From the "Hope I Die Before I Get Old" Dept.

In case you're old enough to wonder, here's a report on how many of the original Woodstock performers are still alive: The Woodstock Death Count | Jeff Kay’s West Virginia Surf Report!

Repeat after me. "I don't know what to say."

A guy in Finland, who lost part of a finger in an accident last year, has the missing tip replaced with a prosthetic finger that has a USB flash drive inside.

And, in the odd chance that you wanted to see more, there's more.

Story from Register Hardware

Why Holden needs three pharmacy chains

Just a reminder that the good folks of Holden are struggling along, bearing up under great privation, with only two national pharmacy chains (Rite-Aid and CVS) in town. A third, Walgreens, is under construction on Main Street.

	Only at Walgreens can you celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior with a 4 ft. Lighted Airblown Inflatable Bunny.
	At Rite-Aid, with Altered State nitric oxide supplement, perhaps you can build the muscle that would let you roll away the stone, but the product info doesn't say that it works when you're dead.
	Meanwhile, at CVS, you can get an Animated Easter Friend. They're not even calling it a bunny.But, it's animated, so it's got life and life is what Easter's all about, isn't it?

Math lesson

Abbott and Costello do the math, explaining how credit default swaps work.

A repost from Intellectual Property & Business Law.

A side order of naproxen with lunch, dear?

When last we left our brush pile, it looked like this:

Lots of folks were burning this weekend, the first calm days that we've had in many weeks. The firefighter who inspected our burn site said that there were seven firefighters issuing permits, each with a list of 25 homes to visit.

With the town fire department's approval, we burned most of our brush pile yesterday, reducing the pile by about 80%.

At quitting time, we doused the flame and cooled the coals with water from hose, mixed with tears from Al Gore.

Moving the contents of a brush pile across the yard to the burn site involves some muscles that don't get exercised regularly. We each had a couple of Aleve^® with our lunch in anticipation of the aches that were sure to come (and they did).
It's humbling to remember that there are lots of people, our ages and older, who work this hard and harder every day. We shouldn't get extra credit for this amount of work, but we do have the satisfaction of reducing a big pile of brush to a small patch of charcoal.

We still have clean-up work to do, the aforementioned brush pile, larger branches that will require the chain saw, and a pile of stuff over by the fence that's still frozen into the ground. All in due time.

Old age begins at 27

New research tells us that cognitive decline begins at 27. Emblematic of "Hope I die before I get old," then is the 27 Club, the roster of musicians and others who died at age 27, presumably lest they become old and stoopid.
It's a bit disturbing to think of Jimi Hendrix, who played his guitar with his teeth, having to use dentures:

Lasers against mosquitoes? Sound good to me.

Noah missed his chance to do some real good for us. He could have left the mosquitoes behind. Sure, bats and frogs might have had to find other sources of food, but I'm sure they could have evolved.
Anyway, the earth has these little bits of flying misery - a nuisance at best, deadly at worst. But, we've got lasers. The Wall Street Journal reports that scientists are experimenting with using lasers to knock off mosquitoes, one by one (emphasis mine), with lasers.

We'd be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power," says Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist who once worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

I think that you'd have to be a pretty good shot, but Monty Python has already shown us how it could be done.


via Scientists shoot down malaria-carrying mosquitoes with frickin' lasers

Scott Adams has been reading my resume

Today's Dilbert sums up life (and my career) in high-tech product development. There's nothing much that needs to be added, nothing taken away.

Worcestershire Journal - News, not news, rinse, repeat - Part 2

The current breathless brouhaha regarding bloggers, the future of newspapers and the news industry, the World Wide Web, and the Twittersphere is just one more round in a centuries-old struggle to define what it means to think and act on those thoughts in society.

Worcestershire Journal - News, not news, rinse, repeat - Part 2 : Real Worcester - Worcester News and Blogs

Destroy world financial markets? Good job. Here's your bonus.

We learn that AIG will pay $450 Million in bonuses to the gys in the Financial Services business (WSJ, subscription) to the guys who ran the credit default swaps and other hustles that we've had to pay $173.3 billion in aid to keep the parent company from imploding. CEO Edward Liddy said that the compay is contractually obligated to pay these bonuses. "Honoring contractual commitments is at the heart of what we do in the insurance business."
At first, I start to mutter stuff such as "What color is the sky in the world that these people inhabit?" or "How do they accept these checks and not laugh until they wet their pants?" Then, I got angry, thinking that it's beyond arrogant and into the realm of criminal.
Now,  don't know what I thnk or feel.
Maybe this is "Springtime for Hitler," some sleazy guys who set out to do the most awful thing that they can imagine and make more money than if God was selling Girl Scout cookies. Maybe the outrage and confusion is meant to dull our senses so that we'll be too wiped out to respond to an even greater outrage.