(no subject)

Dear all advertisers everywhere selling everything from booze to paint,

Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.
Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.
Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.
Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.
Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.
Do not use pictures of women's torsos without their faces.

It's the twenty-first century. Try to keep up, you idiots.

Yours,
- me

(no subject)

Nobody actually asked me any questions, which makes me suspect I have already given more than sufficient information about myself - either that or my gentle readers thought I was just making fun of the meme. :-)

(no subject)

Last year I found out, while critting someone else's SF, that fusion reactions create radioactive waste. As I was one of those SF readin' teens who grew up thinking of fusion power as the Philosopher's Stone, this was a shock, and I wondered why I hadn't learned it before. (Or was I busy writing fanfic during that lecture in first year chemistry?)

Two letters in the 3 December 2005 New Scientist reminded me of this discovery, but the editor has some reassuring facts: the fusion reactor would only be a tenth as radioactive as spent uranium rods; and the materials would have a much shorter half-life ("The radioactivity of a fusion reactor is predicted to drop by a factor of 10,000 within 100 years, compared to a factor of 5 for a conventional nuclear power plant.")

A more serious problem is that it may be decades before any fusion reactor will be up and running (and I heard on the radio today that it will be a decade before "clean coal" technology is available). We can't afford to wait - clean power is available right now, this house is running on it, and cutting down the amount of power we actually use is often as much a matter of will as of technology.