links for 2008-01-31

"Ever since I saw the painting shown above, I've wanted to suffocate birds in my very own home laboratory. As I got older, the desire to destroy life subsided, but the desire for a home laboratory remained."

"Congratulations then, cold and flu, on prevailing over typhoid and cholera."

Academic adminstrators as movie characters.

"The NCAA has agreed to a $218 million fund for athletes over six years and to allow schools to give athletes year-round health insurance as part of a settlement of an antitrust suit."

"The whole thing left me with the impression that I had just broken up with a website."

"Out of about 7 million abstracts, some 70,000 were flagged as being highly similar to their corresponding "most related article" on Medline. Manual checking suggests that about 50,000 of these are going to be true duplicates"

Maureen McHugh explains novel-writing in one handy graph.