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We have a baby! That is, a baby fish! I have some platys in a 10 gallon fish tank, along with some serpay tetras and cory catfish. Today when we fed the fish, we noticed that one of the platys was looking plumper than usual. She had been that way for a little while, and I thought it was just over-eating. Well a little more detailed survey of the tank revealed a tiny little fish hiding in the plants, ducking out to grab nibbles of food! The platy wasn’t fat, she was pregnant!

We’ve moved the mother to a breeding partition, and have been trying to snare the baby to isolate it until it is big enough to avoid being food for the other fish. Once we get him, we’ll post some pictures.

I stayed up later than I should enabling the random photo that you see on the main page now. Refresh the page to see another one. Go ahead, refresh again. And again. Then one more time. Each time you refresh, a new image appears! Crazy!! You can just click that silly little refresh button all damn day, and you’ll see nothing but random images. Of course, there are only about 148 images in the pot right now, so you’d get repeats soon enough.

As usual, contact me if you want to know more about how I did that.

This is a note to all those using RSS feeds to view this site. There is now an RSS 2.0 feed with comments included, if you desire it. The url for the feed is http://www.flexistentialist.org/index-comments.xml if you would like to subscribe. Using this feed, your aggregator will show an entry as new if it has a comment posted. You can then read the entry to see the comment listed at the bottom. Its handy for keeping up with the discussion that often ensues from my entries.

Of course, if you think the comments are nothing more than mindless blabbery, and you don’t want to have entries you’ve already read show up as new just so you can read the comment, then stick with the regular RSS feeds.

If you don’t know what RSS is, then read this handy article titled All About RSS. In short, RSS is a method by which the content of this website is sent out in a generic news format that programs called aggregators can read. The aggregator downloads the RSS file on a set interval (once an hour, once a day, etc.), and checks to see if there is a new entry. If so, it highlights the entry, and makes it easy for you to browse. I have about 30 websites in my aggregator, and whenever any of them make an update, I am informed within the hour. It makes keeping up with a lot of blogs and news sites very easy.

Today celebrates over 100,000 words of nonsense written on Flexistentialist. The current stats for the site, including this post:

• Entries: 319
• Comments: 515 (And thanks to every one of you.)
• Total words: 101,415
• Unique words used: 10,051 (Which is somewhere around 3.5% of the total number of words in the English language, by conservative estimates. Source: How many words in the English language?)
• Average words per entry: 317.92
• Probability that any given word I type will be unique: 9.91%
• Flesch Reading Ease score: 63.76 out of 100 (Higher numbers indicate more difficult reading. Reader’s Digest = 65, Wall Street Journal = 43, Average Insurance Policy = 10)
• Average number of unique visitors per month: Approximately 3500
• Most popular entry: Black Eye Peas and Jurassic 5 – September 15th, 2002. Read the comments on this one, they are very strange, and new ones appear almost daily now. I only leave the comments open as a sort of social experiment.
• Selected amusing search terms, each of which has been used more than 10 times (and some have been used hundreds of times):
  • black eye peas
  • tour de fat
  • adrian barbaeu
  • girls using urinals
  • pictures of women peeing
  • topless skiing (That one is your fault, mother.)
  • weird food
  • girls with glasses
  • teabagged
  • gender change
• eating a pomegranate

• Time spent collecting these stats: 57 minutes

  Here is to another 100,000 words of drivel, coming at you from Flexistentialist.

Yesterday I tie dyed a few lab coats with Drew from work. He came over and we washed the coats, soaked the coats in activator, tied them, dyed them, cured them, rinsed them, and washed them. Then we drew some equations and chemical symbols on them to make them cooler (yes, that is how we are defining ‘cooler’ in this case).

All in all, they made quite a splash at work today. We are now officially the coolest geeks in the building. I also started doing a brand new demonstration on Electrostatics today, and the lab coat brought a good start to a new demo. I shock kids with static electricity, send over 7000 volts of electricity through my body to light up a fluorescent light bulb, and zap myself with a 250,000 volt Van de Graff generator. Fun stuff.

