Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Plans for the day got scrozzled, mostly due to sleep issues, but compounded by looking at my to-do list, suddenly feeling terribly rushed on several fronts and winding up feeling scattered. Energy level has been ticking along at "functional but not especially alert" for a few hours; enough to handle editing some text but not enough to be aware of how much time is passing while doing so. I'd been getting nervous because I hadn't seen a sample ballot in the mail, but it finally arrived today ... and I realized there are some candidates for local offices I haven't done any research on and some ballot initiatives I wasn't aware of. Hope I don't wind up still looking for relevant info Monday night.

In case anyone's still unaware of it, or has been so intent on the presidential race that the House and Senate have fallen off the radar, I remind y'all of twistedchick's Congressional Evaluation Project:

"[...] most voters don't really know what their own representatives have been doing. Hence this project, a personal attempt to find out what all incumbent Congressmen and Senators up for re-election have done during the past few years so that voters can decide if they want to continue to support them. [...] This project uses the ratings of nonprofit organizations and lobbying groups to assess incumbents' voting records."

It's now the last minute and I got distracted from Hallowe'en/Samhain planning, which means probably recycling a previous costume idea unless inspiration strikes (and all relevant materials for the new idea happen to be handy). Fortunately I know where most of the parts of one or two costumes are.

There are several things I want to be doing at the same time right now -- answering personal email, doing research, making sure costume stuff is all in one place, serious poitical link sausage, humourous political link sausage, ordinary link sausage, writing another important-sounding essay, repairing broken computers, getting rid of this headache, sleeping, filling out overdue paperwork -- so I'm going to not-quite-randomly pick an easy-looking one to do now, then go sleep. Not the most important nor even the most urgent, just the one I feel like doing first: a normal link-sausage entry.

• First, to go with the current titles of my journal and my friends page, here's some diode porn. (Okay, resistors are involved as well...) Six images, around 70K each. Whether it's worksafe or not depends on how hung up your workplace is -- no humans are pictured, if that's an issue.
• This list of Top 35 Jewish/Israeli Misconceptions about Disney Facts includes such important information as, "Snow White was not punished for eating a treif apple...she was punished for eating an apple that was prepared by a non-Jew," and whether or not The Little Mermaid is kosher to eat.
• A political link anyhow: Marry An American is a site dedicated to preserving a threatened species -- single, sexy, American liberals -- if Bush gets re-elected, by recruiting Canadian volunteers to marry the fleeing Americans and bring them into Canada. (I am inordinately amused that the page for additional information is labelled "Aboot Us".)
• Science meets science fiction (again) -- Franken-Rodent: Rat Neurons in a Dish Play Flight Simulator: "It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom," DeMarse said. "Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network -- a brain." The grid is connected to a computer running a flight simulator, and "At first, the simulated plane drifts randomly. But the neural network slowly learns; currently, the brain can control the pitch and roll of the simulated craft in most weather conditions, including storms and hurricane-force winds."
• No More Socks is a site collecting interesting gift ideas that are intended to appeal to the geekly and the geeky.
• A seasonal link: all these years that I've explained to folks that Samhain -- the Pagan holiday that All Hallows (All Saints Day) was supposed to supplant (except that instead all the spooky Samhain traditions just got attached to All Hallows Eve) -- was the New Year day of the ancient Celtic calendar, I may have been mistaken. John Bonsing argues that that interpretation was based on an error by scholars in 1886. Whoops. Well it's still the New Year for modern Druids (and Witches?) so I can still wish folks Happy New Year on Samhain even if Bonsing is correct and I have to stop saying "ancient Celtic" before "New Year".[*]
• Two about even more ancient humanity: first, "Star dust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led German scientists to speculate that a supernova explosion 3 million years ago might possibly have helped bring about human evolution." ...
• ... And second, the discovery of 18,000 year old remains of a colony of hobbit-sized humans in Indonesia. (Already discussed by many of my friends.)
• Free and legal downloads of classical music are indexed at Classic Cat: "links to over 1500 free to download classical performances on the internet, sorted by composer and work" (Oh! A link where I haven't already misplaced the information on where I found it. redaxe pointed it out.)
• Finally, to close with a theme related to that with which I opened, a sex-toy review that I might not have deemed linkworthy except that it uses one of my longtime favourite words (which there aren't enough excuses to say), "teledildonics". The last time I looked into the state of the art, they were using an interface that stuck to your CRT and read a patch of the screen that the related software drew control signals in. Nowadays unbiquitous USB ports make for a much less kludgey hookup. "The control panel looks like a grown-up version of a driving toy for baby, with buttons and levers and sliders that you manipulate with your mouse. I laughed when I first saw it -- now you can have sex and drive a race car at the same time! If that's not a popular male fantasy, I don't know what is." There's also a much more intuitive user interface that makes the interaction a more symmetrical experience for both participants.

Okay, that let me close a few browser windows, at least.

[*] My policy is to observe as many opportunities to wish people Happy New Year as I remember in time. But for lunar and lunisolar calendars I often lose track of when the new year is coming up.

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2003-10-31:

"Please do not wear Halloween masks into the bank. Thank you."
   - sign on the door of a Key Bank branch in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Submitted by: John Karabaic