The New York Times reports on a solution to the problems of trust and knowledge inherent in online social life—a solution anticipated in a movie from 1987.
Unearthing a potential mate’s cheating, thieving, maybe even psychotic ways during the early stages of courtship has always been tricky business. But it is particularly difficult today, when millions are searching for dates online and finding it far easier to lie to a computer than to someone’s face. But the Internet is now offering up an antidote. Web sites like DontDateHimGirl.com, ManHaters.com and TrueDater.com are dedicated to outing bad apples or just identifying people who may not be rotten but whose dating profiles are rife with fiction.
A colleague reports that he remembers this from Amazon Women on the Moon—”when a woman (I’m thinking Rosanna Arquette, but I could be wrong) took her date’s credit card, ran it through a card reader, and got an extensive printout on the guy.”
Those anxiously awaiting their own micro-triceratops would have been disappointed by last night’s NOVA about fossils preserved in amber.
While animals more than 100 million years old have been preserved in amber, it is not clear that extremely old DNA has ever been successfully extracted from this source. Worse, for those with Jurassic Park dreams, a scientist asserts that getting a complete genome from amber is “absolutely impossible,” as preserved DNA is highly fragmented.
However, the show did not examine what could be learned from fragmented DNA, or whether future techniques might enable information to be gleaned from it.
LiveScience recently offered a handy list of 10 ways to destroy the planet. The author won’t tolerate merely making it unpleasant or uninhabitable; only outright destruction is good enough. (Note: in a futurist’s attic I once saw an old 1970s document of possible megaprojects people could pursue. One of the bullet points was “Destroy the moon.”)