Dan’s Data has an extensive review of Konami’s DigiQ Tanks — mini-IR remote battle tanks that you can pit against each other in battle. Only downside is they will cost you about $50-$60/tank on E-Bay (not yet released in the United States), which is a lot to pay for something that’s not even 3 inches long.
Category: Uncategorized
Why Not Just Make a Buffy Movie?
Apparently Seth Green is joining the cast of Scooby Doo 2. WTF? Okay, it is inconceivable to me given how bad the first Scooby film was that anyone would greenlight a sequel. Second, since Sarah Michelle Gellar’s career is going to last about as long as her hubbie’s one BTVS is finished, why not just replace the entire cast with Buffy regulars and make a film people might actually show up to see instead of this pointless sequel?
Get High Traffic — Malformed HTML Is The Key
Over the past few weeks, the traffic to my AnimalRights.Net site really started going through the roof and I was at a loss to explain why. There hadn’t been any major news developments in the animal rights area, and with the war on Iraq stories about animal rights activists seem to have been down somewhat (reporters busy elsewhere). So why the higher traffic?
It turned out I had a tabloid and the Dixie Chicks to thanks. Of course the Dixie Chicks earned a lot of ink for their stand on the war in Iraq, and as part of that it came out that the Chicks had posed for one of those “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads posted by PETA. Then they chickened out and told PETA never to release it.
Anyway, this tabloid whose web site receives a lot more traffic than mine wrote a story about the controversy that included a thumbnail graphic of the ad which you could click on to see a bigger version and a link to a page on my site about PETA.
But the HTML was malformed so if you clicked on the picture, as thousands and thousands of peopel did, you got sent directly to my site rather than the site containing the larger version of the JPEG.
I wish I could get bigger sites to do that more often!
China Takes a Beating Over SARS Intransigence
China’s reputation in the world community has taken a beating over its failure to promplty and accurately report about case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in its country.
World Health Organization Director-General Gro Harlme Brundltnat criticized the Chinese government recently for failing to report on SARS cases in China until after the disease had become a worldwide epidemic.
In fact, China was so paranoid about SARS that it lied to its own citiziens and blocked some communications without the outside world in a feeble attempt to prevent information about SARS going either in or out.
The first SARS cases occured in China’s southern Guangdong province in November 2002, but China did not allow experts from WHO visit the area until late March 2003.
Even now China can’t seem to help but lie about the diseae. It claims taht 19 people have been infeced with the disease in Beijing, for example, and that 4 of them have died. But the BBC quotes unidentified health workers in Beijing as saying that at least 100 people have been infected with the emerging virus.
As far as the virus itself is concerned, it is intersting to compare its emergence and the reaction to the disease with the doomsaying nightmares of yesteryear of civilization-killing diseases. Once cases started appearing outside of Chian it took almost no time at all for health warnings and travel advisories to go into place. Heatlh agencies spread the word and took extra precautions agaist the disease. Within a few months researchers had posted genetic information online about the virus — a scene straight out of a science fiction film.
Yes the world’s vulnerability to the spread of emerging diseases is now greater than ever before, but so are the tools and methods we have to deal with such outbreaks.
Sources:
China accused of Sars ‘cover-up’. The BBC, April 9, 2003.
WHO Criticizes China on SARS reporting. VOA News, April 7, 2003.
World Health Organization: Infectious Diseases Kill More than 5 Million Children Annually
World Health Organization representative Dr. James mwazia recently issued a statement for World Health Day noting that infectious diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and others kill more than 5 million children each year.
The sad irony is that these diseases are easily preventable and treatable but, children in the developing world still die from them because of poor medical infrastructure, official corruption, and the whole host of other ills associate with too many governments in the developing world.
But don’t worry, that won’t stop WHO from spending resources tackling obesity in the developed world. No sir, even WHO has to keep its priorities straight.
Source:
Illness accounts for 5 million deaths. The Independent (Banjul, The Gambia) April 7, 2003.
World Health Organization: TB Control in Africa Improving, But Not Fast Enough
The World Health Organization recently issued a press release stating that the detection and treatment of tuberculosis in Africa has show improvement in recent years but still falls far short of global targets for controlling the disease.
Dr. Eugene Nyarko, WHO Adviser for TB in the African Region, said that over the last decade the detection rate of TB has increased in Africa from 32 percent to 52 percent and that successful treatment of the disease had increased from 59 percent to 70 percent.
The level of reporting of tuberculosis in Africa had almost doubled from 83 cases per 100,000 population a decade ago to 164 cases per 100,000 population in 2001.
But despite that success, Nyarko said, Africa is still short of world targets,
These are all encouraging statistics, although some of the figures still fall short of the global targets. For example, the overall treatment success rate for infectious forms of lung of 70 percent fall short of the global target of 85 percent, while the current case detection rate of 52 percent falls short of the global target of 70 percent.
According to WHO’s latest estimates, almost two million Africans contract TB every year, and 600,000 people die as a result of the disease.
Source:
Indicators for TB Control in Africa Improve, But Still Fall Short of Global Targets. World Health Organization, Press Release, April 7, 2003.