soapbox

“Hedgehogs do not like tidy gardens.”

Be it due to increasingly diligent Brits, seeking to do their part to help London land the 2012 Summer Olympics, or some other reason, the cute wee little spiky guys are in trouble. Roadside surveys in England have seen a decline of over 20% in the last four years, and that could be a cautious estimate based on observation techniques (as suggested by the Leicester Hedgehog 2003 Survey).

58% of households fed the hedgehogs coming into their garden with 77% of these using cat food. The other 23% fed their hedgehogs hedgehog food such as ‘Spikes Dinner’, dog food, or household scraps. The message that bread and milk are bad for hedgehogs seems to have mostly got through with only 3 people saying that they put out bread, and one person leaving out milk.
One person confessed to putting out cake for her prickly visitors!

So, I’m all for nuclear power as a viable alternative energy source, and, done properly, it can really be viable, but not the way Bush proposes it.

For instance, take this bit on Bush’s energy plan, as he presented it to the G8 folks today. Now, we all know the troubles of traditional uranium/plutonium style reactors, what with their waste products, potential runaway reactions, and possible sources of weapons-grade fuels.

What I don’t understand is how come none of the political big dogs are behind the thorium-fueled alternative that provides cheap, safe, clean power with less insertion cost than the massive Generation IV (PDF link) plutonium plants the US Department of Energy is promoting.

Just some early-evening food-for-thought…

Today’s list of TTS:
(1) spending a month getting the experimental apparatus tweaked just so, such that we finally get a decent looking curve, then making one small adjustment that shouldn’t change anything, and all of a sudden the slope goes to hell. [solution: Wilder needs to be taller when I jump off it]

(2) Adelphia. If you have questions you can ask Nick, he’s had to deal with them too… but basically they’re taking way too much advantage of their monopoly in the upper valley, offering shitty and over-priced “service”. [solution: satellite dish, baby! 800,000,000 channels of crap!]

(3) Intentionally crippled cell-phones/other products:
Some people over in Tuck would call it SMP - Strategic Market Pricing and Positioning. Everybody’s doing it for all sorts of stuff - digital cameras, dvd-burners, car engines/chips, CPUs, mp3 players, video games - but that doesn’t make it ok.
“Selling a device that is intentionally crippled is just plain ridiculous. Of course, the only natural thing to do in a situation like this is to hack it.”
[solution: hack the stupid thing]
The above link describes how to fix the Motorola v265, but don’t get your hopes up… “Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless announced it too will carry the Treo 650. We already know that Verizon’s Treo 650 will be different than Sprint’s in one way: In the fine print, Verizon states it intends to suppress OBEX functionality. ”
nice going, jackasses.

Ah, the list of carnage from the observing run:
numerous ladybugs
3 daddy long legs
3 unidentified spiders
1 centipede
1 rabbit
1(?) bird

alas, yes, i failed the challenge of the “sunrise bunny gauntlet” that is the trek down from the mountain. i almost hit one (did a nice little skid), and a couple miles later, one just ran right out in front of the tire. i didn’t have time to react. a few more miles later, a bird flew across the road, and instead of moving on when it saw me, for some reason it decided, hey, why don’t i hit that windshield there? ann said she thought it went up over the van then, but i thought (not that my mind is terrible reliable at that point) that i saw it fall down over the front of the van. it almost seemed like he didn’t hit that hard. windshield was fine. i just hope there’s no blood, fur, or feathers on the van. i forgot to check when we got out.

Item #1: A Russian astrologer is suing NASA b/c of the Deep Impact Mission, which “ruined the natural balance of forces in the Universe“. Actually, it’s nothing new for science to be under attack from psuedo-science crackpots, but I think NASA will win this one b/c it has nothing to do with evolution/GW/American stupidity?

#2: I really don’t know what to make of this. Zosia, care to chime in with a Swedish perspective? I mean, I’m a fan of appreciation of beauty, but I thought some people might be creeped out?

#3: “(MOUNDSVILLE, W.Va.) — The parents of a five-month old child face charges after the mother allegedly tried to get marijuana to the father by smuggling it into the Northern Regional Jail in the baby’s diaper.” hmmm, contact buzz?