Stalking the wild Tyvek[tm] -- A reader writes:

A totally useless upgrade to your comment in TidBITS #192 - in the article about dust covers, you mentioned that the covers are made "from Tyvek, a strange, durable material that definitely never came from anything living."

Just to set the record slightly less crosswise, Tyvek[tm] is a sort of synthetic fur that has been melted into a sheet. The raw material is a garden variety plastic, made from petroleum, which, as you know, derives from the countless remains of little critters unlucky enough to be buried deep beneath the swamps of Texas or the sands of Arabia.

Last I heard Tyvek[tm] was a registered trademark of the DuPont Company, whose computers unfortunately can't make that little registered trademark symbol. [My Mac can, and the setext format cleverly accounts for that, changing it into [tm]. In an ideal world, a setext browser would convert it back, but even the estimable Easy View doesn't yet do that. -Adam]