6 Tishri 5767 * 28 September 2006: Ten Days of Repentance

Greetings.

Today’s news and commentary:

• “Sense and Transcendence”
  
• “Vaccines, tobacco taxes "best buys" for health - WHO” (Law-makers, take note.)
  
• “Meet Henrietta, the 4-legged chicken”
  
• “Agency makes breaking up easier” (Somehow this doesn’t seem right.)
  
• “Protesting Palestinian policemen block Gaza City”
  
• “The collapse of Israel's legal system”
  
• “French Surgeons Claim Zero-Gravity Surgery a Success”
  
• “Squandering the country's credibility”
  
• “Journal: Agency blocked hurricane report” (Why am I imagining a prison just for bad politicians right about now?)
  
• “Another Tack: Friends in deed”

Today’s weird thing, submitted by Barry, is Globus Cassus, a long-term project to turn the Earth/Terra into a huge hollow sphere with lots of living space on the inside. I believe this is a bad idea for two major reasons: 1) Since Terra is the human home-world, in the long term it will inevitably be considered the holy place for our species. The Globus Cassus project, if implemented, would be so destructive to Terra as to qualify as sacrilege; one does not treat anything holy as mere building material. 2) I have trouble imagining that the project would work. I did not see anything on the site explaining why a hollow structure with Terra’s mass would not collapse due to gravity. Enjoy, or be puzzled, or something, and share the weirdness.

Aaron