j7uy5 | September 27, 2007Sorry, no bizarre sex organ photos this time. But
the story is interesting from an evolutionary standpoint.
href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070925-bat-bugs.html">Bat
Bugs Evolved Fake Genitals to Avoid Sex Injuries
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
September 25, 2007
For African bat bugs, the battle of the sexes is quite literally a
violent struggle—and now it appears that the bugs are using
gender-bending tactics to defend themselves.
Bat bugs are small, reddish-brown parasites related to bed bugs that
suck the blood of bats and sometimes bite…
j7uy5 | September 26, 2007The government, finally getting wise,
has installed
href="http://www.plenglish.com/Article.asp?ID=%7BA602DDD6-4C6E-413C-8299-F951DBA7CC0C%7D&language=EN">100
stations to measure wind velocity in 32 areas. The
idea tis to get a map of available resources for the generation of wind
power, specifically with the intention of reducing dependence on
foreign
oil.
There is already a demonstration project with 1.67MW wind generators.
This
particular demonstration project is expected to supply about
10WM by the middle of next year.
It is located east of Havana.
j7uy5 | September 26, 2007I was prompted to rant again about health insurance, after
reading a post at Blogcritics. The author was highly critical
of the
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092501474.html">SCHIP
proposals.
href="http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/09/25/185410.php">SCHIP:
It's for the Insurance Companies, Not the Children
Written by Dave Nalle
Published September 25, 2007
Whenever someone in government makes a proposal and says it's 'for the
children' you know you're about to be screwed. The 'for the chidren'
argument is one of pure emotion…
j7uy5 | September 25, 2007
In response to customer demand, computer manufacturers pressured
Microsoft into offering an easier way for users to "downgrade" their
new machines.
Business customers who feel that Vista is too bloated and slow, or who
find it doesn't run what they need it to run, now can get Vista taken
off, and XP put in its place. Meanwhile, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and
HP have joined Dell in offering new machines with XP installed instead
of Vista.
(
href="http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Provides+XP+Downgrade+for+Unhappy+Vista+Users/article9027.htm">source)
j7uy5 | September 25, 2007The long-awaited details of the Hillary Clinton health care
finance
plan have been revealed. The plan has received lukewarm
support
from columnists at NYT (
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp">Paul
Krugman) and
href="http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9833354"
rel="tag">The Economist.
It has been criticized by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney" rel="tag">Mitt
Romney, oddly, as it is
href="http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200709200002">quite
similar to the plan he enacted while governor of…
j7uy5 | September 24, 2007A new report on sleep disorders in pain patients reveals a
not-very-surprising finding: chronic opioid treatment is associated
with very high incidences of both obstructive and central sleep apnea.
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/81771.php">Higher
Risk Of Sleep Apnea When Patients Use Opioid-Based Pain Medications
Opioid-based pain medications may cause sleep apnea, according to an
article in the September issue of Pain Medicine, the journal of the
American Academy of Pain Medicine.
"We found that sleep-disordered breathing was common when chronic pain
patients…
j7uy5 | September 22, 2007Some people are amazingly creative...or thirsty.
(
href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=854&num=5">Source)
j7uy5 | September 20, 2007The Republican War on Science is not a war on science, after
all. It is
href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091907R.shtml">a war
on reality itself.
j7uy5 | September 19, 2007
One of the essential skills a medical student has to
learn is the ability to take a list of symptoms, exam findings, and lab
results and determine which diagnosis is consistent with that
data. For example, when seeing a patient like the gorgeous
and brilliant woman pictured above, you should immediately think that
this patient may in fact be a pirate. If so, she should be
quickly referred to the Comprehensive Pirate Clinic. (There
the pirate specialists can manage issues like scurvy, splinters from
planks, prosthesis fitting, and deck-swabbing-related repetitive-motion
injuries.) …
j7uy5 | September 18, 2007Courtesy of
rel="tag">NASA, we have this pair of images
illustrating the record
growth rate of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Humberto_%282007%29">hurricane
Humberto (2007):
From
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17773">Earth
Observatory Newsroom:
Though it was not a powerful storm,
Hurricane Humberto did set a record when it formed in the Gulf of
Mexico and came ashore at the Texas–Louisiana state line in
mid-September 2007. According to National Hurricane Center records, no
storm has ever developed to hurricane…
j7uy5 | September 17, 2007Look at these news briefs:
href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cracking_down_on_corporate_abuses_abroad">In
March, Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, pled
guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to
making regular protection payments to Colombian right-wing paramilitary
groups totaling some $1.7 million between 2001 and 2004.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601308.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter">The
Defense Department has picked five companies, four of them
from the…
j7uy5 | September 16, 2007CNN has an interesting article on the safeguarding of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium">highly
enriched uranium. A reporter was allowed to
accompany a mission in Viet Nam to remove some cold war era highly
enriched uranium from a US-built/USSR-fueled nuclear reactor.
