elfs | Meanderings

I was amused at the "introduction" of the word "killography" to the lexicon, following on the low-brow "killology" thesis put forth by several hucksters that games like Grand Theft Auto and others are teaching our kids to "kill without feeling it." It's a stupid neologism, one that doesn't quite have the resonance of the original neologism, carnography, which was first coined to describe the 1972 novel "First Blood," on which the Rambo series is founded. I'm amused to find that I share a fondness for the word with Eric Raymond. (I note with amusement that "carnography" is apparently also a slang term in advertising for a top-of-the-line car ad.)

Wordspy is a great resource, though, if you go wander around. Sometimes they disappoint: only yesterday did they discover "uncanny valley," a term that's been in the Furry community for years and has even appeared in a Journal Entry. Two days earlier the word of the day was "blogosphere." On the other hand, they do have "time porn," "domestic pornography," and "gastroporn"; if porn depicts what we want but cannot have, then images of free time, perfect households, and excellent food qualify.

Hey, USAMRIID has sucessfully conducted a full-scale study of Ebola vaccinations in mice. Cool. One less disease to worry about eventually.

And while it's a press release, there's a new antiobiotic call cystapep that seems to work even when cystatin, that "last ditch" antibiotic, fails. We are again one step (and only one step) ahead of drug-resistant staphylococci and related diseases.

Well, we knew this: Pretty women addle men's minds. Only now it's been demenstrated. After looking at the faces of pretty girls, men are more likely to seek short-term financial gains over more substantial long-term financial gains. The researchers guess that exposure to a pretty face encourages a man to immediately think in terms of resource acquisition, and the human brain never evolved to handle the influx of pretty faces that come from media.

The hormone MSH (melanocyte-stimulating hormone) is significantly elevated in many obese people, and high levels of it in the blood are related to routine overeating. Now it turns out that high levels of it can cause insulin resistance and Type-2 diabetes. If this relationship is proven, the biochemical link between obesity and insulin-resistance diabetes will be established.

And the coolest news of the day: Researchers manufacture carbon nanotube fibers. If this can be turned into an industrial process, we'll have the 130KPc tensile-strength lines we need to string a cable from orbit to surface. And we only need one, as thin as dental floss, on which to anchor a space elevator, because once you've got one, you can send cable-spinning machines up and down, making it thicker and stronger. NASA now thinks that 2050 is the target date for practical use. We'll see.