Dryer Query

I just noticed this today. The clothes dryer in my home has a strange slider for adjusting the temperature at which the clothes are dried. It has little nubbin' best pinched between thumb and index finger, and slides up and down. This in itself isn't very strange, but this is what held my attention: at the top of the slide is the "Regular" setting; three increments down is "Medium"; then three more increments down there is "Delicate" and "Light Fluff". So here's my question, "What does it mean?"
How is "Delicate" a temperature? Medium and Regular are very nearly synonyms, or have evolved to be nearly synonymous. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the sliding scale. What is light fluff?
Temperature is relative, different people have different ideas of what regular temperature means. A man born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico will have a very different idea of "normal" temperature than a young lady living in Anchorage, Alaska.
This is a pretty nebulous line of thought, but it was significant for that moment I did the laundry.
And because I am writing this Monday, March fourteenth, 2011, I would also like to mention the ongoing natural disaster aftermath in Japan. Hopefully I'll send some money for relief soon, I hope you do too.

Arigato.

Similes are your friend

People are like stars. There are millions of them. We see lots of them. Some work well with others, some do not. Some rest closer to Earth. Some are high above the world. Some shine brighter than others. Others are dim. The important thing, though, is this. They are part of something bigger than just a single point. And the world would be much less than it is today if a single one were to fade away.

Shalom, Mir, Peace.

Cryptids

In North America, we have stories about big foot and moth man. The jersey devil and skunk ape. In Mongolia, they'll tell you about Mongolian Death Worm.
Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Death_Worm

The scary thing about Brave New World.

I recently joined a class called Science Fiction reading and writing. An enjoyable class helped by the fact that almost one hundred percent of the class wants to be there. The atmosphere is energetic on the slowest days and the subject often promotes some pretty deep thinking. For example, we're reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Brave New World is a terrific read, a story about the world of tomorrow and the bizarre things that are considered normal in the year 632 A.F. And Aldous Huxley has an incredible knack for predicting what the world of tomorrow would look like. This is no Jules Verne and his submarine. This is no Isaac Asimov and his robots. This is Aldous Huxley and his baby factory. Believe it. Imagine a world where children are not born, but nurtured to maturity by a tandem team of machines and workers. Grown in containers and even altered before birth to fit a rigid caste system. The craziest thing about this world of test tube babies, palovian conditioning, and state sponsored drug use?
Aldous Huxley created this world in 1932.
This was before television, before internet, before World War II, and this man is talking about growing children in glass jars of blood surrogate? Along with the morally dubious form of baby making. Huxley also writes of a contraceptive pill. And a landscape where the family unit is broken down in favor of a less stressful "free for all" atmosphere: "Everyone belongs to everybody", as they put it in the novel.
Brave New World is an impressive literary feat in that the picture it paints is so alien, but also very familiar. And Aldous Huxley does wonders with taking a familiar idea and turning it on it's head. Assembly lines? We have those. Baby assembly lines? No. Recreational drugs? Sure. Drugs served legally in establishments inside your ice cream? Don't think so.
The mind reels at the idea that we are very close to developing some of the ideas put forth in a book written over seventy years ago.
I highly recommend this book to anyway who is a fan of science fiction or philosophy, it will get your gears turning.