j7uy5
Posts by this author
August 24, 2007
Someone has to put a stop
to
href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/semantic-stopsi.html">this.
August 24, 2007
Health care is shaping up to be one of the big issues in the
upcoming elections. No big surprise there, it was a highly
-ranked issue in the last election, too. It's just that last
time, voters failed to see how health care is more likely than
terrorism to affect their health.
Perhaps this…
August 23, 2007
alt="ALT"
src="http://images.forbes.com/media/2007/03/15/labels_6.jpg"
border="1" height="280" width="400">
Product: Midol
Menstrual Complete
Label: Ask a doctor
before use if you have difficulty urinating due to an enlarged prostate.
Sound advice from Merck. But should sufferers of…
August 23, 2007
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the federal
government
to publish climate-change research plans every three years, and
assessment reports every four years. Both are now overdue.
The research plan is one year overdue, and the assessment
report is three years overdue.
On 21…
August 22, 2007
Senator
rel="tag">Dick Durbin has started a project using
an innovative method of writing legislation:
href="http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=318">What
should be America's national broadband strategy?
by: Dick Durbin
Sun Jul 22, 2007 at 13:06:58 PM EDT
(This diary will…
August 22, 2007
In 2005, there was a plague. It started
inadvertently, as
most do, but spread rapidly, resulting in many deaths.
Officials scrambled to find a solution. Eventually
it was contained.
The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=…
August 21, 2007
Made with Legos. This was dreamed up by their development team, but never merketed.
August 21, 2007
style="border: medium solid rgb(204, 204, 255); padding: 5px; text-align: center; background-color: white;"
cellspacing="5" height="351" width="500">
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2007-08-19"
title="Wikipedia:Picture of the day">Wikipedia Picture of
the day
href…
August 20, 2007
I just love things like this. An open-access
article in
title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS
reports on a previously-unknown method of signaling employed by
squirrels.
The squirrels have a way of enhancing a tail-flagging movement with an
IR signal. The IR…
August 20, 2007
These things are hard to photograph. They are
faster than I
am, that is for sure. Out of about 30 shots, at least a few
were decent.
These are said to be the smallest birds in the USA.
They are
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliope_Hummingbird">named
after the Greek
muse of …
August 19, 2007
Hard to know what to make of
href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3499544">this.
The American Psychological Association considered a proposal
to ban participation in military interrogations.
Specifically, APA members would have been prohibited from
assisting in interrogations "in…
August 19, 2007
Spent part of the afternoon trying to get better pictures of
the woodpeckers, but I am not happy with any of the pictures I got.
So here is someone else's picture:
I think it is easier to get pictures of birds when they are
in a confined space.
href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/…
August 18, 2007
No money down, but the payments go on forever. The
only
people who win are the bankers and the contractors. We make
it easy to get in. But like herpes and condominiums, it is
hard to get rid of.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite
books was Starship
Troopers, (1959). It was written by a…
August 17, 2007
How refreshing: a Presidential appointee speaks out
unequivocally
against Administration policy. This is from a Medscape
News article (free registration), which is from
Reuters Heath Information. The report quotes a professor of
Immunology who is on the
href="http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY…
August 16, 2007
Not much commentary needed on this graphic. HT to
href="http://flprogressive.blogspot.com/2007/08/progressivism-is-not-dead-but-its-on.html">Blast
Off!.
Most of the liberals are actually conservative.
Some of the Republican
candidates are close to being as authoritarian as Hitler or Stalin…
August 16, 2007
At first you would not think that pirates would try to
establish a base
in Utah. There are not a lot of coves or bays there.
Even so, it is the first State to have an official pirate
base. They have a logo. They are even circulating a
petition to gain official recognition as a political party…
August 16, 2007
Next to the headline "Corporate America Braces for Market
Fallout," is
a photo, selected at random, of a guy diving in front of some
skyscrapers.
It is not intended as an illustration for the article, but at first
glance it appears to be.
The actual photo is less alarming, when you can see the…
August 16, 2007
This is from a small study, so it would be inappropriate to
draw a broad conclusion from it. Still, it is kind of
interesting.
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=searchcitationsresults,2,2;">
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/…
August 13, 2007
Some
people did not believe that the picutre of the
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/photo_of_surfing_dog.php">surfing
dog was
real. I can't prove it either way, with respect to that
particujlar dog, but I did find a video of
a different dog surfing. This might give pause…
August 13, 2007
An
article in Forbes documents exorbitant commuter costs in some
communities. In and around Houston, for example, the average
commuter spends 20% of their household income on commuting.
That, together with housing costs, adds to more than 50% of
household income. The author ends up making a case…
August 12, 2007
I am now sure this is a ladderback. The photos are not very
sharp, having been taken through a window screen, but it still was fun.
The cat was going nuts. That's how I knew there was something
outside.
August 12, 2007
src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_VbG-d6SeGuA/RePVVb_nxrI/AAAAAAAAAD8/6QbLROwzDEk/s400/anandita-tamuly-eats-bhut-jolokia.jpg"
align="left" height="344" width="238">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">I had not seen this when
I first posted about the
href="http://spectre.nmsu.edu/dept/…
August 11, 2007
The headline:
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/10/AR2007081001204.html">Federal
Deficit Sharply Lower.
The text: The lower year-to-date
deficit was the
result of a record of $2.12 trillion in revenues. Spending, however,
was higher -- $2.27 trillion, which…
August 10, 2007
That, by the way, is a cobra's head in the man's mouth.
Courtesy
of
href="http://news.sky.com/skynews/picture_gallery/0,,70141-1279060,00.html"
rel="tag">Sky News "We've scoured the globe for
some of the best, strangest and most dramatic photographic images..."
They quipped that snake…
August 10, 2007
It is
reasonably well established that treatment with bright light is
effective for
href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/07/seasonal_affective_disorder_th_1.php">seasonal
affective disorder (SAD). The standard treatment is
to have someone expose their face to 10,000
href="http://en.…
August 10, 2007
A
while back, Shelly wrote a nice introduction to
title="Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder">ADHD
at
Retrospectacle:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/07/the_neuroscience_of_adhd_1.php">The
Neuroscience of ADHD. Read that first, for
background, then consider this to…
August 10, 2007
Since
the last one of these I did was kind of scary, I decided to do
one that is not so scary. It is just plain weird.
But there is an interesting story to it.
The
female is on the left; the male is on the right. These are
the genitalia of mallards:
href="http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.…
August 9, 2007
When
unemployment is high, there is more penetrating trauma (bullets,
knives). When employment is high, there is more blunt trauma
(automobile crashes).
href="http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/09/unemployment_predicts_hospital_trauma/5157/">Unemployment
predicts hospital trauma…
August 7, 2007
The
problem, specifically, is that patients with insurance
have higher copays and deductibles. According to an article
on Medscape (free registration required):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/560983">U.S.
Hospitals Struggle Over Who Can Afford to Pay
By Kim Dixon
CHICAGO (…