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…
This 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/…
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…
Orion 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.  
This 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…
No, 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…
This 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…
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 (?).
There 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…
This 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.
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.
The 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…
Razib 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…
This 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,…
Various 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…
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
Cat 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.
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…
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…
Well, 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-…