Salary bump

The next time you’re contemplating going in to ask your boss for a raise, consider the following: If you walked into his office demanding $100,000 a year, under his new contract Shaq will make that much in about a week.

By my estimate, Shaqullie O’Neal’s $100,000,000 5-year contract gets him over $2,200 an hour whether he’s on the courts or not. That should pay for more than a few pairs of size 22 Nikes.*

But then, he doesn’t actually pay for those, does he?

*Nike owns Starter, Shaq’s official shoe brand.

Anti-cancer recipe

First, take some carbon nanotubes. Then coat them in folate molecules (a type of B vitamin, available at most Chinese delicatessens). Inject these into cancerous cells. Don’t worry if you get some on your normal cells. Finally, point a near-infrared laser at them to heat them to 70ºC. Et voilá! Dead cancer cells!

Researchers at Stanford have discovered that carbon nanotubes make excellent heaters to go inside cancer cells and kill them, without harming any other healthy cells around them. Cancer cells tend to be coated with folate receptors, so coating nanotubes in folate molecules make them mutually attractive.

When they used a near-infrared laser — completely harmless to normal cells — it heated up the tubes and they destroys the cancerous cells they were stuck to.

Folate was used as a sort of catch-all, and next they plan on trying it with antibody-coated nanotubes to target specific types of cancer cells.

Nuclear weapon casualties

Since 2000, almost 100,000 claims have been filed nationwide by employees of nuclear weapon research sites detailing the health hazards associated with creating better bombs. There are 35 sites in California alone, and among these one site — The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory — accounts for half of the 3,500 California-based claims.

Some of those are due to just plain ignorance. Workers would wander into radiation-contaminated areas without protective gear. They were assigned to film open-air nuclear blasts from 15 miles away. And the extent of some safety instructions from technicians was as helpful as “don’t pick up any of that green stuff.”

The health claims don’t move through government bureaucracy any faster than anything else. While they’re suffering through cancer and its various treatments and repeated operations, they’re also waiting 3-5 years to get compensated.

Assuming that they live that long.

Google hacker boon

Google is such a great search engine that it’s turning up information that probably no one wants to be found. Stuff like leads to unsecured sites, entry into routers and printer networks, passwords to PBX phone systems and, naturally, unsecured access to web sites themselves.

Once a hacker has gained access to a system, it’s a lot easier for admins to lock them out. Only thing is, hackers usually spend a lot of time within a system trying to pull out the very information that Google can provide without system intrusion — meaning they spend less time looking for things to damage, and more time damaging them.

Weblog noise level continues to rise

According to Weblog search engine portal thing Technorati, a new Blog is born every second, meaning that by the time you finish reading this sentence, fifteen new Blogs will be waiting for you to ignore.

Furthermore, the total number of Blogs has doubled in the last five months, and will probably double again in the next five, leading to a worldwide Blogglut of nearly 30 million meandering, meaningless, mumble-mouthed Bloggers.

Like us!

13% of you are updating at least weekly, and 55% of new bloggers manage to stick with it for at least three months before, we assume, growing tired and bored and frustrated with the whole online world ignoring you, whereupon you pack it in and go back to starting flame wars on other people’s blogs.

Technorati’s main man, David Sifry, credits free blogging services and the growth of using RSS feeders to, ahem, “push” content out as leading factors in the continuing growth of the Blogosphere, or Blogocube as you prefer.

XBOX 360 = $300

Someone over at Wal-Mart opened their big mouth and spilled some beans (maybe) about the price of Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox 360. According to TotalVideoGames.com, the high-end mini supercomputer entertainment hub-to-be will retail for $299.99 in North America, which is about what everyone was guessing. Games will also be more expensive for the unit, with top end titles demanding $59.99.

Microsoft has made no official announcement, and Sony has likewise kept mum on the price of PlayStation 3, other then to repeatedly anounce that anyone who’s thinking about picking one up next year should get used to sticker shock now.