Links of the day

• A Boy Named Sue - an interesting article in naming.
• Spitzer Weighing Resignation - “We’re at a total standstill,” said Keith L. T. Wright, a Democratic assemblyman from Harlem. “Everybody is stunned. Everybody is absolutely stunned.” Shouldn't everyone know about the hypocrisy in politics? People seem to really delight at scandal...
• Maternal Instinct Hard-Wired - I have some issues with the presentation of this article. Before giving off the impression that only mothers have this parental instinct, they should really mention studies of paternal instinct. Also, did they study the reactions of mothers when shown pictures of non-babies they knew and non-babies they didn't know? I guess "Adult Women Care More About Familiar Staplers" doesn't really keep women out of the workplace as effectively...
  

Failure-oblivious computing

This is so wild! The goal of program safety as I knew it was: terminate with the correct answer or raise an error. These people at MIT are working on a computing paradigm where instead of raising an error if the program goes wrong, they perform some default behavior. Apparently this works for many things--web browsers, e-mail clients, etc. Read about it here.