Busy

This promises to be a busy month for me at work. I'm seriously thinking about a blogging hiatus, unless of course an insanely generous reader relieves the financial reasons I really need to concentrate on work. (Ha!)

Anyway, we'll see how we go. Blogging at night might still be OK, but even so it is far too easy for me to be distracted by looking at the web all day for interesting articles to post about.

For example, here's a few things of interest that I see right now:

* Newsweek says China might want to go to the Moon to mine it for Helium 3. Seems to me it would be a good idea if you knew fusion reactors using it would actually work. (Maybe there is a bit of chicken or egg problem here, though.) Also, this line in the article caught my eye:

If significant deposits are found, China's engineers still need to design the world's first lunar mining machines and send them up—while the rest of us shrink in horror at the thought of strip mines on the moon.

Hey don't mark me up as one of the horrified. What exactly is the problem here? It's a sterile, pre-cratered landscape with no obvious inhabitants to upset by having the view from their condo ruined. Does lunar dirt have an inherent right to lie unmoved except by the next meteor?

* Legal battles over movie deals get a lot of coverage in the LA Times, being the industry town that it is. The latest is about "Sahara", which did look expensive on the screen, and was (I thought) very well directed for an action film. Unfortunately, it also starred Matthew McConaughey, a male lead who for some reason I have always found irritating.

Anyway, a reclusive multi-billionaire lost $110 million on the film and isn't happy. The story is of moderate interest.

* Paul Sheehan must be running the risk of getting death threats himself (or maybe he already has?) with articles about Islam in Europe like this one.