GG: Digital Microscope

After sadly finding little geeky gadgetry to catch my attention lately, I’ve gone to the trusty ThinkGeek site to see what they were peddling. As usual they hit upon several things that pique my inner geek’s interests. Among the things catching my eye:

1.3 Megapixel USB Digital Microscope Sure, not many people are going to need something like this but I can see it being useful for some of the small projects I’m planning and/or working on involving electronics and such.

Of course I still like the less technical geek items like a number of their globes: the Celestial Globe that digs at my astronomy loving heart and the “Anti-gravity” Globe even if it really is just an overly complicated way to play with magnets. I just kind of wish they’d make globes for the moon (like my grandfather’s old Lunar globe sitting my desk) or one of the other planets, say Mars. Okay, yes you can get those at other places online like Scientifics.

Green Collar Workers

I don’t know why, but I really, genuinely, utterly hate the term “green collar worker” being bandied about to refer to people who work in the environmental sector. I suppose my annoyance comes from the fact that these people who have been developing alternative energy sources and technology, reasonable conservation efforts, and so on have been doing so for decades without much comment or support from any sector of our society but now it’s suddenly the “green” thing to do. Unfortunately, I suspect that in the end nothing will really come of it, considering there has been talk of conservation and environmentalism longer than I’ve been alive and little has changed. That or it will be commercialized and sold at overly priced costs like many other “green” items of the recent past.

Out of curiosity I decided to look up the origin of the phrase and just about laughed to realize the phrase was used over 30 years ago in a report to of all places a congressional economic committee.

Of course I despise other “collar” titles (i.e. pink-collar, gray-collar, gold-collar) as well, particularly when they were obviously made up to fill some person’s fascination with trying to categorize everything to death and ignores the origin of the classifications: white-collar and blue-collar.

Arizona Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday and the polls closed nearly two hours ago as I write this and already the usual “analysis” has started. I find amusement in local analysts making claims on who is going to win in Arizona and why, since they all just regurgitate the national “experts” opinions rather than look at the primaries from an Arizona viewpoint. That’s too be expected, I suppose, given how many seem so hostile to a state (any state) choosing to be independent through historical, political, geographic, social, and cultural differences from the other states in the Union. It’s fine to be different in food, art, and music but apparently not so when it comes to politics and society. Pity really since such attitudes would turn the United States from the Melting Pot to a bland paste.

So, anyway, while obviously far too early to know who the winners in Arizona will be, my continuing hope is for a McCain vs. Clinton presidential race come this November.