Even Nicky Brendon is working (and with our favorite Ralph Fiennes-alike Bradley Cooper (the reporter best friend from Alias), no less). Lots of other Buffy/Angel alumni are mentioned in the article, too.

If only the purchase of this shirt somehow credited Joss with a beer or other tasty beverage of his choice.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has declared a leap second for the end of this year, after which the difference between UTC and TAI will be 33 seconds. GPS-UTC will be 14 seconds.

H5N1 has started to spread among wild geese.

The LoC has a “web magazine” to guide you to cool stuff in their collections. Which I suppose I could do, too, were I not so busy goofing off with Corbis.

Wow, it’s all about sheds. In the UK, where a shed is really a shed.

The tallest building in Bellevue (right at the city’s 450-foot height limit) will house a Trader Vic’s, as well as other stuff.

Seems like just the other night we were talking about Kennewick Man, and now folks are (finally) headed to the Burke to check him out.

H5N1 (one of 15 Avian Influenza strains) has been simmering in Asia since December 2003, and has claimed at least 54 human and countless (more than 100 million as of last year) poultry lives. "Most influenza experts also agree that the prompt culling of Hong Kong’s entire poultry population [due to H5N1 infection] in 1997 probably averted a pandemic." The WHO has been closely tracking the situation in Viet Nam (later expanded to Cambodia) since December of 2004. They aren’t raising the pandemic alert level above its January 2004 level ("incipient pandemic", near as I can tell), but neither are they lowering it. China’s unwillingness to share information and propensity to do stupid things (and then deny them) are probably creating the greatest hindrance to minimizing the pandemic threat.
It’s a bummer that poultry farming practices in Asia are creating a nearly ideal virus incubation and mutation lab. The conspiracist in me wants to see some significance in the fact that the government of the world’s most populous nation is behaving in a way that is encouraging a situation that could wipe out a substantial chunk of the world’s population, but I find it hard to take the conspiracist in me very seriously most of the time.

The physics makes a certain amount of sense, I guess, since they’re all massive and stuff, but who would have thought Saturn’s rings would have atmosphere?