It turns out that Body Mass Index is a great general indicator of physical health and likely lifespan. Do you know what your BMI is? If not, check out a BMI calculator. You’re looking to have a number below 25 and if you really want to live to be an old foggie you want a 22 or lower. I’m at 22.7 so I have a little way to go yet 😉

Actually I’ve been gaining weight lately, moving from 160 to 165 or so, which is sort of bumming me out. More exercise to come as a result. Thankfully the warm weather just rolled in with the dawn this morning, I’m hopping on my bike when I get home and going for a long ride.

Now this is cool. I’ve been reading Manage for at least 8-9 years now, but only on a casual basis. This is partly because it’s somewhat inaccesible – you can only reliably get the translated editions as trade paperbacks which are released years after the original editions are published in Japan, and I’ve had trouble identifying series that I enjoy. For every Adolf: A Tale of the Twentieth Century I pick up, it seems like I buy 5 Battle Angel Alitas, which has for the most part kept me from buying a lot of it. I’ve also found that I don’t enjoy the manga “canon” as much as the critics would expect me to: Things like Akira really didn’t do all that much for me.

Anyway I’m rambling. My point today is that a new magazine is out, Shonen Jump, which collects manga and runs them as series. It’s sort of like an asian flavored Vertigo Presents, or a PG-rated ‘Heavy Metal.” The comics seem to be skewed towards the younger reader, but still I am loving it, finally I can get my hands on large volumes of manga inexpensively and scope it out, rather than dropping $20 on a trade paperback that may or may not completely suck. It’s well worth checking out, a 300+ page issue sells for about $5 and will keep you in bathroom reading for at least a week. I plan to subscribe, plus I am trying to track down the initial issues on ebay (there have only been 4 issues so far).

I think I’ve mentioned my sister’s website here before. Recently she added the pootycam, which is a perfectly pointless way to waste a few minutes of your day. Ever dreamed of watching a slacker dalmation while away her day snoozing and licking her various orifices? Now’s your chance, click the link!

I really need to work on getting the davecavecam going, I actually bought the camera for it ages ago but never got around to getting it up and running. The topcat owes me some system install work so maybe I will hassle him into getting the webcam going for me this month.

Scientists take first steps towards extending the brain with silicon. This is seriously cool shit, and I am not exagerating – assuming this approach works, actual immortality is ours within our lifetime. I’ve been reading about this since the early 80’s, it’s completely awesome to see it take its first steps towards practical reality.

Of course it’s not really immortality in the way we might think of it, but if you were able to communicate with a perfect copy of me every day, even though I was 6 feet under, would you still think I was alive? I might not, but you definitely would. It reminds me of ancestor worship in asian cultures in a way; instead of revering the dead, you can actually sidle up to the family shrine and ask their advice.

Count on me backing up my head the moment this tech becomes commercially available. In fact you can start the bidding now on your own personal copy of me! 😉

Well, in about 10 minutes my workgroup at the college is sitting down with the college’s President to discuss our future here at the college. Wish me luck, hopefully my status will be settled at the conclusion of the meeting, one way or another, and I can stop worrying about what’s going to happen.

Most of you know I have been increasingly disatisfied macs the last couple of years, so much so that I was about to sell off my last mac. It’s not OS X so much, in fact there are aspects of it I love, it’s mostly an issue of them being so goddamned slow, I mean ridiculously slow compared to pc’s. Mac bigots seem to just turn a blind eye on this subject, but I run both platforms and macs just suck speedwise, especially web browsing which is like 94% of my waking life (and yes, safari helps loads but it’s still no contest). Anyway I was about to ditch the laptop and enter a pc only world, but Kevin and I struck a deal and I’m getting his old mac desktop. Pretty much the only reason I decided to do this is because of Net Newswire. This program is changing how I surf the web radically and greatly increasing the amount of info I can absorb in the same amount of time. I absolutely love it. It’s a class of application known as an RSS aggregator, it allows you to pull together article headings from tons of websites (including this one) into an outline view that’s extremely easy to parse through.

There are RSS aggregators for the PC as well, but none nearly as elegant as Net Newswire. I’ll do a writeup of some alternatives this weekend, but if you’re on a mac box, by all means go grab it and take it for a spin, it’s superb.

(oh and the new mac will also be running snipsnap and another webserver at home, I want a playground for python and some other tools, so I guess net newswire wasn’t the only reason I wanted the mac desktop, it was just the main reason).

Ever wonder what your feedback rating on ebay is worth? A kennedy business school professor did and researched it. His conclusion:

Zeckhauser’s research has determined that a person’s good reputation is not only valuable, but it’s worth about 7.6 percent in a retail transaction.

You can read the full text of the article if you want, though the above pretty well sums it up 😉

Glad to see that my fastidious behavior on ebay is likely paying off though, I really do try extremely hard to maintain my rating. Unfortunately this sometimes extends into behavior I wish I didn’t have to rely on, like not leaving negative feedback on a transaction that I wasn’t happy with for fear that the other party will leave negative feedback on me.

It also suggests to me that this whole notion of ‘persistent karma’ has some real legs. Imagine a world where everything you did online (and ultimately in real life) contributed to your karma profile. Blast a flame mail on an email list, get a bunch of negative karma. Help out some shmoe who can’t get his network routed correctly, get some positive karma. Curse out an old lady in traffic and cut her off, negative karma for you! Then when you go to do business with someone (say you’re hiring a plumber) you can check out their karma profile. This is the slashdot model writ large, and I am vastly oversimplifying, but you probably get the idea.. I’m not the first one to imagine it – Cory Doctorow over at boingboing even wrote a novel that covers the concept that you can download for free, check his website if you’re curious, and buy his novel if you think it’s cool. But more importantly t(to me anyway) – kick the idea of persistent karma around in your head too – what do you think? Good idea? Or horrific orwellian lack o’ privacy future? I’m fascinated by the whole notion and will be writing more of it here over the next couple of months.