Digital Analogue

Reading material

I've gotten a number of slides done, but my day has been pretty boring. Here is some reading material to tide y'all over:

Sunlight surgery may replace lasers?

Apparently some Israeli scientists have figured out that they can use sunlight, magnifying glass-on-ants style, as a safer and cheaper alternative to lasers in burning away tumours. Way cool, eh?

Exegesis 6 on Perl6 development.

Technical, but a fun read if you've ever programmed perl before (and especially if you've taken a programming languages class). I am simply giddy from all the neat new features they discuss, even if I'm not convinced they'll be able to efficiently implement them. Still, I'm an optimist. :)

How Bush shuns the media.

Self-explanatory, really. Highlight: "Mr Bush had held just eight solo news conferences in his two-and-a-half years in power. At the same stage of their terms, Bill Clinton had held 33 such events and the first President Bush 61."

Israel to block naturalising spouses of Israelis---at least if those spouses are Palestinian.

The Knesset is currently debating not granting Israeli citizenship to Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens, although spouses of other nationalities will receive citizenship as before. The official justification---that the past 16,000 such citizens included 20 terrorists---stinks to high heaven, and the unofficial justification---that most of those marriages are to Arab Israelis, and Arabs have more children than Jews do---is even worse. The 20 are a small fraction of the total number of terrorists entering the country; and the 16,000 are a small fraction of the total number of immigrants to the country (most of the rest being Jewish). Lovely.

"IIRC, "hepatitis" is just itis of the hepa. That is, an inflamed liver." --Sam Walker