Click for larger image

This is a picture of that lab coat. It is quite nice. The molecule drawn on the pocket is glucose, and the other pocket (not visible) depicts 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, also known as caffeine (oh yeah!). Drew’s lab coat currently shows Maxwell’s equations describing electromagnetic behavior, as well as Faraday’s Law of Magnetic Induction, which is a pretty hip law, if I do say so myself.

I’m pretty satisfied with how they came out, though next time I’m going to let the dye cure a little more, to get brighter colors. Its still pretty bright though!

I’ve made it a fair way into the construction and design of a headlight modulator for my scooter. What is a headlight modulator you ask? It is a device that causes the headlight of the scooter to pulse on and off at about 240 beats per minute. It contributes to motorcycle safety by making the vehicle far more visible.

Some design aspects, mandated by federal law, are that the light not flash between full brightness and being completely off. Instead, it must go between full brightness, and no less than about half brightness. That is the difference between ‘flashing’ and ‘modulating’. The rate that the light modulates is also mandated by law, to be between 200 and 280 beats per minute. This keeps it from causing ‘target fixation’ that some strobes cause in drivers, as well as distinguishing it from emergency vehicle strobes.

Another design parameter is that it must turn itself off at night, returning the light to normal operation.

The one I’m working on now uses a pair of 555 timers to modulate. One creates a 300Hz flicker at about 50% duty cycle, producing an output that looks half as bright as normal (you don’t notice the flicker, because 300Hz is fast enough to cause persistence of vision to make it look like a continuous brightness). The other timer flickers at the 240 beats per minute, also at a 50% duty cycle, switching between the dimmed output, and normal output.

A relay connected to a small circuit with a phototransistor checks ambient light level. When it moves above a preset level, the phototransistor activates the relay, which switches the headlight to modulated mode. When it goes dark, the relay snaps back to its closed position, which allows the headlight to work as normal. This is designed to cause the ‘default’ status, in case of malfunction, to be normal operation, another aspect required by law. If the circuit fails, the light must return to normal operation.

Currently the entire mess is sitting on the dining room table, a nest of wires attached to a prototype board. I’m using an old AT computer power supply to provide the 12V to the board. I purchased a set of organizer trays to hold my electronics stuff, and that has helped organization a lot, but it is still a bit of a mess. I don’t think it is possible to work on electronics without making a mess.

Anyway, I’ve got this, as well as a few other interesting projects, moving forward to increase the safety of my scooter. Recent studies have confirmed what many suspected, that motorists simply don’t see motorcycles. A combination of smaller form factor, as well as a level of ‘unexpectedness’ prevents people from noticing motorcycles. Most motorcycle accidents are caused by a cage driver (thats what we call you car-bound people) not seeing a motorcyclist, and running into them, usually by making a left turn into them. All the studies have recommended that motorcyclists do anything in their power to make themselves more visible.

In the 70’s, federal law mandated that motorcycles leave their lights on all the time. Since then, all motorcycles have been made without the ability to turn the lights off. My scooter has a light switch, but it only lets you choose between high beam and low beam. That helped visibility, but with the advent of daytime running lights on cars, motorcycles are losing their edge again. Headlight modulators are one thing that makes the motorcycle much more visible.

Some people find them annoying, but because mine will still be controlled by a manual switch, there are things that can be done to make them less annoying. For instance, it can be turned off while at a red light, so the driver ahead of you isn’t forced to stare at it in the rear view mirror. However, one thing must be made clear. Headlight modulators are despised by some, misunderstood by many, but seen by all. And that is the important thing.

Stay tuned for more info on the circuit, including diagrams, once I have it tuned up the way I want it. Also, I’ve got a neat circuit in the works for the brake lights too, I’ll post more about that once I get started on it. There are also plans in motion to add auxiliary brake and turn signal lights (all LED of course), add strategic and attractive 3M reflective material and increase horn volume. My hope is that once I’m done, no one will be able to ignore the flashing, brightly colored streak of light and sound that my scooter will become.

