Date: 9 Dec 91 13:58:14 PST (Monday)
Subject: Life 7.N
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From From: SCHWARTZ_VICTOR@tandem:
Government studies show that a 7% unemployment level is acceptable to 93% of
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Now is your chance to have your ears pierced and get an extra pair to
take home, too.
We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand.
We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for $1.00.
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ABDUCTED BAT IS BACK, BUT MYSTERY LINGERS
By Stephen Hunt, Salt Lake Tribune
Last year, shortly after Kris and Tyler Walton noticed an inflatable black
Halloween bat was missing from their porch, the Salt Lake couple began
receiving postcards from around the world signed by "Matt the Bat."
The cards -- usually indicating Matt was "having a good time" -- were
postmarked from New York, Florida, Mexico, Hawaii and Paris.
Mrs. Walton initially thought she was receiving the postcards by mistake.
But after reading a few of them carefully, she decided they must be linked to
her missing inflatable bat.
Some postcards promised Matt would return in time for Halloween.
Sunday night it happened, with Matt returning as mysteriously as he
disappeared. He was delivered at 11:30 p.m. by a neighbor claiming three
people she met on the street asked her to deliver the package.
The Waltons are still puzzling over that. But a dozen photos in the
package with Matt left no doubt the intrepid bat had been seeing the world.
The snapshots show Matt relaxing on a sandy beach, snorkeling in the ocean,
cooling off in a Virgin Islands hotel swimming pool and hanging out in frong
of a Honolulu police station.
Though various pepole appear in the photos with Matt, there is no one the
Waltons recognize. "We're baffled," Mrs. Walton said.
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(From the always-entertaining "Selling It" column in Consumer Reports:)
The Flesh is Weak
A consumer concerned about weight might well have been drawn
to a coupon (printed in a magazine advertisement) good for a
free two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. A six-ounce serving of Diet Coke
does save you calories (it has 71 fewer than a serving of Coca-Cola
Classic). But to qualify for the free diet soda, you have to buy Fisher
mixed nuts (170 calories per serving), Duncan Hines cookies (110
calories per serving) and Pringles potato chips (170 calories per
serving.)
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Lick That PLate Clean -- And then eat it (Reuters)
Taipei
A company in the Republic of China on Taiwan has invented what it claims is the
world's first range of edible tableware.
"Our bowls and plates are made of oatmeal and can be eaten or thrown away after
use. Unlike plastic foam, they won't cause any pollution because birds and
dogs can eat them," Lin Wan-jung, spokesman for Taiwan Sugu C., said yesterday.
"The surface is glossy just like china ... they're the first of their kind in
the world," he said.
Production will start next week and is intially set at 20,000 bowls and plates
a day, Lin said, adding that he expects the inventions to be popular in
environmentally conscious markets such as the United States, Japan, and Europe.
Edible bowls start to leak three to four hours after coming in contact with
boiling water, he said. They will sell for 19 cents each.
----------------------------
Still hungry? Eat the plate
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Diners tempted to lick a plate after a delicious meal
can now go a step further - eat the plate.
Chen Liang-erh, 50, an amateur inventor, announced Friday that he had perfected
an edible plate made from wheat grain, and that he planned to mass-produce it
and other edible crockery including cups, bowls and food containers.
Chen spent six years developing the plate, which he said would retail at about
7 cents each.
Diners who don't want to eat the items - which taste like unsalted popcorn -
can boil them for a nutritious meal for animals, he said.
Chen said this can help reduce pollution caused by discarded crockery.
The only disadvantage, he said, is his crockery cannot be washed and reused.
----------------------------------------------------
From SPAF's collection
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From: lost in transit
Subject: Flying the coup
To: eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
I heard that Aeroflot now has a program for frequent flee-ers.
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From: ekirby@buckeye.boeing.com (Elizabeth Kirby)
Subject: Longevity
Newsgroups: sci.med
[...preliminary stuff deleted... Looks like time for the net-Vegan
to re-register. --spaf]
The 31st of January is "Alien Day." That's the deadline by which all
aliens (i.e., non-U.S. citizens residing in the USA) are required to
register their addresses with the U.S. Post Office.
A bunch of science-fiction fans dressed in costumes of their favorite
BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) from outer space went to the main post office
in Bloomington, Indiana and demanded alien-registration forms.
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From: Joe Wiggins [JWIGG@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU]
Subject: Mathematics, etc.
To: yucks
A team of engineers were required to measure the height of a flag pole.
They only had a measuring tape, and were getting quite frustrated trying
to keep the tape along the pole. It kept falling down, etc.
A mathematician comes along, finds out their problem, and proceeds to
remove the pole from the ground and measure it easily.
When he leaves, one engineer says to the other: "Just like a
mathematician! We need to know the height, and he gives us the length!"
