Today I discovered that I learn better when what I am learning is not being forced down my throat i.e. when it is not in the cirriculum; I also feel I work faster without a T.A. So, I figured out that I should try to illude my subconscious that what I have isn't really that important to the cirriculum. I officially classifies meself wierd.

Looking for "The Music" is very hard

Today I was looking for an album by a wonderful British group called "The Music" on Amazon (don't worry, they don't jack up their prices on every visit anymore;) got what I think may be their entire CD catalogue; they should consider changing their name *sigh*.

Praise "Bob"!

Fiddling through Wikipedia today, (go to this site, your mind will love you forever (this is a mild exaggeration)) I came upon this curious organization called The Church of the SubGenius. It's hilarious, read this! I was even considering joining—due to the sheer silliness of it alone, but, alas, I actually like some semblence of order, and I find the Simpsons to be stupid; however, given the popularity of that show, and the Church's belief in wierdness, I think that belief may make me suitable for membership. I was also considering joining the Discordians, but that might be a little dangerous, and some of their tenets are creepy.

I recently read an article in Popular Science about some creepy weapons the U.S. army is developing. One is a ship mounted electro-magetic cannon (a.k.a a Gauß rifle) that uses an electro-magnetically driven carriage to fling projectiles at targets hundereds of miles away, and it produces enough force to "vaporize" targets without the need of explosives (see, I told ya, if the original dreadnoughts sent imperial Germany into nervous fits, this baby would send them into suicidal panic.) What originally prevented such a thing from being possible were simply power requirements—early mechanisms used a lot of power; however, for this one they simply have to reallocate electricity from the engines to the cannon (I think a better idea would be to have the ship be nuclear, and have the steam turbines drive both propulsion and the generators, the majority of the power being devoted to the cannon; if the ship needs to be stationary, simply disengage the turbines from the propulsion shafts). The current issue is trying to keep the carriage from wreaking the mechanism—metal on metal creates a lot of friction.
Another one talked about a 'supercavitating torpedo'; a rocket powered device with a nozzle at the front to produce a gas bubble for the torpedo to fly through with less friction than water; other torpedoes have greater range, but no other concept has as great speed. The Soviet Union had a similar device—called a Squall or Skval in Russian—it is currently on the black market—but the U.S. army wants something steerable—a desire that poses obvious problems.
They are also devising an arcraft mounted laser cannon, which is nice.
The last one I saw—I did'nt read the entire article—was a particularly fearsome device: it is a two piece orbiting system—one being the communications suite, the other being the payload delivery system which simply drops these huge tungsten slugs from orbit, and if a paint chip can do serious damage to a space shuttle windshield, imagine what a large tungsten lump can do at reentry velocity, and start worrying.

I have an idea that may revolutionize armaments: a 250-mm C4 filled squash-head round.

Tomorrow, Friends will finally end. Good riddance.