Photographer David Burnett has posted his series of photographs of the Gulf coast, taken last January and published in the new <I>National Geographic</I>. It's stunning stuff. Burnett has the eye for both the big picture and the telling detail&mdash;his photo of the refrigerator-magnet&ndash;covered car of a worker at the garbage dump where they destroyed "white goods" is surprisingly touching and human, even though no people are shown.

Learn the Northern Jersey dialect of Italian. Think <I>The Sopranos</I>. Racy language alert&mdash;or is that redundant after mentioning Tony's gang?

RadioShack, the second-rate phone store that used to sell electronics, just fired 400 employees by email. Classy, no? But here's my question: Considering that the last five times I tried to buy basic computer supplies at RadioShack (yes, I'm a slow learner, but it <I>is</I> just around the corner), the employees treated me as if I were asking for unobtainium, are the 400 people who've been let go capable of accessing an email account to find out they've been made redundant?

Don't laugh until you see the pictures.

Now, <I>this</I> is revenge served cold!

You can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Sean Carroll finds this almost strange, because "the fundamental laws of physics themselves are symmetric and don't seem to discriminate between the past and future."