My Blue Heaven: I continue to be amazed by
The Blue Planet. Last night, an episode entitled The Deep kept me away from doing anything productive again. If there weren't any commercials I would've never got my laundry done. As you may have guessed from the title, in this epsiode they went exploring as deep as possible. So little is known of the very, very deep ocean (we're talking one to three miles down) that every expedition turns up multiple unknown species. The footage is incredible; bizzare, bio-luminescent creatures (one of which was the inspiration for Alien), that are beyond anything Dali could have imagined. There was the carcass of a Grey Whale calf, killed but only partially eaten by Killer Whales in the first episode that had drifted to the bottom and ended up feeding the entire ecosystem for nearly a year. There were vents of toxic, sufuric gas that super-heated the surrounding water to beyond four-hundred degrees, yet some creatures had found a way to use them to survive in the complete absence of any sun-dependent life forms. And strangest of all, there was a lake at the bottom fo the ocean. At the very bottom of the sea, where the water perfectly transparent, there was a lake of brine, heavier and darker than water so it had settled to the bottom and looked just like a lake, with waves and a beach. Except the beach was actually a huge colony of mussels living off methane that was being emitted from the sea floor. Amazing: life surviving off methane and sulfur, in the complete absecnce of photosythesis. I don't know how they are going to top that episode.
What's Up, Doc?: My gym crony,
The Pixie, is going to be doing her Ph.D. defense soon, so I figured I had better give her a list of Ten Things Not To Do In Your Thesis Defense:
- Start a reply with "According to the prophecies of Nostradamus..."
- Point to your thesis and ask, "Did you want fries with that?"
- When asked a particularly difficult question, respond by patting the professor on the head and saying, "Aren't you a precocious little one?"
- Ventriloquism.
- Play the Theme from Rocky on a boom box as you enter.
- Ask for a short recess because you "gotta go drop a log"
- Respond, "I know you are but what am I?"
- Belch your answers.
- The Hokey-Pokey.
- Flick boogers on the committee members.
It's My Party: There's a new worm floating around. It will arrive as an email with the topic "new photos from my party" or something like that. It contains an attachment named
www.myparty.yahoo.com. Note the .com at the end. A web address will not have a .com at the end if it is an attachment (it will probably say .url), but this might fool you into thinking it's a web site - it is not. It is an executable program that will infect your computer with a worm if you open it. So don't open it. Never opened unsolicited attachments. Especially if that arttachment ends in .com or .exe. Never.
