An interesting news story appeared last week about Stalin’s (alledged) attempts to create a human-ape hybrid soldier:

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior [by crossing humans with apes].
Couldn’t help but think [...]

I sometimes write software at one of the local coffeeshops. One of the coffeeshops I go to has a fair number of foreigners. Today, I was talking to this guy who is into politics and political revolution. He’s originally from Ethiopia. He talked about the latest books he’s read recently on [...]

I had scarcely posted the last entry when I heard a *snap* from the kitchen. Sure enough, the mouse had been lurking around even while I was writing the last post. But, I didn’t want to necessarily kill it. I setup a contraption to actually capture the mouse inside an aquarium. [...]

Downloaded the demos for Quake 4 and Civilization 4 yesterday. Quake 4 looks pretty good. Although, they started the demo in “low quality” mode for some reason. It looks a lot better in high quality mode assuming your graphics card can handle it. Civilization 4 looks nice. I was a [...]