Today, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! It is the one day of the year where everyone must use as much pirate-speech as they possibly can, to inject a healthy dose of amusement and absurdity into ordinarily mundane tasks.

Instead of trundling off to your daily grind, why not swagger down the street like a saucy man ‘o the sea? You aren’t just some average girl today, you be the comeliest wench that the land lubbers ever did see. Argh!!

Here are some choice phrases and lingo:

• Instead of saying, “Good morning,” try, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, ya filthy bilge rat!”
• “Can I buy you a drink?” becomes, “Arrr!! I do be blown to shivers by the sight o’ such a comely wench! Prepare to be boarded!”
• Instead of, “Bye” why not, “Avast! If’n you do be tossed into Davey Jones’ Locker before I see ye next, slap the Devil on the back and save me a mug ‘o the best grog in Hell! ARR!!”

• “Its not my fault,” is much better said, “Arr! If you be accusin’ me o’ any wrongdoin’, then you best be ready to become a sharpenin’ stone for me sword you filthy bilge rat!!”

  Use your imagination, and I’m sure you’ll do great. If you need some help, check out these websites:

• TalkLikeAPirate.com – This is the official website set up by the creators of Talk Like A Pirate Day. Its got good history, as well as some helpful pirate lingo.

• TalkLikeAPirateDay.com – This isn’t the official site, but its got some good info and phrases. Its also a wiki, so you can add to it if you desire.

  So get your swagger on, turn up the saucy, and be the best pirate talker of them all. And if’n ye don’t, I’ll be the first to string ye up on the yardarm like the land lubber ye are, ye filthy bilge rat! YARRGH!!!

This Sunday, the 21st of September, the Galileo spacecraft, launched in 1989 to study Jupiter, will be intentionally crashed into the atmosphere of Jupiter, signaling the end of its mission. It was never meant for reentry, so it will break apart and burn up as soon as it enters the upper atmosphere.

The spacecraft was a good one, that made it through quite a few difficult circumstances such as delayed launch, antenna problems, radiation damage and more. Despite the issues, it remained in service for many years after its official mission had ended. It discovered 21 new moons of Jupiter, and got fantastic data about the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet when it crashed into Jupiter in 1994.

You can read a Space.com article about it here: Journey’s End: Galileo Set for Fiery Finale

One thing I think is particularly interesting about the decision to crash it into Jupiter was that it is being done to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa, due to fears that it might contaminate any life that may be living on Europa. Europa is a watery planet, that contains far more water than all the oceans on Earth combined. It has an icy shell, but tectonic action and a warm core keep vast quantities of liquid water under the surface. Of all the places in the solar system, Europa has one of the highest chances of harboring some form of life.

To my knowledge, this is one of the first times we’ve avoided an area specifically due to concerns about contamination. Certainly those issues came up with the Mars missions, but in this case, we are actually specifially avoiding contact with potentially living organisms. I think its a good sign that we are concerned about that. Until a mission can be sent specifially to Europa, its important that we keep the possibility of life there as an open one.

So in conclusion, here’s to the spacecraft that let us reach out into space just a little bit further, and to the people who do such a great job designing them, operating them, and keeping up with them over the years.

Cleaned my house today. That is, the actual house. Madalene and I went out and got some big plastic storage bins, and shelving things. I cleaned up a good chunk of the bedroom area that had become quite the disaster area. Hopefully the new-found organization will hold.

On a side note, its amazing how much stuff they can make with injection molded plastic. What an age we live in.

As any Movable Type weblog software user knows, finishing a post only to realize when viewing the page that there is an error, and having to navigate back through the MT menus to edit the entry, is a hassle. One solution is to put an “Edit this Entry” link next to each post. Clicking the link opens the MT edit window for that entry, and you can fix the entry right there. However, this requires you to put an unsightly link by each post, something that your users will never use. If they try, they just get prompted for your username and password. Some hide the link, make it tiny, etc., trying to minimize this problem.

