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And Gary Larson has a louse named after him. I wonder how many other things have been named after famous people? As tributes, I mean--I'm not talking about Newton's Laws of Motion or Einstein's Theory of Relativity here.

"The Internet reacts to censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore (frequently misattributed to Howard Rheingold)

Well, there are a whole bunch of them in Russia, where in fact they originated.

The eruption/explosion of Thera and devestation of the Minoans (and general havoc around the Mediterranean) would have been a good basis for a lost civilization story, and a lot closer to home than the Atlantic or Antarctica (or Mars, etc).

For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac or fenugreek, a durian, or fresh kaffir lime leaves in rural America?

When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.

A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)

For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.

I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.

Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.

The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.

Proponents of the "flammable fabric" theory contend that the extremely flammable iron oxide and aluminium impregnated cellulose acetate butyrate coating could have caught fire from atmospheric static, resulting in a leak through which flammable hydrogen gas could escape. After the disaster the Zeppelin company's engineers determined this skin material, used only on the Hindenburg, was more flammable than the skin used on previous craft. Cellulose acetate butyrate is of course flammable but iron oxide increases the flammability of aluminium powder. In fact iron oxide and aluminium can be used as components of solid rocket fuel or thermite.

from http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/h/h i/hindenburg_disaster.html

I got a job and realized that almost everyone I worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent

That's the Dilbert Principle in action. Or I suppose the Peter Principle really (where *everyone* is incompetent, not just managers), but Scott Adams made it funnier.

Things could work out well:

1. Get job where almost everyone worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent.
2. Leave job and instead write about job where almost everyone worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent.
3. Profit!

> I guess we'll not agree though...

That is because you are wrong. "In mathematics, a distinction is made between different "grades" of infinity because it can be shown that some infinite sets have greater cardinality than others."

Here's a nice summary of the various soul levels. (These are only the ones that humans have.)

Now you say that even though there is a pile of evidence a hundred miles high stating that the world is more than 6000 years old, that ONE piece of evidence in that pile may or may not be valid, the whole pile is invalid?

Luther replied: "Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason -- I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other -- my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe."

According to tradition, Luther is then said to have spoken these words: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen." [Bainton, pp. 142-144].

Actually it's associated with Chicago elections and Honorable Mayor Richard Daley (the first one).

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/r/r i/richard_j__daley.html

The thing that irks me is that there is no general computing source any more. Things have pretty much descended into the various "camps" with pee cee people reading about those new processors and the Mac people reading about the Power PC processor.

I used to be able to keep up with processor design in Byte Magazine. It also kept me apprised of each different computer that came out back when no one computer type and operating system had over 90% of the market and I think that Byte helped serve those who didn't want to see Microsoft-Intel become as dominant as they have become.

The death of Byte is still a sore spot with me. I ran an Intel platofrm for many years and was able to keep up with what Motorola and Sun were doing with their designs. There were even columns on embedded applications. I felt like I had a really good handle on the microprocessor universe and the differences. Sadly, not so now (or should I use Jerry Pournelle's frequent "Alas...").

I believe that mplayer has a compatible Sorenson 3 codec decoder (no encoder). Alas, latest (Apple) audio codecs are not decodable by anything but the binary codecs :(

So, you are correct, sir... at least partially.

Perhaps you could watch the trailers and make up your own dialog?

been there. done that. I eventaully got that 3.3 obsd box running on a '94 - 486 as a firewall - the same one that I saw in the museum along with CSIRAC. But lets face it. Unless you have plenty of time on hand and you want to reexamine old hardware is it really that geeky?

It's just time consuming and hard work trying to locate old hardware and getting it to talk together. Going back to '94 (and earlier hardware) is getting harder. MTBF eventually catchs up. ... Geekiness is all about resourcefulness ...

to a point ... but after that its more wasteful of time. True geekiness would be emulating the hardware in software :)

I always thought there was only one fission nuke in most thermonuclear bombs - in the center.

I also thought, and I'm pretty positive about this one, that the neutron bomb is just a small fission bomb. Fission devices with low TNT equivalent still have a large neutron radiation output. In the 50s and the 60s thy made bombs with as little as 10 ton TNT eq., where all the effect of the explosion would be from the penetrating radiation. Just take a look at this beauty: Davy Crockett.

Erm, I must have malformed my tags: A new version of the Sokal Affair.

This can not be used for faster than light communication. No "information" is exchanged in the "teleportation" it is just that one can "copy" a quantum mechanical state from one place to another, which of course is crucial for building quantum computers. For more explanation on the difference between entangelment and FTL communication see for example see a discussion of the EPR Paradox.

Let me introduce you to Tom Lehrer
Now let's go poison some pigeons in the park.