We are well aware that this news from Drudge has made it to nearly every snarky news site out there ("Baaaah") — based on irony alone. But in case you've been too busy actually doing work through the latter part of this week, and upon our really considering the juiciness of the piece, we're joining the herd ("Baaaaaaaah."):

A Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing — entitled "Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?" — scheduled for this past Wednesday, was canceled due to an ice storm.

Pilots Must Know English
Reuters reports that India has sent home at least 20 foreign pilots flying for its airlines in the past year due to their poor English posing safety concerns. Rapid growth has led to carriers hiring hundreds of foreign pilots, yet English is used by India's air traffic controllers.

Several near misses have been reported in recent months as planes competed to land at overstretched big city airports. Newspapers and television channels have said poor communication between foreign pilots and air traffic controllers is often to blame.

So there have been cases where pilots have been sent back as their English proficiency was not up to the mark, Kanu Gohain, Director General of Civil Aviation, told reporters.

Sanitary Speed Record
Deep inside an Airbus factory, technicians kill time by stuffing socks and other random things down toilets. And not just for kicks, either.

Reuters reports:

Flushing away strange objects is among the unglamorous tasks carried out on a giant 3-story rig designed to test the vacuum-toilet system on an A380 superjumbo. While the plane's electrical wiring problems occupy the attention of would-be buyers and the world's media, plumbers are perfecting the A380's 1,000 meters (3,280 ft) of waste and water pipes. To handle the waste produced by up to 800 passengers, Airbus designed plumbing capable of pumping sewage along the 60-meter length of an A380 in about two seconds…

That equates to more than 100 kph (60 mph), which could be a sanitary speed record.

Considering just how perturbed airlines have been over wiring problems that delayed A380 deliveries for months, Airbus cannot afford to make mistakes on even the matter of waste treatment after experiencing toilet troubles with an earlier model.

'Leadership in Engineering'
Just in time for National Engineers Week (which starts this Sunday), Design World is hosting "Leadership in Engineering," an engineering community-based print and online promotion to support and gain industry recognition for individuals, engineering teams and innovative companies.

Place your vote now for engineering companies in the following categories:

• Switches & Sensors
• Advanced Materials
• Engineering Services
• Fastening & Joining
• Fluid Power
• Mechanical
• Motion Control
• Networks & Fieldbuses

Each person is permitted one vote within a given category. Winners will be recognized later this year.

Your Desktop vs. Your Toilet
A new study by a researcher at the University of Arizona has found that when it comes to being clean, "your office desktop is far behind your toilet seat."

Professor Charles Gerba — who tested more than 100 offices at the university and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington — found that the average desktop in the office has 400 times more bacteria than the average office toilet seat.

As a part of the study commissioned by disinfectant maker Clorox, Gerba also found that a woman's work area has more germs that that of a man — due to the habit of women of stashing snacks in their drawers.

RIPPY Clippy
The paperclip is dead.

Microsoft's Clippy was one of those features that split users in a very passionate way: there were actually a set of people who did like Clippy and were sad to see him go; there were also an equal number of people who looked at it as interference or an annoyance, and even though it was easy to turn off, represented something of a bad direction in interface design.

Microsoft began phasing the little helper out by making it easy to turn off, which started with Office XP. In Office 2003, it is actually off by default. In Office 2007, it met doom.

Good riddance or sadly departed?

Chinese Space Potato
The latest entrepreneurial food fad in Shanghai is a purple potato grown from seeds taken on a space mission, according to BBC News.

The sweet potato seeds were part of experiments on China's second manned space mission, Shenzhou VI, last year. The potatoes then were grown on the beaches of southern Hainan Island.

Supporters say space-grown produce can be more nutritious and hardier, though skeptics say similar results can be obtained in Earth-bound laboratories.

Helix Nebula
The Helix nebula, photographed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, has been likened to the red pupil at the center of a green monster's eye, according to BBC News:

Here is a 1997 infrared observation of the Helix nebula by ESA's Infrared Space Observatory, ISO:

And here is the Eye of Sauron:

We'll be back on Tuesday. Cheers.