June 2003
Friday, 20 June 2003
One of these days I will host a double feature of 28 Days and 28 Days Later.
Thursday, 19 June 2003
“Rosetta Stone” Found to Decode the Mystery of Gamma Ray Bursts: “Gamma-ray bursts temporarily outshine the entire Universe in gamma-ray light”
Monday, 16 June 2003
Terrorists too blissed to blitz?: “They get families, they get jobs, and they lose the fire in the belly. Welcome to America.”
Friday, 13 June 2003
Top VC at odds with valley on options: “Brett Trueman, professor of accounting at UCLA who has studied the issue, agrees that companies like Cisco likely have been overpaying their employees because they didn’t need to expense the options on their bottom line. ‘Yes, (expensing options) would put the private companies on a level playing field,’ he said.”
Monday, 9 June 2003
No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers: “Adams and Gordon feared the government was targeting them because they’re veteran peace activists and co-founders of War Times, a San Francisco anti-war newspaper. Now it appears that reservations systems were rounding up anyone with a name similar to ‘J. Adams,’ including a Virginia attorney (J. Christian Adams) and a young woman (Jodi Adam) who was stopped at SFO the same day as the peace activists, according to TSA complaints and police records.”
In the chronicles of “things I need to do once before I die”, I went skydiving. Observations:
- It is often referred to as “jumping out of a perfectly good airplane”. This is misleading on both counts. First, you do not jump out; you step out. Second, that airplane was scarier than the concept of jumping out of it.
- Be sure your leg straps are adjusted tightly or they will yank and you will bruise.
- Clear blue skies + snow covered mountain + -120 feet/sec = heaven, at least for a very brief time betwee altimeter checks.
- Unlike the grass on the other side of the fence, the grass on the ground looks greener from up close.
Friday, 6 June 2003
Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents: “The girls were recruited after one of their fathers, an agent involved in the pedophile investigations, watched her instant messaging a friend and couldn’t understand what she was typing.”
The Confusion of Hebrew Numbers: “In the modern Hebrew Bible all numbers are written out in full, but for a long time the text was written without vowels [which] made it possible to confuse two words which are crucial to this problem: ‘eleph and ‘alluph. Without vowel points these words look identical: ‘lp. ‘Eleph’ is the ordinary word for ‘thousand’, but it can also be used in a variety of other senses: e.g. ‘family’ (Judges 6:15, Revised Version.) or ‘clan’ (Zechariah 9:7; 12:5,6, RSV) or perhaps a military unit. ‘Alluph’ is used for the ‘chieftains’ of Edom (Genesis 36:15-43); probably for a commander of a military ‘thousand’; and almost certainly for the professional, fully-armed soldier.”
Wednesday, 4 June 2003
Pig-to-monkey transplants may herald cure for diabetes: “One per cent of diabetics overreact to the smallest change in levels of glucose in the blood and insulin injections do not work well for them.”
Sunday, 1 June 2003
Ronald McDonald Is So Busy, But Just How Does He Do It?: “Ronalds in costume aren’t to say who they are in civilian life. That rather annoyed Craig A. Oatten, a police chief in Michigan, when a Ronald, in full red-and-yellow regalia, got into a fender bender near Saginaw a few years ago. Asked several times, the Ronald steadfastly refused to give his name for the police report.”