DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

CamWorld notes (on 02/16) that Network Solutions sells its domain database to marketing firms. This is loathsome but not particularly surprising; their whois tool has provided email and snail addresses for every domain owner in their database, for years.

Don’t get me wrong — this is worse. NSI is serving up custom views of its database, data in bulk to exactly the sort of people who know how to abuse it (junk mailers).

IMO this requires two immediate responses. The first is to contact your senators and representatives to request an investigation. As pointed out by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, this sale may not even be legal. Copy the text at that last link and send your own letter to Washington DC; find the addresses of your senators and representatives here.

The second is to transfer all domains away from NSI immediately. The added benefit is that you can save $20+ dollars per domain per year by doing this. I’ve had good results with these registrars: Joker, Dotster. Dotster makes the transfer process easy; they do not require domain holders to fax in documentation — some registrars do.

To be clear, NSI may well be selling domain registration information for domains registered through other approved registrars. If they are, then transferring your domain away from NSI won’t stop your privacy from being violated, but still I think you’ll feel better if you’re not paying NSI to violate your privacy. I know I will.

My wife uses the occasion of travel to nurture a latent addiction to logic puzzles. Apparently, figuring out whether Chet sits across from the person who ordered french fries, and whether Arnold paid less than the person in the red shirt, is an excellent way to occupy one’s mind while cooped up on an airplane for twelve hours.

So we’re sitting there on the airplane. My wife has immersed herself a page of clues (with critical facts circled and underlined) and scribbled grids and cross-marks, and I am deep into #3 of the four page-turners I’ve stowed in my carry-on. My subconscious mind processes the various sounds of 200 people pursuing 200 varieties of in-flight entertainment: Game Boys bleat, children fidget, vectors of infectious disease perform grotesque rituals of personal hygiene. Through this, a stewardess happens down the aisle. She stops, briefly contemplates my wife’s mad pursuit of the seating order, shirt size, and dessert choice of five people whose names invariably begin with A, B, C, D, and E, and asks: “Is that the MENSES test?”

As a person who travels with some frequency, I’ve come to admire the peculiar behaviors of stewardesses. I have no doubt that the thin air and overexposure to solar radiation have affected the neural density, if not the DNA, of the people who spend most of their waking hours in the stratosphere. And although I do not believe that this exposure has turned the brains of all airborn courtesy personnel to jelly, it should suffice to say that one of the prerequisites for joining MENSA is the ability to pronounce its name.

Buried in today’s Chronicle was a column by Mike Weiss that contains an idea so profound it could literally change the world.

Weiss reports on the work of Mark Murray, a physician who figured out how to fix one of the most annoying aspects of modern healthcare — the fact that, unless you’re bleeding profusely from a recent stab wound, you can’t see your doctor for 2-3 weeks.

Murray’s solution is as fascinating as it is simple.

His company conducts workshops to teach the implementation of the “open access scheduling” system, but it appears an overview is available online, for free.

I wish my doctor would take the time to read this. [insert joke about my doctor’s 2-week backlog here]

As reported in Grok (Education - 10/00), the Industry Standard’s “special reports” magazine, the Center for Disease Control has come up with a novel way to teach kids about health risks: Infectious Diseases Trading Cards

According to the article, the CDC pulled the cards off its site last year to “tweak the design” — but we note that five months have gone by and the CDC’s site says the cards are unavailable at this time.

But wait — there is a light (albeit sickly and, if we had to guess, contagious) at the end of this tunnel. The CDC merely commented out its directory of PDF files, making the retrieval of the trading cards a trivial matter.

CDC Infectious Diseases Trading Cards:
Anthrax, Antibiotic Resistance, Avian Flu, Cryptosporidiosis, Cyclospora, Dengue, Ebola, E. Coli, Hantavirus, Hepatitis B, HIV, Lyme Disease, Meningitis, Mumps, Pinkeye, Plague, Salmonella, Rabies, Smallpox, Strep A

Big news in orgasm research (now that’s an interesting specialty) — Dr. T. Stuart Meloy reports that by implanting electrodes in a female’s spine, he can induce orgasm via remote control.

The description is ghastly: The device is made up of three parts: the set of electrodes which are implanted inside the spinal canal, a connecting cable and a pulse generator, which is about the size of a beeper. The generator is implanted in the upper buttocks, so all three pieces are under the skin. (ABC News)

But none of these worthy reporters explored the technological implications of such an invention. Leno and Letterman probably exhausted the garage-door-opener jokes… but what about the X-10 jokes? What about the bluetooth jokes? There’s such a rich field of possibilities here. Will the pulse generator have an HTTP server built-in, so patients enjoying frequent wireless orgasm can report their status to the web like so many coffee machines and refrigerators?

Also: if the hardware is mounted in your buttocks, where do they put the batteries? Heh, sorry, I couldn’t resist.

There is a dangerous precedent to this research, by the way. When I studied psychology I learned about an experiment in which researchers inserted electrodes in the pleasure centers of rats’ brains, and then provided the rats with a lever connected to the electrodes. Pressing the lever would induce (essentially) orgasm. The rats starved to death. [1, 2, 3]