It’s official: Isabella Rossellini has gone crazy.

Or “buggy”, which would be more in line with the theme behind her “Green Porno” series of insect-sex (”insext”?) short films for Sundance Channel. I mean, it’s one thing to produce nature documentaries on the same reproductive topic — that give it a veneer of scientificness. But to (sorta) dress up as a spider, a dragonfly, etc. and act out the wild wiggling? Cute, but way out there, man.

Although, maybe she’s on the crest of a trend. Perhaps Jerry Seinfeld cracked open the door with Bee Movie, with everyone else just now catching on.

You learn something new every day. Like about the existence of vog, a volcanic smog that’s currently plaguing the Hawaiian islands:

Kilauea on the Big Island has been erupting continuously since 1983. But in mid-March, a new vent formed at the summit, giving Kilauea two large sulfur dioxide outlets instead of one.

Sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that is also generated by burning coal and oil, can lead to asthma and other respiratory illnesses and aggravate lung and heart disease. When combined with dust and sunlight, it makes vog.

I guess the lava and debris that vulcan activity coughs up isn’t enough — air pollution completes the environmental trifecta.

It’s a soaking-wet day in New York, with a steady downpour that’s forecasted to last the whole day. Far from optimal conditions for someone who’s got client meetings to flit to and from all day long.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s no such thing as a “normal” rainy day anymore? Specifically, I can’t remember the last time I’ve experienced a rainstorm without moderate-to-heavy winds being in the mix. Today’s no exception — it’s far from hurricane strength, but there’s enough windplay going on to swirl the raindrops all around, making even the best umbrella coverage only iffy.

It wasn’t always this way, was it? My memory’s failing me on more and more things these days, but I could swear I remember rainy days that didn’t practically assault you.

I’m thinking we can chalk this up to another manifestation of global weirding.

Many’s the time during my college career when I’d walk all over campus barefoot. I wasn’t alone, and it wasn’t just the granola contingent, either — lots of students took advantage of the Florida climate and terrain to regularly feel the ground against their soles. No harm done, and in fact, it probably helped keep the feet strong and healthy.

But that was college. These days, the idea that the human foot is more harmed than aided by footwear is a little hard to swallow, despite the alleged historical background:

[New York Magazine write Adam] Sternbergh calls the ubiquity of footwear a “conspiracy of idiocy.” He points out the probability that at no point did any shoemaker say, “Let’s design something that works with your foot.” In the Middle Ages, for example, people began wearing shoes with higher heels to avoid stepping in other people’s excrement. Today, high heels are considered sexy. Whatever their reasons for wearing the shoes they wear, people don’t usually consider whether a shoe actually works with their foot, he says.

Given the daily barrage of ground-level threats in the big city — various debris, unforgiving surfaces, elements, other people — I’d say the mere protective covering provided constitutes a shoe that “works with your foot”. Preventing damage to the footsies makes human mobility that much more efficient. After that, you can worry about details like gait and support (which is what ends up happening with orthopedic obsessing like this anyway).

Besides, from the glance-through I gave Sternbergh’s article, “You Walk Wrong”, it comes off more as an advocacy for yet another more-perfect ergonomic shoe line, this time some sort of Kevlar-soled slipper. Basically an advertorial filled with claptrap, which is the general consensus from the Bryant Park Project peanut gallery.

Can we live without our shoes? I wouldn’t mind it — after I retire to some warm-weather beach somewhere near the equator (or on the Moon, by midcentury). Until then, my feet will be losing their “war” with the shoes in my closet.

What can be gained from reading Mary Roach’s “Bonk: The Curious Couple of Science and Sex”, an irreverent look at the study of sexuality?

If nothing else, you’ll learn that Egyptian lab rats clothed in polyester pants have sex less often than those wearing cotton or wool slacks.

I have a feeling that, for untold thousands of readers, that single fact is the deciding factor for whether or not to pick up this book.

Perhaps acknowledging that Earth Day has devolved into a passive naval-gazing session for eco-slackers, the World Wildlife Federation has launched Earth Hour, which requires an active lights-out global effort to raise awareness.

Starting at 8 p.m. on Saturday in Christchurch, New Zealand, citizens from around the world will shut off their lights for an hour, to draw attention to the connection between energy use and climate change. From New Zealand, the event will move westward with the sun to Australia, Manila, Dubai, Dublin, New York, Chicago and finally end in San Francisco, where both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge will go dark for an hour.

And there’s no better way to raise awareness than this:

Earth Hour won’t suffer for a lack of gimmicks. Servers wearing glow-in-the-dark necklaces will sell eco-tinis at bars and restaurants in Phoenix. A local yoga house in Michigan will offer sessions by lamplight, and the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago will have check-in by candlelight.