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Date: 17 Sep 91 20:04:16 GMT
From: ketter@MDI.COM (Cindy Ketterling)
Subject: The Macross Beer Can
Newsgroups: rec.arts.anime
... I see it more as the same sort of thing George Lucas did
in "Empire Strikes Back" when he put a potato in the asteroid
field. (It's there, kiddies ... we found it!) ...
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From: saddison@ca.novell.com (Skip Addison)
(From Aviation Week and Space Technology, Oct 17, 1991 --
excerpted without permission)
An accoustic-guided submunition call the BAT may be good against tanks,
but not against an F-117. A reader who works on the stealth fighter in
Saudi Arabia says bats (the natural ones) occasionally work their way
into F-117 hangers [sic]. One night a hungry bat turned right into an
F-117 rudder and fell stunned to the floor. He flew away groggily,
leaving behind a heightened impression of the aircraft's stealth. "I
don't know what the radar return is for the vertical tails of the F-117
but I always thought it had to be more than an insect's," the reader
said. "I guess I was wrong." There may be some "science" in this --
the ultrasound wavelengths used by bats are roughly the same as X-band
radar.
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Matthew P. Dukes, 26, sentenced to 30 days in jail in 1989 following his
sixth drunken-driving conviction, tried for 15 months (through December 1990)
to get into jail in Ravenna, Ohio, but each time was turned away because the
jail was full. In December, Dukes filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming
that his constitutional rights are being violated by the jail's refusal to
admit him.
In October, Salt Lake City police spotted a 28-year-old man who was
loitering, and asked for identification. The man then absent-mindedly offered
an ID a demand note that had been used in two recent robberies, and was
arrested.
Two teen-age boys, being driven to juvenile court by police officers in
Reading, Pa., in March, escaped by dashing away when the car stopped for a
light. However, the boys were handcuffed together and failed to communicate
as they approached a flagpole. One went left, one went right, and they
collided, stunning themselves momentairly until two nearby firefighters could
hold them down for the police to catch up.
In the English soccer championship game in May (seen by 80,000 people in
Wembly Stadium and on television by 600 million people in 100 countries), the
winning goal was scored in sudden-death overtime by Des Walker of the
Nottingham Forest team, who headed the ball past his own goalie into his own
net to gave Tottenham the title.
In May in Ho Chi Minh City, about 50 people crowded onto a rickety bridge to
peer at a girl who had jumped into the river below to commit suicide. The
bridge collapsed, killing nine. The girl was rescued.
]From the classified section of the Albuquerque Journal, Feb. 1, 1991: "Lost
since March 1983, tortise shell female cat, reward."
Included in last year's edition of "Outstanding Young Men of America" were
five inmates of the Indiana State Prison, including a man serving 110 years
for murder, named for his "outstanding civic and professional contributions."
He had been nominated by another murderer.
The Centers for Disease Control reported last August that the leading cause
of on-the-job death for female workers is not accidents but murder - at a
rate of 3 1/2 times that for male workers.
The biggest traffic jam in Japan's history occurred last Aug. 12 - 15,000
vehicles, extending over 94 miles, brought on by a typhoon that forced the
closing of several roads.
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Date: Sat, 17 Aug 91 10:03:17 PDT
From: one of our correspondants
Subject: Computer Provides New Insights
To: yucks-request
MARIETTA, Ga. (AP)
Adam, a small but muscular fellow who wears only sunglasses and a
fig leaf, may eventually revolutionize the way medicine is taught and
practiced.
While Adam stands at the ready, the click of a computer mouse
directing an interactive software program peels off his layers, from
his skin to his bone marrow.
The software program takes anatomy out of the textbook and into a
computer. With it, medical students can dissect without cadavers and
doctors can show patients exactly what they're about to do to them.
"No one has ever illustrated anatomy in this kind of detail," said
Greg Swayne, the medical illustrator who's president of A.D.A.M.
Software Inc., a medical illustration company. "What we'll end up
with is the Gray's Anatomy of the 21st century," he said, referring
to the standard anatomy text.
Educators and doctors say they're intrigued by A.D.A.M.
"I've got 20 years teaching anatomy to medical students, and I've
seen a lot of different-type innovations come and go," said Dr.
Andrew F. Payer, associate professor of anatomy and neuroscience at
the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. "I really
believe this particular program is probably the most innovative I've
seen, with the most potential."
A.D.A.M. stands for Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine,
but Swayne admits the acronym came first.
The design team is working its way up Adam's body. The foot and
lower leg went on the market in January. The knee and hip are almost
done. The thoracic region, upper extremities and head and neck will
follow within two years, Swayne said.
Twenty-eight feet programs have been sold to podiatrists.
A.D.A.M. for MacIntosh computers sells for $3,450; IBM users pay
$3,750.
The price isn't necessarily a stumbling block for "a modern
podiatric medical establishment," Wakefield said. "You know, $3,600
or so in an effort to contribute to patient education may pale by
comparison with $36,000 for some automobiles these days."
