According to this story, the practice of dentistry hasn’t always been the walk in the park it is today…

A Neolithic graveyard found at Mehrgarh, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, shows that Stone-age dentists used to have a go at curing toothache by using drills made from flint heads.

In a word… Yikes! I suppose it’s better than extracting them all and then starving because back then nobody knew how to make mush. But only just barely. My preference would be to take the topical anaesthetic followed by a few cc’s of novocaine.

Apparently the region has enough blood, since they’re turning down people who didn’t make an appointment to donate blood during the blood drive on campus today. But they said I could go over to the Red Cross facility (a couple of miles from campus). “They usually can handle walk-ins,” I was told.

I’m sure it would be more convenient for the Red Cross to know exactly how many people will come in.

I’m also sure Wal*Mart would like to know how many blue widgets they’ll sell tomorrow. But they manage to get along without perfect knowledge. And since selling blue widgets isn’t really all that important compared to saving lives, which organization do you suppose would be more capable of improvising, adapting, and overcoming life’s vicissitudes?

It’s not like they were giving the stuff away. Back in 2002 it cost $215/pint. (Or $215 for the blood and another $465 to process it; I can’t make sense of the press release, due not to its writer but its subject matter, i.e., medical costs are involved.)

I use an analog sheet of paper instead of my personal digital assistant to manage my todo list. A friend recommended I upgrade from the blank pages I currently use to a hand-crafted page from pocketmod.com. Maybe I will.

I have a PDA that I use mainly for my vocabulary flashcards and playing Bejeweled. Once in a long while I have an appointment or a phone number to look up and it does that too. But it’s lousy for keeping lists of things to do.

• Partly this is because my Apple-branded to-do software is lousy. (Lousy as to-do software. As a calendar it’s not half bad. Better than the one that my PDA has, and that’s a whole separae problem.)
• Partly its because it takes forever to sync my PDA with my iBook. To sync at all requires third-party software, which runs fine until it starts running the Apple conduits.
• But mostly it’s because the input methods on the PDA range from lousy (typing on the on-screen keyboard) to worse (handwriting using Graffiti 2.0).

Instead, I put next to my PDA in my shirt pocket either a 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper folded in half vertically then thirds horizontally, or, sometimes, a 3.5″x5″ index card. I can write anything I want on them, including diagrams. That’s where I generally manage my todos.

Now a friend has pointed me to PocketMod, “the free disposable personal organizer.” I’ve played with it and it’s pretty cool. Give it a try.
Continue reading →

I just upgraded WordPress to 2.0.2. It’s a security upgrade, so if I knew what XSS was I’d probably be breathing a lot easier now. But upgrading went very smoothly.

I took advantage of the confusion to move the blog from its old site at buzzword.org to its own shiny new domain here. Just doing my part for namespace congestion.

I lost my themes and plug-ins, but that was (more or less) deliberate. I’ll fix that in my copious spare time.

I picked up Batman Begins for $11.96 at Sam’s Club the other day and w00t! it’s the best Batman movie ever.
Continue reading →

During reading week I watched the pilot episodes and six subsequent episodes from Season 1 of Lost. It’s an okay show, and if I watched TV in real-time (over the air) this is the sort of thing that could nibble away at your weeknights until you realized you had none left. But. I watch TV only when I’m exercising on my elliptical trainer, and never broadcast, only DVD. (“Fortunately, I am immune.” -Spock)

Continue reading →