Another great 'Switch' Ad..

[ROFL...this is my favorite - Nano]

Switch to Linux

] Even though roads were clear of snow, sleet and ice
] Friday, schools around Georgia closed because of brutal
] cold.

Southerners are WEAK!!!

Georgia schools closed because its too cold...

] According to the Red Book of Westmarch,
] In Middle-earth, Marie Kimberly Cross was a
] Intelligent Eorling

Well, I guess its better then being an Idiotic Eorling

The Barrow-Downs: Middle-Earth Name Generator

] Carlos nonchalantly asks whether his drink was made with
] whole or skim milk. He takes a moment to slurp on his
] grande Caffe Mocha in a crowded Starbucks, and then he
] gets back to explaining how much he wants HIV, the virus
] that causes AIDS. His eyes light up as he says that the
] actual moment of transmission, the instant he gets HIV,
] will be "the most erotic thing I can imagine." He seems
] like a typical thirty-two-year-old man, but, in fact, he
] has a secret life. Carlos is chasing the bug.

Wow, this is really fucked up. I can't believe that someone would think that living with AIDS is anything like living with diabetes. This made my stomach turn.

[THis is definitly one of the most fucked up things I have read in a long time. These people are incredibly selfish and ignorant. First of all, having HIV isn't like having diabetes. When you get HIV, you are given a heavy cocktail of drugs that you have to take throughout the day. You have to adhere to a very specific schedule of taking these drugs, and its not just three times a day (at every meal)...its many more times then that...its a few different pills almost every hour of the day. Then, after a few years of doing that every day, eventually, the HIV starts to gain resistance, and you have to switch to a totally new cocktail of drugs. Side effects for these drugs arn't pretty either. Some people are lucky, and their immune systems stay ok. But most aren't so lucky...their immune systems eventually are compromised by the HIV because the virus hides out in places like your lymph nodes and fuck up immune cells. Then, if that person contracts even little diseases such as the flu, there is no immune system left to attack the new disease, and that person dies. These bug chasing people not only are providing the virus with an environment to grow and evolve into more resistant forms, making it impossible to eradicate this virus (if that is even possible at this point), but they are probably also contributing a major expense to the medical community. Its not cheap at all to develop new drugs when the drugs we have now become useless due to resistant strains of virus. It is just disturbing to me to think that there are people out there that would strive to contract a virus such as HIV. I studied HIV in Virology, and by far, its one of the scariest viruses I learned about. Its a very complex virus that knows how to hide out and use human genes and proteins to reproduce itself. These people are very stupid, and I guess they will figure that out sooner or later. Hopefully, sooner. -Nanochick]

RollingStone.com: News: Bug Chasers

] Rosen, 44, seems to have planted herself squarely in the
] path of inevitable technological change. In fact, she's
] far from naive: She knows downloadable music is the
] format of the future.

An interview with Hillary Rosen

Wired 11.02: Hating Hilary

] Hilary Rosen, the articulate, tough chairwoman and chief
] executive officer of the Recording Industry Association
] of America, the music industry's top lobbying group, said
] on Wednesday she will step down by year-end.

ABCNEWS.com : Chairwoman of Music Trade Group RIAA to Step Down

MADRID, Spain - Imagine the human genome (news - web sites) as music. Unravel DNA's double helix, picture its components lined up like piano keys and assign a note to each. Run your finger along the keys.

Spanish scientists did that just for fun and recorded what they call an audio version of the blueprint for life.

[Cool....is there anywhere I can download a sample? -Nanochick]

Yahoo! News - Researchers Translate DNA Code As Music

] People who hope cloning will resurrect a pet will be
] disappointed, said Duane Kraemer, one of A&M's animal
] cloning experts. Experts say environment is as important
] as genes in determining a cat's personality. And as far
] as appearance, having the same DNA as another calico cat
] doesn't always produce the same coat pattern.

People are paying thousands to have their pet's DNA frozen so they can clone it when the techniques are perfected... Pet Cemetery anyone?

I think that this mostly demonstrates that people still do not understand what cloning is. I don't think this is likely to be commonplace outside of pet breeding circles.

[Actually, Wired came out with an article in the past few years about people who freeze bits of skin from their loved ones in hopes that when cloning gets big, they can have their dead loved on back. Its really sketchy, not to mention, due to different environments, the person wouldn't be an exact replica of the original. -Nanochick]

CNN.com - Copied cat hardly resembles original - Jan. 22, 2003

] In order to celebrate mathematics in the new millennium,
] The Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge,
] Massachusetts (CMI) has named seven %u201CMillennium
] Prize Problems.%u201D The Scientific Advisory Board of
] CMI selected these problems, focusing on important
] classic questions that have resisted solution over the
] years. The Board of Directors of CMI have designated a $7
] million prize fund for the solution to these problems,
] with $1 million allocated to each.

Solve one of these math problems, and win a million dollars. All you computer geeks should check out the P versus NP problem.

Clay Mathematics Institute - Millennium Prize Problems

] Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been
] printed using modified desktop printers filled with
] suspensions of cells instead of ink.

Rad, rad, rad!

New Scientist - Ink-jet printing creates tubes of living tissue