j7uy5 | August 24, 2007Someone has to put a stop
to
href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/08/semantic-stopsi.html">this.
j7uy5 | August 24, 2007Health care is shaping up to be one of the big issues in the
upcoming elections. No big surprise there, it was a highly
-ranked issue in the last election, too. It's just that last
time, voters failed to see how health care is more likely than
terrorism to affect their health.
Perhaps this time around, people will have a more rational perspective.
In an effort to keep our perceptions in such a rational perspective,
the American Medical Association is starting a massive advertising
campaign. The gist of the message is that they want health
insurance for all.
At first glance, that…
j7uy5 | August 23, 2007
alt="ALT"
src="http://images.forbes.com/media/2007/03/15/labels_6.jpg"
border="1" height="280" width="400">
Product: Midol
Menstrual Complete
Label: Ask a doctor
before use if you have difficulty urinating due to an enlarged prostate.
Sound advice from Merck. But should sufferers of
premenstrual syndrome really lose sleep over enlarged prostates?
That's from a collection on the
href="http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/03/15/apple-merck-teflon-ent-law-cx_mf_0315liability_slide.html?feed=rss_entrepreneurs">Forbes
website. At first glance, it seems senseless. But I
suspect…
j7uy5 | August 23, 2007The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the federal
government
to publish climate-change research plans every three years, and
assessment reports every four years. Both are now overdue.
The research plan is one year overdue, and the assessment
report is three years overdue.
On 21 August 2007, a federal judge ruled that the Administration was
violating the law, despite their claim that compliance was "
href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=avpEoyrooXLI&refer=us">discretionary."
The case was: Center for Biological Diversity v. Brennan, 4:06-cv-7062…
j7uy5 | August 22, 2007Senator
rel="tag">Dick Durbin has started a project using
an innovative method of writing legislation:
href="http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=318">What
should be America's national broadband strategy?
by: Dick Durbin
Sun Jul 22, 2007 at 13:06:58 PM EDT
(This diary will remain at the top of the page for the next day. New
content will continue to appear below. For example, check out Jenifer
Fernandez Ancona's The Role of Candidates in Movement-Building, and
Matt's Why Are Men Overrepresented in CNN/Youtube Debate Submissions? -
promoted by Chris Bowers)
Today I'm…
j7uy5 | August 22, 2007In 2005, there was a plague. It started
inadvertently, as
most do, but spread rapidly, resulting in many deaths.
Officials scrambled to find a solution. Eventually
it was contained.
The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071">Corrupted
Blood), in the massively-multiplayer
online role-playing game (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG" rel="tag">MMORPG),
href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml">World of
Warcraft. The people who died were not
real people. Nonetheless, it may be that the…
j7uy5 | August 21, 2007
Made with Legos. This was dreamed up by their development team, but never merketed.
j7uy5 | August 21, 2007
style="border: medium solid rgb(204, 204, 255); padding: 5px; text-align: center; background-color: white;"
cellspacing="5" height="351" width="500">
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2007-08-19"
title="Wikipedia:Picture of the day">Wikipedia Picture of
the day
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bezier_3_big.gif"
class="image" title="Bézier curve">
alt="Bézier curve" longdesc="/wiki/Image:Bezier_3_big.gif"
src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Bezier_3_big.gif/300px-Bezier_3_big.gif"
height="125" width="300">
An
title…
j7uy5 | August 20, 2007I just love things like this. An open-access
article in
title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS
reports on a previously-unknown method of signaling employed by
squirrels.
The squirrels have a way of enhancing a tail-flagging movement with an
IR signal. The IR enhancement is optional. It turns
out they use it when confronted by rattlesnakes that are sensitive to
infrared.
When confronted by snakes that are not IR-sensitive, they do not use
the IR trick.
The rattlesnakes that see the IR signal are more likely to adopt a
defensive, as opposed to a predatory,…
j7uy5 | August 20, 2007These things are hard to photograph. They are
faster than I
am, that is for sure. Out of about 30 shots, at least a few
were decent.
These are said to be the smallest birds in the USA.
They are
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calliope_Hummingbird">named
after the Greek
muse of epic poetry, if you can believe Wikipedia.
j7uy5 | August 19, 2007Hard to know what to make of
href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3499544">this.
The American Psychological Association considered a proposal
to ban participation in military interrogations.
Specifically, APA members would have been prohibited from
assisting in interrogations "in which detainees are deprived of
adequate protection of their human rights."
The APA national meeting is being held in San Fransisco this year.
