Make mine meat!

Okay, so… here’s a little something to think about when you’ve nothing better to do than ponder the future of meat production. A team of scientists is divising a way to grow meat in a laboratory that would be edible and more nutritious than standard cow-based food.

They’ve already produced small amounts of edible muscle tissue that could be used in future space missions, and cultured meat for mass production is the next step in the process.

How would they do it? Hold on to your gorge! One method is to grow healthy muscle tissue in large flat sheets on thin membranes that they’d then pile up to simulate meat. The other is to grow muscle cells on small beads that stretch with changes in temperature, resulting in faux meat McNuggets — just like regular McNuggets!

Growing it is no challenge. The problem is making it taste like animal protein, with the necessary fat/muscle ratio and somehow “exercising” the meat just like an animal would.

Riding the Jesus-Go-Round

A judge in Florida has ruled that The Holy Land Experience, a Christian theme park, is being used “to spread what it considers to be God’s word,” and is therefore exempt from all property taxes.

Zion’s Hope, which runs the park in Southwest Orlando, uses walk-through dioramas and reproductions of relics and cities to present the history and stories of the Bible for its visitors. Guests, assuming their attire is not “immodest” and they refrain from smoking and bringing any outside food or drink inside, pay $29.99 per adult and $19.99 per child to enter the park.

And don’t leave without visiting the Jerusalem Street Market! Why? Two words: Biblical ties!

Chinese sex idiots

If you’re wondering which country can boast the population most ignorant about sex — you’re wrong if you immediately thought, “America!” Because while we here in the states may be backwards and puritanistic and thumping our Bibles harder than we’re thumping each other, turns out it’s the Chinese people who are woefully inept, sexually speaking.

And you have to give this a little weight, at least, because the ones saying it are the Chinese themselves. Xi Tianming, president of the China Sexology Society, calls both children and adults in China “sex idiots,” being more ignorant about sex than most other subjects. This is mostly because they’re sheltered from the subject and don’t start a normal sex life (whatever that is) until the age of 25.

Historical inaccuracy

Here’s a fun little lawsuit to think about, even if it is ultimately doomed (unless there’s a really dumb judge out there who doesn’t understand some Web indexing fundamentals). First, one company sues another company for trademark infringement. So, the second company hires a lawfirm to go out and find historical data over use of the trademarked phrase, so the lawfirm visits the Wayback Machine, a standard action in such cases, to pull up old web pages and see how far back the use extends.

Here’s the catch: The first company complains that they had a robots.txt file in place to prevent the Wayback Machine from archiving certain pages, but that 92 times it ignored those instructions and allowed the lawfirm to get pages already on the Web that it had no right to get.

So the company is now suing the lawfirm, the company (again) and the non-profit Internet Archive for violating the DMCA because they supposedly circumvented “technological measures” to gain access to copyrighted material.

The lawfirm says it wouldn’t know how to bypass a block, and anyway the robots.txt convention is purely voluntary and robots don’t have to read the file or agree with its conventions anyway. In effect, once you post it — it’s out there for anyone to see.

P.S. Man, I sure used to love Photoshop filters.

Roving reporters

If Newsweek is right, and it appears that they are since no one’s denying anything, then the Minister of Darkness, Karl Rove, is the mouth that spilled the beans to the press about Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. lifestyle. Or one of those who did — either way, it’s coming clear that it was the White House that leaked the name in one way or another, and now their dance of legal speak begins.

It depends on what your definition of “is” is, to quote another legal dance expert.

It’s not hard to predict that, once again, the administration is likely to squeeze its way out of this sticky wicket just as it has again and again, over much larger issues like fixing the documentation over the war in Iraq and bringing in the Enron boys to help plan out the nation’s energy policy.

One can hope, however, that it’s a simple mistake like this one, perhaps done in the heat of the moment as a way to get back at Ms. Plame’s husband, that puts the first nail in the coffin of the worst presidential administration since Nixon.

Also: Watch for deflection tactics. Already, Republicans are trying to make an issue out of Hillary comparing our fearless leader with Alfred E. Neuman, which I think we can all agree does a huge disservice to Alfred.