I’m not a major music afectionado. Heck, I can barely spell “afectionado.” But I found something particularly good (i.e., I really like it and damn it so will you) and felt it was my civic duty to point others there.
Go to www.myspace.com/justjinx and select either “Hideaway” or “The Sound of Ending…” from the player on the right side.
Of course, your taste in music and mine might be radically different. I like songs that have catchy beats and a good voice and that stick in your head — and these do it for me.
The girl is self-produced with no label (yet), so it strikes me that this is the kind of thing that MySpace and the Net in general are supposed to allow. Give it four minutes of your life.
You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, how incredibly, irrevocably stupid do you have to be to make a big deal about some elementary school kid seeing a couple of stone boobs? Really. It wasn’t like she took them to a strip show, or even a photo exhibit with nudes. It was a sculpture gallery for gods’ sake!
But there’s always one parent — one sad, pathetic person who thinks it’s just fine to screw with someone’s life because she’s so oversensitive that the best place for her and her family is some compound in the middle of nowhere, where they can avoid contact with the horrible, dirty world.
And people wonder how the Taliban got into power.
You know what I’d love to see? Someone explain what the danger of seeing nudity is. Seriously. Too many people seem to accept as fact that seeing a naked person is somehow bad for you. Before we ban and fire and censor, we ought to have some shred of evidence that seeing a bare breast is actually bad, as opposed to something that goes against a few people’s Puritan instincts.
Because we’ve reached the point where that an idiot parent in Texas went so far as to say that seeing a nude sculpture — not even something incredibly lifelike! — could somehow harm her child.
They don’t raise ‘em very smart down there, do they?
This tiny turtle crawls around your desk as would any turtle (except it seems happy, because of its wagging tail.), You can tap its shell up to 15 times in the rhythmic pattern of your choosing, and it will chirp it back to you. It can also play Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony.Get a few, to keep each other company, or to turn your cube into Churchill Downs.
As an experiment, which my USA Today editor graciously let me try, I did this week’s column as a video. It’s on the USA Today site, but this version is a little larger.
Once upon a time, Dave Wickersham, COO for hard-drive giant Seagate, commented:
A car in 1956 cost about $2,500, could hold five people, weighed a ton, and could go as fast as 100 mph. If the auto industry had kept the same pace as disk drives, a car today would cost less than $25, hold 160,000 people, weigh half a pound and travel up to 940 mph.
Funny. But SFGate’s Tech Chronicles has a wonderful rebuttal showing that there are at least two perspectives.
A sample:
If my car was like my computer and it failed to start on the first try, I would have to go back into the house, get back into my pajamas, get into bed, re-set the alarm clock and start the whole process all over again.
So CNN has a big science story, “When a fish becomes a canary,” about how cities are monitoring the vital signs of fish in tanks to detect any problems in the water.
Interesting, especially when I wrote the same story two years ago, called “Ordinary fish serve as water watchdogs.”
When is a fish like a canary? When it’s one of the tiger barbs in Biological Monitoring Inc.’s Bio-Sensor - a machine that uses fish to make sure that drinking water is safe for humans.
The AP writer even used the same analogy I did. (No big deal, of course — the canary was an obvious one.) Not too bad, I guess, only being a coupla years behind.
In fact, the local guy I wrote about who’s doing this published a paper in 1981 explaining the possiblities of the process.
Abstract: Biological monitoring is a means of assessing the quality of water or wastewater. One such method, which enables continuous and automated monitoring, assesses the ventilatory rates of fish as an early warning system. The various methods for data acquisition and data analyses are discussed and compared.
A first grader in Kansas City, Mo., was suspended for 10 days for bringing a two-inch, bright orange squirt gun to class.
According to Kansas City, Mo., School District policy, the squirt gun is a simulated weapon and a class IV, which is the most serious school offense. Principals claim to have no discretion in cases like [these]. It is an automatic 10-day suspension.
Automatic? By what standard? What if they decided against it? Does it have the force of God behind it, or even Missouri law? No. “Automatic” is a meaningless word in this case — it just sounds important.
But that’s part of the school district’s game to avoid responsibility. By creating a “policy,” it’s trying to make it seem that the situation is out of its hands — that it had no choice. That it has no responsibility for interpretation.
Which of course is nonsense.
“It’s policy, so there’s nothing we can do.” Bullshit. It’s your policy — you made it, you can enforce it as you see fit. This nonsense of the district and the principal throwing up their collective hands is some sort of joke.
As at least one source of the recent E.Coil-in-spinach outbreak has been traced to Earthbound Farm, an “organic” grower in California, you may want to think about something the next time you’re thinking about “organic” vegetables.
(I use quotes there not because I don’t think they’re organic, but because all vegetables are. It drives me crazy. I guess I buy a lot of artificial carrots.)
There are a some distinct disadvantages to organic foods, although most of them are disadvantages for the farmer. They take a lot more work and a lot more space to grow, for example. And the yields are a lot lower. We need to feed a lot of people in this world, so organic farming on a large scale would be a problem.
Think Ethiopia. Somalia. Niger.
And there are studies that seem to show that eating foods grown without lots of pesticides and other chemicals is better for you. (Seem to show. There’s no consensus yet.)
But there’s a downside, besides the lower yields. Organic produce uses organic fertilizer: Manure. Shit. And sometimes that carries diseases.
When you wash your “artificial” lettuce or spinach, you’re getting rid of any chemical residue. When you wash your “organic” veggies, you’re getting rid of, among other things, manure.
But any bacteria in the manure might not rinse off that easily, whereas chemicals, while nastier, are a bit easier to remove. And if you don’t remove the bacteria, and they’re the kind that get you sick — well, you’ve seen the news.
Not a lot has been made over the fact that what’s making people sick around the country was organic spinach — and more importantly, that it wasn’t a coincidence that the E.Coli came from an organic farm; it was because it was grown organically that the spinach was infected.
I need a bit more time to write about holographic memory, which has been essentially a lab-only thing for years. It stores data in a three-dimensional crystal by using two lasers to mark an exact point and beam angle within that crystal. The data can be retrieved by duplicating the beam angles.
(Like I said, I need some time to write a layman’s explanation.) What’s important is that in can potentially store hundreds of times the amount of data that today’s media does, but in the same space — a terabyte in a sugar cube, for example.
This is Tommy Holohan. His sister is married to my brother.
Tommy was a firefighter at Engine Company 6, in lower Manhattan. It was one of the first responders on 9/11. Tommy was one of four from the company that didn’t make it out.
No long eulogies. Plenty of those around. Let me say this, though: Never forget that while we are all running out, these people are running in.
And little could make me prouder than to have my son one say say to me, “Daddy, I want to be a fireman.”
