Famed columnist, author and political commentator Arianna Huffington posted on her Twitter account just before she took to the stage at Ithaca College last night to address the current state of journalism and the rise of new media.

The reality of Bryan Christy’s life may be stranger than fiction.

This reptile boy turned lawyer turned journalist turned author presented a reading from his debut book, The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers, to a crowd of fans and curious Cornellians last Tuesday in Uris Auditorium. Christy discussed the peculiarities of his life, his research and the illegal business of reptile smuggling.

According to Christy, The Lizard King is the product of two passions: reptiles and writing.

“When I was a boy in South Jersey, what I cared about was reptiles,” he stated. “On my street, if you had a snake, you were king.”

This past summer, I interned with the website of a major news network and received an unexpected initiation into the world of celebrity journalism. Though I was assigned to the website’s science and technology section, I often aided with celebrity-related stories, which seemed to exist in infinite abundance.

While most students were packing up in preparation for Fall Break, 1,000 ticket-holders joined National Public Radio’s Ira Flatow in Bailey auditorium for a live broadcast of Science Friday to millions of listeners across hundreds of NPR affiliate stations. Science Friday is a weekly science talk radio program entering its 19th year of hosting expert panel discussions and listener call-ins on current issues in science, nature and technology.

In the first half of this year, 106 newspapers stopped their presses, 556 magazines closed their doors and more than 12,000 journalists were laid off, according to Mother Jones magazine. As a result, the outlook for journalism schools seems uncertain at best.

Applications to graduate journalism programs, however, have surged. Columbia, Stanford, the University of Colorado, the University of North Carolina and the University of Maryland have all seen double-digit percent rises in applications. Other schools, like the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, have expanded their graduate enrollment to accommodate increased interest.

My Sun career comes down to this: 800 words and then I’m finished, done for good. What that means I don’t know, but it does leave some room to be creative. No matter what I've written, there will be no worrying about firing or suspension, no need to take angry calls and no requirement to respond to livid e-mails. There will be no looking back.

I’ll start by noting that the very fact that you’re seeing this column means I’ve moderated a bit. There are many things I would have loved to have written but, if I did, this would be in the trash and instead you’d be taking in some wisdom from the College Exchange. Thus, in the spirit of getting this printed, I’ve forsaken some of that wiggle room.

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In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton made a pretty compelling case for gravity — but it never hurts to get a second opinion.

Two weeks ago Cornell’s Prof. Hod Lipson, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Michael Schmidt grad did just that when they unveiled a supercomputer that discovered Newton’s natural laws on its own.

The computer’s algorithm is so sophisticated that it can literally teach itself some of the most influential principles in the history of science without any prior knowledge of them.

Now, it is no secret that newspapers and other print media have been waging what seems to be a losing war against technology (mostly against free, internet-based media), and so I can’t help but wonder: How long will it be before Lipson invents an algorithm for writing columns?

Life magazine’s inaugural issue was published on Nov. 23, 1936, just four months after the start of the Spanish Civil War. For the first few weeks of its existence, the pages Life dedicated to the war in Spain were astoundingly few, especially relative to the coverage domestic and other foreign affairs received. As Life boomed and the war raged on, the magazine claimed to present a balanced account of the conflict but in reality — notably in photography — favored the fascist Nationalist forces.

John McCain was right about something — he predicted that the economy was “about to crater,” and crater it did. The aggregate effect of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch had the magnitude of a meteorite and caused financial havoc unseen since the Great Depression. Perhaps that is why many of America’s landmark industries are going the way of the dinosaurs.

Layoffs and a complete lack of confidence in Wall Street have decimated the savings and spending power of middle class Americans. Industry in turn has suffered, and the Big Three American automakers have been held up as the archetype of the failing and unprofitable American business model.