But what about a more elegant solution? Girlie has a solution that involves making a custom PHP file that sets a cookie, then having some PHP code in your index template that checks for the cookie, and then presents the link if it finds the cookie. This works fine, but still isn’t very elegant. You need to visit this special little page to set the cookie, and anyone could find said page and set the cookie, or you could lose the cookie and forget where the special page is, etc.

What would be best, is if the snippet of PHP could detect the cookie that MT uses when you have it remember your login settings. A quick modification to Girlie’s code lets it check the cookie that MT places, and compares the author name of the post to the author name in the cookie. If they match, it presents the link. This even works for multiple author blogs, because the cookie will only match for that author’s entries, hence the link will only appear on those entries.

Now, this is all very elegant sounding except for one horrible dirty little secret. You have to make a small modification to the MT code. I hate to do it, but I couldn’t figure out any other solution. The problem is that when MT sets the cookie, it sets the path of the cookie to be the relative location of mt.cgi, ie, ’/cgi-bin/mt/’. This means that the browser will only return the cookie to pages that are underneath that directory. If we try to access the cookie from flexistentialist.org/ the browser won’t send the cookie data, and it is though the cookie doesn’t exist. What we need to do is change it so that instead of setting the ‘path’ value of the cookie to ‘cgi-bin/mt/’, or whatever the install location of MT is, it sets the path location to ’/’ which means the cookie will be sent to any file or directory at your domain. It still won’t send the cookie data to other domains (which would be a security risk) because we aren’t changing the ‘domain’ parameter of the cookie.

So down to the nitty gritty practical stuff. Keep in mind that you are making a change to software you don’t understand, and that it is possible to break something in a way I can’t predict. This is a simple change, but still, back up your installation, and export your entries before doing this, because its just good policy. The following mod is being done to version 2.64 of MovableType. Other versions probably have similar lines, but they may appear in different areas of App.pm. The bake_cookie subroutine is pretty streamlined, so it is unlikely to change in future versions, but I’m not Ben, nor Mena, so I don’t know for sure.

First, lets make the small modification to one of the MT files. Navigate to the MT install directory, the one mt.cgi is in, and then navigate to lib/MT/ and open App.pm. Scroll down to about line 164, which will put you around the beginning of the bake_cookie subroutine, which looks something like this:

sub bake_cookie {
    my $app = shift;
    my %param = @_;
    unless ($param{-path}) {
        $param<del>path} = $app</del>>path;
    }

See the bottom three lines of code, beginning with the ‘unless’ statement? These three lines are what set the path parameter to $app>path; which is your installation directory, /cgi-bin/mt in my case. What we want to do is comment these two lines out, and add one that just sets the path to ’/’. Change the above section of code to look like this:

sub bake_cookie {
    my $app = shift;
    my %param = @_;
	

		
Add the line below this comment. The line simply sets the
		
-path parameter to '/' in all cases. This lets the cookie be
		
accessed from any file on your domain, instead of just files
		
beneath the MT installation directory.
	
    $param{-path} = '/';
	

		
Comment out the three lines below this as shown. These
		
lines are what set the -path parameter to 'cgi-bin/mt/' or
		
whatever your install directory is. We don't need them
		
anymore, but its bad policy to delete stuff, in case you
	
	

		
want to undo this, so we just comment it out.
	
	

		
   unless ($param{-path}) {
		
       $param<del>path} = $app</del>>path;
		
   }
	

Now that we have told MT to always set cookies with a path of ’/’, we are done with the dirty work, and can simply insert a snippet of PHP into our templates where ever we want an “edit this entry” link to appear!

Here is the snippet. This snippet assumes your files are parsed as PHP files, look elsewhere if you need to find out how to do that, it isn’t hard. The snippet must be placed inside an MTEntries container tag to work.

