Scott Simon

Resurrected frog gives us cause to brood

Scott Simon — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:00:11 +0000

The gastric brooding frog may be coming back. Does that give us a lot to brood about, too?

This week scientists at the University of New South Wales' Lazarus Project announced they have reproduced the genome — that bit of biological material that carries our genetic structure — of a gastric brooding frog.

The gastric brooder once lived in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, and was declared extinct in 1983. It was not so named because it had the temperament of a Russell Crowe character, but because it gave birth through its mouth.

Sexiest Man Alive Gets 'The Onion' Taken Seriously

Scott Simon — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:41:30 +0000

If satire had an Olympics, The Onion might have won a gold medal this week.

WWII veteran fought to cast his last vote

Scott Simon — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 20:19:01 +0000

This is the time of a long election season when voters can begin to feel weary. You can't watch the World Series without seeing ads so scolding and snarling you may want to shoo away your children. The ads can make voting seem like a nasty chore.

When 93-year-old Frank Tanabe of Honolulu moved into the home of his daughter, Barbara, earlier this year, he had liver cancer and knew he was going to die. But his family said he was determined to hold on long enough to vote.

Frank Tanabe grew up in Washington state. He was 22 years old and a college man when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

The emoticon turns 30, seems happy about it :-)

Scott Simon — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 17:02:57 +0000

The emoticon, punctuation to depict a facial expression, began 30 years ago this week. Using three keystrokes, the colon, dash and parenthesis, to suggest a smile may not be a great scientific advance, like the coronary stent or computer chip. But the emoticon has been simple, useful and enduring.

There had been previous hints of emoticons.

Actress sues IMDB, but it's Internet privacy on trial

Scott Simon — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:27:19 +0000

I hope it's not ungentlemanly to note that Junie Hoang is 40 years old. Her birth date appears in the Internet Movie Data Base, or IMDb, as does the fact that she has played a headless woman in Domain of the Damned and Ms. Fix-It in Voodoo Dolly.

She doesn't sound like a woman to cross.

Junie Hoang is going to court against IMDb, which is owned by Amazon, because they reveal her age in her entry.

Should the 'leap second' be abolished? Could you repeat that?

Scott Simon — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:07:44 +0000

Let me take a second here.

Not very long, was it?

But a second tied up delegates to the UN's International Telecommunication Union, who postponed a decision this week on whether to abolish the extra second that's added to clocks every few years to compensate for the earth's natural doddering.

The earth slows down slightly as we spin through space. No one falls off, but earthquakes and tides routinely slow the earth by a fraction of a fraction of a second, which makes clocks minutely wrong.