I have my one fully automatic Pentax MZ5 and I love it. It's light, it's fast, and it has a decent, if a bit on the slow side, lens. It's nice for doing action shots - shot that D.O.A mini-concert and I'm pretty happy with the results. My little $400 full auto Pentax gives me 15 megapixel resolution if I scan the negatives in my 3600 dpi transparency scanner. In conjunction with good film shot in a fashion I've been able to nail down through experimentation, I get some incredible shots. Buy a 15 megapixel digital camera? No.

Photography and Why Digital Cameras Suck

The US will have two days to apply for parts of the testimony to be removed from the public record if it considers them harmful to US national interests.

This is refering to the testamony of former Nato commander Wesley Clark in front of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. They're currently trying Slobodan Milosevic.

I'm wondering what the US is afraid he's going to say. For that matter how the hell they managed to arange for this "unprecedented agreement"?

Milosevic 'as petulant as ever'

] Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his
] colleagues propose a simple modification of random
] vaccination that is more effective, according to their
] computer simulations. The idea is to randomly choose,
] say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one
] acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances.
] Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of
] acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at
] least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the
] super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20%
] of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.

Vaccinate Thy Neighbor

NOBODY CAN SAVE YOU.
WE WILL ALL BE EATEN.

Who Will Be Eaten First?

If you are involved in Raves you are in great spiritual danger. Raves are ungodly environments rampant with sin. Flee this lifestyle, repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ before it is eternally too late !!

I have no love for bad house music and pink fur pants... but this is ridiculous.

Electronic music, and dancing, and ecstasy and all that, are what they are. Each person's spirituality is what it is. And personally, if there is a God, I don't believe that he/she who would create a world so beautiful and full of cool stuff, if he/she had intended us not to enjoy it. And if that was his/her intention, then I don't believe sutch a petty and asshole-ish God deserves to be worshiped.

Hrm. I hadn't intended to get on my soapbox, but this is something I feel strongly about, so I'm leaving it there.

Truth About Rave

A tiny fossil of a creature that lived some 425 million years ago has entered the record books as the oldest unequivocally male animal. The organism, which resembles a cross between a shrimp and a clam, sports a large penis which has been perfectly preserved in three dimensions.

I'm not sure why this amuses me so much...

Tiny fossil found to have the world's oldest known penis

] They live - and die - on a traffic island in the middle
] of a busy downtown street, surviving by panhandling
] drivers or turning tricks. Everyone in their colony is
] hooked on drugs or alcohol. They are the harsh face of
] the homeless in San Francisco.

Rattle: First of a five part series on San Francisco's homeless problem. Don't miss the pictures.

The entire series, so far, is pretty non-sensationalistic and well written. Living in SF kind of teaches you to ignore the homeless, and an ocational fresh perspective is a good thing.

SFGate | Shame Of The City / Homeless Island

Federal health officials are debating whether it's time to put emergency contraception — the so-called "morning-after pill" — on pharmacy shelves right next to the aspirin, available without a prescription.

This is huge and important for a number of reasons:

1) Emergency Contraception needs to be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex or contraceptive failure. And the sooner the better. Being able to run to the store right after you realize the condom broke beats the pants out of calling your doctor's office, getting them to call in a prescription the next morning, etc.

2) Although formally a teenager's medical records are not accessable to their parents, it isn't always possible to call up the family doctor without parents finding out. And getting out to the drug store is much easier to explain than trying to get to Planned Parenthood or another community health clinic.

'Morning-after pill' over the counter? FDA considers it

] Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in
] Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his
] amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to
] be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: "We live
] in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured
] by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by
] religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing,
] What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with
] pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people
] using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not
] distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an
] astonishing power: that of creating whole universes,
] universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same
] thing."

An interesting article about the proliferation of Dickian tales in modern society. I'm amazed at how he was so right (mood organ anyone?) and other sci-fi greats such as Clark and Bradbury were so wrong (ahem... 2010...). Proof positive that you can see the future. Which makes me feel much better in some ways and much worse in others.

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

Pictures of Magnetic Liquids being pulled around by electro-magnetics. Pretty interesting images of the topography of magnetism. Site is slow, good things come to those who wait.

Magnetic Fields