With the system's "scalpel," students can slice through Adam's
skin, exposing what's underneath without any bleeding. They can pry
apart his muscles, saw his bones and install screws to heal a nasty
fracture.
"This is going to be to doctors what airline simulators have been
for pilots," Swayne said.
"Cadaver dissection is really becoming a dying art," he said.
But at least one educator says A.D.A.M. won't mean the end of
dissection and surgical practice. "It's not a total replacement,"
said Dr. Margaret Hougland, who wants to test A.D.A.M. at East
Tennessee State University's Division of Health Sciences. "You still
have to have the touch."
A.D.A.M.'s designers are already working on improvements. Coming
soon will be four races of Adam with changing skin tones, and an Eve.
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From: bostic@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: And you thought that it was unethical to patent a look and feel ...
To set the background for this - Congress has been sold on a 15-year,
$3-billion project to map and sequence the entire human genome. The
problem, of course, is that only about 3% of the 3,000,000,000 base
pairs in our genome are what one might call a real gene; the rest is
(currently believed to be) junk of various sorts. Starting with DNA,
all of it, it will be slow and painstaking work to separate the wheat
from the chaff, but much will be learned along the way.
There is another, cheaper, approach, and that is to decide that one is
not immediately interested in all that 97% of the DNA that appears to be
junk. If one takes this approach, one then looks instead at the RNA's
that are transcribed from the DNA to see what parts of it are actually
active genes. The technique is to:
1) Isolate all of the messenger RNA from a cell
2) Convert it back to DNA (cDNA) using viral reverse transcriptase
3) Clone and amplify it (using the polymerase chain reaction)
4) Sequence the clones, which will be pure genes.
So far, there has been a sort of less than gentlemanly debate between
those that want to hurt themselves by sequencing all DNA, good and bad,
and those who are accused of trying to strip mine the cream off of the
top by sequencing only cDNA.
Enter a DNA researcher named Craig Venter. He has set up a laboratory
of DNA sequencing robots and is cranking out cDNA gene sequences. So far
he has no idea what any of them are or do, he simply culls out the new
gene sequences, based upon his not finding them in existing gene sequence
databases. This might just be regarded as bad manners, had he not filed
a wholesale patent application on the first 337 of them, with 2000 more in
the works. (Over the course of the last 10 years, only about 600 human
genes have been sequenced in the traditional way, and only a handful of
these have been patented, at great effort and expense.) The biology world
is in an uproar!
It has long been regarded as perfectly ok, even desirable, to be able to
patent a cloned gene. One isolates and purifies it, determines what it
does, and figures out how to make a useful drug/test/etc. from it. The
problem is that Craig is doing the equivalent of the following: he has
discovered a smashed alien spaceship, sitting amidst a mountain of circuit
components. Rather than try to reassemble and study some part of it, he
has put an army of robots to work at systematically disassembling and
diagraming all of its circuits. As each circuit diagram rolls off of the
printer, if it looks unlike anything else on Earth, he submits it in a patent
application. He will figure out what it does later, maybe.
Patent law considers three criteria: it must be novel, nonobvious, and
have utility. It does not consider how hard you had to work to invent it.
It is thus expected that if he fails, then it will be on the utility test.
Not knowing what each new gene sequence is, or what it is related to,
makes it hard to claim any utility for it. (This approach - the shotgun
construction of many chemical variants - has been tried in the past by
chemists without success.)
But just in case, maybe you should contact your lawyer before you try to
do anything useful with any of your genes - like lift a finger - just in
case it has already been patented. If it hasn't, then I would turn it to
pushing a key on you computer - the one that spits out random number
sequences with a patent application filled in at the top of the page.
Who knows - maybe one will predict when the Turing machine will stop.
[Hmm, I hope I'm not a Gene that has already been patented, or I'm
in real trouble! --spaf]
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From: Chris "Johann" Borton [borton@garnet.berkeley.edu]
A New Programming Language: SARTRE
Bruce R. Donald
[BRD@MIT-OZ]
Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an
extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no
purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define
their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed
and are no fun at parties.
The SARTRE language has two basic data types, the EN-SOI and
the POUR-SOI. The EN-SOI is a completely filled heap, whereas the
POUR-SOI is a dynamic structure which never has the same
value. The structures are accessed through the the only operation
defined in SARTRE, nihilation, which usually results in a
?BAD FAITH at PC 02AC040
error.
Comparisons in SARTRE have a peculiar form in that the
IF statement can take no arguments and simply reads
IF;
Similarly, assignments can only be of the form
WHAT-IS := (NOT WHAT-IS);
since in SARTRE the POUR-SOI is only, and exactly, what it is not.
Although this sounds confusing, a background process, the NIHILATOR, is
constantly running, making any such statements (or any statements at
all, for that matter), completely meaningless.
SARTRE programs do not terminate, of course, since there is
No Exit.
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