Welcome to the Wilcox Family weB LOG, your source for the latest Wilcox news, anecdotes, and rants; and, as Jack Benny quipped on his first radio show (March 29, 1932), “There will be a slight pause while you say, ‘Who cares?’â€â€
I scored 44.77318% — Major Geek. (SWEET! I’m actually far more geeky than a couple years ago: 61.14398% – Extreme Geek.) Co-worker Kevin Miller may be disappointed in that rating, he always acknowledges me as an Uber-Geek. :: sighs ::
Or Perhaps You Are Evil Genius Material?
[nuke][doug]It angered me when I heard (a few years ago) that former President Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro at the United Nations. Were I President, I would have relished the opportunity to speak with Castro, but I would not have shaken his hand, and my conversation would have opened with, “¿Por que odias tu propio gente?†(Why do you hate your own people?)
One of the first Cuban exiles I ever met, Pastor Elmer Fernandez, has a lovely final memory of Cuba—he was able to flee to America to be with relatives when he was 8 years old—his last significant memory is his mother saying to him, “Do you hear that noise? Those are gunshots. They [Castro’s revolutionaries] are executing our pastor.â€
Modern-day Cuba should be a paradise. It has amazing agricultural and tourist potential, yet in all but a few areas it clearly demonstrates the absolute failure of Totalitarian Communism. We know a number of people who have visited Cuba, some on covert missions trips, who are able to provide a better picture than our media. Would you like to live in a large city that has running water only two hours a week? How about visiting a hospital emergency room with your infant, to find nothing but squalor and crying? Would you enjoy being part of a population that cannot buy aspirin? Or books? The people there don’t even mention Castro’s name—they merely make a sign with their fist like a beard.
It is a pity Castro has lived so long.
You may also be interested in some of the other Google settings, most people ignore, especially some very amusing language settings.
Scientists in the UK have created a sticky tape which works in the same way as gecko feet.
Co-worker Brian Cortez sent me this link from the BBC, about a tape that has been developed that works using microscopic hairs, just like a gecko’s feet. (Isaac owns a New Caledonian crested gecko, and they are amazing climbers.)
There are still significant technical challenges to overcome before this can be mass-produced, but Brian suggested this likely scenario at the WIlcox house:
I can see the toy manufacturers drooling over this one. Imagine being able to sell a set of real “Spiderman†gloves! I can also imagine you as a parent telling your son Isaac to get off the ceiling … it’s dinner time. 🙂
Mark Greene (a master of all things related to databases) was kind enough to diagnose our ailing SQL string that was preventing certain numbers from being found. Thanks, Mark!
One can now add responses to the items that are “perm-a-linked†and/or in the Hot Topics list.
In Denver, a judge overturned a convicted murderer’s death sentence because jurors consulted Biblical passages such as “an eye for an eye†while they were sequestered during death-penalty deliberations.
For the record, Robert Harlan was convicted in 1995 for murdering Rhonda Maloney, a waitress who was driving home from work, and shooting and paralyzing good Samaritan Jaquie Creazzo who tried to come to the woman’s aid.
Well, last week’s lunar eclipse was clouded out, but this view of Earth and Jupiter from the Mars Orbital Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor is pretty darn cool, and helps compensate [somewhat] for the missed eclipse.
[doug]Okay, I’m really a fairly big Star Trek fan, despite being very disappointed by the latest film, but this list on the Happy Fun Pundit site is too delicious to pass up. Somewhere down the page you’ll find my own comments.
Here’s item one from the list, to give you a sample:
Noisy doors.
You can't walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They're dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!†every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40.
The science fiction dealing with robotsis is slowly becoming a reality. This article from Reuters deals with the war of technology, and technology’s contribution to battlefield and civilian rescue technology.