Please pardon the somewhat rambling writing; I'm simultaneously exhausted and jittery. A visit to the woman who makes my life worth living is long overdue, and as a result my rather sporadic updates as of late are likely to become even more so for the next two weeks.

I can never sleep the night before a flight. I don't know why. It might be partly historical; I remember once upon a time trying deliberately not to sleep ahead of a long flight, so that it would be easier to sleep on the plane, and thus make the period of enforced inactivity easier to bear. Now it just seems to fade into the background of my general insomnia, a habit too well ingrained to break when my body actually wants to encourage it for me.

The Guardian reported last Friday on a potential new hydrogen fuel process, discovered by medical doctor Randell Mills, that would allow us to tap water for heat with roughly the same efficiency as coal. Supposedly, prototype heaters making use of this process have already been demonstrated and the process replicated independently. The only problem is that it appears to be physically impossible.

Apparently, despite the amount of coddling the human race receives from its safety-conscious societies, the human genome is still evolving, finding 9% of our genes evolving rapidly, and another 13% showing signs of negative selection.

This cheers me immensely, as I'd figured that by this point we were simply breeding for brutality. But then, I'm a cynical sort.

Massachusetts has finally released the final version of its policy on data interoperability, and the requirement that all future software purchases conform to OpenDocument is still there, despite the strenuous objections of Microsoft (rebutted several places already, the most amusing of which may be the extended rebuttals in the comments of a Microsoft blog entry complaining about the decision).

In news showing the better side of humanity, three sophomores from Duke University posed as reporters to get inside New Orleans last weekend and rescued two families. They were turned aside a couple times until they came up with the idea of faking Associated Press badges. The impassibility of the roads turned out to be a myth; they got in with a two-wheel-drive Hyundai.

Normally, I'd have said that doing this sort of thing was a bad idea, because you risk getting in the way of a coordinated relief effort. That presupposes, however, that there is a coordinated relief effort. As it was, they got out seven people who might not have been able to wait for official relief and brought water to others who needed it, while FEMA and the National Guard stood around preventing access.

Hat tip to Pandagon for starting a Heroes of Katrina thread, where I found this. My first suggestion was Jabbar Gibson.

My webserver logs are actually showing people showing up searching about this, possibly due to my Beth Patterson photo gallery, so for those of you dropping by out of Google, yes, she did make it out safely to Lafayette before the storm hit. From her guestbook (you may have to go through a couple pages to find it):

There's no way to find out what happened to O'Flaherty's or her studio, however.

Independence day has just ended, and in the spirit of a holidy, I have something positive to report: some parts of the U.S. are making significant progress in improving their environment, meeting the Kyoto standard even though the White House failed to support it — and rather than going bankrupt doing it, they're actually coming out ahead economically. The trick appears to be to take a large number of little steps, all couched in terms of solving other problems that citizens want dealt with (such as traffic congestion or energy costs), redirecting saved money from energy into public transit, and nudging businesses to support public transit. Portland, Oregon's carbon dioxide emissions are at pre-1990 levels now.

I arrived in California last Friday, and have been busy both relaxing and exercising on my first leg of my vacation. Lynne should arrive today, which will cheer me immensely, but I am going to be posting even more infrequently than usual. I expect to have lots of pictures for my return, however.

Those pictures may not include as many birds as I had originally hoped. The hawk visiting the back yard here is no longer visiting, and the remaining birds remain too skittish to come bathe while people are present. I have lots of flower shots, however — my father's garden is quite spectacular, and I even missed the blooming season.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization of lawyers "dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights", has made the news recently by coordinating the legal representation for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, some of whom were picked up far from any battlefield and who have languished there years without any evidence against them being disclosed. Their actions have, along with the recent change in public opinion about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been handled, have been causing increasing numbers of lawyers to go through the arduous process of gaining access to Guantánamo. The additional scrutiny alone seems to have already had a positive effect:

No, not of computer equipment this time. I've got a pack loaded nearly full, and I will be carrying it for five or six hours hiking through Tunica Hills with some friends and acquaintances from work. This will give me some idea of how much pain I'm going to be in this summer, when I get to do that for about a week straight.

At some point after that, I intend to write up reviews of all the gear I used. We'll see if I live up to that.