j7uy5 | December 11, 2008
href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16514.html">Senate
rejects auto bailout
By DAVID ROGERS | 12/11/08 11:15 PM EST
A White House-backed bailout for ailing automakers collapsed in the
Senate Thursday night, pushing General Motors Corp. closer to almost
certain bankruptcy absent a major intervention by the Treasury
Department.
The 52-35 roll call fell well short of the 60 needed to cut off debate,
and appeared to doom any chance of legislative action until a new
Congress convenes in January.
“We’re not going to get to the finish
line,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid…
j7uy5 | December 9, 2008This is a photo of the controls in the cabin of the Mallard, a steam
locomotive built in 1938. The Mallard was capable of
traveling 202.7kph (126 mph), a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A14609333">record-high
speed at the time..
The picture is from a series by
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6928">David Mindell,
posted at IEEE Spectrum Online. Below is a photo of the
Mallard, photographer unknown, from the Artehouse at trains.com.
One of the stations served by the Mallard was Paddington Station
(London), which
opened in 1854 (
href="http://www.designmuseum.org/…
j7uy5 | December 8, 2008
Tapentadol
is a drug for pain. It was approved by the US FDA for the
treatment of moderate to severe pain. The
href="http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2008/NEW01916.html">FDA
news release was dated 24 November 2008, although the actual
approval was a few days earlier.
Tapentadol acts on μ-opioid receptors, making it similar to
morphine
and its ilk. Do we need another opioid agonist? And
if so,
why? Suspicions deepen because it was produced by the same
company that makes tramadol. Indeed, it is similar to
tramadol in
many ways. Tramadol is the active ingredient in
Ultram®, now…
j7uy5 | December 3, 2008Orion Magazine has a neat article on the first
greenwashing campaigns in the USA. Remember the crying
Indian? It's all explained
href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3642">here.
Although beautifully written, it is kind of sickening. How we
all were misled. Screwed everything up.
j7uy5 | December 1, 2008This post ties together a number of themes that I have been harping upon
for the past few years. First, from Greg Mankiw's blog:
href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/whats-wrong-with-efficient-scale.html">What's
wrong with the efficient scale?
Reuters reports:
President-elect
Barack Obama vowed on Tuesday to cut billions of dollars from wasteful
government programs....An obvious example, Obama said, were reports of
crop subsidies to farmers who make more than $2.5 million per year.
Like President-elect Obama (but unlike candidate Obama), I am all for
getting rid of…
j7uy5 | November 26, 2008No, it is not newspapers and videos that are disrupting your endocrine
system (well, not that we know); rather, the topic
is in the media.
href="http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/index.cfm">Endocrine
disruptors are chemicals that mimic the effects of hormones.
Perhaps the best-known example is bisphenol-A.
Others include various pharmaceuticals, dioxin and
dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other
pesticides.
Today I'm not going to review the topic; other ScienceBloggers have
done so extensively. There are too many to list.
Just use the…
j7uy5 | November 25, 2008This is from an interesting open-access article in Annals of
General Psychiatry. It describes two studies,
relating to two different catastrophic events. The authors
examine the differences in how various risk factors may contribute to
the development of PTSD in persons of each gender.
href="http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/24/abstract">Risk
factors predict post-traumatic stress disorder differently in men and
women
Dorte M. Christiansen,Ask Elklit
Annals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:24
doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-24
18 November 2008
Background
About twice…
j7uy5 | November 24, 2008
It is not obvious what
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/haly/223020107/in/pool-stickfiguresinperil/">this
sign is intended to depict, or why. It almost has
to be a photoshop job (?).
j7uy5 | November 21, 2008There was a time when I was vacationing, near the Bosque del Apache
wildlife preserve. There were literally thousands of birds.
Most were snow geese or sandhill cranes. There were
a lot of people, too.
But off a ways, there was a trail. It went, among other
places, to a spot called Solitude Canyon. Sounded good.
Even better, there was an overlook. On a hill, high
above the bosque, it was possible to see the preserve. The
thousands of birds appeared as white and gray pixels, rendered on a
pointillistic expanse.
On the way back, I came to a point in the trail. There was a
post with a…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2008This looks like a pile of wooden cubes with odd images on them.
Assemble them correctly, and you get a 3-D image of the brain...except
you can't see it when you are done...
...because the image is entirely inside.
