Is WindowsXP Professional a better option than WindowsXP home edition? I’m asking because my work has a license for employees to get an XP Pro upgrade for home use. I wonder if I should do it.

(not that I even have a computer running XP… I’m still on 98 at home. But hopefully one day soon we’ll be able to get a non-extinct computer)

Don’t miss the recipe for Megan’s Honey Pecan Triangles, found in the comments here

Jonathan Edwards: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

sigh

Happy Boss’s Day. ooooooooh I’m stuffed from our little division party. Whoever brought the Krispy Kremes deserves honorable mention.

The printer for everyone on my floor is next to my desk. One colleague just came in to pick up something he printed. It was apparently an article of some sort, and as he picked it up, he said to me, “Did you know that 1/3 of the world’s amphibians are endangered?” and then promptly swooshed out to do his work.

A moment after he left… a moment of processing what he said, and I said (now to myself), “That’s not true”.

See, the statement just isn’t qualified in a way that is meaningful. I suspect what he was saying is 1/3 of the species of amphibians in the world are endangered. This might be true. But, 1/3 of the amphibians in the world is not the same as 1/3 of the species of amphbians. There are millions of frogs hopping around these united states that are doing just fine. The ‘big’ species aren’t likely endangered. It’s probably the small ones… the species that are isolated to one very small geographic location, like an island, that are endangered. The ones where, under normal circumstances, the population numbers only in the thousands. So if 50 of them are killed, that’s a substantial piece of the population. And it’s not like all the frogs are going to die if one species of frogs goes extinct. That’s the way of things. Natural selection and all that rot.

Of course, I’m not saying the small species is unimportant, and that we shouldn’t do what we can to protect them. Diversity of life is an amazing thing, worth protecting. But sometimes these environmentalist statistics are so screwy…