The Spinsanity guys take their typically evenhanded approach to the Charles Pickering confirmation issue today (unfortunately, you have to be a Salon Premium subscriber to read it for now). Their verdict is that both sides are exploiting the controversy for political gain, which is, of course, true.

National Geographic somehow found the Afghan girl whose striking portrait became the most famous cover photo in the history of the magazine 17 years ago. She returns to the cover for the April issue. Amazing.

National Geographic has the story on how she was located.

Andrew Leonard has a review of Mozilla 0.9.8 up at Salon.

New York Times staff editorial: America as Nuclear Rogue

A reader in Israel sent along this link to an op-ed by Ishai Menuchin, an IDF reserve officer who refuses to serve in the occupied territories.

I’m always a sucker for a story on the teaching of evolution, because I think it’s a subject that’s a touchstone for a lot of the general anti-rational feeling that’s pervasive in society. The Ohio State Board of Education is coming up with a new curriculum, and proponents of “intelligent design” are demanding that it be given equal footing with natural selection. Never mind that this is a science curriculum, and that intelligent design is superstition, not science. It’s depressing to see how many people don’t understand the scientific method or its value in this day and age. This basic formula for scientific inquiry is the basis for most of the positive aspects of our modern lifestyle, and yet the majority of people don’t even understand what it’s about.

Mozilla 0.9.9, get it.

Anne Applebaum has an excellent article today on the fundamental flaws in and unintended consequences of the Oslo peace process.

Jonathan L Zittrain in the New York Times: Taming the Consumer’s Computer. I agree that some consumers are going to want personal computers that are more appliance-like and less computer-like. The important issue here is to let the market serve the customers. There are plenty of us who are going to want PCs that enable us to do whatever the hell we want, and I think Congress and the entertainment industry need to piss off if they think otherwise.

Robin Miller is reporting at NewsForge that AOL 8.0 will feature the Gecko HTML rendering engine that underlies Mozilla in place of Internet Explorer. If this is true, it means that all you lazy people who just coded your sites to work with IE had better get to work fixing your sites so that they are standards compliant. I’m still using Mozilla pretty much exclusively as my browser, and it’s definitely getting close to being ready for prime time.