Low Earth Orbit

It's about form, not function

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New York airport baggage screeners were fed answers to written tests and were not asked to identify bombs, guns or other dangerous objects in carry-on luggage, a homeland security official said yesterday. Clark Kent Ervin, the acting inspector general for the Homeland Security Department, said a review of the Transportation Security Administration's testing procedures found that on a recent final exam given to new screeners at LaGuardia Airport, 22 of the 25 questions were used during the practice quiz, and testing protocol "maximized the likelihood that students would pass."

Well, you wouldn't want them to _not_ pass, right? That's the goal.

Second-hand electromagnetism

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Though previous scares over electromagnetic fields in overhead power lines and cellular phones have pretty much petered out, fear springs eternal and now is taking as its subject "Wi-Fi" computer-access technology: "Parents in Oak Park, Illinois, have launched a class action lawsuit against their local school board for allegedly threatening the health of children by installing wireless local area network technology in classrooms." (Tim Richardson, "US parents sue over WLAN school fears", The Register (UK), Oct. 8; Wi-Fi Networking News, Oct. 6 (check out the comments); complaint courtesy Wi-Fi Networking News (PDF))

Big Media credibility watch

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Almost a year following the stunning announcement of that they had engineered the birth of the world's first cloned humans, Rael and Clonaid president Dr. Brigitte Boisselier have yet to prove the existence of these babies, even to their own members. In fact, Raelians have made fun of the media that gave such extensive coverage to their cloning story. "Come my beloved friends and journalists, and ask me if we did all that just to benefit from free publicity ... YESSSS!" Rael cries and bursts out laughing during a Raelian gathering staged in Montreal. Boisselier is also much amused as she recalls the press conference last December 27. [...] Today Claude Vorilhon, known to his followers as Rael, laughingly contends that the cloning controversy was perhaps a simple stroke of genius to make his movement known. "Even if you want to think that we did all that only for publicity, it is wonderful. If that is the case, we are promotional geniuses!" he says. "But if what we say we did is true, we are also scientific geniuses. In any case, we are geniuses! Wonderful! In any case, we win!"

OK, now that's just mean. Funny, but mean.