below, but an exit had been on his mind for some time. Months earlier, this lobbyist of choice for dictators, tyrants, and mass executioners had called the Washington Post to arrange an interview that he hoped would lead to “a better understanding of his life.”

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney
January 30, 1941 - Late yesterday afternoon

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do you any good if you lose,” Dick Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his 8th and final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Dick Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to just about every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics--and getting away with it--this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.

The first time you kiss somebody, you may well be caught up in romance and various libidinal tides, but your brain and olfactory system are hard at work, gathering information to decide whether to take it to the "next level." At least that's how the assembled sex-starved panelists and journalists at this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago saw the process.

"You're not just kissing," said one scientist suggestively, "you are likely absorbing information about your partner's immune system, looking for a good match should you two procreate."

Climate change is causing the sea to rise far faster than expected, potentially a meter or more by 2100. Perhaps that doesn't seem so dire to you. Perhaps you read that sentence and think: "Pity; there go some beaches and beach-front real estate." Maybe you think: "You know, I've always liked the ocean more than New York City anyway..."

Most petty crime is dull, in both motivation and execution. But I have always wished I could be a great outlaw. Consider the outlaw, and the merits of his or her avocation: the perpetration of grand, spectacular, and/or marvelous crime. A widespread and enduring fascination with outlaws, hucksters, escapists, charlatans, and rogues of various ilk has always harkened to embrace the heroic combination of focus, ingenuity, bravery, determination, and intelligence needed to rise to a level of criminal infamy.

In July of 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something unprecedented in its history: It lowered its official estimated value of an "average American life", from $8.04 million to $7.22 million.

Why?

Mostly because the EPA performs a cost-benefit analysis when evaluating and creating policy and regulation. To do this, they have to agree on the value of a human life and weigh that value against the cost of regulation. The less a life is worth, the less statistical need exists for regulation.

Birds, who once were dinosaurs, could take over the world (again) if they wanted to. And not just in the movies, a la Hitchcock's 1963 terror, The Birds. (If you haven't seen the movie, check out this well-edited one-and-a-half-minute version of it.)

Biofuels have been hyped as the answer to global warming, as "fuel for the revolution," and as a way to prevent the predicted catastrophe of "peak oil collapse." They've also been blamed for driving up food prices and contributing to global warming (in some instances, at a greater level than traditional fossil-based fuels).

The darling has become dastardly, at least judging by recent media coverage.