I was feeling discourage about all of the recent anti-science, including the attacks on evolution and politicians interfering with the decisions of FDA scientists. And then I found this cheerful distraction: a scientific experiment from Monty Python's Holy Grail:
Remember Vioxx? There's a lot more where that came from. Remember According to the NYT, more corruption has been uncovered at the FDA. According to the unanimous conclusion of FDA's scientists, a medical device called the Menaflex was unsafe. But after receiving what an F.D.A. report described as “extreme,” “unusual” and persistent pressure from four Democrats from New Jersey — Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steven R. Rothman — agency managers overruled the scientists and approved the device for sale in December. According to the story, the members of Congress each received significant campaign contributions from the manufacturer. The FDA is now considering rescinding approval for the device. All of this raises an interesting question: Who would be more qualified to determine whether a medical device should go to market, A) a medically trained scientist or B) members of Congress who receive campaign contributions from the manufacturer of the device? Easy call, right? Anyone with a high school education should know that politicians shouldn't override scientists on matters of science. If this were a just world, one or more people would be going to prison for this corruption which has endangered (and potentially, injured) many of those people purchasing the defective device.
I am old enough to remember floppy disks that deserved the name. They bent. I remember wondering why I might need more than one to back up my files. 360,000 characters was a lot of writing. A full novelette. When I bought my new desktop computer a couple of years ago, I got what I thought was an adequate hard disk: Equivalent to 417,000 5¼" floppies, or room for about 100,000 five megapixel photos. But then I started playing with video. A normal digital video at 640 x 480 30 fps eats 100Mb/min. So my once open spaces got filled in. What to do? I considered adding a second drive. I'd done this on several of my previous computers. It requires remembering what is on which drive for daily use, as well as backing up. And how does one reliably back up such huge amounts? I didn't want to do this, yet again. So I decided to replace my main drive. "What?" you may well ask, aghast. This is not the ordeal it once was. I got a bigger drive, cloned the old one onto it, and then swapped it. Easy, and here's how (assuming you aren't stuck with a single-source machine (Apple)): (Details "below the fold")
Yesterday I wrote a cool sentence. Well, not actually a sentence - more of a statement. Well, not even a statement - more of a descriptive title to what I thought could be a chapter in a science fiction novel. Look, whatever it was, I was very proud of it. It was so conducive to creative thought that I actually began to write the introduction to a science fiction novel (it was here that the author decided that the makers of Word for Windows were the most annoying bastards in the entire world. Every time he began to write the word "novel", he'd get to the first 'e' and a little box would pop up next to the with "November" in it, implying that he didn't have the intelligence or presence of mind to put a capital letter at the start of a proper name. Naturally, being an educated person, he would have put a capital "N" if he was going to write "November". But he wasn't going to. He was about to write "novel", because that's what he started to talk about and he wasn't planning on writing "November" until the bloody programme starting annoying him by suggesting it every time he started to write a word with N, O, V, and E as the first four letters. Damn programmer geeks think they're being so bloody helpful, popping up little squares every time you type something, thinking they're helping you get things done quicker…it'd be a lot quicker if they didn't keep implying that you don't know what the hell you're doing all the time. And if they're so smart and so helpful, why couldn't their programme have figured out that it would've been completely out of context to write "November" in that position: "…a chapter in a science fiction November…"? Now, because of those well-meaning, over-cautious but more likely bloody-minded programmer bastards, not only has most of the introductory paragraph been taken up by a bracketed and completely unplanned rant about an annoying little "help" function, the author has ended up writing "November" six times when he didn't intend to mention it at all unless it was relevant to the story, which it was never going to be [stardates don't use Earth months, as any decent science fiction writer should know]). Ahem.
[More . . . ]According to The Onion:
An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.