Unusual spam

I got a spam this morning trying to get me interested in watersports, and it was about boating!

Technorati

This is actually a link so Technorati can find me and get me into its search engines. Kind of self-serving, I know, and nothing readers are particularly interested. Makes me wonder, though, how much promotional crap has to appear on a blog before it starts pissing people off.

A lot of people freaked out when cable stations started putting little logos on the screen to ID what channel you're watching. That never bothered me; actually I rarely noticed them. Those things have been growing to the extent that you often have a whole layer of identifiers and promos for other shows running at the bottom of the screen.

That's a little distracting, but only really annoying when they start rolling clips or dynamic grafix down there.

I don't usually pay much attention to the social-networking promos or links on web content, either, except when they get really excessive, as is the case with one of the sites I write for.

The links I put on here are mainly to get the blog to appear in various places, not necessarily encourage people to go post links. So I hope they don't bother you.

There's a fine line between avoiding visual spam and keeping your radar profile so small no one ever finds you.

Thanks for reading, anyway.

Technorati Profile

Wanted: Destroyer of space shuttles

No kidding. I know NASA used to arm unmanned rockets with self-destruct devices to blow errant rockets up before they hit populated areas, I didn't know they did it with manned shuttles as well.

Given how often they have false-positives on various danger tests and abortive attempts at take-off, reentry and honesty in budget proposing and airline-danger-report-censoring, you'd think this would make the astronauts nervous.

I desperately wish this thing were on the market

The intersection of Cool and Useful














Although this update might have it beat:

Heat-sink vest could save lives, improve athletic performance

This is a much more interesting idea than it looks (though it actually looks like the reverse of those puffy, quilted-down vests that make everyone look like the Sta-Puf Marshmellow Hunter). It looks here like they're treating this vest like an elaborate comfort accessory -- snivel gear, essentially.

I'd be the last one to denigrate that; I'd probably buy the damn thing just for that reason, especially for anything involving a lot of effort and very little breeze during summer months -- hiking, yardwork, running.

But it turns out that heat is a major contributor to fatigue, especially during exercise. Cooling some part of the body (preferably one wiht a lot of blood circulation) during exercise reduces the core temperature and as much as doubles the endurance of some of the athletes who have participated in the experiments.

This is a fairly limited test, but I've seen others in which runners or cyclists on stationary equipment keep keep one hand stuck in a big heavy cooling mitt (it's not a glove, really, more of an appliance). They were able to keep going looong after they should have had to quit, because their blood was cooled as it circulated through just one hand.

I'd be very surprised if we didn't start seeing some similar bit of cooling gear -- either the vest or the glove or something wrapped around the shoulders or neck -- as a regular piece of equipment for not only race drivers and other competitors for whom weight isn't much of an issue, to even football players, cyclists and others who have to perform at peak over a long period during hot weather.

It could probably not only improve performance, but also reduce the rash of heart attacks and heat-prostration deaths you hear about every year when football teams come back to two-a-day practices in August.