The classes are underway. We repeat. Classes are underway...

Ooog. A cold appearing now is not the greatest thing to happen. Luckily, I have the weekend to recover from it. I really would rather not ever get sick, but until we can develop the superimmune ability to knock out every strain of a cold before it gets to us, well, we suffer. Hopefully, this will be a short cold.

Security stuff for those using under Acrobat Reader 8 - apparently there's a pretty big security hole, so upgrading is the way to go, they tell us.

And, of course, the Big Blog Thing. Instead of going straight-to-video, you get to go to bradhicks. Mostly because I think his take on this issue has been one of the best. So, J. Brad Hicks on Ashley, the girl whose body stopped. (Here's his reference article from BBC. You can find others everywhere.)

A poem for the new year from Lawrence of Cyberia. Poetry and pictures, with a hope for the new year.

If you like green living and eco-friendly environs, consider moving to one of Natural Home and Garden's best eco-neighborhoods. If you’re going out and thinking about picking mushrooms once your’e there, keep in mind the following - six in the hospital after eating mushrooms they picked themselves. Either take the mycologist with you or play it safe. Some of those fungi are not fun guys at all.

If, instead, you’re looking for the world to end and are brushing up on your theories, consider classifying them according to Open The Future's Eschatological Taxonomy. If nothing else, if helps you to prioritize the ones that might be preventable.

Richard Reeves tells the Congress to exercise their Constitutional authority - If you want a war, declare a war rather than continuing with the trend of non-war that’s been going on since the end of World War II. And, because you knew someone was going to do it eventually, comparing the United States as Republic and Empire with Rome as Republic and Empire . Apparently, if we’re following historical trend, there’s still a long way down to the nadir. Not necessarily a heartening thought, but good for the procrastinators.

From Wii to 3-D and beyond, computer avatars and sims are starting to put up a pretty good game of virtual ping-pong. Put on the glasses, pick up the sensor control, and let the stereograms and computers do the rest. There’s a ways to go, though, if they want to be able to train with pros or against them.

Making fun of themselves... or making fun of someone faking fun of them... or something. Anyway, here’s The Telegraph deconstructing a set of definitively English gestures, stances, and devices meant to make any foreigner shiver and feel insulted. Or at least, profoundly ignored.

The last part for tonight - need some confirm/deny on this, but it looks like family planning, including contraceptives, examinations, and such will is available for low-income women, thanks to the State of Michigan. Are we actually moving forward? Shock and awe! Why didn’t I see this before? I know who to go poke about this, though. If it’s on the up-and-up, then this should be circulated as widely as possible.

Anyway, that’s it. I’m going to bed and hoping this cold goes away by the time I wake up tomorrow. If not, well, there’s another day to work it out with...

Yay, Saturday.

Well, I woke up better. Have since returned to what I was. Maybe when I wake up again tomorrow, it’ll be better. And not backslide. Then again, you never know.

Reminder - get the last of the books on Monday. Which does mean going to the bookstore and such. I hope the books I grabbed from Amazon arrive soon. I need to consult one of them about the proper markup for a XHTML table construction. I feel that I’m going to be using up a lot of paper and ink this semester - since I’m going to have to print off source code on a regular basis, no doubt. Hopefully, the allotment I get between the graduate school and ITCS works. And if anyone near me has a laptop they’d like to loan me for the semester, it’d probably be appreciated. But it’s not necessary. I’m not buying one just for this semester.

As always, when engaging in something that could have legal consequences, like contracts, permission slips, and yes, contest entries, it’s always good to read the fine print. That way you don’t find out that the baby's not eligible for winning a contest of being the first baby of the new year because the parents aren't American citizens.

Something with significant play on my friendslist - Momofuku Ando, founder-chairman of Nissin Food Products and inventor of instant ramen, has bassed away at 96. College students, anime fans, and those with very little pocket change all salute Ando-san and wish him well making ramen in the afterlife. “Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat.” he said. Wouldn’t hurt to make his statement a truth and see what happens, would it?

Making a reappearance every so often (because I’ve seen material on this in various places for a while now, but it tends to cycle around a bit), another attempt by ICANN to create a ".xxx" top level domain. I’m surprised that it hasn’t already happened, myself. It would certainly make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on the Web, anyway. (Cue Trekkie Monster.) Of course, anyone who actually got one would probably find themselves blocked by filtering software (depending on the proprietor of the business, this may or may not be acceptable to them.) Considering, though, there’s no requirement for them to abandon any current domain names, it may be getting a .xxx domain and then pointing it to the current website. (This entry and my journal has probably just been blocked by filtering software, too. That’s assuming it already wasn’t totally blocked for content.)

To perhaps further increase the filter warnings, and because I think this is also a cyclical thing, there’s another warning about the dangers of pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites being issued by an eating disorder group. These sorts of things are likely to continue mostly because people are going to do what they want. You can slap a hundred warning labels on cigarettes and people will continue to smoke them. The same for anorexia sites - people will still put them up. I don’t personally approve of the idea of starving yourself to look like some idealized waif, mostly because I think it’s pretty stupid to starve yourself. And I’m not too fond of the ideal of the waif, myself.

