Short-sighted prediction of the distant future of Humans

An article from the BBC covers one man’s theory about a bifurcation in the human race. He presumes that over long periods of time, sexual selection combined with dependence on technology will lead to beautiful, athletic men and women on one end of the spectrum, and hunched ugly little trolls of men (and women) on the other.

He neglects, in his up to 10,000 year outlook, one simple thing that is very likely to happen: we will gain the ability to manipulate and fix our bodies and even our genes. This very likely eventuality, should it come to pass, will nullify his whole idea. It is already coming to pass.

How to make iCal display time zones on events

Apple’s iCal has the ability to use timezone-aware scheduling. This comes in handy because I sync it with my Treo, which changes time zones automatically. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s easy to forget which time zone you’re looking at, and become confused.

Yesterday I accidentally discovered that if you change your date/time format preferences to include time zone (even for the “short” format) in System Preferences, the time zone will be included in iCal events as well:

Screenshot from iCal

The Cold

I’m dragging pretty badly today, and I think I know why: The Cold.

No, not the one I was coming down with last week. The Cold that seeps in through windows, that slowly takes over the house as the improperly-set thermostat trundles along, thinking everything is okay. When I woke up this morning, freezing cold under my minimal covers, I immediately dove for socks/pullover/etc from the closet.

This is not weather that I’m accustomed to, especially not indoors.

The issue has (hopefully) been remedied — I spent five minutes programming the thermostat this morning and it should be a nice 68 degrees throughout the day and night now. Eventually my body will adjust to these temperatures. A warm last week with a New Orleans weekend left me vulnerable, but last night’s long term chill hopefully got my thyroid working on an adjustment plan.

I need blankets.

New OS X Install on Arwen

I had installed Linux recently on my PowerBook Titanium (again, yes), but was having issues related to WPA2 encryption for wireless access, so here I am back on OS X again.

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve decided this time to actually write down all of the things I install and do to set up the machine. These notes are below

Continue reading →

Going to New Orleans Tomorrow

Tomorrow will be a great day — I’ll wake up in Baltimore, but I’ll be in New Orleans before I go to sleep. I won’t be checking or replying to email as much while I’m gone, so don’t expect a quick reply until Monday.

Hi Katie!