j7uy5 | September 7, 2007Mitt Romney's national finance committee (ex-) co-chairman,
title="Forbes article"
href="http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/09/ap4006058.html"
rel="tag">Alan Fabian,
is in trouble. He's been indicted for mail fraud, money
laundering, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.
Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty. The story
here, as
href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200709010002?f=h_latest">Media
Matters points out,
is that the problems with a donor to the Hillary Clinton campaign have
been aired repeatedly on all the major networks. The problems…
j7uy5 | September 7, 2007This morning the US government revealed that employment is
down by 4,000 jobs. The market took a dive. Why was
the impact so bad?
It is one of two reasons. Either the numbers are so bad, that
the government can't lie about them, or the numbers
are so bad, that the government isn't even going to bother
lying about them.
j7uy5 | September 5, 2007
This is Theo at his desk, during the first day of Kindergarden, at Eberwhite.
j7uy5 | September 4, 2007In the 1950's, a new class of antipsychotic drugs was
discovered: the
antipsychotics.
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine" rel="tag">Chlorpromazine
(Thorazine®) was the first.
By the 1970's, several related compounds had been discovered.
In
1976, it was learned that there is a direct linear relationship between
the strength with with the compounds bind at the dopamine D2 receptor,
and the clinical potency of the drug.
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">[Figure from Seeman,
Molecular Psychiatry (1998)3, 123-124]
The discovery of this direct relationship was…
j7uy5 | September 4, 2007IBM is launching
href="http://linuxgazette.net/142/lg_bytes.html">Project
Big Green. Part of the initiative is to consolidate
operations in the world's largest data centers. They will
replace nearly 4,000 servers with 30 refrigerator-sized
System
Z mainframes, running Linux, using virtualization technology.
This will reduce energy usage by about 80%, saving about $250
million per year.
What's more, the consolidation will leave plenty of room for
future expansion.
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Tesla Roadster
The University of New Hampshire is going to
href="http…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007
This picture shows
href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/float1.html" rel="tag">Hurricane
Felix 2007 after attaining category 5 status. You
can see a video of it, growing as it approaches Central America, at the
NOAA site,
href="http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t1/sloop-wv.html">here.
Background info is at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/09/here_we_go_again_hurricane_fel.php">The
Intersection (
href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/09/a_scary_intensification_record.php">more).
Chris Mooney points out that Felix now holds the record for…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007
alt="Pogona vitticeps"
title="from Joachim S. Müller's photostream"
src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1159/1304259520_04b0d4b93d.jpg"
border="0" height="375" width="500">
src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif"
align="left" height="31" width="88">
class="ccIcn">
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">
src="http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/cc_icon_attribution.gif"
alt="Attribution" title="Attribution">
src="http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.com/images/cc_icon_noncomm.gif"
alt="Noncommercial" title="Noncommercial">…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007This is good.
href="http://www.getfirefox.net/">Firefox now has
an extension that makes it simple to store all your bibliographic
information from online research.
It is at release candidate 3 stage now, well-developed and
fully functional. It is called
href="http://www.zotero.org/" rel="tag">Zotero.
It is bundled with the "
href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/">Campus
Edition" (the best thing since ramen noodles) of Firefox, but
it can be installed easily into any version on Linux, OS X, or even
Windows machines.
From an article at
href="http://www.…
j7uy5 | September 3, 2007Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful.
Usually these things don't bother me so much. The
problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his
argument poorly -- although both are true. What bothers me is
the pointlessly malicious tone of the piece.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bawer2sep02,0,833953.story?coll=la-home-commentary">The
peace racket
A growing movement is pushing a worldview that ignores
history's lessons about strength and appeasement.
By Bruce Bawer
September 2, 2007
'If you want peace, prepare for…
j7uy5 | September 1, 2007
There may be another crisis brewing in health care finance.
In the early 2000's, health insurance premiums were
increasing by ~10% per year. The increase in premiums was
greater than the increase in health care costs.
Why would insurance premiums go up faster than health care costs?
It is because health insurance companies make most of their money from
investments (
href="http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=29450&ref=rellink">1).
In the early 2000's, their investments (along with everyone
else's) were not doing so well.
Of course nobody knows if the sturm und…
j7uy5 | August 29, 2007
Sexual assault is a common and serious problem. It is
hypothesized that misconceptions (rape myths) may play a role in this.
About 50% of sexual assaults involving adolescent or young adult female
victims occur in the context of alcohol consumption. The
authors of a recent study from the University of Michigan Institute for
Research on Women and Gender and the Substance Abuse Research Center
investigated this in a recent study. The full text is $ for
access, but the abstract is openly accessible and a press release is
available
href="http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id…
j7uy5 | August 29, 2007
class="inset"
alt="Flickr. By Chickenboots. Creative Commons License"
title="Flickr. By Chickenboots. Creative Commons License"
src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/148054501_759fdbdd9b.jpg"
border="0" height="375" width="500">
Shows what can happen when you withhold cheezburgers.
(The
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dah-sab/148054501/">caption
indicates that the lizard survived.)
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://…
j7uy5 | August 28, 2007
Google News no longer indexes ScienceBlogs, but they continue to link
to drivel like this, from the Wall Street Journal:
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118800560693308626.html?mod=googlenews_wsj">Lone
Star Spending Spree
By MARY KATHERINE STOUT
August 25, 2007; Page A6
Austin, Texas
Give George W. Bush credit. He's drawn a lot of criticism for not doing
more to control federal spending over the past six years. But he is now
deep into a spending fight against a sacred liberal program. And he
isn't backing away.
In recent weeks, Mr. Bush has confronted Congress over the…
j7uy5 | August 28, 2007My non-expert identification of this:
href="http://www.mister-toad.com/photos/lizard/lizardphotos.html">desert
spiny lizard,
href="http://www.mister-toad.com/photos/lizard/Sceloporus_magister_15June05.jpg"
rel="tag">Sceloporus magister.
j7uy5 | August 27, 2007William Rivers Pitt argues that what the President, Cheney, and Gonzalez have done is not illegal. Apparently, it is not illegal for the President to declare himself and his administration to be above the law. The idea is so outrageous that it never occurred to anyone to make it illegal.
j7uy5 | August 27, 2007What would happen if you set up a system to automatically
print out all
the spam in the Universe? Never mind the question of why you
would want to.
(link)
j7uy5 | August 25, 2007
class="inset" alt="Crusade Radio logo"
title="Crusade Radio logo"
src="http://www.crusaderadio.com/christianradiohdr.jpg"
align="left" border="0" height="131" width="304">This
topic has been covered by
href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/08/more_christian_curses.php">Ed
Brayton,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/08/drake_endorses_huckabee_huckab.php">twice,
and by
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/lightning_bolts_boils_sour_bee.php">PZ
Myers. This is a little update.
A minister made headlines a couple of weeks ago when he called…
j7uy5 | August 25, 2007This
controversy has been evolving for the past three years.
Perhaps at this point it is no longer newsworthy.
But often, after a topic fades from the radar of the MSM,
there are new findings.
The journal, Psychological Medicine, has published
a study about the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in persons
treated with an antidepressant (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine" rel="tag">fluoxetine)
for conditions other than depression.
href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1219444">Evaluating
suicide-related…
j7uy5 | August 25, 2007A neat little podcast, in which ordinary people express
incredulity at the notion of a medical doctor buying into young-earth
creationism, is at
href="http://quirkynomads.com/wp/2007/08/22/podcast-geology-as-comedy/">Quirky
Nomads.