I once complimented a woman for her Christmas brooch, which had tiny, multicolored, rapidly flickering LEDs on it. "I use it at work," she said, when she has to feed Alzheimer's patients. They fixate on the flickering brooch, she explained, which gives them the calming and the concentration needed to accept her spoonfeeding.

I hope other caregivers experiment with LEDs.

That high-cost form of care adds up too. Here in Canada, publicly-funded health care — together with retail health care costs outside of the public system (like prescription drugs) — cost about 9% or 10% of GDP...I forget the exact number. By the same yardstick, U.S. health care is 13% of GDP. So tlhingan is right, the user-pay system *is* more expensive. Obamacare will have reduced U.S. costs a bit by now, but maybe not by enough to make a dent in the 13% figure.

From www.webelements.com/cerium... "It is the most abundant of the rare earth metals and is found in minerals including allanite, monazite, cerite, and bastnaesite. There are large deposits found in India, Brazil and the USA."

I saw one price point online, $12 per kilogram. To my eye, that's cheap and suggests ready availability. Especially for the ingredient in the CalTech fuel-making process which gets regenerated.

My provincial goverment is using your quick and violent method, in fact, to destroy about 30,000 hard drives.

Well, not exactly *your* method, using bullets. But the same idea.

As they take each old computer out of service during a government-wide system upgrade, they:

1. Remove the hard drive.
2. Drill through it once, using a cordless drill. Right there in the office!

Full munching and recovery of recyclable materials takes place later at a depot. The important thing is to keep citizens' private data private! It's leaks to the media which drives the paranoia, by the way.

In the summer of 1961, as a kid, I got to play tic-tac-toe on the new Axel Wenner-Gren computer at the University of British Columbia. No way can I remember the model, but the Wikipedia article on Wenner-Gren suggests that it was a Wegematic 1000.

It filled a room, and they say its air conditioner was housed in a second room. Ah, tubes... It had something like 32 words of memory. I typed my move on an electric typewriter, and it re-drew the board in typewriter characters a few seconds later.

My older sister used it to customize a job application letter for a number of different companies. That surely is one of the first end-user mail-merges in history.

And to think I'm not 60 yet. Computers really are new!