Thursday miscellanea #44

• Eight weeks from the day after tomorrow.
• I took my friend Julie to lunch today for her birthday.  My lunch had pine nuts on it.  Did you know that some substantial percentage of pine nuts can cause temporary but pronounced taste distortions in some people?  I didn’t.
• Michael Jackson’s death was a significant cultural event, and I stand by my post.  I’m annoyed, but not surprised, at all of the tongue-clucking about how “we’ve lost sight of what’s important in this country” and similar, referring to the wall-to-wall coverage of the proceedings.  Pardon the -5, but that ship has sailed, folks.  The Michael Jackson coverage is a current manifestation of the same old phenomenon that’s been with us for a long time, not a new phenomenon in itself.  Your outrage is decades late.  See also the wisdom from Larry Miller here.
• Remember my Burmese python post?  Some researchers have rounded up a bunch of them and taken them to South Carolina to learn a bit more about just how far they might reach into the United States.  Isn’t it weird that we have permanent breeding populations of huge constricting snakes now?  Where’s your cat, by the way?
• I finished Bob Barker’s book last week.  The greatest game show host ever has a gift for sharing his favorite memories in a way that puts you there.  All of his professional gigs are covered, as well as his childhood, Navy career, marriage, and animal activism.  (It’s not a tell-all, though, so if you get it thinking you’re going to find out what Dian Parkinson will or won’t do, you’ll be disappointed.)
• Only 34% of survey respondents say the U.S. is headed in the right direction, and The One is up to a disapproval rating of 48%.  Unfortunately, those numbers will probably have to be 20% and 60% before his fawning media corps will be forced to acknowledge them.
• Here is an interesting post on how close we are to solving the hard storage problem.  Colossal Storage predicts it will have a 1.2-petabyte hard drive on the market in the next two to five years.  (That’s 1.2 million gigabytes.)  It would only take 50 petabytes to store the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.  (Remember when an 80-megabyte hard drive was enormous?)

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