Monthly Archives: December 2005

Some things to think about…

If you look at sperm counts in humans, on average the older the man is, the higher the sperm count is. However, as young men become old men, they do not experience an increase in sperm count. The correlation is not with the age of the man, but with the time period he was born. It is believed that this is due to exposure to artificial hormones in food while still in the womb — as the level of hormones, pesticides, and so on in our environment has increased, our fertility has decreased.

Instead of solving this problem by making our environment cleaner, healthier, and safer, we instead balance out the effects of reduced fertility due to pollution with about $8 billion a year (and that's just in the United States) dealing with the problem using fertility drugs and other methods. Personally I like the me so horny nasal spray. That said, I'm not looking forward to all the spam I'm going to get for it soon. It may however result in a whole lot more of this, which I will not be complainy about.

Brief interjection: Fabulous.

Anyway, there's a tower in Taiwan called the Taipei 101. It's currently the world's tallest skyscraper at 1667 feet, and weights about 700,000 tonnes. Think about the Earth's anatomy. To over-simplify, it's like an orange — the peel is solid rock and dirt, and below that is lava. Push a pin into an orange and it doesn't take a lot of pressure to rupture the peel… Like that pin, Taipei 101 has been putting enormous concentrated force on the Earth's crust and is breaking through — it has re-opened an ancient fault line in Taiwan and so far has been linked to several earthquakes.

In response to Taiwan's mega-tower, other nations have vowed to build even larger skyscrapers. Right now oil billionaires are constructing the Burj Dubai. They're expecting to finish this 2,300+ foot monstrosity in 2008, making it the tallest structure of any type ever built by mankind. The foundations' concrete alone weighs over 110,000 tonnes, with the total weight being in the range of a million tonnes.

As a point of trivia, the tower is being built by Osama bin Laden's family. You have to wonder which branch of the family is going to be the more destructive one for humanity in the long run.

Oh, and in more real world terms did you know that Halliburton/KBR workers in Iraq are getting paid only $150 a month, and they're working twelve hours a day, seven days a week? Oh, and they don't even get paid — the money is wired home to the families of these walking corpses… Ah, capitalism. That said, if they're mercenaries from America rather than slaves from Sierra Leone, they're making $1000 a day. And they have body armor that works, unlike the US Army.

Yeah, these days, it helps to be crazy.

But don't worry, you are immortal.

Grr. I had something I wanted to post about but I can't remember.

Update: Oh wait, now I remember the other “you should think about this” point. When your body is threatened by disease, microbes, or injury, it responds with leukocytosis — the immune system, recognizing that the body is at risk, sends out white blood cells to destroy the invasion and keep you healthy and alive. There is however a “non-at-risk” leukocytic response — it also happens when you eat food. For a long time it was assumed this was a normal part of eating, but then it was discovered that with raw (or slow-cooked) and unprocessed foods, there was no leukocytosis.

To put that in the clearest of terms, your body responds to cooked and processed food in the same way as it does to poison. Human physiology was simply not designed (err, I mean evolved) to consume what we eat as modern man. Click the picture below to check out various examples of “before and after” shots from we like it raw, one of my favorite food blogs.

Michael makes a few amazing raw food dishes, and I wish I was in a place that I could eat more of my food raw, but it's really a big and somewhat limiting commitment if you're the only one that wants to try it in a household… Someone should put out a cookbook for this context — raw dishes that can be split at a final stage of preparation and presented both raw and cooked for different diners.

Good news, bad news

Well, in the good news department, I've finished the fine tuning of the image adder software and given it a couple new features. So from now on Phil and I will be able to work at the same time without using each other's resources or even having to share an office. It's all running over the new gigabit network and is really blazing fast and a pleasure to use…

BTW, Can I just interject here how much we hate our current ISP. The IAM and BME servers are running fine, but traffic isn't being routed to it. We'll get it dealt with ASAP, but parts of it are out of our control. I apologize for the inconvenience and we're moving ASAP.

Other than those two things, the shift linkage for the Manta Montage is all built, but now it's apparent that it was covering up a bigger problem with the transmission iself. One or two of the gears don't appear to be active, and when you shift into them, it hooks the gear next to it instead. Argh! I just want to drive this car and it's such a pain in the ass! But it will be worth it I think…

Security isn't always good

Can I just say what a pain in the ass it is to convert a Windows single-user application to a multi-user networked application with a master-slave setup due to ridiculous “security” bans in Windows like not being allowed to share your Program Files folder over the network? Seriously, if you don't see me post here over the next 72 hours it's because I've finally cracked, moved to Goa, and am spending the rest of my life learning how to play the flute on the beach. I kid you not.

If someone knows a quick and easy way to allow that folder to be shared (I literally want to share my entire C:\ drive as a single unit), drop me an IM, because if it can't be, I'm going to have to handle it as separate shares which will mean a lot more code in an already monstrous (about 10,000 lines of code) and ancient program… Ha ha, good news for Phil I suppose because if I can't get this done today he gets another day off while I fiddle with this all! I think I'm going to put some black plastic over my windows to block out the action and screaming coming from outdoors…

In any case, I should have a BME update posted soon.

Not the good kind of swastika

I went to the beach today with Jodi (my brother's wife), Milo, and Auden (their two sons). My brother is currently serving overseas so they came down here to take a break from the cold weather up north. We climbed a mountain, took pictues with giant cacti, saw starfish, urchin, and sea cucumber, walked way out on sandbars, and more… A very nice day before tomorrow's day of programming.

Later Michael and I went to the C.C.C., a local supermarket, to buy vegetables and such for supper. As I understand it this is a good company; locally owned with fare wages and decent benefits. But it was a surprise to find these shirts (available in kids sizes through adult) here in Mexico at a left-leaning supermarket. That said, freezing cold Jordan was not so surprised.

It wasn't just Nazi swastikas — there were also communist logos, knock-off West Coast Choppers stuff, and of course poor old commercially exploited Che.