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What a strange trip it is, this semester. Paper due in one week, first draft complete, but probably requires an overhaul. Another mean thing to arrive on Wednesday (regular as clockwork) and then the other weird thing on Thursday. Still, I finally ended up reading a couple of the books I bought. Excel Saga 15 was definitely different. I don’t think I’ve seen ACROSS that... competent... before.
Anyway, before I bore you all too much, here’s another shameless plug for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
twoheadsbetter, which has new content and some actual comments.
And now, the links. First Marijuana, then LSD, then psilocybin, now MDMA (ecstasy) is a candidate for being a therapeutic drug. It’s like science is deliberately trying to get the goat of the government’s Schedule I drugs and systematically prove that they have good effects, just that they need to be supervised under tight medical control. Who knows? Maybe there’s going to be progress in the War on (Some) Drugs, after all.
Another outbreak of H5N1, the avian flu that everyone is keeping an eye on. We had hoped that this sort of thing wouldn’t appear again. And people are now worried that it’ll take a mutation somewhere and become a pandemic human flu...
Forty percent of the world's wealth is concentrated in one percent of the world's population. And fifty percent of the world’s population holds but one percent of the world’s worth. Disparity at its finest, and yes, I realize that I’m part of the really wealthy, trying to tell the other really wealthy people that the wealthiest of people should do something about the least wealthy. Still, that’s a lot of wealth concentrated in one place. No wonder everyone wants to immigrate into the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
I’m not sure if the finding of dots on Xerox pages that have tracking data on them is old news, but the EFF says that it's figured out how to decode the dot grid that appears on the affected printouts. I’d like to know why such a thing is there in the first place - if you want authenticity in your work, you should leave it up to the end users to produce their own watermarks.
I suspect that the Citizendium people are nodding and marking the following article as a justification for their split from the Wikipedia project - namely just by registering the name theangryblackwoman, a user almost gets herself pre-emptively banned. Hrm. Wonder if the avatar or username you choose will not be the subject of people’s impressions of you. Rather than, say, getting to know you and working from there. Since Wikipedia seeks verifiability rather than truth, then perhaps that was an apt judgment - they could verify that she had the name and they could verify that some people were going to have a problem with it.
It’s been quite some time since the first ancestors figured out “tab A into slot B”, but ever since then, they’ve been whooping it up. A new exhibition at the Neanderthal Museum in Germany pays tribute to 100,000 years of nookie, right down to the anatomically correct Neanderthal man.
Going from past to future, NASA solicited some opinions on what people would want to do on the moon if humans lived there. After sorting and compiling, they’ve released a list of 181 things to do on the moon. Science Blog has a nice post about what the potential is, as well as a link to the actual PDF. According to the BBC, the metabolic process has been created in a virtual model, a University of California team claims. The network looks like it could come in handy for predicting interactions and actions of various chemicals as they metabolize.
The International Herald Tribune asks us to stop and take a moment to consider whether contractors are really just an unofficial arm of the government. They’re certainly getting paid better than the actual government workers are. With mercenary companies being the second largest force in Iraq, the conflict looks like it’s being fought by proxy almost as much as its being fought by the military. Although, I suppose the military is a proxy, at least at the moment, considering there’s no draft on.
Taking swipes at the newest Microsoft OS (which sounds more and more like a successful Apple marketing campaign, the more I hear of it), I’m pretty sure I’ve linked into Peter Gutmann's "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" before. Or maybe it’s just become so widely spread about how Vista does bad things silently, hoards things to itself and doesn’t share, and basically behaves like a spoiled little brat that wants the latest toys before it will do what its supposed to. A blog says that Microsoft is just playing by the rules set in front of it, and that unless premium content is actually accessed, none of the scary things will happen. What constitutes premium content, especially the longer that Vista is out, though, means that we could all be running into the difficulties discussed. And I wonder whether a computer that has Vista installed on it will refuse to boot if another operating system is detected on it. Or whether, if that’s not in the spec now, it will be soon enough.
It is a truism of American society that sex sells things. The appeal or the merest hint of sexuality draws crowds. This has been put to yet another use in sexpresso shops, where the clientele is always happy to see you and show off a little bit. It’s kind of like the American version of a maid cafe. More raw sexual energy, packaged in as little as possible, than cultivating a sort of aesthetic and atmosphere and letting imagination do the work.
Following up on an earlier comment, it appears that the Minister of Health in Japan was not referring to women in his birth-giving machine speech, as diagrams of the device have now been released to the public. (A hat tip to an Englishman in Osaka for pointing them out to me) If, however, one is looking for the mroe old-fashioned way of romance and children, perhaps some personal advertisements will be of use to you? Recall, though, that if you should be successful in creating a child, you are most certainly not permitted to leave the child out in sub-zero temperatures and abandon her. That child’s lucky that she got noticed in time. I didn’t think that infanticide was still practiced. Even if abandonment was the goal, at least put the baby somewhere warm.
Anyway, that’s the wonderful world of insanity for tonight. Tomorrow, we hope it gets warmer, not colder, even though schools have already been called off for tomorrow because of the wind chill. I think I’m going to put on some extra insulation and figure out a way of wrapping the scarf so that the very least amount of skin is exposed to the elements. I think I need to figure out some way of reinforcing my hat, as well. Or that there needs to be lots of activity so that the heat generation keeps going on the whole time I’m outside. Which, of course, is a bank trip, so that’s a lot going on outside. It’ll definitely be chilly. But the university treks on, despite the cold. It takes a terrorist attack to close our university. Tomorrow is one of those days where you might want to drive. You might also want to consider not driving because it’s simply too cold out. Stay warm, people.
