Friends, enemies and health

"Friends come and go, enemies accumulate."- Zadeh

"Your health comes first, you can always hang yourself later."- Yiddish proverb

Physics is like sex - Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman - Wikiquote:
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.

* On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.
This was said after he was introduced when giving the Messenger Lectures at Cornell Univ. 1964-5, and the introducer mentioned that Feynman played bongo drums.

* I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose— which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Horizon: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Cheap Stuff II

Heard about those damn blogs? Start one of your own for free.
http://www.blogger.com/start

Receive faxes on the road for free via email. With your eFax free account, you will get a non-local eFax number to receive faxes in your email. Upgrade (or not) to eFax Plus and send faxes as well.
https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/signupFree

Find cheap local gasoline or sell the SUV.
http://www.gasbuddy.com/

Got wifi, but want free service on the road?
http://www.wififreespot.com/

I've had good experience with Panera Bread free wifi.
http://www.panerabread.com/wifi.aspx

Do you need that latest tech gizmo?
No you don't, but shopping here may
ease the monetary pain of having the biggest
hard drive on the block.
http://www.techbargains.com/


Please put all your "savings" into your retirement fund!

Homage to Ray Johnson - Father of Mail Art

What is Mail Art?

Term applies to art sent through the post rather than displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels, encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books, images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps, postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other art forms generally considered marginal.

John Held Jr. The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, Macmillan Publishers Limited 1996

Ray Johnson Gallery

'Oh my God, what did I do?'

"Many suburbanites who moved farther out from the city in search of a nice big yard discover the grass is the first chore they want to unload.
'They've never done it,' said Gary Cogle, owner of A-1 Lawn Care Services of Kearneysville, W.Va., which serves Loudoun County and West Virginia. 'They might buy a mower because it's a neat little thing.'
For a few months or even as long as a year, those new suburban residents will toy with their new mower, cutting their own grass, he said.

'Then they said, 'Oh my God what did I do?' '

Cogle takes over and often sells the mower, which otherwise would sit unused in a garage."

Free Windows software that works

Here is a list of free software applications I have found to work well, sometimes better than the ones that cost money.

As always, you are on your own. I assume no responsibility for the silly/creative things you might do with these tools. I can't answer any questions about the meaning of life or technical question about these software applications.


http://picasa.google.com/index.html
image organizer and editor

http://www.readplease.com/english/downloads/#freev
reads your text out loud, be sure to get American , not English accent

http://www.mozilla.org/
browser, mail client - faster modern browser

http://www.nvu.com/
website design

http://www.gimp.org/windows/
photoshop for free -almost

http://www.winamp.com/
nice sound program - they don't pester you with unwanted junk like some other companies
http://www.jajsoft.com/products.html
records songs off internet radio - needs winamp

http://www.openoffice.org/
free office suite - if you want to do serious work with it, buy the book/guide for open office

http://www.coffeecup.com/
nice zip utility- ignore the ads

http://www.copernic.com/
highly rated desktop search - find that note you wrote six months ago to Aunt Tillie

Zazzle: Create stamps, cards, posters, etc.

Fun Stuff:
Express Yourself on every letter you send with your own designs or from other great artists and designers. Our stamps are real U.S. postage — and you cannot find these at your local post office. You can even add your own messages to the stamps.

Stamps come in sheets of 20 stamps, available in all denominations, $.37 for First Class mail, $.23 for Postcards, and all the way up to $3.85 for Priority Mail.

http://www.zazzle.com/products/default.asp

Deodorizing Light Bulbs - Not A Joke

Fresh2Ti is more than just a light bulb. It’s a fresh bulb – a revolutionary new product that breaks down odors while providing energy-efficient light. Simply turn on your light and fresh2Ti begins eliminating odors in just 10 minutes! Making it ideal for restrooms, closets, workout rooms and damp-smelling areas. And fresh2Ti will continue to break down odors for up to three years. Plus, since it's a compact fluorescent SpringLamp®, its power to light a room will last for 10,000 hours – saving you hundreds in deodorizing systems and up to 75% in energy costs. In short, the titanium dioxide coating on fresh2Ti creates a photocatalytic reaction when exposed to the fluorescent light produced by the bulb. This reaction releases electrons, or negatively charged particles. At the same time, a positively charged hole is formed in its place. This combination of negative and positive creates a very strong oxidizer called the hydroxide radical. Odors that come into contact with the positively charged holes are broken down by these oxidizers into odorless compounds.

Catalog Code: FC14/28914F2

Lack of Sleep Affects Doctors Like Alcohol

Scientific American
September 07, 2005

Working long hours is considered a hallmark of a medical residency. But in recent years, concerns have risen about how shifts that can last days affect a doctor's ability to function. The results of a new study quantify the negative effects and show that the performance of fatigued residents is comparable to how they would act after imbibing three or four cocktails."

nothing new under the sun ...

Mrs Jellyby, Dickens devotees may recall, is "a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa."

In Mrs Jellyby's own home, chaos prevails. The living room is strewn with papers. Tea is an hour late. One of her children, unattended, tumbles headlong down the stairs. Mrs Jellyby scarcely notices. Her eyes, Dickens tells us, "had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if they could see nothing nearer than Africa."

"The African project," Mrs Jellyby explains, "at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species. It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so [long as] it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day."

It may come as a surprise to Live 8 fans, but the top three reasons why most African countries are economic basket cases are not lack of aid, excessive debt service payments and protectionism by developed countries. They are in fact chronic misgovernment, recurrent civil war and the high incidence of diseases such as malaria and Aids. It is just possible that more aid, debt relief and freer trade could mitigate these problems. But experience is not encouraging.
click click for link to full article
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

Katrina facts?

"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

On the other hand:

"Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

'The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.'

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

plane wrecks

train wrecks

car wrecks

Hindsight is Perfect - Foresight is Lacking

Warning
Another great earthquake on the San Andreas fault could leave more than 240,000 Bay Area residents homeless, according to Jeanne Perkins, who leads the earthquake program for the Association of Bay Area Governments. “Logistically, it’s going to be a mess,” she says. And most of those who do become homeless won’t be prepared to rough it for a while. “In 1906, Bay Area folks had better survival skills, as they were only decades out of covered wagons,” says Eisner. “We have lost many of those skills.”

The Bay Area Red Cross is working hard to prepare for the hordes of people that would be forced out of their homes by a high-magnitude quake, and their plan has become a model for the rest of the country. But they will almost certainly fall short of taking care of everyone. “At some point it’s not the Red Cross’s responsibility. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s,” says Perkins. “I don’t think the typical person in the Bay Area understands that they really could be in a shelter. It could be your house, folks.”

Fewer than ten percent of the older houses in the region have been retrofit to meet earthquake building standards. Many of the row houses with living space above a garage so characteristic of San Francisco are unsafe. The large garage doors leave the front faces of the buildings unbraced, allowing side to side movement in an earthquake. Adding a steel brace to the garage is an easy fix, but few people have taken this step. Many other San Francisco structures are still vulnerable as well. “We have a big inventory of pre-1970 concrete buildings,” says Eisner. Many of them would collapse in a major earthquake.

Today there are more than 500 high-rises in San Francisco. Newer buildings have sprinkler systems that are connected to on-site water supplies, but nearly 400 of these skyscrapers, filled with thousands of people during work hours, lack their own water reserves. "