(no subject)

I'm kind of bemused by all the fuss over Olympic athletes taking drugs to improve their performance. Why is this considered such a terrible violation of ethics, when mechanical enhancements are okay? Every Olympics the US track teams show up with shoes that have been custom-made by Nike: one of a kind shoes that this huge company has put who knows how many millions of dollars of R&D into, all to give their favoured clients an advantage over barefoot runners, or those who use off the shelf shoes. Similarly, the pole vaulters have composite poles that university research staffs have laboured over; the US bobsled team's sleds are researched and built by Wallace Racing to try to gain some advantage over the teams that have production-built sleds; the swimmers have special low-friction suits, again the product of a massive and costly research effort.

Why is it okay if a sprinter shows up with shoes that a major company spent millions of dollars making just for him, a service that's not available to the other competitors, but it's a crime against the Olympic spirit if some poor guy from Africa who doesn't have a research team backing him up takes a commonly available hormone that anyone can acquire to try to be more competitive? That seems incredibly wrong to me.

*****

I'm sure I'm far from the first person to ever remark on this, but tennis has probably the most retarded scoring system ever devised by the mind of man. It's so annoying that it actually sucks the fun out of watching it.

*****

"Eeediot" won the gold medal in badminton :)

*****

Here's an impressive account of the Chernobyl disaster from one of the engineers who was present that night.

"From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful."

Imagine standing there in the dark wee hours of the morning, looking at a split-open reactor shell and seeing that. It makes me shiver.

*****

Here's something useful. http://www.bugmenot.com offers logins for those annoying newspaper sites that want your personal information before they'll let you read the news.

*****

We've had something of an infestation of door to door religious pamphleters of late. I'm unsure whether one of these beside the front door would deter them, or inspire them to greater efforts. If I had the money to waste, it'd make an interesting experiment. More reasonably priced (and cuter) is the Weasel Shaman