Re: Nanobes announced

hal@rain.org
Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:01:04 -0800

It's getting unpleasantly close to April 1, making me begin to mistrust every surprising result announced for the next few weeks. Just the other day a magazine reported that PC's constantly saved the noises picked up by their microphones and the resulting files could be queried remotely (that's why your disk drive light flashes occasionally, you see). This was a joke but it went around for a while before everyone realized it.

I wish this stupid custom would go away. It's getting to the point where there needs to be a moratorium on discoveries for a month starting in mid March.

I tried to make some variation of "april fool" by anagramming "dr philippa uwins". I got "april" and was worried, but the closest I could come to was something like "april pun hid wisp" which doesn't seem too close. So I guess we can count this one as legit.

Hal

> Major press coverage this weekend in Australia for the apparent discovery
> by Aussie geologist Dr Philippa Uwins, at University of Queensland's Centre
> for Microscopy and Microanalysis, of a new class of life-forms at the nano
> scale, retrieved in a commercial oil drilling sample from 5 kilometres down
> off the West Australian coast. This work, done with UQ microbiologists
> Rick Webb and Tony Taylor, was published in *American Mineralogist, An
> International Journal of Earth and Planetary Materials, Volume 83; No.
> 11-12, Part 2* back in Nov/Dec 1998.