Hummingwolf at Home

Listening to the BBC's Digital Planet programme online. Many of you might be interested in the first story this week, about Project Loca.

A work of art, in which people receive messages on their mobile phones from anonymous sources who seem to have been monitoring their movements, has been criticised.

Project Loca has come under fire for possibly doing the very thing it warns against - infringing civil liberties.

The story continues Digital Planet's discussion about the degree to which our lives have come under surveillance.

Artist Drew Hemmet draws attention to the trail unwittingly left by mobile phone conversations and explains why he thinks his work should be exempt from certain privacy laws.

Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti, meanwhile, sets out some of her concerns and criticisms about such projects.

The other stories are somewhat sex-related, which also might be of interest to many of you. Well, nominally about sex--about the domain name sex.com in one story.

1. When I was little and first learned the scientific term for humanity, I bounced around the house chanting, "I'm a homo sapiens! I'm a homo sapiens!"

My father, deeply offended, said, "No child of mine will ever be a homo sapiens." No, he was not mistaking it for another term. He simply did not want to be associated with the human species in any way and insisted that the only way I could be human was if I were someone else's child.

2. Feeling a need for old familiar things, I'm getting in touch with my inner child (of the '80s) listening to some of Launchcast's preprogrammed stations with 1980s themes. Am being reminded why I'm not normally nostalgic for that decade's music. The Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way"? Ach, there's a reason why Richard Butler was referred to as "a very poor man's David Bowie."

3. Someone just gave me a space heater for my room! This is especially welcome as we're surely due to run out of heating oil soon.

4. Thanks to the work of dedicated researchers, my ancestry has been traced back to the Celtic mother-goddess Don and her consort Beli Mawr (for whom Beltane was named). No, I am not making this up.

5. While I'm highly skeptical of astrology, the fact that my natal chart has the moon conjunct the ascendant and the sun in the third house makes perfect sense.

6. I know way too much about astrology for someone who doesn't believe in it.

7. Every time I've taken a mini-version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (whether using a book or a test online), my results have been either INTP, INFP, or a tie between the two. Except for one online quiz which told me I was an ESFJ. That quiz was probably coded by someone on very interesting drugs.

8. The books which I reread the most as a young child: Lewis Carroll's Alice books, L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, collections of the Grimms' fairy tales and Andersen's tales, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and a collection of stories & poems by Edgar Allan Poe.

9. The two authors I've read the most as an adult: C.J. Cherryh and C.S. Lewis. If I ever write anything that gets published, I'll have to use my initials too.

10. I own a single niobium earcuff I bought years ago from these people at a Renaissance festival. If I were a rich woman, I would own more. So what if I never wear the one I have? If I were a rich woman, I'd go places where I wouldn't feel ridiculous wearing niobium jewelry.