Really making sure I get blocked by filter software, here’s a sneak peek at a photo book detailing Love Hotels in Japan, the places where people go to have sex. I’m kind of surprised such things haven’t caught on in America - a discreet love hotel might be just the thing that people would need to deal with the more Puritanical ideas about sex. Fetishists might enjoy the themed rooms, but the whole concept could probably do for getting put out for a spin. We’ve got topless and bottomless shows, so why not have a place where you can take your significant other to for some hot sex? (Thanks, Wired. Also, it’s a series of photos - keep clicking next to see some of the room designs.)

Thinking of the future? More often than not, we take the past as a springboard for thinking about the future. According to Scientific American, we use much of the same brain areas thinking about our past or our future. There’s a certain amount of sense made there, as we progress from cigar-shaped rockets to UFOs to Matrix-like technofutures and cyberpunk. We take our past as the basis for the future. It can turn out some very interesting things. (And that’s both mundane futures and The Futurrrrrrrrrrre.

It appears that Senator Santorum’s defeat, while good for the country (if you think that Democratic control is good), was bad for the Senate sweet tooth. Senator Santorum's "candy desk" is not going to return, because of ethics rules. Wyoming, the state that inherits the desk, is apparently not quite as candy-filled. This disappoints the Senators. Maybe they’ll start bringing their own sweets.

Jeff Bezos releases some film from a protoype spacecraft flight. Lots of people in the market for trying to make affordable travel up to higher altitudes of the atmosphere. In something slightly more down-to-earth, assuming the Board of Supervisors doesn’t nix the deal Earthlink will provide wireless service to the entire city of San Francisco. There’s apparently a free tier and a pay tier, but municipal wireless broadband will be available in San Francisco for all if this deal goes through. That’s a neat thought. Let’s see if it succeeds and other municipalities make contracts for wireless in their cities, too.

Cooling computers using one's swimming pool. Keeps temperatures down, water-cools it all. Considering nuclear reactors use water as a cooling mechanism, maybe a swimming pool is all of what everyone needs to keep their houses and electronics cool all year-round? (Might also get the pool up to nice heated temperatures, too.)

Maybe it’s particularly obvious in these pieces, or maybe I got primed to it for some reason, but the following three pieces have a significant amount of charged language in them. Perhaps it’s the choice of the words and phrases used, but I can imagine all of these making people puff up in defense if they should believe the opposite. Let’s start with a relatively obvious example - introduced in Congress today were bills called The War Profiteering Act of 2007 and the Effective Corruption Prosecutions Act of 2007. (Link to the introducing Senator’s senate.gov website, with his comments and remarks on the acts). These bill titles are certainly not neutrally-worded. It’s pretty easy to tell what side is being taken and what sort of remarks can be expected. Moving outside to other countries, the BBC’s headline for the next article is Japan's whaling fleet sets sail. The article explains that commercial whaling, for most of the world, has a moratorium engaged on it, but there are exceptions for scientific projects and Norway, which lodged a formal protest against the measure. From the headline, and a lot of the quotes there, though, the prevailing opinion seems to be that Japan is engaging in whaling operations underneath the guise of science. Regardless of the truth of the matter, that’s still slanting the discussion in one direction.

The most egregious violator of them all, though, is this release from the Union of Concerned Scientists that accuses ExxonMobil of running a deliberate disinformation campaign on global warming, comparing ExxonMobil’s work to that of the tobacco industry.

I’ve happened across the blog Light and Life, which looks to be an interesting mixture of thoughts on various denominatiosn, the nature of God, and other things, both spiritual and secular - it’s pulling from all sorts of places on all sorts of topics. It’s got new theses for the Christian community, in the 21 units and 95 units varieties, pulled from different sources. It looks good, and so I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Finally, 51st Skeptics' Circle is in, at See You at Enceladus. The Skeptics’ Circle is always worth a read, whether you agree or disagree with their contributors’ ideas and positions. Some of the highlights include taking swipes at Brittanica's article on Intelligent Design, a reminder that sea salt is still only salt and may actually be less helathy for you, the occasional twinge of regret at being right when skeptical, smacking people upside the head who jump to conclusions based on potentially flawed studies about activity and breast cancer risk, and one of the best claims for skepticism I’ve seem in a long time - skepticism will save you money. That might make a few people notice.

Singled out from the pack as the most brain-bending of them all is Doggerel #51: "Threatened", which starts as a nice post about how skeptics have plenty of reasons to be aggravated by “woo” promoters, none of which are “Those ideas threaten my worldview, onoes! Must destroy to keep my beliefs sacred!” The true gem, though, goes in reading the comment list, where things so from surreal to worse as they cover ground from the apparent necessity to have the Bible memorized and be able to quote at will from it to be considered to have read it, and thus actually be able to argue about it to “atheist hypocrisy” to Genesis contradictions to a horde of other strange things. Comment wars are interesting things to see, that’s for sure. Perhaps I should be exceedingly glad for not having Internet notoriety, simply because I don’t have to worry about people dropping those kinds of comments off. The worst I get are male-enhancement ads in my long-passed posts.

Anyway, this set seems to have been a lot richer in content than the normal set. I think it’s because I really like a lot of the stuff displayed here, and I’m finding, through it, even more venues to explore and gain more knowledge. I like it. I like it a lot. Now, to vanquish the cold, and I’ll be just fine.