Cyrus Farivar

The Dominion Post: Pitcairn Island is celebrating the arrival of its newest resident, a baby girl who is the second child to be born on the remote island in the past 21 years. Adrianna Tracey Christian, born on March 3, is Nadine Christian’s fourth child and a ninth generation descendant of Fletcher Christian, the Bounty mutineer who settled the Pacific island in 1790. Because of the difficulty of getting medical treatment on the isolated, inaccessible island, for the past 21…

Wired News: By Cyrus Farivar04.02.07 | 5:00 AM Imagine you could treat cancer by taking a pill, then directing a laser light toward the location of the tumor. The growth would dissolve with no chemotherapy, and no harm to healthy tissue. It might sound futuristic, but a select number of cancer patients already benefit from the method, called photodynamic therapy. An upgrade for the procedure could save thousands more cancer patients from the horrors of chemotherapy. “It’s an approach that…

My Q&A with Esme Vos of MuniWireless.com is now online. For some reason, the San Francisco magazine website sucks and my article isn’t available online. So, you’ll have to make do with Esme’s scan of the piece. If you do manage to get a print copy, apparently there’s a brief bio about me in the front of the magazine.

The Associated Press: Former House speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday described bilingual education as teaching “the language of living in a ghetto,” and he mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages. “The government should quit mandating that various documents be printed in any one of 700 languages depending on who randomly shows up” to vote, Gingrich said. The former Georgia congressman, who is considering seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, made the comments in a speech to the…

PC World: It’s been barely a week since the release of the Apple TV, the new box from Apple that allows for streaming video to a television, but hackers from coast-to-coast have already been able to turn the $300 multimedia box into a full-fledged computer. The Apple TV comes with a stripped-down version of Apple’s OS X, but retains many of its basic features, such as directory structure and file format. Hacking the Apple TV is the latest in a…

Shafer had a great piece yesterday on Slate about lying, memory and journalism. He also linked to a piece in The New Republic about how David Sedaris embellished at best and lied outright at worst in many of his crazy stories: Even so, in the end, I decided Kid Sedaris probably did volunteer at Dix. Why? Because I called him and asked. He says he did, and I believe him. During a long conversation from his temporary roost in Tokyo–where…

Wired News: by Cyrus Farivar Cell phones that could be recharged with a shot of Coke, Kool-Aid or even maple syrup might hit the market within five years, using experimental, enzyme-based fuel-cell technologies described in a recent study by Shelley Minteer of Saint Louis University. Minteer’s team released a similar study nearly four years ago, showing that it was possible to use ethanol, or even shots of tequila, to power fuel cells. At the time, Minteer reported that the research…

Last night, I made the best Persian rice (with tadiq, the burned crunchy bits at the bottom of a rice pot) that I’ve ever made! Chowhound helped a bit, but this was all me. Previously my tadiqs haven’t been quite as uniform, nor the saffron as diffuse. So freakin’ delicious. Also, one of the benefits of working at home is that I get to cook lunch in my own kitchen if I want to. The other week I made this…

Crap. I’m about 70 minutes (read about $30) over my monthly allotment on my cell phone. No one call me between now and 9 pm tonight. Thank God for upcoming free weekend minutes.

When I first read the headline “The Year Without Toilet Paper” in today’s New York Times, I thought to myself “Um, that’s not a big deal.” Most people in many parts of the world don’t use toilet paper (read: most Africans as well as people in the Middle East and many other places, I’m sure). While that may sound repulsive to many Americans, it’s really not as hard as one, typical American consumer might think. Sliding down past the headline,…