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England and Wales were delightful: I saw lots of good people,
drank enough good tea and cider, adopted a nephew, saw castles and
the ruins of a Roman bath, was a groundling for a performance of
Hamlet at the
Globe,
and generally had a good time.
Thanks to
Alison Scott,
Steven Cain, Marianne Cain,
Jo and Sasha Walton,
Sandra Bond, and Mom for the hospitality.
The
Mississippi State University
gravity forecast
includes a disclaimer, just in case.
The
Astronomy
Picture of the Day
is usually informative; sometimes it's also
surreally
beautiful.
Bring on the
telephone
sanitizers.
You don't have to go to Io to find
sulfur
volcanoes--lakes of sulfur may be part of most terrestrial
eruptions, but sulfur evaporates quickly, and has largely
been overlooked by modern vulcanologists.
Within four hours of the sulphur lake forming and breaching its banks, just about all of the sulphur was been burned away into the air. All that was left behind were trenches about six inches deep in the rocky debris, lined with rubble and encrusted with ash. Had the geologists not been there to witness their creation, they could not have known that these channels were formed by sulphur overspills.
There are
sound technical reasons why you should always
mount
a scratch monkey before performing system maintenance or
testing.
Jeffrey Goldberg asks why Americans ignore, or
tolerate,
atrocities and suffering in Africa that we would
at least try to prevent if they were happening in Europe.
While in Abuja, I happened to bump into Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard economist who is a very angry man. Just about everyone agrees with Sachs that with an investment of $1 billion a year ($200 million of it from America), as many as half a million children who would otherwise die of malaria could be saved. Sachs calls it the 75-cent solution: 75 cents from each American to save thousands of African lives. But whenever he asks for aid (or, more important, debt relief), he gets the same answer. "The administration says there is no support in Congress and among the American people," he told me. "But they are amazingly unwilling to ask for anything, so how could they possibly know what the American people think?"
Doug Wickstrom has written an excellent
relationship
manifesto. It's based on his specific experience and needs,
but could be useful for many people, especially those who don't
always remember that they deserve to be treated well.
If you're
lost faith in the idea of clicking on ads to feed the hungry,
dislike the Hunger
Site's choice of sponsors,
or you want to do more,
Oxfam is addressing the
causes of poverty
as well as its effects, and takes
donations
online or by mail or bank transfer, depending on where
you live.
Fight, flight, or find a friend:
female
responses to stress often differ from the standard model, which is
based almost entirely on studying men, and isolated men at that.
The
Romanian town of
Baia
Mare has been poisoned by years of badly run mining and
industry--and even the clean-up efforts have been killing people.
I haven't
ordered through them, but
BestBookBuys looks
promising: search for a book by author, title, ISBN, or
keyword, and the system returns the prices at all of its
member bookstores that have the book, in price order.
(Shipping costs are included in the calculations.)
The database includes Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, Borders, Powell's, and lots of shops I've
never heard of. Note: while they will ship internationally,
they seem to only search US bookstores; those of you seeking
non-US books will need to look elsewhere, and people living
outside the US can probably do better by avoiding international
shipping charges.
The nice
people at the
U.S. Census sent us two
copies of the short form, since we live in a corner building:
apparently both addresses were in their database. I was good
and sent in precisely one census form.
Last night, my partner came home
and found a census worker on our doorstep, wanting to interview
us because we "hadn't sent in the form." Okay, fine, here's the
information again, and an explanation of what happened. We have,
of course, no way of finding out, ever, if we're being counted twice,
but I won't be losing any sleep over it.
Helicobacter pylori is the bacterium that causes most
ulcers, and many cases of stomach cancer. A new genetic study
of the bacterium suggests that it may only have infected humans
for
a few thousand years. Instead of being part of our distant
heritage, H. pylori may have been acquired
from domestic animals. Suddenly, the pre-agricultural lifestyle
looks more appealing, even if
it didn't contain cheese omelettes and buttered toast.
The
Press
Freedom Survey 2000 covers the entire planet, with
discussions of both official and unofficial restrictions on
press freedom, and a handy overview map. Both good and
bad news jump out: a spot of blue (signifying a
free press) in northern Africa's sea of yellow and green--for
not free and partially free--turns out
to be Mali. Even for countries that have a free
press, the site lists possible threats to that freedom.
Well, that didn't take long: on Vladimir Putin's second
day as President of Russia,
armed
police raided the offices of NTV, which has been critical
of Putin's policies and his commitment to democracy.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
We're only in it for the money: If you use
my
referral to sign up for Paypal, we each get
five dollars from the company. Paypal is almost
a way of emailing money, and they're promoting it for people who
do online auctions. (Their business plan appears to be collecting
interest on the money A sends B between the time it's put into
the system and the time B picks it up. I assume the bonuses are
being charged to the ad budget.)
For all you leveraged filkers,
The Day
the NASDAQ Died:
But Alan Greenspan made me shiver
With every speech that he delivered
Bad news on the rate front
Still I'd take one more punt
Gerard 't Hooft has proposed a
constitution
for his eponymous asteroid, 9491 Thooft. Among other things,
since the IAU wouldn't put an apostrophe in the asteroid's name, it
bans all uses of apostrophes. Also banned are miles,
inches, and gallons.
Also on Dr. 't Hooft's Web site are some sketches of the future of evolution and links to photos of him with the king of Sweden.
My
latest Epinion,
Mad
dogs and Englishmen, is some basic travel advice,
which I doubt I'll get much chance to apply in London and
Swansea, but I can hope.
Our ancestors were using paint
before
they evolved into Homo sapiens. There are
ground pigments, but no paintings, in an archeological
site dating to 350,000 years ago; archeologists suggest
people were painting their own bodies, possibly for ritual
purposes. Or maybe they were doing it for sheer pleasure,
like children, or to make themselves more attractive, as
we still do today.
[via Follow
Me Here]
I hope Woody Guthrie would be pleased:
a collection of
"patriotic
songs" presented, for no apparent reason, by the
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, includes
"This
Land is Your Land," including a verse often omitted by those
who would like us to forget that Guthrie was a radical:
In the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office
I see my people
And some are grumblin'
And some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.
The US Geological Survey has released an
incomplete, but interesting, map of
arsenic
in ground water. This information does not directly
reflect arsenic levels in drinking water, and the USGS warns
against using it as an indication of the condition of any
particular well. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to live in an
area with low arsenic levels.
Here are a few of the
things
creationists hate, including the hair on the back of their necks.
[via Memepool]
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
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