How Could You Not Listen To Jennifer Connelly?

I have been telling people about the stupidity and the immorality of buying and wearing diamonds for a few years while receiving mostly perplexed looks and polite smiles from the people I tried to convince. Needless to say, I am quite a failure at this.

However, in the movie Blood Diamond, Jennifer Connelly's character summed it up infinitely better than I could have done. She said, "People back home would not buy a diamond if they knew it cost someone their hand."

Wanting and buying diamonds, besides being an example of how we are fooled by brilliantly evil marketing strategy to pay enormous sum of money for artificially-scarce commodity, also provides great incentives for mistreatment of the poor and the children. Child enslavement, mutilation, and murder are done just to bring us some stupid shiny rocks. A good summary of all the various reasons we should stop wanting diamonds can be found in this article and this article.

I also would like to point out that we have the technology to synthesize diamonds atom-by-atom, resulting in better quality gems than any naturally occurring diamonds. (This reminds me that, once upon a time, aluminum was priced more highly than gold, due to the difficulty of extracting pure alumninum from rocks. Now, after appropriate technology was discovered in 1886, aluminum is abundant and cheap enough that we can throw away aluminum foils. I suspect that I will use diamond-based semi-conductors, diamond-powder coated electronic devices, and forever-sharp-diamond-edged knives in a decade or two.)

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P.S. Jennifer Connelly, besides being one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, can actually act, and very well at that. She got an Oscar for her role in A Beautiful Mind. I saw her movies since she was a teenager, and I thought, "Good thing this girl is pretty, she cannot act." I'm very happy to see that I'm completely wrong. Starting in the late 1990's, it became more and more apparent what a good actress she has become. Some of her roles I enjoy include a lesbian college student in Higher Learning, the leading role in Dark City (one of my top ten Sci-fi movies), a political activist in Waking the Dead, and a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream.

Electro-Bio-Nano-Engineering

Scientists asked virus to assemble very small wires to be used inside high-capacity lithium-ion batteries!

Specifically, they manipulated the genes in a laboratory strain of a common virus, making the microbes collect exotic materials -- cobalt oxide and gold. And because these viruses are negatively charged, they can be layered between oppositely charged polymers to form thin, flexible sheets.

The result? A dense, virus-loaded film that serves as an anode.

A report on the work will appear in the April 7 issue of Science.

After so much stupidity, incompetence, corruption, and just plain evil exhibited by most politicians and officials involved with the construction of our 4-month-old-and-already-falling-apart-4-BILLION-US-DOLLAR Suvarnabhumi airport, it's uplifting to see ingenuity and inventiveness exhibited by our species.

Applied Chemistry: How To Make A Zombie*

Tetrodotoxin is a very potent neurotoxin found in pufferfish (ปลาปักเป้า) and other animals (เช่น คางคกบางประเภท และ ปลาหมึก blue ring.) It blocks sodium channel in cells, disrupting the cell's normal signaling mechanism. The person poisoned by tetrodotoxin will become numbed, paralyzed and die of respiratory failure if the dose is high enough** ("...Only 0.00000065 g of tetrodotoxin is required to kill an adult, making it about 1000 times more toxic than cyanide." ... "It is a terrible death," reports on fugu devotee. "Even though you can think very clearly, your arms and legs become numb and you cannot sit up. You cannot speak, cannot move, and soon cannot breathe.")

In the 1980's, Wade Davis went to Haiti to explore the Voodoo's method of making zombies. He brought back the "Zombie Powder" which was analyzed and found to contain tetrodotoxin. It seems that the powder was used by unscrupulous Voodoo practitioners to create zombies who would be used as slaves in plantation. Apparently, people would be poisoned by the powder, became sick, "died", buried, and later dug up by the criminals to be sold as a slave. Once sold, the "zombie slave" is kept docile and confused by another drug that contains tropane alkaloids. Dr. Davis' experience is described in his book "The Serpent and the Rainbow" which was later made into a movie.

I wonder whether Juliet was given tetradotoxin (probably at approximately 0.00000015 g, since she was a small teenage girl), by Friar Lawrence when Romeo thought she was dead. Had the Friar reduced the dose by 5-10%, she would have waken up in time to prevent Romeo's suicide. To think of it, Friar Lawrence probably succeeded many times in similar situations but we only know of Romeo & Juliet because he failed so spectacularly in this case. (Of course, it was not the Friar's fault; I would place the blame squarely on Romeo for being way too hot-headed and didn't wait another day--or another half hour.)

*I know I didn't tell you exactly how to make a zombie. However, any self-respecting mad scientist can use the provided clues to do further research him/herself.

**Six fishermen in Thailand died from consuming pufferfish a few years ago.