Send in the clones.  It's finally happening.  Yahoo carried a story about some fellas attempting to clone homo sapiens sapiens -- 10 infertile couples volunteered for said procedures.  And if possible, nay, when possible, how many of us will elect to produce offspring thusly?  What if you could walk into a doctor's office, endure a simple, relatively non-invasive procedure, which grows into a genetically identical version of you during a normal human gestation cycle, hosted by an artificial womb provider in your town?  For a small fee -- would you do it?  Would others do it?

It's only a matter of time now -- a very short time, as it turns out -- something on the order of 9 months, give or take a few days -- and we will likely begin to see what will become an interesting challenge for technophilic society-- cloning should be right up there with abortion for the more traditional mindscape.  Rather than "asynchronous twin," which is probably a more accurate description, the clone necessarily carries with it a cognitive framework that presupposes the ethical viability of human genetic engineering....

Add to this the recent move by dispair.com -- stealing a commonly-used emotive pioneered in the early days of the Internet and registering it as a trademark!  How absurd!  And yet, how brilliant.  From a marketing perspective, the news story about 7,000,000 lawsuits should drive considerable eyeballs to their site -- their excellent set of demotivation tools are, I'm sure, well known if not cherished accoutrement.

:-(   is now a registered trademark of dispair.com

Does that mean :( as well?  What about 8-( for those with glasses?  or :=(  for those with stuffy noses?  Perhaps all possible emotives should be registered as trademarks --  I'm chagrined   :-|

The Solar Power Tower  from Sandia Nation Labs is pretty cool, though.    Rather than solar panels and photovoltaics, Hugh Reilly uses an array of mirrors to reflect energy from the sun onto the top of the tower, where a special material acts as an efficient heat conductor.  This excellent design utilizes liquid salt, which has a very high efficiency profile for heat storage. Thus, a turbine which produces electricity from the heat can be used during periods of darkness as well as daylight -- the liquid salts acts as a "heat battery." This system is much more efficient than photovoltaics, and is just as clean to operate, which means governments like Mexico can receive economic incentives to build such energy farms -- perhaps a home model could be developed as well, eh?  Given the recent problems California has seen with energy constraints, this seems like an idea with great potential.  There is a lot of desert on our planet, much of which could be host to energy farms based on the Solar Power Tower.  It should be much cheaper to build than photovoltaic equivalent factories, and at least as reasonable per megawatt as traditional electricity producing instantiations.  I want one of these in my back yard!

Liz and I are doing great.  We had no idea life could be this damn enjoyable; leaving New York has been a lot like a therapeutic removal a of chronic pain.    We do miss our friends -- and hope they find their way here.