Well, that’s all very interesting, says the American press, but a famous black man has slept with blondes.

* Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation,[...].

* LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field. That's right: you get to be male or female. Period. That's it. (Source.)

If this pisses you off as much as it pisses me off, go to Edit Profile and select Unspecified for your gender option. Then, go to http://www.livejournal.com/contact/?dept=feedback and politely register your displeasure. (The people who read and process Feedback are not the people who make the decisions. They are often the people who are yelling internally about the decisions.)

(This will likely take place at the next code push, which given LJ's history will be either this Thursday or next, so spread the word fast, especially to the genderqueer community. After that point, you will no longer be able to pick "Unspecified" as your gender.)

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Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet's 'terrible impurity'

Leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis on Friday told their flock to shun the Internet, claiming that even sites meant for the arch-conservative religious community contained "lies and terrible impurity."

Those who enter the world of the Internet "will never return," they warned ominously in a letter published by three ultra-Orthodox newspapers.

"Many Jewish souls have already fallen into its trap."

The 21 rabbis noted that private use of general Internet sites is already strictly prohibited for members of the Haredi community, as the ultra-Orthodox call themselves. "Recently, the so-called Haredi sites have gone overboard," the rabbis said, adding that "they disseminate forbidden slander, gossip, lies, terrible impurity and abominations."

Haredis recently made headlines in Israel as thousands took to the streets to protest against a car park and an industrial company that operate on Saturday, which they consider a grave desecration of the Jewish holy day of rest.

Dear Lazyweb,

I want to put two embedded videos side by side. I want each of them to have a 1 pixel border around the embed box. (E.g.) In Safari and Opera (no idea about IE), you can do:

<EMBED ... STYLE="border:1px solid">

But in Firefox, the border does not show up. One way to accomplish it in all three is this:

<DIV STYLE="border: 1px solid; width:480">
<EMBED ... WIDTH=480 ...></DIV>

which is dumb because you have to specify the width twice, and also because that doesn't let you put the embeds side by side unless you wrap a TABLE cell around each of them.

Any other ideas of how to make this work?

Is it a bug in Firefox that EMBED and OBJECT ignore the CSS "border" attribute?

UPDATE: Problem solved.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the ground opens up and fails to swallow us, and a tagger is rewarded.

Giant Panda Genome Reveals Why It Eats Shoots and Leaves

The panda genome gives clues to understanding the panda's strict bamboo diet. It turns out that pandas have mutations in two copies of a taste gene called T1R1, which encodes a protein that senses the savory taste of meats, cheeses, broths and other high-protein foods. These mutations may have robbed pandas of the ability to taste meat, pushing them toward their bamboo diet, the researchers suggest.

Pandas possess all the requisite genes for digesting meat, but none of the genes required for digesting bamboo, Wang and colleagues found. The researchers guess that pandas rely entirely on communities of gut microbes for extracting nutrients from bamboo.