Very interesting interview about the crazy ways in which copyright laws are being used against creativity and innovation. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig.html
Is this really possible? I hate Dr. Pepper. I hate vanilla Coke et al. I hate cherry Coke et al. I don’t like diet soft drinks. Diet cherry vanilla Dr Pepper!? That’s beyond my wildest nightmares!
I found this drink is so outrageous that it is worth blogging about it, but before I did, I searched the web and found that others have already written better comments on the topic. Matt at matthearn.com says: Diet Cherry Vanilla Doctor Pepper (hereafter referred to by “DCVDP,” which can also stand for “Diseased Cat Vomit: Duck Poop,"…)
For an opposing view, see this post at everything2.
An anonymous victim told me this story of strife and suffering.
For mysterious reasons, most programs in her laptop (including, but not limited to Microsoft Office) worked fine while plugged in at the office, but they hung when trying to run them at home. After several perplexing months, the conclusion was that those programs didn’t work because they couldn’t find the network printer. The solution: to set a dummy printer such as PDFwriter as the default printer.
I like this browser so much that I’ll provide a free advertisement here:
I forgot to post about it, but my second paper in the Jorgensen lab was submitted last week:
Tubert-Brohman, I.; Guimarães, C. R. W.; Jorgensen, W. L. Extension of the PDDG/PM3 Semiempirical Molecular Orbital Method to Sulfur, Silicon, and Phosphorus. Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, submitted.
Let’s see how it does…
One of my heretical inventions:
Cook and drain the pasta (follow box directions). Add everything else and mix. So simple any bachelor can make it!
The Jorgensen group has a new website, created by Theresa and me. She did mostly the visual design, while I did the implementation (100% hand-crafted HTML and CSS).
Very interesting novel about the end of humankind due to mad genetic engineers trying to improve life. Told by Snowman, who appears to be the only survivor, as he remembers his life and the events that lead to the disaster. Although there are no explicit dates, it is in the near future (perhaps Snowman was born on the 2010s…).
The scenario before the catastrophe is a fairly typical dystopia for our times. The world has already suffered from global warming and an unexpectedly early and high rise on sea level. New York is no more, but we have New New York instead. Giant corporations have all the power and are like represive city-states where the well-to-do people live. The rest live in the “pleeblands", which are dirty and anarchic.
Something odd is that, despite the incredible advances in biology, they still use CDs, which in my opinion are not likely to be common after 2010. But this is not a very “technical” type of science fiction, so I didn’t care that much. Along those lines, I’ve seen people criticize the author for her made-up words for the new genetic creations, such as pigoons, wolvogs, rakunks, and chickienoobs. Although I also found those words unlikeable, I think they are realistic when one thinks about the kind of names that marketing comes up with in the real world.
Is such a future plausible? I doubt it, but it’s good to remember that humans may now an be an endangered species, of our own device.
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
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