I'm almost positive I'm negative.

Got my HIV test results today. They came back (pause for dramatic tension) negative. There's about a 1-3% chance of a false negative, but I'm a low-risk person, so the odds are incredibly in my favor, much like the odds are in the favor of a falling object continuing to fall until acted upon by some outside force.

Sorry. I've been reading a physics book for fun. It's interesting stuff, and I just finished section 3: "Field and Relativity". Some mind-bending stuff in there; I can't wait to start section 4: "Quanta". The book has got me thinking about perspective, and how limited we all are in that respect. We cannot deal with what happens to physics, well, at any frame; people don't generally like to think about physics. But even the few folks who do like to think about it have some trouble with what happens to physics at huge scales of time, speed, distance, energy, etc. We just don't have the capacity to think that way, unless we've been working hard for many years at being able to do so. I am, at this point, hit-or-miss with the concepts he's putting forth, but with a few more runs through the book, I think I'll be able to get a working grasp on it.

Another book I have been looking at made me cry when I finished it. Seriously. It starts off light and happy, with funny concepts like dying from snake venom well before anybody has a chance to go get help, and gets more serious from there. It, too, has me thinking about perspective, but also about the impact people have on their environment. Frankly, the book seems to imply that the only real difference between people and viri is that we ought to know better. There are six billion homo sapiens on the planet. There's a species of fruit bat on Mauritius that, as of publication, had a few hundred individuals left in its entire population. By global standards, the fruit bat is in some serious trouble. By Mauritius standards, it's doing fine. Great, even; there are animals whose numbers are in the single digits, and a kind of palm tree of which there is one. One member of the entire species of tree is alive, in the middle of Curepipe Botanic Gardens, which was discovered (and almost killed) while they were clearing land for... Curepipe Botanic Gardens. The very institution that showcases this tree, the hyophorbe amaricaulis (or, hyophorbe amaricaulis; it hasn't got any other name- what would be the point?), nearly drove it off the face of the earth during its own construction. This is a very powerful book, and will make you want to help out without making you feel like you're personally responsible for all these terrible things. You go, Douglas Adams. Incidentally, if you didn't know, Douglas Adams himself is extinct, but the Rodrigues fruit bat is getting by.