rushed rushed rushed... and late

First blog update in WEEKS
weeks I tell you!

dear lord.... I hate it when work gets in the way of things I like to do.

I have come tot he conclusion that my blog will never be popular because I do not have the time or energy needed to get truly new and interesting stuff on it.
oh well.

First up, the westernized world is lazy. I honestly think you can tell how westernized a civilization/society is by how many services they have to allow people to be lazy. Americans have taken it to the extreme by having generalized services for the lazy. Disagree? Well did you know that pizza delivery started in america? How about drive through windows? We started them for fast food and moved them on to Funerals!!!! Thats right, there are drive through body viewing windows in funeral homes in Florida. We have maids, personal shoppers, handy-men, people to organize our collections (isn't that supposed to be part of the fun of collecting?), people to sell things on e-bay for us and people to plan our every daily move.

As if bird flu were not enough, lets bring back epidemics from years gone by. No I am not talking about the idiots who are sequencing and recreating the 1918 flu (which had a 25% mortality rate, not as bad as some would think) but rather some brilliant people who sent a testing kit (testing for what?) containing the 1957 H2N2 strain (killed between 1 and 4 million world wide, disappeared by 1968) to 3,700 laboratories including 61 outside the US and Canada. The international labs included such trustworthy places as Lebanon. The WHO says the threat is minimal.... unless of course the strain should get out of the lab.... then no one born after the flu season of '67 will have immunity and no vaccines are ready or likely to be made ready. Thats sort of like saying 'We will all survive the danger of this volcano as long as it does not erupt, if it does, we are mostly all dead'. More on this here and here and here and thats all.

Lexus Nexus, renowned for collecting data on everything and everyone.... and then giving it inappropriately to anyone who asks for it may have a bigger screw up on their hands. Recently it was revealed they had allowed the identities of 30,000 people to be stolen..... well now it turns out it was more like 310,000.

need to finish quickly:

Very cool article on extreme textiles in the NYTimes. From a diffarent source, really cool photos of the fibers.

From a few days ago, the article on how IBM hopes to make cash by giving away usage rights to its patent library.

Very cool paper buildings, I just wonder what happens if it rains.....

TAKE NOTE: this will change the way we do things. A company says they have a paint that dries in seconds and has no fumes.

In politics: The deficit reaches an all time high...... yeah thats good for the country.

Some very embarrassed Israelis out there.

This is another thing that just seems so obvius. That keyboards, which EVERYONE shares...might spread disease.

Op-ed piece on eating healthy.

Those Sharper Image Ionic breeze air purifiers may be giving you lung damage.

Cool way to create energy from waves.

A robot for building planes.

thats it for now.