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I’ve poked fun of “Incompetent Design” before and even bugged creationists about measuring the Light-Year (1 2 3).

Now David Veksler, an old college friend of mine, dug up an interesting photo-story about the Top 10 Useless Limbs (and Other Vestigial Organs).

Being a flightless bird might not be so bad, you can at least kinda glide, which is more fun than any wisdom tooth provides.

Not really.

However, back in 2003 he was granted a patent on the prestin molecule. Prestin is a protein found in the inner ear of every mammal.

Oddly enough, it turns out that 20% of the human genome is patented by someone. This of course leads to problems for, among others, drug researchers who cannot create vaccines targeted at specific genetic defects without permission/royalties on patented genes.

In fact, there is a whole slew of problems that were recently addressed in an informative article in the NY Times entitled Patenting Life — which was written by controversial author Michael Crichton. [Note: one of the more humorous comments regarding his piece was at Slashdot]

One of the biggest problems with being allowed to patent biology is that quite simply: no human invented it, let alone the individual(s) laying claim to it. Sure they may have discovered it, but would that not open up the floor to debate on who owns the rights to mitochondria, T-cells, or heaven forbid: proteins found in semen?

The tie in with prestin is that, as the New Scientist noted, “it may be 10,000 times more efficient at generating power than the best manmade material.”

If Dallos owns an artificial monopoly on it, what could be the negative consequences of his judicious enforcement upon the technology sector?

Unfortunately this looming issue will continually come back to hinder technological and potentially life saving progress, and will invariably effect individual freedoms — after all if you are currently not allowed to do what you want with your own organs, what won’t you be allowed to do with your itty bitty genes?

The developers have released yet another useful feature, to add interconnectedness between your FB account and your websites. It’s called a badge (many other web 2.0 services are creating them too).

It’s a javascript, so end-users end up sucking down a lot of bandwidth FB must pay for. I mention this because aggregated over a long period of time, it will cost a pretty penny to continually load the images every time someone visits your site. Note: this is an internally created application, not one from the newly released API.

If you look at the right side of the front page and scroll down, you will see mine (you can flip through the recent images I’ve uploaded by clicking “prev” or “next”).