AlexH

Having spent many summer days ‘beachcoming’ after a storm, I’ve found lots of cool things, but this would be really creepy:

Another mysterious right foot floats ashore in Gulf Islands

For the third time in six months, a right foot wearing a sneaker has washed up on the shores of the Gulf Islands, in the Strait of Georgia.

The latest foot was found on the east side of Valdez Island, near Nanaimo.

Last August two other right feet, both male and both wearing size 12 sneakers, washed ashore on nearby Gabriola and Jedediah Islands.

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Study traces origins of syphilis in Europe to New World

New evidence from the jungles of Guyana suggests Christopher Columbus and his crewmates carried syphilis-causing bacteria from America to Europe, triggering a massive epidemic that killed more than five million people there.

Smallpox went from Europe to North America, syphilis went the other way.

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There is a thread on the fool.com boards discussing a fair tax, ie a simple sales tax on everything, and income tax would then be abolished. People much smarter than I am are talking about why it wouldn’t work:

TMF: Re: fair tax / Atheist Fools

Wealthier people certainly use the roads to get goods delivered to them, don’t they? That big house, with the marble from Vermont and the lumber from Oregon? Didn’t that come in via roads? Those 5 big screen TV’s, didn’t those come on a truck? In this society, if you spend more, you are surely using the roads to procure those goods, aren’t you? Speaking of “wealthy”, it’s clear that most of the corporations in America are owned by the wealthy, or at least “not the poor”. Both private and public corporations, I would guess, since “the poor” don’t tend to own much of anything, stocks included. Wouldn’t you say that corporations make pretty good use of the roads? From General Motors to Amazon.com, without those “good roads” their business would be very different, wouldn’t it?

Copyright quagmire

Our customers shouldn’t have to worry about being sued for private, non-commercial activities. Canada is not a litigious “zero tolerance” regime. If the law is amended to facilitate such litigation here, experience suggests that it will surely happen. We agree with Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies who says, “We think lawsuits … would be terrible for the music business in Canada. It’s short-sighted to say ‘See you in court’ one day and ‘See you at Massey Hall’ the next.”

Seeing the editorial in the Sun from Ron Wilson of Best Buy has floored me. I never expected to see a retailer weigh in on the customers’ side here, but I guess it makes sense. They want to sell electronics and media, and having a restrictive Copyright Act will reduce people’s willingness to buy new equipment if there is a risk of incompatibilities between DRM systems.

No sign of slowing down: Ont. man, 85, sets street-racing record

An 85-year-old man has sped into the record books as the oldest person charged under Ontario’s street-racing legislation. An officer on patrol north of Toronto spotted an Oldsmobile Intrigue zipping through the eastbound lanes of Highway 407 on Wednesday morning, Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Cam Woolley told CBCNews.ca on Thursday.

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NOVA | Absolute Zero | Absolute Hot | PBS

Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?

Wow, that just blew my mind. I’ve never thought about that before!

Because of the 1024 character limit.

Is MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server dead? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger

Tell me why the same thing won’t happen here.

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Again I’ve been impressed by Amazon’s web services. This time it is a simple database made to work with S3 and EC2. It’s not as fully featured as something like MySQL, but the advantage here is reliability and availability. Hopefully we’ll start to see some projects start to use SimpleDB as an alternate backend instead of MySQL.

Amazon.com: Amazon Web Services (2): Help: Amazon Web Services (2) FAQ & More

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

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Thanks to Charlie Angus, an MP and musician:

Charlie Angus – In the House

What is also rich is that the government tabled the bill this morning. Now, three hours later, he is telling me that he has cold feet. What? Did he just discover Facebook this morning?

Very cool website Charlie!

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City of Port Moody – TransLink doubles funding allocation and approves Murray-Clarke Connector

At its December 12, 2007 meeting, TransLink’s outgoing Board of Directors approved the allocation of up to $50 million for the design and construction of the much-needed Murray-Clarke Connector.

Finally there will be some improvements to the Port Moody traffic problems.  It’s only going to get worse as the new highrise construction is finished and people start moving in.

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