Quick Update

Hokay, so. Had a big meeting at work today. I was very much out of my league, but I brought backup, so it went well. I'm at my parents' house tonight and really rather happy. I got to talking with my little siblings about school and higher learning and life and... Today I just feel happy and successful and great. Now, though, bed. We're going to the papal mass tomorrow, and apparently that means getting up at 3am to get on a bus. Crazy.

Follow-up: Climate Bullying

This
is a follow-up article on the piece I liked to last week (I think) about a
BBC news story that got bullied into changing it's thrust from "temperatures
fall" to "Global Warming dips." They don't add a whole lot -- most of it
looks to be letters from readers -- but there are some comments from the
BBC, Fox, and the scientists who did the bullying. The Register also notes
that, apparently, a Global Warming advocate said that temperatures hadn't
risen "this century" (not sure if he meant since 1908 or since 2000), and
(The Register) reiterated that someone else had concluded that temperatures
hadn't risen since 1998 (but that's a decade, not a century).

Also, someone said that maybe it's not so much that the temperatures rising
as that the world is getting wetter or dryer. But, and I think The Register
implies this, there's something of a difference between "Global Warming" and
"Global Drying."

Carmen Sandiego next?

This is kind of cool. A while back, there was a rumor going around that
Target and others were trying to take advantage of Google Maps/Earth by
putting ads on their roofs. In truth thought it turned out that the
buildings in question were near and airport and were advertising to landing
airline passengers, not web geeks. Apparently, though, this got some guy
thinking and he's
hidden an image of Waldo from "Where's Waldo" on some unidentified
building in Vancouver.

Unfortunately (as evident by the fact that my parents' house still isn't on
Google Maps after almost 5 years), there's no telling when Waldo will
show up, nevermind trying to find where. It's really a cool idea,
though, and if anyone else wanted to put Waldo in other cities I'd be
greatly amused.

Suspended Animation, Again.

This
is an article relating to a topic I found some 6 to 8 months ago, namely
that of suspended animation. My first article talked about how it wasn't
the lack of oxygen that caused brain damage and the like to victime of
suffocation, but rather the rapid reintroduction of oxygen. This principle
was used to place mice in a sort of suspended animation where they could
survive having lost 70% of their blood, a feat which would be invaluable to
human soldiers if it could be extended to people. I'm not sure how, or if,
that relates to this new article which claime that Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S)
can be used to put mice into a state of suspended animation where they can
survive extreme cold which would have killed them otherwise. The article
claims it helps explain how our "evolutionary ancestors" might have survived
the greatest of Earth's five periods of mass extinction, but also notes that
such a finding could revolutionize trauma medicine.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the DARPA scientists to unlock the key to
lizard-like regeneration in people. That'd be pretty cool.

Motley Who?

Motley Crue and Def Leppard release new singles Via
Video Games this month. It's a really interesting idea, and I think I
really like it if I'm reading it right. Def Leppard and Motley Crue have
new singles that they're putting out, and they're releasing them onto the
popular rhythm games Guitar Hero III (Def Leppard) and Rock Band (Motley
Crue). Now, as the article at Ars Technica notes, these bands are fairly
well past their prime and probably have little to lose, though I'll not that
by selling the game expansions at the same price as an iTunes purchace they
aren't really risking much of anything at all. What they ARE getting is
exposure to two or three subsets of society that probably wouldn't have
thought twice about them three weeks ago (I didn't even know they were still
MAKING music, let alone selling any). The thing is, also noted in the
article, having your song in one of these games is already shown to boosts
sales. If people are smart, they'll figure out that artists should probably
be PAYING to have their songs in the game, not charging for it.