PlasticBoy

Waiting for Godot: The Interactive Adventure.
I let this load in the background for about 10 minutes before I got it.

Men who drink six cups of tea a day have 60 percent less heart disease.

Woohoo! Lake Effect is back. I was getting ready to take it off my blog list.

My brother commented a few weeks ago that all he really wanted to watch on TV was the NASA channel. I said they should build a big arm on the space station with a camera on the end so you can see the whole structure with the Earth revolving below. We both agreed that they really need a techno soundtrack like The Orb or, better yet, Orbital. Can’t you just see this with A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld playing in the background?

Natalie Portman on mideast racism.

Sierra Club sues Tyson Foods over chicken farms.

The head of the FDA wants to cure chronic wasting disease in deer.

Exercise reduces breast cancer risk by 30 to 40 percent.

On Thursday, the Senate voted to reject drilling in ANWR. You can check how your senators voted.

Eating meat tied to cancer risk
“Limiting consumption of meat is clearly a good idea, whether ‘white’ or red. A recent study found that the average American diet gets more HCAs from chicken than red meat. Follow AICR’s advice to cook meat at lower temperatures (baking, microwaving), and follow a mostly plant-based diet that keeps meat portions modest and focuses on the vegetables, fruits and whole grains that protect our health.”

Remember Mike Zellers, author of those nifty vegaterianism and Yoga articles I linked to a while back? Well those pages are gone but Mike’s started a blog called Spacemonk that I know I’ll be watching with interest.

Francis Fukuyama thinks that biotechnology needs to be regulated so that scientists don’t make some fundamental change to the human essence. I just finished reading The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will begin transferring their consciousnesses into machines by the end of the century, after making heavy use of biotech implants. According to another article I read in Scientific American (The Fate of Life in the Universe, November 1999; by Krauss, Starkman), this is the only way that organisms can continue to exist. The problem is that in an infinitely expanding universe, matter density is constantly declining. At some point (probably more than 100 trillion years away, when all the stars are dead), intelligent beings won’t be able to gather enough resources to stay alive. The only consciousnesses that will survive are those that exist in very low-power machines that spend eons in hibernation to conserve resources. So, if we’re going to have to make fundamental changes to human nature to survive past 100 trillion years anyway, what’s the point in resisting biotech now? ;)

Pictures from Mexico are up.

Major lifestyle changes needed to prevent diabetes
“The prevention of diabetes requires substantial rather than modest changes in lifestyle habits,” co-author Dr. Jim I. Mann told Reuters Health. “Our research has shown that to achieve the maximum benefit of exercise, it is necessary to exercise at least five times per week to an extent that appreciably increases heart rate.”

I’m back, had a great time, will post pictures soon.