,
// its just there for display purposes.
$edit_link = '<a>mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=
  &blog_id="
  target="_new">[edit]</a>';
	
// This checks to see if the cookie variable begins with the author name.

if (eregi ("^", $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS['user'])) {
  echo $edit_link;

} 

?>

The first part of the code just defines the ‘edit’ link. You can have it say anything you want as the link text. It is also set with target=”_new” to have it open a new window, remove this if you don’t like that behavior. The details of the URL, such as the blog ID, the entry ID and the MT URL should all be filled in automagically.

The second part of the code just checks to see if the contents of the ‘user’ cookie, which is the one MT leaves, which will look something like this, “Sam::ajel23jfaU3::1”, begins with the name of the author who wrote the post. The first :: and everything after it isn’t important for our purposes, so we ignore it. If the author name and the cookie match, then the edit link is displayed. Since that cookie is only in place on computers where you have logged into MT, and specified “remember my login details”, then it only appears for you!

Ta Da! Put this snippet on your main index template, in your archive template, or anywhere you want an ‘edit this entry’ link! I put the link right after the title of the entry, but maybe you’d like to put it somewhere else, or even change the [edit] text to the MTEntryAuthor tag, and put it at the bottom of the post where it says, “Posted by soandso” so that the name becomes the edit link (but only for you!). The world is your oyster, go wild.

What are some potential problems associated with this? Well, one potential problem might be a naming conflict with other web software on your domain that is trying to leave a cookie called ‘user’. Part of the purpose of setting the path of the cookie to be the install directory of MT is that no other applications, such as bulletin boards, will see the cookie and potentially be confused by it. By having the cookie be displayed to all files on your domain, if you had another piece of software that left a ‘user’ cookie, they could confuse each other. Theoretically, it would have been wise for the cookie to be called ‘mtuser’ or something less generic than just ‘user’, to avoid possible conflicts. For instance, the cookies left when someone chooses to remember details when leaving a comment are called ‘mtcmtemail’, ‘mtcmtname’ and ‘mtcmturl’, which are good names. If you are using any other software on your domain that leaves cookies, I recommend viewing your cookies to see if they leave anything called ‘user’ before making this modification, to avoid conflict, and promote harmony between web-apps.

Security concerns? This mod only allows other files on your domain access to the cookie, no other domains, so that keeps it ‘in the family’. If there are multiple people running things on the same domain, then potentially they could access the cookie when you browsed to their site. If you think that they are very clever and malicious, then you might not want to make this mod. However, if you think that the people you share a domain with are clever and malicious, you might not want to be sharing a domain with them. Beyond that, this should be a safe change to make, but still, do it at your own risk.

Finally, if anyone has any trouble getting it to work, better ideas on how to do something I did, or security concerns or if you just want to say ‘thanks’, please post a comment, or email me about it. Enjoy!

Update: Edited the code to use eregi() instead of ereg() as per Mark’s suggestions. This makes the login search case insensitive, to match the login of MT. For instance, your author name could be ‘Sam’ but you could login as ‘sam’ or ‘saM’, which could set a cookie that doesn’t match the author name, unless you use a case insensitive comparison. So now it does.

Thousands of years from now, when the past becomes an indistinct fog, two historians will be sitting in an office, arguing. They are both specialists in a certain time in the past, which was known to its inhabitants as the time between 1700 AD and 2200 AD, a tiny little 500 year block that almost no one cared about, and was covered in less than one week of lecturing in most high-school level World History classes.

The argument today concerns emergency response systems in the landmass that was, for the greater part of the period, known as America. Their infrastructure, what was left of it, made it clear that they had a system by which individuals could report an emergency such as a crime in progress, or a health problem, and have teams of emergency response crews arrive quickly. Scattered documentation suggests that the inhabitants were able to dial a number into their common communication system, telephones, and be connected to a central dispatch for emergency crews. This number was most probably ‘911’.

One historian has been studying the cultural significance of a very brief period of turmoil, only a few decades long, that began with an attack against the country known as America by some sort of religious organization. The date the attack occurred on is generally agreed to be 9/11/2001. The historian notes that after the attacks, the numbers 9/11 held cultural significance, as the inhabitants mourned over the attacks, and bolstered morale.

