Half-Life 2 revisited

Further searching has revealed that people are claiming many different release dates for Half-Life 2. Amazon.com says November 1, and I'm likely to take the word of a retailer over a gaming site. Just one more month!

Gay marriage debate rages on

Gay marriage is back in the news. Voters in 10 States Likely to Ban Gay Marriages on NYTimes and Spain Church Blasts Gay Marriage on BBC News shows just how different the US is from Europe on this issue. Anti-gay marriage people continue to use language that amazes me:

Their spokesman likened gay marriages to a counterfeit currency. "It would impose on society a virus, something false, which will have negative consequences for social life," Juan Antonio Martinez Camino said.

This is one that I find especially hard to understand, since allowing gay marriage won't increase the number of gays living together. It will just give them the same rights as heterosexual partners. What is the big deal?

Physics and Wireless Communication

I heard an interesting talk from a Bell Labs scientist on Friday regarding the use of techniques borrowed from physics in modern wireless communication schemes. Specifically, these schemes have multiple antennas at both the sending and receiving end. Taking advantage of the multiple antennas requires modeling the effect of the environment on the progating waves. To do this, the Bells Labs scientists have borrowed some techniques from mesoscopic physics, particularly the random matrix methods developed by Dyson et al. Apparently, they published an article regarding this work in Science in 2001. I should try to find it.

Half-Life 2 to be released next week

Holy shit!!! Half-Life 2 will be released next week!!! I noticed on the website that you can already download some of the game content in encrypted form with Valve's Steam service. Now, if only I had a machine fast enough to play it.

I guess it's time to upgrade =).

Stem Cells

Apparently stem cell research is proceeding with some sucess in this country (despite Pres. Bush's ridiculous restrictions). See Wired News: Stem Cells May Open Some Eyes for some information on an experiment which converted stem cells into eye cells. If we could actually "grow" new eyes, that would certainly beat the current efforts with implanted CCD chips.

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