links for 2008-08-22

• Never wait in line at the museum again - Destinations- msnbc.com
  “It’s a little like the difference between sitting in the bleachers and having front-row seats to a concert,” she says. “You’re going to see the show in both cases, but your experience will not be the same.”
  (tags: museums art tours business)
• Fish Tale Has DNA Hook - Students Find Bad Labels - NYTimes.com
  Harriet the Spy (well Spies, really) for the modern age:
  "In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting."
  (tags: nyt fish food science restaurants)
• A Daughter Sifts Through Her Father’s Clutter for Oddities of History - NYTimes.com
  According to Mr. Perrottet, who spent more than a year researching the relic’s history (a chapter of his new book, “Napoleon’s Privates,” is devoted to it), it is “possible” that the phallus was removed during the autopsy, but there is no absolute proof. (Dr. Lattimer, he said, bought the item at a Paris auction for $3,000 in 1977 to remove it from public scrutiny; as a urologist, he had taken offense at the salacious attention it was attracting. Dr. Lattimer had the item X-rayed, Mr. Perrottet said, and determined that it was a human penis, but the French government has not agreed to provide a sample of Napoleon’s DNA for comparison.)
  (tags: random collecting auctions)