Surely, he argues, the fact that the emergency response code is agreed to have been ‘911’ is not a coincidence with the fact that the attacks in question occurred on a date known to the inhabitants as ‘9/11’. Surely the emergency response system wasn’t set up until after the attacks, and the number ‘911’ was chosen because it evoked a sense of tragedy in the populace, and hence, was easy to remember.

The second historian is skeptical. She notes that in all probability, emergency response teams would have been summoned for the attacks, since much cultural significance at the time was placed on the role of rescue teams. Those had to have been organized teams, she argues, meaning the emergency response system was already in place, and ‘911’ had been chosen for other reasons.

The debate goes back and forth for the better part of an hour with both sides finally agreeing to continue the debate at a later time, because the issue really wasn’t a big deal anyway, and they had real work to be doing.

BTW, Madalene flew back in from New York this morning, of all mornings. She brought me bagels, such as the horrifically delicious garlic bagel that I’m eating right now that surely required at least 4 cloves of garlic to make.

No no, you silly, I didn’t clean my real house, I mean to say that this website has been cleaned. I removed the Daily Sam picture, because it was horribly out of date, and I don’t feel like setting my webcam back up for now. I might replace it with a random image from my image archive, but we’ll see.

I modified how comments are displayed, in the hopes that it will be a little easier to read. I tweaked the CSS here and there a bit too, but you probably won’t notice, unless you are me, which you aren’t.

I also got the On My Playlist feature working again! The old one was based on spyAMP (see my programs section for more details on that), which required Winamp3. I’ve reverted to Winamp 2.91 because on my system it is faster and more stable than Winamp3. However, I lost the ability to update that part of the website. I wanted to remedy it, so I started using a new plugin called Currently Hearing that uploads your currently playing information to an ftp server. Now, this isn’t ideal, because my last set of scripts were built around the idea that the plugin would send an http POST query to the script, which would log everything in a mySQL database, and then a second script was called to display the data. Now, I have to parse a file that has been uploaded, which is a bit of a pain, and I have to do some funky logic to get it to understand whether or not Winamp is still playing.

So basically, the On My Playlist looks basically the same to all of you, but its totally different on the back end. I don’t feel like posting my script for that right now, because it is horribly hacked up, the logic is backwards, and the formatting is embedded in the script. However, if you know PHP and want a head-start on a script of your own, I recommend first checking out the example PHP scripts on the Currently Hearing page, and if you want to see how I’ve modified it, email me and I’ll hook you up with the script ‘as is’.

Do you know what you are talking about? Do you know what anyone else is talking about? Critical thinking is the art of determining what it is people are talking about, how to let others know exactly what you are talking about, and how to avoid deception and illogical arguments.

This online course, called Mission: Critical at San Jose State University is a great start to learning how statements are formed, and how arguments are built.

Lets be clear on one thing. You are being lied to every day. You are lied to in the newspaper, on the TV, by your politicians, and by people you see on the street. Some are doing it intentionally, and others unintentionally. A clear understanding of how to parse an argument can give you a good idea of when you are being manipulated, and when someone feeds you a line of bullshit.

Johnny F. and Jasper B. reminded me of a good example in this post which is also where I got the critical thinking course link.

Bush has frequently used the term “Al Qaeda-type fighters” to describe combatants in Iraq. Why does he use this term, and what does he mean? If you’d like to see how often this term gets used just try this little Google search.

As noted in Jasper’s post, the Washington Post reported that 69% of Americans polled believe that Saddam Hussein had some roll in the 9/11 attacks against the US (see Jasper’s post for a discussion of why that statistic probably isn’t particularly representative of actual sentiment). Why do so many people believe that, despite a complete lack of evidence to support such a claim?

