Brain Fertilizer

...and I'm busy, too.
Sorry.

I have PRK (laser eye) surgery Monday. So it won't get better next week, either...

Sort of.

I wish I could have attended a school like this.

Glenn Reynolds approvingly quotes Bill Gates for one of Mr. Gates' new projects.

I have to believe that one of the reasons Bill Gates (and Glenn Reynolds) care about this is because of the human toll, as Mr. Gates explains:

This week in Seattle, an extraordinary group of people – scientists, policymakers, and advocates – came together for three days to discuss what can be done to stop malaria. Melinda and I issued a challenge to those attending the meeting. We asked them to begin charting a course to eradicate malaria – not just to control or reduce it, but to work toward a time when no one on earth is infected with malaria, and no mosquitoes carry the disease.

Today, malaria kills more than one million people every year, most of them children in Africa. That’s the equivalent of losing every student in the New York City public school system in one year.

1 million per year. That really struck me. It's a big number.

I thought of that in a different way: A few years back, I was thinking of how to better understand that number of people dying every year, and at the time, San Antonion had a population of about 1 million people. So I thought of it as: what would the reaction be if a city the size of San Antonion were destroyed every single year, all the people dead.

It was a different toll I was thinking about, not the number of malaria-caused deaths per year.

Bill Gates could have used the number I was thinking of, instead of the number of kids in the New York School system.

1 million dead a year.

That's the number of abortions in the US every year since Roe V. Wade.

Hmm...I wonder why Bill Gates didn't use that as a way to help people understand how many people die of malaria every year?

Check it out: Hoax letter with a nice ending.

Even the response is a hoax, of course. Part of the humor.

I'll be having fun poking around that site, I'm sure.

Found via David J Zombyboy.

I'm thinking about buying a new stereo for my car.

JVC, Sony, Kenwood, and Pioneer all seem to have a head unit priced about $99 with 3-band EQ, MP3/WMA capability, and a front, 3.5mm jack for mp3-player connection/playthrough.

Any thoughts or suggestions as to which might be best? I would prefer something with more EQ bands, but the only decently-priced head unit I can find with more is a Sony with a 7-band EQ...but it doesn't have the mp3-player connection...