In a session 19 August 2007, they chose not to ban
all participation. Instead, they adopted a substitute motion.
href="http://www.apa.org/governance/…
j7uy5 | August 19, 2007Spent part of the afternoon trying to get better pictures of
the woodpeckers, but I am not happy with any of the pictures I got.
So here is someone else's picture:
I think it is easier to get pictures of birds when they are
in a confined space.
href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=471537&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments">Source.
j7uy5 | August 18, 2007No money down, but the payments go on forever. The
only
people who win are the bankers and the contractors. We make
it easy to get in. But like herpes and condominiums, it is
hard to get rid of.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite
books was Starship
Troopers, (1959). It was written by a guy
(Robert
A. Heinlein)who was medically unable to be in a combat role
in World
War II.
In Starship Troopers, the planet Earth is ambushed
by an enemy, but ultimately wins the war decisively. This is
done with just the right combination of patriotism, leadership,
righteousness, brainpower, and…
j7uy5 | August 17, 2007How refreshing: a Presidential appointee speaks out
unequivocally
against Administration policy. This is from a Medscape
News article (free registration), which is from
Reuters Heath Information. The report quotes a professor of
Immunology who is on the
href="http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY/pcp/pcpchr.htm">President's
Cancer Panel at the
rel="tag">National Cancer Institute.
href="http://www.mdanderson.org/departments/immunology/print.cfm?displayPrint=1&id=6BA754F9-6AD2-4220-93954E0F8682EE69&method=displayfull&pn=082E88E7-B295-43D1-94D38FA20872EC4E&PrintPage=…
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007Not much commentary needed on this graphic. HT to
href="http://flprogressive.blogspot.com/2007/08/progressivism-is-not-dead-but-its-on.html">Blast
Off!.
Most of the liberals are actually conservative.
Some of the Republican
candidates are close to being as authoritarian as Hitler or Stalin.
I thought Ron Paul would have been in the lavender zone.
It does not surprise me, though, to see most of the
Democratic candidates falling to the right of center.
Update: John Lynch posted about this before I did. Good comments there.
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007At first you would not think that pirates would try to
establish a base
in Utah. There are not a lot of coves or bays there.
Even so, it is the first State to have an official pirate
base. They have a logo. They are even circulating a
petition to gain official recognition as a political party.
They may be the first band of pirates to have a
href="http://www.pirate-party.us/node/370">web site.
PPUS
announces registration in Utah
Submitted by Andrew Norton on Thu, 2007-08-09 00:39.Utah
PRESS RELEASE
The Pirate Party of the United States
announces it is now accepting…
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007Next to the headline "Corporate America Braces for Market
Fallout," is
a photo, selected at random, of a guy diving in front of some
skyscrapers.
It is not intended as an illustration for the article, but at first
glance it appears to be.
The actual photo is less alarming, when you can see the full context:
Su Qingliang, 58, dives into the Huanghai Sea as he
performs in Qingdao, east China's Shandong province August 15, 2007. Su
and four other people are planning to celebrate the Beijing 2008
Olympic Games by diving 208 times each into the Huanghai Sea on August
8, 2008, the day of…
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007This is from a small study, so it would be inappropriate to
draw a broad conclusion from it. Still, it is kind of
interesting.
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=searchcitationsresults,2,2;">
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=searchcitationsresults,2,2;">Bupropion
in the Treatment of Outpatients with Asthma and Major Depressive
Disorder
E. Sherwood Brown, Lana A. Vornik, David A. Khan, A. John Rush
The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine
Issue:
Volume…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2007Some
people did not believe that the picutre of the
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/08/photo_of_surfing_dog.php">surfing
dog was
real. I can't prove it either way, with respect to that
particujlar dog, but I did find a video of
a different dog surfing. This might give pause to the
skeptics. The dog in the video is a
href="http://www.akc.org/breeds/golden_retriever/index.cfm">golden
retriever. If any dog could do it, a Golden
certainly could.
The photo, below, is a screen capture. The video is at the
SLO Tribune,
href="http://www.sanluisobispo.com/videos/…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2007An
article in Forbes documents exorbitant commuter costs in some
communities. In and around Houston, for example, the average
commuter spends 20% of their household income on commuting.
That, together with housing costs, adds to more than 50% of
household income. The author ends up making a case for a
pro-environmental cause: mass transit.
The make the point that mass transit systems are cost-effective, in
light of these high commuting costs.
href="http://www.forbes.com/home/realestate/2007/08/07/commute-housing-expensive-forbeslife-cx_mw_0807realestate.html">America's
Most…