Michael Reynolds at The Mighty Middle has written a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in light of his speech today.

Microsoft Windows has been around for 20 years.

Ack!

I remember when it first came out. I was both geeky enough AND old enough to own a PC at the time. An 8088-based machine that ran at 8MHz, but it had a “turbo” button that increased the speed to a blazing 12MHz and I got a memory upgrade to 512kb when I bought it (yes, one-half a megabyte… and it took 8 chips to hold that much, too). No hard drive, though, but I had two 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives! Video card? Heh… I had my choice of monitors, green on black or amber on black. I chose amber. Even with the monochrome monitor, the computer I had at the time was hot stuff…

I still have that computer, but I haven’t turned it on for over a decade.

Well, at least I wasn’t around to see this:

Einstein equation marks 100 years

By Roland Pease
BBC science correspondent

Physicists are celebrating the centenary of Albert Einstein’s best known equation: E=mc².

Published in the fourth of a series of papers that shook the foundations of physics in 1905, E=mc² is now linked with the power of the atom bomb.

No equation is anywhere near as recognisable as E=mc².

In 1905, it was final proof of the genius and imagination of a young German-born scientist who had yet to land a university post.

It seems so simple: three letters standing for energy, mass, and the speed of light, brought together with the tightness of a soundbite.

Yet what it encapsulates is still hard for scientists to grasp.

The author then goes on to prove it is still hard to grasp because he convolutes the famous equation with the Special and General Theories of Relativity, which can cause effects such as Einstein rings. (really cool photos at the link)

Oh, well…

Regular readers here at Random Fate know that my father has cancer, and it is the reoccurance of this disease that is prompting me to return to the United States early from my expatriate assignment in France.

I have a request of those who wish to express their sympathies.

If you have a computer you leave on all the time, please consider donating your unused CPU resources to research on finding new drugs to fight cancer.

Grid.org, in association with United Devices (along with several other sponsors) has a distributed computing project that looks at how certain ligands “dock” with proteins associated with cancer. You can read more about it at their site.

I have had this software installed on my computers for years, even for my laptops to run.

While I sincerely doubt anything arising from this work will directly aid my father, I believe it is a good project to devote resources that otherwise lay unused.

My father has always shown through his actions that the highest calling is to leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it. This is one small but significant way to do so.

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…can be found at Searchlight Crusade, an all around useful site.