November 25, 2008
With 80.6 percent of the vote recounted, the known difference between Coleman and Franken has for the first time grown greater than the audited and adjusted original count differenct of 215. The difference is now, by my rekoning, a whopping 238. This, by Norm Coleman's standards, is a virtual…
November 25, 2008
All sides in eastern DR Congo have committed serious human rights abuses, the UN secretary general has said.
Ban Ki-moon said both government forces and rebels loyal to Gen Laurent Nkunda had carried out arbitrary executions, mass killings, rape and torture.
The report covers July to November, when…
November 25, 2008
And a bonus (also from Heads Up)
November 25, 2008
This is a MUST SEE video.
It starts with Arthur Laffer, the Regeanomic Yahoo looking like a moron. Then we move on to some other guys who look like utter fools ... Then, Ben Stein totally sticks his foot in it.
Ben Stein's Famous Last Words, one year ago: "Stocks will be a lot higher in one…
November 25, 2008
The numbers are now settling in for the Coleman-Franken Senate race recount for Minnesota. With 74.2% of the votes counted, it is now possible to make a reasonably good prediction of the outcome of the current recount, not counting challenged ballots or other changes. The following graph shows…
November 24, 2008
Courtesy of Elle.
November 24, 2008
... ah, no, actually, it's just a meteor. But caught on video!
And a more detailed report:
So, so many science fiction stories start exactly like this....
November 24, 2008
Season's greetings from the secular side
by
August Berkshire
Minnesota Atheists
'Tis the season. With winter coming, some members of the religious right have begun bracing themselves for the so-called annual atheists' "war on Christmas." While we think that the government and public schools…
November 24, 2008
By Charles Darwin.
Read it here!
November 24, 2008
Gardening Like The Forest: Home Scale Ecological Food Production
Learn how you can grow an abundant food-producing ecosystem in your backyard!
Join us and learn how to grow food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizers, farmaceuticals, and fun. We can meet our own needs and regenerate healthy ecosystems…
November 24, 2008
And on behalf of John Lennon, I say: "Kiss my ass, Vatican..."
(Though I'm sure John would not have said exactly that.)
A Vatican newspaper has forgiven the late English singer John Lennon for saying four decades ago that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
In an article praising The Beatles…
November 24, 2008
From the bbc:
A US couple is suing McDonald's for $3m (£2m) after nude photos of the woman, which were on her husband's mobile phone, ended up on the internet.
Phillip Sherman says he accidentally left his phone, with the photos, at a McDonald's in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He says staff promised…
November 23, 2008
Here is the film of the space tool bag floating away.
Apparently, a veteran sattelite watcher ... this is a guy with a telescope who watches satellites from earth ... has filmed the bag from a different angle. From his back yard!
... Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin…
November 23, 2008
FiveThirtyEight is a pretty good web site dealing with polls and other election realted number crunching. They predicted the outcome of the race for president almost as accurately as I did, so I figure they're pretty good. And now, FiveThirtyEight has a reasonably good analysis suggesting that…
November 23, 2008
In fact ...
Linus Torvalds can run kill -9 and kill Chuck Norris.
Linus Torvalds doesn't die, he simply returns zero.
Linus Torvalds runs Linux on his wristwatch and toaster.
There is no theory of probability, just a list of events that Linus Torvalds allows to occur.
In the tradition of PZ Myers…
November 23, 2008
Carnival of the Recipes Turkey Recipes Edition
The 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The trouble with Orac
The Carnvial of the Liberals: The Post Election Blues
Gene Genie Edition #40
Four Stone Hearth
November 23, 2008
... a culinary repost.
You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I…
November 23, 2008
There are a little more than 300 people in the world with the condition Laron dwarfism, a third of whom live in remote villages in Ecuador's southern Loja province.
Sufferers of Laron - believed to be caused by inbreeding - lack a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1, or IGF1.
Research…
November 23, 2008
The genome of the extinct woolley mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) has been sequenced, and reported in Nature. This confirms that elephant genomes are large, like the elephants themselves. It confirms previously proposed relationships amongst the elephants (see phylogeny below) and refines the…
November 23, 2008
According to Julia. Here, I'm speaking of the books (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1), New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2), Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, Book 3), and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4)) not the movie. Julia went off yesterday with my sister in law to see the movie, and…
November 23, 2008
PZ Thinks this is for real:
I'm not so sure. What do you think? (Click on Fidel to visit the site. If you dare.)
November 23, 2008
Here's the graph:
The explanation for the graph is here.
This is a little misleading. The number of votes counted yesterday and contributing to this right-most point is very small ... hardly any counting was going on during the day Saturday. The Monday data, added to this, will be more useful…
November 23, 2008
"Finding Family" with Dr. Matt Kaplan
Do you have questions about your ancestry before written time? When you've sent your DNA to a lab to find out about your ancient ancestors, are you curious about how they get the data? National Geographic was one of the first organizations to answer these…
November 23, 2008
Really, the news media is a meat grinder. It is a semi-intelligent powerful automaton meat grinder, where the meat is almost any kind of information and the stuff it puts out is the sausage they call reporting. The meat grinder must make a certain number of sausages (separated by commercials) per…
November 23, 2008
I once read a novel by John Le Carre about Inguhetia (Our Game). For quite some time, if I mentioned Ingushetia to anyone they assumed I was making it up. But it is quite real. You've heard recently of the problems in Georgia vis-a-vis South Ossetia. Well, Ingushetia is nestled along side of…
November 22, 2008
A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.
The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.
State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs,…
November 22, 2008
This is hyst-fucking-erical.
OK, we've been recounting ballots pursuant to the implementation of actual Democracy in the Coleman-Franken race for U.S. Senate.
So what do you think the standard JOKE among the Democrats ... working as volunteers to observe the count for Franken ... has been? This:
"…
