Glenn McDavid

I just looked at a jug of milk in our refrigerator. The label says

Milk from cows not treated with rbST.

No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST treated and non-rbST treated cows.

I have often thought that phraseology sounded odd, and wondered why. I found out today when I read Monsanto's Harvest of Fear, which begins

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

Via Slashdot

Awareness of the problem with biofuels is spreading, but Sean Carroll speaks more to this geek than Paul Krugman or the editors of Time:

Funny thing about energy: it’s conserved! .... We bring you this reminder because a knowledge of basic physics can occasionally be helpful when formulating public policy.

In particular, biofuels (such as ethanol) and hydrogen are not actually sources of energy — given the vagaries of thermodynamics, it costs more energy to create them than we can get by actually using them, as there will inevitably be some waste heat and entropy produced.

From Energy Doesn’t Grow on Trees.

Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas.

via Let Easter be Easter.

Today is "Super Tuesday" in the U.S. political process. It is also, in the Western Church Calendar, Shrove Tuesday, the eve of Lent. Not a problem for the churches. There are no special liturgical observances for the day. Pancake suppers are frequently found, but they are social (and perhaps fund-raising) events with no sense of religious obligation. So I was not surprised to see a notice at my church that there would be nothing happening on Shrove Tuesday this year: We were all encouraged to do our civic duty and attended our political party caucuses. No problem.

However, outside of the churches, some people are more upset:( Read about Pancake day )

Staff at Woolworths baffled by fuss over the little girl’s bed called Lolita.

Via Ann Althouse.

Round one (so far) goes to Narnia

(See yesterday's post.)

Buy Nothing Day. From my old friend Sister Edith at Monastic Musings.

Once again I made it through "Black Friday" without spending any money.( Read more... )

An interesting and informative analysis by jeff_duntemann.

...yet.

Taking a Whack Against Comcast, via Little Old Lady Hammers Comcast.

More at Comcast Must Die, in particular

"I expect [Mona Shaw] to be on Jay Leno very, very soon. Why? Because she's old 'n' cute 'n' violent, and because we feel her rage."

jeff_duntemann notes

The larger problem with Harry is that monster retailers are using him as a loss-leader to bring people in the door, sometimes with a retail price so low it's lower than the wholesale price offered to smaller booksellers.

(If you let this monster in, you really cannot call it your computer any more)

Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems. Via Slashdot.

A great argument for open-source software!

Vivoleum, Solves Global Warming and Peak Oil

It’s new, it’s disgusting! And it fooled an oil industry group

Yes Men charged with trespassing after hoax at energy conference in Calgary

Some interesting follow-up at Slashdot

The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer.

"Min leaned back and stretched, then set about the tedious business of resurrecting his character, a drawn-out sequence of operations that can put a player out of action for as long as 10 minutes. In farms with daily production quotas, too much time spent dead instead of farming gold can put the worker’s job at risk. And in shops where daily wages are tied to daily harvests, every minute lost to death is money taken from the farmer’s pocket. But there are times when death is more than just an economic setback for a gold farmer, and this was one of them."

Via Slashdot.

The Salem Witch Cartel

I spend the last three days at an excellent class on SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft's latest and greatest database system). I am not an enthusiastic M'soft fan, but it is what we use at work, and I have enough battles to fight there already.

Anyway, a couple side notes:( Read more... )

The last couple days I was shopping for computer parts and visited two local stores that have used/reconditioned computers for sale. At the low end of the price ranges in both stores I saw the same model Pentium III Compaq DeskPro for sale. One store wanted $59 for it. The other was asking $149. Is the second just being greedy? They had more memory on the box. At current retail prices that would account for $20. It may have had a bigger hard disk--perhaps another $10-20 at current prices for old hard disks (I did a little checking). That still leaves $50-60. Pure profit? No--the more expensive store was selling a functional system with Windows 2000. The cheaper store was selling a nearly naked box. It had just enough pieces of DOS to boot. Looking at the current price of Windows, that is not unreasonable. So I really cannot fault the second store.

But, don't you need Windows? No, you don't. Linux is free. That $50-60 goes straight to Bill Gates.

I bought a few books at Penguicon, mainly because it was a chance to buy from an independent book dealer, and in fact a dealer I remembered from Chicagoland cons. Since the demise of Irish Books and Media I have become even more conscious of how small book sellers are threatened by the chains, and by you-know-who on the Internet.

Of course, this is not easy. Even with my rather odd interests, you-know-who has some books with a better price than I can find elsewhere. So I have to think about how much extra I am willing to pay to help the independents.

Today haddayr got me off the hook on one such case: She showed me where the book in question (or at least the text thereof) was available free on the Internet. But I cannot really count on that happening very often.

Global Solutions to Personal Problems.

They are to be launched into space, but what then? Celestis, the company that arranges for handling the cremation ashes, suggests that they are going into orbit. However, the firm that is providing the rocket clearly states that their vehicles are only capable of suborbital flights. More at Bad Astronomy.

Orbital or suborbital? James Doohan and Gordon Cooper certainly understood the difference, and I think it would matter to them.