I created a bookmarklet last night that I find very useful, so chances are some of you might as well. The idea is: you are reading a news article on the internet, and want to quickly and easily find other articles related to it. Generally I used to go to google news and try to come up with search terms to find the content that I want. With this bookmarklet, one click is all you need. (works on IE, MacIE, Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, and Opera probably others as well, I just haven't tried them)

To install, simply drag the link below to your Bookmarks/Links toolbar. (if you have the google toolbar installed, you probably won't be able to drag it, just bookmark it the old fashioned way - by rightclicking - and stick it where you can easily get to it)

Related Google News(drag or rightclick to bookmark)

Now, all you have to do is load up a news article, click on the 'Related Google News' bookmarklet. If that particular article is indexed by google news, then you will see all the related articles google knows about. If it isn't indexed, you won't get anything helpful. To get around this, I added another feature. If you are looking at the article you want to find more of, simply hilight the headline of the article and then push the 'Related Google News' bookmarklet. Search results for that headline will be returned rather than the specific article. This works rather well and I recommend you do that all the time.

Here's a shot of some protestors outside Terri Schiavo's hospital. I particularly like the girl noticing what the tubby gentleman's sign says.

Why is Bush selling F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, a country we imposed a weapons transfer ban on in 1989 due to a silly little matter invoving building nuclear bombs out of their uranium stockpiles?

According to an article on Slate, after the announcement was made Bush called up India to assure them that he would "take a well-disposed look at their weapons wish lists" to rectify any unfair advantage one side may have over the other. If Pakistan appears to have an advantage, we will sell more weapons to India to even the scales. Pakistan won't like being out armed, so they'll just order more.

This ought to make the executives at Lockheed Martin - who recently announced that they'd have to close their Fort Worth, Texas factory unless more orders are received before October - very, very happy.

The interesting bit is, these new F-16s are fully equipped for carrying atomic weapons. Bush has talked on and on about how this War on Terror is about halting the spread of "weapons of mass destruction" around the world. Why then are we giving Pakistan the ability to drop atomic bombs after they've already demonstrated that they have nuclear capabilites. We also know that India has nuclear-capable planes, and yet we are offering to sell them even more.

It just doesn't make any sense.

I don't ordinarily like posting things I saw on BoingBoing - their reader base is so broad that it seems like everyone would have already seen it - but this was just too great not to post.

World Beard and Moustache Championships National Geographic reports on the annual World Beard and Moustache Championships that will take place this October in Berlin: Another top contender is Jurgen Burkhardt (image left), a 48-year-old photographer from Leinfelden, near Stuttgart, who sports a curled mustache/muttonchop combo about the size of a boomerang. Left unstyled, Burkhardt's mustache has a wingspan that stretches five feet (one and a half meters) from tip to tip. The German washes his mustache three times before starting his 30-minute daily styling regime. Needless to say, hairspray factors heavily into its maintenance. "A nice mustache, also beard, is the result of the perfect harmony of curves," Burkhardt wrote in a recent e-mail interview. "You must have good style with a good form and line."

via Boing Boing

Not one to sit idly by as Terri Schiavo hogs all the medical treatment related news coverage, The Pope has decided that he too needs a feeding tube. He must hope that he can regain the attention of the public eye without having to go through all the trouble of having the tube removed by force and the subsequent Presidential/Congressional enactment of a new law prohibiting its removal. I'm sure he's praying that it won't require Jessie Jackson's presence.

Today there were a couple breakthroughs in the development of non-embryonic stem cells:

First up, growing stem cells from hair follicles.

Next, harvesting stem cells from nose tissue.

I have a suggestion for a way to help out both of these scientific studies. Teamwork. Yup, join the two projects together and you get double the stem cells by gathering nose tissue and nose hair at the same time.

Sure, a few researchers will be out of a job, but they can always find work studying other pointless crap.

Johnny Cochran has died. Now what other Great 'White' Hope does Terri Schiavo's family have looking out for the rights of America's most famous ill-treated patient? Well, with no time to spare, Rev. Jessie Jackson has decided to step in and take some action.

"I feel so passionate about this injustice being done, how unnecessary it is to deny her a feeding tube, water, not even ice to be used for her parched lips," he said. "This is a moral issue and it transcends politics and family disputes."

