Awake.

Got a fairly good sleep last night, and woke up earlier than expected. Since I've been trying to get my hours sorted around to waking up around this time anyway, I got out of bed and got myself some coffee. Its not like I was having a good dream either. Me and a friend (who I met long after I left school) and a bunch of other school kids were given a strange detention that involved a huge (many acre) obstacle course and maze with puzzles posted at various points. I recalled it was a maze that I sometimes did for fun, but I was damned if I was going to do it for punishment for something that I hadn't done... Then I woke up.

Yesterday's dream was much more fun, and far more erotic. More of the those dreams, please!

Signage of Worry.

So, I may well believe that this sign doesn't mean what it seems to, but I would still be wary of following that arrow:

More Bad Brand Names.

I wonder what this tastes like?

Idle speculation on a source of new memes.

I was just idly peeling an egg this morning, and breaking up the shells to throw into the compost for recycling, when I remembered an old childhood tale about eating hard-boiled eggs. It says that witches can only cross water riding in eggshell halves, so if you want to prevent a shipwreck caused by a witch, you should always crush your eggshells when done with them.

Now, the interesting thing is that these two memes:

1) Whole eggshells don't compost well -- fragments do; and
2) witches need whole eggshells

compete to cause the same behavior. I can even see how, a few hundred years ago when family farms were the norm and composting was common, they may have had a sort of symbiotic relationship.  You see, if a parent was infected with #1, he may well wish his huge brood of kids to share his behavior. The trouble is, telling them that it helps the compost is not going to have a lot of sway on kids. Kids are fairly immune to meme #1. On the other hand, meme #2 causes the desired behavior with far more reliability.  As the kids age, a signifigant portion (although probably far less than 100%) will slowly become immune to meme #2. Now, they may then ask their parents why they were told such an outlandish thing, and thereby get infect by #1, or they could simply pick up meme #1 from the local farming community, once they are old enough to care about the quality of their compost. What is likely though, is that once infected with meme #1 and having kids of their own, they may well deliberately infect their kids with meme #2 to get the desired effect.

So, now we have a mechanism whereby one can start with a population of rational and sensible adults and end up with the propagation of a nonsensible and irrational meme.  Now, there is no way of knowing if the above scenario ever actually happened, but its plausible enough that I'm sure similar things have happened.

Sustainable Housing.

Lots o' links here. Firstly, one can make houses out of paper, and corrugated cardboard schools. Now, there could be legitimate concern about flamability and susceptibility to water damage (although you note that lumber has these problems too) but there are machines that can make fireproof and waterproof cardboard, so these concerns could be addressed. Besides, a house that can be built for $35,000 and constructed in 6 hours by 2 people has a lot going for it! (Actually, that house is featured at http://www.housesofthefuture.com.au, but the site's been slashdotted.)

Of course, one can also find many links to Canadian straw bale houses. Those two are in Ontario, but I learned recently that there is one that's been built in Montreal. I'm afraid I don't know exactly where though.

Indiana Jones #4.

So, according to this article, there will soon be a new Indianna Jones movie. This is only of interest to me since a project I was QA on (Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix) was cancelled by Lucas Arts in 1996 due to the 'imminent release' of Indianna Jones #4. We all suspected it was because Lucas Arts art studio put up a fuss when they discovered that the programmers at the Lucas studios preferred our artwork to their inhouse stuff...

Scientists Reverse Paralysis in Dogs.

Not by using stem cells, but by a simple injection of polyethylene glycol, a chemical which is already used to safely treat humans for certain medical conditions. More info can be read here and here.