Samwise rides again

While I was in SFO the other day, between flights, I could hear this child, a girl of .. what .. say 8 years old, working her parents with the ol’ pester power.

As they got closer, I could start to make out what she was saying, at least I think I could make it out, as they were stood almost right next to me.

I true fashion, she was straight to the point with the classic “I want ….”, what suprised me though is what she wanted.

“I want my own business !”, she repeated over and over in a moderate tone.

I am sure there is a back story there, or maybe I just misheard, either way, more power to you sister.

Tonights full moon could cause Mount Mayon to errupt.

Then we can turn it’s seismic oscilations into music.

Check out the press release

Really good article from CATO on terrorism.

Effectivly a war on terror is a war on an emotion, and we are, each of us, responsible for our own emotions.

One should be very weary of those who try to manipulate our emotions.

From LATimes

“Scientist Judith O’Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.”

“some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.”

“The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water.”

“Like other scientists, Jeremy Jackson, 63, was slow to perceive this latest shift in the biological order. He has spent a good part of his professional life underwater. Though he had seen firsthand that ocean habitats were deteriorating, he believed in the resilience of the seas, in their inexhaustible capacity to heal themselves”

It has all the makings of a great Victorian Science Fiction novel

Now the local interest …

“On the southern coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, high tide leaves piles of green-brown algae that smell so foul condominium owners have hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning.”

“We’re pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution”

Many species of whale have an annual buildup of earwax, adding one, two or four layers (depending upon the species) each year. Similar to the incremental dating method of dendrochronology for trees, the number of layers can be counted to determine the age of the whale after its death.

Strange, disgusting, but true.

Think I’ll stick to horses

There is no longer a single “digital divide” in the UK between “haves” and “have nots“.

You could belong to a `tribe` known exclusively as “technology as fantasy“.

We have another name for them.

From Aunty

“Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?

If they’re not, then it’s a misuse of your power to make people laugh”

From IP Watch

Brazil has published a list of more than 5,000 generic terms from the Portuguese language related to Brazilian plant biological diversity to raise awareness and prevent further misuse of trademarks that hinder Brazilian exports.

The Brazilian government has been, and is, involved in a number of trademark disputes with companies that, for example, take a name of a fruit in Brazilian Portuguese and trademark it to get exclusive rights to commercialise it under that name in a certain country or region.

This hinders Brazilian exports, especially when it happens in larger markets.

Brazil has experienced this trademark problem in the United States, and in individual countries such as Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. Some of the companies have, however, revoked the trademarks.

One example is “açaí,” which is the generic name in Brazil for a small, dark blue/black fruit that was traditionally eaten in the Amazon but which became very popular as a health food item in southern Brazil some five to 10 years ago. This has, for example, been trademarked in Japan.

Another example is “rapadura,” an unrefined brown sugar traditionally eaten in northeastern Brazil, but which some foreign companies have tried to trademark in certain markets.

From Evil Mad Scientist

You will need :

one drywall screw

one 1.5 V alkaline cell

six inches of plain copper wire

one small neodymium disk magnet

Place the flat head of the screw onto the magnet, place the tip of the screw on the positive end of the battery and allow the magnet to suspend the screw from the battery. Connect one end of the wire to the negative end of the battery, and with the other touch the magnet.