We first saw Sean Bean as the best bad guy in the best Pierce Brosnan, James Bond film, "GoldenEye" and he just gets better with age.   He also loves the sword and sorcery stuff, as witnessed by his turn in "The Lord of the Rings" and now "Game of Thrones".

But who knew he was so tough in real life also?

Bean was apparently smoking in front of a London pub Sunday evening with a stripper (or whatever)  when someone walking by made a lewd comment about her, so Bean took off after him and the guy ran but when Bean went back out for another cigarette the guy was waiting and stabbed him.

Did he to a hospital?  Nope, he threw a band-aid (or whatever) on it and ordered another drink.

Did the Chinese come to East Africa before the Europeans?

China says yes and, to prove it, Chinese and Kenyan archeologists are now searching the African coast for the fabled wreck of a Ming dynasty junk, an ancient Chinese sailing vessel, from the fleet of legendary 15th-century explorer Zheng He.

 Researchers have identified several shipwrecks of interest off the Kenyan coast near the World Heritage site of Lamu but after years of excitable hype by China’s state media, the underwater archaeologists involved in the search are warning that the newly discovered wrecks could be from any era or country — and even if a sunken Chinese ship is found, it may no longer be intact or even identifiable.

The organic food crisis in Europe has caught popular attention even in America - dozens dead and thousands sickened due to another E. coli occurrence in organic produce - but America has another issue that could harm people who have been educated by advertising into believing that raw and organic is nutritionally different and just as safe.

Raw food, in particular unpasteurized milk and juice, poses a very specific public safety risk that is unrelated to dietary concerns. Consuming a diet loaded with fat and salt is unhealthy, but the government has no business regulating that. Raw milk, however, is different. Unpasteurized milk has a greater chance of being contaminated with disease-causing bacteria than pasteurized milk.

The EPA believes it has the ability to impose new regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants including mercury and arsenic without Congressional approval.

Oddly, both Republicans and Democrats are against a sweeping power grab by unelected officials who have no accountability and no oversight.   Regardless, until it is resolved, new rules are driving power plants out of existence.

If you think energy prices are too high, wait until more power plants close.     American Electric Power said yesterdsy that it will shut down five coal-fired power plants and have to spend billions of dollars to comply with a series of pending Environmental Protection Agency regulations.  Who's going to pay for that?   Consumers.

Francis Crick was a polymath - a literate guy who crossed from the physical sciences to help solve one of the great mysteries of 20th century biology, the double-helix of DNA.   There are numerous others but science has become increasingly specialized and that is essentially, it is said, in a more complex world.

In "It's Sad But True That Most Discoveries In Biology Are Made By Physicists" - Freeman Dyson it was discussed that more and more complex problems would be ill-suited for just one field, biology being an example, and polymaths are becoming more prominent again. 

I don't use auto-correct and you know why?  Because I am never wrong, sure, but also because it is rarely right.

damnyouautocorrect.com has their 15 most popular auto-correct errors from last month and you will fall off your chair laughing.  Here is a sample:

No one seems to know which organic food has killed 22 people and sickened thousands due to E. coli bacterial contamination.   A day after blaming German sprouts - not a bad guess, sprouts have been the cause of 30 food scares just in the US since 1996 - and a few days after blaming Spanish cucumbers, investigators are admitting they may never know.

It's probably wiser to just not shop in the organic supermarket for a while.

"We have to be clear on this: Maybe we won't be able anymore to identify the source,"  said Andreas Hensel, head of Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, a further sign that this outbreak of E. coli has done to organic food what the earthquake at Fukushima did to nuclear power plants.

What do you get when you add 1 billion daily Google searches,  60 million Facebook status updates, 50 million tweets and 250 billion emails per day?

A whole lot of melting glaciers, that's what.   While activists are happy about the Depression-era economy and its drop in carbon emissions, the one area of business still working, the Internet, is now getting an evil gaze.   

The Internet has become the fastest growing source of carbon emissions - if the Internet was a country, it would be the planet's fifth-biggest consumer of power, ahead of India and Germany.   And that's only going to grow more.

Cranky militant females in science resent the heck out of attractive women who are also smart - they insist it is objectification but really it is plain old discrimination to demean the intellectual accomplishments of a woman just because she has great legs - no differently than it would be to understate the intellectual accomplishments of a woman, or anyone else, if they didn't have great legs.

To encourage tolerance and diversity in science, we present the latest in the Science Cheerleader pantheon of women who are in the science field and can kick a hole through a wall with their legs - Mariela: