short takes

[cellio]

Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay on what the terrorists want. Excerpt: The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer. (I think I got this from goldsquare.)

On a lighter note...

I found myself wondering the other day about wisdom teeth. What's the connection between teeth and mental acuity, and what does it mean that most of us end up having them pulled out at some point? Do wisdom teeth grant wisdom, or consume it?

Tonight Dani and I drove past a (closed) store called "Bird Bath". This seems rather specialized for the amount of real estate involved. I suggested a garden shop that, perhaps to stay in business, also sells fountains and planters. Dani proposed an avian spa. I kind of like that: imagine your songbird or parrot in an itty bitty jaccouzi, maybe with a shampoo and grooming -- maybe even massage and pedicure. Would the bath end with itty bitty blow dryers, do you think? Or would feathers respond better to towels and time?

From the Dilbert blog (lost the actual entry link, sorry): Allow me to explain the business model of a cruise ship. When you set sail, the ship has a billion tons of food and a few thousand humans. The cruise company's objective is to end the cruise with something on the order of one leftover cupcake and a billion tons of feces. I'm fairly certain that if that goal is not met, a busboy from Mozambique is thrown overboard as a warning to the other crew members. We ate our share just to make sure Pooka Muuwa was safe.

Comments

Wisdom Teeth

[rob-of-unspace.livejournal.com]

Wisdom teeth start coming in late in life. You're supposed to be wiser then.

The human brain doesn't stop growing and building the impulse control sections until sometime around 25. Until that time, everyone's more or less brain damaged.

Interestingly, the area seems to retreat somewhat when puberty hits. Pre-puberty kids have better self-control than they will when they're hormone crazed, independant from the hormones.

Humans are built strange.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Except for being off by a few orders of magnitude on the food and feces, that sounds like the cruise business model. We saw a housekeeping staffer from El Salvador being sacrificed to the waves as we were pulling back into port. :-)

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

I thought your not supposed to use soaps on feathers. The detergents remove necessary oils, hence the need for Penguin Sweaters. Or is this an over-generalization of a specific case?
-- Dagonell