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September 17, 2007
Look at these news briefs: href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cracking_down_on_corporate_abuses_abroad">In March, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, pled guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to making regular protection payments to…
September 16, 2007
CNN has an interesting article on the safeguarding of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium">highly enriched uranium.  A reporter was allowed to accompany a mission in Viet Nam to remove some cold war era highly enriched uranium from a US-built/USSR-fueled nuclear reactor.  It is…
September 16, 2007
I support universal coverage in a single-payer system.  I won't belabor the point.  Today I just want to point out another insurance industry lie, printed in the New York Times today. It's in an article about Mrs. Clinton's health care finance reform proposal.  (Which I do not support.)   Mrs.…
September 15, 2007
If you are willing to settle for a two-dimensional desktop experience, and you love The Matrix, this might be fun. The image is an animated GIF, so it is big.  (Sorry to the dial-up users.)  The real thing works much better than the animated GIF shows.   The howto is href="http://geekhacks.…
September 14, 2007
This is a regular photo of a tiger at the href="http://www.cabq.gov/biopark/">Albuquerque Biological Park. href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tejedoro_de_luz/1382289147/"> The href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tejedoro_de_luz/1382289147/">photo is on Flickr, taken by Glen.   The…
September 14, 2007
The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative article on the role of endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy babies in the Arctic.   I've written about the topic before ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">1 2) as have href="…
September 11, 2007
I don't think this has ever happened before.  I was reading an article about the organizational chart at the href="http://www.fda.gov/" rel="tag">FDA and I laughed out loud.   Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather, it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush" kind of LOL…
September 11, 2007
September 9, 2007
class="inset" alt="by Fabiogis50, Creative Commons (click)" title="by Fabiogis50, Creative Commons (click)" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1260/1338885976_56919ab4dd_d.jpg" border="0" height="324" width="500"> href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/" title="Click…
September 8, 2007
What is the world coming to?   title="Am J Psychiatry">AJP has an article about "intensive" therapy for bipolar disorder.  Their definition of intensive?  Thirty sessions over a period of nine months. Back in the day, when you could struggle to stay awake during a seminar when people read…
September 7, 2007
Mitt Romney's national finance committee (ex-) co-chairman, title="Forbes article" href="http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/09/ap4006058.html" rel="tag">Alan Fabian, is in trouble.  He's been indicted for mail fraud, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice…
September 7, 2007
This morning the US government revealed that employment is down by 4,000 jobs.  The market took a dive.  Why was the impact so bad? It is one of two reasons.  Either the numbers are so bad, that the government can't lie about them, or the numbers are so bad, that the government isn't even going to…
September 5, 2007
This is Theo at his desk, during the first day of Kindergarden, at Eberwhite.
September 4, 2007
In the 1950's, a new class of antipsychotic drugs was discovered: the antipsychotics.   href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine" rel="tag">Chlorpromazine (Thorazine®) was the first. By the 1970's, several related compounds had been discovered.  In 1976, it was learned that there is a…
September 4, 2007
IBM is launching href="http://linuxgazette.net/142/lg_bytes.html">Project Big Green.  Part of the initiative is to consolidate operations in the world's largest data centers.  They will replace nearly  4,000 servers with 30 refrigerator-sized System Z mainframes, running Linux, using…
September 3, 2007
This picture shows href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/float1.html" rel="tag">Hurricane Felix 2007 after attaining category 5 status.  You can see a video of it, growing as it approaches Central America, at the NOAA site, href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t1/sloop-wv.html">here…
September 3, 2007
alt="Pogona vitticeps" title="from Joachim S. Müller's photostream" src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1159/1304259520_04b0d4b93d.jpg" border="0" height="375" width="500"> src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif" align="left" height="31" width="88"> class="…
September 3, 2007
This is good.   href="http://www.getfirefox.net/">Firefox now has an extension that makes it simple to store all your bibliographic information from online research.   It is at release candidate 3 stage now, well-developed and fully functional.  It is called href="http://www.zotero.org/"…
September 3, 2007
Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful.  Usually these things don't bother me so much.  The problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his argument poorly -- although both are true.  What bothers me is the pointlessly malicious tone of the piece. href="http…
September 1, 2007
There may be another crisis brewing in health care finance.  In the early 2000's, health insurance premiums were increasing by ~10% per year.  The increase in premiums was greater than the increase in health care costs.   Why would insurance premiums go up faster than health care costs? It is…
August 29, 2007
Sexual assault is a common and serious problem.  It is hypothesized that misconceptions (rape myths) may play a role in this. About 50% of sexual assaults involving adolescent or young adult female victims occur in the context of alcohol consumption.  The authors of a recent study from the…
August 29, 2007
class="inset" alt="Flickr. By Chickenboots. Creative Commons License" title="Flickr. By Chickenboots. Creative Commons License" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/148054501_759fdbdd9b.jpg" border="0" height="375" width="500"> Shows what can happen when you withhold cheezburgers…
August 28, 2007
Google News no longer indexes ScienceBlogs, but they continue to link to drivel like this, from the Wall Street Journal: href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118800560693308626.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">Lone Star Spending Spree By MARY KATHERINE STOUT August 25, 2007; Page A6 Austin,…
August 28, 2007
My non-expert identification of this: href="http://www.mister-toad.com/photos/lizard/lizardphotos.html">desert spiny lizard, href="http://www.mister-toad.com/photos/lizard/Sceloporus_magister_15June05.jpg" rel="tag">Sceloporus magister.
August 27, 2007
William Rivers Pitt argues that what the President, Cheney, and Gonzalez have done is not illegal. Apparently, it is not illegal for the President to declare himself and his administration to be above the law. The idea is so outrageous that it never occurred to anyone to make it illegal.
August 27, 2007
From Cellar Image of the Day...
August 27, 2007
What would happen if you set up a system to automatically print out all the spam in the Universe?  Never mind the question of why you would want to. (link)
August 25, 2007
class="inset" alt="Crusade Radio logo" title="Crusade Radio logo" src="http://www.crusaderadio.com/christianradiohdr.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="131" width="304">This topic has been covered by href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/08/more_christian_curses.php">Ed…
August 25, 2007
This controversy has been evolving for the past three years.  Perhaps at this point it is no longer newsworthy.  But often, after a topic fades from the radar of the MSM, there are new findings. The journal, Psychological Medicine, has published a study about the risk of suicidal thinking and…
August 25, 2007
A neat little podcast, in which ordinary people express incredulity at the notion of a medical doctor buying into young-earth creationism, is at href="http://quirkynomads.com/wp/2007/08/22/podcast-geology-as-comedy/">Quirky Nomads.