There live all over the world little critters called tardigrades. There are several thousand species worldwide. They make their living sucking the juice out of lichens and moss, primarily, although recent discoveries seem to indicate that some tardigrades live off other tardigrades. They're not that small as microscopic organisms go, and easily seen under the common home microscope.

Here's why they're weird - they can be frozen, subjected to radiation levels that'd kill us many times over, dessicated, put in a vacuum, and subjected to pressure much higher than that found in the deepest ocean trenches, and survive. They lay dormant during dry and cold seasons, to return to active life when moisture and warmth return.

If any of y'all have a kid at home that needs a science project idea, this'd be a great one.

Google for tardigrades, and you'll get lots of good links, to include a site when they were used by a graduate student in a study to measure air pollution.

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Cleaning up my mail folders the other day, I ran across a letter I'd sent to my legislators over the Napster case, back when the outcome was still in doubt. I am, of course, pleased that my prediction that the demise of Napster would not only be insignificant in the larger course of file swapping things, but also exacerbate the problem that the record companies face by forcing the file swappers to move to unpoliceable peer-to-peer networks, turned out to be true. :-)

Here's the letter. (Think I'm gonna send it again to their offices, and see what they have to say now. ;-)

It was addressed to:

Senator Phil Gramm Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison

As an addendum, Gramm never answered, and I got a canned reply emphasizing support for copyright holders from Hutchinson.

I am a registered voter in Harris County.

I would appreciate your support in an effort to keep the Napster file-sharing system up and operational.

Contrary to record company spin, this is not about copyright infringement, but about maintaining control over the production and distribution of music and artists, to keep an antiquated business model afloat.

Even if the record company spin were true, shutting Napster down will not solve their problems. Other file-sharing technologies are available, some of them on servers outside US jurisdiction, and some on distributed systems that use no servers at all.

It would be, in any practical way, impossible to stop this technology short of measures so draconian as to be tantamount to shutting the internet down.

The tremendous growth of the internet has been due, in a large part, to the lack of interference by government entities. As one British member of the Parliment remarked to his peers, during the debates on how to handle the rebellious thirteen colonies, "They grew by your neglect of them." So it is with the internet.

This laissez-faire approach should continue. It is in the best tradition of the Republican Party, and republican government, to do so.

Should you or your office need any further information on this issue, I will be happy to forward it, or confer by telephone to answer any questions you might have. I have experience in both the music industry, and in computer technology.

Thank you.

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For the last week or ten days, I've been having the most vivid, violent, dreams, so surreal that it's hard to even put them down on electrons. The common theme has been my being drawn into a mortal struggle in weird, somewhat futuristic, bleak, societies, (think music by NIN, scenery by Blake and Bosch) sometimes in some sort of game, fighting against some Big Brotherish types, in others, in sort of a Dante's Inferno styled journey, and in others just trying to survive the random affects of Chaos. That last sentence is imposing waaaay more coherence than the dreams deserve, I think.

One of the most bizarre and chilling sequences involved me having to follow a crowd of doomed people in to these horrible Holocaust machines that crushed and incinerated them. In each case I was ordered/escorted/forced into them by these burly/goonish faceless armored guards, that would put me in line with the weeping, hopeless victims, and make me witness the effects of the machines, all the while reassuring me that I would not be hurt. Then, I would be put in the chamber to be maimed/burned/pulverized, only to have them "save" me at the last instant, when a secret door would open and whisk me away just as the machine began to operate.

In the final instance, the machine involved worked by shoving the prone victim down this ramp through a square steel opening that was much too small for any adult human. The hydraulic ram forced them through anyway, with pieces of their bodies shearing of the sides of the aperture in a spray of blood. After seeing a half a dozen or so people "processed" was the word the guards used, in this way, they ordered me to the head of the line and told me to lay down the little luge-type sled that the ram shoved down the ramp to the opening.

I did, resigned to my fate. The ram began to accelerate down the ramp.

At the very last instant, a large door popped open just above the square opening, a small ramp popped up, and the luge flew up over the too-small opening and into the blackness of the larger door above it.

I landed in a sort of a pit/cauldron/mixer where I was tossed around in a mucky swampy-thick soup composed of decomposing bones, body parts, and a gray ashy mud formed with the waste of the incinerators. I could recognize the features of some of the folks I had witnessed go before me.

After a time, the mixer tossed me out and down a long winding sluice, where I rode in the current of muck, and finally into a pool where the guards fished me out and dragged me into a room where I was cleansed with high pressure water jets, and then hurried along, naked and wet to meet this entity that I can only describe as the GamesMaster.

I asked one of the guards ( I had now come to think of them more as for my protection than anything else, think Vergil in Dante) why this had been done to me, and he replied that it was important for the Bad Guys (not his word, but the label I've put on the Evil Force, Chaos, whatever) to think I was dead, that I had been "processed" and all of the preceeding had been a charade to decieve them.

Then a bunch of other stuff happens - even less coherent than the above.

It's been Purty Weird.

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