One reason might be that the term “Al Qaeda-type fighter” implies that the fighters are somehow connected to the Al Qaeda organization. However, if you parse the statement, its really just saying that the fighters bear some similarity to members of the Al Qaeda, which can be as vague as noting that these Iraqi fighters, like Al Qaeda fighters, are angry, dark skinned, and armed. A claim that there were a lot of “Viet Cong-like fighters” in Iraq would likely be just as accurate, though the implication would be confusing. Why would Bush compare these fighters to the Al Qaeda, if not to make people think there was some sort of connection? Its not a very effective way to actually describe the fighters, but it is a great way to lie, without actually making a false statement.

You can get away with a LOT of deception by using a little implication and associative logic (which is not particularly logical). This process has been honed to a fine art by politicians and the media, many of whom probably do it without even thinking.

So arm yourself with a little critical thought, and even if you think you know it, go skim through the online course as a refresher, its helpful. Now is a good time to be vigilant about what people are telling you, and how you interpret their statements.

UPDATE: Check out this article, titled Understanding Iraq’s Resistance in the Christian Science Monitor. I don’t normally read things like the Christian Science Monitor (in fact, I typically avoid them), but this article caught my attention. It is a very realistic and informative treatment of what sorts of people are resisting US forces in Iraq, and why it is misleading and inaccurate to describe them all as “Al Qaeda-type fighters.” Here is a quote from the article I find to be pertinent:

Although some, if not most, of these fighters sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot all be lumped together as President Bush has done, calling them “Al Qaeda-type fighters.” ... Defining everything broadly as a “terrorist” threat won’t resolve the underlying problem in Iraq – which is the lack of legitimacy of the US military presence in the eyes of Iraqis. Nor will it prepare the American public for a prolonged and costly struggle in Iraq.

What does Madalene actually do? Well, she is at the American Chemical Society national conference in New York City presenting on her research. If you’d like to know a little more about it, the press has picked up on her research via a press release sent out by the ACS.

Here are some links to articles that are beginning to spring up! Look for quotes to read what she has to say:

• United Press International: New Material Could Rejuvenate Aging Eyes
• EurekAlert: Lens Replacement Material May Improve Cataract Treatment, Eliminate Bifocals
• Dr. Koop: New Gel Could Help Sight
• HealthCentral.com: New Gel Could Help Sight
• Hindustan Times: Gel Promises Better Vision For Aging Eyes
• Naples Daily News: Researchers See A New Way To Correct Vision

• Science Daily: Lens Replacement Material May Improve Cataract Treatment, Eliminate Bifocals

  More to come!

I’m very happy. There is a type of cheese I like called Red Dragon. It is made by a company called Somerdale, and it is a fine Welsh cheddar, made with whole mustard seeds and ale. Boy, its good. The holy union between mustard, ale, and cheese has never been more apparent than in this Red Dragon cheese. However, the cheese is quite pricey, at over $16 a pound.

After work this evening, I was shopping at the local grocery-mart chain, when I happened upon the cheese. It was wrapped up, looking at me through its plastic wrapping, taunting me. Then I noticed the price. It was nearly half the price it is normally! I looked both ways, certain a trick was being played upon me. I reached down, and picked up a block of the cheese, half expecting it to be pulled from my hands by an unseen string, held by a laughing prankster. I inspected the label, and found that it had been mislabeled by the grocery-mart-clerk, and was falsely claiming to be another cheese of generic variety. The wax inner label and a quick whiff proved the cheese to be Red Dragon in truth, despite the labeling. I took the opportunity to root through the pile of cheeses, and found the problem. Some of the Red Dragon cheeses had been falsely labeled as a neighboring cheese. Some hadn’t however, and retained their original pricing. I grabbed a large block of the mis-labeled cheese, and slipped it into my basket. Their mistake was my gain, as I now sup upon the Red Dragon, having paid a pittance for it.

It reminds me of the time I got (from the same store) a 12 pack of Amstel Light, a beer I’m not normally all that fond of, for about 5 dollars, due to improper labeling. Ah, what a hardened shopper I am, searching for improper labeling and exploiting it at every turn. Oh well, the cheese was worth it.