There should be a board game, video game, or RPG called "Red Shirts."

You would be the humanoid, monster, or killer plant on an unexplored planet, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down with a complement of red shirts. Your goal is to stab, eat, poison, or vaporize all the red shirts before the main characters take you down.

You might be able to wound major characters, but of course, not kill them.

You would play a different menace in each level, and the number of main characters and red shirts would change.

Is this for real?

Fox News report about water powered engine on YouTube.

OK, it's probably real, but is it realistic? The hydrolysis uses the car's battery, so it's ultimately self powering? Thoughts?

SNORT!

Darth and Droids

On MSN's front page today, there is a link to a list of good/bad foods. It notes that coffee has moved into the "good" category, and a couple of ounces of dark chocolate per day, also "good." It notes that soda is generally bad, indicating new information that soda with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is also high in "reactive carbonyls," which may pose a significant risk for triggering type-II diabetes.

If you do a little research you'll find that sucrose has no reactive carbonyls, but that HFCS does indeed include reactive carbonyls. You may find that the average soda contains 5 times the concentration of reactive carbonyls as in blood. (you've got about 6 quarts of blood -- consuming a 12 ounce soda would then boost your reactive carbonyls by about 30%).

Scared?

Here's what they don't tell you: a sucrose molecule is a combination of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule, and when it gets to the intestine, the two are dissociated, forming a mix of 50:50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is 45:55 glucose and fructose. The reactive carbonyl is on the glucose (in sucrose, it's where the glucose and fructose are stuck together, so it's no longer "reactive"). So taking a similar amount of sucrose, you end up absorbing MORE reactive carbonyl than with HFCS.

By the way, polysaccharides (starch) are composed of chains of glucose, which are broken down in the mouth, stomach, and intestine into individual glucose molecules, each of which contains a reactive carbonyl.

There are good reasons to avoid HFCS. Some people don't like the taste. Some people don't like the corn-industry politics. But there is no significant difference, health-wise, between sucrose and HFCS. And don't buy into the scare of the "reactive carbonyl."

About half-way through a document, the spelling dictionary goes wacky.

All of a sudden, it doesn't know words like "seed" and "oil" (though it did offer a spelling suggestion of "oil" with an umlaut over the i). If I type "seed" in the first half of the doc, it's fine. If I type it (carefully, no typos!) later in the doc, it gets a red squigly.

WTH?

A new convention devoted to Jordan's series, in Atlanta. Guest of Honor will be Jordan's wife/editor.

Information

Imagine if our Olympics athletes were chosen the same way as other representatives of our country, such as ambasadors, government agencies heads, Supreme Court justices, etc.

Today's Qwantz (online dinosaur-based comic) suggests an interesting question. How would the story of Lolita be different if the sexes of the main characters were reversed?

Making the rounds...

( behind the cut )

Science fiction fans will know Don S. Davis as General Hammond from Stargate SG-1, but he was a ubiquitous character actor, appearing in countless series over the last twenty years. He reduced his role on Stargate SG-1 to cameos after season 7, due to health issues. A massive heart attack took him on June 29.

The official Stargate site has a nice biography of him.

N.B.: Davis will be in the upcoming direct-to-DVD Stargate movie, Stargate: Continuum, coming out later this month.