Site News: As you may have noticed, on the lower left I have added a service called BlogSnob. It's a free service, you sign up and put a little code on your page which displays a random link to another blog that has also signed up, in turn your site is as likely to appear randomly on other participating blogs. Don't know how much traffic it will generate, but it's a clever idea.

I also managed to mangle some of the links under Sublime and Ridiculous. Fixed now.

Darwin Defeated: It is just too easy to make a living in this country. This morning, my breakfast at McDonald's came to $3.81. So I hand the girl a twenty and the register says the change is $16.19. Then I reach into my pocket, and offer a penny. Bad move. I recognize the look on her face as the same one I had throughout freshman calculus. She pauses briefly as she devotes more and more neurons to the problem at hand. Then she offers me $6.19 (yes, $10.01 short) in change. I say, "I should get $16.20 back." She looks at me suspiciously, but she is cowed by the confidence with which I spoke, so she hands me $16.10. I let her keep the dime.

In more unforgiving epoch (like the Pleistocene), anyone that devoid of cognitive ability would have been trampled by wooly mammoths like a possum on the turnpike. Now, she can survive and breed. I fear for the human gene pool.

Another case of life imitating fiction.

Missed the Boat: A while back I had a book signing where I was surprised to find a camera crew from the local cable access station waiting to do an interview. Everything went well and they were supposed to let me know when it would be aired and send me a tape. Well, sure enough, they did neither. Turns out it was aired at the end of December. I wouldn't have had the slightest inkling that it had been aired if I didn't stumble across this page as cached at Google. Anyway, I'm going to try to get a tape out of them. If I do, and the interview turned out well, I'll see about digitizing it and posting it.

Run For Cover!: On two seperate occassions I have a seen an animated software program that displays of a map of the world showing every eathquake and volcano eruption since 1960. Essentially time runs forward from 1960 and each eathquake appears as a circle, sized in proportion to it's magnitude. Volcano eruptions are similarly indicated with triangles. The entire simulation takes about five mintues, and it's fascinating to watch. The first time I saw it was a couple of years ago at the Minneapolis Zoo, they also have it at the Smithsonian Natural History museum, where I was a couple of weeks ago.

It turns out this program is available for free download (Windows only). It's called SeisVolE. It's a big download - about 9 meg. - tough for a dial-up connection, but I managed. Interesting stuff. Apparently it can be set to automatically update so you are covered for tracking these events into the future.

I'd like to see something like this for hurricanes/typhoons, etc. If I had the time and skill, I'd do it myself.

Of course, if I had the time and skill, I'd be William Shakespeare.