j7uy5 | November 20, 2007Here is a part of a screenshot, showing the most-viewed
pages:
Notice that the page on homosexuality has 78% as many visits
as the main page. The site?
rel="tag" href="http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics">Conservapedia:
"The Trustworthy Encyclopedia." It is a wiki, like
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="tag">Wikipedia,
but for conservatives.
See the entire screenshot
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/conservapedia-screenshot.JPG">here.
This was posted on
href="http://politics.reddit.com/info/611rb/comments/">Reddit…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007Any time something related to a
medical use for cannabis is found, it
makes headlines. Mostly, the interest is generated by the
relationship to an illegal drug. Sometimes, though, the media
do a decent job of reporting the real issue.
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">Researchers
at the California
Pacific Medical Center Research Institute
have announced that one of the compounds found in cannabis,
cannabidiol,
inhibits a gene that is important for the growth and metastasis of
breast
cancer.
Note that this has nothing to do with medical marijuana, really.
Cannabidiol is not…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007America missed her chance to elect a sane pro-environmental
candidate
in 2000. Or rather, the Supreme Court missed its chance.
Whatever. The critical point is that
environmentalism cannot be understood as an isolated issue.
Pro-environmental thinking must pervade everything we do from
now on.
That is not to say that it is the only issue. In
some cases, it will not be the most important issue. But it
should be considered in all aspects of governmental activity.
Economic growth is totally worthless, if not sustainable.
Sometimes, it is worse than worthless. I believe we
shall
see…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2007It is common for tension to occur in the doctor-patient
relationship occurs when the patient reports symptoms that are
distressing to the patient, but which do not seem serious to the doctor.
Each instance of this is different, so it is hard to make
generalizations. However, in the case of sleep problems,
patients
have one thing working against them. All too often, doctors
relent, or try simply to save time, by writing a prescription.
The problem is described nicely in the New York Times Magazine:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2007According to the
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2213075,00.html">Guardian:
...because it minimally adheres to certain
superficial conventions, it can masquerade as a "news" outfit and enjoy
all the rights that accrue to that...
j7uy5 | November 18, 2007Sun Microsystems
is
href="http://www.techworld.com/green-it/news/index.cfm?newsID=10667">planning
to put a data center in an old coal mine. The idea is to save
on energy costs. In fact, they expect nine million dollars
per year on electricity. This is because much of the
electrical operating cost is for cooling.
This leads me to think we should do the same thing for the White House.
As an added benefit, we might see some long-overdue
href="http://thepumphandle.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/history-of-rockbursts-at-crandall-canyon/">improvements
in mine safety.
HT:
href="http://…
j7uy5 | November 18, 2007
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/"
title="Click this link to find out details of the Creative Commons license associated with this image.">
src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif"
alt="There is a Creative Commons license attached to this image."
style="border: medium none ;" height="31" width="88">
class="ccIcn ccIcnSmall">
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">
src="http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/cc_icon_attribution_small.gif"
alt="Attribution" title="Attribution" border="0">
The
rel…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007The cost of health insurance has been increasing, typically
at
double-digit annual rates.
With the expansion of information technology, particularly electronic
claims processing, one would expect that the insurance companies would
be operating much more efficiently now that they were ten years ago.
Perhaps they are. Some would insist that they certainly are
more efficient that any government program could ever be.
However, take a look at these data:
I had to shrink it a bit to fit, so it is hard to read.
Let me explain. In the past ten years, the number
of persons employed in the…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007
rel="tag">Simon N. Young, PhD, the Editor-in-chief
of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience, has written an editorial: How
To
Increase Serotonin In The Human Brain Without Drugs.
In is
published in this month's edition of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience.
The Journal is an open-access journal, so anyone can read it.
The PDF is
href="http://www.cma.ca/multimedia/staticContent/HTML/N0/l2/jpn/vol-32/issue-6/pdf/pg394.pdf">here.
I have to admit, I was both surprised and skeptical when I first saw
this. Although there are many converging lines of evidence
associating…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007The term "Freudian Slip" has been the subject of innumerable
puns.
This one is new to me:
It's the perfect holiday gift for shrinks in cold climates.
HT: Mental
Floss
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007According to Google, we are heading into a bad season for
Science:
This is from Google
Trends. Every December, there is a steep drop in
the number of searches conducted for "science." Plus, there
has been a year-to-year decline. What could it possibly mean?
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007The environmental consequences of shopping catalogs have
been well
documented. For example, over eight million tons of trees are
consumed each year in the production of paper catalogs.
Now there is a website where you can go to opt out of them:
href="http://www.catalogchoice.org/#welcome">catalogchoice.org.
(Note the .org, not .com)
They've been up for about a month, and have already stopped the
unwanted delivery of over 1.5 million catalogs.
Update: the origin of the project is explained here.
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007The San Antonio Express-News
href="http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read/114296">reports
that "Reviewers have found 109,263 errors in sample copies of math
textbooks to be used next fall in Texas."
One second-grade math book, for example,
has 4 plus 7 equaling 10.
OK, anybody can make a mistake. But at least own up to it.
Their explanation:
Many of the math book errors resulted in
faulty translations from English- to Spanish-language textbooks...
Uh, I think in Spain, 7+4 still equals 11.
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007In 1984, the Hatch-Waxman Drug Price Competition and
Patent Restoration Act was passed. This was an
important development that changed forever the economics of the
pharmaceutical industry.
NEJM has a nice, short, open-access
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/20/1993">article
on the history and consequences of the Act.
The author, Richard
G. Frank, Ph.D., points out some interesting facts:
Today, generic drugs account for 63% of all U.S.
prescriptions for drugs
Between 2007 and 2010, roughly 110 drugs will
lose their patent protection
The first firm that files…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlzimmer/sets/72157601351535771/">
class="inset" alt="click" title="click for photoset"
src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1435/1173226117_faab61f1eb_t.jpg"
align="left" border="0" height="75" width="100">Carl
Zimmer has been
href="http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/08/06/branded_with_science.php">documenting
the results of various scientist's impulses to have themselves inked
with images related to science. The phenomenon is something
of an oddity, though, since scientists tend to be more on the
contemplative side, as opposed to being…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007Currently, both the
href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/House_passes_FISA_update_without_telecom_1115.html">House
and the
href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/in-twist-senate.html">Senate
are leaning away from granting immunity to telecommunications companies
that were involved
in warrantless domestic spying.
In an unrelated debacle, the State Department tried to
href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004662.php">grant
immunity to Blackwater personnel who shot a bunch of Iraqi
citizens. (Now the
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/world/middleeast/…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2007I haven't gotten to the actual research paper yet, but this
is sufficiently interesting that I wanted to put up a quick post about
it. Live Science has an article about some research, showing
that persons who think of themselves as righteous are, in some
circumstances, the most likely to cheat.
href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/071114-cheating-basics.html">Oddly,
Hypocrisy Rooted in High Morals
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 14 November 2007 08:04 am ET
Morally upstanding people are the
do-gooders of society, right? Actually, a new study finds that a…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2007This is strange. A person with a Ph.D. in
molecular genetics,
href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/events/bio.aspx?Speaker_ID=52"
rel="tag">Georgia Purdom, wrote a post in which
she claims to have shown that the development of antibiotic resistance
in bacteria is not an example of evolution.
href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n3/antibiotic-resistance-of-bacteria">Antibiotic
Resistance of Bacteria: An Example of Evolution in Action?
by Georgia Purdom, Ph.D.
July 10, 2007
The extraordinary ability of certain
bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics—which…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2007The all-new, completely free LOLCats calendar for 2008 is here. It is a 2MB PDF download.