Employer OMG!, Zombie fire ant, and Decentralized social networking

They're kidding, right? Help Wanted. Please Have Résumé, References and Details of Sexual Inclinations. I must admit I'm kind of amused but I'm more appalled. I mean seriously?! An employer "personality assessment" test that asks: 57. Do you prefer ordinary sex?, 100. Would you go to a wife-swapping party?, 206. Would you take part in an orgy?, etc. If employers are asking this, I guess I won't be hired since I refuse to answer questions about my freakin' sex life on some of employer assessment test. I'd better start looking starting my own business. :-P

I never thought anything could make me feel sorry fire ants but this does: Zombie (!) fire ants: Fire ants lose head over parasitic flies. OMG. A tiny fly is turning the ants into zombies and causing their heads to fall off. Wow, horrible. That makes me feel bad for them; even more than when I put poison out to kill them (yes, I feel bad when I kill insects for some reason--even fire ants). It doesn't stop me from doing it though. :-)

I thought this was interesting. Decentralized social networking. From XFN's webpage: XFN puts a human face on linking. As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

In sufficiently modern browsers, authors using XFN can easily style all links of a particular type; thus, friends could be boldfaced, co-workers italicized, and so on. It is also the hope of the authors that this practice becomes widespread enough to allow the creation of a service that charts personal (as opposed to purely mechanical) links between weblogs and the people responsible for them.