Last week I went to the Preservation Lab at work, and saw a few objects that reaffirmed my belief in the value of preserving material culture.

The first was a rough cotton smock that had been worn every day for one and a half years by a Jewish woman at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The second was her blanket, which was dark grey and had been woven from strands of human (presumably Jewish) hair. The blanket was very soft, and very chilling, to touch.

It’s been quite a long time since I came across anything that surprised me on the web, but this short article from the University of Utah certainly piqued my interest. It describes, using simple household materials, how to extract DNA from anything living.

I’ve been getting a lot of “penny stock spam” recently — unsolicited and bogus bulk marketing email trying to raise the price of various dubious stocks by purporting to be “insider” tips and investor alerts.

Today I received several that were particularly ironic — they were bogus “investor alerts” for some company called Epsion International Inc., “a leader in the fight against email based viruses, spam and outbound threats of corporate espionage.”

It’s REALLY hot in New York today — it’s now 36 degrees celsius (96 F), although apparently with the humidity it’s supposed to feel like 41C/107F.

I just went outside for lunch and it was a bit breezy, so it felt like having a hairdryer blown in my face!

However, although electricity consumption in New York has broken records and people are apparently dying because it’s so hot, I’m not finding it as bad as it could be because the humidity is only around 50%. Having said that, it’s only the 3rd of August…