Author: Dave

Something that caught my eye on a link off a link off Slashdot* and which seemed pretty damn cool was some guys experimenting with ferrofluids. You can get some really cool patterns when you apply a strong magnet to a bunch of small ferrous particles suspended in a fluid.

* Slashdot and wikipedia link jumping has become one of my main and favorite pastimes online. It’s surprising what cool stuff these two sites link to (whether it’s interesting articles on wikipedia, which contain links to other interesting articles ad infinitum, or reference links within Slashdot posts, which themselves contain interesting stuff, or contain links to other interesting stuff)

One of the things that has been in the news a disproportionate amount recently, and which has been provoking much thought in me has been the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and America’s objection to it.

I can’t ever get past the feeling that it’s terribly arrogant and hipocritical of America to say “We don’t trust you with a single nuclear weapon, and we don’t ever really trust you to simply run a civilian nuclear program for generating power”, while at the same time insisting on maintaining a stockpile of something like 4000 nuclear warheads themselves.

If they were in the process of actively reducing their nuclear stockpile towards some goal like 50 or 100 weapons (which would still be plenty enough to continue threatening people with…) then sure, saying “We don’t want you to have nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are bad, and we’re also getting rid of most of ours as well” might seem a little more reasonable.

As it stands it seems that the Iranians have a legitimate reason for wanting a nuclear power plant, and a reasonable arrangement with the russians where the russians sell the iranians nuclear power plant fuel, and the iranians send their nuclear waste back to Russia for processing, which allows for confirmation that no fuel has been retained by the iranians.

All up it’s almost as bad as the US continuing to say “We want a free trade pact with China” while also trying to tell everyone (particularly the Europeans) that they’re not allowed to sell military technology to the Chinese. I mean either China is a bad coutry, and no trade sould be entered into with it, or else it is accepted as a legitimate nation that you can trade (whatever goods you want to) with.

It all just seems that American foreign policy revolves around not letting anyone else get big enough to challenge it. Now I don’t like China, but on some levels It’d be very satisfying to see them get big enough to push America around for a change. (although a strong European Union would be my preferred choice for contender of course)

Turns out that surgeons and physicians have not one but two patron saints.

Sts. Cosmos & Damian

I haven’t quite figured what if any practical use I am going to make of this particular piece of knowledge, but I’m sure something will come up sooner or later.

One of the things which has been confusing me whenever I go into one particular room in the birthing quite is how a towel heater which almost certainly has nothing more complex in it than a couple of resistors, a bilayer metal temperature switch, some rheostats, perhaps some transistors, and a pile of wire in it could require, and indeed eventually receive not one but two “Y2K compliant” stickers….

Previously I have mentioned the concept of Podcasting (which appears to have rather take off quite madly since I wrote about it) and today I had an additional idea occur to me.

Now podcasting revolves around the iPod, and as such is just an audio thing, but the recently realeased Play Station Portable (PSP) has the ability to play back movies, and what I wondered as when people are going to start distributing video blog entries, short documentries, video news, and so on, which can be uploaded to a PSP for viewing at a later point such as on the train or in boring lectures….

I was horrified to sit in on two consecutive women in birthing suite who had chosen to listen to Kenny G while they squeezed out their bubs.

I had (obviously wrongly) though that Kenny G music had died a quiet, well earned death years ago, and was now little more than a distant terrible memory in the collective consciousness, a dirty little secret among people who hadn’t gotten around to throwing his albums out of their collections, or a last ditch extreme emergency fall back option for easy listening radio stations.

What a pity that obviously isn’t the case. Six hours of Kenny G on repeat left me about ready to hurl the CD player out the fourth floor window of the birthing suite..

Baby development

Well our intern job ballot for next year has closed, and now it’s just a waiting game to see where we end up getting allocated for jobs on the basis of our preferences, but even before we know exactly where we are going to be going, it is clear that next year will be a parting of ways.

It looks like some of us will be up at Towoomba, others in Brisbane at the PA and Royal, some may end up as far away as Tasmania or West australia, and everyone it seems is going to be far enough from Logan (where it looks like I will be working) to mean that I will not get to see nearly as much of my friends as I would like.

It seems to me very sad that modern life is structured in such as way that every 4 or 5 years I end up having to pack up and leave my life and friends from the preceeding 4/5 year period for a new start, in the name of moving forwards.

I had always thought that comic book store patrons generally fitted the Bart and Milhouse stereotype, being young boys aged 7-15 spending their pocket money and pay from their paper route, but this was dispelled the other day when I popped into a few comic stores in town looking for the Superman Red Son spinoff comic (which I have previously mentioned).

Instead, (to continue the Simpsons analagy) all the people in the stores were more the Karl and Lenny types: twenty or thirty something males fitting the reasonably well dressed administrative job type. They obviously had some personal spending power, and were not only buying the $3.75 paperback comics, they were also buying the $37 graphic novels, because comics were one of their hobbies, and they were happy spending (sometimes serious ammounts of) money on that hobby.

It all made the economics of the comic book industry seem far more sensible too.