Perspective Jeff Mizanskey, 61, is a poster child for one well-known criticism of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws — that nonviolent marijuana users (and small-time sellers) may wind up doing decades of hard time and, in fact, more time than some sociopathic offenders serve for heinous offenses. Mizanskey is 20 years into

Cat nanny Facial recognition software, increasingly important to global anti-terrorism operations, is being brought to…cats. Taiwanese developer Mu-Chi Sung announced in July plans for marketing the software as part of a cat health device so that owners, especially those with multiple cats, can better monitor their cats’ eating habits. Sung

The continuing crisis Clinton Tucker, who is black, sued Benjamin Moore paints in Essex County, New Jersey, in June for wrongful firing — after, he said, he had tolerated years of workplace racial insults. In fact, Tucker said the company had introduced two new paint shades shortly after he was

Rocking ‘Messiah’ Prominent theoretical chemist David Glowacki was ejected from a classical music concert at England’s Bristol Old Vic in June for disrupting a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” by attempting to crowd-surf in front of the stage. Dr. Glowacki, an expert in non-equilibrium molecular reaction dynamics and who is presently

The other gas Argentinian agricultural scientists in 2008 created the “methane backpack” to collect the emissions of grazing cows (with a tube from the cow’s rumen to the inflatable bag) in order to see how much of the world’s greenhouse-gas problem was created by livestock. Having discovered that figure (it’s

Felons for furnishing alcohol California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo has a huge, 350-student “viticulture and enology” program, preparing its majors for an industry critical to the state’s economy (and with a venerable international cachet) — but puritanical state law continues to hobble it. Many in Cal Poly’s

Eyes of the beholder Thirty thousand spiders, led by members of the British Tarantula Society, gathered in Coventry on May 18 for the annual BTS exhibition, with a Socotra Island blue baboon spider taking Best in Show for first-time entrant Mike Dawkins. According to news reports, judges ignore spiders’ personalities

Hamster buttocks

Marking Japan’s latest unfathomable social trend, two paperback photo books — both consisting only of portraits of the rear ends of hamsters — have experienced surprising and still-growing printing runs. Japanese society has long seemed easily captured by anything considered “kawaii” (or “cute”), according to a May Wall Street Journal

What’s in a name Vanellope, Rydder, Jceion and Burklee head the latest annual list of the most common baby names on the Social Security Administration register of first-time-appearing names. There were 63 Vanellopes (girls), but only 10 each for Rydder and Jceion, the most popular debut names for boys. Other

Gigadollars and cents In April, Anton Purisima filed a claim in Federal District Court in New York City that the Lowering The Bar blog calculated was for the largest monetary demand ever made in a lawsuit, “$2,000 decillion” (or 2 followed by 36 zeroes, which, of course, is many times