2011 — 13 March: Sunday
If the effects of a tiny rhinovirus are this tedious1 one has to wonder just how much "intelligence" is involved in the "design". I've even excavated the "inhalator" that Christa bought when she got fed up of me teasing her about the previous vapour technology (also known as a bowl with a towel over it). Still, I remember reading that the viruses of the nasal tract dislike temperatures a little above body heat.
Good (sniffle) night!
Fly Bright
Big Bro sent over a photo of one of his newest aircraft in lively livery...
... that (I suspect) only a marketing person could choose, or find ungarish. This is the first of four repaints, apparently. Though I thought a previous shot (here) of an Air India Boeing 777 was much tastier.
He also asked about progress on selling dear Mama's house and current status of said lady. Sorry, Bro. Nothing exciting to report on either front (though I did arrange to cancel her council tax and yesterday confirmed the rebate went into her account). If her bank is going to insist on inviting me to take an online survey every damn' time I use them I shall not be best pleased.
It's a grey, drizzly start here at 08:32 and well past time for my next cuppa. Still, at least I didn't keep waking up during the night unable to breathe2 — that always makes a nice change. Grrr.
(Too much) news to me
I was unaware of the unit "zettabyte"...
The current volume estimate of all electronic information is roughly 1.2 zettabytes, the amount of data that would be generated by everyone in the world posting messages on Twitter continuously for a century. That includes everything from e-mail to YouTube. More stunning: 75 percent of the information is duplicative.
Only 75%?
I was equally unaware of Scorsese's documentary on Fran Lebowitz, but I shall be keeping an eye out for it. I wonder what footage they've dredged up of SJ Perelman?
Speaking of dredging, this caught my eye:
I wonder if anyone did end up strung from a lamp-post? It's from a 1976 book Print and the people (1819 to 1851) that contains, among other things, an extract from the epic "Varney the vampyre" story that comfortably pre-dates the tale by Bram Stoker.
It's 12:14 which, by my reckoning, makes it time for "lemonses". [Pause] There's always time for an after-lunch daffodil. I think I prefer the shade of yellow here to the Ukrainian paint job. Click the pic for a bigger image:
Where's my cuppa, Mrs Landingham?
Who the hell is...
... Lady Gaga, and what has she done? Come to that, who's Meg Whitman? I'm so ignorant these days...
Lauvergeon may be the world's most effective proselytizer for nuclear energy. "Atomic Anne," as she's known, heads France's Areva, the largest builder of nuclear reactors on the planet. The 51-year-old executive, a perennial member of the Forbes most-powerful-women list (recently outranking Melinda Gates, Meg Whitman, and Queen Elizabeth, though trailing Lady Gaga), has been the guiding force behind her country's massive push into nuclear energy, which today fuels 75 percent of all its electricity.
I'm reminded of the delicious put-down I read years ago in New Scientist. It was used by a senior British civil servant to a brash young minister who'd been boasting of his achievements. It went along the lines of, "By the time I was your age, minister, I'd exploded a nuclear weapon."