Here's my favorite bit:

Jackson said he asked Michael Schiavo for permission to see the brain-damaged woman but was denied. He also telephoned black legislators in a last-ditch effort to bring back a bill that would prohibit severely brain-damaged patients from being denied food and water if they didn't express their wishes in writing.

Leave it to Jessie Jackson to somehow turn a bunch of greedy white people fighting over the "well-being" (ie, money) of a white bulemic brain-dead vegetable into a race issue.

First off, here's a really great article on why the Conservatives are wrong regarding the case - written by a Conservative. Very well written, with some really great arguments.

Secondly, here's a link to Terri Schiavo's blog. Not as well written, but thats understandable...

Thirdly, an amusing/enlightening entry on craigslist (since removed) regarding the situation. (via Dan Gillmor)

Dear loved-ones, I make the following statement in a sound state of mind and of my own volition: If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc. However.... If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death. * Debt Relief to Impoverished Nations: I will agree to stay in a PVS for an indeterminate amount of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of debt relief and debt forgiveness to developing and impoverished nations. * Nuclear Disarmament and De-escalation: I will agree to stay in a PVS for a open-ended period of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of nuclear disarmament and de-escalation. By this I mean desisting from developing new bellicose nuclear technologies and providing significant non-military incentives for nations to avoid nuclear armament.

Heres an amusing device every home should have:

FOXBlocker is an innovative new product that filters out the FOX News network. Simply screw the filter into the back of your TV and never be exposed to right wing propaganda again (at least through FOX News). Using a proprietary technology, the FOXBlocker works to filter out FOX News from your cable lineup.

Saturday night marked the debut of the latest of the SciFi Channel Original movies, entitled Alien Apocalypse.

One part Planet of the Apes, one part Wizard of Oz and a healthy dose of Battlefield Earth is the easiest way to describe it.

Bruce Campbell stars alongside a crew of expendable minorities who die in the first 5 minutes, about 50 different people in tattered clothes with bad facial hair and horrible overdubbing and a handfull of cheesy computer animated alien termites referred to as 'Mites. I assume the audio was completely shot because every line was overdubbed. Everyone that wasn't Bruce was seemingly dubbed by the same person - just slight variations of different "voices" and accents to throw off the viewer, Muppet style.

Read on for a full synopsis with lots of pictures.

Way back at the beginning of the popularization of P2P filesharing, I had read a forum post saying how cool this "napster" thing is. I did a little searching and found a command line napster client for linux that was written in python or perl or something and fired it up.

I immediately decided that this "napster" thing was all it was cracked up to be. The only problem was, there was aparantly a bug in the download resuming code in my client. Every 1 out 10 downloads that resumed from a previously disconnected user would contain chunks of a Pearl Jam song that I can't recall the name of.

The first time it happened, I thought it was a strange random occurance. Then it hapened again. And again. The same Pearl Jam song each time. Whenever I saw this happen I would immediately delete the file so no one else would download it from me. The problem was things often downloaded when I wasn't there.

Eventually I switched to a much nicer client, but would occasionally run into a song containing chunks of Pearl Jam that someone had downloaded from me inadvertently and not deleted.

Not long ago, I hopped onto kazaa for the first time in years and came across one of the Pearl Jam tainted songs. Total elapsed time had to be about 4 years between my client Pearl Jam-ifying the song and then me finding it on a completely different P2P network.

If you have been annoyed by these "remixes", I am very, very, sorry.

Does anyone else see the irony in Terri Schiavo starving to death in a "vegetative state" that she fell into as a result of complications from an eating disorder?

I recently heard on the radio that McDonalds is experimenting with using call centers in India to improve the efficiency of drive-through order taking. Technical logistics aside, the one burning question I had was, "How do the call center employees, who are in all likelihood Hindus, feel about selling beef?"

I imagined a typical trip through the drive through like this:

"Hello, wel-come to Mac-Donalds, may I takeyourorderplease?" "uh, yeh, I'll have a Quarter-Pounder w/ Cheese, a Super-Size Fry and a Super-Size Coke." "Ohhkay. That is one Fillet of Fish Sandwich, no cheese, one SuperSizefry and one SuperSizeCoke. $6.95 at the firstwindowplease." "uh, I said Quarter-Pounder with cheese." "Yes, one Fillet of Fish, no cheese. Nextwindowplease, comeagain."