Anyway, before I bore you all too much, here’s another shameless plug for
twoheadsbetter, which has new content and some actual comments.And now, the links. First Marijuana, then LSD, then psilocybin, now MDMA (ecstasy) is a candidate for being a therapeutic drug. It’s like science is deliberately trying to get the goat of the government’s Schedule I drugs and systematically prove that they have good effects, just that they need to be supervised under tight medical control. Who knows? Maybe there’s going to be progress in the War on (Some) Drugs, after all.
Another outbreak of H5N1, the avian flu that everyone is keeping an eye on. We had hoped that this sort of thing wouldn’t appear again. And people are now worried that it’ll take a mutation somewhere and become a pandemic human flu...
Forty percent of the world's wealth is concentrated in one percent of the world's population. And fifty percent of the world’s population holds but one percent of the world’s worth. Disparity at its finest, and yes, I realize that I’m part of the really wealthy, trying to tell the other really wealthy people that the wealthiest of people should do something about the least wealthy. Still, that’s a lot of wealth concentrated in one place. No wonder everyone wants to immigrate into the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
I’m not sure if the finding of dots on Xerox pages that have tracking data on them is old news, but the EFF says that it's figured out how to decode the dot grid that appears on the affected printouts. I’d like to know why such a thing is there in the first place - if you want authenticity in your work, you should leave it up to the end users to produce their own watermarks.
I suspect that the Citizendium people are nodding and marking the following article as a justification for their split from the Wikipedia project - namely just by registering the name theangryblackwoman, a user almost gets herself pre-emptively banned. Hrm. Wonder if the avatar or username you choose will not be the subject of people’s impressions of you. Rather than, say, getting to know you and working from there. Since Wikipedia seeks verifiability rather than truth, then perhaps that was an apt judgment - they could verify that she had the name and they could verify that some people were going to have a problem with it.
It’s been quite some time since the first ancestors figured out “tab A into slot B”, but ever since then, they’ve been whooping it up. A new exhibition at the Neanderthal Museum in Germany pays tribute to 100,000 years of nookie, right down to the anatomically correct Neanderthal man.
Going from past to future, NASA solicited some opinions on what people would want to do on the moon if humans lived there. After sorting and compiling, they’ve released a list of 181 things to do on the moon. Science Blog has a nice post about what the potential is, as well as a link to the actual PDF. According to the BBC, the metabolic process has been created in a virtual model, a University of California team claims. The network looks like it could come in handy for predicting interactions and actions of various chemicals as they metabolize.
The International Herald Tribune asks us to stop and take a moment to consider whether contractors are really just an unofficial arm of the government. They’re certainly getting paid better than the actual government workers are. With mercenary companies being the second largest force in Iraq, the conflict looks like it’s being fought by proxy almost as much as its being fought by the military. Although, I suppose the military is a proxy, at least at the moment, considering there’s no draft on.
Taking swipes at the newest Microsoft OS (which sounds more and more like a successful Apple marketing campaign, the more I hear of it), I’m pretty sure I’ve linked into Peter Gutmann's "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" before. Or maybe it’s just become so widely spread about how Vista does bad things silently, hoards things to itself and doesn’t share, and basically behaves like a spoiled little brat that wants the latest toys before it will do what its supposed to. A blog says that Microsoft is just playing by the rules set in front of it, and that unless premium content is actually accessed, none of the scary things will happen. What constitutes premium content, especially the longer that Vista is out, though, means that we could all be running into the difficulties discussed. And I wonder whether a computer that has Vista installed on it will refuse to boot if another operating system is detected on it. Or whether, if that’s not in the spec now, it will be soon enough.
It is a truism of American society that sex sells things. The appeal or the merest hint of sexuality draws crowds. This has been put to yet another use in sexpresso shops, where the clientele is always happy to see you and show off a little bit. It’s kind of like the American version of a maid cafe. More raw sexual energy, packaged in as little as possible, than cultivating a sort of aesthetic and atmosphere and letting imagination do the work.
Following up on an earlier comment, it appears that the Minister of Health in Japan was not referring to women in his birth-giving machine speech, as diagrams of the device have now been released to the public. (A hat tip to an Englishman in Osaka for pointing them out to me) If, however, one is looking for the mroe old-fashioned way of romance and children, perhaps some personal advertisements will be of use to you? Recall, though, that if you should be successful in creating a child, you are most certainly not permitted to leave the child out in sub-zero temperatures and abandon her. That child’s lucky that she got noticed in time. I didn’t think that infanticide was still practiced. Even if abandonment was the goal, at least put the baby somewhere warm.
Anyway, that’s the wonderful world of insanity for tonight. Tomorrow, we hope it gets warmer, not colder, even though schools have already been called off for tomorrow because of the wind chill. I think I’m going to put on some extra insulation and figure out a way of wrapping the scarf so that the very least amount of skin is exposed to the elements. I think I need to figure out some way of reinforcing my hat, as well. Or that there needs to be lots of activity so that the heat generation keeps going on the whole time I’m outside. Which, of course, is a bank trip, so that’s a lot going on outside. It’ll definitely be chilly. But the university treks on, despite the cold. It takes a terrorist attack to close our university. Tomorrow is one of those days where you might want to drive. You might also want to consider not driving because it’s simply too cold out. Stay warm, people.
