No cavalry … and no calvary either … is going to ride over the hilltop and save us. We can only keep healthy, keep learning and keep doing the best we can for each other. Yeah, it matters today. And it’s always today.

THANKS for alerting me to another source of XKCD madness!

All pets were at one time wildlife. Killing one to save it… wow.

It’s gross, fraudulent as three-card monte, and … as with many corporate tricksters … there needs to be a law with prison terms.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was ‘wrong’ by less than an order of magnitude … compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What’s the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

A new Linux OS may emit unfamiliar sounds if some network app is still running and set to use them for notifications. Quitting the (sound-making) app(s) and/or the network connection will can avoid that problem. Of course you can just turn the sound volume all the way down.

Suspended OSs may sometimes ‘wake up for no reason’ if some vibration causes the mouse, for example, to jiggle around enough.

Logging out of your user account before suspending/sleeping the machine will stop that stuff without having to dig thru settings. Faster to log back in than to reboot.

Hard to define ‘hard’, a few more I liked: (no ranking)

• The Time Machine (both the Pal and the Wells films; quite different)

• Dark City (1998, Pryas)

• Forbidden Planet (1956, Wilcox)

• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Wise)

• Fifth Element (hilarious, Besson, 1997)

• Alien (Scott, 1979)

• 13th Floor (Rusnak, 1999)

• Stargate (1994, Emerich)

• Steamboy (2004, Otomo)

Movies made from famed series I’d REALLY LIKE to see:

• Ringworld (Niven, a crime noone’s DARED to try).

• Some setting of Riverworld. (Farmer)

• ANY of Neal Stephenson’s SF books, esp. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem.

(Not even the BBC? I mean, who expected Doctor Who to get THIS far?!)