copyrighteous

I saw this article (and many others on the same subject) about how laptops can reduce men’s sperm count. I’m at the Ubuntu Conference in Mataró: a virtual sperm apocalypse.

Many geeks who are at no risk of impregnating anyone — or who are paranoid at the idea that they might — seem very concerned by the negative effects on potency of laptops that raise their "scrotal temperature." I’ve never understood this.

At some point in your life, you might have the opportunity to try out the NES-based game Bad News Baseball. I can save you the trouble.

Bad News Baseball is bad news.

I saw someone on the subway wearing a red hat with a picture of Ernesto "Che" Guevara on it. He was reading Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard — a sort of motivational popular psychology book that is self-described as "An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life."

I couldn’t help but think of the ways that Che, perhaps the most famous communist revolutionary ever and author of a book called Guerrilla Warfare, might disagree with Spencer Johnson’s advice on "dealing with change" and, in all likelihood, have a very different idea of what "dealing with change" meant.

Today I tried to read an article titled, The Morphogen Sonic Hedgehog Collaborates With Netrin-1 To Guide Axons in the Spinal Cord written by Patricia C. Salinas.

Apparently Sonic Hedgehog, morphogen or otherwise, is a pretty important gene. That may be, but I still find the gene’s namesake, Sonic the Hedgehog, to be a lot easier to understand.

I may not understand what Netrin-1 is but I’ll bet I can score higher on Sonic than Ms. Salinas. It’s nice to see that such different skill-sets can find common ground in a single term.

Many people from outside of the US and Western Europe receive a vaccine for tuberculosis called Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG). It often leaves a pattern of scars on the arm of person who was vaccinated. They look similar (but less distinct in adults) to this:

I’ve suggested to Mika that she should tell people that hers is from a street fight involving bike chains or the time she had to push a child out of the way of a speeding motorcycle and was grazed by the spinning gears.

Thinking about the possibilities makes me wish I had such a scar.

Presumably, the women (and the few men) who wear make-up apply it so that they will look more beautiful in public. What makes me wonder is the fact that these same people often see no problem with applying or touching up their make-up — in public — making faces similar to these:

(Dramatization)

I think that publicly showing these sorts of faces undoes much of the positive effect that the make-up might subsequently have.

Here’s a set of two signs in front of a vase that Damog and I found at the Museum of the Zona Arqueológica del Templo Mayor in Mexico city. Yes, that’s a sign in braille.

Keep thinking about it. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition on several levels.

Today I learned where Chihuahua was. I haven’t gone there yet but I hope to some day. I’m afraid it will be a repeat of my trip to Dalmatia; I didn’t see a single dalmatian in Dalmatia — at least not of the spotted canine variety.

I grew up in Seattle which is less than 2 hours from the Canadian border. I always thought the following idea would be a fun and enjoyable way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

A group of us could fill up a car trunk with hundreds of clear plastic bags full of white baking ingredients — flour, sugar, baking power, baking soda, etc — and then drive back and forth across the Canadian, US border. If stopped and searched, we would insist that we were planning on baking a whole lot of cakes.

In the absence of laws against harassing mounties and the US Customs officials, this would be a very good plan.

People think I’m joking when I say that if I ever have a child, I will name her (or him) Debian.

I’m not.

Like many others, I ordered a pile of free (as in both speech and beer) Ubuntu CDs through Ubuntu’s website. My CDs were shipped via a courier service called TNT Global Express.

I think that in todays environment of oversensitivity and confusion around explosives and air travel, an air-mail courier service like TNT could have picked a better name. I can imagine some humorous confusion that I would wager the folks at Homeland Security (whose sense of humor seems to have been surgically removed in the operation to excise their critical capacity) would not find too humorous at all.

When I was at University and several times in my career as a Free/Open Source software consultant, I’ve been involved in crafting "Long Term Technology Plans."

I am now convinced that a long term technology plan that does not include flying cars is no long term technology plan at all.

I think that if you want to secretly insult somebody, you should call them a star. People tend to only think of stars in the sense of being refulgent or luminary. I think that the term star could just as accurately be used to imply that you think that the person is a giant ball of gas or hot air. The person being insulted will never guess.