I guess I’ll see what it’s like in a couple of hours. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I would have noticed if I hadn’t gotten early word of it.

UPDATE, EARTH HOUR PLUS 24: Looks like NYC took a pass on this little green-fest. I saw no evidence of a municipal-wide lights-out; a few corporate advertisers shut down their Times Square mega-watt billboards for the 60 minutes, but no coordinated observance. Most people I talked to had never even heard of the thing. Maybe momentum will be stronger next year.

I ran into a lawyer recently, and we somehow got around to talking about drinking and hangovers. He told me about his strategy for carefree imbibing while never having to worry about the after-effects:

He’s sold on this hangover-prevention pill called Cheers. I thought he meant Chaser, which I’m only aware of because I’ve seen advertising for that product; but no, apparently Cheers is even more powerful at blocking the boozed-up blotto effect.

So he’s basically laced his life with on-hand supplies of Cheers tablets: He’s bought God-knows-how-many and stashed them in his coat pockets, his girlfriend’s purses, his office desk, his car, etc. All for the purpose of ensuring that, should the sudden impulse to knock back a few hit no matter where, he can drug up beforehand to prevent a hangover from setting in.

While I admire all the diligent pre-planning in the name of spontaneous merriment, I had to note that maybe, just maybe, this guy’s got bigger problems than experiencing the throb of a hangover…

Developed as an accidental side-effect to a cardiovascular/blood pressure treatment, Viagra debuted 10 years ago this week, forever changing the prospects of limp-dickedness:

Since Viagra went on the market it has been used by 35 million men around the globe, and it took impotence off the taboo list, making it infinitely easier to treat.

Urologists’ waiting rooms became busier as news got round that the condition, which was rechristened with a new, scientific name — erectile dysfunction, or ED — could be treated with a triangular blue pill.

Personally, this decade-long journey has meant that I now can’t remember what National Football League game broadcasts were like before the torrent of penis-pill TV ads started dominating commercial breaks.

Cute presentation, no? This serving of fried rice was set down in front of a lunch companion yesterday at Chai Restaurant, and I couldn’t resist taking a quick cellphone picture.

I think it’s obvious that the two cucumbers with plum tomatoes, accompanied by wedge of lime, represents a face. That wasn’t apparent to a third lunchmate, who thought the arrangement looked like “boobies”, with no accounting for the lime.

Said lunchmate obviously is swimming against the tide of cognitive human visual language, which allows us to see two dots and a half-moon and interpret the visual representation of a face.

On the other hand, I kinda envy the ability to conjure up images of female breasts. Maybe a cultural re-education is in order — to the extent that our desensitized society hasn’t already done the job.

When I first got my iPod Touch, I was amazed that I was able to manipulate the touchscreen controls and keyboard so effortlessly and so quickly. I was afraid that my fingers wouldn’t be thin enough to accurately tap the onscreen keys, buttons and sliders, thus making my experience with my shiny new toy less than ideal.

Well, for some odd reason, the last few days have seen me regress in my iTouch adroitness. I’ve had to tap on the little sucker’s screen twice, three times even, to fast-forward to the next track or adjust the volume. Keyboard typing has been better, but even there I’ve been less accurate than usual.

In short, I’m completely off.

Have I gained weight in my digits? Unlikely. At least I hope so. I wouldn’t want to resort to having my fingers surgically “whittled” thinner, like some people have, just to cut down on my iPoding errors. It seems like an extreme solution.

Actually, not blinded, but close enough for this NYTimes writer who’s enduring complications from the highly-touted vision-correction surgery:

True, I no longer wear glasses. But the 20/20 line on the eye chart is blurry. I can make it out only if I squint, and it takes about a minute to read. My doctor views this as proof of the surgery’s success…

I thought I’d be able to decipher words in the real world at a glance. My consent form said: “The patient understands that the benefit of the Lasik/P.R.K. procedure is to have an improved uncorrected visual acuity.” I took that to mean that my eyesight would be 20/20. Most doctors, on the other hand, focus on the words “improved uncorrected visual acuity.”

“Not every patient has the potential to see 20/20,” Dr. Belmont told me this month. So, if your eye can see 20/20 with glasses or contacts, the doctors try to replicate that, but there are no guarantees. Dr. Belmont said, “You do the best that you can.”

Medical chutzpah never fails to amaze me: They solve the problem with a solution that’s worse, and count that as success.

