The cutting-edge, ultra-tech, hyper-hip bible of the alpha geeks is Wired Magazine. If you want to be knowledgeable about the future of the Information Age, you have to subscribe to Wired.

So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I read a cover story in Wired’s current June, 2005 issue about a young physicist who was overthrowing Einstein and revolutionizing the concept of time. Satisfying, because To The Point subscribers learned about him almost two years ago, in September, 2003.

The Wired article is entitled Time’s Up, Einstein, on pages 124-126, describing how a high school dropout in Wellington, New Zealand named Peter Lynds wrote a paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity," that challenges the foundations of modern physics. The paper was published in the August 2003 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics.

It took Wired a little under two years to tell its subscribers about Lynds. It took To The Point less than a month, in The 21st Century Einstein. Frankly, I think it is very cool for To The Point to be, in this case, more wired than Wired.

There’s been a lot of acute commentary on the Newsweek-in-the-media-toilet/Koran-in-the-Gitmo-toilet story. It makes the excellent point that rioting Moslems murderously freaking out over this cannot be looked upon with respect and seriousness.

Just imagine, goes one analogy, if upon hearing Al Jazeera published a story about Al Qaeda sympathizers in Pakistan desecrating the Bible, Southern Baptists in Alabama went berserk with rage, attacking a Birmingham mosque and killing everybody inside. How tolerant and forgiving would world and American media be towards their humiliation and bruised feelings?

But of course this would never happen, because Southern Baptists, like other Christians, are civilized. Once again, it turns out, Moslems have disgraced their religion with uncivilized behavior.

There’s also been a lot of justified disgust directed at Newsweek for publishing the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theatre. The MSM’s reputation has been taken down another notch, which is a definite social good. Let’s hope Newsweek’s paid circulation drops concomitantly.

Yet there is another silver lining to this sorry episode that may have long term benefits to our national security. It has to do with the identity of Michael Isikoff’s source for the KoranToilet story.

Last week was the 13th birthday of my youngest son, Jackson. One evening a few days before, I was engrossed in writing on the computer when my wife reminded me it was Jackson’s bedtime. He was in bed reading, waiting for me to kiss him goodnight.

As I walked down the hall towards his room, my brain was filled with thoughts about the article I was working on. I was on autopilot and all I could think about was what I would write when I got back on the computer. For some reason, I stopped and stood still. Somehow, an extraneous thought had popped into my consciousness from nowhere.

It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.

A number of US soldiers fighting in Iraq have become afflicted with a horrible disease called leishmaniasis (leesh-mun-eye-ah-sis). They get it from the bite of a sand-fly which injects a parasite into their bloodstream. The “cutaneous” version of the disease causes huge, ghastly, and painful boils on the face and other areas of the skin - thus the name, Baghdad Boils. The “visceral” version destroys the liver and other internal organs and can be fatal.

Compounding the problem is that the treatment seems worse than the cure. It’s a 20-day therapy of being injected with sodium stibogluconate (commercial names: Pentostam or Stibanate), which can leave every joint in your body with screaming pain, plus give you unending blow-your-head-off migraines.

There is some very recent research which indicates a way to greatly increase the effectiveness of the antileishmanial drug therapy while greatly decreasing its painful side effects. If you have any friends in the military, know of any soldier suffering from this affliction, or know any soldier serving in Iraq who may be at risk from sand-fly bites, you may want to make them aware of this.

It involves the use of a common bioflavanoid called quercetin.

The only thing harder to find in the U.S. Senate these days than a Democrat with a conscience is a Republican with a spine.

Democrats may have been waxed at the polls last November, but they're running rings around Republicans in the public relations battles so far this year. One example of many is the Bolton nomination.

President Bush, through the blunt-spoken Bolton, wants to give the United Nations a dose of tough love. Democrats want a U.N. ambassador who will suck up to Kofi and the French, which is not what a large majority of Americans would prefer. Yet Republicans have permitted the debate to focus on whether or not Bolton was mean to subordinates, charges which would be irrelevant if true, and which appear not to be true.

If Bolton is defeated, Bush will receive a black eye, and bureaucrats at the State Department and elsewhere will be encouraged to resist administration policy. This will be almost entirely a self-inflicted wound.