Thar She Blows!

Also in today’s links: porn aficionados, boys who break the law — and more.

• Sure, we all knew somebody in middle school named Ernest Funkhauser and figured that, given his name, it made sense he’d be angry with the world. A new study concludes that boys with less common names are more likely to break the law than boys with names such as Michael or David. Now, I’ve spent a long while thinking about this, and it still doesn’t quite make sense in my mind. The creepiest part of the article is the quote from the study about this finding helping target high-risk individuals. Really?
• Forget curbing emissions. When it comes to global warming, some people have moved on to the next stage: acceptance. Pioneers in the new field of geo-engineering are looking at ways to deal with a hotter earth, from CO2-sucking algae blooms to a giant space umbrella.
• Sulphates, such as what’s spit out by volcanoes, are also discussed as a means of controlling temperature, so perhaps Mount Redoubt might help. Scientists are keeping a close eye on the Alaska volcano, which may blow any time now. The natives seem completely unruffled, though.
• The head of the Senate Finance Committee wants to take a look into an issue that appears to be sucking time away from the pursuit of science: the problem of NSF employees watching porn and hanging out in chat rooms while at work. Maybe they were all doing research into human sexuality?
• For the most part we think of the Information Age as a boon to, well, information — there seems to be more of it more readily available than ever. But the head of the British Library is warning that the digital record acquires huge gaps as Web sites are updated and changed.