The beautiful genius of being able to see one’s planet from space is brought home fully in these satellite images of the smoke plume from Mount Etna. It’s both stunningly attractive and a terrifying testament to the volatility of nature. You can imagine exactly why, in ancient times, the romans thought Etna was the home of Hephaestus, god of the forge.
I think I may have found plasticbag.org‘s new motto – courtesy of Jason Kottke.
The bloody Sircam virus is driving me insane. Every day I get sent one more copy than the day before.
I didn’t win the lottery again today. Sometimes I ever wonder why I bother, but then I remember that I’m destined for greater things one way or another, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that I don’t close any potential doors on the way. Opportunity must have … well, an opportunity to express itself. Sigh.
I was born on the same day as these illustrious film greats; Brandon L. Wilson and Daedalus Howell. The stars are clearly aligned to make no one who has just turned 29 famous. Or perhaps I should think that there is an opening there for someone like myself.
The United States, not content with refusing to sign up to Kyoto, and not content with having readily availavable hand-guns and the death penalty has now refused to sign up to an international accord to limit germ warfare. Love the country, hate its leaders.
Wired does a piece on the SirCam virus, which I have been getting in my Inbox about three or four times a day for the last week or so. I’m not alone. Prol has also been suffering it. A couple of interesting paragraphs particularly stick my head: “Most current viruses resend themselves to everyone in an address book, or — in SirCam’s case — to addresses culled from Web pages that a user may have visited.” and “Hybris, commonly known as Seven Dwarfs and first spotted in October 2000, updates itself by downloading little pieces of code that allow it to perform new malicious actions.” I’ve had Hybris a hell of a lot as well. But while I keep being reassured that as a Mac user I am safe from destruction by such viruses, no one has yet explained to me whether or not I can become infected and pass them on – after all, I do use Office and Outlook Express.
Mechanics of this aside (and might there not be an argument for being able to get a better, sharper, range of pulling movement from the right hand version, thus making sheet separation much more likely), Derek’s amusing reaction made me think that maybe there is a disjunct between people who approach common tasks in different ways. An example – while at university, I discovered in conversation that there were two types of people – those that scrunched their loo roll and those that folded it. The existence of folders was, until that moment, completely unknown to me. And I have to confess that the very idea of carefully folding tissue for that purpose seems to me to border on anal-obsessive lunacy. And yet people do it. Can you think of any other examples? Mail me.