This worst-case scenario is exactly what’s kept me from taking the plunge. My glasses are an invitation for others to advise me about the wonders of Lasik, particularly those who’ve had the procedure themselves. They swear by it and can’t understand why anyone won’t follow suit.

I’ve thought about it. Aside from the significant out-of-pocket cost, I’m just not comfortable with having my eyeballs messed with. Surgery is always a crapshoot, and the prospect of gambling with my eyesight — potentially making it worse — doesn’t thrill me. I can live with, and easily correct, a botched nosejob; I can’t live with vision that’s functionally impaired.

Yes, my unaided vision flat-out sucks, and it’d be nice to not need corrective lenses. But in a way, my situation is stable. It’s not like my vision just now took a dive — it’s been poor since grade school. I’m used to it. And glasses or contacts do the job fine. I can’t recall being in a situation where I couldn’t do something because my eyesight wasn’t up to snuff, or needing glasses got seriously in the way. There’s no urgency, so the incentive for Lasik isn’t there.

I do sense a societal shift on this. More and more, I get the feeling that wearing glasses is viewed as more of an eccentricity, or indication of socio-economic standing, when less-obvious solutions like Lasik or contact lenses are available. I’m not immune to peer pressure, so I’m sure in another few years, I’ll probably go back to contacts, and all the while keep surgery in the back of my mind.

It won’t happen anytime soon, though. And this episode of botched Lasiking should keep me away from the knife for a while yet.

A couple of observations on the ethical debate over performance-enhancement drugs, as applied to aiding in mental aptitude:

- There’s a markedly different consideration given to efforts to boost your brain versus your other muscles, i.e. it’s seen as more worthwhile:

“I think the analogy with sports doping is really misleading, because in sports it’s all about competition, only about who’s the best runner or home run hitter,” said Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. “In academics, whether you’re a student or a researcher, there is an element of competition, but it’s secondary. The main purpose is to try to learn things, to get experience, to write papers, to do experiments. So in that case if you can do it better because you’ve got some drug on board, that would on the face of things seem like a plus.”

So as long as you’re not engaging in anything as base as naked competition, it’s okay to pill-pop away. It strikes me as hypocritical, if not downright snobby.

- The long-term implications are being misread by academia:

The public backlash against brain-enhancement, if it comes, may hit home only after the practice becomes mainstream, [University of Pennsylvania neurology professor Anjan] Chatterjee suggested. “You can imagine a scenario in the future, when you’re applying for a job, and the employer says, ‘Sure, you’ve got the talent for this, but we require you to take Adderall.’ Now, maybe you do start to care about the ethical implications.”

I doubt the societal impact would come down this way at all. Rather, it would be more along the lines of the class action lawsuit against Major League Baseball being contemplated by ex-minor leaguer Rich Hartmann, which contends that an unsafe environment was created via the rewarding of steroid-takers with promotion to the big leagues. The harm doesn’t come from an explicit order from a prospective employer to start drugging up — it comes from a broader peer-pressure environment where everyone is juiced up, and you’re at a competitive disadvantage by staying all-natural.

So, correcting Dr. Chatterjee’s hypothetical from above: It’s not going to be a prospective employer saying, “we require you to take Adderall”; instead, it’ll be “you’ve got the talent for this, but not as much as this other guy — who already takes Adderall”. Holding out will mean missing out in this brave new job market.

Winter is (supposedly) almost over, so there may not be many more opportunities this year for the time-honored tradition of catching falling snowflakes on your tongue.

Which is just as well, in light of the news that bacteria lies at the center of most naturally-occurring snowflakes, serving as the nucleus around which flake moisture forms in high-altitudes.

In some samples as much as 85 percent of the nuclei were bacteria, [Louisiana State University assistant professor Brent C.] Christner said in a telephone interview. The bacteria were most common in France, followed by Montana and the Yukon, and was even present to a lesser degree in Antarctica.

The most common bacteria found was Pseudomonas syringae, which can cause disease in several types of plants including tomatoes and beans.

So that pure white snow’s not so pure at its center. If this stuff causes diseases in plants, I’m not sure anyone should be ingesting it, even in fluffy-floating form.

Everybody’s heard of the Bronx Zoo.

Whoever’s heard of the Queens Zoo? I know I sure didn’t, prior to coming across a flyer for it.

I suppose it’s something to hit, should I ever find myself lost on the 7 train.

It’s a cozy little affair at 11 acres, versus 265 acres for the Bronx; that’s actually more manageable, as it doesn’t become as much a chore to have to cover every corner of the grounds. Also, no monkeys, which is a minus; but there are sea lions, which is a plus.

