About Manning

Maybe the DNI/CIA/NSA guys should have been taking their tips from the National Football League the whole time.

As the corners and safeties have figured out, intercepting packages meant for receivers by people named Manning (Eli and Peyton) has become somewhat routine over the last couple weeks. Since Tom Brady threw his last pick, the Manning brothers have compiled 39 INTs between them.

Since the Brady Bill was passed, Bradley Manning was found to have leaked secrets to a foreign national running a massive security leak masquerading as a website.

What we need is better pass protection in our national intelligence structure.

What's on my mind?

I've noticed that people have a habit of asking me what I'm thinking about. Questions about what's on my mind, or just comments that I seem to be lost in thought.

When they ask me, I always wonder if they know what they're getting themselves into.
In that vein, random thoughts I've had today:

1. In the plastic world that mannequins occupy, is it really cold? Or are they aroused all the time? If that's the case, how do they procreate?

2. Superman is a fascist, but is Batman that much better?

3. Why does it always happen that the people who are most willing to tell other people what to do in a group responsibility are the ones who are least likely to do it themselves when their turn comes up?

4. Surgeons are about 2 psychological steps away from being serial killers.

5. Do people who want to take social services away from the poor ever wonder about self-preservation before they run their mouths? Desperate poor + violent revolution = dead rich people.

Dented fingernails

As I sat at my desk, staring at corner where the unplugged LCD monitor that I saved from the trash bin resides (one that, coincidentally, isn't connected to any other electronic device at this time either), I began to wonder what the other scientists on the floor thought about in their down time. Do they ponder their chosen object of scrutiny, their tiny molecule that defines their focus of academic worth? Do they reflect upon their degrees, their theses, the extra letters that they've placed at the end of their names? Or perhaps they just stare out of the window, wallowing in their self-acknowledged greatness as they occupy the corner of their laboratory at one of the world's most excellent universities - one so "excellent" that they even have an Institute for Excellence?

Today, while my biochemical interactions stewed away, my great downtime observation was this:
I have dented fingernails.

Not all of them, mind you - just the ones on my thumbs. Two little indentations roughly 1/3 of the distance from the proximal edge, bilaterally. One of the beauties of the human body is that we're kind of bilateral, at least on the outside, so that you can generally find that if something appears odd on both sides equally, it may just be normal. Or bilaterally odd.