Tales of a vagrant ant

Feeling a bit random right now… brain’s a bit zonkified from being at home for too long, i think… I’ve been in my PJs all day, even though i woke up “early”, at 9am… It gets a bit crazy when your mom is going through menopause, and is relatively irritable.

I keep collecting all these interesting and weird articles on the net, but i forget to actually post them… so here goes nothing:

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time before they did this… hehehe

But I didn’t think that musical breast implants were just a matter of time, but apparently they are.

And lastly, a website documenting bad scrabble hands that people have gotten. How silly is that.

That is all.

Ohh, I’ve probably plugged this to death, but if you want to look at pictures i’ve taken, come visit my site on flickr. There’s a little doodad on the sidebar (under the calendar) to see some thumbnails of recent photos. I know it works on my computer… does it work for everybody else?

This is why the internet is so scary these days… I’ve always been sketched out by the power of google, in its overreaching access to personal information:
During each visit to Google or any other Internet site, a visitor’s computer reveals a numerical address assigned by the user’s Internet provider. The site can store that information, along with the date and time of the visit. This information can be used by researchers, marketers, or investigators to trace the visitor’s identity.
So anything you search on google, emails you send in gmail or directions you look up on google maps, can theoretically be traced back to your computer. Then there’s Google Print, Google video, Google Talk and Google Desktop toolbar, and they also own Blogger. I can’t even begin to fathom how much information they possess right now… And google keeps much of this information… but for what purpose? They haven’t been really nefarious yet, but I think that under its colourful rainbow-lettered facade lies something ominous. And now that the US government is subpoenaing Google to provide 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. They say they want “the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.”, but who knows how else they might try to use that information.
So if you looked up “what to do about my itchy scalp”, they could know that it was you who had an itchy scalp…. okay, bad examples, but you see the implications of this subpoena…

All that said, I am still using google (ugh), partly because there isn’t really any other comparable competitor, in terms of

It’s a little heartening to hear that Google is refusing to comply to the demands by the US government, but with Google stocks taking a beating on the market, who knows what may happen…

Something else scary to think about: The conservatives taking to power in Canada, and acting in tandem of U.S gov’t policies, on things like the Kyoto protocol, abortion rights, marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and just being flung into the far right depths of conservatism…
Blargh….

Organ Printing
Wow, using special printers to print organ tissue… really scary stuff, but lots of potential in questionably more ethical ways of aquiring organs for medical research, or maybe even applications in cruelty-free “meat printers”. Not the most appealing to think about, but a potentially valid route to go.