Miscellany: Your lab fees at work.

For a long time now I’ve been asking to be cremated and buried or scattered, rather than being embalmed and buried whole. This is primarily because I find the whole embalming thing a bit icky and unnatural, and secondarily because as an engineer I realize that the conventional burial model doesn’t scale with geometrically expanding population.

However, I think I’ve now found something that avoids embalming, but also doesn’t have the environmental costs associated with cremation, and as an added bonus is something that sounds completely insane.

Apparently Promessa will give you a very ecologically sound final disposition of your corpse.

How do they do this?

Well, first they freeze-dry your corpse, and then they shatter the corpsicle jerky into dust with sonic bursts. The dust, which doesn’t decay as long as you keep it dry gets put into a corn starch coffin, which will decompose quickly.

Come on, that’s awesome.

You know, I thought that story about the carnivorous fish spa was the freakiest thing I would read about the Japanese and fish. Not so, however. It comes a very, very distant second to the article about the sexual habits of Japanese fishermen. (The original link seems to have vanished, but there’s a copy of the story here.)

Look, I’m going to quote a little bit of it, but you go read it for yourself.

Should you happen to find yourself climbing on a seaside crag, you might come across a type of anemone known as “isoginchaku.” And this, says Makeburu, bodes well for some fishy frolic.

The creature gets its name from the old Japanese coin purse called a “kinchaku,” which puckers tightly in the center when you pull on the drawstrings.

“So if you stick in your you-know-what, it’ll snap shut around it,” he says. “You don’t need any foreplay at all. Just ram the old avenger home. It feels goooood,” he grins, rolling his eyes.

There’s a picture with that bit in the article that makes you wonder about those old size stereotypes for Asian men.

So, you want to be able to access your mail from anywhere, so you use GMail, or something like it. You want to be able to chat with your friends from anywhere, so you use the Google Talk web client, or something like it. You want to be able to read your RSS feeds from anywhere so you use Bloglines or Google Reader, or something like them. You want to be able to see your contacts from anywhere, so you use Plaxo, or something like it. You want to share documents with people over the web so you…

And so on.

The trend continues, and there are distributed applications to fill almost any niche at this point.

The obvious next step, of course, is a distributed operating system: access to your whole desktop from anywhere.

And there’s already a free, open source, implementation out there. Check it out.

Be sure to at least watch the video.

Scientology Faces Criminal Charges

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — A Belgian prosecutor on Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization.

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Finally, I have this one problem at work that is plaguing me–things that work everywhere else behave dismally if the application server happens to be a specific version of Weblogic, running on Solaris (same version of WLS works fine on Windows). I can’t figure it out.

However, after reading about Nepalese airline mechanics today, I have an idea for something that might resolve the problem.