Stereotypes

So, I'm a decent-looking, sensitive guy who lives alone with two cats. I recently moved to San Francisco, a city I think is absolutely wonderful. I generally dress nicely and have some fashion sense. I took care in arranging my furniture and other interior decoration so my apartment would look nice. And I absolutely love musical theater.

I don't know why half the people I know think I'm gay....

"Strip mine the asteroid belt?"

So some guy was on TV the other day, talking about the columbia disaster. Which inevitably leads to the question of why bother with space. One of the people brought up the fact that the asteroid belt might have enough resources, including Uranium, to be worth going there and getting.

So one of the other guys on the program asked, "so, what, after we despoil our own planet, we go and strip mine the asteroid belt?" The first guy mentioned something about careful mining techniques that wouldn't upset the ecosystem or some such nonsense.

Which was wrong, of course.
( Rant warning )

About the recent terror alert...

A thought occured about the new chartreuse-level, (or whatever color it is). This one, unlike previous ones, came with a specific recommendation: buy plastic sheeting and duct tape.

I wonder if the whole point was just to provide a quantifiable measure of how much people are still buying what the feds are saying? By looking at how much duct tape and plastic sheeting was purchased, they can see how much people are still believing them. They can even break it down by region. And, if you use your credit or debit or customer loyalty card, by individual.

And speaking of bin Laden...

What's with the audiotapes? Did his videocamera break? Isn't there a Circuit City in Brazil, or wherever he is?

Or did the state department get too many complaints about the words not quite matching the lips with the last one?

Geeks Without Borders

There was a good article in the San Francisco Chronicle today, regarding a local group, not Geeks Without Borders, but doing the same kind of thing: they're setting up a couple of computers in Laos, in a remote village with no electricity or phone, in a dangerous area of the country (they ended up hiring the army to guard the equipment, I'll be interesting in seeing how
that turns out!).

They did some of the things we have discussed, including a series of wireless transmitters to connect to a phone line 20 miles away, to get onto the internet. Nice to see that that works! The bicycle generator is an interesting idea, as well. We've been looking into water and windmills, as well as solar panels, and Stirling engines.

The headline, of course, focuses on the minor setback they just had (we could have told them about the need for a beefy surge protector, as the exact same thing happened to the computers we set up in Chiapas!), but the rest of the article is worth reading:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/02/14/MN183059.DTL

I wish them the best of luck when they go back next month to replace the hard drives!