The internet has some truly weird sites

16

Created by OnePlusYou

masques and other social events

Today I nipped out at lunch and bought a mask and trimmings to make up a fancy doohicky for the Melbourne cup. We're having competitions for the best dress, hat or mask. I'll put pictures up when I've made it.

I also slipped into dymocks and bought a book of short stories. Now that I've had a flick through, I recognise at least some of the stories. I've either bought it before or read some of them in another collection. I will check my database. Stay tuned. If it turns out I already have "Dark Alchemy" edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (with stories by Garth Nix, Eoin Colfer and Neil Gaiman), I'd be happy to pass it on.

After lunch I went to a biosciences trade display and spent 2 hours just going round the tables...I think the bags of freebies and catalogues weighs about 15kilos. The Biorad guys took advantage of both my hands being full to drape about 6 lanyards around my neck. There was also cake :) Then there were draws from all the trade displays where you had left your details to get them to send you information. I missed out on the bubbly, chocolate and giant teddy bear, but I did win a roche bag with a hat, pen, scribble pad and a book of lab FAQ's - really handy for new students.

are zombies a good model of infectious disease?

The other night I dreamt about zombies. In this dream the previous zombie outbreak had been contained and a large wall built to stop any future infestation. But there was a break in the wall and one small zombie rose from under the ground and shambled in my direction. I realized we could stop this quickly if we could contain it, destroy it & reseal the wall. As is usually the case in dreams, no-one else seemed as concerned to act quickly. By the time I got people moving, the numbers had increased. They continued to increase logarithmically and we were too slow to enact the required responses at each stage. The responses changed based on the numbers you had to oppose. Before I was rudely awakened by a phone call, I was at the stage of locking up the non-zombified in a fortress to keep them alive and worrying that one of them would have been bit before getting in, thus infecting the others.
During the dream I was thinking how interesting it was that zombie numbers were increasing on a standard logarithmic curve...afterwards it occured to me that it looked just like a disease outbreak where no-one had immunity or recovered even down to quarantines and other outbreak control techniques.

high tech..er

I'm now running off two monitors at work. I got a new computer to replace the loud, DVD drive is dodgy, USB drives don't work, blue screen of death computer I've had for 5 or 6 years. The new computer came with a new monitor. I kept the old still working monitor and can now have files I need to look at open in one window and files I'm typing into on the other. I feel very techy. Its brain-numbingly simple to set up. I've even got them at different resolutions as they are different shapes.

:D