I’ve had a copy of Neuromancer for a very long time. I’ve enjoyed the idea of having the book for so long that I think I thought I just might get to know the book by osmosis. I figured having the book made me seem cool. (LanaBob! how many cool points do you get for owning books you don’t read?)

Finally, finally I have read it. It was hard going at the beginning. I didn’t get all the slang and the faux-Japanese industrial business made me tired. Since I don’t read that much sci-fi (I’m starting to wonder how much longer this particular excuse is going to last me but I figure I can claim this much ignorance for at least another half a dozen books), I kept thinking that I was missing large swaths of the plot. Then last night as I was recounting to Stephen what I understood of the plot, he assured me that I was getting the story and so that renewed my energy for reading it.

I got into the actual heist this morning and I just about couldn’t put the book down. I just finished reading it and going over the info in wikipedia and I can’t figure out why I waited so long to read the book. Especially given my love of all things Max Headroom-ish. I completely enjoyed it and feel like I somehow now need to jack in to upload this article. My fingers on the keyboard just don’t seem to be enough of a connection. I will definitely be thinking about that cyberspace for a very long time. And isn’t that just the very definition of a good read?

Stephen pointed out that I hadn’t posted any photos on Flickr in a while. Enjoy!

A family comes together with ice cream

Photos taken on my birthday with my birthday camera

Liza explores

Eli’s first ice cream truck ice cream

Misty makes things

Sometime in the past week, my son has fallen in love with Legos. On Friday he played in his room with his legos while listening to books on CD for close to three hours.

My son, the extrovert, who thinks that he isn’t living a life worth having if someone isn’t watching and responding to his every eye twitch and vocalization played in his room by himself for around three hours.

I thought maybe it was a fluke due to it being my birthday and all. (Happy Birthday to me!) A pleasant respite from the nearly constant attention that Eli wants. But no, it happened again yesterday. I didn’t even suggest it. He went into his room and started up his own music and started building a “tower of power” out of Legos.

This morning? He came to me while I was still in bed to show me the thing he had build with the Legos for the little green men to play on.

I love Legos. They are my new favoritest thing in the whole world.

It would be unsurprising if the Petrelli boys’ father turned out to be alive and was played by veteran actor Leonard Nimoy. This might have to wait, though, if Heroes is governed by a conservation of Star Trek actors law.

Thanks.

In other news, I continue to prove to myself why the county next to ours is called Limestone County. Every third strike of my mattock, rather than sinking into the clay we laughingly call “soil” around here, strikes a chunk of limestone. I have a pile of rocks on one side of my incipient flower bed, some of which are the size of my head.

That’s what I’m doing with my free time; how about you?

I’ve talked about Rick and Jessica’s struggles to have a child. I’m happy to report that Phoebe came this weekend and we couldn’t possibly be any more joyful to see her.

Congratulations Rick and Jess! We love you guys and Phoebe is fabulous.

You know what we grow in Alabama? Cotton.

Field after field of it. During October it mounds up on the sides of the road and is nicknamed, rightly so, Alabama Snow.

We moved to Alabama five years ago this month. I am so glad we moved during October because I got to see the cotton harvest first thing and didn’t have to wait a whole year to see what happens.

Because of the drought this year, the cotton at the gin looks pretty slim. Usually there are four or five times as many bales as you can see in this photo. I hope the farmers have some other income.

Nothing is better than birthday posts from friends!

Update: Another birthday post! I am loved!

When it comes to seafood, pregnant and breastfeeding moms are in something of a bind. On the one hand, the omega-3 fatty acids from seafood aid in neural development. On the other hand, fish, especially those near the top of the aquatic food chain, have noticeable concentrations of mercury. In 2004, the FDA and EPA recommended that moms eat no more than 12 ounces a week of fish, and that they choose fish with lower mercury levels, such as shrimp, salmon, and catfish.

Understandably, a lot of moms opted out of eating fish all together. That can have negative consequences: a recent longitudinal study published in the Lancet indicated that not eating enough fish could lead to behavioral and developmental problems.

Enter Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies. In a press conference this morning, they recommended moms eat at least 12 ounces a week, if not more. Scientists are still hashing out the benefits and risks of eating fish, so why this, if you’ll pardon the expression, sea change?

And who are Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies? They’re not a new organization: they’ve been around since the early 1980s. And they list a number of notable organizations among their members, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the March of Dimes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and more.

Or, rather, they did list those organizations. NPR did some digging, with interesting results.

The top federal government agencies in charge of delivering public health messages expressed surprise over the announcement from Healthy Mothers, Healthy babies recommending increased fish consumption.

“We are members of the coalition, but we were not informed of this announcement in advance, and we do not support it,” says Christina Pearson, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Pearson says neither the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nor the Food and Drug Administration knew about the announcement.

Whoops. And as of right now, the members list of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies no longer includes the American Academy of Pediatrics or the National Institutes of Health. Furthermore, it turns out the group took $60,000 from the National Fisheries Institute to pay for doctors’ “travel expenses to a Chicago meeting, where they came up with their new advice”.

(Note to members of advisory groups who read this blog: when you take any amount of money from an industry-funded group and come out in favor of something that helps that industry, it calls your science into question.)

Neonatal vitamins now include omega-3 fatty acids. Some varieties of milk have the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. And even the group’s list of other countries’ recommendations more-or-less come down on the side of 12 oz/340 grams/two portions of fish a week. Given that, I’d stick with the twelve-ounces-or-less approach and supplement with vitamins.

Fifty years ago today, the USSR launched Sputnik I into orbit. The USSR and the USA had, as part of the International Geophysical Year, been working on putting satellites into orbit. The USA’s efforts had been pulled in several directions: Werner von Braun and the newly-minted Army Ballistic Missile Agency had proposed Project Orbiter, a joint Army-Navy effort, but the Stewart Commission chose the Navy’s Project Vanguard instead. To a large extent that was because Eisenhower wanted to minimize military involvement in space efforts, and Project Vanguard’s Viking rocket had been used for scientific efforts and not military ones like Project Orbiter’s Redstone missile.

When Sputnik launched, all of that changed. The USSR launched Sputnik II, with Laika the dog on board, one month later. Desperate to show that it, too, could hurl metal globes into space, the US attempted a Project Viking launch. The rocket went up four feet, lost power, fell back, and exploded.

Von Braun and the ABMA just happened to have been working on rockets that could be either an ICBM or a satellite-launching rocket. Von Braun’s team was given the go-ahead, and on February 1, 1958, they successfully launched Explorer I into orbit.

The US Space and Rocket Center has many of those old rockets on display. I’ve wandered past them, watching them get taller and taller, until I reached the Saturn V rocket. It’s amazing what a cold war and a large amount of government spending will buy you.