The real puzzle is this: Where do you get one? I found it on
three sites (
href="http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/the-brain-cube.html">1
2
href="http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/2008/11/cube-brain-teaser-puzzle.html">3),
but nobody links to the original source.
j7uy5 | November 18, 2008
This is a sample from Euphoria Magazine's
href="http://www.euphoria-magazine.com/nature/37-nature/287-nature-best-photography-of-2007">nature
photography roundup for 2007. I chose the most
whimsical one; the others are more serious, but equally good.
j7uy5 | November 17, 2008The Cassini orbiter shows us what is happening in the final frontier:
This is an aurora on Saturn. It's false-color, obviously. The
technique is explained on the
href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11396.html">NASA
site:
This image of the northern polar region of Saturn
shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different
wavelengths of infrared light as captured by NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft.
Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the
aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the
wavelength…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2008Razib already did the
href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/11/fear_of_a_black_president_miss.php">definitive
post of voting trends in the South,
looking especially at the influence of skin color.
Now, we see there is a peculiar correlation: those areas that had the
highest cotton production before the Civil War are the areas in which
Obama did especially well.
In the map below, each black dot represents 2,000 bales of cotton
produced in 1860. The counties shown in blue had a majority
of voters who voted for Obama; red for McCain. The darkness
of the hue indicates the strength of…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2008This is an illustration of Basilosaurus, a fossil
whale discovered in
Egypt by Phil Gingerich and colleagues. Gingerich is the guy
who taught me everything I know knew about collecting fossils.
I wanted on the team that went to Egypt, though. I had other
priorities, like medical school. Can't do everything.
Anyway, here is an illustration of the critter:
Yes, those are legs on that whale. The successful excavation
of the 16-meter (50-foot) specimen is noted at
href="http://www.nature-spot.com/2008/11/u-m-team-recovers-ancient-whale-in.html">Amazing
Nature.
Obviously,…
j7uy5 | November 10, 2008Various alternatives to and offshoots from Wikipedia
have emerged over
the years. Some readers may be familiar with Conservapedia,
as an example.
Now there is an entity known as Christopedia.
Today the
Featured Article is the one about
href="http://christopedia.us/wiki/Barack_Hussein_Obama">Barack
Hussein Obama. No big surprise there.
What is telling, is their choice of External Links: Why
Jesus would not vote for Barack Obama, The Assassination of Barack
Obama, The Black Kennedy: But does anyone know the real Barack Obama?,
Obama offers change Kim Jong-Il can believe in, and so…
j7uy5 | November 9, 2008
Tiny houses. Sensible way to live. As
long as everyone gets
along.
Much less resource-intensive. Nothing wasted.
Not good for dog owners. No room to wag tail.
Otherwise perfect. Writers become economical.
No extra words. No commas. To Hell with
semicolons.
HT:
href="http://thistinyhouse.com/2008/our-visit-with-tumbleweed-tiny-house-company/">Hillary
j7uy5 | November 7, 2008Cat Power is pretty cool. Like
href="http://www.pandora.com/music/album/cat+power/what+would+community+think">What
Would the Community Think.
Music such as this has a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail">long tail.
It is the nature of cat power.
j7uy5 | November 4, 2008
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081104/ap_on_fe_st/odd_vote_in_ambulance">SAN
ANTONIO – Betty Owen is 92 and after a stroke four
years ago, needs a feeding tube and can't walk. But she was determined
not to miss Tuesday's election. She arrived at her polling place on a
gurney in an ambulance, where an election judge and support worker
climbed aboard with an electronic voting machine and let her cast her
ballot.
"And you have voted," precinct judge Sam Green said after Owen pushed
the red button finalizing her choices. "You know, You Look So Pretty In
That Red Dress."
Owen…
j7uy5 | November 3, 2008
This is an image of a human brain. It is constructed using an
imaging method known as diffusion spectrum imaging.
The technique has been discussed at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/07/hi_res_brain_topology_map.php">Neurophilosophy
and
href="http://anthropology.net/2008/07/01/diffusion-spectrum-imaging-used-to-map-the-structural-core-of-human-cerebral-cortex/">Anthropology.net;
both posts were based upon a paper in
href="http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159">PLOS
Biology.
The image above is…
j7uy5 | October 30, 2008Well, last week I finally did it. I put up an Obama sign in
the yard. Not that anyone sees my yard.
But now that the Editors of Seed magazine have come out with an
endorsement, I may as well join the crowd and openly announce my
anonymous support, here on the Internet.
I don't like his plan for health care finance. I am
unenthusiastic about his plan to prolong the war. His
environmental policies are too little, too late. Not that he
could have done anything about the too late part.
Since those are my three top issues, it leaves me lukewarm at best.
Still, the prospect of a McCain-…