- I have Star Wars fever! I have it bad...real bad. It's deep in my bones, and I can't shake it. I don't think I want to shake it. It's more painful than Marburg fever, and twice as contagious. I have been debating on various SW-related messageboards about how much money Revenge of the Sith will make. I won't frighten you with an endless, manic diatribe. I will simply say that if ROTS is better than the first two prequels, I think it will make around 370 million. If it's the same quality as the first two prequels, it will make around 310 million. Here are links to websites that keep track of box-office totals. These websites will be fun to read during the summer blockbuster season:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
http://www.boxofficeguru.com/

- Remember the scene in Blade Runner, where Harrison Ford tests a person to find out if it is a replicant? For over fifty years, human beings have been devising tests that hopefully can determine whether something is a computer or an actual human. Here is an example of one such test. Some web-servers use this test to keep automated computer programs from registering with their websites:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/mathtrek.asp

- A few nights ago, I was watching an interesting program on the Discovery Science channel about future evolution on earth. The program showed clips of earth and it's animal life 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million years in the future. Obviously, such conjecture is pure guess-work, but nevertheless, it's fun to speculate. What fascinated me the most was the depiction of future tectonic shifts in the earth's crust. After watching this show, I decided to cruise the net looking for animations which show how earth's prehistoric crust (also known as Pangea), transformed into the current continents. This link is the best animation I could find. It's amazing how the continents kind of fit together like a jigsaw puzzle:
http://wrgis.wr.usgs.gov/docs/parks/pltec/pangea.html

- I want to make a formal apology to anyone who is reading this blog. During my entries two weeks ago, I made a link to an online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It's quite an exhaustive encyclopedia, and anyone can add or edit articles on that website. I thought the website had an editorial process, but I was wrong. Many of the articles, especially the ones dealing with politics or religion, are extremely biased. As with most websites on the internet, the people who hate something are much louder than the people who love something, so the articles tend to be very negative about the topics they explain. The article about George W. Bush, for example, reads like a pamphlet Michael Moore would hand to college students. I will keep the link to that encyclopedia on my web-blog, but if you visit it, take the encyclopedia with an extra-large grain of salt.