Just another nerd.
According to the World Food Program, the former-Soviet republic of Tajikistan is on the verge of massive starvation. Up to 1 million people are at risk of starvation following a severe draft that caused the nation’s grain harvest to fail so thoroughly that the country currently has only about 25 percent of the food it needs to avoid starvation.
Source:
New starvation warning in Tajikistan. The BBC, November 24, 2000.
The BBC reports that Iran beat Guam by a score of 19-0 in a World Cup qualifying match. Iran held the previous record for a qualifying score when it beat Maldives 17-0 in 1998.
Grunts: A Fantasy With Attitude
By Mary Gentle
Imagine a world where JRR Tolkein wrote a fantasy novelization of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The result might read something like Mary Gentle’s phenomenal fantasy novel, Grunts. Gentle takes the fantasy standards of the constant struggle between good and evil, and turns it on its head by telling her story from the point of view of everyone’s favorite fantasy fodder, the lowly orc.
While on a mission to steal magical treasure from the local dragon on behalf of the Nameless Necromancer, a small group of orcs winds up with modern military weapons — and, thanks to a curse from the dragon, a U.S. Marine-style approach to war.
The first part of the book is a well-done straightforward parody of fantasy novels similar in some ways to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. The orcs run around ordering their enemies to surrender “in the name of the Nameless,” while preparing for the latest installment in the Final Battle of the Army of Light Against the Horde of Darkness. The heroes on the good side are so smug in their goodness, the reader is rooting for the orcs to off them.
The last 2/3rds of the novel is more of a sendup of World War II action movies, and the inanities of modern politics. The Dark One decides he’s had enough with the endless battles between Light and Dark and announces that instead he wants to settle the whole matter once and all with an election (of course the evil lord promises free health care and high taxes), while the orcs busily construct their own military-industrial complex in the middle of the fantasy world.
Normally I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels — for example, I can’t stand reigning king of fantasy Robert Jordan’s books — but Grunts is one of the most hilarious and well-plotted novels I’ve read in a very long time. Although the book is slotted in the fantasy genre, it’s really just an all around excellent satire that works on many levels and just happens to occur in a Tolkein-esque setting.
There is only one caveat I have in recommending Grunts. If you’ve seen Full Metal Jacket you know the movie isn’t very appropriate for young people. Neither is Grunts. The violence is non-stop and described very graphically, along with quite a few sexually explicit scenes, including a few sadomasochistic scenes. They work within the novel, but this probably isn’t the book to give your 13 year old nephew.
Other than that, this is one of the best novels I’ve read in years.
CNN reports that Microsoft today released a patch to fix some security problems with Windows Media Player.
In my opinion, Windows Media Player is the biggest piece of crap software that I’ve had the misfortune to find on my PC in a long time. My wife and I bought a laptop a year ago primarily to use for light word processing tasks on the road. It’s got an AMD K6 233mhz processor and 32 mb of RAM. Not exactly high performance, but perfect running a text editor and doing some light web browsing. And, until I installed Windows Millennium, nice for listening to CDs with headphones while I’m working on an article.
Now, though, inserting a CD automatically starts up the Windows Media Player which just destroys any hope of actually using the computer — in fact WMP is such a resource hog that the laptop isn’t even able to play the CD except in fits and starts.
And it’s not just the laptop. WMP does run after a fashion on my 900mhz Athlon with 256 mb of memory, but again it seriously (unacceptably) degrades system performance.
One of these days I’ll get around to uninstalling it.
What role will genetically modified fish play in supplying the world with the fish it wants to eat while at the same time ensuring that declining wild fish stocks get replenished? The answer seems to depend a great deal on who you talk to.
According to Yonathan Zohar, of the University of Maryland’s Biotechnology Institute, GM fish are the wave of the future. As Zohar notes, the genetic makeup of almost every other species of livestock has been modified heavily throughout the past few millennia except fish. That is all about to change as several efforts to create genetically modified fish push forward.
A U.S. biotech firm, AF Protein, has developed a GM salmon that grows about 10 times faster than normal fish. Work is underway around the world to modify at least 25 different aquatic species including flounder, carp, lobster and shrimp.
Of course these efforts face enormous opposition from anti-biotech activists who have resorted to property destruction and other acts of violence to stop such development. The United Nations, meanwhile, is skeptical that GM fish can make any impact on the 60 to 70 percent of fisheries that are threatened. Of course the United Nations has yet to make much of a dent in that problem either, largely because it favors hard to enforce bureaucratic-minded treaties rather than property rights schemes that would give fisherman incentives to allow wild fish stocks to replenish.
Source:
GM ‘solution’ to over-fishing. The BBC, September 29, 2000.
A weblog I’ve been visiting a lot lately is Adam Curry’s site. To be honest, I always thought he was incredibly annoying on MTV, but his ideas about the future of the Internet and computing are almost identical with mine — his essay on a Last Yard-style server is exactly what I’ve been slowly moving to on my LAN at home.
Anyway, Curry recently mentioned sitting down with the Dutch prime minister to discuss some web-related issues. Curry writes,
Let me tell you, nothing more fun than explaining weblogs to the prime minister, who only one year ago was ridiculed publicly when caught on tape trying to move a mouse across the screen. Yes, literally move it accross the screen.
I saw something like this happen at the first job I had out of college. I was hired by a medical laundry facility that had just bought a computerized inventory system and needed someone to implement the system and train users in the many hospitals they serviced.
Anyway, the boss was always asking me to help him solve other computer related problems, and one day he buzzed me in my office saying there was something seriously wrong with the new Excel for Windows software that I’d installed earlier in the day on his computer. It wouldn’t let him select cells he said. So I meander over to his office and the problem is that he literally could not “click” the mouse. He sort of did this stabbing motion at the butotn where he held his hand a few inches above the mouse and quickly depressed the button like he was playing a video game. He quickly went back to his Lotus software running under DOS.
On the other hand, the man had a knack with people that I’ve never seen before or since. I used to have to travel all over the state with him to visit hospitals and he sped like crazy — and got pulled over by police regularly. But he never got a ticket. One time I swear he was pulling a Jedi mind trick on this one cop when he got off with just a warning after being clocked at 20 over the speed limit. And he knew it — he wasn’t cocky, but when he got pulled over he had this aura about him that it was simply inconceivable that he could be ticketed.