It is kind of neat to read about, in part because the whole
thing was secret until the mission was completed.
The author, Jill Dougherty, was even allowed to handle one of the fuel
rods.
She mentions that, so far, 442 kilograms of fresh HEU has been secured
from 11 countries. She adds that the job…
j7uy5 | September 16, 2007I support universal coverage in a single-payer system.
I won't belabor the point. Today I just want to
point out another insurance industry lie, printed in the New York Times
today.
It's in an article about Mrs. Clinton's health care finance reform
proposal. (Which I do not support.)
Mrs. Clinton was
href="http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/us/politics/16clinton.html">quoted:
But she is prepared once again to do
battle with insurance companies, which she has said “spend
tens of billions of dollars a year figuring out how not to cover
people…
j7uy5 | September 15, 2007If you are willing to settle for a two-dimensional desktop
experience,
and you love The Matrix, this might be fun.
The image is an animated GIF, so it is big. (Sorry
to the
dial-up users.) The real thing works much better than the
animated GIF shows.
The howto is
href="http://geekhacks.com/2007/09/13/screensaver-as-a-desktop-wallpaper/">here.
If you want the three-dimensional version, you'll have to use
href="http://compiz.org/">compiz fusion.
It is not for Windows, even Vista, and not for Mac OS X.
You have to use Linux. What are you waiting for?
Anyway, here is the…
j7uy5 | September 14, 2007This is a regular photo of a tiger at the
href="http://www.cabq.gov/biopark/">Albuquerque Biological
Park.
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tejedoro_de_luz/1382289147/">
The
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tejedoro_de_luz/1382289147/">photo
is on Flickr, taken by Glen.
The one below is altered to contain a hidden image. It is
from
href="http://www.moillusions.com/2007/09/tiger-woman-illusion.html">Mighty
Optical Illusions by Vurdlak.
The hidden image is one of those that jumps out at you, once
you finally see it.
j7uy5 | September 14, 2007The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative
article on the role of
endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy
babies in the Arctic.
I've written about the topic before (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">1
2)
as have
href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/satans_perfect_food_tofu.php">PZ.
James Hrynyshyn, on Island of Doubt, has
already commented on
the Guardian article:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/…
j7uy5 | September 11, 2007I don't think this has ever happened before. I was
reading an
article about the organizational chart at the
href="http://www.fda.gov/" rel="tag">FDA
and I laughed out
loud.
Unfortunately it was not a good "monkey-on-a-goat" LOL moment; rather,
it was a "WTF-sounds-like-Bush" kind of LOL.
The chart is from this article:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/10/960">Sidelining
Safety — The FDA's Inadequate Response to the IOM,
by Sheila Weiss Smith, Ph.D, in the latest NEJM (Volume 357:960-963).
(It's open-access.)
I've written about this at length before (
href…
j7uy5 | September 9, 2007
class="inset" alt="by Fabiogis50, Creative Commons (click)"
title="by Fabiogis50, Creative Commons (click)"
src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1260/1338885976_56919ab4dd_d.jpg"
border="0" height="324" width="500">
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"…
j7uy5 | September 8, 2007What is the world coming to?
title="Am J Psychiatry">AJP
has an article about "intensive" therapy for bipolar disorder.
Their definition of intensive? Thirty sessions over
a
period of nine months.
Back in the day, when you could struggle to stay awake during a seminar
when people read their process notes to their supervisors, and watch
brachiosaurids frolic outside the window, intensive therapy was at
least twice weekly. More like thrice weekly.
Gone are the sauropods. Now, you are likely to see
hitherto-unknown strange creatures with spiked hair and iPods race by
on their Razor…