The weather is like a -80 degree freezer. It doesn't snow, but it sure is cold! I'm also feeling a bit edgy, not the restless kind but the paranoid kind (must be the combination of lack of sleep and stress). Of course it didn't help that from the bits of sleep I did catch last night, I dreamed that I had somehow gotten myself genetically altered by accident (not by much though) and the security person who was scanning my DNA was unsure of whether or not to let me into the symposium where some big shot guy was going to announce some medical breakthrough that was going to extend life. Of course, this guy was in a space suit and was slowly dying from a flesh-eating disease.
And then I went to class to learn all about anthrax. I find it ironic that the replicating phase for this little bacterium is called the "vegetating" stage and that this stage has never been observed outside the host (when anthrax senses oxygen, it goes into the spore state). And it's not the bacterium itself that causes death but the toxins it produces. Anyways, I wonder what happened to the hullabaloo about finding the person/people responsible for the mailed anthrax?
Scorpions produce 2 types of venom. I'm already thinking about possible applications of that pretoxin. It sounds like a good candidate for making a drug to target neurological diseases.
The Beauty of a Thousand Stars. "These days it seems that when two or three fans start discussing sf literature, they talk less about the books they're reading, more about the bloody awful state of sf publishing, so let's avoid yet another reprise of the same tired old subject. We will survive, we always do; it will probably take a major shake-out in the publishing industry, and it won't be pretty, but sooner or later the stuff I want to read will be once again published in abundance."