Despite being greased by some of that good ol’ John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funding, the Encyclopedia of Life, a megawebsite which aims to set up a page on every single species great and small, ironically died upon birth yesterday. The site’s servers couldn’t keep up with all the traffic, and organizers are scrambling for advice on scalability.

By the nature of the site’s intended content, they’re definitely going to need it:

Tuesday’s unveiling included limited Web pages for 30,000 species. There are also “exemplar pages” that go into more depth with photos, video, scientific references, maps and text of 25 species ranging from the common potato to the majestic peregrine falcon to a relatively newly discovered obscure marine single celled organism called Cafeteria roenbergensis. Eventually, planners hope to have all 1.8 million species on the Web and already have set up 1 million placeholder pages.

I assume there’ll be no ads, so good luck keeping the grant money flowing. I’m also leery about them looking at a Wikipedia model, especially for non-professional content contributions.

I don’t think the eggheads behind this site have a clue as to how the modern-day Web actually works — maybe their ivory-tower perspective is that it’s still largely a benign academic hangout, without all the mass-market input and persistent malware attacks.

Black is not a color so much as it’s the negation of color: A shade that absorbs 99 percent or more of the entire light spectrum directed at it, thereby reflecting back the minimal amount to make it visible. (White is the same condition, only reversed to absorb most of the spectrum.)

But there’s black, and then there’s superblack: Researchers have cooked up a thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest of blacks.

Sort of a visual black hole that sucks up illumination. Applications abound:

Solar panels coated with it would be much more efficient than those coated with conventional black paint, which reflects 5 percent or more of incoming light. Telescopes lined with it would sop up random flecks of incidental light, providing a blacker background to detect faint stars.

And a wide array of heat detectors and energy-measuring devices, including climate-tracking equipment on satellites, would become far more accurate than they are today if they were coated with energy-grabbing superblack.

And the light-refracting nature of this phenomenon opens up the possibilities for invisibility cloaking. Although you wouldn’t be able to see anything from behind that donned cloak, since all the light is being absorbed more or less absolutely.

It’s been 15 years since little brother Timmy critiqued George Costanza on the sanitary hazards of snack-chip double-dipping.

And now, finally, there’s scientific rigor from Clemson University to give backbone to that germophobic stance:

On average, the students found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the remaining dip.

Each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip. That means that sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite…

Professor Dawson said that Timmy was essentially correct. “The way I would put it is, before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here? Because you don’t know who might be double dipping, and those who do are sharing their saliva with you.”

I’m almost sure that funding for this research round was provided by The Human Fund.

Joining the familiar white-collar and blue-collar labor-market designations is the eco-focused “green collar” class of jobs:

According to a report by the American Solar Energy Society, there are currently 8.5 million green collar jobs in the U.S. and by 2030, this number will likely balloon to 40 million or about one-quarter of the total workforce. And, the jobs listed are just in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors and don’t include other types of environmental employment.

No need to point out that green is the color of money.

Yes, FDA endorsement of foodstuffs from cloned livestock mirrors shifting public acceptance of eating “frankenfood”.

But I can’t say I’m all that interested in that. What I was really interested in was pouncing on this opportunity for a most apropos headline pun, riffed off Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones.

I feel better now.

In an interesting case of geopolitical cause-and-effect, alleged overfishing by European commercial fleets off northwestern Africa is collapsing the local fisherman economy, and paradoxically is spurring fresh waves of illegal migrants toward the European Union.

In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.

“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.

In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.

“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”

And more mouths to feed in the EU means more fish-trawling, for a vicious cycle. No chance of a European mass conversion to vegetarianism, I’d guess…

Amplifying the fatalistic streak that’s already implicit in eco-tourism, more travelers are visiting remote natural landscapes with the idea that it’s pretty much now-or-never:

From the tropics to the ice fields, doom is big business. Quark Expeditions, a leader in arctic travel, doubled capacity for its 2008 season of trips to the northern and southernmost reaches of the planet. Travel agents report clients are increasingly requesting trips to see the melting glaciers of Patagonia, the threatened coral of the Great Barrier Reef, and the eroding atolls of the Maldives, [travel industry trade journal editor Ken] Shapiro said…

What these travelers are chasing may be a modern-day version of an old human impulse — to behold an untrammeled frontier. Except this time around, instead of being the first to climb a mountain or behold a glacier-fed lake, voyagers like the Woodses are eager to be the ones to see things last.

It’s sort of like embarking upon a collector’s quest of the macabre. Imagine the photo slideshow: Here I am standing in front of some Amazonian fauna (that’s now extinct); here I am kneeling on top of Greenlandic tundra (it melted away ten years ago)…