Look at these groovy cross-sections!  I wish I had done something this pretty.  My dad bought a gigantic pro-quality microscope when I was litttle, presumably in hopes of turning me into a scientist/bio major like him.  We found some pretty cool critters under that microscope, especially one time when we looked in some pond water and actually found a rare creature.  It kind of looked like a 2D Brontosaurus without legs, and it moved around by reaching its “head” forward, and then pulling the rest of itself along (if I remember correctly).  Sadly, I ended up being a philosophy major/computer geek and stopped playing with the microscope as I got older, and now I don’t know where it went…. probably in the attic somewhere.

According to this post on Aaron Russo‘s blog (my favorite Libertarian nominee for president), there will be a presidential debate at Swarthmore college on September 28th?

http://russoforpresident.com/batm/index.php/2004/05/24/p311

This will be unbelievably awesome, especially if the two major parties’ candidates come as well as the Libertarians, Nader etc.

I hope Russo wins the Libertarian nomination, his campaign keeps the best blog 🙂  Nolan’s blog is weak.  Russo just did his first audioblog yesterday!  I haven’t even done an audioblog yet….

And yes, I will probably be voting Libertarian in this next election, especially if Russo is nominated.  Russo is very strongly in favor of alternative medicine, which is one of my pet issues (I have never had a drug in my life except for anaesthesia during operations), and he is very strongly against the draft, which is important to me as a Quaker.  My only concern is that since he made his money in Hollywood, he may be opposed to the Free Culture movement.  If he is at Swarthmore on September 28th, I will certainly ask him.

Unfortunately it looks like my parents won’t let me out until I finish writing my 4 overdue papers, which probably means that I won’t be free until Friday night.  Therefore, this Friday, May 21st, I will be holding a GINORMOUS GOING-AWAY PARTY, the day before I fly out to San Francisco to intern with the Electronic Frontier Foundation!  OK, maybe not ginormous… It will be 8pm-1am at my house in Morris Plains, New Jersey.  If you do not know where my house is, e-mail or IM me. 

Everyone who wants to see me before I leave for California is invited, and I’m always open to meeting new people as well, so feel free to bring your friends! (or yourself, if I don’t know you yet)  However, don’t bring them if they have no interest in seeing or meeting me, but just want to help trash my house 😉

If you could help defray the costs of this party by bringing food/drinks/cups/plates, that would make me your friend forever.

This will have to be a stone soup sort of party, since I don’t have time to plan it properly due to my papers.  I’ve asked a couple of friends already to help me think of and implement cool things to do, but the ideal would be for everyone to bring awesome ideas and equipment for having a good time with them.  Then we can just pick whatever seems the coolest!

We have a small yard which is good for more restrained outdoor games, but it is next to a hill, so balls tend to escape down the hill and force people to go fetch them.  If you have musical instruments, bring ’em!  If you have a laptop, bring it, there will be Wi-fi internet, and we can have LAN games!  We should have a TV, so if you want to watch a DVD or play video games, bring your system!  Bring super soakers, nerf guns, whatever floats your boat 🙂

Please rsvp by replying to this post or e-mailing me at nelson at freeculture dot orrg.

Thanks a gazillion!

If you haven’t left Swarthmore yet, talk to Luke about getting one of the Tux armbands we made at the last SCDC meeting!

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing. This is seriously awesome, although it relies on a flash program for most of its cool features. Proprietary bad. But, cross-platform, location-independent is good. I must ponder this.

If you’re desperate to get by on fewer hours of sleep, polyphasic sleep (a.k.a. the Uberman’s sleep schedule) may be the answer!  Basically, you do weird things to your sleep schedule and practices to maximize REM sleep.

Unfortunately, all the bloggers who were going to test polyphasic sleep on themselves seem to have quit the blogosphere in 2002.  I hope they didn’t die… someone suggested that they were recruited by the NSA to train agents, but I think they were snuffed because they were getting too close to the secrets of the Illuminati 😉  At any rate, this seems to imply that the sleep schedule was not practical, if 4 bloggers couldn’t maintain it with each other’s support and the eyes of the community watching them.