revere
Posts by this author
September 7, 2008
The Bush administration and Republicans in general have acted and talked tough about copyright violations. It's not just Republicans, either. Some scumbag Democrats are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and going at it as much as they can as long as the Johns are paying for their services. But it's…
September 7, 2008
Naturally I find Sarah Palin's mixing religion and politics odious. Whether it's believing that the War in Iraq is a task from God or that Alaska's young people should pray that "God's will" be done in constructing her preferred version of a natural gas pipeline or thinking that it's fine to teach…
September 6, 2008
This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information.…
September 6, 2008
This has been around, but even if you've already seen it it's still funny. And instructive. Well, maybe not for everyone. Some people aren't trainable:
September 5, 2008
This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information.…
September 5, 2008
When influenza viruses with different genetic make-up co-infect a cell there is the possibility that they will mix their genetic endowments. The influenza virus is designed to do only one thing: make a copy of itself. It does this by tricking the host's protein manufacturing machinery to use the…
September 4, 2008
This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information.…
September 4, 2008
McCain wants to go full speed ahead for nuclear power (that's a maverick's way of dealing with climate change?) and Obama seems to feel friendly to it, too, as long as the waste disposal issue can be solved, satisfactorily (which it doesn't seem it can be, but that's another story). Everyone agrees…
September 3, 2008
This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor who would occupy the position should he be elected, most…
September 3, 2008
I've mentioned my shit box of a car pretty often here, usually in connection with trying to get someone to buy it. I had another flat this morning from a rim that is so rusty it doesn't hold a seal anymore. I thought I'd replaced it at the junkyard last week but it seems they replaced the wrong rim…
September 2, 2008
Not many people know much about John McCain's new running mate, Sarah Palin, first term Governor of Alaska (in office 20 months). Not even John McCain knows that much about her. He only met her twice before deciding she was worthy of being his running mate. So let's take a look at her record, as…
September 2, 2008
You might think it is an arcane subject, but a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes" by Grime et al., is quite a stunner. This paper is about a century old formula called…
September 1, 2008
This really makes me crazy. I've already ranted about it at least twice (here and here), going back to January 2005. I thought this one was settled in the only way commonsense would allow. But commonsense isn't very common with some judges.
Here's the gist. Back in 2004 a small meatpacker,…
August 31, 2008
The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to…
August 31, 2008
Maybe it says "In God We Trust" on our currency, but it's a financially risky strategy, as the "Christian-centered" Georgia-based Integrity Bank discovered as it came apart at the seams last week:
The Alpharetta-based bank, which opened its doors in 2000 with a Christian-centered philosophy, is the…
August 30, 2008
The daycare where my daughter's 15 month old is a scholar-in-residence is closed this week so grandma (Mrs. R.) and grandpa (yours truly) have been filling in with the newborn and the older sib. It's been a while and there were a lot of things we'd forgotten about. Like the fact that babies like to…
August 29, 2008
I used to joke that the only plan the Bush administration had for dealing with air pollution was to put all the free radicals in jail. If you don't know what a free radical is, it is a highly reactive form of a chemical, usually involving an unpaired electron. Radicals often are short lived…
August 28, 2008
Civilian scientists are still trying to get used to the hysterical nonsense around "biodefense" that the homeland security apparatchiks imposed as Act I. in their Security Theater, bullshit that included indicting an artist and a respected scientist for shipping a harmless bacterium (see here, here…
August 27, 2008
I have been severely critical (many posts among those here) of the Indonesian government's irresponsible assertions of ownership of potentially pandemic pathogenic viruses isolated from their citizens. The question of Intellectual Property is a difficult one in many instances but when it comes to a…
August 26, 2008
It's Presidential politics time, so here's something to think about: the threat to the health of women. In my early medical career I spent some time running down to emergency rooms to meet women bleeding out from botched illegal abortions. That wasn't so long ago, although most people have no idea…
August 25, 2008
Both of our children and all three of our grandchildren were with us yesterday afternoon, which set me thinking about the Nebraska "safe haven" law. If you haven't heard about it, Nebraska has just joined the other 49 states by enacting LB 157, a law that allows a parent to abandon an unwanted…
August 24, 2008
I belong to a number of professional societies and one of them is the American Mathematical Society. The September issue of one of their publications, the Notices, just arrived and I read with interest a statement by one of the world's most distinguished mathematicians, Brown University's David…
August 24, 2008
Was John McCain really getting into the religious weeds when he announced "we are all Georgians" and noting that Georgia was "one of the first nations on earth to convert to Christianity...it's been part of the grand sweep that compromises Western civilization"? Or was it just an addled and…
August 23, 2008
There's a lot of concern about the environmental effects of drilling for oil off the US coast, but I don't buy it. Yes, I know it won't produce any meaningful amount of oil, ever, and no oil at all for years. But that's a technicality. Politically it's a compelling idea and even though it won't do…
August 22, 2008
Yesterday was the 12th 22nd anniversary of an environmental catastrophe in Cameroon. On August 21, 1986 Lake Nyos in that West African country belched a huge load of carbon dioxide and suffocated 1700 people as they slept. Like its monoxygenated cousin carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is "a…
August 21, 2008
Not many scientists were convinced the FBI had a solid science case against accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. So the FBI held a telephone conference call between journalists and their scientific back-up to answer outstanding questions. Some questions were answered by promising the science…
August 20, 2008
Everyone seems to agree about one thing concerning Vice President Cheney's senior aide, F. Chase Hutto III. He never met an environmental regulation he didn't just hate and oppose on principle. According to the Washington Post he has been instrumental in keeping our air and water dirtier than it…
August 19, 2008
News reports that nonagenarians had robust antibodies against the 1918 flu strain were intriguing on several levels but I wasn't sure how many doors were still open to these being antibodies that developed in the years after 1918. After all, the 1918 subtype was H1N1 which circulated freely until…
August 18, 2008
Tropical Storm Fay is bearing down on Cuba and the Florida Keys as I write this and is on the cusp of hurricane strength winds. A new study from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science just published in Geophysical Research Letters looks again at the…